Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(68)

The third man, short and thickly built with a shaved head, was tearing through my office. There was a crash as he knocked over the file cabinet. He came back after a few minutes, holding my purse. “Nothing we want.” The small measure of relief that he hadn’t found the photographs was mitigated by wondering if it mattered; if I’d ever see the photographs again, ever learn what Karen Li had been trying to tell me.

They walked me downstairs and outside. The short man who had torn apart my office got behind the wheel. The lights from the dash glowed. The big guy sat behind me and the pale-eyed man next to me. The van eased into traffic and glided into the night.



* * *



We drove south on Telegraph in the direction of Oakland. The driver was cautious. He drove several miles under the speed limit, stopped at yellow lights, braked if a pedestrian was anywhere near a crosswalk. We weren’t going to get pulled over. I figured they had Brandon in a warehouse or empty building. Probably one they had rented days or weeks before, to have ready for this kind of thing. I didn’t bother to talk. There was no point. The glitter of downtown Oakland drew closer. People out on a Thursday night, happy hours and dinners and concerts. Then downtown faded behind us, the streets grittier, fewer cars. We passed rows of one-story houses, beat-up apartment buildings, and weeded vacant lots. The part of Oakland where tech employees didn’t move and tech money didn’t flow. The streets were familiar.

I realized where we were going. Not to some warehouse.

They had my brother at the most obvious place of all: his own apartment.

The van pulled up to the curb. The driver left the engine running and stayed where he was. The pale-eyed man opened the door and the big guy shifted behind me. They stayed close, watching me carefully. We walked inside as the van pulled away. In the lobby, there was a broken pipe or leak. Slow metronome water drops ticked against the floor. A fluorescent light flickered. A rat bolted across the lobby, long bald tail whipping from side to side.

We walked up the stairs. The big guy in front of me, the pale-eyed man behind.

No choices.

For a moment, it all looked the same. The mess, the smell of stale smoke, Brandon sitting on the couch as usual. Except now his hands and feet were duct-taped together. A man with dishwater-blond hair in a charcoal suit sat next to him, playing a game on his cell phone. He looked up at us and put the phone down, showing a salon-tan face and too-white teeth that looked like he gargled with bleach every morning. Everything else the same squalor—overflowing ashtrays and empty pizza boxes.

“Nik?”

“Brandon.” I tried to run over to him and the big guy grabbed me by the shoulders. He was abnormally strong. He held me back easily, laughing. I forced myself to relax. I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of feeling me struggle. His fingers pressed painfully into my arms long after I’d stopped moving. The man with the pale eyes had brought my purse from the bookstore. He dumped it out on the coffee table and looked at the Beretta with mild interest.

“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

Brandon smiled and I saw the old, gentle humor in his eyes. “Hurt? Naw, Nik. I was bored. Sitting here all alone without anyone to talk to.”

I turned to the man with the pale eyes. “What do I call you?”

His eyes slid off me. He shrugged. “Call me Joseph if you like.”

“Let him go, Joseph. Then you can do whatever you want to me. He’s not part of this.”

“We do whatever we want to you now. No bargains. And he’s your flesh and blood, which makes him part of this.”

“What do you want?”

He gave me a long basilisk look. “Who have you talked to, Nikki?”

“What do you mean, talked to? About what?”

Joseph walked over to the coffee table. I noticed a large briefcase that had been placed on the floor. He set the briefcase on the table and opened it carefully. Wires. Red and black alligator clamps. And some kind of large metal cube the size of a shoebox.

A battery.

“I haven’t talked to anyone,” I said again. “Not about any of this.”

He shook his head. “Forget it. Save your breath. We are going to use this on you regardless. And we will keep using it all night, back and forth between you and your brother. Until we are sure you are not withholding anything we want to know.”

The big guy grinned. “We never really pay attention to anything the first hour. That’s just getting-to-know-you chitchat.”

I met his gaze. “I bet you enjoy that part.”

His grin grew. Not denying it.

They sat me down in one of the armchairs. It took them about two minutes to tape my hands in front of me, then my feet. They were thorough. I didn’t bother to struggle. Not even when Joseph placed alligator clamps onto each of my arms, just above the tape that bound my wrists. I watched as the stubby serrated jaws closed over my flesh.

He held something up. A rubber mouth guard.

I looked at it. “Why?”

“We need you to be able to talk. When it’s time.”

I shook my head. Trying to ignore the visible teeth marks embedded in the rubber. “No.”

Joseph stared at me. His eyes were an almost colorless shade of blue. “Have you ever seen someone bite off their own tongue?”

I thought this over, then opened my mouth dutifully. Tasted the sour rubber, wondering how many other people had sat with this mouth guard against their teeth, feeling the metal clamps pinching into their skin, knowing what was coming. Brandon spoke up, the nonchalance stripped from his voice. “Please, guys. Don’t hurt her. Do it to me, instead.”