Shadow Of Misgivings Read online

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, a healthier me might have punched you, but maybe you have a point. If he’s still breathing when I get out of here, I’ll consider it.”

  Chapter 8

  2 days later

  “I’m really glad you’re doing this,” Melanie said as Margot slid into the passenger seat of her SUV. Since her car was trashed beyond repair, Margot had agreed she would ride with her sister up to visit her dad.

  Margot didn’t want to fight, so she let her sister be glad. She wasn’t going to pretend she was happy about it. She managed to shrug, which was a good enough response for Melanie. Margot hoped this would mean they could avoid any heavy conversation on the way. Margot hadn’t even known her dad had been moved to the Norco California Rehabilitation Center up in Riverside County. It had hospital facilities other prisons didn’t. He was in the minimum security area of the hospital since he’d become sick enough they didn’t consider him a flight risk.

  Margot and Melanie made the trip there in silence. When they arrived, Melanie parked in the visitor’s lot, but she didn’t turn off the car.

  “You coming in?”

  “They won’t let both of us see him at once, I already checked. I’ve already been here, so it’s your turn.”

  Margot nodded and took her driver's license out of her purse. Since the purse was full of weapons, she left it in the car with Melanie.

  Margot had interviewed people in this very facility when she was a cop, but none of them had been dying of cancer. She wasn’t expecting to find her dad in bed in a private room hooked up to several different machines. The shriveled up old man was hardly recognizable as her dad. He appeared to be sleeping, but he opened his eyes as soon as she entered the room.

  “Margot,” he told her as he tried to sit up, “I’m glad you came.”

  “Melanie said you wanted to see me.”

  “Yeah, I did, I do.”

  “If you’re expecting forgiveness, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  He managed to smile. “I’m not. I don’t deserve it anyway. I just wanted to see you. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry one more time.”

  Margot didn’t say anything.

  “It’s fine if you don’t believe me. I just want to be able to say it.”

  “Then say it.”

  “I’m sorry, Margot, for everything. I did all of you wrong.”

  Margot nodded. She didn’t want to cry; she especially didn’t want to cry for him, but the tears came down anyway.

  “Can you sit down? You don’t have to talk to me. I’ll be honest, just talking hurts these days. Listening doesn’t, but if you don’t want to talk, just having you here is enough.”

  Margot wanted to tell him no, but she found herself sitting down.

  “Thank you,” he told her.

  Margot wasn’t sure how long she sat there, but eventually, he fell asleep. A nurse came into the room after a bit and checked the numbers on the machine to which he was hooked up. Margot couldn’t tell if what she saw was good or bad. Seeing the way he looked, she figured he couldn’t be good, so she didn’t ask.

  “If it’s like the last couple of days,” the nurse said to her, “he won’t wake up until well after visiting hours, if you want to go home. If not, you can sit there as long as you want.”

  Margot considered staying, but she stood up instead.

  “If you want, I can tell him you stayed the whole time.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Are you Margot?”

  “Yes.”

  “He talks about you a lot. He said a lot of good things.”

  “Really?”

  “He also said you hated him more than you hated anything in the world.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “Either way, I’m glad you came. I’m not the only one either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A couple of the O.G.’s in here were always asking him when you were coming. It was like they wanted to see him and you reconcile.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the O.G.’s I used to know.”

  “People will surprise you sometimes.”

  The nurse moved on, but something about some incarcerated old gangster taking a big interest in a dying prisoner who never had anything to do with any gangs struck Margot as odd. She hurried out of there. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but her gut told her it was something bad.

  Chapter 9

  Her sister wasn’t in the car. Margot couldn’t figure out where she would have gone. It wasn’t like there was anything around but the prison. She tried the door and found it was unlocked. After opening it, she found a cheap phone sitting on her seat. A quick look around showed her purse and the weapons it contained were gone as well. Her gut feeling about the gangsters inside looked to be correct.

  She picked up the phone and saw someone had sent a text:

  There’s an address already plugged into this phone's GPS. The keys to the car are in the glovebox. If you want to see your sister alive again you will go there. You will come alone or she will die. Text back to let us know that you have received this message. It is a nineteen-minute drive according to the GPS. We’ll give you twenty. If you’re late I cut something off of her that she’ll miss.

  Instead of texting, Margot selected the text and hit the button to reply with a phone call. While the phone rang, she retrieved the keys and slid over to the driver's seat.

  On the fourth ring, someone answered.

  “I told you to text.”

  “I find these kinds of conversations are better if you can hear my voice.”

  “We’re not having a conversation, not right now anyway. We’ll talk when you get here. The clock is ticking by the way.”

  “I’m going to need to talk to my sister.”

  A minute later she heard Melanie say, “Margot—” before being cut off.

  “Like I said, clock’s ticking,” the man told her.

  Margot was already driving when she asked, “Who are you?”

  “I think your friend Mal referred to me as ‘The Cowboy.’”

  “I killed the cowboy.”

  “No, you killed a cowboy. I’m ‘The Cowboy.’ There’s a difference. Clock’s ticking.”

  The Cowboy ended the call. Margot brought up the GPS and started following the directions. She didn’t know when exactly The Cowboy had started the clock, so she ran the stop sign at the first intersection and put the pedal to the floor. They’d said to come alone, but she still called Radcliff and told him the address and what was going on there. She didn’t figure he or anyone else would get there in time to do anything but clean up the bodies.

  Margot ran another stop sign before she pulled up to an old house in an older neighborhood. It had a for sale sign in the front yard that looked almost as old as the house. The phone buzzed and Margot looked at the screen. The text read:

  I’m in the house across the street. Leave your car where it is. I’m watching you.

  Margot saw that her slim chance of the cavalry arriving to save her had just got a lot slimmer.

  Chapter 10

  Margot knocked on the door and a voice matching the one from the phone said, “It’s open.”

  Margot went inside.

  “Come on back, we’re in the bedroom.”

  Margot walked back. She expected to see the man she’d seen a while back at Shaw’s office, the one wearing a hat and boots and driving an old Cadillac convertible, but this wasn’t him. He was younger and taller. He wasn’t built like a tank like Brantley, but he still looked strong. Like the other two men she’d thought might be ‘The Cowboy,’ he looked very sure of himself. He had a Glock with an extended magazine in his right hand hanging casualty at his side. The gun had a long suppressor that hung down past the man’s knees. He could probably fire the weapon in the back bedroom without anyone really hearing it, even if they were right across the street. He flipped a large combat knife around like it was a baton
with his left hand.

  Suddenly, he stopped playing with the knife, tipped his hat to Margot, and motioned towards the bed with the blade. Melanie was bound with duct tape on her wrists ankles and over her mouth.

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but this is not the kind of neighborhood where people come running when someone screams for help.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to scream for help?”

  The Cowboy smiled, “Tough chick, huh?”

  Margot didn’t bother to answer.

  “As you can see, she is alive and well as promised,” he continued. “You must have a lead foot, Margot, because you did that nineteen-minute drive in just under seventeen minutes and that was with a slow start.”

  “Let her go. You’ve got me and she has nothing to do with this.”

  “I don’t know about that Margot. She’s your sister. Do you know how many otherwise innocent people I’ve killed to send their brother or even their cousin a message?”

  “No, I don’t really want to know either. Just let her go. You wanted me, and I’m here.”

  “Do you think that’s my end goal out of this? Just to get you here?”

  “I have no idea what your goals are. The fact is, this was over a while ago. Did someone forget to tell you?”

  “Who said it was over? Not the man paying me. I’m an independent contractor, Margot.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has everything to do with it. The people that hired me to not just kill Dean Stone, Mal, and yourself, but to make all you miserable while I did it, don’t get to cancel the contract just because they lost their status in the cartel. If you hire me to do a job, I’m going to do the job.”

  “How are they going to pay you in federal lock up?”

  “That is their problem, Margot. Trust me, they’ll find a way. I can be very persuasive. Now, enough about me, let’s talk about you.”

  “What’s there to talk about? You were hired to kill me.”

  “Yeah, but I was hired to make you suffer too. In fact, whether I need to kill you all or just kill most of you was unclear. My interpretation of the contract was I had some discretion on who suffered and who got killed, as long as all three of you got a good taste of at least one of those two options.”

  “Is that why you made a deal with Mal? He was just going to get to suffer?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Bullshit, you were going to kill him anyway.”

  “You doubt my word? I said your sister would be unharmed if you arrived on time and she is unharmed. I will give you my word that, if you don’t do what I want, I will harm her, harm her a lot. Do you doubt my word on that?”

  “No, I believe you. What do you want? Do you want me to kill Stone now?”

  “Yes. I think it would be easy for you. He trusts you.”

  “And then my sister and I are free to go?”

  “You’ll have murdered a federal witness, so ‘free’ might be too strong of a word, but no.”

  “No?”

  “Mal let me down in a big way. I need you to kill him too.”

  “I’d have to find him first and that won’t be easy.”

  “No, it will be really easy. Shall we go to the next bedroom?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a surprise. Don’t worry, my man will watch your sister while you're gone.”

  “What man?”

  “He’d rather you don’t see him since, for this to work, I have to let you leave here alive. This way.”

  Margot walked across the hall to a smaller bedroom. Duct taped to a folding chair on the far side of the room was Mal. Like Melanie, his mouth was taped shut.

  “See, he wasn’t so hard to find after all. Once the Racers gave him up, I knew he’d come to visit Manny and his boys for an explanation. Especially after they tipped off Brantley and he shot up his brother. He should have known we’d be waiting for him.”

  Mal looked up at her with sad eyes. He looked resigned to his fate. Margot had a feeling the sadness was for her.

  Margot stared at Mal for a second, unsure what to do.

  “Well, get to it,” The Cowboy told her.

  “What am I supposed to do? Beat him to death?”

  “You were a fighter, weren’t you? MMA from what I understand. Choke him out.”

  “You want me to choke him while he’s tied to the chair?”

  “Yeah.”

  When Margot didn’t move, The Cowboy raised the gun in his hand and shot Mal in the foot. Her analysis of the suppressor was correct. It still made some noise, but it wasn’t enough to draw the kind of attention she needed.

  Mal wanted to scream out, but the gag kept him from doing so. He tried to squirm out of the tape, but he was in there tight. All he managed to do was knock the chair over.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Margot asked.

  “To show you how this is going to go down. You can either choke him out or I can keep shooting him places that hurt but don’t kill until he bleeds out. If I have to do that then I’m going to do the same to your sister. You’ll get to watch both of them die a slow painful death and then I’m going to do the same to you.”

  “I do this and I kill Dean Stone and then my sister and I walk away?”

  “I think I already told you that, Margot. I don’t like to repeat myself,” The Cowboy said as he raised the gun again.

  “Don’t shoot him,” Margot said quickly, “I’ve got this.”

  Mal was thrashing around but with his arms and legs taped to the chair, he wasn’t making any progress except on the gag. Margot noticed he was rubbing his face on the carpet and he’d managed to catch a corner. She wasn’t sure what good this would do either of them.

  “Hurry up,” The Cowboy told her.

  Margot stepped over Mal and knelt behind him.

  “Make sure to do it all the way. If you let go and he’s still breathing, the next bullet is going into Melanie.”

  Margot wished he hadn’t said that since that was exactly what she had been thinking of doing.

  Mal moved the tape on his mouth enough to say, “It’s okay.”

  Margot wanted to tell him it wasn’t.

  “I was dead the day I didn’t kill Stone. I’d rather go this way.”

  “If I have to ask you again…” The Cowboy warned as he pointed toward the bedroom where Melanie was tied up.

  Margot knelt down and wrapped her arm around Mal’s neck. Despite what he had said, he was still struggling, but there wasn’t much he could do. She wrapped her legs around his chest and began to squeeze both his neck and rib cage.