Raven finishes his first hamburger, and takes a sip of his drink before responding.
“I haven’t decided yet, but it won’t be here. We can’t stay here long. There will be police as soon as somebody realizes there’s a bunch of mental patients on the loose. One of them will do something fucking stupid, and attract attention to the situation.”
I nod in agreement because he’s right. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets wise to the fact that Wellard has a bunch of dead people in it, and no patients inside.
“Avert your fucking eyes, asshole, before I cut them out,” Raven growls.
I snap my eyes up from my french fries to the man in front of me. He holds his hands up in defense.
“Sorry, man. I thought your lady looked familiar. No harm intended.”
He walks away and Raven says, “Time to go. You’ve had too much fucking media coverage.”
Tossing a few bags of food to Heather, he puts the rest in the black bag he swiped from Dr. Martin.
“We’ll go to the gas station and grab phones. I’ll put them in a friend’s name, so they aren’t traceable to us.”
After getting two phones and activating them, I stand and watch the girls as they say goodbye. Bianca is a mess, and has asked Heather not to go. Luckily for me she was insistent that she had to leave. I think if I had to spend too much time with her I’d probably kill her, which would be bad for my new relationship.
Heather grabs the taser and hands it to me, but I don’t take it. Shaking my head, I say, “Keep it, just in case you need it.”
They hug one last time, and Heather walks away as Bianca sobs.
“She was my only friend.”
Dropping to her knees, her cries become louder, and completely uncontrollable.
“I have to go back,” she says between hiccups.
“What?” I ask in total confusion.
“I left Marie. I have to go back and get her.”
What she went through in that cell must have made her insane, because we are not going back.
“Who’s Marie?”
She lifts her gaze to mine, and her face is covered in tears, as her bottom lip quivers.
“My cockroach. She’s my pet. I have to get her, Raven. She was my only contact in that cell.”
A crazy person trying to make sense to another crazy person is much like the blind leading the blind, but at this moment, I feel like the less insane person out of the two of us.
People fucking kill cockroaches, they don’t become friends with them. I take a deep breath while grabbing the bridge of my nose and then kneel in front of her, because I know, as nuts as this sounds to me, to her, it’s very real.
“Baby, we can’t go back. It’s dangerous, and I can’t allow anything to happen to you. Marie is a cockroach, and will be fine. Chances are, she’ll go back to the tunnels where she likely came from. We need to get going.”
I go to stroke my fingers down her cheek, and she flinches.
“I’m never going to hit you, Bianca.”
Her response is immediate, “I’m sorry.”
I sigh and pull her into my arms, remembering what Heather said before about trauma responses. The flinching was likely from her past, not because she’s afraid of me.
Getting up off the ground, I pull her up with me, and head toward the sign I saw earlier. We’re taking a bus somewhere out of state. I need to get to New York, because I have a house there, and money stashed in various places. I know I need to be careful because the Bonetti brothers are also there, and I’m not sure if Alexsander actually has a lawyer that he was feeding information to.
We walk inside the bus terminal, and it’s isolated. There’s one man in a backwards ball cap, sitting and rocking back and forth, with music blasting in his ears.
