Cloister snorted and let go of Bourneville. She took off toward the trees, her body stretched out like an arrow and her ears pinned to her skull with speed.
“Hope is for lottery tickets, Tancredi.” He broke into a run and tossed the words back over his shoulder. “I know my dog.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE NOISEscattered Javi’s wits. He was conscious and could move again—although his body felt like it was filled with clay—but every creak or breath around him rattled around his head in a distorted, atonal echo. It made it hard to concentrate.
He was folded up uncomfortably in a small space with his thighs cramped and an ache slowly building from the small of his back to his shoulders. It was hot. The air parched his mouth on the way in and didn’t seem to fill his lungs. When he shifted position, his shoulder and feet hit hot metal.
Javi closed his eyes and kept his breathing steady. It wasn’t a “small space.” It was the trunk of a car. That was a fact, and he could deal with it. When he brought his hands up to wipe his face, the plastic cuffs around his wrists scraped against his chin. He worked his way onto his back, but his knees didn’t fit, and his eyes stung as he blinked into the dark.
He could hear himself blinking.
Panic tried to crack its way out of his chest. He closed his eyes—not that it made a difference—and dissected the experience. The GHB had caused the dizziness and heaviness in his body and the spray of vomit he could feel cooking sourly under his head. Bath Salts were making him panic with increased heartbeat, a flood of endorphins, and paranoia. The needle scratch on repeat in his head, like a horror-movie soundtrack, was an auditory hallucination caused by the drugs. He wasn’t losing control. There was nothing to control. It was just chemistry.
“Matthew,” he said. His voice felt raw, as though he’d been screaming, and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard against the inside of his skull. Javi pressed his hands flat against the metal over his head. The pain of the metal branding his hands gave him something to focus on. “Matthew, we want to help you.”
Something smacked against the trunk. It left a dent in the metal, and the harmonics of it rumbled through his chest until he felt like he wanted to puke again.
“You’re lying. No one wanted to help me or my sister or my mom. You blamed us. We should have done this. We should have done that,” Matthew said. He hit the trunk again and again and made it groan like a cracked bell. “All you care about are them. Rich kids. Spoiled kids.”
“Like Birdie?” Javi managed to ask. He was bathed in sweat, soaked with it, and it was getting warmer.
“Yes. No. I loved her,” Matthew said, his voice doubtful. The car creaked and shifted as a weight lifted off it. “But she was going to leave me. She thought she could just go away and that was it. Like it didn’t matter? I couldn’t let her do that, so I showed her, and then… I didn’t want to hurt her. That was an accident. Death by misadventure. Nobody’s fault.”
“You didn’t mean to hurt her,” Javi repeated agreeably. If he kept his eyes closed, it was better. He felt his way around the trunk in an absent effort to map each rivet and solder mark. “I see that now. You haven’t hurt anyone else.”
“No,” Matthew said. There was something odd in his voice. “That was what was wrong. Nobody got hurt, not really. They didn’t see what I’ve seen.”
Javi was getting used to the sound in his head. He pressed his fingers against the trunk until his nails dug into the rust. Flakes of it dropped onto his face.
“What did you see, Matthew?” he asked.
No answer.
“Matthew?”
No answer, and the sound of his own voice had a Doppler effect on the hallucination. He squeezed his eyes shut and banged his skull back against the broken plastic under his head.
Javi took a deep breath of sour, hot air and squirmed around onto his other side. He could see a thin bar of dim light where the trunk closed, and he could make out the shape of the taillights.
He felt his way around the lock and traced the open areas of metal with his fingers. Strange thoughts clawed at the back of his head. He tried to ignore the pulse-racing notion that it was Matthew out there, crouched by the side of the car as he listened to Javi try to escape. He finally bumped into the stacked rounds of the lock mechanism. The metal was bubbled with rust and disuse, and the lock rod extended to the left. It was clotted with old grease, and he yanked on it. Nothing happened, and for a second, he could actually see the scarred, glitter-eyed kidnapper with his face pressed against the side of the car. Javi’s breath was ragged despite his best efforts, and he could feel panic like a ball of static under his skin. It would have been easy to accept defeat, but he tried again instead.
This time the trunk lid popped open. Javi clumsily dragged himself up. His body was still tranq heavy and his muscles cramped, but he hauled himself over the lip. It wasn’t much cooler out of the trunk. He landed hard on a packed-dirt floor, rolled onto his back, and sucked in fresh air. Overhead he could see the high, slatted ceiling of a barn and the harsh red glow of heat lamps.
Grow barn, he realized. They were in the old Retreat grow barn. Matthew had parked his car in the middle of it, where the rows of plants would have been bathed in heat. There was no time to dwell on that. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up on his knees. Nausea roiled in his stomach like slurry, as though it had an actual weight. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around to take stock. Matthew wouldn’t be gone long.
Javi got his feet under him—they were bare, he noticed, although thankfully the rest of him wasn’t—and levered himself awkwardly to his feet. The zip cuffs would have been worse if Matthew had cuffed his hands behind his back, but they still threw his balance off. He dealt with that next. The cuffs were already tight, but he was able to grab the end between his teeth and work the lock around until it was between his thumbs. Little curls of torn skin came with it, and the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He shook his head, tried to make the lingering dizziness go away, and brought his hands in hard toward his stomach. A sharp pinch of pain and the cuffs snapped.
He peeled them off and tossed them aside. The itch of blood seeping back into his swollen fingers made him curse under his breath. He rubbed the feeling back into his hands roughly as he looked around the barn. Other than the car and the grow lamps, there was nothing much to see. The rusted framework of a disused irrigation system sagged overhead, and there was a small desk and an old laptop set up in the corner. No sign of Drew Hartley.
The humming from the heat lamps and the sound of the wind outside drilled into Javi’s ears. He just wanted to lie down and wait for it to go away, but there wasn’t time for that. He spat to get the taste of old puke out of his mouth and limped toward the front of the barn.
The door was made of old, weathered white wood, dry as a bone, and creaked open with a nudge. Outside he could see a rusted-out pickup sitting on its rims. Weeds grew up through it in fat green bunches. A shiny red ATV that Matthew was struggling to cover with a tattered old canvas tarp. The wind snatched at the corners of it and whipped his legs with the cords, raising welts where it hit bare skin.
Javi’s Glock was stuck into the back of Matthew’s jeans, black and bulky. The visual reminder that he’d let himself be taken unawares, drugged, and disarmed made Javi cringe, but the fact it wasn’t in Matthew’s hand was an opportunity. He tracked his eyes past him to the gap in the trees and the heavy, “too new to belong to the farm” gate. A quick glance up to the sun affirmed that, unless he’d been out a lot longer than he thought, it was more or less the right direction to go if he got out.
Javi took a deep breath, shoved the door open, and braced his arm against it as the wind tried to slam it shut again. He staggered into a run. The hard-rutted dirt dug into his bare feet, and he tackled Matthew from behind. It was graceless and undignified, but if Matthew got his hands on the gun, Javi would end up back in the trunk again.
