“But—”
“Your husband has literally no redeeming features. He uses you as a human punching bag, he’s a shitty father, and he doesn’t know how to buy groceries or do housework.” Ouch. “We’ll find you an apartment.”
Donna cried harder. “I don’t got no money.”
“Well, I have plenty. Why are you still standing there?”
“Bo’ll lose his mind.” Her voice cracked. “He said he’d put me in the ground if I tried leaving again.”
“It’s the neighbourly thing to go to a funeral, right? Do you want burial or cremation? Open casket or closed? Closed would probably be better.”
Donna ran from the room. The Hayes home was small, more of a shack than a house, and they soon heard the sound of retching coming from the only bathroom.
“Damn, Alexa.”
“What? Someone needed to say it.”
Alexa had called Donna a punching bag, but that wasn’t entirely right. She was more of a bowling pin. No matter how many times she got smacked down by her husband, she got right back up again and stood in the line of fire, exactly the same way as she had before. She’d learned to weather the hard knocks, but she had no idea how to handle a tiny human cannonball like Alexa. And Alexa didn’t care how much carnage she left in her wake.
Nolan tried putting a hand on her arm. “Go easy on Donna.”
“A bit of a temper?” She began pacing the kitchen, but the kitchen was only five steps long. “If a man punched me in the face, I’d fry his balls with a Taser. Okay, I’d get Jez to do it because she’s better at that stuff than I am, but it’s basically the same thing.”
Nolan winced, even though he’d never laid a hand on a woman and never intended to. He absolutely believed Jerry Knight would send fifty thousand volts through his crown jewels if he crossed that line.
“I know you only want to help, but you’re asking her to abandon her kids and everything she knows.”
“She needs to learn that this isn’t normal or acceptable. Think of it this way—Donna gets a fresh start, and Bo and the boys will have to find new hobbies besides trespassing.”
“What do you mean, new hobbies?”
Searching for Donna? Plotting revenge on the people who helped her escape? Finding a new victim to take her place?
“Cooking, laundry, cleaning…”
“I doubt they’ll do any cleaning.”
“Two out of three ain’t bad.” Alexa lowered her voice to a whisper. “I was going to confiscate Bo’s money, but he has, like, forty-seven bucks in his bank account. Taking his wife is the perfect alternative. I mean, it’ll definitely be more of an inconvenience.”
In the time they’d been apart, Nolan had almost forgotten just how warped some of Alexa’s thinking was. But he couldn’t disagree with her goal. For years, he’d been dropping gentle hints to Donna that Bo was a monster, but either she didn’t see it or she didn’t want to. Nolan had no doubt that Alexa was right when she said there’d be a homicide someday if Donna stayed put.
He tried that box breathing thing again. In on four, hold, out on four.
“If Bo finds out we helped…”
“I’m not going to tell him, are you?”
“No, but?—”
Alexa began humming the funeral march.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine, we’ll do it.”
CHAPTER 28
ALEXA
With Chase in Japan, I’d called Marcel, and Marcel had told Priest about the Donna problem. Priest had called an old friend, who’d called his wife, who’d called a friend of hers, and now Donna was safely stowed at a women’s shelter in Sacramento. Apparently, booking her an Airbnb would have been a terrible idea because without a support network, she would have gone right on back to Bo, which I didn’t really get because when I left home, nothing on earth would have convinced me to return. But Nolan said everyone processed trauma differently. So, the shelter it was, and they had therapists on hand for those weirdos who liked to talk about their problems, plus I’d offered to rent Donna an apartment for a year when she was ready for a fresh start.
