I wiped the residue off the coffee table with my thumb and rubbed it across my gums. My hands were shaking again. I looked down at them and thought about Rashid, about how steady that man’s hands always were, how he could sit in a room full of killers and never break a sweat. He built BCC into something that commanded respect across three states. And I’d turned it into this. A cokehead alone in a house full of furniture his missing girlfriend picked out, with no soldiers, no connect, no plan, and the most powerful family in DC closing in on him from every angle.
I leaned forward and hit one more line. Because that’s all I had left. I needed to get out of town ASAP.
7
Janelle
The gas light came on somewhere around New York Avenue. I glanced at it the way I glanced at most warnings in my life. Noted it, filed it, kept driving. I’d make it to the warehouse on fumes if I had to. I’d been running on fumes for years.
At the red light I pulled up my bank app because I was a glutton for punishment apparently. $487.32 in checking. $12.00 in savings. The savings number was almost funny. Twelve dollars. I had a master’s degree, a license to practice clinical social work in the District of Columbia, eight years of experience, and twelve dollars in savings. Sallie Mae was getting $1, 100 a month. The bankruptcy from 2016 was still following me around like a shadow I couldn’t outrun.
After Quindon died I shopped like spending money could fill the hole his death left in my chest. Bags, shoes, clothes, furniture for an apartment I couldn’t afford, trips I put on credit cards I couldn’t pay. I was grieving with a Nordstrom card and nobody stopped me because nobody knew. By the time I filed for bankruptcy I was $94, 000 in debt on top of the student loans and I’d lost everything except my license and my car, and the car was ten years old now with an oil change light that had been onfor two months because oil changes cost $80 and I didn’t have $80 to spare.
This was my life. The one I’d built after Quest left. The one that was supposed to prove I could survive without him. Some proof. My brothers wouldn’t even help me. They told me I needed to learn to stand on my own two feet and fix my shopping addiction. And they admonished me for cheating on Quest. I had regrets about that but I was drunk that night. So, sue me.
I thought about Mehar hanging in that warehouse and I felt something that wasn’t guilt and wasn’t satisfaction. It was closer to exhaustion. I had planned this for months. Followed her, studied her, extracted Thad from the cage, rented the warehouse, bought the chains, the zip ties, the syringes. All of it on a budget I didn’t have, using a credit card I’d opened under a different name because my real credit was destroyed. I had put more effort into kidnapping this woman than I’d put into anything since getting my degree, and the worst part was that it had felt good. For the first time in years, I felt like I was doing something instead of just surviving.
I didn’t think Quest would figure it out this fast. I thought I had time. A few days at least. Enough to do what I needed to do with Mehar and disappear before anyone connected the dots. But I’d underestimated him. I always underestimated him, or maybe I just forgot what he was capable of because fourteen years of distance had softened the memory. Quest Banks wasn’t a man who waited for information to come to him. He went and got it, and God help whoever was standing between him and the answer.
My phone rang and Mekhi’s name lit up the screen. I almost didn’t answer. But this was my brother.
“Janelle.” He sounded like he’d been gargling glass. His voice was wrecked, raspy, cracking in places I’d never heard it crack. “Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“Listen to me. I need you to let that girl go. Right now. Tonight. You hear me? Do not hurt her more than you have.”
“Mekhi—”
“No, shut up and listen. Quest just left here. He came to my spot looking for you and when I wouldn’t give you up he beat my ass, Janelle. My best friend of twenty years put his hands on me because of what you did. I got a busted lip and a cracked rib and broken glass all over my basement floor. And I still didn’t tell him where you were because you’re my sister and that’s what I do. But I am telling you right now, if you don’t let that girl go, he is going to find you. And I will not be able to save you from him. I can’t protect you from Quest, Nelle. Not from this.”
My brother had not called me Nelle since we were kids. Since before I left for college, before Quindon, before everything fell apart. He used to call me that when he was trying to get through to me about something serious, when the big brother voice wasn’t enough and he had to reach for something softer. The fact that he was using it now, bleeding and broken in a basement, told me exactly how scared he was.
And Mekhi didn’t scare easy. This was a man who’d been in the game since he was eighteen. Who had bodies behind him that nobody talked about. Who sat in a hospital hallway for six hours while his brother’s spine was being operated on and didn’t shed a single tear because tears didn’t solve problems. That man was on the phone begging me, and the sound of it cracked something open that I’d been holding shut all night.
“If you let her go right now,” he said, and his voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, “he might spare your life. Might. I can’t promise you that. But if he gets to you before you let her go, Janelle, there is no might. There is no conversation. There is no me stepping in between you. He will kill you.”
I pulled over. I don’t know what street I was on. I just pulled to the curb and sat there with the engine idling and the gas light glowing orange and my brother’s breathing in my ear and I thought about all of it. Everything that had led me to this moment.
Every man since Quest. The adjunct professor I dated for six months who forgot my birthday. The firefighter who cheated on me with his ex-wife. The attorney who took me to nice restaurants and then asked me to split the check. The physical therapist who told me I was “a lot” after three dates. Every single one of them measured against Quest and found lacking, because Quest had set a standard at seventeen that no man had ever come close to meeting. He loved hard. He loved completely. He loved like he was building something permanent, and when I destroyed it, the blueprint went with him and nobody else could reconstruct it.
The depression came in waves after Quindon. Some months I was functional. Going to class, writing papers, doing my practicum hours. Other months I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d call in sick and lie in the dark and think about my son’s face and the sound of the machines in that hospital room and the way Quest looked at me when he found out.
The Zoloft helped. Then it didn’t. The Wellbutrin helped. Then it didn’t. I cycled through four different medications in three years and none of them fixed what was actually broken, because what was broken wasn’t chemical. It was the absence of being loved by a man who loved like Quest loved, and no pill on earth could replicate that.
And then Mehar walked into my office. A scared, angry, beautiful woman with more trauma than she could carry and a body that held tension the way mine held grief. I liked her. Genuinely. Before I saw them through that restaurant window, I was rooting for her. I wanted her to heal. I wanted her to trustagain. I was good at my job and she was my best work and I was proud of the progress we were making.
Then I saw the way he looked at her. And something in me that I thought was dead woke up hungry.
“Nelle,” Mekhi said. “Talk to me. Where are you?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Don’t think. Just tell me where the girl is and I’ll go get her myself. You don’t even have to be there. Just give me the address and disappear for a few days. I’ll handle it.”
I could let her go. I could give Mekhi the address and drive in the other direction and check into a motel somewhere off 95 and sleep for the first time in days and let this whole thing collapse without me in the center of it. I could walk away with my life and my license and my twelve dollars in savings and start over. Again.
But starting over was all I’d ever done. Starting over after Quest. Starting over after Quindon. Starting over after the bankruptcy. Starting over after every failed relationship and every medication change and every morning I had to convince myself that getting out of bed was worth the effort. I was so tired of starting over. I’d kidnapped Mehar because for one night I wanted to stop losing. I wanted to take something instead of having everything taken from me.
