Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I’d be fine.
She would be fucking scarred for life.
Before I could say anything else, though, she was pushing open her door, stepping out, and walking on determined legs toward the warehouse.
“Christ,” I hissed, rushing to join her just as she reached for the door.
She paused, taking a deep breath, then wrenched it open, and strode inside.
I watched as she tensed, step by step, getting closer to the place where she’d been kidnapped, where she’d seen her father get murdered.
I knew the moment we reached the spot.
Because she froze, gaze on the floor.
The clean floor.
Not even a hint of a bloodstain left.
They’d cleaned up.
The chances of her finding her father’s body were… slim to none.
“We can still do a service,” I told her, pressing a hand to her back. In an ideal world, she’d get to bury a body. But this wasn’t the normal world. This was the criminal one. And bodies tended to disappear.
“Yeah,” she agreed, head ducking, making the tears slide off of her chin and onto the ground at her feet.
I didn’t try to tell her it was alright.
It wasn’t.
Her dad was dead.
The only member of her blood family she was close to.
Yeah, I knew that she had me and my family now. But it was different. And it wasn’t okay.
So when she let me, I pulled her against me, and let her cry it out for a while before she sniffled and pulled back, sucking in a deep breath.
“Okay. Let’s go,” she said.
I’d been floating the bills to her and her old man’s apartments for the past few months, something she’d only learned about a few days ago, prompting her to insist we had to go and clean them out, so I wouldn’t be paying for them anymore.
She didn’t want to hear that I didn’t mind paying, that it wasn’t putting a dent in my income.
Besides, some part of me did feel like this was an important step. Going back to wrap up her loose ends, to fully pack up her old life, so we could keep looking forward.
Her apartment was a surprisingly easy task. She had decent stuff, but not a lot of it. The back of the SUV was stuffed with clothes, bedding, and personal items. But she’d opted to leave the furniture.
But now it was time for the hard part.
Digging through her old man’s place.
Where little bits of him would be all around, bringing up memories, tugging on her heart.
We’d been working on the place for four days, having ten times more garbage and donation boxes than we did shit that was coming back to the city with us, when she suddenly called me, her voice tense enough to make me rush toward the living room, where she’d been going through her dad’s action movie DVD collection.
“What’s all that?” I asked, seeing her sitting there with several open, empty DVD cases scattered around her.
It was then that she lifted her hands.
Where a fucking pile of keys were located.
“Keys,” she said, voice strange.
“To what?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, putting them down on the coffee table, and reaching for one. “This one belongs to the garage where I know Neeley’s money is stashed,” she said, holding it out to me.
And, sure enough, on the back of the tag were the words April Ave.
“Do they… all have addresses?” I asked, looking at them.
“Yes,” she said, her wide eyes looking up at me.
“Fuck,” I said, looking down at the key, trying to calculate just how much money that might be, if he had it stashed in a ll of those locations.
“We have to go and look in all of them, right?”
Her father had been murdered for this.
A dozen other men were dead for it too.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “If you don’t want to do it, I could do it by myself,” I offered.
“No. No, I want to. He died for this. I owe it to him to collect it, right?”
“Where do you want to start?” I asked.
“The one I know about, I guess. We probably have to clear them out too.”
I didn’t expect them each to be as full of crap as they were. But I guess it made sense. If he wanted to throw people off the scent of all of the cash hidden in there, the best way to do it was to make it seem like the garages and storage facilities were full of shit that no one would even want.
For the most part, it seemed like he’d possibly driven around on trash day and collected all the junk at the curb. Broken chairs. Old mattresses covered in stains. Those cube organizer things full of old kid toys.
But, inevitably, hidden somewhere in each of those storage spaces, there was cash.
In the first unit, it was in brown bags in a chest. In the second one, stashed in cheap, straight-to-DVD movie cases. In the third, he’d put the cash in the bottom of old plastic containers of coffee.