“You don’t remember?”
A low growl escaped, frustration or maybe anger, I didn’t know. Maybe both. “Would I be asking if I did?”
“Right.” Stitch took a deep breath and I listened in equal parts horror and anger as he reminded me about the un-fucking-necessary pitstop at his girlfriend’s apartment and her married boyfriend. “We fought, and you killed one of his men before you took the butt of a 9 mil to the back of the head and we ended up here.”
Here seemed to be a cold slab of concrete in a dark room, which didn’t tell me much. “Shit, I killed somebody? I hope that fucker deserved it. Any idea where here is?”
“Some fucking warehouse but I don’t know where.” The frustration in his voice was about the only damn thing that could have doused the anger threatening to spill out of me. “I was out for a long damn time, too. I think that crazy fucker chloroformed me. I woke up about an hour ago.”
Shit. That meant he knew about as much as I did, which was to say not a goddamn thing. “Anyone been in here?”
“Not since I first woke up. Some short Hispanic dude came in and dropped a few bottles of water between us, maybe three feet toward my voice.”
I felt like I had cottonmouth, in addition to the biggest goddamn headache I’d ever had so I pushed myself up into a sitting position and tried to orient myself. Even in a black room, it spun from my movements. “Fuck that must’ve been one blow to the head.”
“It was,” Stitch confirmed. “You were on the ground and the pussy stood right above you.”
I listened to Stitch with a sinking feeling in my gut. As he talked about the fight, it all came back to me. The blood squirting from the asshole’s neck as he went down. Stitch knocking that little pissant Carlito to the ground. “Fuck.” These goddamn zip ties were a fucking problem and I wasn’t flexible enough to reach for my blade.
“If you’re looking for help with these fucking flexi-cuffs, good luck. They’re tight as shit and your blade is back at Marisol’s place.”
Marisol. Even the sound of her name pissed me right the fuck off. If not for her, and if not for Stitch’s inability to keep his cock zipped up, I’d be at home with Maisie right now. “This is your fucking fault, Stitch, I need you to know that. To hear me and really fucking let that sink in because when we get out of here, I’m gonna fuck you up.” He stayed silent like the kid he was and I grunted. “But right now, we have to figure a way out of this shit.”
“We can’t do shit in this fucking place. I was so damn thrilled at first, thinking they’d be easy to get off since they tied us up in the front, but we’re good and fucking stuck.”
That was where he was wrong. Though I would never admit this to the kid, or anyone for that matter, I’d spent a lot of time watching bullshit videos on YouTube while I was sitting around waiting for my mom to die. Some of it—crazy Russian drivers, epic fails and motorcycle fights—was useless, but some of those videos turned out to be pretty damn helpful. I’d renovated mom’s place on my own before putting it on the market with the help of a few at home DIY’ers and now I would get us out of this mess as well.
“It’s a good thing I don’t plan on keeping these fucking things on for long.”
“You keep a blade under your nut sac or something?”
He was being a smartass while I was concentrating on trying to remember what I saw in that damn video at four o’clock in the morning. I rose to my feet figuring it would give me better leverage and pulled the little tail until my fingers started to tingle. Then I lifted my hands over my head and brought those motherfuckers down against my tightened stomach with all the force I could, and the hard plastic snapped down the middle. “No, asshole, I keep a brain in my fucking skull. You ready to get the fuck outta here?”
Just then, the door opened and a large slice of light spilled in, silhouetting two figures in the doorway. “Be cool,” I whispered to Stitch and slid back to my spot, knocking over the remaining bottles of water in the process, goddammit. We needed any advantage we could get against these assholes and clearly it was up to me to find it.
One guy walked in with two bags and tossed them on the floor. Thankfully he set the takeout cups down with a bit more finesse. While he dealt with the food, the other one held a gun trained on us, an M4 Carbine favored by the most brutal of the cartels. “Eat.”
“No onions?” Stitch asked in his trademark smartass.
“Eat, puto.” The little fucker turned with a smirk and left us again, in the goddamn dark. Apparently, he expected us to pick up our food in the dark, grabbing it with the cuffs on.
“So what’s your great idea?” Stitch’s mouth would get him in trouble one day and I could only hope I wasn’t caught in the blast zone when it did.
I saw him grabbing for the food and went over to him, smacking the burger out of his hand. “Don’t eat that shit, you don’t know what they did to it. Stand up.”
“I’m not gonna fight you, Gunnar.”
“I know that, stand the fuck up.” When he finally did what I asked, I showed him how to get out of his zip ties.
“Holy shit, it worked!”
I couldn’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. “We’re going to find a way out of this place,” he blurted out.
It was hard to forget that compared to most of us, Stitch was little more than a kid. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself because I couldn’t keep snapping at him even if this was completely his fucking fault.
“Keep quiet. We need to look around and see where we are, find something to use as weapons and figure out how to get the fuck outta here.”
He waited a beat until my words sank in, then he gave a sharp nod. “Got it.”