Scum (Wrong Side of the Tracks 1)

Ros hadn’t liked Pete as a person, but he’d never wished him dead. The whole situation felt like a bad dream, yet there he was, with his hand on Shane’s thigh as they approached unknown territory with a corpse in the back of the car.

“Just let me talk. It’ll be off your hands soon,” Shane said, squeezing Ros’s wrist as he drove the car down a narrow road through a woodland. The tree trunks standing guard on each side looked unpleasantly stark in the glow of the high-beam lights, and as shadows moved along with the vehicle, Ros couldn’t help but reimagine them as demons creeping behind the trees to soon follow them to whatever hellhole they were headed to.

Home, Shane had said. They were going to the place where he lived.

“What will happen to… the body?” Ros asked, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

He could only hope Shane knew what he was doing because he was Ros’s lifeline. Nerves were getting the best of him, and he was once more finding it hard to breathe.

“There’s a few options. But he won’t be found,” Shane said as he slowed upon approach to a road running parallel to a tall concrete wall.

“What is this place?”

Shane stiffened, but as he changed course and followed the wall, the tension in his thigh relaxed somewhat. “Do you really need to know?”

“I don’t need to, but I want to. You live here?” Ros took a deep breath and glanced at Shane’s handsome profile. He hadn’t realized how little he knew about his boyfriend. He’d never asked about any particulars, but maybe Shane hadn’t been willing to disclose parts of himself he was ashamed of? His standoffishness earlier betrayed that there was a deep ravine between him and Ros, so maybe he’d just been self-conscious about his past?

“Yeah. My friend, Frank, owns this place. And he took me in after I got out of prison.”

“That’s nice of him.” Ros smiled nervously. “And he’s aware of our… cargo?” If that was the case, then Frank surely wasn’t a normal nice man.

Shane gave a shallow laugh as they approached a massive gate and stopped in front of it. “Not yet,” Shane said and stepped out of the car. “You’ll be doing the driving from now.”

Ros followed him out so they could swap places. “Okay… but… he won’t freak out?”

“Oh, he will be pissed off. But I’ll deal with it,” Shane said, approaching a panel at the side of the closed entrance, his dark silhouette only a shadow.

Ros hated staying alone, but he had to close the door to drive in once the gate opened for them. His dinner kept trying to crawl up his throat, but he’d not puked yet, so he’d hopefully manage to keep it down in front of Shane’s unsavory buddies as well. At least he’d been told they were all gay, so he wouldn’t have to stress over revealing who Shane was to him by accident. And if one of these guys had been Brad’s contact for getting drugs, it was in their interest to help out in this terrible situation and avoid being implicated themselves.

He flinched when metal creaked, but it was just Shane pulling one wing of the gate wide open, and Ros collected himself enough to drive through.

So far, he hadn’t paid much attention to what loomed on this side of the fence, but once the car came to life and illuminated the mountains of twisted metal and other junk piled on either side of a cracked asphalt road, his stomach tried to crawl up his gullet.

What if Shane intended to never let him leave?

Would he stand a chance in a fight with Shane? Impossible.

But Ros drove through like a good boy, and Shane hopped back into the passenger seat as soon as he locked the gate behind them. A sane person would have been terrified, but Ros was overcome by a strange sense of calm. The junk yard filled to the brim with mountains of crap like rusted cars and piles of old mattresses should’ve felt like a coffin, but it could also be his haven. Away from public roads, they wouldn’t bump into cops, and Shane said the people here were his friends and would help. It would be fine. It would.

“I can see how someone could just vanish here,” Ros said with a nervous chuckle. He could only hope he wasn’t about to join Pete on the journey to nothingness.

Shane surveyed the piles of junk around them as if he were expecting an attack. “That’s the idea.”

“Is this… something you’ve done a lot of?” Ros asked, biting his lip and unable to look up at Shane, but from the corner of his eye he could see the powerful chest rising and falling faster.

Shane stalled, hesitating with his answer until Ros’s body hair bristled as if he were a rabbit that had just spotted a wolf. “But I never… killed anyone,” he said in a dull voice that seemed to hang in the air until neither of them could breathe properly.