Sinful Suspense Box Set

  A noise in the hallway made us all freeze. He pushed the gun harder against my head. I shut my eyes wondering how much pain I would feel when my skull blew apart. I opened them again. My throat was dry as I spoke. “Sugar, if he pulls this trigger, you fucking run.” My voice broke.

  “Tommy,” she cried.

  “Do you fucking hear me? You r-r-run and get the hell out of here.”

  The lights went out. Blackness sucked into the room. The lack of sound meant the power was down. It was my chance. I swung my hand back and knocked the gun from my head. It clanged against the file cabinet and smacked the tile floor. Out of the shadows, Frank’s massive arm came at me with a balled fist. He clipped the side of my head as I ducked out of the way. I stumbled sideways and caught myself on the cabinet.

  Even in the dark, my target was hard to miss. He was coming at me like a brick wall. I kicked out and my foot made contact with his leg. He grunted in pain. I’d managed to hit his knee or shin because it stopped him short. As my eyes adjusted to what was a complete lack of light, I saw Sugar’s thin silhouette standing nearby. I reached for her hand and dragged her out of the room before Frank could recover from the kick.

  It was fucking dark, but we knew the place well enough to fumble our way through the blackness. Pushed by adrenaline and the utter shock that we had just been saved by an unexplained power outage, we ran down the hall and past the grisly scene in Dr. Kirkendall’s office. I could only assume that her murderer was still lying there in his own pool of blood, unconscious or maybe even dead.

  I knew by distance when we’d reached my room. Sugar had a tight hold of my hand. As I reached for the door, I sensed someone come up behind us. I spun around and shoved Sugar behind me. A tiny light flicked on. Julian’s shadowy face appeared in the faint glow. He was holding a penlight. His laptop was tucked under his arm.

  “Get in your room,” he said in a confident, authoritative tone that sparked me into action. The three of us ducked inside. There were simple locks on the doors, but for safety reasons, staff members had the master key. There was no way to keep Frank out if he wanted in. I hoped he had been smart enough to run, but now, of course, he had witnesses to testify against him in court.

  Sugar held onto my arm with cold, trembling fingers as if she would never let it go. Julian opened his laptop for some light. He still had on his hat, but the solid, grim expression had gone. He was focused and alert, almost as if the prospect of danger and intrigue had snapped him out of the dark mood.

  “I came around the corner and saw Nurse Greene draped over her desk.” Julian looked at me. “Was she dead, Tommy?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Frank hit her on the back of the head with the butt of his gun,” Sugar’s voice broke on the last word. “I threw the popcorn away. Then I heard a sound coming from the front desk.” She sniffled. I took my arm from her grasp and put it around her. She was shaking almost uncontrollably. “I thought I would go say hello to Nurse Greene. As I stepped around the corner, Frank hit her. That’s when he grabbed me.” She wiped at the tears on her cheek. “I didn’t know Dr. Kirkendall was dead.”

  Julian’s mouth dropped. It was rare to see his face rich with emotion, but it was there, even in the mostly dark room, I could see it, shock, horror, possibly even sadness. “Dr. Kirkendall is dead?”

  “Stabbed to death. I beat the murderer senseless, but Frank is the one with the gun. What should we do?” It was strange. Julian’s moods sometimes shifted from kidlike to cranky old man, from manic to grim, from calm to paranoid, and yet, I wanted his direction. I knew he would consider the facts and come up with something. Because, underneath the complicated layers of personality, the guy was fucking brilliant. He’d seen us in trouble and in seconds had come up with a plan to help. He’d turned off the lights. That was all it took to get us out from under Frank’s deadly plan.

  “At the moment, we’re sort of in a post-apocalyptic situation. I cut off the power to blind our attacker, but it has also cut us off from the outside world, and help. I knew that man was dangerous the first moment I set eyes upon him. He seems like a fool too, but stupid and dangerous is the worst combination. The gates are unlocked. We need to get out of here, and quietly, so we don’t wake anyone else. If someone else stumbles out into this mess, they’ll be in danger too.” He was logical and calm and analyzing the situation with ease, enthusiasm even. We’d stepped into a computer game, and he was amped up about winning.

  I grabbed my wallet from my nightstand and plucked my sweatshirt off of the chair. I handed it to Sugar. She pulled it on. I went to the door and poked my head out. All was calm, as if we’d all just been imagining this whole thing. Frank was nowhere in sight, but we couldn’t be sure that he had fled yet. Julian doused his light and Sugar took hold of my hand.

  We crept down the empty hallway. Adrenaline pumped through our veins like three kids who’d just stepped into one of those make-believe haunted houses where you were just waiting for a monster to jump out from the dark and grab you.

  The acrid smell of blood wafted out from Kirkendall’s office. I wondered briefly if she had any other family besides the dad she’d mentioned. I hoped there were more people to mourn her than the people at Green Willow, who she’d tried to help.

  I led the way and Julian had taken up the rear, with Sugar sandwiched in between. This whole evening, starting with the moments alone with her in my room, before any of this nightmare had begun, had solidified in my head that we belonged to each other. We were connected now more than ever. In these few short months of knowing her, I had not just fallen in love with her, she’d become part of my soul, my existence.

  Then, as if my earlier visions about the haunted fun house had come true, a bloodied figure stepped out of the office. Sugar gasped. It was Kirkendall’s murderer. Looking eerily similar to a character from a zombie movie, he groaned through gritted teeth and lunged at me.

  He was unstable and had lost a good amount of blood. One shove with both hands sent him flying back into the office. A thud and grunt of pain followed. We continued toward the doors. Sugar was huddled so close to me, her shoes kept tapping my heels.

  Frank hadn’t come back for his accomplice. It seemed he had fled, which was the best scenario we could hope for. Julian pointed his tiny light at Nurse Greene’s desk. She was still there in the same position. I didn’t need medical training to know that wasn’t a good sign.

  I stopped before we reached the doors. “Maybe we should find a phone. I think Frank is gone.”

  Julian glanced around as if he had figured out the key to night vision. “Right. The cell phones are behind a padlock. Stupid rule and I’ve mentioned that to my father more than once.” He slid out the laptop from under his arm and opened it up. After the complete darkness, the light from the monitor was harsh enough to make him squint at the screen. “I’ll turn the power back on.”

  “I’m going to check on Nurse Greene.” Sugar started walking toward the nurse’s station but stopped suddenly. She spun back around. “He’s still here!”

  I grabbed her hand, and we ran toward the doors. From the corner of my eye, just before Julian closed his laptop, killing the light, I saw Frank emerge from the back corner.

  We pushed through the doors and out into the yard. The night sky was clear, and the stars and half-moon gave off enough light that we could find our way easily. Unfortunately, it also made us clear targets for a man with a gun.

  I heard the door to Green Willow open but didn’t bother to look back. Sugar and I raced for the gate. Then she pulled my hand to stop me. “Wait for Julian,” she pleaded.

  I looked back. Julian was walking, holding his computer open in front of him. His fingers typed away on the keyboard. Frank was not far behind.

  “Julian,” I yelled, “hurry!”

  He moved his feet faster but was still busy wit
h his computer. Frank fired a shot and Julian nearly dropped his laptop. The missed shot coaxed him into a run.

  Sugar and I pushed through the gate. Frank ran toward us. Now the idiot had alerted the entire sleeping population of Green Willow that something was going on. Julian pushed through the gate behind us and tapped his finger down on the keyboard once. The lights came back on, and the gate snapped shut. Frank had a security pass, but he would have to fish it out. Julian had bought us time.

  Confused voices and a scream followed. People inside were just stumbling upon the grisly scene we’d left behind. It seemed the seventy-seven percent success rate bragged about in the Green Willow brochure was going to take a hit this year. This was going to set everyone back big time, especially the three of us.

  Frank looked back at the building. He didn’t follow. He grabbed the end of his shirt and wiped his gun clean. With a powerful arm, he threw the gun over the fence. It bounced across the asphalt of the parking lot. As we ran, I gave his shiny yellow car a good kick.

  Green Willow was at the end of a long stretch of open road that was lined on both sides by flat fields of grass and summer wildflowers that glowed white in the moonlight. There was not another person or car in sight.

  “Why do you think he threw away his gun?” Sugar asked between breaths.

  “Not sure,” I said.

  “Evidence,” Julian said. “He’s getting rid of evidence.”

  It was way past midnight, and fatigue and shock were catching up to us. We stopped and glanced back, and for a second, a fucking surreal moment in time, we looked around at each other, no longer surrounded by the safe green walls of Green Willow, but out in the open, in the middle of a road, a road through the center of deserted fields, a road beneath a starlit night sky.

  The adrenaline hadn’t stopped pumping. I could still hear my heartbeat in my ears. The image of Dr. Kirkendall’s dead eyes and the feel of someone’s face beneath my fist were still fresh and ugly and hard to comprehend.

  Sugar and Julian were doing the same thing as me, trying to absorb everything and trying to decide if this was all real. A soft cry came from Sugar’s direction. She suddenly looked younger and more fragile than I’d ever seen her. She was shaking, her entire body, from her thin shoulders down to her feet. I reached for her hand and pulled her against me. As I wrapped my arms around her, the slightest sigh, a sigh of relief that went straight into my chest, floated from her lips.

  Julian glanced up the road. “I know this area pretty well. I think I can find our way to the bus station. It’s probably five miles from here. We could get tickets to Bloomington. That’s just north of my family’s estate and about a three hour bus ride. We can make a call to authorities from there, but it’s not safe here.”

  “We need to get off this main road in case Frank comes looking for us.” I looked down at Sugar. “Are you going to be all right to walk?”

  She lifted her face from my chest. “Yes, I promise that was my last wimpy girl breakdown of the night.”

  “There’s nothing wimpy about you, Sugar. Not a damn thing.” Reluctantly, I lowered my arms.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  With no sleep, and after the tornado of shit we’d gone through at Green Willow, five miles felt like a hundred. A few miles in, my leg had started to throb, a pain that was always there to remind of that shitty day. At first we had moved solely on adrenaline, but as the rush slowly dissolved into the numbing aftermath of shock, our energy had dissolved with it.

  The bus stop, a small rectangular building with the big Greyhound logo and a lot of scratched up windows, sat in the center of a quiet city block, with a market on one side and, strangely enough, an old cemetery on the other. The terminal’s rock hard seats, obviously made extra uncomfortable to keep people from lingering inside the bus stop overnight, had made the three hour wait extra long.

  My head ached as I turned my neck to glance through the hazy windows. Thin shards of pink crisscrossed the dark sky, announcing that a new morning, and, hopefully, our bus, were just minutes away. There were several other people waiting in the row of seats, but, according to the ticket man, only a few people ever caught the bus from there to Bloomington.

  I stretched my fingers open and shut for the hundredth time, trying to alleviate some of the stiffness. The knuckles on my hand had swollen up to twice their size, and dried blood had crusted over two teeth marks. It had been a long time since I’d pounded my fist into someone’s face, and as good as it had felt giving it to the guy who had killed Dr. Kirkendall, a cold feeling had sunk into my stomach. My blood might have been a little less clogged with chemicals since my arrival at Green Willow, but nothing else about me had changed. Even after I knew I’d rendered the fucker unconscious, I couldn’t stop myself from hitting him. Someone had taken the pin out of the grenade, and there was no way to stop the explosion. There was no way to stop myself. I looked down at my ugly hand. It hurt like hell.

  Exhausted as we were, none of us had slept, but we were all too wiped out to hold a conversation. Sugar pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over her head as the temperature inside the warehouse-style building dropped with the arrival of a bitter dawn. Julian hugged his laptop to his chest. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping. He’d once told me that he rarely slept and that insomnia had plagued him since he was a teen. As comfortable and familiar as I felt with Sugar and Julian, it was strange sitting with them outside of Green Willow. They felt it too. Sugar was uncharacteristically quiet. Julian had so many facets to his personality, it was harder to gage the way he was feeling, but I knew he didn’t like to be out of his routine. This would be close to the hour when Julian usually took his meds. I wasn’t completely sure what most of them were for, but I hoped he could keep it together until we got him home. He’d spent a lot of time within the protective walls of the place named after his grandfather, and now, the security Green Willow gave him had been shattered for good.

  Even weighted down with fatigue, we all jumped when the terminal door opened. An elderly woman was dragging a rolling suitcase behind her. It caught on the door jamb. Sugar hopped up to help her. She’d just gone through a hellish night, but she couldn’t squelch the urge to help someone who needed it. The woman smiled brightly at her. I wondered what it would be like to be Sugar, to have this insane ability to make people smile. She sat back down looking satisfied and much better than she had just hours before. Resilient. Another attribute I could add to the amazing list that was Sugar.

  Headlights blinded us as they flashed through the front window of the building. I hadn’t thought anything about it except that my head hurt as if a hammer was pounding it and that the lights made it worse.

  Sugar put her hand on my arm. “Tommy,” she said quietly.

  I followed the direction of her gaze. A yellow car rolled into the lot behind the bright headlights.

  “Jules, he’s here,” I said.

  Julian, who had been sharp and focused hours before, seemed dazed as he opened his eyes. It took him a second to understand who I was talking about.

  “Get up slowly and follow me,” I said. We crouched down and scurried to the other side of the terminal. We ducked behind the vending machines. The car rolled slowly past the bus stop. I looked around for an emergency exit. It was inside the ticket seller’s booth. It was the front door or nothing.

  We held a collective breath as the car moved past the building and back out onto the road. We stayed tucked behind the vending machine, garnering several confused, worried looks from the ticket seller. The hiss of brakes sounded outside as the bus pulled up front.

  We shuffled to the back of the bus, passing by the few people who had already boarded on an earlier stop. Julian slid in next to the window. Sugar plopped down next to him, and I squeezed onto the end.

  Tucked beneath
his cap, Julian remained quiet and grim, holding his damn computer like a kid holding a security blanket. The transformation from the take charge mission impossible guy back at the recovery center to the unnaturally subdued guy slumped against the vinyl seat was astounding. It was as if the first Julian had been replaced by a badly programmed clone sometime during our wait at the bus stop.

  Sugar sensed the change too. There was no way not to. She reached over and took hold of his hand. I waited for him to pull it from her grasp. His fingers tensed under hers. Then he relaxed his arm. She kept his hand in hers. She didn’t need to say anything. Just that small physical contact seemed to comfort him. He leaned back against the seat and pushed the brim of his hat down to shade his eyes from the rising sun.

  Sugar yawned and dropped her head against my shoulder. “I’m so tired, I feel like everything is moving in slow motion.” She yawned again. “My god, Tommy, what the hell happened back there? I still keep waiting to wake up from it all.” She ran her soft fingertips over the swollen mass of knuckles on my hand. I sucked in a breath, not from the pain but from knowing that she’d seen the guy’s mangled face on our way out. She now knew what I was capable of. She and Julian. I wasn’t sure if Julian had enough human emotion or reaction to care that his friend, the guy who’d been calling him buddy for the last few months, was nothing short of a fucking wild animal when it came to anger. But Sugar was the opposite. She was pure emotion. And now she knew me better than I wanted her to.

  “Sugar, I’m s—s-sorry.”

  She didn’t lift her head as she shook it against my arm. “No, Tommy. You did what your heart told you to do.” She picked up my hand and kissed my swollen fingers. “That’s what I love best about you— you lead with your heart.”

  Her lips against my raw, tender knuckles felt like heaven. My eyes drifted shut as I absorbed the feel of her kiss. She lowered my hand.