A tiny part of me was wondering if Hans would try to keep me down here, so him guiding me out of the room is a good sign. But then I remember the way he ate my ass in the garage last weekend, so Hans locking me up and keeping me as his little sex pet might not be a bad thing.
Hans pauses to make sure both doors close behind us, then we’re back to moving.
I follow him up the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the garage.
Like last time, the garage is pitch black, but Hans keeps his hold on my hand and guides me to the pickup truck.
I hear the door open, but no light comes on.
“Climb in.”
“I can’t see.”
“Oh, right.” Hans says it like he didn’t realize there is zero light in here.
His hand leaves mine, and I hear his footsteps across the floor, then the garage door starts opening.
It’s dark outside too, but there’s enough ambient light to illuminate the truck in front of me.
I climb in and am closing my door just as Hans opens his.
He tosses the two backpacks into the back seat, then gets in himself.
“So…” I start as he turns the truck on. “Can you see in the dark?”
Hans turns his face to me. “What?”
“You walk around like you can see everything when I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.”
He shrugs and puts the truck in reverse. “I just have things memorized.”
Memorized.
Hans backs out of his driveway, then right up mine, stopping with his rear bumper a few feet from mine.
Ah yes, my car that won’t start.
“Stay here,” Hans tells me, then jumps out, leaving the engine running.
Watching him circle around to the back of the truck, I realize I never got an answer when I asked where we were going.
Hans lowers the tailgate, and I watch him open a panel I didn’t know was there in the side wall.
He pulls something free, then slams the panel shut and jogs off around the corner of the garage.
My eyes widen.
Is that…?
Just before he disappears into the dark, he gives the plastic a shake, and it unfurls into what can only be described as a body bag.
I bite down on the completely inappropriate urge to laugh.
A man with a basement full of guns and camera angles of my house, who also keeps body bags in his truck, has to be a red flag. Right?
I stay turned in my seat, my eyes glued to where I last saw Hans.
If he’s running into the backyard with that, then the man must be dead.
On cue, Hans reappears with an occupied man-sized bag slung over his shoulder.
It hasn’t even been a minute.
He must be good at bagging bodies.
Hans stops at the back of the truck and bends forward with a heft of his shoulder, causing the body to thud into the truck bed.
The impact reverberates through the vehicle, and my mouth pulls into a frown.
Ew.
Hans slams the tailgate back into place, then pulls a retractable cover across the top of the truck bed, blocking anyone’s view of what’s inside.
He opens his door, but before getting back into the truck, he takes a little bottle of hand sanitizer out of the pocket in his door and slathers his hands with it.
“Safety first,” I try to joke.
Hans drops the bottle back into the pocket, then climbs in. “Can never be too careful.”
“From the number of scars you have, I’m guessing you learned that the hard way.” I clamp my mouth shut, but Hans just lifts a shoulder.
“The hard lessons are the ones you usually heed more.”
I think about that and have to agree.
Hans drives us off our street, through our little neighborhood, and toward the main highway.
“So…” I drag the word out. “Is there a reason we’re taking the corpse on a joy ride? Do cops like delivery service on murder victims?”
“We’re not involving the cops.”
His words shouldn’t bring me such relief, but I don’t want to spend my life in prison for accidentally killing someone.
“But what if people ask—”
Hans is shaking his head before I finish. “Nothing happened for them to ask about.”
“But—”
“Nothing happened, Cassandra. No one died in your yard. You want to talk about it, we can talk about it. But you only talk to me, okay?”
I roll my lips together, then nod. “Okay.”
“Far as the world is concerned, all that happened was you came over to my place, and we decided to go to a hotel for the night.”
“Hotel?”
Hans turns us off the highway and onto a side road. “We need a little space from Holly Court.”
I don’t think I’ve been down this road, and from the looks of it, there’s not much out here.
“When you said you had other houses…”
“Not local,” Hans answers. “I had a condo downtown, above my club, but the manager and her family live there now.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Several months ago, the ownership transferred to an overseas entertainment company, so no one should be going there looking. And if anyone does, I have good security.”
I repeat the first part back to myself. “You have a club?”
“I just own it. I don’t run it.”
“Like a nightclub?” I don’t know why I’m so hung up on this.
“More of a venue. Concerts and stuff.”
This doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Hans would like. “Why?”
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “All sorts of people are always coming and going from a place like that. Can hardly tell who’s who half the time.”
His answer is cryptic. And I feel like it might have something to do with the reason he has body bags stored in the back of his truck.
I swallow, thinking about the body bouncing around in the back of the truck. “The guy I killed… He was a bad guy, right?”
I don’t know why I expect Hans to know the answer to that, but I want to feel better about not feeling bad.
“He wasn’t good,” Hans replies. “But I need to get some more information.”
“How do we do that?”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket. “I gotta make a few calls.”
I pat my hoodie pocket, knowing that’s where I put the phone when I was still in the basement.
How did he…?
The phone starts to ring, and I see him look down at it for a second, like he’s deciding something, then he puts it to his ear.
Was he going to put it on speaker and then decided not to?
Even though the audio is going through the phone, it’s still connected to the truck, so the screen on the dashboard shows the call is being made to someone named K.
“Karmine,” Hans greets. “I have a situation.”
K is for Karmine.
Then I hear the unmistakable sound of a female voice on the other end of the line.
The jealousy I feel is so instantaneous I don’t even have time to register what I’m doing until I’m doing it.
My finger presses the screen on the dashboard, switching the audio to the truck.
It clicks over, the speakers humming with silence from the other end of the line.
“Hans?” the feminine voice prompts.
I cross my arms and glare at Hans’s profile.
He glances at me, and from his expression, I can tell he doesn’t understand what’s going on.
“Give me one sec,” Hans says, then reaches for the mute button.