A girl with long blonde hair was sitting on the couch, hunched over, her hair falling into her face. She was wearing tight gold spandex shorts and an oversized navy sweatshirt. It was an odd outfit to be wearing, but maybe someone had given her the sweatshirt because she was cold.
There was a guy sitting next to her, young, maybe a couple years older than me. He had his arm around the blond girl and he pulled her close to him while she cried. She shifted on the couch and pushed her hair back from her face. She was startlingly pretty, with a gorgeous, perfect complexion that was dewy and glowing. Her lashes were long, and even though she was crying, there was no mascara dripping down her face.
But there was a huge red welt on one of her cheeks, the kind of welt you got from someone hitting you. I’d had a lot of experience with welts like those. They were red as soon as you got them, and then they turned into nasty bruises. I would bet anything the girl’s cheek was going to be all kinds of shades of blue and purple in a few hours.
“It’s okay,” the guy said, trying to soothe her. “You’re safe now, it’s okay.” His voice was cracking, though, almost like he knew it wasn’t going to be okay at all.
The girl moved again, turning her face and burying it in the guy’s chest. I almost gasped when she did. There was a long jagged scratch down the side of her neck, and her hair on one side was shorter than the rest, ending right above her ear. It looked like maybe someone had taken a pair of scissors to the girl’s beautiful hair and just started whacking away.
Something about the whole scene was extremely eerie and creepy and put me on edge. I quickly moved pass the doorway, hoping they were too caught up in their own situation to realize I was there.
The rest of the doors were dark, and I kept going, not looking inside any of them for fear of what I might see. All I wanted was to get my purse and get out of there. There was a certain feeling I would get sometimes, an instinct or a sixth sense that told me when I needed to get out of a certain place, or avoid a certain person. It was a feeling, deep in my gut, that made the blood rush through my ears and my stomach burn. I was getting that feeling now.
I thought about going back out the service entrance, then doubling around to the front of the building and asking for Colt, but I didn’t want to walk by the couple in that room again. Even though I hadn’t seen anything that horrible, I had a feeling that the less I knew about whatever was going on, the better. And I didn’t want to get caught by them, whoever they were.
Plus, I was pretty sure that if I kept walking I would find Colt, because where else could he be? Unless he cut through the kitchen and out into the front of the club, he had to be in one of these rooms.
I was almost to the end of the corridor and starting to think that Colt wasn’t back here after all, that I was going to have to double back down the hall anyway, when I heard his voice.
It was low and serious, coming from the very last room at the end of the hall. I made my way down there, and as I got closer, I was able to start picking up the conversation.
“…go to the police,” Colt was saying.
“You know we can’t let that happen, Cole,” came the reply. It was a deep voice, that of an older man, and I was pretty sure I recognized it as the voice on Colt’s speaker phone in the car. Mick, the caller ID had said.
“Bullshit we can’t let it happen,” Colt said. He was talking louder now.
“Keep your fucking voice down.”
“No,” Colt said. “There’s no way, Mick. It’s not what he would have wanted.”
“Let it go, Colt,” Mick said. “They wouldn’t do anything anyway.”
“You don’t know that! And that doesn’t even fucking matter. What matters is that she –”
“What matters is that she got what she deserved,” Mick said. A shiver went down my spine. Something about the way he said that reminded me of my foster father, Karl, who used to say things like that all the time. If he hit us, if he yelled at us, if he kept food from us, well, in Karl’s opinion, everyone got what they deserved. It didn’t matter if you hadn’t done anything.
“You fucking bastard,” Colt said, and the sound of something scraping across the floor echoed through the hallway. “If you ever say –”
There was a huge crash then, like a chair or something being thrown to the ground.
“Listen to me, you little shit,” Mick said. “You’re not in charge around here So shut your mouth, Colt, or I’ll kick you out on your ass faster than you can say ‘fuck you.’”
I frowned. I didn’t get it. Why was Mick saying he was going to kick Colt out on his ass? How could he when Colt was the owner of the club? Of course, no one had actually told me he was the owner of Loose Cannons, I’d just assumed it from the way he carried himself, and because of that fact that he was in charge of hiring. But maybe I had it wrong.