Up in Smoke (King #8)

“Yeah, that too.” Nine says.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s got some deal with a guy named Griff. Smoke’s keeping me while this Griff person tries to get my father to surface using pictures of me. If my father doesn’t show his face in a few days, and he won’t, Smoke’s going to take me to this Griff person so he can get take his pound of flesh my father owes him out on me.”

“Something sounds a bit screwy with your story,” Nine says.

“What do you mean? It’s the truth.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying that if Smoke was hired to kidnap you for this Griff person don’t you think he’d hand you over to him right away? There’s got to be a reason why he hasn’t. Something more personal to the story.”

“Like what?”

“Beats the fuck out of me, Frankie girl.”

Nine hits enter and a screen pops up. A black and white video. He fast forwards through the feed and finds the day in question. He pauses and hits play again. A woman, who I assume is Morgan is there. She’s a little older than me with shorter wavier dark hair. She’s alone and obviously very pregnant. She’s just walking around the house packing for the most part. There’s an open suitcase on the kitchen island. The video doesn’t have sound, but she appears to be whistling.

That is, until she’s no longer alone. “Shit,” Nine whispers.

Morgan jumps back in surprise, but whoever she’s surprised to see it off camera.

Nine tries to pick up another angle, but the feed suddenly goes blank.

“Where did it go?” I ask, needing to know and see more.

“Shit. It’s not there. Someone must have washed it out,” Nine says, slamming a few keys. “I’ll try and recover.”

After prying open a few internet doors that were never meant to be opened, the screen flashes with an image but it’s hard to see what’s on it because it’s flickering on and off like a light bulb that’s about to die.

“There, that’s all that’s left of it,” Nine says. “Whoever cleaned house knew what they were doing, that’s for fucking sure.” He takes another drag of his joint and passes it to me. I do the same.

“Can you freeze it?” I ask, leaning over his shoulder.

Nine presses a few more keys, and the image freezes and expands.

My stomach flips, and I cover my mouth.

“Holy fucking shit,” Nine whispers, his eyes as wide as the computer screen.

I’m glad it’s in black and white because I can’t imagine how it would look in color if it’s making me want to vomit now.

“I can’t look at this anymore,” I say, as Nine’s sauce threatens to burn its way back up my throat. “Do you think Smoke could have…”

“I don’t know.” Nine shakes his head. “I know some sick fuckers, but this…” He leans into the screen and squints. “Wait! Look.”

He expands the image again. In the corner of the frame, walking away from the bloody scene is a man. “I’m going to zoom in more.” The face of the man is blurry, but he’s too small to be Smoke.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“So, all we can make out is that the man is wearing an old fashioned white hat with some sort of black ribbon or stripe around it above the brim,” I say.

“And that it’s not Smoke.”

“And that it’s not Smoke,” I repeat.

I was hoping this would give me some insight into what Smoke’s hiding from me, but all it’s done is make me ask more questions than ever.

“Fuck me. Do you see that?” Nine says, pointing to what the man’s carrying in his hands.

“Holy shit,” I say, covering my mouth with my hand. Nine’s right. There is more.

So. Much. Fucking. More.





Chapter Thirty-Five





Nine puts his laptop back in the van.

When he comes back he stands at the counter, eating his pasta slathered in his ‘world famous’ sauce. I pass because one more taste will surely set fire to my stomach and I’ll turn into a dragon.

Nine cleans up while I go change.

I need to go outside. To breathe fresh air.

To think.

The weather is beyond beautiful. Eighty-five degrees and cloudless blue sky. The world around me is obviously unaware that it’s not supposed to be so lovely under the circumstances.

It’s odd to think that despite if I’m here or not, everything will still go on without me. Good weather. Bad. Droughts. Storms. Day and night will still take shifts.

Just because I know what might happen to me doesn’t mean I’ve given up hope.

Not yet, anyway.

I want to take advantage of the beautiful day so I rummage through the big storage container of clothes and pull out the only bathing suit I can find. Along with everything else in the box, it’s new with the tags still attached.

It’s a simple black string bikini that ties at my hips, behind my neck and around my back. It’s a size too small so my ass cheeks hang out the bottom as do the bottom swell of my breasts, but it’s all I got so I pull it on and tie my hair into a messy bun on the top of my head.

I grab a towel from the bathroom and one of the romance novels I found on a small bookcase in the corner of the living room. I need a distraction after seeing that gruesome scene on Nine’s computer, and I decide that Mercy by Debra Anastasia, a romance I’ve read several times before, will be just what I need along with a little sun on my skin.

I let Nine know where I’m going, and he tells me he’ll be out in just a sec. He’s on his phone, talking in a hushed voice at the dining room table.

I lay my towel down in the middle of the small front yard, the only section for miles that isn’t a tangled web of vines and weeds. I’m not two paragraphs into my book when The Warden appears, nudging my book with his wet nose.

“Okay, okay, boy” I laugh, taking the tennis ball from his mouth and tossing it across the yard.

After a few minutes of play, The Warden tires and lays down next to me, content to chew on his ball instead of chase it. I do the same and pat his head with one hand while lying on my stomach and holding up my book with the other.

“Mind if I join you?” Nine asks. I look up to find him shirtless. A big goofy grin on his face.

I sit up and put down my book. “You’re the babysitter. I think if you left me alone that would kind of be beside the point.”

“True. Although Smoke’s on his way back. He just called so I’m gone soon. I just wanted to give you something first.”

“What’s that?”

Nine hands me a mini zip drive. “Hide it. I hope you can somehow use it to help your cause.”

“Thank you,” I say, taking the drive and tucking it into the pages of the book.

“And there’s one other thing,” he says. His hands come around from behind his back and before I know what’s happening he’s spraying me with cold water from a hose. The Warden barks, and I yelp in surprise, then spend the next ten minutes trying to take the hose from him to get him back.

When we’re all out of breath, we collapse onto the towel, and I dry my hands, picking back up my now somewhat soggy book.