Made for Breaking (The Russells Book 1) Read online

  The man he’d tried to go see earlier today, Ray Russell, who was clearly related in some fashion, even if just professionally, to the girl from the bar, was thirty minutes late to their meeting.

  The girl from the bar…

  Drew’s thoughts wandered toward her even though he didn’t want them to. He knew nothing about her save for the fact that she obviously had two jobs and obviously didn’t want anything to do with him. But seeing her in the daylight, in camel and tan cowboy boots, her hair in a ponytail, a Braves t-shirt hanging loosely off her shoulders, he’d confirmed what he’d suspected the night before: She was really pretty. Hot, yes. Cute, sure. Was she the kind of girl he found sexually attractive? Double yes. But she was pretty too in a very honest way that had clashed with the cold, unreadable look in her green eyes today when she’d sent him away. Most girls couldn’t keep from flirting, but she apparently could…

  A sound pricked his ears and sent his head swiveling around on his neck. Just a quiet whisper of a noise that he couldn’t even be sure he’d heard. Drew cussed his lack of focus as he scanned the shadows around him. His eyes bounced around in panic, so quick that he almost missed the contrast of a darker, blacker, more defined shadow as it moved amongst the darkness.

  “Hey – ”

  His voice turned into a grunt; his teeth snapped together; he tasted blood in his mouth. His body went rigid. Fire raced along every nerve ending, and then he felt nothing, not even when he saw the world tilt crazily as he went crashing to the pavement, as stiff and unmoving as a rake handle. He blacked out before he landed.

  Sly pocketed his Taser and withdrew a plastic zip tie instead, kneeling beside the immobile body at his feet. The Lynx might have fought mightily in the ring, but with fifty-thousand volts of electricity coursing through his body, he’d fallen like all the rest. With military precision, Sly pulled the man’s wrists together behind his back and secured them with his makeshift cuffs. In his experience, taut, biting plastic were easier to deal with than traditional handcuffs. He didn’t have to keep up with a key.

  “You’re getting rusty,” he said as he stood.

  Eddie emerged from the darkness behind the van, his ski mask pushed up onto his forehead, mouth curled in disgust. He scratched at his goatee. “We didn’t have to Tase him, dude.”

  Sly peeled up his own mask. “Check the van.”

  Eddie was a better pick-pocket than mechanic – and he was a damn good mechanic – and he had the rear doors of the utility van open in seconds. “Shit,” he swore. His flashlight came on with a click and Sly watched its beam dance across a very small cache of what appeared to be iPods and iPads. “This isn’t all of it.”

  Sly nodded. “See? Had to Tase him.”

  Eddie turned around, still frowning. “Ray’s gonna be pissed.”

  “He’ll get over it. Come on, help me load him.”

  9

  “Wake him up.”

  He registered voices through a hazy barrier of consciousness before his head was doused with something cold. Grogginess fell away in an instant, all his sensory receptors coming back online at once. Drew blinked away the water – he licked his lips and was thankful to realize that the cool liquid pouring down his face and into the neck of his shirt was just water – from between his lashes. He didn’t panic, but he was overcome by the sudden knowledge that he needed to wake the rest of the way up. When he lifted his head, the world tilted, and he knew that he hadn’t just been stunned, but injected with some kind of sedative too. A Taser didn’t knock you the hell out like whatever was giving him double vision and sending him lurching forward against…

  Ropes. He took a deep breath and felt them digging into his chest, his arms. He flexed his biceps and felt his wrists fight the biting pressure of whatever held them.

  Calm, calm, calm he told himself. He relaxed, though it was an effort, and blinked until his eyes were clear. But it was still too dark to see much of anything: a section of earthen floor with a film of algae growing on it, a rough-hewn wooden wall, a rake and a broom hanging on it, a swinging bare incandescent bulb on a chain. The smell of decaying vegetation shot up his nostrils as he took his next deep breath through a nose that dripped water. And the ropes tightened and slackened with each contraction of his lungs.

  “Welcome back to the world of the living,” a man’s voice came from somewhere behind him. “I was starting to think you’d OD’d.”

  On what? Drew wanted to know. His head weighed a hundred pounds on a neck too weak to lift it, but he managed to do so anyway. His vision still swam, but he was able to pick out more details: two metal trash cans in a corner, a John Deere riding lawnmower. He sensed that he’d been here before – it smelled familiar, it felt familiar – but his reeling mind couldn’t put a name to the place.

  “Wha – ” His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and he swallowed, the insides of his cheeks feeling like dry, cracked leather. “What are you doing?” He craned his neck around as far as he could, which wasn’t far given the post-Taser full-body cramp that was rapidly taking hold of him, and saw the sleek, black glimmer of a vehicle to his right. And three figures standing just within the edges of his vision, their faces unclear.

  Ricky’s van, he recognized the car. It had been pulled into what was obviously a garage or a barn or a…storage shed. Oh shit. The church. The Catholic Church in Cartersville where he and Josh had lifted the van full of electronics. The electronics he’d intended to sell to…

  “Oh shit,” he groaned aloud.

  “Yeah, ‘oh shit.’ Or in your case, stupid shit.” Booted footsteps made soft thumps over the dirt floor as one of his captors circled around in front of the chair. “What kind of dumbass robs a church?” The speaker came closer, flirted with Drew’s line of sight, then his footfalls retreated and moved slowly back around to the other side of the chair. He was smart; he wasn’t going to let himself be seen.

  “That was a question,” he said, and Drew felt the need to test his bonds again, the ropes digging into him.

  “What was?” He could feel his pulse picking up, hear it drumming in his ears. He was still loopy from whatever they’d used to drug him, and the cottony feel of his mouth made him think they’d forced it down his throat – ketamine or Rohypnol most likely.

  “What kind of dumbass robs a church?” the man repeated. Drew didn’t respond, though he wanted to. “You. The answer would be you, apparently.”

  It wasn’t my idea, he answered in his head. I’m not this guy. He didn’t steal parishioners’ donations or sell stolen shit out of the back of a van. At least, he hadn’t ever thought he’d be doing that. But he needed the money, and Ricky was his trainer, and fighting was all he was good at…Men in his position always said they didn’t have a choice. He did, probably, but the choices hadn’t been good ones.

  “Where’s Ricky keeping the rest of the stash?” the man asked. “Or did he sell it already?” A beat of silence passed – a silence that was filled with the sounds of night insects beyond the shed walls and the stink of mildew – and then the questioner sighed. “We don’t want you, or your fatass boss. Just the goods.”

  Ricky was going to be furious. He was going to turn so red, and that vein would pop out in his forehead; he’d stutter and spit as he talked, ranted, screamed. Drew could imagine the stink of his hot breath as he got in his face. He hated Ricky. How many times had he wondered what it would be like to break the rest of his teeth? To put his fist in the middle of that jowly, mottled face?

  But whatever else Drew was, he wasn’t a rat. There was no coming back once you’d squealed. So he sat, silent, willing to wait this guy out.

  “Not talkative then? That’s fine.” He heard a snap, like fingers, and then footsteps again. A man stepped in front of him. Drew didn’t get a good look, but he registered dark hair and a goatee, a shapeless black sweatshirt. And then a hand slapped duct tape over his mouth and the man was gone again.

  He’d seen it done in the movies, but he hadn’t b
een prepared for the sudden sense of suffocation, the urge to scream at the top of his lungs. He took a deep breath, told himself not to be a bitch, and forced his muscles to relax.

  “We’ll be back in a while,” the original speaker said. “Maybe after you’ve had some time to yourself – after your whole body’s gone to sleep and you’ve got piss running down your leg, you’ll be ready to chat.”

  The light was extinguished and a dark, cool, complete blackness doused the parts of the shed he could see. Drew listened to three sets of boots leave, the door shut, and then he was alone. In the dark. With nothing to do but wait.

  ***

  Ray watched the sun come up through the many-paned, lace-curtained windows in Father Morris’s kitchen. The priest had seemed anything but surprised to find them on his doorstep – undoubtedly he’d seen the headlights down at the shed behind the church and his remark on Ray’s text had confirmed as much. What do ya know: a clergyman who was up to speed on cell phone technology.

  As the first pale fingers of pink lemonade broke over the horizon, stabbing through an indigo jungle of clouds and stars, the pine-and-linoleum rectory kitchen smelled like strong coffee and the loaf of cinnamon bread the Father had slid into the oven upon their arrival. Canned lights in the ceiling illuminated a small, tidy room full of potted ferns and an impressive collection of wrought iron crosses mounted on the wall between a cordless phone and a hutch full of serviceable white crockery. It was the same kitchen where Ray and Mark had first met the priest, but at dawn, it felt less like a meeting place and more like a man’s home, the priest himself less like a client and more like a host.

  Ray glanced across the table and took note of Eddie, who seemed locked in a staring contest with a statuette of the Virgin Mary. He lifted his brows in slight amusement and then turned his attention to the priest. “We’ll have him moved before anyone knows he’s here,” Ray assured.

  Surprisingly, Father Morris hadn’t argued when he’d learned that one of the men who’d stolen his donations was being held hostage in his maintenance shed. He lifted his shoulders now in an almost delicate shrug. He was not a large man, and seemed even smaller dwarfed by a terry robe with slippers poking out from beneath the hem. But he had one of those peaceful expressions on his face that Ray thought was mandatory of all clergy. “Keeping him here doesn’t worry me so long as your…questioning…proves useful.”

  “It’s always ‘proved useful’ in the past,” Sly said, and Ray picked up on a hint of pride in his otherwise neutral tone.

  Father Morris gave another little shrug and opened a drawer along his bank of cabinetry, pulling out a pair of oven mitts that were too flowery even for Cheryl’s kitchen. “It’s just…” His eyes flicked upward, moved across the four of them, before he turned toward the oven. It had been a very pointed trail-off-and-glance move, one Ray had seen executed many times in the courtroom.

  “It’s just what, Father?” he asked.

  The bread came out of the oven and the hot smell of cinnamon came swirling through the room like it was being fanned in their direction. Ray’s stomach growled.

  “Sometimes.” The priest set the steaming baking dish on a cutting board in the middle of the peninsula and pulled off the mitts, another of those practiced, pointed looks sent toward the table. “I’ve found that guilt can be more persuasive than force.”

  “You ever seen somebody get water boarded?” Eddie asked. “No guilt there, and it’s pretty damn effective. Er…friggin’ effective.” He pulled a face.

  Mark chuckled.

  “No disrespect,” Ray said, “but we got this covered.”

  Father Morris went to his outdated, but spotless white fridge and withdrew a little ceramic plate of butter and a jar of Smucker’s. Ray had an idle wonder if the man worked on the side as a butler as he watched him pull a tray from a cabinet and begin loading it with napkins and plates and butter knives. Had Father Morris been anything other than a priest, Ray would have waved off his offer of hospitality – something about having a man play waitress for him was unsettling.

  “Well, if you change your minds,” the Father said, “I’ll be glad to help.”

  There were two of them, his questioners. One was the guy who’d had the duct tape before. He was distinctive enough that he should have kept his face hidden: the Mr. GQ looks, the goatee, the little white scar in his left eyebrow. He didn’t look like any thug Drew had ever met, but he had the trash talk down pat.

  The other guy, the one who said little but did a lot of staring, was the spooky one. He looked like Frank Bullitt from that old movie of the same name, those eerily light eyes watching with an intensity that rivaled all the chaotic bloodlust of the men Drew fought against. This man’s violence was calculated and practiced. He was threatening even at rest, even though he sat on a stool, watching, doing nothing.

  “I’m gettin’ real tired of asking this,” GQ said with an elaborate sigh. “Where” – he enunciated each word like Drew was an idiot – “does Ricky Bullard keep his shit stashed?”

  Drew was so soaking wet, he might as well have been in the pool for hours. Water – cold water – dripped off the tail of his t-shirt and saturated his jeans; it trickled down between his socks and the clammy skin of his ankles. These two had the Guantanamo Bay routine down to a science.

  “You might as well put that towel on my head again, boys.” He wished his voice sounded braver and less exhausted. At this point, he wasn’t giving Ricky up just on the principle of being difficult. He had a fleeting wonder if Ricky would do the same for him. He doubted it. “’Cause I ain’t saying nothing.”

  “You heard him,” Goatee said, twitching his brows. “Let’s – ”

  A knock from somewhere behind Drew cut him off, and a moment later, a shaft of sunlight opened across the floor; Drew could feel its warmth against his back.

  “Our good padre’s getting tired of this,” a voice – the initial voice from the night before – said, and Drew tried unsuccessfully to twist around and get a look at him. “Take a lap, guys.”

  The two inquisitors backed off with one last frigid glance from the blue-eyed man. He listened to their boots leave, watched their shadows blot out the light a moment, but the door remained open, and a moment later, a new figure came circling around the chair. This one walked rather than stalked, his steps slow and almost gentle. He wore some sort of soft-soled shoes that sucked faintly at the earthen floor that had been turned to muddy soup during his water torture.

  The newcomer moved slowly, like a man afraid he might startle an aggressive animal. His face, though, showed no sign of apprehension as he stepped fully into the light. He was not very tall, not even five-ten, with white hair and a neat gray mustache. Thin and soft-looking, he was dressed in acid wash jeans he’d dug out of a time capsule somewhere and a polo shirt with all the buttons buttoned, the tail tucked in neatly. He carried an orange Home Depot bucket that he turned upside down and then sat on, hands resting on his knees. Maybe Drew was having hallucinations at this point, but he could swear the man brought a sense of calm order into the shed with him. He offered a small smile.

  “Hello.”

  Drew blinked.

  “I’m Father Morris.”

  Oh shit. Drew’s father had been an atheist, or maybe he’d sought religion in the bottom of a bottle, but his mother had been Catholic. Devout Catholic. Being in the presence of a priest made him suddenly, ashamedly guilty. Not to mention, he’d stolen from this priest. He averted his eyes, staring down at the murky water that had puddled on the floor.

  “This is my church,” Father Morrison continued. “Did you know that?”

  Drew nodded – it just seemed wrong to ignore a holy man.

  “So.” His expression became one of disappointment, like a parent addressing a misbehaving child. “You knew you were stealing from a church, then?”

  If guilt was a motivator for Drew, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. If a priest thought he could put some holy-ro
ller bullshit over on him, have him recant his sins and all that, then he was very, very naïve.

  At least, that’s what Drew told himself to bolster his resolve. The truth was, he was crumbling fast. He’d been more loyal to Ricky than the guy deserved. No way would Josh have held out this long. Drew had come to the breaking point. He was being driven to collapse by the water that had chilled him to the bone. The extreme fatigue. The shakes that must have been some sort of aftereffect of what they’d dosed him with. A church thief deserved no less, he reasoned. But he was thinking more and more that he had absolutely nothing left to lose. He was going to jail anyway; he might as well not prolong this misery longer than he had to.

  “Can I ask you why?” Father Morris wondered. “What’s gone wrong in your life, son, that you would stoop to this level?”

  Drew sighed, the ropes again cutting into his chest, preventing him from drawing in the deep breath he needed so badly. “Look,” he said through chapped, tape-burned lips. “I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

  The priest lifted gray brows expectantly.

  “I’ll tell you where the rest of the stuff is.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Mark said when Father Morris emerged from the garage. “Shoulda sent you in from the start.”

  The priest offered a brief almost-smile. “I think he was close to admitting it already. I didn’t have to push too hard.”