Not You It's Me (Boston Love #1) - Julie Johnson Page 0,128
than you already have.
Eyes watering from the pain radiating through my rapidly swelling cheekbone, I see Ralph roll down his window and toss my phone onto the road. My gaze swivels to the rearview, just in time to see a car behind us run it over.
“Take a left, up here.” Ralph’s legs are jittering again, and every few minutes he glances in the side mirror like he thinks someone might be following us.
I turn the car down a road I don’t recognize. We’ve reached the outer fringes of the city, where the buildings are a little worse for wear and the people a little less polished. Graffiti streaks the sides of crumbling concrete overpasses, trash litters the streets, and few businesses are actually open, though it’s only late afternoon. We pass row after row of triple-decker public housing projects before entering a stretch of seemingly abandoned warehouses. Both pedestrian and car traffic grow thinner as we weave through this forgotten southeastern suburb.
The sound of a phone beeping makes my entire body tense. For a minute, I worry it’s the second cell in my purse — the new one Chase got for me, which now symbolizes my last shot at escape — but it’s Ralph’s, buzzing in his pocket.
“What is it?” he snaps into the receiver.
I hear the faint sounds of a female voice, on the other end.
“We’re almost there,” Ralph confirms. “Yes, I got her.”
He pauses, listening.
“No, not exactly.”
Another pause.
“Well, she’s not exactly alone. Her friend was with her.”
I hear a loud shriek reverberate from the other side.
“Fuck you, Vanessa!” Ralph sneers. “She’s never fucking alone — Croft trails her around like a puppy. This was the only shot I had, so I took it.”
Vanessa!
A rapid stream of words screech in response.
“Don’t call me an idiot, you bitch! You don’t know who the fuck you’re talking to.”
My eyes drift to the rearview mirror and meet Chrissy’s. Her breaths are shallow, she’s got one hand pressed to her abdomen, and she’s starting to look panicked.
I raise my eyebrows.
She holds up seven fingers and mouths something at me.
Seven minutes apart. Getting stronger.
Shit.
Chapter Thirty-One
Peachy
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Vanessa is pissed. Super pissed. Probably because, when she envisioned kidnapping me for some kind of idiotic extortion-ransom plot to strike at Chase’s weak spot, she didn’t anticipate her partner bringing along a heavily pregnant woman having regular contractions, as well as a squirming toddler.
Serves her right for teaming up with someone as idiotic as Ralph.
“What is this, daycare?” she snaps, striding toward Ralph. “I told you to bring her alone! Not only did you ignore that instruction, you’ve created two witnesses to a crime, you amateur!”
“I’m getting pretty sick of the name-calling, Vanessa,” Ralph snarls back.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings?” She rolls her eyes. “Too damn bad!”
Winnie shivers in my arms and I hug him a little closer. It’s freezing down here.
Ralph’s brought us to some kind of abandoned, underground parking garage, with ripped-up concrete floors, a handful of dim lights, and low, rust-stained ceilings that drip water on our heads as we stand against the wall, waiting for the two worst kidnappers of all time to sort out their shit. The age-yellowed headlights of my car do little to illuminate the space, but the bright LEDs of Vanessa’s Mercedes cast a huge halo around the cavernous garage.
Chrissy’s got one hand pressed to her abdomen, as if she might stave off the pain with firm pressure, and her other is wrapped tight in mine, clenching hard enough to bruise the bones of my fingers each time a contraction moves through her. Right now, between waves of pain, her eyes are squeezed tightly shut as she focuses on her breathing and tries to tune out Ralph and Vanessa.
“You’re such a bitch! I don’t even know why I teamed up with you.”
“Because you needed me, asshole! It was my idea to grab her and force Chase to pay up.”
“Well, I don’t need you anymore! I can do it without you.”
“You’ve got half the Boston police force out looking for you!” Vanessa scoffs. “As soon as you make contact and Chase finds out you’ve got his girlfriend stuffed in a trunk somewhere, you’ll be dead fucking meat. You need me to negotiate. And, since you’ve been such a royal fuck up, I’m upping my price. I want seventy percent, now.”
What’s all this about a trunk!?
“We said fifty-fifty!”
“That was before you brought a pregnant woman and her spawn into the mix!”