sitting next to him, slit throat and all.
Black leaned over and whispered: “Don’t worry, mon—I can’t talk, either.”
Then he got up and disappeared into the shadows.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the drug den’s back door. The gunman who’d laid out the ketamine for them yanked Nolan and Twitch to their feet.
“Fun’s over,” he told them. “Time for me to take you to the next stop.”
He steered Nolan and Twitch to the back door and opened it. They staggered outside and found themselves in yet another smelly, unlit alley.
An SUV was waiting here, its engine running. It was black, all its windows were tinted.
The man with the crooked mouth opened the SUV’s rear door and waited for Nolan and Twitch to climb inside. But just as he was climbing in himself, two shots rang out. A dark figure in the SUV’s passenger seat had put two bullets into the gunman’s forehead, knocking him back into the alley.
Then the SUV’s rear door slammed shut and it sped off into the night.
14
NOLAN COULDN’T BELIEVE what was happening.
Nor was he sure he should believe it. Because of the ketamine making its way through his system, he was having a hard time telling reality from drug-induced fantasy, real life from hallucination.
Have we just been kidnapped? he thought.
It was as if Twitch heard him, because he roared back in reply: “Who the fuck would kidnap us?”
Yet here they were, in the back of the SUV, roaring down the dark and dirty alley, prisoners of somebody.
The man who shot the drug den goon turned around and pointed his massive handgun at them. Two more men, hiding in the storage area behind, pulled strips of duct tape tight around their necks awkwardly, adhering them to the rear seat. All four of their captors were laughing hysterically.
Nolan just couldn’t absorb how the driver could go so fast, through such narrow alleyways. The buildings and the faces and the handcarts and the Chinese lanterns were all going by in a mind-blowing blur, broken only by the occasional flash of a neon sign, which to Nolan’s distorted vision seemed like the sun exploding.
It was terrifying and crazy—but was it real?
“You fuck up!” the man with the gun was yelling at them in slurred English. “You hurt my grandmother? You bite her on her ass? You have big mouths. Now, we gonna make you pay!”
Once again, Nolan was unable to process any of this. Grandmother? Biting someone’s ass? What the hell was he talking about?
The man never stopped screaming at them. “You don’t eat her candy? You don’t like her candy? We make you eat her candy!”
That’s when Twitch went ballistic
“We fucked up?” he screamed back at the gunman. “You fucked up, you mean! Your grandmother’s a whore!”
Nolan was horrified. Without thinking, he screamed at Twitch to shut up.
But nothing came out.
He tried again—but just like back in the drug den, nothing happened. He tried a third time. Nothing.
Nolan was stunned. Panic washed over him.
He really couldn’t talk.
The gunman, meanwhile, had turned beet red. “You’re gonna kick my ass, Joe?” he yelled back at Twitch. “Then how about this?”
He pointed his gun right at Twitch’s brow—but then that’s when the SUV driver yelled, “Don’t shoot him in the eyes!”
The man raised his aim slightly—and began to pull the trigger.
But somehow Twitch was quicker. Despite the tape holding him to the seat, he grabbed the gunman’s hand, clamped his teeth onto it and would not let go. The gunman screamed in pain, and Twitch only bit down harder. The gun fell out of his hand and went beneath the front seat. Not missing a beat, Twitch grabbed the gunman from behind and around the throat. He pinned him against the front seat with his left hand, then began pummeling him viciously with his right.
“I banged your grandmother!” Twitch was yelling at the man as he pounded him on his face and the top of his skull. “And she was a lousy fuck—for a midget!”
Twitch reached in his coat pocket, retrieved the candy the dwarf had given them back at the Sea Witch and jammed it into the gunman’s mouth.
“Here’s your fucking candy!” he bellowed at the man, choking him. “You eat it, asshole! How do you like it?”
The man fought back fiercely—and all the while, the SUV was still speeding through the narrow alleyways and the three other kidnappers were laughing hysterically.
But an instant after Twitch forced the candy into the man’s mouth, the victim screamed in excruciating pain. A huge red