Chapter 9 - The Voice on the Line
I snatched the phone out of my brother’s hand, hit the accept button, and jammed it against my ear.
“If this is a sick joke, I swear to—”
“Mark.”
The voice stopped me dead in my tracks. It was Lena.
Her voice wasn't tearful, panicked, or apologetic. It sounded hollow, digitized, and strangely distant, as if she were speaking through a filter of absolute terror.
“Lena? Where the hell are you?” I roared into the speaker, ignoring the nurse turning around at the front desk. “Our son is in a hospital room with a broken arm because of the animal you brought into our home! The police are looking for you, your boyfriend is in a jail cell, and—!”
“Mark, listen to me,” Lena interrupted, her voice breaking for a fraction of a second before hardening back into steel. “You need to get out of the hospital right now.”
“What?” I stared down the empty hallway in disbelief. “Get out? Are you out of your mind? My son is recovering from surgery—”
“If you stay there, you and Noah both die,” Lena hissed, the background noise on her end filled with the high-pitched shriek of tires and roaring wind—she was driving at high speed on a highway. “Travis didn't just hit him with a bat because he was crying, Mark. Noah walked into the basement storage room yesterday afternoon. He saw the crates. The ones Arthur Sterling had us store behind the drywall.”
The world around me stopped spinning.
“Crates?” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “What are you talking about?”
“We weren't just renting out our spare room, Mark. Travis was running synthetic narcotics through your freight manifests for Sterling’s distribution ring,” Lena confessed, a sob finally breaking through her manufactured composure. “When Noah saw the packages... Travis lost his mind. He threatened him. And when I tried to stop him today at work, Travis locked me in the garage and took the baseball bat to our baby.”
“Where are you?” I demanded, gripping the phone so hard my knuckles cracked. “Tell me where you are right now, Lena, or I swear to God when the police find you—”
“I’m coming to the hospital,” she said softly. “I have the ledger. The real one, with Sterling’s signature and the transfer codes. But Mark... look out the window of the fourth-floor corridor.”
My breath caught in my throat.
May you like
Slowly, mechanically, I turned away from the nurse’s station and walked toward the tall glass windows overlooking the hospital’s circular drop-off bay far below.
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