I clench my jaw. "No."

"Do I owe you anything at all?"

"No."

"Then why do you presume that I would bow and scrape to your crazy questioning? You weren’t right in the ‘ead when you asked me 'bout the girls last time. You had that fucked up…” he waves his hand in my general direction, grimacing, "…bloodlust in your eyes that you only get when you've got something stuck up your ass."

"You had a girl kidnapped. A girl from Seattle, two and a half years ago. Where is she now?" I brace myself by my fingertips against Charlie's desk. I'm doing everything in my power to hold back the wild creature that’s just begging to mess him up. Charlie smiles a benevolent smile, like my anger is endearing. Like I'm a puppy simply baring his teeth. Fucker.

"I don't take Americans. And I don't shit where I eat, you know that."

See.

“I thought I knew a lot of things about you, but looks like I was wrong.”

“What d’you care ‘bout some fuckin’ kid that got snatched two and a half years ago, anyway?” He flicks his cigarette into the crystal ashtray, so big it’s almost the centrepiece of his desk.

“She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“But she means something to someone else, right? That little slut you been shacked up wiv the past little while?”

He knows about Lacey but he’s never mentioned her before. She’s too far below him to be even on his radar most days. “No. This has got nothing to do with her.”

Charlie grunts. “Well, either way, I can’t help you, son. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout some missin’ hooker. I’d forget all about ‘er if I were you. Sounds to me like you bin carrying this ‘round wiv you the past two years. You carry it ‘round much longer, I think maybe you and I are gonna develop a little bit of a problem.”

I tilt my head to one side, considering the dangerous look on Charlie’s face. We’ve already developed a problem; he just doesn’t know it yet.

******

I’ve got fifteen minutes to get home before Lacey officially freaks the fuck out. I’ve been gone all day today waiting to speak to Charlie, the first time since Frankie laid me up with a gunshot wound, and my co-dependant houseguest became even more co-dependant during that time. Like, forget the co. She’s just dependant. I’m only just starting to graze the surface on the girl’s backstory. She’s already told me some dark shit that went down in her household as a kid, but I know there’s more. She had it way worse than me. Fucked as it may sound to me now, she didn’t get lucky like I did. Charlie is a hateful, vengeful, evil son of a bitch every day of the week that ends in a Y, but he saved me. I’d literally be dead right now if he hadn’t have taken me from my uncle when I was six.

You really know your problems are bad when you wish a psychotic, drug-pushing Englishman had come to your rescue as an impressionable youth. I don’t know if Lace does wish for that, though. I just know she gets fucking crazy when I leave the warehouse for too long. If this version of me right now could go back in time, say, fifteen months and have a conversation with the me from that time, I think past me might shank current me in the ribs for going so damn soft. I mean, shit. I’m rushing home for a woman. And I’m not even fucking her.

Her phone keeps on ringing out every time I call, and that makes my palms sweat like a rapist sent down the line at Chino. I did a stint in Chino one time; let’s just say I saw first hand what happens to guys who force themselves on others. Women, kids, animals, doesn’t matter. A rapist in a prison like that is a man living on borrowed time.

“Come on, fuck, Lacey. Pick up the goddamn phone.” She doesn’t pick up the phone. I break every speed limit and run every red on my way home, gunning the Camaro’s engine to the hilt. It’s raining when I finally arrive. The warehouse is a two-storey fortress, silhouetted and daunting in the storm-colored evening. The huge steel doorway, covered in blistered red paint, is still locked and chained like I left it, but Lace has a key. She could have left if she wanted to. The thumping music coming from inside tells me she hasn’t gone anywhere, though. Maybe that’s why she didn’t hear her phone.

Hope. Hope is a nasty little bitch.

I know I’ve fucked up as soon as I step foot through the door. The place is trashed. Broken furniture lay discarded like kindling on the floor; the TV is smashed but still works well enough to produce skull-splitting white noise and a fuzzy, distorted screen. There are shattered beer bottles all over the place and clothes absolutely everywhere, both mine and Lacey’s. Shit.

“Lacey! LACE, WHAT THE FUCK?” I roar. I charge from the main living space through into my bedroom—she hides in my bed sometimes when she’s really struggling. I’m never in it, you feel, but sometimes she says it makes her feel safe. She’s not in my bed, however. And not in hers, either. It’s full blown panic stations when I find her in the bathroom.

She’s gone and done it a-fucking-gain.

Her skin is almost blue this time. Her body floats fully stretched out in the water filling the tub, which is a deeply offensive shade of crimson. I jump in feet first, dragging her limp body out with me. She weighs nothing at all, so lifeless in my arms.

“Fuck you, Lacey. Fucking fuck you.”

Her wrists are a mangled mess. I wrap her up in her duvet and dump her ass in the passenger seat of the Camaro, and then I drive. I drive her to the one place on the face of this planet I really don’t want to go. The place I chose not to go when I was in trouble myself—St. Peter’s Mission of Mercy Hospital.