Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

a psychopath. We were headed for a pin marked on a map, well away from any paved roads or structures. I glanced at the phone as we rolled through California City, a lonely row of shopfronts in the middle of a vast, flat void three hours from Downtown LA.

Like the planned and failed utopian community partly built and now rotting by the Salton Sea, California City was marked out on Google Maps as much bigger, grander, and wider than it was in real life. We drove past ghost streets, working our way north through a dream that never materialized. I turned off the main road onto a strip of dirt cutting a path through low, sparse desert scrub, heading toward the flat, hazy horizon. Wind-scattered piles of trash rolled past the car. A rusted oven resting on its side. A clump of children’s toys and clothes half buried in sand. Sheets of corrugated iron making shelters for snake families in the boiling sun.

I saw Ada’s car two miles before we arrived at it. A candy-pink Porsche Panamera gleaming so brightly I couldn’t look directly at the paintwork. Ada was standing ten yards ahead of it with her foot resting on an upturned blue plastic bucket. Her black leather pants and boots were dusty, and she’d stripped down to a black singlet top. There was a leather jacket on the hood of the car, which told me she’d been out here since the chill of morning. The shovel on the ground beside the car nailed it. The guy was dead and buried. I stopped but didn’t put the car into park.

“Should we just go now?” I asked Sneak.

Sneak got out of the car. I parked and joined her. That voice was whispering at me again, the one that told me I had got myself into this mess, that I was getting deeper and deeper with every second I hung around these women.

Ada flicked her cigarette into the wind and jutted her chin at me.

“You’re late.”

“We left when you called.” I shrugged.

“What’s the matter with you? You got a vat of soup in the car?” she said.

“That’s just how I drive.”

“Is he dead?” Sneak broke in. I looked and saw that her fists were clenched. “Did you at least get something out of him before he died?”

Ada stepped off the bucket, kicked it so that it flipped off a human head sitting on the desert floor.

I reeled away, pressing my fingers into my eye sockets.

“Oh, Jesus. Oh, god!” I cried.

“Help!” A man’s voice cut through my blindness. “Help me, please. Please! This bitch is crazy!”

The human head was talking. The man from the video was buried up to his neck in desert sand. It was Dimitri Lincoln. His tightly cropped crown of black curls was covered in dust, and his mouth was crusted with sand and blood. Sweat was running in stark lines through the dust on his face, rivers cutting paths toward the ground. The absurd, decapitated head turned and looked around him, took in the sight of Sneak and me standing casting shadows over his situation.

“Listen to me,” he said. “My name is Dimitri Lincoln. I’ve been kidnapped. I—”

“We know who you are,” Sneak said.

“Dimitri has been trying to figure out what all this is about for six hours now,” Ada said. She sat on the bucket and put a boot up against Dimitri’s temple, pushed his head at a painful angle. “He’s got some very interesting guesses. He owes a lot of money to some pretty heavy gangs. He’s fucked a lot of connected women, the wives of some important people. Cops. Drug dealers. This isn’t a very surprising scenario for you, is it, Dimitri? You’ve been expecting something like this for a while.”

“Fuck you,” Dimitri snapped, wiggling his head and neck madly in the sand. “You bitches are looking at twenty to life for this. This is kidnapping. Conspiracy. Assault.”

“Cut the lawyer bullshit,” Sneak said. She yanked her phone out of her pocket and showed him the page for the video of him and Dayly. “See her?”

Dimitri squinted in the sun. “I see her.”

“That’s my daughter.”

“Sounds about right.” Dimitri looked Sneak up and down, which was an interesting move from his position. “She said her momma was a junkie whore.”

“She’s missing,” Sneak said. The veins in her neck were standing out. She was edging closer to Dimitri’s head, and I could see her thighs tensing as though she might deliver a fatal kick. I grabbed her arm to hold her in place. “Tell me where she is or I’ll back that big fucking car over your fat, stupid head.”

“I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

“This video was posted”—Sneak checked the screen—“eleven days ago.”

“Yeah, I posted it. Dayly cheated on me, and I had the video. I needed cash. So what, huh? She took off, and the video was just one thing she left behind. Too bad. I made good money from it on the site.”

“I don’t like that,” Ada said, her lips twisted in distaste. “Revenge porn, they call it. I don’t like it.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you like, bitch,” Dimitri scoffed.

“Well, you better start, baby.” Ada’s voice was soft, terrifying. “You better start real quick.”

“Did Dayly know you took the video of her?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Bullshit,” Ada said.

“She did.” Dimitri turned with difficulty and looked at Ada. “Maybe she would have been into selling it, too, if I’d asked her. She liked getting freaky. She was playing with fire, that girl. When I met her she was uptight. Wouldn’t say ‘dick’ if you paid her. Then suddenly she wants to know about drugs, wants to go out and party. She was a fairy princess. Wanted to come over to the dark side. I was happy to show her. I introduced that bitch to a bunch of things. She had one of the tightest asses I ever—”

Ada shot out her foot and kicked Dimitri in the mouth. His head snapped sideways.

“Fuck!” Some of Dimitri’s bravado drained away.