Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

Hugh Jackman shuffled loudly in his box. A stab of pain hit my ribs, seizing my breath. Santiago leaned on the counter again, curious this time.

“What the fuck was that? Don’t tell me we got rats in this place.”

My hands were numb as I brought the ice cream container up onto the counter. The men all crowded in.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s just my pet. I, uh … See, I’ve been having some trouble at my apartment. My friend … My friend’s daughter … It doesn’t matter. Look, it was just for the one night and he hasn’t been out of his box at all. I would never let him out. None of the customers have noticed. He’s not a rat. He’s a gopher. Some people have them as pets. I’m sure they do.”

“Open that thing up.” Santiago pointed at the box. My throat felt ragged now. Torn. I was about to feed my gopher to a pack of wolves. I took Hugh Jackman out of the box and held him in the light. The gopher stretched, its rump in the air, then put its head up and yawned, baring two long front teeth. The cartel members watched as he did a circle on my palm and headed for my wrist.

Santiago snatched the animal.

“Please don’t hurt him.” I made a grab for the gopher. “Please. Please just—”

“Look at this thing.” Santiago held the gopher in his fist like a microphone, Hugh Jackman’s round, furry head poking out from the choke chain of the man’s thick thumb and forefinger. The men all leaned in to look. I couldn’t bear to watch the gang leader crush the life out of Dayly’s pet, so I stared at my own terrified reflection in the windows.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for a pained animal squeal, the crunch of broken bones. Nothing came. When I looked back, Santiago was stroking Hugh Jackman’s head with the index finger of his free hand.

“It’s like a hamster.” Santiago was smiling. “Only smaller.”

“I like the nose. It’s twitchin’,” one of the big goons said. “See it twitchin’?”

“Look at the ears. They’re so small. So stupid.”

“Can I have a hold, boss?”

Santiago tipped the gopher into the big man’s hand, which was the size of a baseball glove. Hugh Jackman ran over his palms and the men watched and laughed.

“Does it bite?” Santiago’s lieutenant asked me. I wiped my throbbing face on my palms.

“No, he’s friendly,” I said.

“What’s it doing in this little box here?” Santiago said. “That’s no place to keep a pet.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “The arrangement was supposed to be temporary but it’s gone on longer than I anticipated.”

The two big goons put their palms together to make a big platform and watched the gopher run between them, almost giggling with delight. Santiago picked up the gopher and put it in the pocket of his shirt, showed his crew how the gopher popped out again, looking over the hem of the pocket like a kid going for a ride at the fairground.

“Alejandro here is gonna bring you a nice hamster cage,” Santiago said, nodding at his sideman. “One of those ones with the tubes that go in and out. The tunnels. You know? So the gopher can run around. Can he use a mouse wheel? Get one with a mouse wheel, Alejandro. Two mouse wheels.”

Alejandro nodded once, smiled warmly at me.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I like this thing,” Santiago said, ignoring me. He was making a tunnel with his fists now, the restless Hugh Jackman wriggling through one hand and into the other. “I like its stupid little ears. I might get one for my sobrina. Do you have a name for it?”

“Ye—”

“You will call it Santiago Mateo Nicolas Cruz,” he said, passing the gopher back to me.

“Of course, I will,” I said.

Santiago gave Alejandro some instructions in Spanish. I returned the creature to its box and tucked it safely away. When Santiago nodded, the men started to file out. The gang leader pointed back at me as he left.

“You’re a nice person, Blair Harbour,” he said again.

JESSICA

Jessica stood on her balcony and stared down at the vehicles backing up at the traffic lights on Alameda, panhandlers ducking between cars with their cardboard signs. She could see a helicopter circling the streets south of Downtown, its blue-white spotlight stabbing down, stirring, looking for someone in the murk. She had taken a flight with one of the bird crews once, just out of curiosity. She’d sat rigid in her seat, gripping the frame of the shuddering aircraft, sweat rolling down her belly under her uniform. They’d flown over one of Johnny Depp’s houses, so low they’d rustled the treetops. The unbroken view of the glittering city had been ruined when her pilot started up with a story about how the chopper had been shot at as it flew over Compton once. A bullet had pinged off the left landing skid. Another half an inch and it would have hit the fuel tank, turning the machine into a fireball rocketing toward the earth. She’d thrown up for fifteen minutes straight after her feet hit solid ground.

The time had come. Jessica held her phone in one hand and a piece of paper with a number on it in the other. A phone number for Kristi Zea had been difficult to obtain. Zea filtered her calls through a website that specialized in masked numbers—generic phone numbers with an area code of the client’s choosing. According to the piece of paper, Jessica would be dialing Missouri. However, she would bet that the call would be diverted through the website’s algorithms and back to Los Angeles, where Kristi Zea was still living. People were creatures of habit, and trauma tied them to a location. She dialed the number and waited with little hope that the woman would pick up.

Someone did. There was a shuffling, as if the phone was dropped and retrieved. “Yeah?”

“Kristi?”

A pause. Jessica gripped her balcony