Murderfunding, p.20
#MurderFunding, page 20
Becca had only a moment to think. Boyd had her under the arms, just like she’d grabbed Mistress Distress before dropping the dominatrix to her death. She had to grab on to something. Flailing around with her hands as they reached the top of the bungee’s recoil, Becca managed to wrap her arms around Boyd’s helmet a split second before Boyd released her grip.
Becca hung suspended from Boyd’s head, mouthing a silent prayer for the structural integrity of the chin strap holding the helmet in place, as they plummeted downward toward the Juggernaut, pulled by gravity. Boyd batted at Becca’s hands, trying to dislodge them, but Becca held on for dear life. She looked down, hoping she’d land close to where Boyd had snapped her up, or, even better, in the balcony, where her friends would catch her, but as both rapidly approached, Becca realized they were going to fall between the two, in the gap that separated the turret from the balcony. If she fell, there would be no way she’d ever make it back to the top of the Juggernaut.
As she hurtled past her friends, Rita, Stef, Coop, and Fiona all reached out to try to catch hold of her, but they weren’t close enough, and Becca couldn’t release her grip on Boyd’s helmet to give them her hand. The bungee cord hit its maximum and began to recoil, and Becca felt her hands slipping. She was going to fall.
Just as Becca’s strength was about to give way, something slammed into her from the side at the exact moment she was racing up past the turret again. She saw a flash of green and instinctively let go of Boyd’s helmet as Lars grabbed her around the waist.
For a moment, the world moved in slow motion. Becca and Lars tumbled through the air, arcing toward the balcony platform from the force of Lars’s running start off the top of the turret. Becca was over Lars, then under him, then over again as they descended. She couldn’t see anything but Lars’s face smiling at her; then someone grabbed her arm and yanked her away as Lars continued to fall into the gap.
“No!” Becca screamed. She reached out for Lars at the same time as Coop, Stef, and Fiona did. But they couldn’t reach him.
Lars was gone.
BECCA STOOD ON THE platform, a strong arm holding her upright as she watched Lars crash headfirst onto the concrete floor. She stood frozen, waiting for him to get up. But he didn’t move.
“FUCK!” Becca screamed, her voice raw. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” She was crying, a mix of rage and sadness, while someone cradled her from behind.
“I’m so sorry, baby girl,” Rita said. “I’m so sorry.”
Becca spun around, pushing her mom away. Lars had sacrificed himself to save her, and it was all Rita’s fault.
It was as if Rita could read Becca’s mind. “I can explain,” she said, her face pinched with pain. “I know how this looks.”
You’re more like your mom than you realize.
All the Martinellos had blood on their hands.
“Becca, look!” Stef grabbed her hand and pointed to the corner of the balcony where a massive digital camera had been mounted. All of its lights were off. The cameras had stopped recording. “Nobody’s watching. We have to go.”
Stef was right. They probably had seconds before Victor and his thugs burst into the balcony from wherever they’d been watching the camera feeds, but Becca needed to say something to her mom. Not that anything was going to make it better—no shouts or screams or curses would repair this rift. Her mom—both of her moms—felt like complete and total strangers.
A door burst open at the opposite end of the balcony, and Victor strode through, pointing his finger at Becca and her friends. “Stop them!”
Stef pulled Becca’s arm. “We have to go now.”
Reluctantly, Becca broke eye contact and turned to follow Stef.
“Wait!” Rita cried.
Becca spun back just as Rita lifted the chain around her neck, pulling it over her head. She stared at the ring, kissed it, then pulled back her arm and threw it across the balcony to her daughter.
The ring, chain and all, flailed through the air, losing momentum as it went. But Becca thrust her arm forward just in time to catch the looped chain with her outstretched fingers. Hanging from it was Ruth’s sapphire wedding ring.
When Becca looked up, Rita was already gone, racing up the steps toward Victor and his thugs. They were armed; she was not. It was suicide.
“No!” Becca screamed as Rita launched herself at Victor’s guards.
“There’s nothing you can do.” Stef dragged her through the exit door. As she raced down the steps, hardly aware of her surroundings, Becca was relatively sure she heard gunshots.
From above, a door slammed open, ricocheting against the wall of the stairwell from the force of impact, as Alexei, Sergey, and the rest of Victor’s thugs raced after them. Becca had to force the confused jumble of feels out of her mind. Everything they’d done, Lars’s sacrifice, Rita’s too—it would all be in vain if they couldn’t escape.
Three flights down, Coop reached the exit first, throwing his body against the release bar as if he thought he’d have to break it down. But the door gave easily, unlocked and unblocked, and he went floundering into the twilight of early evening. Fiona and Stef followed, then Becca stumbled out behind them. How long had they been in there?
“Let’s move,” Coop said, turning to face them. “Those guys were right behind us.”
They broke into a run, following Coop down the length of the building, and as they reached a cross street, he slowed down, trying to get his bearings.
A horn beeped, loud but high-pitched like from a child’s toy. A golf cart pulled around the corner, skidding to a halt as Coop braced himself against the hood.
“Watch where you’re going!” the driver yelled. He wore a guard’s uniform.
“You need to call nine-one-one!” Becca cried, racing up to him. “There are a bunch of guys with guns chasing us, and at least six people are dead inside that soundstage.” Six or seven.
“Ha-ha,” the guard said. “Very funny.”
“We’re serious!” Stef pleaded.
The guard pointed at Fiona’s blood-splattered dress. “Right. Next thing you’re going to tell me is that stuff is real. Please, kids. I’ve been on this lot for fourteen years, and I can tell fake blood when I—”
The door to the soundstage burst open, Alexei in the lead, spotting Becca, her friends, and the security guard. He raised his arm, not even bothering to hide the weapon in his hand, and fired.
“Holy shit!” the driver said. Then he fumbled with his walkie-talkie while Becca and her friends took shelter behind the cart. Alexei continued to fire, advancing slowly, as his men fanned out beside him.
“Clyde!” the guard shouted into his walkie. “Clyde this is Mathers. I’ve got these kids here a-a-and there’s gunfire…” He paused, flustered. Not the best-trained guard in Hollywood, clearly. “Shots fired. I repeat, shots—”
One of Alexei’s bullets caught him straight in the forehead, and Mathers slumped over the wheel, dead.
“Move!” Coop cried. He grabbed Fiona’s hand and, crouching low, made a break for the shelter of the building across the street. Stef and Becca raced after him, not daring to look back at the golf cart or Alexei or the barrage of bullets whizzing around them. They ducked into the alley behind the next soundstage, temporarily shielded from the Russian bullets, and sprinted down its length. At the end of the building, they paused.
“What do we do?” Fiona panted, her hand still firmly grasped in Coop’s.
“That gunfire should get the police here pretty fast,” he said.
“Not fast enough.” Becca didn’t want to sit around and wait for Alexei to find them. He’d already killed a federal agent and a security guard. She doubted he’d drawn the line there, even if the police arrived. “We need to get out of here.”
“How?” Stef said. She nodded toward the twenty-foot-high fence around the lot. “No way we can climb that.”
“If Alexei is half as smart as I think he is,” Coop said, “they’ll be watching the main entrance for us.”
“We could just find a good hiding place,” Fiona suggested, “and wait for the police.”
An idea popped into Becca’s head. “Or we can drive out of here and go to the police.”
“In what?” Stef asked. “The golf cart? I’m pretty sure we can run faster than that thing can drive.” She looked exasperated. Exhausted. She’d been so strong through all of this, but now it was Becca’s turn to carry the weight.
And she knew just how. “How about a giant stripper bus?”
Becca was pretty sure Alexei wouldn’t suspect that they’d doubled back to the main soundstage, certainly not that they’d be bold enough to try to steal Victor’s bus, so it seemed like a decent plan. Sneaking between the buildings proved easy enough. They skirted the perimeter of the lot to keep from being seen in the open and came upon the bus on the far side of the building they’d just escaped from.
The good news was that they hadn’t been caught. The bad news was that it had been at least ten minutes since Mathers had been killed, and no sirens could be heard in the distance. Which was a really bad sign. Had Alexei gotten to Clyde too? Had anyone left on the lot thought that the gunshots were just props and sound effects in the same way that Mathers had thought they were just actors?
The stripper bus was exactly where they’d left it. More importantly, there was no one inside. The guard must have been called in for the search.
“Anybody know how to hot-wire a bus?” Becca asked, climbing on board behind Coop.
“Nope,” he said, then turned to her with a wide grin. “But I know how to use the keys.” He dropped into the driver’s seat, jangling a pair of old-fashioned car keys still shoved into the ignition as he brushed past.
Stef sighed, resting her head on Becca’s shoulder. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Can you drive it?” Fiona asked, less awed by the miraculous appearance of the keys than she was concerned about the practicality of driving an actual bus.
Coop just shrugged. “No time to learn like the present.”
The bus engine roared to life, louder than normal because the door was still wide open. Coop hit a few buttons, trying to close it, and only managed to turn on some swirling disco lights and a thumping house sound track.
“What the hell?” Becca cried. She leaned forward to try to turn off the media and strobes, when out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone running toward them.
“Coop,” she said, watching the figure grow larger as he approached. “I think we better move.”
“But the door…”
“Screw the door!” The figure reached into his jacket pocket, a move Becca recognized all too well as he reached for his gun. “Go!”
Coop threw the bus into reverse and stepped on the pedal. The tires screeched from the force of acceleration, and Becca was thrown forward against the dash.
“Hang on!” Coop cried, then cranked the wheel to the left. The bus turned sharply, and this time, the momentum tossed Becca toward the wide-open door. She managed to grab hold of the hand railing and clutched at it frantically as Coop slammed on the brakes and shifted into drive.
Stef and Fiona scrambled forward, grabbing Becca by each arm and hauling her back into the bus as several pops sounded from outside. A crack appeared on the driver’s-side window, but the glass didn’t shatter.
“Heh,” Coop laughed. “Victor had bulletproof glass installed. How cool is that?”
“Great,” Becca panted, climbing back to the bench seats.
“Becca,” Stef said, her hand on Becca’s arm. “What about your mom? Should we go back and…and see?”
Becca’s stomach clenched, the sickening reality of Rita’s death washing over her. Becca had heard the gunshots as they fled the soundstage, and she knew, in that moment, that Rita had sacrificed herself for them, to help them escape. Just like Lars. The only thing they could do now was honor their deaths and survive.
“She’s gone,” Becca said, feeling herself choke on the words. “We can’t save her.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Becca clenched her jaw, fighting back the tears. “Coop, can you get us out of here?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Coop floored the accelerator and bounced the bus out of the parking lot onto one of the internal streets that crisscrossed the lot. Becca gripped a stripper pole with both hands as he careened around a corner toward the main gate, hardly slowing down. The bus tipped precariously and she thought for one horrific moment it might topple onto its side, ending their escape before it had barely begun, but as the centrifugal force of the turn ebbed, the bus righted itself and Coop gained more speed as he raced toward the entrance.
“Where are the police?” Fiona asked, a note of panic in her voice. “They should have been here by now.”
“They’re not coming.” Stef sounded incredibly calm, and Becca appreciated that she wasn’t freaking out. At least not on the outside.
Fiona’s panic escalated. “What do you mean? That guard is dead. He told his partner to—”
“Alexei and his goons must have gotten to them,” Becca said, hoping she matched Stef’s coolness. “Which means no one’s called….” She gasped, reaching into the bodice of her dress. “The phone!”
“Oh my God, I forgot!” Stef grabbed the phone from Becca’s outstretched hand. Her face lit up as she stared at the screen. “There’s a signal!”
“Guys,” Coop said from the front of the bus. “We have a problem.”
Becca groped her way to the front and leaned down to see out of the windshield. The guard tower was approaching fast, the gates on both the entrance and exit sides still down, and standing in their way with guns raised were Alexei and three of his goons.
“What do I do?” Coop asked. Becca felt him ease up on the accelerator.
Murder and violence had not been a part of the life that Becca had known. Her parents rarely fought, there were no murders in her town, and the closest Becca had ever come to killing a living thing was the occasional spider she washed down the drain when it somehow made its way into the bathtub. But as she watched Alexei and his men begin to fire, bullets striking the windshield and leaving round shock-absorption pools in their wake, she knew that it was either her or them, her friends or a bunch of hitmen.
“Floor it,” she said, gripping the back of Coop’s seat. “And don’t slow down.” Then she turned back to Fiona and Stef. “Hold on, you guys.”
Fiona braced herself against one pole while Stef shoved the phone into her dress and grabbed the other pole with both hands. The engine revved, and Becca anchored her shoulder against Coop’s seat. Alexei’s men scattered first, the wash of fear on their faces identifiable as they realized Coop wasn’t going to slow down. But Alexei held his ground. It looked as if he was going to die firing his gun at that bus—they were so close Becca could even see the crooked scar on his left eye. Then, at the last moment, he dove out of the way.
“Impact!” Becca cried.
The bus crashed through the barrier, ripping the gate from the mechanism, then bounced over a speed bump so fiercely Becca was momentarily airborne. The force of the bump must have released the bus door, which slammed shut as Coop peeled down the driveway and onto the street.
And just like that, they were free.
BECCA COULDN’T STOP SHAKING.
Bram’s death had been a shock, but somehow watching an undercover FBI agent shot by a Russian hitman made more sense to her than what had happened in the Juggernaut. That was pure madness.
Kylie’s scream. The squishy sound that Sumo Sutra’s body made when the steamroller hit it. Kayden’s decapitated head. The smell of Mistress Distress’s burning flesh.
Then there was Lars.
Did Becca deserve his sacrifice? Had she deserved his friendship? She pictured the smile on his face as he flung her toward the balcony before falling to his death. It was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen.
Hypocrite.
Becca thought of the Molly Mauler video Stef had shown her, a video where her own mother fed a man to a giant snake. Someone had cared about that man. His family. And they’d watched him die a cruel, painful death while people like Becca watched from the comfort of their own homes, confident nothing like that would ever happen to them. Because she was a good person. Her family were good people. Those people were criminals. They’d deserved what they’d gotten. And so everyone could watch their gory deaths and root for the Painiacs, guilt-free.
Of course, with all the revelations during the last days of Alcatraz 2.0, could she really be sure that anyone who died on the prison island was actually guilty of a crime? And either way, considering what Becca had just experienced in the belly of the Juggernaut, she was pretty sure that no one, no matter what their crime, deserved to die like that.
Not even her mom.
Heavy tears spilled from Becca’s eyes at the memory of Molly Mauler’s death. She’d tried to climb up the side of the cage to get to Dee Guerrera. The Cinderella Survivor had used Molly’s remote control to open the gate, releasing a pack of ravenous wolves on her mom, her body torn apart in a matter of minutes.
My mother’s body torn apart. My other mom dead back on that soundstage.
Maybe her moms deserved it, after all the deaths that had come by their hands—Ruth’s literally, Rita’s by association. But Becca couldn’t hate them for it. Now they were both dead, and Becca would never be able to tell her moms how much she loved them. And how she forgave them for the horrible things they’d done. All Becca had left now was Rafa. Where was he? There was no way Rita had brought him to LA—was there?
Wherever he was, she’d find him, and she’d never let him learn the truth, that was for damn sure. She’d spend the rest of her life protecting Rafa from the knowledge of what their parents had been. He was her only priority now.
The bus rocked as Coop took a corner. “Sorry,” he said, his voice weary. “I’ll get the hang of this eventually.”
“Doing great,” Becca replied, trying to hide the fact that she was crying. She wasn’t the only one. Fiona whimpered softly from the backseat, wiping her nose with the hem of her dress. The purple overhead lights glistened off the tears that streamed down her cheeks.
