Maren is not the first Avenger (backintheworld) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-08 21:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | captain america, dean winchester |
Who: Maren, Kellan (and some Delano NPCs)
What: Taking care of things
Where: Maren's RV
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Violence and dead peeps
TL;DR: There are three (Delano) bodies, burnt to a crisp in the desert, and Maren's RV has gone up in convenient flames. None of Hunter's dogs were harmed in the making of this doc.
The RV was nothing special - a standard place, room enough for Maren and another person, he supposed, though entire families were known to live in these things. The lack of privacy that would afford almost made Kellan shudder, but he knew he was never going to be stuck in one of these. Not unless something really drastic happened. It wasn’t the nicest place, but at the same time, he’d found himself hiding out in worse, and people lived less comfortably. Presumably Maren was okay with it.
An hour after the call he was there, having finished up a little extra work and bringing an extra pack of cigarettes along with him. If she wanted to start smoking, he was the last person to try and talk her out of it. He was already on his third out of an opened pack as he approached the RV and paused at the door. So, she’d killed someone. Apparently the first time she’d ever done that. It hadn’t gone well and she was distraught and had called Kellan to either ask for advice or get comfort, and he wasn’t entirely sure how to take that. Was he just the only person she knew who was in the same line of work she felt comfortable talking to? The alternatives were … troubling, for a man like him.
But a friend was a friend, and if she was planning to keep up in this life - something he was in support of - it wouldn’t hurt to help out. Killing someone for the first time - intentionally killing someone - was shaky even if your morals were as trodden into the mud as his were, and fucking it up really didn’t help.
Kellan knocked on the door of the RV and stepped back, feeling the nudge of the gun at the small of his back. Even if he knew Maren wouldn’t try anything, Vegas was Vegas. Defense was a necessity.
Maren answered the door with her skin stained red and blood on her hands. The dress she’d worn was behind her, a red puddle with bright yellow flowers on the floor of the small RV, and her dark hair was sticky at the ends where blood had dried it in clumps. She wore a pink t-shirt, underwear with yellow butterflies on them, and one of her white socks was slouched down around her ankle. The door swung open quickly, all cold air and the secrets hidden within, and the sound of music filtered out into the hot Vegas air. Something angry was playing, something recorded years and years before Maren was born, something by the Rolling Stones about a devil that wanted to introduce itself. Somewhere in the yard a dog barked, but it didn’t show its face, and Maren held her hand on the metal of the door and blinked down at her visitor without comprehension.
She hadn’t forgotten that she had called him, but that was before, when the dress was still on her body and before the blood had dried on her pale skin. She had tried to read three books in that time, and they were opened throughout the RV, pages dotted with bloody fingerprints. She had tried to clean, but that had only resulted in her staring at the blood-soaked dress in the center of the room, watching as the puddle beneath it grew arms and fingers and reached for her. She had spent the remainder of the time sitting on the small bed that hid behind the colorful curtain, toes on the edge and arms wound around her knees.
And then the knock had come, and she had dragged open the door like she wasn’t expecting callers. Her smile was absent, the teasing and red lips from the night they’d slept together gone. She blinked at him and, now that she had him, she wondered what the rules were for this type of encounter. There were so many scenarios in the books and, it occurred to her as she stood there, she had no idea what was appropriate. In the end, she wasn’t lucid enough to care; she reached out a hand, and she waited to see if he reached back.
Disheveled and bloodstained and looking distant, possibly even traumatized - though Kellan wasn’t entirely sure about that last part. There was blood everywhere as he glanced past her into the RV. How exactly had she tried to kill him that ended up like this? Hack him to death with a breadknife? She looked young, and all the darkness of their last meeting seemed to have fled.
But death could do that to you. Especially when you read about how fantastical and unreal it all was in books, like Maren seemed to do all the time. Kellan reached out a hand himself (eyes moving at the sound of a dog barking, but no other flinch visible) and grazed Maren’s bloody fingertips with half a grin.
“Usually you’d take a shower at this point,” he commented. And burn the clothes, and clean up all the blood with as much speed as you could muster, and make sure there was no trail of blood leading from the place of death to your own front door. He hadn’t seen any on the way in, but with how much there was pooled on her dress and on the floor, he seriously doubted that there wasn’t some kind of trail along the way here.
Then again, that was the lucky thing about an RV. You could move it. Once she had a clearer head, he’d make a few suggestions and see what happened next.
“You want me to come in?”
She watched his hand, dark eyes focused solely on the approach of his fingers, of the progress they made as they moved toward hers. She imagined they could change course at any moment, turn and go another way, and then he would be lost on the breeze, the one that didn’t actually exist. That thought made her clutch his fingers with painful tightness. Nothing one second, then all of her fingers closed around his the next.
His voice was firm and strong, and it made up for how not-firm and not-strong she felt. He was practical too; a shower, of course, a shower, and she lifted her dark gaze from his fingers to his face. Did she want him to come in?
She looked over her shoulders, gaze dancing along the surfaces of the RV and finding smudges of red everywhere, but she could trust him, she thought, in this. And it didn’t matter if she couldn’t, because he was strong calloused fingers in her hand, and he was broad shoulders, and she had no illusions about him being hers, not in any permanent way, but just then she would pretend, and that would be enough.
She tugged on his hand in response, pulled him past the threshold and into her small sanctuary, which seemed impossibly tiny for him to fit in. She didn’t notice, and she didn’t care, and she let go of his hand and clutched her bloody fingers in his shirt. Close, close, and he was alive, and that chased away the hacked up man in Passages for a second.
The tightness of her grip, both on his hand and then on his shirt, almost made Kellan wince. She was really that far gone, lost in the fear and the aftermath of a death gone wrong. He’d made his fair share of mistakes, even in killing people. Sometimes they got out of the fire mostly alive, or only half-dead. Sometimes they did the unexpected and came after you, a screaming, flaming specter that showed up in nightmares for years afterward. And then there were the times when one bullet or one slash didn’t do the trick, and suddenly they were coming after you, and you had to stop them before they turned the tables.
With time, you got used to it. Learned to improvise. Maren hadn’t had that time and didn’t seem prepared to kill people and yet she had. Kellan dropped a hand on her shoulder, one brief moment of potential comfort, before glancing around the blood-spattered RV and gently nudging her toward the half-open door to the bathroom.
“Shower. Clean up. You’ll feel better for it, probably. Don’t drown.” Only half a joke. In the meantime he could get rid of some of the rest of this mess and then, once she was out, he’d ask the questions he hadn’t gotten answers to over the phone. Why was she killing someone? Why call him automatically? Why leave a trail of blood, especially when there were dogs around, whining and clawing at the smell?
She disentangled her fingers from his shirt, leaving behind dry flakes of rust red on the fabric as she moved away. She heeded his words, minded what he was telling her to do, and she turned for the shower without any argument whatsoever, as if she had only needed to be told what to do, in order to do it.
She ran the water scald hot, and she stayed there far too long, in the tiny bathroom that seemed more a thing from a dollhouse than a place where a real adult lived. But the water turned off eventually, and she came back out wrapped in a towel, hair dripping along her back and shoulders. But all the red was gone, and some of her calm had returned with the pink rivulets that went down the plastic drain between her bare toes.
She didn’t look to see what he’d done, if he’d cleaned, if the RV had been washed clean like she had, not immediately. Instead, she wandered up to him, and she pulled the pack of cigarettes from where she knew they lived in his pocket. Her hand all slip and certainty and a certain intimacy in the reach, thoughtless and sure that it would be permitted. The lighter came next, and she lit the smoke while she stood close enough for him to feel the heat from the lighter’s flame, close enough that it lit up his features and the pull of that first inhaled crackled between them.
An exhale later, she tucked the items back in his pocket, her dark eyes still impossibly dark, but calmer for it. He took up the space in a way she couldn’t, in a way that was settling, and she let her hand slide over his waist as she moved away, back against the counter, not bothering to find something other than the towel yet.
Once the door to the bathroom had shut and he could hear the water on in the shower, Kellan let out a sigh, running one hand through his hair in minor aggravation. He liked Maren. She was a good kid, a great fake witness, and … well, she knew how to make sex really interesting for him. But when Kellan cleaned up a mess, he did so by burning shit down, and he did so for decent payment. Maren had probably called him thinking of nothing but how to reach out to someone. How, he wondered, was this going to end up?
Nevertheless, he stuck around and cleaned the blood off the floor. He got most of it off the couches and chairs, off the walls, off all the places it shouldn’t have been, though when it came to the books he just tried to wipe the dried spots away and made a mental note to ask her about burning at least the spots off the pages, if not the entire books themselves. With sleeves rolled up he picked up her dress and put it in a plastic bag to burn later - potentially incriminating himself, but there were too many people around here to just take it out and light it up. By the time Maren was out of the shower, Kellan had left relatively little blood in his wake, and was smoking on her couch, eyeing her towel-wrapped form carefully.
He let her take the cigarettes and the lighter, mollified when she put them back. He continued to keep an eye on her as she smoked against the counter. She looked better. So maybe some questions could be in order.
“You wanna tell me what happened?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
She held onto the cigarette like it was some kind of lifeline, and maybe it was. Drag, drag, and she looked older standing there, the blue towel bright against her pale skin. Maren seldom managed “trashy” as a fashion statement, too much old Castilian in her blood for it, her features not nearly homegrown enough to pull it off. But she did just then, a little, one foot pressing down on the other and the cigarette gripped tight between her fingers.
Did she want to tell him what happened? She wanted to tell him lies. That everything had gone off without a hitch, that the world was perfect, that she felt no guilt and no remorse, that she wasn’t in well over her head. Did she want to tell him what happened?
He looked impossibly large on the tiny couch, and she pushed away from the counter and closed the gap between them, small as it was. She tucked the cigarette she was pulling off between his lips, and then she straddled his lap, all pale limbs and blue terrycloth. She weighed nearly nothing, a leaf on the wind, and yet she felt substantial when she pressed against him, proving he was there and there was no one chasing her.
“I’m doing work for the Mumfords,” she began, the Mafia family well-enough known that he would recognize the name, even if they did battle for the same ground as the Delanos. “They hired me to take care of that person, the one you torched,” she explained, connecting the dots there. “They hired me again to find some prime jobs for their people in Las Vegas, and to take care of anyone in those positions. I only meant to look, but someone caught me. I lured him to Passages,” she said, which had been poorly done, but that other killer was there, the one that had killed the girl Hunter went on about, and she figured it would be a safe spot and he would be the immediate suspect. It went without saying that she wasn’t trained for assassin work. That, likely, she shouldn’t be taking care of anyone.
Kellan didn’t react when Maren came over to him and straddled him, when she gave him her cigarette, leaving him with two (neither of which would go to waste). He barely did more than raise his eyebrows when she told him the details of her work. Inside, however, there was a flash of anger that cooled in an instant; a rise and fall of worry; a sense of I told you so and mild disappointment. He knew Maren had her own work to do, but it had never been death, apparently, and he’d made her look good to the people who wrote her paychecks. Not his fault.
“And you took him out once you were there. Badly.” There was no scorn in his voice, only the flat tones of a man stating facts. “He’s definitely dead, though, right?” He wasn’t going to offer to go in and make sure of that. Even for Maren, that was going too far, and Kellan was a man of self-preservation above all things. “And you didn’t leave any evidence behind?”
Was he dead? He had to be dead. If not then, by now. “I thought slicing his throat would be like in the books,” she said, very much out of her league. Oh, she was a brilliant con artist, a wonderful liar, adept at getting in and out of places, almost incomparable at spying. She could slip on personas like other people slipped on coats and shoes. She could be nearly anything, a trait learned from living in her own mind for so very long. But that wasn’t the same as killing, and no one had taught her where to cut, how deep to go, what was fatal and what was not. “But he didn’t die, and so I kept cutting.” Hacking was, in truth, the more appropriate word. She took a cigarette back (his, not hers), and she sucked on it to the point where her cheeks dipped and she couldn’t hold any more smoke in her lungs. Her exhale was measured, careful slow, and she rocked against him a little, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs bare against the denim of his jeans. It wasn’t seductive; it was just scrape and grounding, and her dark eyes were a little more focused when they settled on him again. “I didn’t leave the knife.”
Always with the books. Somehow he knew that was going to be the problem. Kellan sighed and rubbed his eyes with one hand, staring at the ceiling just past Maren’s shoulder. Mafia work could be tricky, which was why he tried to stay out of it, but now he was involved whether he liked it or not, it seemed.
“That’s good,” he said. “Hope you cleaned it and put it away. And I hope you’re planning to move this RV.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Killing someone’s not easy the first time you do it. You should’ve gone for a gun, or aimed for the gut. Slashing him might have slowed him down fast enough to go for the throat.” He could still hear the dogs outside, barking. At least they weren’t inside.
What next? Keep advising her? Stick around? Maren seemed to want contact and comfort more than she wanted anything else, but Kellan wasn’t really the ideal person to offer those, even if he’d already done so. Besides that, Maren hadn’t been in a stable state of mind when she asked him over, which meant the possibility of friends, family, or worse showing up at her door. He didn’t mind being seen with her, but sometimes that could lead to questions, and questions didn’t always have pleasant answers.
“What’re you going to do the next time you need to off someone?” he asked, partly curious and partly convinced he already knew the answer: I don’t know.
“It’s in the bathroom sink,” she said of the knife, which she’d only just now scrubbed clean. “I wasn’t planning it,” she reminded him. “It wasn’t like a death in one of Shakespeare's plays,” she explained. No rage, no anger, no personal vendetta or wrong to right. It was just bad luck, and too much for someone of her size without any training. “It wasn’t meant to happen.” She sounded mournful, and she had never sounded that way before. She had no moral quandary with what he did, but she wasn’t prepared for it herself. And fires weren’t the same, she thought. They were faceless and no one’s blood slid over your fingertips as they burned.
She watched his face as he thought, wondering what all those things that slid across his eyes were, those thoughts. He was like a book she never could read, even when the letters were on the page for her. She realized he didn’t see it that way, and she realized it was not reciprocated, but that didn’t change it. There was something like hunger in her dark gaze while she watched him, and she stubbed the cigarette out on the arm of the couch without looking, listening to the hiss and breathing in the burn of the wood.
She wasn’t sure she could kill someone else, and she knew he wouldn’t want that answer. She wanted him to find her competent, to keep offering her work, and even with her current state of shock she realized she was going to need to backpedal. His question had given that away, and she reminded herself that she could be Calamity Jane. She had only to believe that she was.
“I’ll learn between now and then,” she said. “I’ll get better. I won’t make the same mistakes.” She turned a smile on him, and it started out weak and false, but gained strength the longer she smiled it. “I was paid $20,000 for this job. You’ve helped me clean up. I’ll give you your cut,” she said, letting her intelligence kick in over her fear, that survival instinct that had gotten her through hell. Cash deals, she knew, he understood. Just like she knew emotion would send him running. She could be this, she told herself.
Something cracked outside, a twig? Maybe just a dog, since the barking started up again after.
She seemed to be recovering, and for that, Kellan felt a twinge of relief. He watched her put out the cigarette, listened to her words turn from faltering and fiction-bound to stronger, offering him a cut of her pay. Maren was smart, he knew that, and even if she was currently still traumatized by the death she’d inflicted she was still intelligent and strong-willed enough to hold herself together. After a time. And a cigarette.
There was that dark look in her eyes again, but Kellan wasn’t sure if right now was the best time for that hunger to come to the forefront again. And then he heard the noise outside, a dog starting to bark, and he glanced over his shoulder toward the door of the RV. The curtains were drawn over the windows, and there wasn’t much to be heard over the barking and the distant roar of cars. But he was forever a wary man, even if he didn’t show it - didn’t so much as twitch under Maren except to turn his head.
“I appreciate that. And hey, you’re smart - I’m sure you’ll pick up the tricks sooner rather than later. I’d say go with a gun next time. Grab a silencer to go with it. Wouldn’t suggest leaving too many corpses in that hotel, though.” He let out a cloud of smoke with his eyes still fixed on the RV door. “How many dogs do you have?”
She didn’t hear the twig cracking. Too young, too inexperienced, too suited to tuning out sounds she didn’t want to hear. But she looked when he turned his head, because she was observant, especially when all of her attention was focused on him, as if he was the only thing in the space, an interesting book, the kind that chased the nightmares away. It spared her, too, having to tell him that she wasn’t sure she wanted a next time, that maybe that wasn’t for her. Would he still want her then? Did he even want her now? But he turned, and her expression went from dark and hungry to sharp, sharp.
“I don’t have any. They belong to my brother, but they’re not always here.” She had no idea if the dogs barking were Hunters, or if Hunter had taken them off somewhere. But that wasn’t his question, and she slid off his lap, even as she said, “three.” Three dogs.
Something cracked again, definitely closer this time, and Maren backed away from the door and clutched the blue towel closer to her body. Even she’d heard it that time, the crack of booted feet against some twig, and she was fairly certain whoever it wasn’t even making an attempt at silence. “Maybe it’s nothing,” she said, forcing calm she did not feel.
If there were three dogs outside, Maren’s or not, they would be making more noise, and he probably would have seen them. And a dog didn’t move purposefully like the way those snaps sounded. It could have been someone moving along, past the RV and toward another road, another car, anything. Or it could have been someone coming straight for them. Given that Maren may very well have left a blood trail right up to her door, Kellan was suspicious enough to grind out his cigarette on the arm of her couch and lean forward, eyes still locked on the door.
“Get some clothes on,” he said, his voice low and quiet and slightly dangerous. Part of him hoped it was nothing. Part of him hoped it was something. Part of him was already planning the best escape route should someone kick the door in, bullets flying, and an automatic sliver of him had already sought out the more flammable parts of the RV’s interior. The gun was still tucked back in his belt, but he didn’t grab it yet. The less threatening he looked, the less likely he was to get shot.
That still left Maren, of course, but so long as she either stayed away or got herself ready to run, his concern for her was cursory.
All this was going to be kind of embarrassing if the footsteps walked right by the RV and continued on their path, leaving dwindling tension in their wake. But he stayed ready anyway.
The footsteps did not walk right past, and she was just dragging open the drapes when she heard a sound outside, one she didn’t recognize. The click of a safety being released, the hairsbreadth of time before the click of a semiautomatic’s first volley.
Luckily, she was leaning over, hands in the drawers hidden beneath the bed, the ones that kept her clothing in safe, neat little squares that were reminiscent of book’s covers in soft colors and flowered fabric, when the bullets pierced the edge of the RV. A single, perfect row of bullets, all at window level, in a perfect rectangle around the RV, into the RV, and out the other side of the tin that encased it.
Kellan recognized the sound in an instant, and was flat on the ground when the bullets came flying. The windows shattered in explosions of glass, showering him in broken bits and pieces; he swore against the carpet and waited for the gunfire to cease, hoping - automatically assuming - that Maren was hiding. One hand moved to the handgun in his belt and pulled it free, hitting the safety, aimed at the door in case someone decided to come in and check their handiwork.
In the monstrous silence following the attack, dogs barked, louder than before, more frantic. Kellan ground his jaw and slowly, carefully crawled forward, using his jacket to protect his hands from the fallen glass.
At least he could be sure of one thing - it wasn’t a cop armed to the teeth outside her RV.
Maren was hiding, or as close to it as she could manage. She was huddled in the space between the bed and the couch, arms over her head and not even a sound coming from her. She was silent fear, and the position was one she had spent so many hours in in her youth. It protected important organs from belts and hands, and kept her face from earning bruises. Now, it kept the glass shards in places they wouldn’t do much damage, and it kept her from meeting her end in a spray of bullets. Steve’s orders in her mind were simple: Stay Down! said with enough military force that she actually listened.
Then the door came flying inward, just as Kellan feared it would, and one of the Delano footsoldiers stood there, flanked by two associates, a gun pointed right at Kellan’s head. His gaze skated to Maren, curled up in her towel, and then he looked back at Kellan. “Put it down.”
Delano. Naturally, she’d been sent after his guys. Kellan had done far more work for Michael Delano than he normally did for a single man or syndicate, and it would really put a burden on the business relationship if he’d automatically offed one of his men (and promptly gotten shot by the other two). Still with his jaw clenched, he set down the gun, barrel pointed away from both of them, and slowly got to his feet. Still dangerous, yes, but not in the face of a weapon pointed at his skull.
What a fucking night this was going to be. He was absolutely sure the only reason Dean hadn’t started mocking him just yet was because if Kellan got shot or buried in the middle of the desert, Dean would meet the exact same fate.
He was silent for now. No sense in trying to talk his way out of something if he hardly knew what that something was.
The man at the door grinned, and it wasn’t a very nice grin, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. He didn’t recognize Kellan, had no idea who Kellan was or who he worked for. He was a low-man on the totem pole, the footsoldier, sent to clean up; that was all. He walked forward, kicked Kellan’s discarded gun back to his men at the door, and he put the gun to Kellan’s forehead. “Who do you work for?” he asked, misunderstanding the situation entirely and pinning Kellan as the murderer, and Maren as a mere bargaining chip in the interrogation. He motioned for one of the men to grab the girl in the corner, and he waited to see if Kellan would start talking before the man got there. Most men would, the man knew, and Maren (head buried against her knees) saw nothing.
For a moment Kellan was silent and still, not entirely sure he was hearing things correctly. But it didn’t take long for the pieces to snap together, and he realized that while he was now more fucked than originally thought, he was also in a position of potentially getting these assholes out of the way completely. If he was going unrecognized, that meant there was a chance this might not get back to Michael. It meant he could cause all sorts of havoc just for the hell of it. He could set them after Mumford and associates or pin someone else with the crime - all that mattered was how well he could act.
And Dean, concerned for himself and Maren more than he ever would be about Kellan, did this kind of thing for a living.
“I - ” Take away the glare. Look dangerous, worried, concerned, unsure, afraid - okay, not afraid, but at least unsettled. “I don’t work for anybody. I’m just a freelancer. A contract.” The gun was so close to his skull he could feel the cold coming off it. All he had to do was reach up and push it away, or yank it hard enough to get his own hand around it. “I got a call, okay? They said they’d pay me if I did this one thing. I don’t do this much. I needed the cash.” A desperate old man with a much younger woman around, his daughter, maybe, living in an RV, trying to make do with what he had, turning to crime because there was nothing else … it stung his pride, but there were worse things to sting.
Maren looked up for one reason, and for one reason only; she couldn’t believe what he was saying. His voice filtered through in the way the man at the door’s hadn’t. She was accustomed to shutting out the villains, the belt wielders, but Kellan’s voice made it through the noise of fear crashing against her ears. Her dark eyes were visible just above her knees, just as a hand closed around her arm and dragged her to her feet. The towel hit the floor a second later, and she was tugged back against the man that had just shoved into the small space, his arm around her waist and his fingers at her throat.
Kellan was right; the man holding the gun was thinking father, old enough for it, hard up for money; he knew the type. “You got a call,” he repeated, pressing the cold muzzle of the gun’s barrel against Kellan’s forehead with more strength, hard enough to leave a bruise. His finger twitched at the trigger. “You got a call? Unless you want to watch your kid die, you’ll remember who you got a call from,” he explained, motioning for the man to apply pressure to Maren’s throat. It went without saying that, no matter what Kellan said, neither of the inhabitants of the RV were going to make it out alive. But people liked believing their groveling would work. He took the gun, and he pistol-whipped Kellan, the force hard enough to draw blood at the temple. “Answer me.”
That they were following his words, his plan, was a good start, but it wasn’t quite enough. Just because they believed him didn’t mean they would let him survive, or Maren survive. He’d been in this situation on the side of the gun enough times to know when someone was just humoring the people about to be shot. It was reinforced when the barrel of the gun bashed him at the temple, stunning him and making him stumble. He could feel the blood trailing down the side of his face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Maren, naked, being pinned by one of the thugs.
In a situation like this, what would a father do …
“I don’t - Jesus Christ, let her put some clothes on!” Anger and worry, supplied by Dean in spades. “Don’t hurt her, for god’s sake … ” Inside, he was all slow-growing indignation. How dare someone like this, who worked for Delano but didn’t even recognize him, think he could just walk in and smack him around? Kellan touched the blood at his temple even as the gun was back at his forehead. “They didn’t give me any names, they didn’t even say they wanted your guys gone. They just said, keep an eye on these places, and if you get the chance, take someone out so we can move our guys in.” Planning, thinking … if they let Maren go to get something on, he might have the chance to break some fingers and shoot at least one of the thugs. For now, he shook under the weight of the gun at his forehead, cowered, acted the part of a man with so much to lose. “Please, don’t hurt her. She’s all I have left … ”
Maren didn’t even blink at the rough handling, at the fingers on her throat, at the nudity; for someone not trained in torture, that was all likely telling, and she didn’t realize she had a part to play until a few seconds in, a few seconds of watching Kellan with dark, scared eyes that refused to shed tears or turn to panic. A blink, and that all changed, as Kellan’s play filtered into her mind. She cried, and she pleaded, and she covered herself as she was supposed to do. She was good at it, and it was convincing, and she was fairly sure they didn’t know she wanted every last one of them to burn and ash, because she knew that was likely what Kellan had planned, once it was all said and done.
The man holding the gun laughed at Kellan’s request. “Fine,” he said, but his expression was all sneer and cruelty, and he motioned to the man holding Maren. “Help her get dressed,” he said, and the man laughed as he shoved Maren onto the bed and yanked the curtain behind him. The other gun filtered in, taking his place at the leader’s back, his own hand on the gun at his hip. “You expect me to believe that?” he asked Kellan, a tsk on his lips. It was dead quiet behind the curtain, too quiet, surely someone should be screaming or grunting, and the man’s weight fell on the bed a second later. The leader holding the gun looked over again. “What’s going on in there?” he asked, and Maren replied with a very believable scream, but that sound would never come from her lips if she was truly frightened. No, fear for Maren came with complete silence. But the man believed it, and he turned a smug grin back to Kellan. “You were saying?”
Maren was the real actress. She was the one who sealed the deal, and Kellan could tell. Anybody could play the part of a concerned parent; acting terrified, screaming, pleading the way she did - it was as close to real as you could get, and something he could never even attempt. But he wouldn’t ever have to. Not when he was this close to getting out of here whole and hale and only slightly scratched up by glass.
“Don’t you dare - ” Maren’s scream, a little delayed, very startling, made him jump, and he winced, eyes shut. Feeling the way the gun was pressed against his skin, how much pressure there was, whether or not the asshole holding it was ready to pull the trigger at the slightest wrong move or if he was just enjoying the show. “No! Don’t you fucking - dare!”
At those words, his hand came up, sweeping past his face and grabbing the barrel of the gun. Kellan yanked hard on it and brought up his other fist, intending to smash the man’s face in, rip the gun out of his grip, and put at least half the clip in the other thug lingering just behind the leader. Then he’d make sure Maren was all right. The scream had been so real, but he’d never known her to scream, so …
The leader was too busy being pleased, and he lost precious moments to raise his hand and protect himself, and Kellan’s fist landed, the gun suddenly in lax fingers, there for the taking. The man behind the leader reacted quicker, but his first shots landed in the fallen man’s back, not expecting the movement of his body when Kellan’s fist fell, and even the ones that met with skin were poorly aimed, arm shots, nothing that would pierce an organ or cause a fatal wound. He was young, new perhaps, which was evident now, but he kept shooting, aiming a few shots at the quiet curtain too, realizing that the man there should have offered help, would have if he could.
And then, he tried to run, the man holding the remaining gun.
Kellan cursed when the leader wound up shot in the back, but didn’t waste time trying to revive him. There might be a few precious minutes left before the bastard bled to death. He hissed as a few shots grazed his arms, raising the gun - then lowered it just enough and took aim at the fleeing thug’s knee. Lucky for Kellan the guy was new and afraid and more willing to run than stick around and aim properly. He fired off one bullet, incapacitating the thug, watching him stumble and nearly fall out the door of the RV.
For a second, Kellan glanced back at the curtain, seeing bullet holes but no emerging figure with gun drawn.
“Hey,” he called, “you okay in there?” Meaning Maren, of course, but he wasn’t willing to use her name at a time like this, when people were still conscious and able to listen. He didn’t go to check on her right away, instead moving closer to the crippled thug, grabbing him by the injured leg and dragging him back into the middle of the RV.
She didn’t answer him but, by the time he was dragging the injured thug back, she was pulling the curtain aside. She was still naked, and the man’s heavy body was pinning her down, but she shoved him away (after some effort) and revealed the glint of his gun in her pale hand. The man’s mouth was an open maw of shock, the back of his head blown off during her piercing scream, a successful attempt to muffle the silenced sound of the bullet against the back of his throat as she’d pulled the trigger. Knocking him out had been easy. Shooting him had been easier. And none of it had actually been her.
She dropped the gun on the floor, and she slid her bare feet to the floor and, silently, she pulled a white lawn dress from a drawer, linen and innocence, cap sleeves and bare feet as she slipped it over her naked body. She still didn’t say anything. She just looked at him, small and pale and hair clinging to her cheeks, and then she looked down at the still-alive men. Her dark eyes were saucers of inky nothing, and she looked back up at him as she stepped forward, her bare toes connecting with one of the men’s shoulders. They were alive, but she knew he wouldn’t let them stay that way. Hers, the man on the bed, he was entirely dead; she didn’t look back at him, not even once.
There was relief, some of the tension dropping from his shoulders, as Maren pulled aside the curtain to reveal a dead man with half his skull missing. She’d done a good job muffling that, and Kellan gave her an approving look for it as she pulled on a white dress - one that would eventually wind up bloodstained as well. Then he looked back down at the bodies on the floor and wondered what to do.
The crippled thug he took the gun from and kicked in the injured knee. The leader, who was still alive but for how much longer nobody knew, he prodded in the various bullet wounds, eliciting groans of pain. Kellan raised an eyebrow and settled back on his heels. It would be so easy to put a bullet in the man’s skull, but he was bleeding out anyway.
“You really fucked this one up, didn’t you,” he commented wryly, almost smirking, ignoring the thin trails of blood on his arms. “Bad luck. And it wasn’t even me that killed you.”
Because he had no love for the Mumfords, and frankly didn’t care if they got in trouble for this (though Maren … ), and besides which neither of these men was getting out of here alive, he leaned in a little closer and whispered just low enough for the dying man and the injured man to hear him:
“There’s other families in this town with plans, jackasses.”
Maren was too far away to hear what Kellan was saying, but she had heard the almost-dead man’s sounds of pain as Kellan prodded the bullets, and she could hear the other man gurgling on the blood in his throat. She didn’t care about those things as she stood there, numb and unflinching. No, it was the blood trailing down Kellan’s arms that made her move forward, all pale white and dark hair, a haunt from an old black and white movie as she reached down a hand and rested it on his shoulder. The touch was light, hardly capable enough to blow a man’s head off, and if it wasn’t for the gunpowder on her fingers and the smell of it in her hair, it would be almost impossible to believe.
She waited a moment, and then she knelt beside him and pressed a cheek to his shoulder, to his jaw, to his neck. The man on the floor’s eyes widened, realizing he’d been taken in more ways than one, but Maren didn’t care, none of it registered. She would have crawled onto Kellan’s lap right then if she could have managed it. As it was, she pressed close to his side, and she throat at his neck, and then she slid a hand into his pocket and freed the cigarette and the lighter from the denim there.
He’d been right, and her dress was stained red from the blood on his arms when she rocked back on her heels. She lit one of the cigarettes, took a drag and exhaled the smoke over both of their heads. A long exhale, and then she dragged one of her fingers against a grazed bullet mark on his arm, blood coating the tips. “What do we do?” she asked. We.
Maren’s presence was both inviting and vaguely comforting and a little bothersome. Murder didn’t do it for Kellan the way arson did; he didn’t mind her touch, her pressing against him, but he wasn’t going to give in if she tried to get even closer. This was three bodies and a hell of a lot more blood to take care of, and not a lot of time to do it in if anybody had heard the gunshots. He glanced out the window at the darkening sky, not hearing anything more than the distant sounds of the city. Move fast, don’t draw attention … and burn the bodies.
“We clean up,” he said, giving the leader a sharp kick and leaving him to bleed out on the floor. “And you might want a new RV. Or at least move this one somewhere that nobody’s going to see the bullets and the blood.” Already the other thug was trying to crawl back out the door, but Kellan stood up and stepped hard on the man’s injured knee. “Plus, we need to find a pit somewhere. I’m not burning these assholes in your metaphorical front yard. Know a good place?”
Maren didn’t push. It wasn’t that the dead and dying men did it for her, it was fear and comfort and that desire to have someone close that was alive, that hadn’t died despite the volley of bullets, that was safe. Not hers, not that, she wasn’t innocent enough for that, but the closest thing there was in the RV. She sucked on the cigarette, fast, fast, and way too many drags.
She looked around the RV when he replied, and then she looked back at him. The bullets surrounded the entire rectangle, and the windows were shattered. It would be too hard for her to explain, even if she moved it. What would she tell Hunter? But she couldn’t leave it either, for the same reason. “We can’t burn everything here?” she asked.
She’d served as a witness for him countless times, but she had no honest idea how to leave no trace. The RV wasn’t actually in her name. Like everything else in her life, there was an alias tied to it. But Hunter knew where it was, and so did Theo. Hunter didn’t worry her; Theo did. But she could lie, especially if the fire looked like an accident, and there was no one better at fires that looked like accidents than him. She turned her face up to him, cigarette forgotten between her fingers, and she nodded, in case he still needed the response. “I know somewhere a dead girl’s buried. It could confuse things,” she suggested.
It was her reasoning for dumping her own botched body in Passages, and it was the reasoning for the suggestion now.
“You want me to burn this place?” It was up to her entirely - whether she was willing to sacrifice everything that was hers in order to hide what had happened here. Kellan wouldn’t say no if she asked him to. A gas leak and a spark, an abandoned cigarette, an errant firebomb … actually, given the bullet holes, the last one might be the best idea. The police might guess at vandals or worse, but if there were no bodies left behind, it would just be a casual vandalism-arson case, especially if nobody came forward to claim the place. “It’s your stuff.”
He vaguely recalled Maren mentioning that someone else lived here, or at least that occasionally she had the place to herself. But that wasn’t really his problem, and there was still the third man to take care of.
“Sounds like a plan. Let’s drive this thing out there, dump these assholes, and then you can decide what to do with the RV.” Delano wasn’t going to be happy to find out three of his men were dead, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. After all, arson happened every day, and it wasn’t always Kellan’s fault.
She stood, a silent ghost in white, dark hair framing her face. “I don’t think RV moves,” she told him, looking around, because she was pretty sure the tires were just for show - something pretty for whoever rented the tiny tin castle. “Can we put the bodies in your car?” He had a car, right? Or was that asking too much. Would that push him away, make him run into the night and never return? She could see that, him being the kind of man to weigh the pros and cons and find her coming in too heavily in the cons column. “I’ll pay,” she said, as if it was a job, because it could be, if it meant he didn’t feel a noose around his neck.
She stepped back, without waiting for his response, and she packed the things she absolutely had to have. A few books, her favorite ones. A few dresses, her favorite ones. Steve’s journal, and her cellphone, and that was all she really had, all that mattered, and maybe that told a story too, along with the scars that lined her back and outer arms. “It can burn,” she said, and she moved toward the door on bare feet.
She looked around, and she wanted to step forward, to touch, to cling, but she didn’t. She reminded herself that she was competent, and she regarded him with dark eyes. “I can tell you where to take them, and I can stay here while it burns,” she said of the RV. Maybe it would be easier that way. Maybe she should change, though. Yes. A few steps forward, and the dress was over her dark hair, bloodied and forgotten, and another slipped into place, nearly the same, almost a mirror. It went with this evening’s chapter, she thought, the pure and pristine white. It would look good while the world burned; fitting.
The rest took under an hour. The bodies were loaded up, and they ended up in a deep pit in the desert, an hour out and burned alive. The RV took a little longer, but the fire was beautiful, Maren thought, as she watched it from the diner on the corner, the place that was her alibi. The dogs were tied a safe distance away, and the Vegas night sky turned a bright and beautiful smoke-filled red. And the Delanos were gone, and all their secrets burned away.