Ghosts by Matt Rogers (ap literature book list txt) 📕

Remember Beckham, she kept telling herself. Remember Beckham Lang.

He was Violetta’s ex-boyfriend, paralysed from the neck down many years ago after a failed assassination attempt from the Sinaloa cartel. Alexis and Slater had rescued him from a disability centre after word spread that the government was seeking to eliminate Beckham to get to Violetta. They’d set him up in a new home, given him a new life, and he’d taken it all in stride with unwavering self-confidence. He was the most inspirational person she’d ever met.

She recalled his words.

‘I separate everything I can potentially do into the tasks that have positive outcomes, and then I do only those things. I have no expectation of anything else. It helps me stop thinking about what could have been, because that’s useless, isn’t it? We’re living in this reality.’

She would never forget them.

So when the door opened and light flooded the small back office, she sat up and adjusted the wrist that was handcuffed to the desk leg so she could look Ray in the eyes. He loomed over her, and she couldn’t stand up, but she didn’t cower. She didn’t wilt.

She controlled what she could control.

Ray was hot and flustered from barking commands. He wiped his dirty forehead with a dirty palm, slicking his wisps of hair straight back, and spat brown spit into a wastebasket beside Alexis.

She said, ‘Come to say hi?’

He regarded her. ‘You’re either certifiably insane or stupidly brave, sweetheart.’

She didn’t react.

He said, ‘You know what I’m going to do to you.’

She didn’t react.

He crouched down so they were eye to eye. ‘You’re lucky I’m a private man. My men are out there working hard. I need to be a strong leader. I need to lead from the front. I can’t be wasting my time messing around with you in here — not until they’re off the clock. Not until we’re bunkered down for the night. I don’t like the idea of them sitting outside, listening.’

‘So then what are you doing now?’

‘Interrogating you.’

‘This doesn’t feel like much of an interrogation.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

Ray reached out and grabbed her by the throat.

She coughed and spluttered but didn’t panic. She couldn’t control Ray cutting off her airways. She could control her response to it. She let him choke her, and she sat there with her face reddening and her eyes turning bloodshot until finally he released her grip. She spluttered again as air flooded in, but she didn’t double over. She didn’t hunch.

No cowering.

He looked at her with newfound respect. ‘You’re tougher than you look.’

‘How do I look?’

‘Like your ordinary showgirl. Maybe even better looking than them. More privileged. Like the whole world is going to fall into your lap just because you’re hot.’

‘You’ve got a lot to learn about impressing women.’

Ray smiled the same brown smile. ‘You say that chained to my desk.’

She masked a shudder.

‘You look like me, you never get what you want in that department,’ Ray said in what she interpreted as a rare moment of self-reflection. ‘My whole life I was alone. It made me the sheriff of the whole county. But then I’d go home to an empty house. I’d pour myself a drink or five and go to bed and get up and do it all over again. I reached the top of my field. I asked myself, is this it? Then I realised something you and your smugness haven’t yet figured out. I realised I could simply reach out and take whatever I wanted. So that’s what I’ve done to you. You want the truth? I don’t care how you know me. I don’t care why you were looking for me. You’re here now, and you’re mine, and nothing you say or do is going to change that, sweetheart.’

She thought, Why the hell is he telling me this? His train of thought is all over the place.

Then it clicked.

Out there, he was the alpha male. The top dog, inspiring loyalty in the ranks, convincing ex-cops and ex-decent-human-beings to come and work for him and his operation. But it was all founded on his own frailties, on the simple fact that no woman would look twice at him when they realised what a sick, perverted old man he was. He’d dipped a finger into the fountain of power and then jumped in with his clothes on. But that meant out there he had to be flawless, rigid, lacking any and all weaknesses. In here, in the company of a stranger who couldn’t judge him because she was his prisoner, he could speak freely.

He could admit it was all because of his own misery.

But he’d come back round at the end of his speech, re-injecting the power dynamic.

You’re mine.

Alexis said, ‘When this is over, everyone’s going to know how pathetic you are.’

A pause.

She said, ‘All I see is an old man overcompensating for the flaws he never had the balls to fix.’

She left it at that.

He slapped her so hard in the face she thought it knocked her unconscious. But her vision only went dark for half a second, and when it returned she saw him broiling with rage, practically shaking from the flood of emotion. She’d touched a nerve.

She smiled.

This doesn’t affect me.

He went to hit her again, despite her non-reaction to the first strike, but something held him back.

She noticed it, too.

A couple of Ray’s men just outside, milling around the half-open door, searching for the source of the smack of palm against cheek.

If he kept hitting her, it’d prove to them that she’d cut him to the core with her words.

He had to show restraint, despite no part of him wanting to.

He stood up, hissed, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

In the dark, she kept smiling.

44

The fourth guy died with his secrets as King put a round through the side of his skull.

The other three didn’t fare much better.

The two with sub-machine guns didn’t react fast enough. They turned in half-circles, fast, hearts thumping and