Chapter 15

Over the course of the next four days, Nyah stayed cooped up in her apartment. To give herself some breathing room with Maroney and his goons, she hired a moving company and had them box up and take most of her furniture to a storage locker outside the city. She asked Matt to take Lei's ashes to his apartment and hide them, just in case Maroney decided to escalate to breaking and entry. She reluctantly packed away the rest of the shrine and sent it with the movers.

Karen and Foggy delivered what few groceries she needed and they of them ordered in two of the nights and all four of them ate together at her apartment. She thoroughly enjoyed it and was growing more comfortable around them. Their joking and laughing was contagious and, despite the threat that loomed over her, she was happier than she had ever been since the curse began.

On Saturday the package with the items that she had ordered arrived and she spent the afternoon configuring the them and installing the programs for them on her computer. By the time Sunday dawned, she was as ready as she was ever going to be.

That evening, Karen came over for a little while and they watched a movie and ordered pizza. Nyah was impatient for her to leave so she could carry out her plan but made herself wait patiently so Karen wouldn't become suspicious. That was the last thing she needed. If Karen suspected she was up to something, she would tell Matt or Foggy and then they would stand watch over her and she would lose the opportunity and have to wait a month before she got another chance; if she got another chance.

The four of them had yet to address the 500-pound gorilla in the room: the new moon was Monday night. She would have to leave her apartment then, she had no choice in the matter, and she wasn't sure how they would handle it. This would be the first new moon since she told them about her curse, and it might not have occurred to them yet.

No matter. If her plan worked, she wouldn't be back until the crescent moon rose in four nights.

After Karen left for the night, Nyah got ready for bed as usual, but set her phone alarm for 1:00am and laid out clothes and shoes before she turned off the lights. When her alarm roused her, she got dressed without turning on the lights. She didn't put her shoes on until she reached the bottom of the stairwell; Matt had unusually good hearing and she didn't want to chance him hearing her and interfering with her plan. And she knew he would. If she had shared what she intended to do with the three of them, they certainly wouldn't have allowed her to carry it out. She wasn't even sure she wanted to herself, but she couldn't see any other way to put an end to both the kidnappings and the threats against her and them.

Her next stop was at Matt and Foggy's office where she deposited a letter in the drop box for them to find the next morning. By then, her plan would either be in executed one way or another. Then she continued on to the women's center.

She knew from her time working there that the door that opened to the alley had a faulty lock and with a little patience and luck she was able to jimmy it open. Once inside the offices, she turned on a couple of lights. Stealth was no longer her intention. Her plan hinged on someone noticing the lights and reporting it to Mrs. Williams. In the director's office, she placed a listening device under the desk where it would not be easily found unless someone was specifically looking for it.

While she was waiting to be discovered, she wanted to make the most of her time by going through the files and identifying as many other women that met the victim profile so they could possibly expand the list of missing women. When she opened the file room door, she stopped in the doorway. The room was completely empty; there were no file cabinets to be seen. She quickly checked the rest of the offices and didn't find the files. They had been moved which wasn't surprising in retrospect.

With nothing else to do, she hid her phone in the waiting area and settled down to wait. Fortunately, she didn't have long. Less than an hour after she entered the offices, she heard the front door open. She was in her old office, making a show of going through the desk when the door was flung open and banged loudly against the wall.

She didn't have to act startled when she turned and saw detective Maroney in the doorway.

"You really are a stupid bitch," he snarled at her and advance into the office.

She edged away from him, trying to keep the desk between them. "I left some personal stuff her and didn't get a chance to get it last time," she offered as a weak excuse.

He just snorted and followed her around the desk. She took the opportunity to dash out the door, only to run into a second man. He had a nose that had recently been broken and she recognized him from the attack in the alley.

"Were do you think you're going?" he leered at her as he made a grab at her.

She managed to dodge his grasp, but Maroney was behind her by then. She was trapped between them and prepared to put up a fight when something hard hit her on the back of her head and the world went black.

Nyah came to in the trunk of a car with her hands cuffed in front of her. She had planned on this and with a little contortion was able to slip her new bracelet off her wrist and tuck it under the corner of the mat, hoping it was inconspicuous enough to be missed. The bracelet had a GPS tracker that would transmit its location for the next four days; then the battery would die, and it would be useless. Until then, the program on her computer could track everywhere this car went.

She listened for sounds outside the car as it drove through the city, but nothing jumped out at her. She couldn't help but think Matt would be much better at this and would probably be able to identify exactly where he was just by the street sounds. It all just blended together to her and she gave up after a few minutes of straining to identify anything specific.

The movement of the car had almost lulled her to sleep when she felt it slowing down and making a right turn onto what sounded like gravel. At the slam of the doors, Nyah closed her eyes and pretended to still be unconscious. The trunk opened and rough hands grabbed her and unceremoniously drug her out of the car and dropped her on the ground. She landed with a painful thud despite trying to catch herself with her bound hands. A heavy foot pushed her over onto her side and she glared up at her tormentor.

Maroney looked down at her, "Yeah, you're awake. Get up!" he commanded her.

When she was slow responding, he reached down and yanked her to her feet then pushed her towards the rundown warehouse they were parked in front of. It looked derelict with many of the windows broken out and boarded up and garbage and debris in scattered piles against its peeling walls. The door hinges screeched in protest when Broken Nose opened it for Maroney to shove her through.

When he turned on a flashlight to light their way, Nyah could see that the building was in even worse condition on the inside. Water dripped and pooled in oily puddles across the pockmarked floor and more garbage littered the interior. The three of them had to skirt around partially collapsed walls and rubble that had fallen from the ceiling high overhead. A wall deep into the interior of the building seemed more or less intact and their destination was a metal door set into it.

The hinges on this door must have been better taken care of because they did not protest being used like those on the outer door. Once inside and the door shut behind them, Maroney flipped a switch by the door and a single bulb suspended from the ceiling illuminated the room with a sickly yellow glow that left the corners of the room in shadow. The room was marginally cleaner than the rest of the warehouse and contained a ratty old couch, a small table surrounded by three chairs, and an old TV in the corner. A skinny man with bad skin was sitting at the table playing solitaire and smoking a cigarette when they came in. Apparently, he was expecting company because he barely looked up to acknowledge them.

"Everything quiet?" Maroney asked him.

"Yeah, one of them started crying, but it didn't take much to make her stop," he said taking a drag of the cigarette and flicking the ashes onto the floor.

Maroney snickered, the pulled Nyah over to one of the three doors lining the wall opposite the door they entered. Unlocking it with a set of keys hanging on the same wall, he opened it and, unlocking her cuffs, shoved her into the room and shut the door behind her.

She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the dark; the only light source was from a tiny window high on the wall in the back of the room, so the room was almost completely dark. She could hear others around her, but, apart from a couple of sniffles, nobody said anything. They were probably scared to death. After a few minutes, her eyes had adjusted all they could to the darkness, and she could make out a few shapes on the floor. Three, maybe four, mattresses were along the walls, all but one with a body lying on it.

Carefully, she shuffled over to the empty mattress and sat down on it. Looking around, she could see two sets of eyes reflecting the weak starlight.

"Hi," she said barely above a whisper, "I'm Nyah."

"Shh," one of the lumps hissed at her.

"Fuck off, Becky," a set of eyes to her right hissed back. "I'm Juanita."

"Megan," said the girl with the sniffles.

"Are we the only ones here?" she asked.

"Don't know," sniffed Megan.

"How long have you been here?"

"Shh," Becky hissed louder this time.

"Becky, if you shush us one more time, I'm going to come over there and smother you with your pillow!" Juanita threatened.

Megan giggled.

"It's okay," Nyah told Juanita. "We have enough problems without turning on each other in here. Let her be."

They sat in silence for a while. Finally, Nyah heard a door shut, followed by the sound of the TV.

Juanita must have heard it to because she responded to Nyah's question. Through their whispered conversation, she discovered that Juanita had been held the longest, nearly a week now, and Becky had been there for four days. Megan had only been there for a day and was having a hard time of it. Cigarette Man had been in twice now to slap her around for crying and making a fuss. All three women had been to the women's center and their case worker had been the director. Juanita had been thrown out by her boyfriend and Mrs. Williams had made a call to a women's shelter to get her a bed for the night and called an Uber for her. Only the driver wasn't really an Uber. Instead he had driven her to this warehouse and had dragged her in at gun point.

Becky had gone to the center to get help escaping her pimp, and Mrs. Williams had offered to have her driven to the bus station. She had even given her the money for bus fare. But, once again, the driver brought her here and taken the money from her. Megan's story was almost exactly the same. None of the three had anyone in the city that would care enough to report them missing to the police.

While they talked, Nyah slipper her necklace over her head and slipped it into a hole on the side of her mattress. Like the bracelet, its pendant had a GPS tracking chip that would transmit its position until the battery died. In the morning, Karen should find her letter at the office. In it was an explanation of her plan and instructions for accessing the program on her computer to track the devices. Hopefully, they would call the police and all of them would be rescued before lunch. If there were other places women were being kept, the chip in the car would help find them.