Hard to Trust by Wendy Byrne Page A

the secrets she'd promised to keep.
    Had Alex told secrets before they'd killed him? Had he somehow set in motion this catastrophe? No, that didn't make sense. Why would they wait six weeks?
    Geez, her brain was a scrambled mess. Nothing made sense in her current state of mind.
    Alex.
    What did she want to remember? It was important. Maybe that was what they wanted from her. Maybe he'd told her something that was stuck in her memory somewhere.
    Not that she wanted to tell, but she wanted to know what they thought she knew. Maybe something would jog her faulty memory. One last hurrah before she got buried in some landfill.
    Landfill?
    The last time she'd thought about being buried in a landfill, she was with that Jake guy. Fat lot of good he did protecting her, even if she chose to go out on her own. Just like a man. Never around when you need them, but always around when you want your space.
    Tessa sighed. At least that was what she thought she did. Her chest seemed to hurt every time she breathed. Getting kicked a couple of times in the ribs probably bruised a few of them. She wished she had the energy to fight back, but that ability had been taken from her as soon as they shot her up with that liquid fire. Lucidity seemed to be an elusive prospect right now.
     "I don't know." Her lips felt parched, like the fire had taken all the moisture inside her body. To speak ate up the tiny bit of dampness inside her mouth. "Can't think."
    "We need to know about Backgammon. What do you know?" The man who spoke was tall, maybe over seven feet.
    Her eyes drooped closed despite the vehemence in his tone. She shook her head and forced them open. She glanced back up at him, and his body distorted, resembling one of those stilt walkers in the circus. That made no sense. Was he on stilts? No, that couldn't be. She thought she might have smiled. The whole thing seemed comical.
    The other man was dressed as a clown, a red bulb on his nose, the flowery pants and ruffled shirt seeming to be in contrast to his hairy arms and fists. The third man was dressed as a trapeze artist, with a leotard, and carrying one of those long poles to help him balance.
    She started to giggle even while the fire inside ate up her muscles and bones. Their faces melted. Could they have that fire inside them as well? Was that what her face looked like now?
    "She's still too far gone to be cooperative," the tall man yelled to the clown. "You gave her too much ecstasy. Combined with the other stuff we shot her up with, we're never going to get anything out of her. I said a dose to keep her from going crazy in the car, not something to keep her out of it so she's of no use to us."
    "Maybe she's faking it," the trapeze artist said.
    "Look at her eyes. They're so dilated, there's no color left."
    She blinked at their words. She'd heard all of them before, but she was trying to put meaning to what was said.
    "Does she recognize us?"
    "She wouldn't recognize her own mother with the trip she's on." She couldn't distinguish one voice from the other, except to know they were two different people speaking.
    Drugs? Of course she knew that. Their descriptions seemed muddled inside her brain. It was like she knew the words, but struggled to figure out what they meant. And why did she understand them? They were talking…Russian. That's right. She'd taken a course in it.
    "This has been one giant screw-up from the beginning. I say we get rid of her and be done with it. Bury the secrets with her."
    Why did the tall man's voice sound so familiar? She squinted at him. Did she recognize him from somewhere? The memory whispered at the edge of consciousness, but remained elusive.
    "You still haven't found anything on her computer?" the clown asked the trapeze artist. She couldn't help but giggle at their ill-fitting costumes that bunched around their paunchy waists. How did they fly on the trapeze like that?
    "She has every file on it so encrypted it will take a real hacker to get to what