* * * * *
I felt a hand lightly touch my shoulder and I woke with a start to see Vance standing over me.
I blinked at him and stared.
I was in the surveillance room and had fallen asleep in my chair.
Ally and I had made the wrong decision, the way wrong decision.
The surveillance room might seem cool, but spend more than fifteen minutes in it and it was boring as hell. I wasn’t into that kind of thing, but after thirty minutes of staring at pretty much nothing happening on the monitors, I was praying for some poke-the-nanny action just for a little excitement.
“Let’s go,” Vance said.
I looked around, I had no idea what time it was but I figured it was late, Monty was gone and Ally and I were alone in the room. Ally was staring at Vance. Even in all my years of knowing her, I noticed she was staring at Vance with a new look, one I’d never seen before. It was an oh-my-God-that-guy-is-hot mixed with an oh-my-God-what-the-fuck-is-going-on look.
My eyes turned to Vance and he was not in a flirting, grinning, hot guy mood. He was in a serious, badass, hot guy mood.
“Where’s Lee?” I asked.
“Out,” Vance replied and that was all I was going to get and the way he said it made me decide not to go for more.
I stood and as I did, Vance got tense, his body turned so he was facing the closed door as well as standing in front of me and his hand went to a gun holstered at his belt.
We heard a violent thud on the wall outside the door and a muted exclamation of pain.
My mouth dropped open and I stared at the door.
Ally came up beside me and she stared at the door.
Vance listened (also staring at the door).
After awhile, there was silence, Vance relaxed and nodded to us.
He left the room.
We followed.
The place was darkened, but not dark, the light on Dawn’s desk was burning and the overhead lights were on but muted. The office seemed, somehow, sinister. There was not a good vibe in the air.
We ran into Brody in the parking garage.
“Hey!” he yelled, trotting up to us, all excited and happy and definitely not feeling the sinister vibe. “Guess what? Monty called and he’s letting me do the surveillance room.” Brody lifted a plastic bag filled with cheese puffs and energy drinks. “All night. I’m, like, one of the guys!”
“Righteous, Brody,” Ally said quietly, definitely attuned to the sinister vibe.
“You guys want to do the shift with me? It’ll be cool. We’ll order pizza.”
“No,” Vance said and Brody’s eyes swung to him.
“No?” Brody asked.
“No. No pizza and no visitors. The office is no longer safe,” Vance replied.
Brody got pale.
Ally took in breath.
I forgot to breathe.
What on earth did that mean?
Vance kept speaking. “You lock down the surveillance room once you enter it, watch the screens, field the calls and that’s it. You don’t open the door unless you get the code.”
Brody was beginning to look a little panicked but he hung in there. “Oh shit, another code, what’s this one again?”
“Same as always,” Vance said.
Brody looked blank.
Vance looked unhappy. “Three two two.”
“Got it. Yeah. Right. Okay.” Brody didn’t say good-bye and walked away, whispering to himself.
I allowed myself a moment to hope Brody was going to be all right before we all climbed into a black Ford Explorer.
Vance took Ally home first, asking her address. She got out, quiet and looking worried and she promised to call me.
Vance waited until the door closed behind her and her inside lights went on, then he took me home and didn’t ask my address. He walked me to the door, took my key from my hand, opened it and made me stand just inside the closed door while he checked the house. He came back downstairs, went out to the Explorer, came back carrying a small duffle and walked immediately to my dining room table.
He opened the duffle and started to put stuff on my dining room table, announcing each one as he set it down. “Gun, Glock, loaded. Extra clip. Taser. Stun gun.”
I stared at the weapons on my table and then back to Vance.
“Lee says you know how to use them,” he said.
I realized his statement was a question and I nodded.
“Lock all doors and windows after I leave. You don’t open the door to anyone unless it’s Lee, Mace or me. Even if you know them. Got me?” Vance asked.
I nodded, then he nodded.
“Where’s Lee? What’s happening?”
“This will all be over soon,” he said instead of answering. He went to the door, stopped and turned to me. “Close your blinds.”
“Hang on a second.” I went after him and grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t go. “What the fuck is happening?”
He looked at me a beat, likely trying to guess my reaction to whatever dire news he was about to impart.
Then he decided that he could share.
“Lee’s escalated hostilities, Wilcox has done the same.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Again, he looked at me a beat.
Then a slow, arrogant, unbelievably handsome, shit-eating grin spread across his face.
“That means, tonight we’re gonna have fun.”
With that, he left.
I stood staring at the door thinking it didn’t sound fun at all.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Where the Hell Was Lee?
After I’d locked my doors and windows, closed my blinds and stopped myself from hyperventilating, my phone rang.
I ran to it hoping it was Lee, falling on the phone like a crazed woman who’d been on the Atkins Diet one day too long and just entered a bakery.
It was Ally.
“Do you know what’s going on?” she asked.
“Escalated hostilities, on both sides,” I answered, wanting to talk to Lee, see Lee, hear from someone that Lee was okay even if it was a disembodied communication from a higher deity.
“What does that mean?” Ally went on.
“Hell if I know.”
And I didn’t want to know. I was deep in my Denial Fortress, way deep.
“Do you want me to come over?” Ally asked.
“I’m not allowed to open the door to anyone but Lee, Mace or Vance,” I told her.
“Says who?”
“Says Vance.”
“Since when do you do what you’re told?”
“Since the words ‘escalated’ and ‘hostilities’ entered my vocabulary and I finally told your brother I love him and he’s living with me and I might be pregnant with his child and I haven’t seen his cabin in Grand Lake yet and his office is not safe anymore and –”
“All right, all right, I get it,” Ally cut me off. “Call me when you know something.”
“Gotcha.”
I hung up and stood in my living room and stared at the weapons on my dining room table.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
This was all my fault.
Well, maybe not all my fault, it was mostly Rosie’s fault but if something went wrong, I’d feel responsible. This wasn’t the kind of something that could go wrong like jumping in a car with ten dollars in your pocket and a half a tank of gas and driving to Colorado Springs in hopes of going to a bar, not getting carded, and meeting hot, soon-to-be-fighter-pilot cadets from the Air Force Academy, an endeavor doomed to fail (and I would know as I was the voice of experience on that kind of thing, how do you think I got my t-shirt?). This kind of something meant guns and bullets and Brody in the surveillance room where, outside the door, grunts of pain could be heard.
I wasn’t really good at doing nothing, I was kind of an action girl and sitting around waiting was not my style.
Nevertheless, I pulled my cop’s daughter shroud around me, not impe
netrable but it would do the trick in a pinch. I sat on my couch, pulled my heels up on the seat, rested my cheek on my knees and waited.
* * * * *
Looking back, it was kind of an idiotic thing to do.
Not that I should blame myself too much, it wasn’t like cars exploded in front of my house every day. Not to mention, I was a little wired, what, with the love of my life who I’d finally hooked up with, done the deed with and started living with, out there escalating hostilities.
In my defense, Vance didn’t say anything about not going outside if there was an explosion that shook your house, made your windows buckle and was so loud, it made you think your ears were bleeding.
I wasn’t totally stupid. I did look outside first. There was a car on fire in the middle of the street, burning debris everywhere. The car didn’t explode, it exploded and bits of it were all over the road, the sidewalk, even in my front yard, wrecking Stevie’s beautifully tended legacy. There were people shouting and running around. And anyway, what kind of neighbor would I be if I hid in the house if someone was out there, hurt, burned, whatever.
Not to mention, that someone could be Lee.
I thought, with all those people, I’d be safe.
I was wrong.
I nabbed the stun gun (my premier choice in weaponry), unlocked the door, unlocked the security door, did a scanning sweep of my porch and stepped outside.
I got to the edge of my porch, which was where they took me down.
* * * * *
This kidnapping was entirely different from the one before and the one before that.
I came to in the backseat of a car, legs bound at the ankles, wrists bound behind my back with the added dimension this time of being gagged.
With hindsight, and a lot of time to lie in the back of the car thinking, the explosion was not a very ingenious tactic of getting me to expose myself. In fact, it was kind of crude.
I’d fallen for it though so what did that say about me?
We drove for a long time, I couldn’t see much and I didn’t try. Cherry had been nearly exploded the day before so the minute a call came into dispatch about a car going up in flames in front of my house, the Denver Police Department, and Lee and his boys, would be all over it like flies on doo doo.
I couldn’t imagine someone hadn’t seen me being carted away, seemingly unconscious.
I couldn’t imagine they’d be far behind.
I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t rescue me.
You live, you learn, unfortunately, all my life, I’d always learned the hard way.
* * * * *
It seemed like we were driving forever, maybe it was half an hour, maybe longer, when we finally started to do some turns, obviously coming off the highway. The car slowed, there were streetlights then there were none. Then, we hit a gravel road, drove for a few minutes and we stopped.
I was yanked out of the backseat by my ankles and thrown over a shoulder in a fireman’s hold. I didn’t see much, it was late, dark and we were well out of the city so dark meant dark. I could tell we were in the mountains though.
Shit.
I was carted into a cabin and thrown on the couch, then arranged in a seated position.
When the new goon moved away, I could see Terry Wilcox was sitting opposite me in an armchair.
It was a nice cabin, very swish, the kind of rental for upper, upper middle class Texans to hire when they felt like a change of scenery. Two guys were with us, both steroid-fuelled, like Goon Gary, Terrible Teddy and The Moron but I had never seen these guys.
“Take off her gag,” Wilcox ordered.
Both of the guys were dark-headed, one darker than the other and taller and maybe hitting the pharmaceutical websites a little too hard. He came forward and took off the gag. The minute he did, I realized how tight it was because my cheeks hurt. I opened and closed my mouth to exercise my cheek muscles.
Then I glared at Wilcox. “That hurt.”
“I’m sorry, India. Precautions. We can’t be too careful, can we?”
Was that a dig at my idiot act of walking out of my house and into the clutches of the villain?
My eyes narrowed.
I knew I was an idiot, I didn’t need this guy rubbing it in.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
He ignored me. “Don’t worry. We don’t have to wait too long. The plane will be ready soon and we’ll be leaving.”
Uh-oh.
Did he say “plane”?
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You and I are going to disappear. We’re taking a long vacation.”
I stared at him.
I wasn’t getting a good feeling about this.
“I don’t want to go on vacation with you,” I informed him, I thought, unnecessarily.
“You’ll enjoy yourself.”
My eyes got wide. “Enjoy myself?”
“Shopping, eating in the finest restaurants. I’ll get you anything you want. We’ll go wherever you want. I’ll show you the world.”
Wow, Lee wasn’t wrong. This guy was nuts.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said, I don’t want to go on vacation with you.”
“We’ll spend time together. You get to know me, you’ll like me.”
Yep, totally nuts.
“You kill people,” I told him.
“I do what I have to do to get what I want.”
Holy crap.
“I don’t like people who kill people. They’re creepy. You’re creepy.”
Perhaps I should have been more careful with what I said but it was like he had selective hearing and he chose not to hear that part.
“We’ll have to stay out of sight for awhile. I have a friend who’s letting us use his lovely house, on the beach in Costa Rica.”
Oh my God.
This guy was talking about lovely beach houses to a woman he kidnapped.
Totally a nut.
“You’re creepy and icky,” I broke in, hoping to get through to him. “I don’t want to go to a beach house in Costa Rica with a creepy, icky guy who looks like Grandpa Munster.”
He continued to ignore me and my insults. “You can sunbathe every day. I’ll buy you two dozen bikinis. I think six months, maybe more. Then, perhaps, we’ll go to Paris.”
“I’m not going on vacation with you. I’m staying here,” I announced.
At this, he smiled his oily smile.
Serious euw.
Time to get down to it.
“Listen,” I said, changing tactics and leaning forward to show my sincerity, “I’m really um…” I was losing it, I couldn’t think of a suitable lie. I couldn’t remember the last time I couldn’t think of a suitable lie. I just went with the first word that popped in my head, no matter how hard it was to say it. “Honored that you like me and everything but I’m in love with Lee. I’ve been in love with Lee since I was five. We’re living together. We’re going to get married, eventually, when he asks me. He has it all planned out.”
“I’ll help you forget Nightingale,” Wilcox told me.
Okay, seriously, this guy was nuts. Even if he wasn’t a weird, creepy, icky, scary bad guy who killed people, there wasn’t a woman alive who would forget Liam Nightingale, especially if she’d seen him naked.
And what was taking Lee so long? He should have stormed in here and saved the day by now, surely. I was somewhat experienced with being kidnapped and now was about the time for a grenade or tear gas or Lee to saunter in looking badass and pissed off and scaring everyone into doing what he wanted.
“Perhaps you should be asleep for the first part of our journey.” Wilcox broke into my somewhat fevered thoughts.
I realized my mistake at once. I’d been spending so much time talking to Wilcox, I hadn’t paid attention to the Steroid Sidekicks. One was walking toward me, carrying a loaded syringe.
I stared at him coming toward me and I felt the chill of fear.
This was just like in those movies, wh
ere they tranquillized the heroine and she woke up lying on silk pillows wearing an I Dream of Jeannie outfit and finding herself a member of a harem where all the other girls hated her.
I didn’t want to be a member of Terry Wilcox’s harem, even if I was the only one.
My mind filled with colliding thoughts and I realized I had two choices, let him drug me and sleep through my (hopeful) rescue or, well, I didn’t know what my second choice was, considering my extremities were tied together.
I was fond of naps but only those I took myself or fell into naturally, not those induced by overdeveloped henchmen.
I watched him come at me and did the only thing I could do, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
I rolled to the floor, rolled into him and took him off his feet. He fell over and hit the deck with a grunt and an oath.
I kept rolling to get away from him and struggling to get out of my bounds.
This, surprisingly worked (almost). My hands must not have been tied very well because they started to come lose.
Once I dropped Bad Guy Number One, Bad Guy Number Two came at me, I rolled to my back, lifted my legs and as Tex and The Kevster suggested, I aimed right between his.
I missed, but nailed him in the thigh with a good deal of force and some seriously pissed off attitude. He staggered back and went down on a knee.
I kept struggling to get my hands free, reared up with a crunch of the abs that would do any personal trainer proud and found my feet. With my momentum and weight, feet and arms still bound, I toppled over and hit him, head to the chest and we both went down, rolling and struggling, him trying to get a hold of me and me squirming like crazy.
I was beginning to get ticked.
Where.
The hell.
Was Lee?
Finally, I freed one hand from the bounds and shook the other one free of the rope and started fighting in earnest.
This didn’t last long. Even though I had the use of my hands, he was stronger and he subdued me, humiliatingly quickly. He yanked me, still squirming, to my feet, whipped me around so my back was to his front and his hands held my wrists behind me.
“Give her the shot. Now,” Wilcox ordered.
He hadn’t even bothered coming out of his chair, the jerk. He was totally calm, eerily calm. Like he knew he was going to get away with this.
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