But as she stewed, she realized they hadn’t been ordinary cases.
The first, supposedly a quick job in Bucharest, had gone very bad almost at once. Cole knew without question that the main reason for this had been Dan. Not that Dan had directly caused her to be captured, but she was always thinking about him on some level, mostly with more than a little acrimony. He was a dangerous distraction. It was completely ridiculous that she’d allowed herself to be backed into a corner, from which the only way out that she could see was to bring him further into this other world of hers, into the corner with her. Because of Dan, goddamn it, she’d been careless, and she’d been captured.
But that she was alive now, able to be mad at him all over again… was because Dan, sweet, simple, distracting Dan… Dan had put a bullet through the man that was just about to do the same to her. In fact, when she heard the shot, it took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t dead. Dan, who had never gone hunting and had fished very infrequently (and resentfully the few times he did), because, as he had told her, “I can imagine no pleasure in killing something.”
In a very real sense, saving her caused Dan to betray one of his most deeply held beliefs. But even as she worked to tame her temper into a more manageable beast, she realized he’d been able to do this without hesitation because of something even more deeply entrenched: his love for her.
The second time, they’d been taken prisoner together, so excusing Dan from this was impossible as well. But as had been the case in Romania, the assignment in South Carolina had become so much more complicated and profoundly life-altering that even though her mind was a mob of finger-pointing, frothing zealots, all naming Dan as the man who poisoned the well, there was one person in the crowd who would not point. Ironically, Dan had been more directly responsible the second time, as Nicole was looking at him as their captor had gotten the drop on them. But she knew without having to turn and face the sound of the cocking gun to know who was holding it, and at that point, Dan was irrelevant.
Irrelevant until he saved them both in an insanely dangerous maneuver, one that Cole had to admit she might not have had the stones to pull off.
But this time…this time… it was all on her.
She had not focused on Dan in any way since leaving Denver. Granted, just prior to leaving, she was very focused on him. Even in this metal box, growing hotter and more foul-smelling exponentially, she had to smile at the memory of the two of them humping like high school kids in the farthest corner of the extended-stay parking lot.
She had carried that sweaty sweetness with her to Tijuana, but she hadn’t focused upon it, and it did not become a debit on the ledger as things began to accelerate. That parking lot connection had been just what she’d needed to successfully disconnect from Dan once she was wheels up and headed south.
No, it wasn’t another Danny entanglement this time. It was her own carelessness. She’d approached the mission too casually. Not that she wasn’t aware of the potential danger, but that she never thought to question whether she was equal to it.
Because she’d always been equal to it. For the first twenty-nine and, ultimately for the present year, she’d done what needed to be done.
But now, in this place she could not see, couldn’t really feel (but could definitely smell), she had to ask herself if it had been her own failings that had gotten her in trouble the other times as well. Maybe it wasn’t really Dan at all, ever.
And if so, what the hell did that mean? Was she done as a cleaner? Was it time to take herself out of the lineup, like Lou Gehrig finally did in May of 1939. After an unprecedented streak of two thousand, one hundred thirty games, Lou could no longer deny that his poor play was hurting the Yankees. As much as she knew Dan would have hated the analogy, was this her Lou Gehrig moment?
Her frustration welled up again and she tried once again to kick her foot in frustration. This time when she did, two things happened. First, she scraped the heel of her right foot on something rough, causing her to utter an audible “Ouch!” and to realize for the first time that she wasn’t wearing shoes. The other thing that happened, and it took Cole several seconds to confirm that it actually had happened, was that the far wall of the blackness seemed to have shifted slightly.
She began to push against it, steadily this time rather than in a violent burst. Immediately, she felt it give just a bit under the pressure. She increased the thrust and heard the groan of complaining metal as it begrudgingly gave way.
She stopped pushing and thought about her situation. There was now enough room for her to almost straighten her legs, and she did so, stretching them as far as she could, this time to ease some of the pain and cramping from being in this folded position for… for however long she’d been in here.
For the first time, Nicole considered how she’d come to be here. The last thing she remembered was being roughly removed from the back of the panel van, followed by… nothing. It was at that point that she became fully aware of the pounding in her head, radiating from a spot toward the back of her skull. It didn’t take much to figure out she’d probably been struck with something unfriendly and knocked senseless, crammed into… wherever she was, and left to regain consciousness. Or not. She supposed that Cara Rota’s brother wouldn’t worry too much if she came out of wherever she was as a former problem rather than a continuing one.
Moving the wall panel hadn’t increased her area of confinement by much, but it was enough that she could shift a little bit. Pushing herself upward with her prickling hands, she realized for the first time that the top of the space was a little higher than she’d expected. There was no room on either side of her, and her head was still resting at an uncomfortable angle against another metal wall. But with the extra room by her feet and the newly discovered space above her, she began to twist around.
Her progress was slow, even with the spatial gains, but eventually, she’d managed to painfully contort herself sufficiently to reverse the position of her head and feet. She shimmied inch by inch until her aching head was now against the wall that had yielded slightly. The main reason she decided to try this was the scrape on her heel. She desperately hoped that if she could again find that rough spot, she could drag the zip-tie on her wrists back on forth on it enough to cause the bind to fail, restoring use of her hands.
Her new position didn’t make this easy. At first, her body weight was on her arms and hands, making moving them painful and frustrating. But after several minutes of tiny adjustments, she let out a second expression of pain as she cut her finger against what was, as near as she could tell, a sharp edge caused by a slightly bent section of the metal plating that made up the floor. With effort, she was able to position her wrists upon the burr, and using her elbows to prop her upper body slightly, she began to draw the plastic back and forth over it.
It took her about fifteen grueling minutes, having to relocate the rough spot a couple of times when the back and forth motion went slightly off-center, and during which the flesh on her wrist was repeatedly abraded. But finally, she felt her left hand suddenly separate from the right as the zip-tie gave way.
She turned enough to allow herself to move her arms in front of her, and for several minutes, that was all she could manage. She rubbed the area where the thin tie had cut off her circulation, feeling wet warmth that she knew represented blood flow. While that was never something one hoped to feel, she could tell it was not serious. As the feeling gradually returned to her extremities and the leaden throb in her upper arms began to recede, she worked to bring her ragged breathing under control. The entire exercise had depleted what little energy she had.
But it also gave her time to think again. For a full sixty seconds, her thoughts were wholly practical: when she regained a little strength, she would further explore her surroundings, she’d retrieve her phone and…
Her phone! She could still feel it crammed uncomfortably in her panties. How had they not found it? What did this say about their competence as kidnappers?
As her still mainly useless arms continued to regain proper feeling and function, she forced them into action as she slid her hands inside of her pants, eventually pulling out the rectangular lifeline.
The first thing she did was to check the level of charge, and she saw to her great distress that it was at four percent. That wasn’t going to last long. But even in the dim light of the home screen, she could finally get a visual impression of her surroundings. She was indeed inside of a metal box.
A word came unbidden into her mind: “Coffin.”
Nicole darkened the screen as she rested once again. It was concerning to her that even minor movement was proving exhausting. Yet another indication that she was just getting too old for this shit? She laughed thinking about Danny Glover, and quickly stopped, hearing the ragged timbre of the sound.
Suddenly, a new thought came. Ever since she managed to move the wall by her bare feet, all the reflection about her fate had stopped and she’d gone in to action mode, albeit action at a snail’s pace and with extreme pain. And she realized that maybe she wasn’t washed up after all. Maybe she wasn’t fully past her prime. In the clutch, she was still a survival machine. And then came the thought that her mind had been trying to pull into the spotlight for some time now. At no point had she felt that she was going to die in this box. All her thoughts, even the depressing ones, were about what she’d have to decide to do once she’d gotten herself free.
She turned her attention to the phone again. Her hands were not yet able to manage the fine motor skills needed to type a text. Her fingers no longer tingled, but the creep had been replaced by stinging pain as the blood angrily reclaimed its ancestral home in them, so all she could manage was a clumsy poke at the telephone icon, then a second jab at J.J.’s contact entry. Cole waited until she heard a single ring, then hung up. The battery indicator was already down to two percent from the little bit of use it had gotten. She didn’t have enough juice to talk to J.J., but hopefully, the one-ring call would be enough to encourage her.
Finally, Nicole decided that it was time to get a clear picture of the situation. She put her finger at the bottom of the phone’s screen and dragged upwards, revealing the utilities and pushed the flashlight icon. Her head immediately experienced a stab of pain as her eyes struggled to adjust. The dim home screen had been one thing, but she had not been prepared for this amount of brightness. After a moment, though, she was finally able to see her prison. Regarding all dimensions save height, she was indeed in a metal coffin, about the size of the sad caskets used to bury dead children. But the ceiling-to-floor dimension was incongruously spacious, relatively, being about four feet. She was on her knees and she pointed the light directly at the cell’s ceiling, where she could see an obvious hatch.
With considerable effort, she rose to an uncomfortable crouch, which allowed her to reach the small door. She pushed on it but, not surprisingly, it did not budge. So it was either locked somehow, had something heavy set on it, or…
Nicole set the phone on the floor so that she could use both hands on the hatch. She pushed with all the strength she could muster and was rewarded with feeling it move ever so slightly, followed by a small shower of dirt from the edges of the square plate.
…or it’s buried, she thought.
At that instant, the phone died and she was plunged once more into darkness.
15
Two-Dicks
“No. Who the hell is Conrad Barker?” Tony asked as Marc.
By way of an answer, Marc puffed out his cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie, then blew the air through his lips in a long, slow raspberry. He shook his head and finally managed to say, “I don’t really know. I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”
Tony considered Marc as he stood there, still in swim trunks, but now with a nylon beach shirt pulled over his lean but toned torso. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that while his parents had come to treat him and J.J. with a fair amount of autonomy, both would have raised an eyebrow at the thought of their kids taking a road trip to California with a guy they met in the Taco Bell drive-thru. And the more he thought about it now, the more it was beginning to feel weird. He wondered why it hadn’t from the beginning.
“Sorry, dude. I’ve never heard of the guy. So if I don’t know him, and you don’t know him, maybe you should try telling me why you thought I would.”
“Alright. I’ll level with you, but I gotta tell you, it’s going to sound pretty strange.”
“Strange I can deal with. You haven’t met my parents yet, but you know the two of us a little. You’re probably figuring out strange is kind of in our wheelhouse.”
“Okay, so I went to Kent Denver with a guy named Bill Montrose. Billy was kind of a weird kid, artsy but in a subversive, dangerous way that always made his teachers uncomfortable. But he was cool, and we were pretty good friends until I went away to college, when we lost touch. I knew he wasn’t going to school and that he was hoping to land himself some sort of job where he could use his artistic skills in a practical way. That’s all he told me, and by the time that happened, my head was so into leaving for LSU, I was only half-listening.”
Tony, displaying his talent for grabbing on to a peripheral point in any situation, said, “J.J.’s best friend went to that high school too. Kent Denver.”
“I know,” Marc almost mumbled.
Anthony Porter was not the student his sister was. He wasn’t as quick on his feet mentally. He knew this. But neither was he an idiot, and hearing those two words made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at full-dress attention. He looked hard at Marc.
“Whoa. Do me a favor. Do me two favors. First, put that fucking gun down.” As Marc put the gun back in the table and slid the drawer shut, Tony continued, “Secondly, start again, please. Because I have to admit, I zoned out right after you mentioned Kent Denver. But you got my attention back when you said you knew about Jan.” Tony waited to see Marc’s reaction.
“You mean Fran.”
“Okay. Test passed. You’re not completely full of shit. That’s right, Fran. Jayj and Franny have been friends since kindergarten. I plotted her death on a regular basis when I was nine. She used to torture me. But knowing that you went to school with her is kind of making this start to feel more weird, man. Not less.”
“Hear me out,” Marc said, holding his hand out in an entreaty for a little more grace. “Fran, Billy, and me were tight in high school. And I’d heard Fran mention J.J. before, but we didn’t really hang out with too many Cherry Creek kids. Fran kept her friendship with your sister separate from our group.”
Tony nodded. “Okay, so that would explain why you never came to any of my birthday parties.” Not mixing those two worlds made sense to him. He relaxed a little.
But he was still a long way from being satisfied with the direction this story was taking, even though he smiled when Marc replied, “Which year did you have a Batman party?”
“Every year, even now.”
“Righteous. So anyway, life happens, like I said. Billy and I talked once a week or so… for a couple weeks. Then it was every few months, then not at all.”
“What about Fran? Did you guys stay in touch?”
“Pretty much the same story, I’m afraid. Franny went all the way east to Georgetown, I was at LSU. We were Facebook friends. Still are, but even there… different circles, I guess. Billy was never on Facebook. Until last summer, that is. Funny enough, it was Fran who messaged me to tell me he’d shown up on her list of potential friends.”
Tony shrugged his shoulders. “Nice story and all, Cark, but what does it have to do with J.J. and me? And why you acted so odd when you told me you knew that Fran was Jayj’s best friend?”
“Almost there,” Marc said. “Anyway, I sent Bill a friend request, and two or three days later, he accepted. Typical Bill, I thought. Probably was looking at his phone when the notification popped up and waited for three days intentionally. Some sort of bohemian gesture of non-involvement with the human
condition or some shit.”
Tony let out a low whistle. Cark was getting a little worked up.
“So we connect on social media. I was still in Baton Rouge, but it was just before Christmas break, and I prefer that holiday in the Rockies. Can’t help it.”
“Preachin’ to the choir,” Tony said.
“Yeah, you know. So I let a couple of profs know that my dear Uncle Patrick has suffered a stroke, and we’re not sure he’s going to last until school let out. With their thoughts and prayers tucked in my backpack next to my underwear, I grabbed a flight to Denver.”
“Gonna get the band back together?”
“Ha ha. Kind of, only no Fran. I don’t know why. It was just how it went down.”
“What went down?” Tony asked, neck hairs twitching again.
“Huh?” Marc seemed to have momentarily forgotten that Tony was there. “Oh, nothing ‘went down,’ man. Why you being weird?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. First tell me what went down.”
“I just met up with my friend at the Nob.”
“You went to the Nob Hill Inn?”
“Why are you saying it like that? Like you’re saying, ‘How’s life in the sewers working out, Marc?’”
“Whatever, dude. My people always kind of thought of the Nob as food that had been on the floor for more than five seconds. Like if your mom saw you about to walk into the Nob, she’d run after you, screaming ‘Noooooooo,’ in the creepy slo-mo voice… right through traffic to stop you from going inside.”
Marc looked at him for a long time. “It’s not that bad.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It is so fucking bad, okay? Not the point, though, Tone. Do you do that a lot?”
“You’re stalling.”
“Is… is that like Dragnet or something? Are you going to call me a ‘mug’ soon?”
“Dude.”
“Point is…” Marc leaned in close, hoping to hold Tony’s attention, or at least nudge it in the right direction. “Billy was there with a new guy. Friend of his I’d never seen before. Billy said his name was Richard Peters…”
The Terror of Tijuana Page 14