Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  “Mommy, I don’t want to die,” Leah whimpered.

  “You can’t think about that,” Lauren said. “You have to be brave now, Leah. We have to think and we have to fight. Do you understand me?”

  Even as she spoke, Lauren had the box cutter in her free hand. Lying facedown with her left wrist bound to the U-bolt, she had to twist awkwardly to get onto her right side so she could reach their bound wrists.

  She glanced at the curtain, which gaped open enough that she caught the odd glimpse of their driver. His concentration was on the winding road. Lauren had no idea where he was taking them, but the road was on an incline, with turns and switchbacks.

  Into the mountains. Somewhere remote. Somewhere he and Greg Hewitt could feel free to do whatever they wanted—rape them, torture them. Ballencoa would take photographs, recording their degradation and their deaths.

  How many times in the last four years had she imagined what this monster had done to Leslie? Thousands. Now she would know firsthand. In a strange, sick way, she would have satisfaction. She would have the closure she had prayed for. The not knowing would be over.

  At the same time, the idea that she would have to witness Ballencoa do those things to Leah was more than she could stand. She was willing to pay a price with her own life, not Leah’s.

  She glanced again at the curtain, then put her attention to her task, trying to cut through the zip ties without slitting either of their wrists.

  One gave way, and then the other.

  “Don’t move,” she cautioned Leah.

  Even with Hewitt partially incapacitated, they were still two men against two females much smaller than they were. She and Leah would need the element of surprise on their side.

  Lauren worked the screwdriver from beneath her and passed it discreetly into her daughter’s hands.

  “If you get a chance to use this, go for the head, go for the eyes,” she instructed. “If you get the chance to run, you run. Do you understand me? Don’t worry about me. If you can run, save yourself. Promise me.”

  Big crystalline tears welled in Leah’s eyes. “But, Mommy—”

  Lauren stared hard at her child. “Promise me.”

  Leah nodded.

  “I love you,” Lauren whispered, fighting tears of her own. “I’m so sorry, Leah. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The van slowed and turned and lurched over rough ground, eventually rolling to a stop.

  Ballencoa got out. Lauren’s heart was lodged in her throat. She heard another car door and the unintelligible voices of the two men.

  How could she not have seen Greg Hewitt for what he was? Why hadn’t she questioned who he was when he had come to her?

  Because she hadn’t cared. He had been a means to her end.

  Literally, she thought.

  The back doors of the van swung open.

  Lauren turned her head and looked out, seeing sky and scrub and rocks. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.

  Hewitt had parked the BMW just ten or fifteen feet back from the van. His skin looked gray as he came toward them. There was relatively little blood from the wound in his shoulder, but he cradled his half-useless right arm against his side, bent at the elbow. The hand was a gruesome flag of tattered, bloody flesh with shards of bone protruding.

  At least she had the satisfaction of knowing she had damaged him.

  “I’m not feeling so good,” he said to Ballencoa.

  Ballencoa ignored him. His eyes were on Leah.

  “I get the daughter first,” he said, climbing into the back of the van on his knees. He looked down at Lauren, his face the bony mask of pure evil. “Did you hear that, Mommy? I’m going to fuck your daughter and you’re going to watch.”

  Lauren glared at him.

  “I wonder how she’ll be, compared to her sister,” he mused. “That one was sweet. She liked it. She wanted it.”

  Lauren wanted to scream at him. She wanted to attack him. She wanted to cut the tongue from his head and shove it down his throat.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, his voice thick at the memory. “She was hot and wet and tight. She screamed and screamed and screamed.”

  “Where is she?” Lauren demanded, as if she had any power at all. “What did you do with her?”

  Ballencoa looked down at her and smiled like a snake. “It would spoil my fun to tell you. Do you think maybe she’s still alive? Do you think maybe I kept her?”

  “Hey, Rol.” Hewitt’s voice broke the moment. “I’m serious.”

  “Go sit down, then,” Ballencoa snapped over his shoulder. “What do you want me to do? I’m not a doctor. I can’t help you.”

  “He’s going to die,” Lauren said.

  Ballencoa smiled down at her. “So are you.”

  59

  “I want the chopper in the air before we lose any more daylight,” Mendez said. He stood with Tanner and Dixon in Lauren Lawton’s driveway.

  The crime scene unit had arrived and parked its fancy new RV outside the gate on Old Mission Road. The evidence techs were like a swarm of ants in the house, and on the driveway, photographing, videotaping, collecting blood and tissue samples.

  Mendez didn’t want to stop to imagine whose blood or whose tissue. Lauren’s Walther had been abandoned on the table in the great room. Two spent .380 shell casings were on the floor. He hoped she had fired the shots. He hoped she had hit something. He hoped at least some of that blood belonged to Houston or Ballencoa.

  Even if she hit one or both of the men, the fact remained that Lauren and her daughter were gone.

  “They could be long gone by now,” Dixon said.

  “We can’t assume that,” Mendez said, knowing it was entirely possible. If Ballencoa had taken Lauren and her daughter, he had only to drive to the 101 freeway and be gone in either direction—north or south. They could have been well on their way toward Mexico or Canada or anywhere else.

  He had alerted the CHP. Every highway patrol officer, every county cop for fifty miles around was looking for Ballencoa’s van and Lauren’s BMW. The CHP choppers were already in the sky cruising the big artery that ran California’s traffic from one end of the state to the other.

  “Ballencoa’s too smart to take the freeway,” Tanner said.

  Which left the mountain roads. Miles and miles of them. County roads and fire roads and pig trails that cut back into the wilderness. Rugged hills and deep canyons ran up and down the county on either side. It could take days to find a body. It could take years. It could take forever.

  No one had ever found any trace of Leslie Lawton. Mendez hoped to God her mother and sister didn’t write the same ending to their story. The chances of him or anyone else riding to their rescue in time were slim to none.

  60

  “I want to kill her,” Greg Hewitt said. “Let me do her now. Before I fucking pass out.”

  Ballencoa sighed impatiently and climbed back out of the van. The men began to argue over who would be allowed to commit what atrocity in what order.

  Lauren wrapped her fingers around the handle of her weapon.

  “Remember what I told you,” she whispered to Leah.

  Her daughter nodded, clutching the screwdriver close to her chest.

  “Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked his cohort.

  “They’re in a bag. She’s laying on it.”

  “I don’t want blood on them.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Hewitt groused, pushing himself away from the car. “I’ll get the goddamn books. I told you you’re an idiot for keeping them.”

  Lauren could hear him breathing hard, as if he’d been running. Please let him pass out, she thought. If Hewitt could be taken out of the equation, they might have a chance.

  “I don’t care what you think,” Ballencoa said. “I’ll get them myself.”

  He came back inside the van, muttering, a wicked long hunting knife in his hand.

  As he bent to cut the zip tie from her wrist, Lauren twisted around and swung the hammer,
catching him a glancing blow across the brow. She struck at him again, just above the ear, unable to get a good swing going in the close confines of the van.

  Ballencoa cried out, as much from shock as from pain. He scrambled backward, trying to get away from her. Lauren swung again, missing entirely.

  Bleeding, cursing, Ballencoa tumbled out of the back of the van, tangling his legs and falling. Lauren got to her knees, grabbing at Leah, pulling her, pushing her toward the back of the van.

  “Leah, run!” she screamed. “Run!!”

  She flung herself out of the van, her body colliding with Ballencoa’s as he tried to regain his feet. He hit the ground beneath her, cushioning her fall, the breath going out of him in a grunt as her knee rammed into his belly.

  Leah leapt out of the vehicle and dodged to the side like a cat as the blond man tried to snatch her out of the air. He caught her by one arm and yanked her toward him.

  Screaming and screaming, Leah swung wildly with the screwdriver. The tool caught him in the face, sinking into his cheek, hitting bone and teeth. He staggered backward, howling, grabbing at the handle of the instrument with one hand.

  For the briefest flash of a second, Leah stared in horror at what she’d done. Then she heard her mother’s voice screaming.

  “Leah, run!!”

  Leah ran. She had lost her shoes before she was thrown into the van. Rocks and twigs bit into the soles of her feet through her thin pink socks.

  They were in the small mountains west of Oak Knoll, a range of red stone and scrub. There were no trees here. There was no forest to hide in. There was brush and chaparral and shale that shifted and slipped out from under her feet as she ran.

  The only thing Leah could do was run downhill until she reached the road. And even then she wouldn’t be guaranteed safety. They were in the middle of nowhere. There might not be another car on that road for hours or days.

  She tried to run faster than her legs could go, and she tripped herself and fell hard to her hands and knees. Crying and choking, and gasping for breath, she pushed herself to her feet and looked over her shoulder.

  She had gone maybe fifty yards from the van. Her mother was still fighting. Ballencoa had gotten up and he and the other man had her trapped at the back of the van.

  Run no matter what, her mother had told her.

  Her mother had also told her to be brave.

  Leah didn’t think the two things went together.

  She had lost her weapon, leaving it stuck in the face of the man who had come into her home and beaten her.

  This was what happened to Leslie, she kept thinking. These men had taken her and killed her, and now they would kill her mother too.

  Leah had never been so afraid in her life. She wanted Daddy. She wanted Mommy. She had no one. No one was going to save them.

  Her hand brushed against something dangling from the belt loop of her breeches.

  The steel hoof pick the Gracidas’s farrier had given her.

  She unclipped it from the belt loop and fixed it in her hand like a claw. It wasn’t much, but it was what she had.

  Be brave, Leah, she heard her mother say as she turned around and ran back toward the van to try to save her mother’s life.

  Lauren kept the hammer poised in front of her as she backed toward the van.

  Hewitt was coming from her right. He had pulled Leah’s screwdriver out of his face and held it now like a dagger. He was a monster with his once-handsome face smashed and torn and oozing blood. He was trying to shout, trying to curse. The sounds were garbled and grotesque. His tongue was swelling out of his mouth, dripping blood.

  He staggered side to side as he came at her with the screwdriver clutched in his one good hand, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

  Ballencoa came at her from her left, his face twisted with rage, spewing obscenities. The hunting knife had come out of his hand as they had tumbled to the ground, but he had recovered it, and he came at her with it now.

  They were both too close. If she backed up any more, they would have her trapped against the van.

  She bolted like a cornered horse, banging hard into Hewitt. He careened sideways, losing his balance, and they went down in a heap of tangled legs and arms. He lost the screwdriver but grabbed at her with his one good hand as Lauren scrambled frantically to get away from him.

  He snatched hold of her ankle, yanking her leg out from under her. Lauren kicked and struggled like a drowning swimmer to free herself, getting first one foot under her, then the other.

  She hadn’t taken two strides when Ballencoa was on her. He hit her hard between the shoulder blades, knocking the breath from her, and she hit the ground hard, rocks biting into her flesh.

  The hammer came out of her hand. She grabbed at it, fingernails breaking as her fingertips hit nothing but dirt and stone.

  This wasn’t what she’d had in mind, she thought dimly as her vision blurred and darkened around the edges. How many times had she imagined having Roland Ballencoa on his knees, begging her for his life? A thousand? A million?

  In her dreams he told her where Leslie was before she shot him dead.

  Body. Body. Head shot. Breathe . . .

  Leah saw her mother try to run. She saw her fall. She could hear nothing but the pounding of her pulse in her head and the pounding of her feet against the earth as she ran. She had never run so hard or so fast in her life, and still terror gripped her throat at the idea that she couldn’t run fast enough to get to her mother in time.

  Ballencoa had a knife. The light flashed off the blade as he brought it up, and flashed off it again as he brought it down and plunged it into her mother’s back.

  “NO!!!!” Leah screamed.

  She launched herself at his back, slamming into him so hard she almost knocked the wind from herself. She struck at him with the steel pick in her hand over and over and over. Like a giant claw, it tore at him, ripping hair and flesh from the back of his head, from the back of his neck.

  His body twisted and bucked beneath her as he tried to fling her off. Leah clung to him like a limpet, sobbing and stabbing at him with the hoof pick until he finally shook free of her and flung her into the dirt.

  Then he was on his feet and he had hold of her, his hands crushing her arms to her sides as he picked her up. He lifted her and turned and threw her into the back of the van like a sack of trash.

  Leah cried out as she landed hard. Then Ballencoa was over her, and his hands were around her throat. He was screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear him. His face was twisted and dark like a demon from a dream.

  This was the last thing Leslie saw, Leah thought as she tried in vain to struggle and her consciousness began to dim.

  Lauren struggled to turn over. Ballencoa’s weight was gone, but her own body felt as heavy as lead. It seemed to take every ounce of strength she had to lift a foot, to move a hand. The world had gone to slow motion, black and white, no sound.

  She saw him lift Leah off the ground and hurl her into the back of the van. In her mind she screamed NO!!! But no sound came out of her.

  She moved a hand . . . a foot . . . She bent a knee . . .

  Hewitt lay on the ground where she had tripped over him. He might have been dead. She hoped so.

  She struggled to suck in a breath, to get up on one knee.

  She had a clear view of the back of the van. Ballencoa had one hand at Leah’s throat, the other tearing at her breeches.

  This was what he had done to Leslie. He had stolen her off the side of the road. He had brought her to a place like this and stolen her innocence in the most vile and violent way he could.

  Lauren hadn’t been there to stop him.

  She was here now.

  In her blindness to gain justice for one daughter, she had put the other in exactly the same brutal, horrible place to face the same brutal, horrible death.

  No.

  No.

  NO !

  NOOO!!!!

  Lauren didn’t know if the sou
nd came out of her or exploded only in her brain. It didn’t matter. It came from the deepest part of her and brought with it a wave of strength.

  She grabbed the hammer as she got to her feet and turned it in her hands.

  Not my daughter, she thought. Not again. Never again.

  She brought the hammer up with both hands.

  His attention was on Leah. He turned too late.

  Lauren brought the hammer down, claw side first, with every last ounce of strength she had.

  The claw caught him between the temple and the ear, driving into flesh and bone and brain. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from Leah, away from the van. The look on his face was one of stunned horror.

  He stuck out his arms, flailing like a blind man to break his fall as his legs buckled and he went down, the hammer still embedded in the side of his skull.

  The look in his eyes was both wild and blank, and the sounds coming from him were guttural alien babble. His body began to jerk and jump as the electrical system of his brain shorted out and seized.

  Lauren leaned hard against the van, watching him die even as she felt her own life slipping out of her, running out of her with the blood that flowed from the knife wound in her back.

  “Mommy!” Leah cried, hysterical, flinging herself into her mother.

  Lauren wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her as tightly as she could.

  “It’s over, baby,” she whispered again and again. “It’s over. It’s over.”

  It’s over.

  At last.

  61

  Like flies to carrion, the local media had already begun to arrive on Old Mission Road outside the gates of the home Lauren and her daughter had been taken from.

  Mendez had set up a roadblock of two cruisers and four deputies to keep the media well back from the scene.

  They were losing daylight. The sun had slipped over the far side of the western ridges, turning them purple and casting the valley into a light that was neither day nor night. In Santa Barbara, tourists would be sitting on the wharf, watching it float like an orange balloon above the Pacific horizon.