The band snapped.
Relief flooded through her, as she snatched the blindfold away from her eyes. She blinked in the sudden light, but at least it was muted. Sunlight streamed through the front windshield and front two windows of the white paneled van, reflecting through to the rear, where she had been kept.
Up there in the front of the van, she could see the back of her captor’s head. His hair was close shorn, military style, but she couldn’t make out his face. The rear view mirror seemed to have fallen off the windshield at some point, which actually made things a bit easier for Reggie right now.
She glanced around, looking for anything she could use as a weapon. There was nothing but a couple of small cardboard boxes. Not much she could do with those unless she was looking to give her captor a nasty paper cut. Or stick the box on his head while he was driving.
Great idea, Reggie.
She reached down to take the zip tie off her ankles. This one proved to be a lot easier, with no pain involved. She thrust her fingernail down into the zip tie locking mechanism until the lock disengaged, then slipped the loose end right out.
Okay, maybe now she hated that demonstration guy a little bit less.
She was free. Her eyesight was restored to her. But she still remained weak, she hadn’t eaten in who knew how long, and she had no weapons on her.
This next part should be a real hoot.
As she crept toward the front of the van, she heard a cell phone buzz. It was resting on the front console, and her captor scooped it up and answered. As he did so, Reggie saw that her own phone was right beside it. And it was on. Maybe…
There was a pause, and then her captor began speaking.
“You have him? Good. Stay right where you are. I’m only a minute or two away.”
You have him? Who was he talking about? Joshua was the one that made the most sense, with his connection to Humpty, but really she had no way of knowing what was going on here. Reggie stopped, trying to sort out what she should do.
The longer she remained free back here, the more of a chance there was that she would get spotted. But if she could hang out here just a minute or two longer, she might be able to make sure that Joshua was going to be okay.
The decision tore at her. Every time she thought she was getting close to an answer, the counterarguments would present themselves.
Screw this. So far, Reggie had taken risks that had paid off. Time to take another one right now. But not before preparing herself.
If she was going to go for big, stupid ideas, might as well go whole hog. She scooped up the unbroken zip tie, the one that had been around her ankles. A glimmer of an idea had formed. Whether or not it would work would mostly depend on her grip.
She lurched toward the front of the van, doing what she could to stay right behind the driver’s side seat. Reaching up and over the man’s head, there was a slight hesitation as she tried to see who her captor was, but she shoved the thought from her mind. Then, gripping the zip tie in both hands as hard as she could, she encircled his head with her arms and pulled.
The zip tie pressed itself into the man’s larynx, and her captor immediately reacting, thrashing and reaching back to try to grab at her with his hands. Her placement behind him kept the man from reaching her, but she had underestimated his strength and her own weakness after being tied up for however long it had been.
Immediately, the zip tie began to slip from her fingers. Another second or two, and the man who was currently choking would be free to turn and face his attacker. And Reggie wasn’t sure she could take him on in her current state.
Time to adjust the plan. Angling her body to come around the side, Reggie shot her knee into her captor’s side, hitting him right in the ribs. He groaned and leaned away, pulling the zip tie entirely out of Reggie’s hands.
But she was prepared for that.
Following up the knee, Reggie launched herself at the man’s eyes, recognizing his face as she raked her fingernails across his eyelids. He screeched and lashed out with a blind fist that managed to catch Reggie on the side of the face, causing her to see spots.
“Oh, Reggie,” he grunted, shaking his head. “You disappoint me.”
She felt his hand curl around her locks of hair, pulling her head down to crash against the middle console. As her consciousness sank toward oblivion, Reggie tasted the bitter taste of failure on her tongue. Her captor’s voice echoed in her head.
“Time to lock you up somewhere for safekeeping,” he murmured. “Such a shame. Such a sad, sad shame.”
For some reason, Reggie thought it sounded like he was saying goodbye.
* * *
“This guy is all over the map,” Had grumbled, staring at his phone. “One second, we’re closing in on him, the next he’s darting off someplace else.”
“But should we still take this exit, or not?” Coop demanded. They were right on top of the ramp for exit 74, their driver’s hands hovering over the wheel.
The dot he was tracking seemed to be going perpendicular to the direction of the freeway, at least for the moment, so Had made an executive decision. Well, as executive as he ever got, anyway.
“Take the exit!” he called out.
Their huge driver yanked the wheel, pressing Had into Bailey for a moment. She had her own phone out, looking at what appeared to be the time. It was a reminder to Had of the urgency of their task. As if he’d needed another one.
But as they neared the bottom of the exit, his attention was diverted by the sight of a wrecked vehicle that was smoking off to the side. Another cab.
It looked like the one Joshua had been in.
“Um, Coop?” he uttered, pointing. But she was already staring in that direction.
And then he spotted the figures standing around, off to the side. There was Joshua and Leslie… and some man that looked like he could have been their driver. The guy also looked the worse for wear.
They pulled up, and Joshua was at their taxi before they could get out.
“It’s Agent Shively,” he barked at them through the window.
Had wasn’t sure his hearing was working. That couldn’t have been what Joshua had said. Sure, Had wasn’t a huge fan of the guy. He’d been a total grump and seemed to have a stick up his butt the entire time they’d been back at Fort Jackson.
But a killer? Working on the crime he’d committed himself. There had to be a mistake somewhere.
They clambered out of the car, listening as Joshua explained in terse words everything he’d discovered since their cars had been separated. Joshua’s driver, Shively’s unwitting assistant, was nodding along, providing backup to the bizarre story.
Out of the corner of his eye, Had noticed that Bailey was over speaking to Joshua’s sober companion, one arm resting on Leslie’s shoulder. It looked like she was trying to comfort the woman.
Bailey seemed to be reaching out to the only woman here who wasn’t as used to law enforcement. Checking up on her to make sure she wasn’t overwhelmed.
The sight of that kindness reminded Had of Reggie. It was just the sort of thing that she would do.
That, in turn, reminded him to check his phone. As much as finding Joshua and Leslie had helped them to understand who they were facing, they still needed to actually find the guy. And Had was the one with the information on that account.
He glanced down at his phone, and for a moment was confused. There was the dot that showed their location. And there was the dot that showed Reggie’s phone.
They were almost on top of one another.
How was that possible? Just a few minutes ago, the dot had been headed off in the opposite direction. Was it a glitch?
Or had the killer turned around and was now hunting them?
A shot rang out, and the military looking man who had been Joshua’s driver crumpled to the ground, a flower of red blooming out of the back of his head. For a moment, everyone was stunned, staring at the man as the life drained from him.
Then ev
erything turned to chaos. Joshua ran and pushed Leslie and Bailey to the ground while Coop and Had pulled out their guns, scanning the area for the shooter. Then Had spotted him.
Agent Shively was tossing the rifle he had used to the ground, pulling out a pistol as he moved around from the back of the wrecked taxi, where he seemed to have taken the shot. He walked with purpose, with no apparent desire to stay under cover.
Then he began firing.
Bailey lifted her head from where Joshua had thrown her to the ground. She scrambled away from the former agent, but then seemed to see what was happening around her. When she spotted the man advancing, she screamed out in horror.
“No!”
Shively faltered for a moment, apparently distracted by the scream. Then he seemed to refocus his attention to Bailey’s side, aiming at one target, ignoring all others, as he strode toward them. His face was a mask of fury as he emptied his gun at one single point. The place where Joshua had landed as he’d tried to protect the two women.
From all that Had could see, Shively was doing his best to kill Joshua in the same way he’d killed his former assistant. And Had couldn’t let that happen.
He took careful aim and fired his pistol right at the man’s chest. As he did so, he noticed Agent Cooper doing the exact same.
They fired together, hitting the man over and over again, his body twitching as the bullets passed through him. Seconds later it was over.
Shively fell to his knees, and for one brief moment before he toppled over, Had could see his face. The face of the man who had betrayed his team. Had was shocked at what he saw there.
Pasted on the man’s mouth was a huge smile.
* * *
Sariah swore to herself.
The deadly force had been necessary. She knew that. Shively had been firing right at one of her team, doing his best to kill Joshua.
The corrupt CID agent already taken down his helper… what had the man’s name been? Agent Rasmussen? The hapless agent that Shively had duped into helping him.
So now, they had absolutely nothing to go on.
Shively hadn’t worked alone. At least, that was the assumption right now. According to Klingler, they had evidence that the other kidnapping at Fort Sill had been a murder as well. So at the very least, Shively had a helper. Someone to capture a recruit for him from Fort Sill at the same time he was doing the same at Jackson.
Whether that was to create confusion or reasonable doubt for his own killing, Sariah had no idea. And there was the problem in a nutshell.
They didn’t have any information.
“I found Reggie’s cell phone on him,” Had said as he approached her. “And I found something else. Two somethings.”
He’d gone over to search the body while Sariah had made sure that no one was hurt. Now he held out his other hand. In his palm rested three more phones.
“From what I can tell, one is the phone he used for work,” Had said, pointing with his chin at the nicest looking cell. “It has Agent Klingler’s number in it, along with a bunch of others. But then there’s the other two.”
Sariah looked, wanting to reach out and snatch the phones from him, to pry any information she could out of them. The desperation she recognized as a manifestation of her helplessness. Reggie was out there somewhere, and the key to finding her could be contained there in Had’s hand.
He continued speaking, after giving her a searching look. Perhaps Sariah wasn’t keeping her expressions as schooled as she would like.
“What’s that one?” she asked, pointing to a phone that seemed almost identical to the first, save that it appeared more beat up.
“Check it out,” Had said.
He opened up the first phone and punched a number. The one that looked almost like it buzzed in his hand.
“I just called Agent Klingler’s number from this one,” Had said.
It was the missing phone. The one that Klingler had said he had lost. Only instead of it getting lost, it had been stolen by Shively.
“What about that last one?” Sariah asked.
“It’s a burner. There were only two numbers in it.”
“Any texts?”
Had nodded. “From the one number there’s a bunch. Last text just had the number 74 on it.”
Joshua chimed in as he moved closer to their conversation. “According to Rasmussen,” he said, pointing back at the fallen agent, “that was Shively giving him directions on where to meet.”
“So the plan was to join up here,” Sariah muttered. “Or somewhere close.” She peered around the area.
As she did so, she caught sight of Bailey, just as she heard the investigator’s voice calling out to them. The woman was down close to the underpass and was calling them over, waving her arms as she did so.
“I found it!” she said as they jogged over to her. “I found the van he was using.”
“Is there anything in there?” Sariah asked, her heart beating fast in anticipation.
Bailey nodded. “There are some broken zip ties in the back with blood on them. Looked like maybe Reggie managed to get free, at least for a bit.”
Hope warred with fear in Sariah’s chest. “Anything else?”
The investigator frowned at that question. “Yes. There’s blood on the console, up in the front of the van.”
Hands wringing in front of her, Bailey paused and swallowed. Then she delivered the rest of her findings, the reluctance clear in her voice.
“It’s fresh.”
CHAPTER 12
Fort Sill was nothing like Fort Jackson, other than the fact that there were men and women in uniform rushing about everywhere, recruits being put through their paces by barking sergeants who would tolerate no disrespect, real or imagined. Other than that, they might have been two different planets.
Had corrected his assessment as he stepped out of the Humvee that Agent Klingler had sent for them from the base. Fort Hill was just as hot.
But beyond that, the similarities vanished. Where Fort Jackson still managed to maintain most of its green, even in the midst of an extended summer, Fort Sill was a cracked and barren landscape. If Had were to come up with an image for hell, he’d be hard pressed to find one better than what he was looking at right now.
Where Jackson felt like a sticky swamp, the air here seemed to suck all of the moisture out of his body within seconds. Any time at all spent out in this sun felt like it would leave him a desiccated corpse. Wasn’t it supposed to be October, for crying out loud? This heat was ridiculous.
A pale-colored scorpion with a darker colored patch on its back scuttled out of the way as Had set his heels down in the bare dirt road. He was wearing his boots, but had toned down the rest of his attire. Mostly because he wasn’t really sure what Oklahoma was. Was it a Southern state? A Western one? No one seemed to really know.
A cloud of dust wafted off in the distance behind them, marking part of the route they had taken from that exit off the freeway that was now covered in crime scene investigators from the nearest precinct in Oklahoma City. That was not a place that Had would be sad to put in his rear-view mirror.
“You couldn’t have used force that was just a little less deadly?”
Had listened as Joshua yelled at Agent Cooper as he climbed out of the vehicle, a vein sticking out in his forehead. It was another variation on the fight that had been taking place since back at the crime scene.
The criticism was leveled at Had as much as it was at Coop, a fact that was made crystal clear from the occasional venom-filled glance that Joshua had directed at him throughout the trip here. Had understood where it was coming from.
“You know why we did what we did, Joshua,” came Coop’s response, more level than Joshua’s, but only by a little bit.
Had felt the pressure of Reggie’s absence swirl around him like some kind of foul miasma. It wasn’t just that he missed her and was worried about her wellbeing. That would have been bad enough. But without Reggie there to balance their group, i
t felt like things were falling apart.
Both Leslie and Bailey had been left behind at the crime scene. Bailey had stayed to help out with the forensics team that had arrived. Coop had wanted to make sure than they had immediate access to any information that came from the van.
As for Leslie, she had just said that she would catch a ride in with Bailey when the time came. She had made a vague reference to some personal business she had to take care of. What kind of personal business could she have out in the middle of Oklahoma?
Regardless, it was now down to the original three team members, but Had wasn’t feeling all that nostalgic at the moment. And from what he could see, Joshua and Coop weren’t having a touchy-feely time of things either.
“I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been stopped,” Joshua barked at her. “But he was our only link to Reggie!”
Up to that point, Agent Cooper had stayed calm. But now she turned, grabbed Joshua by the collar and shoved him up against the Humvee. Bella, at Joshua’s side, jumped around and barked, her tongue lolling out. She either thought this was play, or she agreed with Coop. Had wouldn’t have been surprised either way.
“Listen, you self-absorbed bastard,” she spat at him through gritted teeth. “If you think you’re the only one who cares for Reggie, you need to reassess.”
Joshua brushed her hands off with some effort. Had forgot at times just how strong Coop was.
The former agent pushed his face into Coop’s. “I’m well aware of your connection to Reggie. What I’m wondering is how you justify it. As well as your actions out there today.”
He turned and stalked off, leaving Coop speechless. Her head hung down and she took a deep breath. When she lifted herself back up, her eyes sought out Had’s.
“You and Reggie, huh?” he asked.
Agent Cooper seemed to freeze for a second. Then she nodded. Once.
Had shrugged. “You two make a cute couple.”
Relief flooded her face, followed by a frown. Had could almost track the thought process. She was grateful to have someone that approved, but she was also worried about her newfound love.
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