The SUV had studded tires, so it could handle the narrow, twisting mountain road even in the deep night and the thickening snow. The fire glowed on the ridge behind them. Jim got onto his phone as they drove. “Yes, I’m calling to report what appears to be a house fire out on Bailey Ridge. No, ma’am, I’m not at the scene myself. I saw it from the road across the ridge, from probably about ten miles away. Looks bad from here. Yeah, sure. Thanks, ma’am. You have a good evening, too.”
Nate pulled out his burner and called Elisa. She picked up on the first ring.
“Yes?” her voice was high and anxious.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s done. We got him.”
“Oh my God.” Her voice choked off. “Is he…is he all right?”
“Yes. He’s pretty beat up, but he’ll pull through. We don’t want to check him into a hospital here. That spreads our security thinner. Hang on.” He turned around, and held the phone toward Josh’s functioning arm. “Your sister.”
Josh lifted the phone to his ear. “Lu?” His voice broke.
Nate turned away to give Josh some privacy and got into the driver’s seat.
After they’d put some miles behind them, Mace reached out and patted his arm. “Yo,” he said gently. “Slow down, man. There’s fresh snow on this road. You got him, okay? He’s safe. You can relax now. Want me to drive?”
“I’m good,” Nate assured him.
“Fine, then. Let me tell you the plan. You drop off me and Jim at that rental car place right outside of Bellamy so I can get myself a clean car. Then Jim and I will blast right on back to Granger Valley to debrief Anton and Fi. I don’t like having just one guy cover them while Anton is still under the weather. You guys swing by to get Elisa, and meet us at the hospital with Mitch and Clint. You got all that?”
“Sounds good,” he said.
“You’re good to drive?” Mace frowned. “You’re not crashing, are you?”
“No. I’m fine. I’m great.”
The hours crawled by. It wasn’t too long now from the eight AM opening time of the rental car place in Bellamy, so he let just Jim and Mace out at the diner next to it to wait. But Mace was reluctant to go. His worried gaze alternated between Nate’s face and Josh’s. “I’m having second thoughts. Maybe I should stick with you guys.”
“No, go on. You and Jim both go cover them,” Nate urged. “Go.”
“If you’re sure. See you at the hospital in Granger Valley. And hurry. That kid needs patching up.” Mace smiled at Josh.
The kid tried to smile back, to ghastly effect, but he got points for trying. “I’m good,” Josh said, but his voice was thin. “I’ve been through worse.”
“Hang tough,” Mace said. “Check in regularly. Ping me every hour.”
“Will do,” Nate said.
Jim Wong patted Josh gently on the back and got out. The two men jogged across the deserted highway toward the car rental place.
Nate pulled back out onto the road, and they drove in silence for a while. Then Josh leaned forward. “Hey.” His voice was hesitant. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Nate said. “Whatever you want.”
“Did my sister hire you for this job?”
Nate smiled briefly. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “I just wanted to help her out.”
“That’s one huge fucking favor,” Josh said. “I don’t know you. I never even met you, and I’ve never paid you to look out for me. So why are you here?”
Nate thought about it. “Because your sister loves you,” he finally said.
When he glanced in the rearview, Josh was giving him a crooked, knowing smile that was a lot like Elisa’s. “Or maybe because you love my sister,” he said.
Nate grunted under his breath. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because I haven’t discussed it with her yet.”
Josh grinned, even though it looked like it hurt. His teeth were bloody.
“Can I call her again?” he asked.
“Hell yeah. Be my guest.” Nate pulled up Elisa’s number on his burner and passed it back to him. “Take as long as you need.”
“Lu? It’s me,” Josh murmured. “Yeah. We just left Mace and that other guy, Jim, to rent a car so he can go back to his brother. He said it would be about an hour. Maybe a little less. Yeah. Oh God, Lu, don’t, please. Please…I know, but if you start up, then I won’t be able to stop. I can’t fall to pieces yet. Not until it’s over.”
True thing. Nate did not feel triumphant in the least. He felt like he was under a looming shadow. Hunted. Stalked. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It took passing a state trooper going the other way to make him notice that he was driving like a bat out of hell.
It was almost impossible to lift his foot from the accelerator and slow down.
22
She had to stop checking the clock. She was doing it every twenty seconds. Clint and Mitch talked quietly in the front room, eyes on the monitors. It was starting to snow. She was glued to the bay window, from which she’d be able to see the highway exit, and Nate’s blue Jeep, the second it got off the highway.
Josh would be in that Jeep. It was too good to be real. She was so afraid that the joke would be on her. She didn’t even remember how it felt not to be afraid. She lived it, breathed it, slept it, woke to it. It was her natural state of being.
The anxiety was making her feel sick. Literally sick to her stomach. Her head was whirling, and her stomach flopped, as if her blood pressure had just plummeted.
Weird. She hadn’t eaten anything yet, but that was nothing new, as nervous as she felt. Another wave of that feeling came, hard on the heels of the first. It was bad.
And strange. Like she was a vessel that was filling up with dark, cold liquid.
A loud, rattling thud sounded from the other room. The two men had stopped talking. The silence was absolute.
Sudden, paralyzing fear gripped her. “Hey, Mitch? Clint?” she called.
No answer.
She forced herself to move toward the kitchen. She was unsteady on her feet. “Mitch?” she called. “Everything okay with you guys? I’m feeling kind of…oh shit.”
She doubled over, as pain stabbed up into her temples. Her vision went dark.
When it flickered back, she was on her knees. From that vantage point, she could see two big, black-booted feet, toes up, sticking up from the other side of the kitchen island. Beyond that, Mitch lay sprawled on the floor face first, next to the dining room table.
“Mitch!” she called. “Clint? Are you sick? What happened?”
Her nausea intensified, as the floor twisted up and swatted her on the side of the head. She came to on the floor, and tried crawling again on her hands and knees, to get closer to the fallen men. Gas. They must have been gassed. She tried not to breathe.
She wouldn’t have even seen it if she hadn’t been on the floor already, her eyes in line with the baseboard. The tiny flexible rubber tube that had been threaded through an air vent. She could hear the whine of high pressure gas hissing out of it.
She sagged to the floor again as the door burst open. Cold air revived her, just enough to focus on the men coming through. They all wore gas masks.
She was hoisted up. The world lurched. Her weight shifted. Loud, harsh voices. Bright light. A white sky. The pinpoint burn of icy snowflakes on her face.
Hard hands, pinching her, handling her with bruising force.
She was slammed violently down into a dark box. No, it was the trunk of a car. Four men were looking down at her. Three had gas masks.
The one with no mask was Gil. He was smiling widely as the trunk came down.
“We should be there in five,” Nate said as he pulled off the highway exit. “Call your sister and tell her to be watching for us.”
Josh tapped into the phone, and listened. He met Nate’s eyes in the rearview and shook his head. “Eight rings. Voicemail.”
&n
bsp; Nate could see from Josh’s eyes that the same fear had gripped him. Always lying in wait. Always ready. He pulled off the road. “Let me try Mitch,” he said.
Same. No answer, then voicemail. He tried Clint. Same.
Without another word, Josh got out of the back seat, using the side of the Jeep to support himself, and staggered up to the front passenger side. He climbed in, with some difficulty. “So,” Josh said. “Now what?”
Nate stared up at the hill toward the house. “I’m going to drive past the place. There’s a spot off the road on the other side of a draw that’ll give us a clear view. It’s pretty close as the crow flies. We’ll look with the binoculars and the thermal specs.”
They drove in silence past the turnoff to the house and around the draw. He parked at a wide side of the road, pulled out a handgun and handed it to Josh. “Hold this, and stay here.”
Josh handed it back. “I’m going with you.”
Fuck. The kid clearly had a mind of his own, and Nate didn’t have the energy or time to assert authority. He let the younger guy limp behind him, his filthy socks stained with mud and blood.
He lifted the binoculars and studied the house. The big picture windows were curtain-less. He could see the gaming consoles, the computers, all the way through the house. He even saw the cluster of shopping bags that Elisa had dumped near the door of the living room. He saw security monitor in the kitchen window.
But no people. No one on guard. No one watching the monitor. Fuck.
“No cars are parked there but the one Mace brought, and the one that Clint came in from Granger Valley,” he said. “No activity. No one patrolling outside.”
“Gil’s been here,” Josh’s voice was bleak. “She gave everything to help me, and that son of a bitch got her.”
“Don’t rush to conclusions,” Nate said. “Let’s go in and see what the place tells us. I’ll check the house. You stay in the car.”
“I’ve been staying where I’m told for eight months,” Josh said. “Don’t take it personally, but I’m never taking orders again. Gil took her, and they’re gone.”
They got back into the car and drove straight up to the house. There was no need for subterfuge at this point. The main door was unlocked. They went inside.
Nate saw Clint first, on the ground and sank down to feel his pulse. His heartbeat was slow, but it was there.
“There’s another guy here in the kitchen,” Josh said.
Josh had his good hand at Mitch’s throat when he got over there. “He’s alive,” Josh said. “And he’s waking up. These guys should be okay. Just hung over.”
“But what the hell?”
“Knock-out gas,” Josh said. “Gil has a guy who’s good with small combat robots. Cutting edge AI warfare. He probably remote piloted a crawler that went under all the motion detectors and missed the thermal detection. The robot stuck a tube of gas through the vent. Jamison used to brag to the others about the stuff he could do with robots. The evenings got long and quiet up on Bailey Ridge.”
Clint let out a cough and a groan. Nate slid and arm behind him and helped the guy sit up. “What happened?”
Clint shook his head. “No fucking idea,” he said thickly. “We saw nothing. Heard nothing. Then suddenly, we just went down. Bam, just like that. Jesus.”
“Nate.”
The stark tone in Josh’s voice made Nate’s head whip around. The young man was still clutching his blanket around himself with his good hand, pointing at the wall. At the whiteboard, to be exact. A big one that hung on the kitchen wall, with magnets and clips for schedules and coupons and grocery lists.
There was a cheerful border of dancing cartoon animals, and beneath it, someone had cleared the space with the eraser, and written in the black marker that hung next to the board.
CHECKMATE BITCH
“Gil,” Josh said. “That’s Gil.”
Nate stared at the word, struggling with his own rage. He heard his dad’s taunting voice in his ears, interspersed with those awful thudding sounds as he slapped Mom’s head back against the kitchen wall. You got a problem with that? You got something to say to me, dumb bitch? Why don’t you just say it? Don’t be shy. Say it!
He’d wanted so badly to kill that asshole. The one time he tried, he ended up in the hospital in a neck brace. He’d ‘fallen down the stairs.’ That old fucking classic. Mom had used it herself on many occasions.
He was shaking, hard. Rage, and fear. A toxic blend that could make him stupid. Make him fuck things up. Chill. She needs you. You have to fucking…chill.
They jerked around at the muted buzz of a phone. It took a few moments to understand where it came from.
The burner phone. The one that he’d given to Elisa, which was lying on the kitchen island. Gil had taken it out of her pocket, and left it for them.
Nate snatched it up, as the phone stopped ringing. He tried to call back, but the call wouldn’t go through. Then a notice for a text message appeared.
Some GPS coordinates, and then, Bring me the flash drive. Bring Josh. Move fast. Come alone to the meet. We’ll meet you and bring you the rest of the way.
Nate replied. Don’t hurt her
Gil’s response was instant. I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. This is not a negotiation. Be quick. No Josh = she dies. No flash drive = she dies. Too slow = she dies. Bring company = she dies. Police show up = she dies.
Nate stared down at the message, his mind racing. I don’t have Josh. He’s at the hospital ICU.
What hospital?
Amity Springs, he wrote. In shock. Broken arm, concussion. Burns.
If you’re lying, she dies. The window is closing. Move your ass.
“Flash drive?” Josh asked. “What flash drive?”
Nate pulled it out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket and showed it to him. “Nasty sex videos. It shows Gil fucking an underage prostitute at one of Shel Sinclair’s orgies, among other things. Your sister gave it to me to look after.”
Clint and Mitch were more or less upright now, though they both looked like they should be hunched over a toilet. He twitched the nearest tablet toward himself and looked up the coordinates that Clemens had sent. “Where is this place?”
The map had a pointer. Josh leaned over and stared at it. “It’s not far from another one of my dad’s houses,” he said. “Maybe ten miles. That’s a state park where he wants you to go, but I’ll bet you anything he’s keeping Lu in that house.”
“What house?”
“Here.” Josh pointed a blood-darkened finger at the map. “It’s on Beecham Lake. One of my father’s favorite mountain houses. He spent a lot of time there. He did a lot of work and renovations on that place. It’s about an hour and a half drive from here.”
“What’s with him, using family properties for his dirty games? Seems risky.”
Josh shook his head. “Once I understood that he wasn’t ever going to let me leave that place alive, he got real talkative. Especially when he drank. He kept me there because it would be easier to dispose of me. He wouldn’t have to bury me, or hide my body or account for my disappearance. He’d just stage a suicide or a drug overdose. They’d find my body, and oh, woe is me. He liked to fuck with my head about it. What’s your preference, Joshie? Slit writs in the bathtub? Hanging from the elk horn chandelier? Chug-a-lugging some drain cleaner? He got off on that. Evil sadist motherfucker. He’ll have something nasty planned for Lu, too.”
They stared at each other in blank dismay.
“I have to go,” Nate said. “Right now.”
“I should go,” Josh said resolutely. “Gil said I had to go with you.”
“You can barely stand,” Nate said. “I’ll go alone.”
Josh’s face looked pinched and miserable. “But it’s a suicide run,” he said bleakly. “He’ll eat you alive if you go alone. And he’ll find out soon enough that I was never at the Amity Springs ICU. And Lu will pay.”
“I don’t think it matters anymore.” Nate pul
led out his spare handgun, checked the magazine, and pressed it into Josh’s hand. “I’m going to do whatever I can. You look after these two guys until help arrives. Shouldn’t be long.”
“So this is goodbye?” Josh’s voice was angry. “You’re just running into his fucking fangs without a plan? Do you have your own private army on retainer?”
Nate stared at him for a second, startled by a sudden, batshit crazy idea.
“Ah…yeah,” he said distractedly. “Yeah, that is exactly what I need. A private army. Ready to move at a moment’s notice. It would be perfect. Thanks, Josh.” He looked around until he saw the car keys for Clint’s SUV parked outside.
Josh looked baffled. “Thanks for what?”
Nate had no more bandwidth for chit chat. He gestured at Clint and Mitch. “Guard them,” he said. “Gotta go. I have an idea. Cross your fingers. Take care. Stay alive, okay?”
Josh stumbled on his dirty, bleeding feet over to the open front door and watched Nate open Clint’s car. “You’re a fucking maniac, you know that?” he called.
“For her, absolutely.” Nate popped the trunk, and looked for Clint’s go-bag, a hard black plastic clamshell case. It looked more like a thing to carry guns than clothes. It was convincing as a case to carry hazardous biological material.
He opened it and the suitcase practically exploded with dirty clothes. Damn, that was so foul. Clint really needed to get his nasty ass to a laundromat.
Nate placed the flash drive on top of the soiled clothes and forced the thing to close again. He was still dressed for Josh’s extraction. Suited up for battle, no need to change. “Tell Clint to use my Jeep to get back to Granger Valley, if he recovers fast enough to drive. The keys are on the kitchen island. Watch yourself.”
“But what are you…” Josh cut himself off. “Never mind,” he said. “If you get to talk to Lu, tell her I love her.”
“Of course,” Nate said. “But you’ll tell her yourself.”
“Right,” Josh said, his lips tight and grayish. “Thanks for everything. Good luck.”
Nate pulled the hacked smartphone battery out of his pocket and put it back inside the phone. It still had some charge, thank God. Enough to get the job done.
Heedless: The Hellbound Brotherhood Book Four Page 18