Colton Showdown

by Marie Ferrarella

  Hurrying out of the apartment, he didn’t even bother to close the door. Instead, he pulled his cell phone out and called the only person he trusted right now.

  Emma answered on the third ring. “Colton.”

  “Emma, they took her.”

  She’d attended the meeting with Villanueva as well and hadn’t expected to hear from her brother so soon. As it was, she could barely make out his voice.

  “Tate? Is that you? Where are you, you’re breaking up.”

  He raised his voice, exasperated at the reception and far more exasperated with himself. He should have never left Hannah alone.

  “I’m in the stairwell at the high-rise. That meeting with Villanueva, Maddox used the opportunity to have Hannah kidnapped again. The apartment’s in shambles.”

  Emma took that as a good sign. “That means she tried to fight them off. She’s still alive, Tate.”

  But for how long? “She knows too much,” he said, taking the next flight down. “Maddox is going to kill her.”

  Emma searched for slivers of hope to offer her brother, as well as Caleb when she told him about this newest development. “Maybe not. If that’s all he wants, then he would have done it already.”

  “And maybe he wants to make an example of her to the others,” Tate countered. Even as he said it, he felt sick to his stomach. Maddox was going to torture Hannah, then kill her—he was sure of it. “I’ve got to find her before that happens, Emma.”

  “We’ll find her, Tate,” his sister told him with as much confidence as she could muster. He didn’t need to hear the actual odds against that right now. Besides, miracles happened every day—they just needed one. And this was the season for them, she told herself.

  Reaching the ground floor, he pushed open the door leading from the stairwell. “Who would have any idea where Maddox would take her?”

  Emma tried to think. “Anyone who’d know is already dead. The people we arrested at the raid are just grunt-level henchmen—”

  Before him, in the lobby, Tate saw that the paramedics had just finished strapping Langdon to the gurney. Pale and bleeding, the wounded doorman had apparently regained consciousness, which was a good sign, Tate thought. The paramedics were going to be taking the man to the hospital—

  “Hospital,” Tate suddenly said out loud as an idea hit him.

  “What about a hospital?” Emma asked, confused.

  “What hospital did they take Miller to after the raid?” He knew that the informant had been shot, but lucky for him, the bullet had gone straight through and, despite a large loss of blood, the formerly disgraced member of the Amish community was going to make it.

  “Let me think.” Emma paused, then said, “Philadelphia General was the closest one to the warehouse. They’d have taken him there.”

  “He still there?” he asked eagerly. Miller was the only one he knew to question. The man had known all the ins and outs of Maddox’s operation from the first kidnapping. Maybe he’d have an idea where the man would take Hannah.

  “As far as I know,” Emma qualified before saying, “yes.”

  “Then that’s where I’m heading. Call the hospital, have them double the guard. Maddox might have gotten it into his head to clean house.”

  It was an educated guess, but Tate was reasonably certain he was right. A man like Maddox, who saw himself above the people he dealt with, would easily kill Miller without so much as a passing qualm.

  * * *

  It was ninety-seven miles from the heart of New York City to Philadelphia, a trip that, on a good day with traffic permitting, could be made in just a little under two hours.

  Calling in favors, he managed to get his hands on a NYPD detective’s car, complete with portable flashing lights, and Tate made the trip in a little over an hour. He spent the entire ride trying his best to calm down, but it was no use. He was highly agitated, highly wired and praying he wasn’t already too late.

  Hannah had trusted him to protect her and he’d failed in his assignment.

  He’d failed her.

  If anything happened to her, he’d never forgive himself. If that madman so much as—

  Tate stopped. He couldn’t let himself think about anything except getting her back. It had to be his entire focus. Otherwise, he’d be no good to anyone, least of all to Hannah.

  Reaching the hospital, he made his way upstairs then hurried down the surgical unit hallway to ICU, the area where Miller was being kept. While the man technically was not under arrest, he was still a prisoner in his room. There was an armed guard posted right outside his door, cautiously watching the movements of every approaching person with a wary eye.

  Tate took out his badge and held it up for the guard to check. “Detective Tate Colton. I need to talk to Miller,” he told the man.

  Nodding, the guard stepped to the side to allow him access to the room.

  The moment Tate walked in, the listless look on Miller’s face vanished. “You here to spring me?” the man asked hopefully.

  Tate didn’t bother answering the question. Every second counted and he had an anxious feeling that there weren’t very many left.

  He led with his reason for being there. “Maddox’s got Hannah Troyer.”

  Miller looked at him, confused. “I thought you rescued her—”

  “I did. He kidnapped her again,” Tate bit off. His tone left no room for a discussion. “Where would he take her? We’ve got people watching all his known hangouts.” Emma had taken care of that for him, sending out extra agents to cover Maddox’s former haunts. “And he hasn’t shown up at any of them. Is there any place, some secret hideout maybe, or a place that means something to him, that he’d go to?”

  Miller thought for a second, then bobbed his head up and down like one of those annoying big-headed dolls people kept insisting on putting in the rear of their vehicles.

  “He’s got this place where he’d take the girls whenever he was getting ready to get rid of them. He called it the Kill House.” Miller raised his eyes to Tate’s face. “It’s this abandoned boathouse just off the Allegheny River.” Miller’s voice grew quiet. “That was where he took those girls whose bodies I led your sister and Hannah’s brother to. He killed them himself. He got off on the life-and-death power trip,” Miller added with an involuntary shiver.

  The boathouse.

  That had to be it.

  It was a gamble, Tate admitted, but it was one hand he was going to have to play until the end. “Tell me how to get there,” he ordered Miller.

  * * *

  With Miller’s directions freshly embedded in his mind—as well as into the GPS in the car he was using, Tate drove on the expressway as if the very devil were behind him in hot pursuit.

  But the devil wasn’t after him, he thought wryly. He was actually on his way to the devil. And fervently praying that he would get there in time. Because if Maddox had killed her—hell, if he’d harmed a single hair on Hannah’s head, Tate couldn’t be held responsible for what he’d do to the black-hearted bastard.

  He had to be on time, Tate prayed over and over again, he just had to be.

  * * *

  “What is this place?” Hannah asked, looking around, doing her very best not to sound as frightened as she really was.

  “The last place you’ll ever see,” Maddox told her nastily. “Gotten real chatty since the last time, haven’t you?” he mocked. “That undercover cop do that for you? Teach you how to run off at the mouth? What else did he do? Make you a lot of promises that if you testify against me, wonderful things were going to happen to you? Bet you didn’t count on this being one of those ‘things,’” he jeered. “Did you?”

  His laugh sent a chill zigzagging down her spine, forming icicles along its way. Somehow, Hannah still continued to hold her head up.

  “You’re an evil man and you have to be stopped,” she told him hotly. He was responsible for her friends being killed. She remembered now, remembered it clear as day, and her anger rose to a danger
ous level.

  He laughed shortly. “Maybe so, but not today, sweetheart. And not by the likes of you, that’s for damn sure.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “Dead men tell no tales—it’s a trite saying, but it’s accurate. And it applies to dead whores, too.”

  The moment they came to the dilapidated building, she braced her hands on either side of the doorway, refusing to enter. Cursing, he pushed her hard through the open doorway. Hannah found herself stumbling into the old, abandoned single-story structure. Inches away from her foot, a rat scurried away.

  Hannah swung around to face him. “Why are you doing this?” she cried.

  The condescending sneer on his face deepened and he laughed. The sound made her skin crawl. “Because I can, my dear. Because I can.”

  Hannah knew that her ways were completely different from this man’s, but she still couldn’t understand his reasoning. Why would he risk everything he’d worked for to kill her, not to mention her friends and the other Amish girls? “But you have so much to lose.”

  “Leaving you alive isn’t going to change that,” he told her. “But it will teach that bastard, Colton, that he can’t mess with me and not suffer consequences for his actions.” His eyes seemed to bore right into her, pinning her in place. “The same goes for you. Now,” he took a deep breath as he stepped toward her, “not that this hasn’t been interesting, but I really have somewhere else to be so—let me take care of this loose end and I can be on my way.”

  The next moment, moving so quickly that had she blinked, she would have missed it, Maddox had his hands around her throat.

  Startled, Hannah tried to back away as she pushed her hands hard against his chest. But she couldn’t budge him. There was no way.

  His hands were tightening around her throat, cutting off her air supply.

  Frantic now, knowing she only had seconds left, Hannah started to claw at Maddox’s face. She raked her nails down his cheeks, then tried to stick her finger into his eye, hoping to create enough sudden pain to make him drop his hands from her throat.

  Rather than push her hands away, he just continued doing what he was doing. Squeezing harder.

  Hannah felt her strength quickly being sapped away. She didn’t know how much longer she could last, how much longer she could keep trying to resist.

  It couldn’t end like this, she thought, flashes of heat exploding through her brain so that holding on to thoughts was proving to be very difficult.

  She didn’t want to die. Not when she was just on the brink of this wonderful new world that Tate had shown her. She wanted to live, to be with him. To make him happy that he’d saved her.

  To make him happy...

  The pain was awful and her grasp on the world was beginning to swiftly fade away.

  She thought she heard a loud noise, like something breaking, falling to the floor, but she couldn’t begin to identify the sound.

  Or even know if she’d actually heard it or just imagined it.

  Everything was spinning out of control and she could swear she was leaving her body, separating from this heavy, heavy flesh that was anchoring her, holding her down.

  The last thing she remembered before the darkness came was falling and hitting something hard.

  Chapter 16

  He’d called Emma the moment he’d gotten back into the car and started following the directions that Miller had given him. He gave her the same directions to the abandoned boathouse and knew she would be coming with backup. Given the circumstances and knowing how fast Emma operated, he was fairly certain that she was no more than five minutes behind him.

  She might as well have been an hour behind him.

  Tate couldn’t shake the sense of urgency that was consuming him. Something in his gut told him that he didn’t have five minutes. In this situation, even one second could mean the difference between life and death. Hannah’s life or death.

  So when Tate pulled up to the boathouse a few minutes later and saw Maddox’s custom-made sedan parked some distance away, he bolted out of the car, barely stopping to pull up the hand brake.

  The door was locked from the inside.

  Abandoned buildings didn’t have doors that were locked from the inside. If anything, there would have been a padlock on the outside.

  Maddox was inside with Hannah—he’d bet his life on it.

  Tate didn’t bother to use his skeleton key tools to jimmy the lock. Instead, he put his shoulder to the door, slamming against it with all his might.

  The door, weakened by weather and termites, splintered in its frame and cracked open.

  The first thing Tate saw was Maddox with his hands around Hannah’s throat. The next second, she was sinking, apparently lifelessly, to the floor.

  Tate felt as if a broadsword had just slashed through his heart.

  He was too late.

  “No!” Tate cried, wildly enraged.

  He didn’t remember flying across the floor, didn’t remember launching himself at Maddox, but he must have because he suddenly found himself pounding on the man.

  The fury inside him flared out, coloring everything in hues of red. His fists made contact, over and over again, with Maddox’s face and body. The skin on his knuckles tore and bled.

  He kept on punching.

  Tate heard a high-pitched buzz and realized a beat later that it was the sound of shrieking. It was coming from the sex ring mastermind beneath him. The man was begging him for mercy.

  The irony of that was mind-boggling.

  Damning Maddox’s soul to hell, Tate promised, “I’ll give you the same kind of mercy you doled out to those girls, to Hannah! How’s it feel?” Every word was punctuated with another jarring punch.

  He had Maddox’s blood on his hands and he just kept swinging—until he heard it. A soft little plea, so soft that he didn’t hear it at first.

  It came again.

  “No, Tate, don’t.”

  Holding Maddox up with one hand, his doubled-up fist pulled back to deliver yet another reeling punch, Tate stopped. His heart hammering, he looked at Hannah. Her eyes were open, looking at him, and she was trying—in vain—to sit up.

  Instantly, Tate released Maddox. The man fell to the floor, a crumpled, bloodied, sobbing heap, as Tate ran to Hannah’s side.

  Falling to his knees, Tate gathered her to him. “Hannah? Hannah?” Her eyes were closed again. Panic filled him as he begged, “Stay with me, Hannah. Please, stay with me. Oh, God, Hannah, I can’t make it without you. You have to stay with me.”

  Hannah felt as limp as a rag doll and if she had indeed been awake a second before, she wasn’t now. But he could detect just the faintest of pulses and he clung to that.

  “It’s going to be all right, Hannah, it’s going to be all right,” he promised her as he rocked her body against him. He held on to her tightly, as if the very action was the only thing tethering her to life.

  Behind him, he could hear the pounding sound of approaching feet. Emma had arrived with the SWAT team.

  “My God,” Emma cried, looking at the unconscious, bloodied heap that was Seth Maddox. She barely recognized the man. “What happened to him?”

  Tate didn’t even bother glancing in the man’s direction. He was afraid he’d become enraged all over again and this time kill the bastard.

  But that would have made him just as bad as Maddox. He had a feeling that Hannah felt the same way about it. That was why she’d rallied and called to him. To stop him from doing something he would eventually regret.

  “He ran into a wall,” he told his sister stonily.

  Emma looked from her brother to the unconscious sex trafficker and nodded. “Works for me.” And then she took her first real look at her brother—and the girl in his arms. Tate looked like hell. A very pale hell. “Oh, Tate, is she—?”

  “Barely alive,” he whispered numbly. “But there’s a pulse and she’s a fighter,” he said, more to encourage himself than to give his sister an update.

  Paramedics
entered the old building, pushing a gurney before them. They were about to attend to Maddox, but Emma called them over to Tate and directed their attention to Hannah.

  “Call a second bus to collect the trash,” she instructed one of the agents who’d come in with her, nodding at Maddox. Turning toward the paramedics, she indicated the girl in her brother’s arms. “She goes first.”

  Emma saw the absolutely haunted look on Tate’s face. He looked as if he wasn’t about to release Hannah to the EMTs.

  As if he couldn’t.

  Placing her hand on Tate’s shoulder, she did her best to try to comfort him. “Let them do their job, Tate,” she coaxed gently. “They know best how to take care of her. How to save her life.”

  He made no move for a beat, no indication that he’d even heard her. And then a sigh shuddered out of him as he finally rose and backed away.

  “I wasn’t there for her,” he said to Emma, watching every move the paramedics made. “If I’d been there—”

  He couldn’t blame himself. He wasn’t at fault, Emma thought fiercely. “You couldn’t have known and vermin like Maddox would have found another way to get to her.” Emma gently tugged Tate out of the way as the paramedics slowly transferred the unconscious victim to the gurney, then snapped the wheels back into position. “You got him, Tate. You got Maddox. A lot of girls, as well as their families, are going to be grateful to you.”

  He nodded, barely hearing her. He was unable to take his eyes off Hannah. As they began to guide the gurney out, Tate suddenly came to. “I’m going with you,” he told the two attendants.

  There was no room in his voice for an argument.

  * * *

  Tate couldn’t remember ever having lived through a longer night. The seconds had just dragged by, feeding into eternity without leaving a mark.

  The moment Hannah was brought into the hospital, she’d immediately been rushed into surgery. A surgery that seemed to last forever. The reports, when a nurse did come out of the O.R. to deliver them, were not all that encouraging in the beginning.