by Ninie Hammon
"Uh … T.J. …?" Dobbs said.
"What!"
He was immediately sorry he'd snapped at Dobbs. He and Brice were to blame. They should have known better, but none of this was on Dobbs. He was the only one among them who hadn't screwed up.
"Look at this." Dobbs handed T.J. the piece of paper where Bailey had jotted down the characters she had seen on the sign through the eyes of one of the kidnapped girls.
"WOH7. What about it?"
"The girls were lying on their backs in the floor of a van, right? They wouldn't have seen what was outside the window from the same angle as somebody in the front seat."
"Yeah, and …"
"Would have seen it cockeyed — maybe even upside down."
"Maybe. What's your point?"
"This is my point."
Dobbs took the paper with WOH7 written on it and turned it upside down and slid it across the table to T.J.
It took T.J. a moment to see what Dobbs was getting at.
Upside down, WOH7 became LHOM.
"What are you getting at …?" But something was already fluttering around the outsides of T.J.'s consciousness as images rearranged themselves in his head.
"She said the W was on top and had some other letters with it but she couldn't see what they were, right? Letters that would have been in front of the W so we figured it was north west or south west."
T.J.'s mind was stumbling toward a destination Dobbs had already reached.
"So you're saying if—?"
"—the sign were upside down, the W would become an M. It wouldn't be on the top, it'd be on the bottom and the other letters would be after the M, on the right side instead of the left."
It was there. T.J. almost had it.
"What if the letters after the M were ine? That would make the word Mine."
T.J. looked from the piece of paper to Dobbs and back to the piece of paper.
"You're saying it could be LHO on the top line and 'Mine' on the bottom." It wasn't a question.
"LHO, as in Last Hope Ollie … Mine."
The two men looked at each other across the table. Neither spoke.
T.J. began to back up from the idea so fast he almost tripped and fell backwards over his own thoughts.
"It couldn't be … there's no way …"
"Why not? It's as reasonable a deduction as North West Ohio 7."
T.J. took a breath. Then another.
"Are you sayin' you think Brice is marshaling all the forces of law enforcement at his disposal to go crashin' down like a hammer on Rock Creek Cavern in Ohio when the bad guys is actually in a mine in West Virginia?"
"Give me a good reason why not."
T.J. tried.
"Well … North West Ohio 7 … Ohio roads are designated 'OH.' But the Last Hope Ollie Mine would have been written out that way on a sign. All the words."
"Not necessarily."
"Are you sayin' you seen a sign where it was abbreviated LHO Mine?"
"Are you saying there couldn't possibly be one we haven't seen?"
The men were silent again.
"We can't just sit here," Dobbs said.
T.J. threw in the towel then.
"No, we can't. We got to go out there to the mine and make sure that it ain't where they've taken them girls and Bailey."
"And if it is? Do we call Brice off the hunt in Ohio?"
"If it is … it'd be too late for that."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bailey turned her face away from the man in the back seat who had slapped her, the Beast who had strangled Poli and hosed Jeni. Jammed into the floorboard area behind the driver, she struggled to grab hold of her runaway panic, tried to order her thinking, to make some kind of plan, figure out …
What was there to figure out?
Something. Something!
Her thoughts were water spiders on a still pond, flitting here and there so fast it was impossible to catch one long enough to think it.
Her feelings, though. What she felt was not some tangled jumble of ever-changing emotions. Just one, only one — abject terror.
But undergirding her terror was a deeper, more familiar emotion. Despair.
The despair of being utterly alone, vulnerable and totally helpless. She recognized that feeling. It was an old friend.
Bailey walks slowly around the empty house, going from one room to the next. She stands in the doorway of each one. Just stands. The only furniture in the house is what's absolutely necessary, the bare essentials. A bed, a dresser and a nightstand in the bedroom. A couch and two chairs in the living room, and a flat screen television that isn't hooked up yet. There are dishes stacked in neat piles on the kitchen counters. Plates, cups, saucers, glasses and silverware. There are basic cooking utensils, too — a pot, a frying pan, a set of muffin tins. A meager assortment. If she wanted to do anything more elaborate than make a sandwich and heat up a bowl of soup she would have to go out and purchase more utensils.
With what?
They'd talked to her about all of it when she was still in that safe house where she'd thrown up her breakfast after they told her about the murderous Sergei Mikhailov. That day, the man she had never seen before had explained to her how the Witness Protection Program worked. She hadn't heard a word he said, and then they'd tucked her into the back seat of a nondescript Honda for the road trip. The first of many.
At the end of the trip was this house.
Another man whose face she could barely recall had told her all over again what the first man had told her about Wit Sec. This time, she listened. She would be given a whole new identity, he said, with the whole paper trail of driver’s license and school records and social security card to back it up. He'd said the government would rent a place for her to stay and provide a vehicle for her to drive and would bank transfer into her account a monthly living allowance, though they had never specified how much that would be and she hadn't had the slightest interest, at the time, in finding out. He'd said they did not expect her to have to get a job to support herself, that she would not be isolated here in scenic Albuquerque for long enough to need employment. She would just be here for a short time, because soon — ah, yes, the mythical soon — they would capture Mikhailov, arrest him and his drunk son, Ivan, she would show up at the trial and testify, and then she could have her life back.
Could have her daughter back!!
But for now …
What furniture there was she had picked out of a catalogue. It had been delivered this afternoon. She didn't know why she'd had to select from a catalogue. She supposed she couldn't be trusted to go into a store and buy a bed or a lamp. Were they afraid she'd burst into tears and tell the clerk that she was being hunted by the madman who gunned down her husband in the street, the old man with a black eyepatch and a gray fedora?
The federal marshals here had been as dour as morticians. They were not the same ones who had driven her across the country. She had learned their names — Jeff and Danny — and a little about them. They had become people to her, not that she had felt particularly chatty as she sat in the back seat of the car, watching the hills and fields and trees streak past the window, packing one mile on top of another, getting farther and farther away from her world, her life — and from Bethany.
The marshals who had driven her had turned her over to the other two men at the house. They had left the rental car they had driven here, told her she would be driving that while she was here. Which wouldn't be for long, they assured her. They had told her goodbye, wished her good fortune, and then left to be taken to the airport to fly back to wherever it was they had come from, their job done. Back to their wives and children. Back to their lives.
The other marshals had looked around the place, making sure there were locks on all the windows, dead bolts on the doors. As if a locked window or door would stop Mikhailov if he ever figured out she was alive and came after her. The fact that there was only meager furniture and only the barest essentials of food and drink in t
he cabinets and refrigerator, didn't seem all that important to them. As soon as everything that had been ordered was delivered and set up in the house, they had given her the keys to the rental car in the driveway, a bank debit card with the pin number 12345 and two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills.
"Is there anything else you need?" one of them had asked.
Such an incredibly absurd and obtuse question. She just shook her head.
Then they had left. Since their departure, she has wandered from one room of the house to another, looking at what is now her home.
Eventually, she realizes that she has been aimlessly pacing for … for some amount of time, it doesn’t matter. It is late afternoon now and she should be hungry. She isn't. She needs to put the sheets, the brand new ones in a plastic package, on the bed, and the bedspread. She doesn't. She needs to begin putting things away, what little there is, the dishes in the cabinets, the linens — four towels, four washcloths, four hand towels — on the shelves in the bathroom.
She does none of those things.
She finds herself wandering again, room to room, in a daze that degenerates gradually into utter hopelessness. She sits down on the couch in the living room, looks at the picture-less walls, shades drawn on curtain-less windows, and discovers she is crying. What she feels is so tangled and confused and intense, she can do nothing but cry. She doesn't sob, though. Not the gut-wrenching sobs that wrecked her body like seizures in the days right after Aaron's murder.
She just cries softly, forlornly. This is her life now and it is more utterly miserable than any bad dream.
The only thing more powerful than her misery is her fear of the one-eyed man who killed her husband. If she let it, that fear would grow in her chest until it stole her breath, stopped her heart, took over her mind and annihilated the person who had been Aaron's wife and still was Bethany's mother.
She had to learn how to deal with raw terror or it would consume her. She began that day — as she sat crying on the plain couch in the nondescript living room, of the not-home where they'd parked her — teaching herself how to deal with fear.
As she listened to the hum of the tires on the highway, Bailey called on what she had figured out that day and learned in the hundreds of days since. Panic would destroy her.
"Boss, you want me to call Vinny?" asked the man in the front seat, the one who had held a gun on her and shoved her into the car. From her position, she could only see the side of his face illuminated in the occasional streetlight. His hair was white and the back of his head was as flat as a dinner plate.
"Tell him we're about fifteen minutes out," said the man in the back seat, the man the girls called the Beast, who was obviously the man in charge. His gravelly voice reminded Bailey of — an image formed in her mind: huge chains dragged across a metal floor, the deck of a ship. Then the image was gone.
Fifteen minutes from where? Where were they going?
When she grabbed hold of her thoughts and tried to concentrate, she didn't like the conclusions she reached. She'd left the kitchen to take Bundy out to potty — it couldn't possibly have been more than fifteen minutes ago. The men at the table had been trying to figure out the puzzle of images, had been connecting the letters and numbers she had given them to a road in Ohio. They appeared to be coming around to the conclusion that it was somewhere on that road that the girls in the van were being transported.
She didn't know where she was, but she definitely knew where she wasn't.
Ohio was on the other side of the lake from Shadow Rock and they had not crossed the lake. Wherever they were going, they were driving, and if that was the case, whatever forces Brice could muster to come looking for her would be looking in the wrong place.
The car swayed as it wound around tight corners and her ever-sensitive ears were popping. They were not on some flat road in Ohio. They were in the West Virginia mountains, going deeper and deeper, higher and higher.
She was so jammed down into the floorboard, her legs folded unnaturally under her, that her legs and feet had gone to sleep. But she didn't dare wiggle to get more comfortable. She didn't want to draw the attention of the man who'd slapped her. She tried to concentrate on calming her breathing, slowing the jackhammer rate of her heart. Panic was an enemy almost as dangerous as the man seated beside her.
Eventually, the car began to slow. Had it really been only fifteen minutes? It had seemed like hours to Bailey — time had elongated and stretched out. The car turned off the highway onto another road, an unpaved road. She remembered that — the bumpy road. They jostled along it for what seemed like another eternity. Her strained muscles were cramping, sending shocks of pain up into her thighs, but there was nothing she could do to relieve the pain. The bouncing made it worse.
Then the car ground to a stop. The driver rolled down his window and spoke to someone in a language she didn't recognize. It sounded like crackling flames. Then the man seated beside her grabbed her by the hair — she cried out in pain — and yanked her up onto the seat. The Beast got out of the car, came around to her side, opened the door and barked, "Get out."
She would have complied, would have done anything he told her to do but she had no voluntary control over the four feeling-less stumps that were her arms and legs. They'd gone numb. He reached for her again and she steeled herself for the pain of being yanked by the hair. But instead, he just grabbed her arm, dragged her out of the car and threw her to the ground where rocks dug into the skin of her hip and thigh.
What she had seen out the eyes of the girls … when they were taken from the van and dumped out on the ground, there were sharp rocks like these.
Feeling the tingling pain of blood flowing back into her cramped arms and legs, she lay on her side and looked around at what she could see without moving. She was afraid to move.
Out in the country.
Away from prying eyes.
Chainsaw!
For the first time in months, she tried to think of a way to dislodge the bullet in her brain and send it out to do its dirty work in the tissues around it. Was there any way to get the bullet to kill her before these monsters began to question her, to ask her questions for which she had no answers they would believe? And since she couldn't answer their questions, what lay ahead for her was an ugly painful death. But maybe there was some way to get Oscar to kill her first.
Chapter Forty
The men were speaking among themselves in a language Bailey didn't know — short blunt sentences, guttural sounds, and then silence. She thought she might have caught names, but she could have been mistaken. The gunman in the front seat with the flat head was Sanderson, Sandy. Besides "Boss," the others called the Beast Jacko.
It was dark except for the headlights of the vehicle and Bailey wasn't facing the front of the car and couldn't see what the headlights illuminated. She lay frozen where she was, fearing any move would draw unwanted attention. She could see only darkness around her, knew it was probably forest. Above, the sky hung in a black velvet drape sprinkled with stars as big and cold as chunks of ice.
Before long, she heard the vehicle, coming up the dirt road they had traveled, then saw the illumination from approaching headlights. A van pulled up next to the car. With the men's attention drawn to the van, Bailey risked a quick look around. In the splash of light from its headlights, she saw that the car was parked on the side of a wide spot in the dirt road where it terminated in a gate and a chain-link fence.
The spill of headlights also illuminated a sign and Bailey felt her heart fall out of her chest down into the pit of her stomach. The sign read "Last Hope Ollie Mine. Closed."
There were other signs around as well, on the fence and against the gate.
No Admittance. There was text under the large words but she couldn't read it.
No Trespassing. Smaller words warned that all violators would be prosecuted.
Risk of Explosion: Flammable Gas. Beneath, in smaller letters but large enough to read: No flames, no sparks.
Keep Out.
Danger: Poisonous Gas.
Bailey was not tied up and none of the men who'd been in the car were paying any attention to her. Should she try to slip away? Make a run for it? But the feeling was just beginning to return to her feet and arms and she probably couldn't have gotten to her feet unassisted, let alone run off into the darkness.
When the van pulled to a stop, two men got out of it. The van driver was a big, black man whose hair appeared, in this dim light at least, to be naturally red. He had the freckles to match.
Brice had freckles. He'd told her "Brice" in Gaelic meant "spotted."
She was never going to see him again.
The stab of pain that realization brought her made a statement about her feelings for him … that didn't mean anything at all anymore.
The man riding shotgun in the van, whose chinless, flat-nosed face was so ugly it was memorable, opened the passenger side door, sliding it along the side of the vehicle. She could hear the sound of crying as soon as he opened it.
"Shut them up, Hollywood," the man said, and Bailey heard what sounded like a slap from inside the back of the vehicle and there was instant silence. The man stepped out of the back of the van then, and she saw why they called him Hollywood. He was tall, blond and strikingly handsome. He was dragging two girls with him. Their hands were bound behind their backs and they were tied to each other, as well. Bailey didn't have to see to know that the plastic ties holding them were tight, digging into their skin.
Their feet were free, but their mouths were sealed with large gray strips of duct tape. Both were dressed in evening wear, like the "white gown" Poli had been wearing. The one with red hair had lost a shoe, tottered on one high heel. The other's brown hair stretched down her back in a single braid. It was hard to tell with the tape on their faces, but she had no doubt they were startlingly beautiful girls. These people specialized in beauty. She also had no doubt that they were young, teenagers, though you couldn't tell that either from looking at them.