by Jeff Gunhus
She braced for another blast and more pain, but it never came. She ducked behind the truck, breathing hard, tears streaming down her face from the effort. The run across the floor told her two things. First, that she could move better than she expected. And second, that Mike was the shooter’s real target. She wondered why.
“Show yourself or I take another pound of flesh from the good agent,” the voice said.
Allison thought about telling Mike it was a bluff, but it would give up her new position. She didn’t have to.
“Come out so you can shoot me in the leg?” Mike said. “No thanks.”
“That was just to get everyone’s attention.”
“You have it. Now what do you want?”
“That house where you started the fire. What did you find there?”
Allison froze, finally understanding the killer’s motive for having them there.
“What are you talking about? I went there to get clothes for Natalie. Spotted the fire and helped get people out.”
Allison crept out from the van and, hugging the outer wall, made her way around the edge of the warehouse. There was an old metal girder that lay on the floor, right where it had fallen from its old suspended position on the ceiling. This gave her a decent cover as she limped her way closer to the sound of the shooter’s voice. She hoped Sheriff Frank would be an effective backstop in case she failed, but the thought also pressured her to move quickly because once the sheriff showed up, the game was over. Even if the sheriff was able to catch the killer, she doubted Natalie would still be alive. No, it was up to her.
“See, I have a tough time believing that,” said the voice. “Here’s what I think happened. You went to go look for young Natalie’s computer, found it, then torched the place because you didn’t have time to search for any other drives she might have copied it to. Am I right?”
The monologue gave Allison a good position on the man. A second floor balcony that overlooked the factory floor. She assumed the two dark rectangles in the wall beneath it were doors that went into management rooms in the back. That was where he must be keeping Natalie.
“Let’s say we both have something the other wants,” Mike said. “Now what?”
Allison stopped. Because of the sudden silence and not wanting to give away her position, and because she just caught what Mike had said. It had to be a bluff, but a dangerous one.
“Come out where I can see you and we’ll talk about it,” the voice said.
Allison crept forward.
“You might miscalculate and think I have the girl’s laptop stashed somewhere that no one will find it if you kill me. That wouldn’t help either of us,” Mike said.
The killer fell silent.
Suddenly, there was a zing from the silenced rifle. Allison jerked her head in the general direction of Mike’s voice, afraid she’d hear a thud as his body hit the floor. Instead she saw a spark where the bullet hit metal and heard it ricochet off into the darkness.
“That was just a warning shot,” said the voice. “I could have already taken you out if I wanted. Just like I can take out Agent McNeil the second she crawls out from her little container.”
Allison felt a twist of excitement in her chest. The shooter thought she was still in the container. She’d managed to get the advantage of surprise back on her side. If Mike could just keep him talking, she might be able to work behind the killer and get a shot on him. She crouched low and waited, knowing it was more important than ever not to make a sound. She had to time her moves to whenever the two of them were talking. As she waited, she moved her head from side-to-side, peering through the tangle of metal ahead of her from the fallen down trusses. There it was. A thin line of light outlining a door down a hallway that led off the main floor. Had to be Natalie.
“What do you want to do here?” Mike called out. “Obviously, we’re not going to trust each other.”
Allison moved toward the hallway. To get there she had to pass immediately under the balcony. It was a metal grid with small holes, not big enough for a bullet to pass through. She couldn’t take a shot at him, but she’d also be protected if he spotted her.
She reminded herself that she still didn’t know for sure if the voice was the only person she was up against. As far as she knew, there could be a dozen snipers positioned throughout the building. But given that no one had spotted her movement made her hopeful that the man on the balcony was working alone.
“Do you have the laptop?”
“Yes,” Mike said. “It’s somewhere safe. I’ve already told an associate of mine where to find it if something happens to me.”
Allison felt her stomach drop as she heard the words. If he was still bluffing, he was a convincing liar. She found herself wondering if maybe he did have the laptop after all.
“Not sure if I believe that, but we’ll go with it for now.”
“You mean you can’t afford to be wrong.”
“I have the backup hard drive,” the voice said. “But my employer hired me to get every copy.”
My employer.
The words struck Allison like ice water. It meant that there was someone else pulling the strings and that it extended beyond the man on the platform. Clarence Mason was the first name that came to her mind. She hated that it did, but she couldn’t help it. He’d had access to her location the entire way via the phone he’d given her. He’d tried to call her off the hunt. Now she wondered if that had been to give another operative a freer hand.
She shook the thought away. Intellectually she knew it was likely confirmation bias in overdrive. Her doubts about Mason had led her to stack up the evidence to support her theory, whether it was warranted or not. All that mattered now was that she knew there was someone else involved. Someone else she had to find and take down before Tracy was truly avenged.
“If you promised you’d get every copy, then you have a problem, don’t you?” Mike said.
A flash of light danced across the upper windows of the old warehouse and the sounds of car engines wafted over the stale air. Allison saw the glow of a screen on the landing above her as the killer activated a phone. She couldn’t see it, but she guessed it was a wireless camera set up outside.
“Now we all have a problem,” the man said.
The rifle unloaded above Allison, rapid shots hammering into metal. She didn’t need to look back to know that the container where the killer thought she was still hiding was taking a beating. The killer was about to make a run for it, so he no longer had a use for her as a bargaining chip with Mike. She realized that if she hadn’t moved, she’d be dead.
Allison used the noise as cover to sprint down the hallway, putting as much weight on her injured leg as she could. She reached the door and flung it open. The bright light turned out to be two powerful camping lanterns. Allison squinted, her eyes adjusting from the darkness of the warehouse. It was a small office filled mostly with trash, graffiti on the walls, a single desk in the center of the room. Allison walked up to the desk, her chest heaving as dread filled her.
There, lined up in a neat row, were the bloody tips of four carefully painted toes.
Other than that, there was no sign of Natalie.
43
Natalie contorted her body in the front passenger seat, doing everything possible to pry open the car door. But it was no use. Her arms were pinned behind her back. A thick rope tied her directly to the seat, the knot cinching tighter each time she struggled, digging into her ribs and making it hard to breathe. The zip ties binding her wrists and ankles cut into her skin until she bled. But even as she whimpered from the pain, she realized the slick blood pouring from the lacerations on her wrists might be her only hope.
The agony radiating up from her feet tried to send her off track, throbbing and bringing tears to her eyes. But she knew she couldn’t stop. She’d fought the man the entire way from the building to the car. She’d fought him as he forced her into the front passenger seat and tied her up there. She’d fought him b
ecause she had no doubt in her mind that the man was going to kill her.
So the pain didn’t mean anything.
In fact, she welcomed it.
It meant she was still alive.
She screamed in frustration as she yanked as hard as she could on her bindings, feeling a warm gush on her skin as blood spilled from the wound. But she didn’t think of it as blood. It was just lubrication. And it was what she needed to get her the hell out of there.
She worked her wrist back-and-forth, trying to fold her fingers together to make them as small as possible.
There was some give around her right wrist, the zip tie sliding up higher than before. She felt a surge of hope and struggled harder against it.
It was agonizingly slow but, bit-by-bit, she worked it up her hand, sliding over the blood now pouring from her wrist. Up to the widest span of her hand between the knuckles of her index and little fingers.
Then it slipped over and her hands were free.
The second it happened, she heard an eruption of gunfire from the warehouse behind the car.
She pulled on the rope tied around her chest with her shaking hands. She wasn’t free yet, but for the first time since the madness started, she allowed herself a glimmer of hope that she might survive.
44
Allison spotted a door at the back of the room. There was blood on the floor. She checked behind her, expecting the killer to come barging through the door at any second, guns blazing. Instead, she heard feet banging on the ceiling above her and then a door slamming.
She imagined there must be a back staircase on the outside of the building. If she could time it right, then she might be able to get the drop on the killer as he ran.
She looked out the small window in the back door. After the bright light inside the room, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the moonlit night. It was better than the inside of the warehouse, but not by much thanks to a thin veil of clouds that diffused the light.
There was a car parked in the back. The massive hole of the rock quarry paralleled the back of the building and curved around the right side. But to the left were several dirt roads that disappeared into the thick brush around the property. She guessed Natalie was either in the car or already at the bottom of the quarry. She heard footsteps and craned her neck to see an old staircase above her. A shadow passed over her. The killer.
Allison turned the door handle, wincing with each squeak. Then, sensing the timing was right, she tugged hard to open it.
But it held firm.
Panic gripped her. She imagined for a second having to watch the killer climb into his car and simply drive away, with her stuck behind a door, unable to do anything about it.
She yanked harder on the door, all worry of making noise gone. It budged a little as the rusted hinges made a grating sound. She jerked on the handle, gaining an inch or two, enough to create a small crack to the outside. A quick search of the floor and she spotted a metal rod, a piece of an old shelving unit. She stuck it into the crack and pried the door back. Finally, the hinges gave way and the door swung open enough for her to get through.
She went out low, gun raised, just in case the door had made too much noise and tipped the killer off that she was coming. But a quick scan of her surroundings showed the man was nearly to the car, his back toward her. She took a knee, lifted her left hand to balance her right and trained her gun on him. From this position, with time to aim, even in the low light, Allison knew she was lethal.
All she had to do was pull the trigger and the night was over.
Tracy would be avenged.
Natalie, if she were still alive, could be saved.
Mike would escape uninjured.
She would acquire the hard drive of videos for Mason and get back to CID.
All it took was for her to pull the trigger and shoot a fleeing man in the back.
God, she wanted to. Every fiber of her being told her to take the shot. To end it right there. To be judge and jury and mete out the sentence she knew the judicial system would take forever to dispense. Vengeance, isn’t that what she said she wanted more than anything? More than justice? And here it was, ready for her to take with a single shot.
Her finger added pressure to the trigger, but not quite enough. She was close, but not quite ready to go that far. Not yet. She knew that once she did, she’d lose something and never get it back.
“Freeze!” she yelled. “Stop right there!”
The shadow stopped, head cocked to one side.
Allison still wanted to end it. Part of her hoped the man spun around, gun in hand, shooting wildly in her direction.
But he didn’t. Maybe he sensed that she wanted him to make a move. Wanted him to run after she’d told him to stop.
“Drop the weapon. Hands where I can see them,” Allison barked. “Don’t turn around before I tell you to.”
She shuffled to her right and retook a knee, now lined up behind one of the metal supports for the staircase above her.
The man threw a rifle to his side and put his arms out.
“On your knees,” Allison yelled.
The man didn’t comply.
“I said on your knees.”
She fired a shot at the ground to the man’s side. The ground spit up dirt and gravel to tell the man how close the shot was.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with here,” the man said, slowly going to his knees. “You’re in way over your head.”
“Doesn’t look like you’re doing so well yourself,” Allison said.
The man laughed. “You don’t even know what’s really going on here, do you?”
Allison felt her skin prickle. “Why don’t you fill me in? Who hired you? Was it Mason?”
The man barked out a laugh. He looked over his shoulder and, even in the pale moonlight, Allison could see the scorn on his face.
“To think someone like you would be the one who finally—”
But he never finished the sentence.
A shadow ran from behind the car, wielding a piece of rebar, and took a homerun swing at the man’s head.
Natalie.
Allison felt a pang of excitement that she was still alive, followed quickly by the dread that she was about to screw things up in a big way.
The man got his hands up at the last second and his forearms took most of the blow. Natalie reared back, grunting like an animal, and swung again and again.
Allison remembered the severed toes she’d seen. And the pain in the girl’s eyes when she’d talked about her abuse as a child. All that pain and all that anger from being a victim was on display as she attacked her torturer.
But Allison knew it wasn’t going to end well.
“Natalie! Move away from him! I have him covered!” Allison yelled.
But Natalie was lost to the world. She just swung harder as if she could break through the man’s forearms to reach his head if she only mustered enough power.
In one of her backswings, the man swung his leg out and kicked her in the side of the knee. The rebar went flying and Natalie fell to the ground.
“Oh shit,” Allison said, looking for a clean shot.
Natalie and the man rolled on the ground for a few agonizing seconds, Allison waiting for a moment of separation. It never came.
Instead, the man slowly stood up, Natalie positioned in front of him, a handgun jammed painfully under her jaw.
“OK, Agent McNeil,” the man said. “Now it’s time for you to put your gun down.”
45
Allison froze. She flashed back to the scene in the forest with Sam Kraw. While the situation seemed nearly identical, there was one major difference. Kraw was a twisted psychopath who liked to kill little kids. A coward that hid in shadows. The man in front of her now was a trained killer, or at least handled himself as one. The fact that he had the gun lodged under Natalie’s jaw instead of at her temple meant that even if a hidden sniper were to take him out, the man’s involuntary reflex would l
ikely pull the trigger and result in Natalie’s head being blown off.
“I’m right behind you,” came a whispered voice from the doorway behind her. “He hasn’t seen me yet.”
Mike.
She resisted the temptation to turn around or even flick her head in the direction of his voice. She didn’t want anything to tip off the killer that the advantage had changed once again.
“Try to draw him away from Natalie,” Mike whispered. “Get me a clean shot.”
“All right, let’s take it easy,” Allison called out to the man holding Natalie, but really talking to Mike. “Let’s go slow, here. Take me instead of the girl, all right? I’m a more valuable hostage.”
“Deal. Now come on out.”
Allison didn’t believe it for a second; the man knew he was running out of time. He’d seen the arrival of the police in front of the building. Sure, they were just locals, but locals carried guns too.
Allison stood, keeping her weapon trained on the man’s head.
Natalie struggled in his arms and he snarled at her to make her be still.
“The place is surrounded,” Allison said. “I’ve got federal, state and local on site. Choppers en route, will be here any minute. Let’s just end this nice and easy.”
The man shook his head. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar? Throw the gun.”
Allison took a deep breath. If she didn’t, she considered the man might decide to just shoot it out with her and then make his escape. With Natalie as a full-body shield, he would probably do all right. But he was looking for a higher percentage shot.
“Throw down your gun or I’ll shoot her in the leg,” the man said. “You know what that feels like.”
Allison prayed that Mike was as good a shot as he said.
She tossed her gun and raised her hands.
“Now let her go,” she said.
The man grinned. “Women. They can always be counted on to make the wrong decision.”
He lowered the gun and shot Natalie in the leg. She screamed and fell to the ground. He turned his gun back to Allison and leveled it at her.