Cornered

by Turner, Linda; Weaver, Ingrid; Miller, Julie

  See? She wasn’t nuts, she decided, backing further into the sheltering pile of pallets. Her problem-solving and self-preservation skills were both still functioning. Dr. Goldstein would be proud of her. She pulled the hood of her jacket closed at her throat and twisted to look behind her, trying to assess the best route to take to get out of there without being seen.

  And because she was looking away, she never saw the blow coming. Pain exploded across the back of her skull. Mercifully, she was out cold before her face hit the puddle.

  Chapter 2

  She was going to barf. The realization dragged Erika back to consciousness. She could feel the bile rise, burning the back of her throat. Next, she registered the pain. It throbbed psychedelic patterns through her head, like one of the pressure headaches she got when the weather changed. She clenched her jaw and tried to lift her hands to make sure her head was still the same size.

  Only, she couldn’t lift her hands. They were stuck together in front of her, with her arms pinned to her sides. She couldn’t move her jaw, either. She couldn’t even open her mouth.

  Panic surged through her. Was she paralyzed? Was she dead?

  No, she couldn’t be dead. She didn’t remember any tunnel with a white light at the end. No floating around the ceiling while looking down at her body, either. And for a headache this bad, her heart had to be pumping and her nerves working overtime.

  Okay. Great. Dead wasn’t an option, so what about paralyzed? She experimentally tried to move her hand again and felt something pull across the skin of her wrists. She tried puffing out her cheeks and felt the same stretching sensation. Tape. Someone had taped her mouth and her wrists. Cautiously, she tried flexing other body parts, but except for her arms, she felt no further resistance, so she had to conclude the rest of her was unfettered. She was lying on her side on a hard, cold surface that smelled like rust.

  Her brain moved sluggishly into gear, like a film running backward in slow motion. She remembered the pain in her skull, the army trucks in the warehouse, the rain, Sloan.

  No, not Sloan. He was dead, she wasn’t. Even if he really had tried coming to visit her from the Other Side, no way was she going to join him.

  Well, that was easy. After a year of skirting around the issue, first with denial, then with alcohol, Erika was surprised by how firmly that point had been settled, but there it was.

  Yes, she loved Sloan, loved him so much it hurt. His absence was a gaping hole in her life, but she wasn’t ready to follow him. She was alive and planned to stay that way.

  Of course, this was a fine time for a realization like that. Why couldn’t she have figured that out during one of her therapy sessions? Or at the very least, before she’d left her car?

  But she’d never been that great with timing, had she? Take that last fight with Sloan. Terrific moment to fling words at him such as, It’s over, and I never want to see you again. He’d known she hadn’t meant it, hadn’t he? Oh, please. She hoped he’d known.

  Their relationship had been intense—they’d been opposites, two halves of one whole. He’d been passion and impulse, she’d been practicality and logic. The sparks they had struck together had powered her days and lit up her nights. How could she have driven him away?

  Her eyes tingled as they began to fill. She inhaled fast and hard through her nose. She couldn’t cry now. With tape over her mouth, if her nose plugged, she’d suffocate. The same thing would happen if she threw up. Regrets were a luxury she could no longer afford. In order to live, her first priority was controlling the tears and the nausea.

  So she thought about chocolate. Instead of the bitter tang of guilt or the acid taste of bile, she imagined the smooth slide of a melted Godiva, with a hint of almonds coating her tongue. Thick, sensuous indulgence glazing the roof of her mouth. She drew on the memory of the taste, letting the phantom pleasure fill her throat and her nose until her tears receded and her stomach calmed.

  Then a millimeter at a time, she cracked open her eyelids.

  Everything was a hazy gray blur, except for a pale strip at the bottom of her vision. She must be blindfolded. Closing one eye at a time, she could make out the contour of her nose. Looking past the curve of her cheeks, she glimpsed gray duct tape wrapping her wrists. More gray tape looped around her jacket, pinning her arms to her sides above her elbows. Beyond that she saw nothing but a metal floor and a swirl of moss-green wool where the fabric of her skirt pooled like a blanket around her legs.

  In a way, the blindfold was a good sign. If they had taken the trouble to blindfold her, that meant they assumed she would regain consciousness and they didn’t want her to identify them later. Which meant they also assumed there would be a “later.”

  So who were “they?”

  That was a no-brainer, which was fortunate, since her brain was still throbbing and not yet functioning at full steam. Someone from that storage shed must have spotted her. Guys who patrolled the docks after midnight in a storm wouldn’t have taken kindly to anyone snapping pictures.

  So where had they brought her?

  The light had a dim, yellow tinge, the kind that came from a low-wattage bare bulb overhead. She strained to listen for clues to her surroundings, but she couldn’t hear warehouse or street sounds. No voices, no rustle of movement or hum of a forklift, only a deep, rumbling vibration that transmitted through the rusty-smelling surface she was lying on. She sniffed. The air was damp and tinged with a hint of mildew, likely from the rag that covered her eyes. Beneath that, she caught the fishy, oily scent of the river…

  She swallowed fast, suddenly recognizing the source of her nausea. Oh, hell. She was on a boat.

  There was a scrape of metal and a loud creak. A puff of cool air blew past her face as heavy footsteps thudded along the floor. “See if she’s awake yet,” someone said.

  For a split second, Erika thought about playing possum, but one glimpse of the large leather work boots that moved into the narrow slit of vision below her blindfold made her reconsider. She didn’t want to find out precisely how these people would determine whether or not she was awake. She lifted her head and made an interrogatory grunt.

  The toe of one of the boots connected hard with her shin anyway. “Yeah, Leavish. She’s awake.”

  Erika rolled to her knees and ducked her head between her shoulders, curling her body into a defensive ball. With her wrists and arms immobilized, it was the only way she could protect her face and chest.

  “Quit fooling around, Dick,” the first voice said. “Wates wants to talk to her.”

  “Get up, woman.” The man who had kicked her grabbed her by one arm and hauled her upright.

  Erika fought to suppress her moan. For a second she thought her arm was about to be wrenched from the socket, but she managed to get her feet underneath her and the pain eased. It was just as well that her mouth was duct-taped. That prevented her from telling this Dick what she thought about men who got off on abusing defenseless women.

  Then again, by taping her mouth they had neutralized her best defense. She might not have that firm a grip on reality sometimes, but she harbored no illusions that she’d be able to win a physical confrontation with two adult males as long as her arms were bound and her eyes were covered. Her only hope right now was to talk her way out of this.

  They led her out of the metal room into a metal corridor. Although the blindfold was disorienting, being upright eased her headache. She tried to absorb as much of her surroundings as she could, counting the number of steps they took, keeping track of direction changes, listening for more voices or background noises. She felt a spurt of hope when she heard the distant bleat of a siren.

  If she could hear a siren, they couldn’t be at sea. Otherwise, she likely wouldn’t have been able to control her nausea. The boat was a large one, which was another reason the nausea wasn’t as severe as it might have been. There was a good possibility they were on the freighter that she’d noticed moored across from the shed with the trucks.

 
; They went up a steep staircase. Erika had to concentrate hard to maintain her balance as her heels kept catching in the metal grating that formed the steps. She thought about the damage those heels could do if she kicked backward, especially when Dick crudely moved his hand to her buttocks and gave her a squeezing grope to keep her climbing, but this wasn’t the time to attempt an escape. She likely wouldn’t get far if she did.

  Finally, her footing leveled out and she could feel fresh air on her face—they must be on the boat’s deck. There was a film of water on the deck plating. The rain had been replaced by a thick mist that curled around her boots. It was still dark. That, plus the fact her skirt hadn’t dried out completely, led her to believe she couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few hours. Another turn, a second, shorter staircase, a narrow corridor and she was pushed through a doorway. White light seeped through the fabric of her blindfold. This room evidently rated more than a few bare bulbs.

  The first man, Leavish, announced their arrival. “Here she is, Mr. Wates.”

  “Take her to the table.”

  Dick squeezed her upper arm and dragged her a few steps into the room. “Sit,” he ordered, shoving her sideways into what felt like a straight-backed wooden chair.

  “Remove the tape from her mouth.”

  Erika tensed her lips and braced herself as Dick dug a fingernail under one edge of the tape and gave it a yank. Stars burst across her vision. She was grateful she was already sitting down.

  Chair legs scraped across the floor in front of her. Wood creaked. “All right, who sent you?”

  She turned her head toward the voice of the man she deduced was Wates. He spoke with the fast, flattened-vowel accent of a Bronx native. At a guess, she would put him in his mid-fifties, but if the wear on his voice had come from cigarettes and not age, he could be in his late thirties or forties. He did seem to be the one in charge, so the more information she could glean about him, the better. She coughed, feigning more discomfort than she felt. “Let me go,” she croaked. “I haven’t done anything to you. Why—”

  “Shoulda let me throw her in the river when I found her,” Dick muttered. “This is a waste of time.”

  Wates snapped his fingers. “That’s enough, Richard. Go back to the hold and tell Tanner she’s awake. I’ll send word if I need you again.”

  Dick gave her chair a parting shove before his footsteps gritted across the floor and into the corridor.

  The men she had glimpsed in the warehouse might not have looked like military, Erika thought, but this Wates character acted as if he were accustomed to being in command.

  “All right, Miss Balough,” Wates said. “Tell me who you’re working for.”

  They knew her name. That threw her for an instant before she remembered she’d had her bag with her. They would have seen her driver’s permit as well as her P.I. license. She moistened her lips and tasted the gummy residue from the tape. Drawing her lower lip between her teeth, she gnawed at the gum, stalling for time as she tried to figure out the best approach to use.

  Wates wanted to know who had sent her. He had to be worried that someone else was aware of whatever action he had going with those army trucks. That explained the blindfold and the duct tape. It was probably why Dick hadn’t been allowed to throw her into the river.

  If she told the truth, Wates would have no reason to keep her alive.

  His knuckles rapped hard on the table between them, startling her into jerking backward. “Miss Balough, I’m waiting. Who hired you to take those pictures?”

  Her camera had been in the bag, too. Wates must have checked through the digital files and had seen the images she had captured of the trucks. She couldn’t plead ignorance. Her only choice was to lie. It was just a matter of deciding which lie would keep her alive the longest.

  “You have five seconds, Miss Balough,” Wates said. “Then I’ll give you back to Richard. Five. Four—”

  His countdown was cut off by a gurgling scream from somewhere beyond the door. It was followed by a thud.

  The sound made the hair on the back of Erika’s arms rise. The way it had echoed was like something out of a slasher movie. Voices outside swirled in confusion. Wates’s chair scraped. He stood and walked toward the entrance of the room. “Leavish,” Wates said. “Get me a report.”

  “Right away, Mr. Wates.”

  Erika tipped her head back, trying to get a glimpse of what was happening from beneath her blindfold but all she could see was the edge of a wooden table in front of her and a pair of polished shoes. Expensive-looking leather shoes the red-brown color that was called oxblood. Above them she saw the tailored hems of trousers the color of wet sand.

  There were more raised voices and the sound of running feet. Erika angled her chin higher to increase her range of vision but at the movement, her chair teetered backward. She jerked herself forward, bringing the front chair legs down to the floor. A minute later, Leavish returned. “Dick fell over the railing, Mr. Wates.”

  “How?”

  “Nobody saw. This fog is too thick.”

  “Damn idiot. He probably slipped. How badly is he hurt?”

  “He split open his head on a hatch cover. He’s dead.”

  Wates muttered an oath. “That’s going to leave Floyd short on the loading detail.”

  “He said we’re eighty percent done.”

  “Good. We have to keep on schedule. We’ll dispose of Dick once we’re at sea. And where’s Tanner?”

  “I heard he was on his way.”

  Dick was dead? Erika felt a spurt of relief that he wouldn’t have the chance to abuse her again. Strange that he could fall over a railing, though, no matter how thick the fog was. And that scream had been so eerie.

  So was the lack of compassion displayed by Wates. If he had this little regard for an accomplice, he would have no mercy for her.

  She didn’t have time to dwell on it further. Wates and his oxblood shoes were returning from the doorway.

  “All right, Miss Balough.” Wates paused beside her chair. “Time’s up. Who sent you?”

  She heard a metallic click—a safety sliding off? Her guess was confirmed when she felt the cold tip of a gun barrel press into the skin beneath her ear.

  Her mind blanked. Simply erased. Another example of her knack for excellent timing. Now that she’d decided unequivocally that she wanted to live, the whole major breakthrough in her mourning could be moot. One twitch of this man’s trigger finger could send a bullet into her neck.

  It would be quicker than drinking herself to death, or playing DWI roulette, or escaping into a fantasy world. It would be faster than falling off a sloop and drowning in Long Island Sound like…

  Sloan.

  It had happened one year ago tonight. It had been raining then, too. The water would have been cold enough to numb flesh and cramp muscles within minutes. Had he struggled for long? Had he suffered?

  Had he called out her name the way she’d awakened alone in her bed that night and whispered his?

  Sloan!

  “Who?” Wates slid the gun muzzle around her neck to push into the underside of her chin. “Speak up.”

  She could see the black gleam of the barrel beneath the edge of her blindfold. It was an older model Heckler & Koch military pistol, likely a 9 mm. There would be no second chances with this one.

  “Who’s Sloan, Miss Balough?”

  Good God, had she spoken aloud? Erika tipped her head away from the gun. It was a futile gesture, and it made her chair wobble again, but it relieved the pressure enough to allow her to swallow. “Sloan,” she said. “Detective Sloan Morrisey. He’s with the NYPD and he knows all about your operation.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Am I? How else would I have known you were expecting that shipment tonight?”

  “The cops don’t work with P.I.s.”

  “Sloan does. He’s my fiancé.”

  “This is bull.”

  She couldn’t move her hands against
the tape so she wiggled her fingers. “Didn’t you notice the ring?”

  Wates seized her left hand. She could see his fingers were short and blunt-tipped. His touch was rough, the skin of his palm dry and thick like that of someone accustomed to manual labor, but the sleeves of the cashmere sweater she glimpsed looked soft as silk.

  He twisted her wrist as far as the duct tape allowed, then dropped her hand and returned the gun to the side of her neck. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  Oh damn, she could feel tears again. No, the diamond engagement ring didn’t prove anything. Those were more words she’d flung at Sloan during their final weeks together. He’d wanted her to wear the ring, but she’d found one excuse after another not to. It caught on her clothes. It drew too much attention when she was playing out a cover. It was an outdated, chauvinistic symbol of male ownership.

  Sloan had laughed at that last excuse. Then he had kissed her senseless and told her she’d had it backward, that she was the one who owned him, body and soul. He would be hers forever.

  Forever, Erika. I swear it.

  “You’re lying,” Wates said. “No cop would bring his girlfriend into an investigation.”

  “No? That would depend on the cop, the girlfriend and the investigation.” She had nothing to lose, so she decided to try a gambit. “Police protocol isn’t as strict as the military protocol you would have learned in the service, Mr. Wates.”

  Wates was standing close enough for her to hear the soft hiss of his breath. She caught a whiff of his deodorant, a pungent, musky scent that reminded her of the taste of the duct tape.

  If he was sweating, her stab in the dark about the military must have found its target. She expanded on the bluff. “You didn’t think the military had forgotten you after you left, did you, Mr. Wates? The authorities have been cooperating to track your activities.”