by T. R. Ragan
He stood far enough away that Beast couldn’t grab his gun without taking a bullet to the gut. Her attacker was tall and slender, his dark hair grungy. Other than the striking blue eyes, he looked nothing like the picture she’d found on the Internet.
“Both of you,” he said, his voice gruff. “Put your hands above your head where I can see them.”
Faith looked to the floor, where Rage had been minutes ago. She was gone, disappeared under the bed no doubt.
“Now!”
Beast raised his arms above his head, his fingers clasped. She noticed the hardening of Beast’s jaw and the tightening of his shoulders. If Beast found the opportunity, he’d take the guy down at the first chance he got.
Faith raised her arms, too.
“Come on,” Silos said. “Get a move on!”
Faith followed Beast out the door and down the narrow hallway. They walked toward the front of the house.
Silos jabbed the barrel of his gun into her back, sending a sharp pain through her body. Faith tried to think of a way out. She didn’t panic until she saw Little Vinnie on the couch. He looked dazed but alive. Blood trickled down his forehead and dripped off the tip of his nose. Silos must have caught him off guard.
She turned, ready to go to Little Vinnie, but Silos grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the kitchen. She looked over her shoulder. Her gaze went from Little Vinnie to the lamp on the side table. If she could break free from Silos and grab hold of the lamp, she could swing the thick base and knock Silos over the head.
“Outside!” Silos said before she made her move. He pushed her toward Beast and gestured for them to head for the back door. Why would he want them outside unless he planned to shoot them and take care of the old man later? There was no way she was going to simply follow orders. Her heart raced as she looked around the room. Dirty utensils were stacked near the sink. A cast-iron frying pan sat on the stove.
Her thoughts spun out of control.
She needed to do something now. If she went for the pan, she’d have to act fast. She thought of Hudson. If she lunged for the stove, one of them would get shot. She’d just gotten her son back. She couldn’t risk leaving him now. Frustration made it difficult to think clearly.
Beast reached for the doorknob leading outside, his movements slow and deliberate.
“Drop your gun!” Rage’s voice boomed from behind them.
Silos pivoted, gun aimed, ready to fire.
Beast grabbed Faith, yanking her close to his chest before he dropped to the floor, bringing her with him.
A shot rang out.
Silos’s body jerked.
Faith watched him take awkward backward steps as he tried to find his balance. He seemed to defy gravity as he fought through whatever pain he must be feeling as blood seeped through his shirt. Silos glanced her way. His forehead was covered with a light sheen, eyes wide as if he was just now realizing this might be the end.
It was no use. He was losing control. His fingers went limp; the gun dropped to the floor.
Rage lunged for it.
Silos toppled over, knocking dishes and utensils from the kitchen table on his way down. A knife clattered across the floor.
Shock swept through Faith as she watched him fall. He couldn’t die. She had questions. He had answers.
Mark Silos was on his back now. Face up. Eyes wide-open.
He’d taken a clean shot through the neck. Faith scrambled across the floor to get to him. Beast grabbed her ankle to try to stop her, but she kicked his hand away and crawled under the kitchen table toward Silos, pushing a spindly wood chair out of her way.
On her knees and hands, she hovered over Silos and stared him down. Blood oozed from the side of his mouth. “Where is she?” Faith asked. “Where’s my daughter?”
His eyes found hers. “McMann?” he asked in a gravelly voice before coughing up more blood.
Faith grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and shook him. “Where’s Lara? Where’s my daughter?” she cried.
He said nothing.
She put a hard fist into his shoulder. “Talk to me.”
The silence was deafening. He needed to talk. Instead she watched his eyelids close as he said, “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. You killed my husband and took my kids! Where is she?”
“Don’t know . . . nobody knows,” he said, the life fading from his body and voice.
His head lolled to the left, and his body went limp.
Nobody knows. What did that mean? “Don’t you dare die!” She placed both hands, one on top of the other, over the middle of his chest and began pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing, over and over again, willing him to come back to life. “You son of a bitch. Tell me where she is. What did you do with Lara?”
She felt a hand rest on her shoulder.
Silos was dead.
Faith looked at Beast. “Where’s Lara?” she asked. “Where is she?”
Beast opened his mouth as if to say something, but no words came forth.
What did Silos mean when he said nobody knew? Had Lara been shipped off somewhere? Had Lara escaped? Where could she be?
Faith’s despair was crippling, her grief eclipsed only by her anger as she pushed herself to her feet. Her chest rose and fell. She would not stop looking for her daughter. Not now. Not ever. This was only the beginning.
FOUR
The next morning, after getting a few hours of sleep, Faith, her dad, and Hudson drove to the FBI headquarters in Sacramento. At the long, rectangular conference table, Faith sat to her son’s right, while her father sat to his left. Across from them were three FBI agents, all in suits, all asking questions. “How are you feeling?” “What have you been doing since you’ve been back?” “Did you recognize the men who took you and your sister?”
They had been trapped in the stuffy room for thirty minutes already, and Faith grew impatient. She wanted to take Hudson home.
Hudson, on the other hand, didn’t seem afraid or annoyed or bothered in any way. If anything, he seemed normal. Like a perfectly average boy who had never been whisked from his home and enslaved by drug traffickers only to escape and end up lost in the Mendocino forest in the dead of winter.
“In the beginning,” Hudson said in response to the agent’s question about the men who had attacked his family, “after the men made me and my sister get into the back of my dad’s car, I was scared. I remember my body shaking. I couldn’t move.”
Agent Burnett, a tall, dark-haired woman Faith had met a few times before, sat directly across from Hudson. Her face softened. “Did the men who took you and your sister talk to one another? Did you ever hear any names mentioned?”
“Only one.”
Faith looked at her son and found herself holding her breath, as they all were.
“Patrick,” he said.
“Does Patrick have a last name?”
Hudson shook his head. “Just Patrick. One of the men seemed worried about the man named Patrick getting mad about something. That’s all I remember.”
Patrick. This wasn’t the first time Faith had heard the name. Cecelia, the woman from the hotel in San Francisco, had told Faith she worked for a man named Patrick. No last name. Just Patrick. Faith never told the FBI or Detective Yuhasz about that night in San Francisco. She’d killed a man in self-defense. Even if she could tell them the truth, it wouldn’t do them any good. Cecelia was dead.
“That’s very helpful,” Agent Burnett told her son. “If you remember anything else, you let us know, OK?”
He nodded.
“You were scared, weren’t you?”
He nodded again.
“It’s OK to be frightened. It happens to all of us.”
“Later I wasn’t scared because I started to pretend everything that was happening was just a video game.”
“Can you explain what you mean by that, Hudson?”
He perked up a bit. “No matter what game I play on Xbox,” he said, “there’s usually a harder
level coming up. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never beat the level I’m on, but if I stick with it long enough, there’s always a way to get past the obstacles and move on.” He stared at his fingers as he made a steeple. “That’s what I did after I was thrown into a metal box with those other boys, and when I was taken to the mountains, and again after me and Joey got lost in the woods.”
Faith watched her son with growing concern. He definitely seemed to be holding in his emotions, keeping the ugly things he’d seen bottled up inside.
“If you don’t give up,” Hudson continued, his focus directed at Agent Burnett, “if you keep on trying, you’ll figure out what you need to do next.”
“That makes sense,” Agent Burnett told him. “You’re a very smart boy.”
He was smart, Faith thought. And clever and brave and all the other things people had been telling him for the past two days. Faith stared at Hudson, mesmerized by his small, upturned nose, long lashes, and wispy brown hair that had grown nearly two inches past his ears. There had been too much going on to worry about his hair. Everything felt so new—watching him and having him near.
Hudson had answered all their questions about the day their family was attacked. How he and Lara were thrown into the back of his dad’s SUV and told to keep their mouths shut or they would be killed. After about an hour into their drive, he said the car stopped.
“Is that when you were separated from Lara?”
He nodded and looked at the table. “She kicked and screamed. I wanted to help her, but there were too many of them. I couldn’t fight them. I didn’t want them to take my sister away.”
“Do you have any idea at all where you were or where she was being taken?”
He shook his head.
“Where were you taken next?” Agent Burnett asked.
“I fell asleep. At the end of the day, after they took me from my dad’s car to another car, I was thrown into a metal box with other boys.”
Agent Burnett and Agent Jensen quickly concluded the metal box was a shipping container. Unfortunately, there were many places in the area where shipping containers were stored.
Hudson went on to tell them about the other boys and how some of them said they had been enslaved for years. Many of the boys were bullies, worse than their captors.
“Do you remember what happened when you were released from the shipping container?”
He shrugged. “Sort of.”
“When they moved you from the container,” Agent Jensen asked, “were you able to see any of the men’s faces?”
Hudson shook his head. “We were blindfolded. I heard the engine, and the ride was bumpy so I knew we were in a car and we were moving.” Long pause and then, “But I never saw their faces.” He looked at Faith. “And I never got the chance to run away.”
“It’s OK,” she told him. “You did everything right.”
“Do you remember what kind of car any of these men were driving?”
“No.”
“But once you were in the mountains,” Agent Jensen prodded, “you saw their faces, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Hudson answered. “I saw them every day. I also saw the men who took me and Lara from our house.”
“That’s good,” Agent Burnett told him. “We have a few more questions, and then we want to show you some pictures and see if you recognize anyone, OK?”
He nodded.
“After you were brought to the woods, what were you forced to do?”
“We were chained to a worktable. We each had our own area where we would trim cannabis.” Hudson looked at Faith and added, “It was better than living in a dark box without water or food.”
She gave him a reassuring smile that contrasted heavily with all the emotions running through her. Faith squirmed in her seat as her son talked about a boy he was pretty sure had died in the container and another boy who’d been shot within minutes of escaping the one-room cabin in the woods. His expression didn’t change when he talked about how his captors beat them on a regular basis and hardly gave them anything to eat. His tone of voice remained even and calm. In the end, Hudson claimed it wasn’t the video games that got him through his ordeal in the woods, but Grandpa’s wartime stories of survival. If he could find sources of water and food, like Grandpa had talked about, he’d been certain he could survive.
And he was right.
Not only had he and his new friend, Joey, fought off their captors; they’d found a way to survive in freezing temperatures until Faith’s dad and brother located them.
“Thank you, Hudson. You’ve been a great help.”
“Will you be able to find my sister?”
“That’s our goal,” Agent Jensen said.
“We’re going to show you some pictures now,” Agent Burnett cut in. “I’m going to lay out six pictures at a time. Let us know if you recognize anyone, OK?”
Once again, Hudson nodded.
Faith glanced at Dad. He gave her a look that said it was going to be all right.
Agent Jensen opened the folder in front of him and began spreading out six eight-by-ten glossies, some women, mostly men. A couple of the photos were taken from a distance, while the other photographs were close-ups.
Faith shuddered when she spotted Diane Weaver. She was hard to miss with her gaunt face and frizzy hair. A permanent scowl made her look much older, but it was her cruel eyes Faith would never forget.
After Hudson told them he didn’t recognize anyone, Jensen laid out another six photos in two rows of three.
Faith recognized two of the men from the binder she had in her possession. After she found Lara, she’d hand it over, but not until then. If the wrong person found out about the list, they might very well pressure the director of the FBI to lay off, or perhaps inspire the bosses in the area to quadruple their efforts in finding a way to shut Faith down altogether.
Either way, it wasn’t going to happen.
Make a phone call. Call the cops. Hand the binder over.
Faith knew what most average, everyday citizens would think about her keeping the names from authorities. But it wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the authorities; they just had different objectives. Their goal was to stop the criminals. Her goal was to find her daughter.
Only Detective Yuhasz knew what she had. He was still in the hospital recovering from the gunshot wound to the shoulder, which gave her some wiggle room. But no matter which way she looked at it, time was running out.
Hudson stared at the photos for a long while and then shook his head.
Another six photos. Hudson pointed to the middle picture in the second row. No hesitation whatsoever.
The man in the photo had dark hair. His eyes were—Faith drew in a breath.
Agent Burnett directed her attention to Faith. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” she lied. “It just makes me sick to see all these men’s faces, knowing what they do.”
Agent Burnett didn’t seem to be buying it, but she let Faith’s reaction go.
Faith had seen that face last night. Although Mark Silos had changed his hair and lost some weight since the photo was taken, she saw the same shocking blue eyes as the man she’d watched die on the middle of his kitchen floor.
Thinking about last night made her wonder how Little Vinnie was doing. He’d been shaken up by the hit to the head. Beast, Rage, and Little Vinnie had done their best to make the scene at the house in Foresthill look like a drug deal gone bad. Afterward they dropped Faith off far enough away from her parents’ home so she’d be able to get into the house without being seen.
How long would it be before someone found Mark Silos’s body? The gunshot alone should have alerted someone, but Beast assured her that shots were often heard in remote areas of the woods.
Hudson pointed at the picture as he looked at Faith. “That was the man who ordered the other two around.”
Faith nodded. Hudson knew what she’d figured out last night—that Mark Silos had been the thir
d man at their house. What her son didn’t know was that Silos was the one who had ordered the other two men to kill her and Craig.
Overall, Faith thought as she studied his photo, Mark Silos had an average-looking face. The face of a killer. The face of a dead man.
FIVE
Faith took a seat in the therapist’s office.
Dad had waited in the lobby to take Hudson home after Kirsten Reich finished talking with him, and now it was Faith’s turn.
The therapist, a blonde with an athletic build, settled in the cushioned chair across from Faith and asked, “How is your family?”
Agitated by the question since Faith only wanted to hear about her son and how he was doing and where they went from here, she fidgeted in her seat and arched a questioning brow as if she didn’t understand.
“How are your mom and dad faring?” Kirsten tried again.
Faith’s mom had been attacked by three men. If Mom hadn’t had the good sense to run and lock herself in her room, and if Beast and Rage hadn’t shown up, she would have been killed. “Mom is supposed to be released from the hospital any time now,” Faith said, trying to keep her frustrations in check. “She’s a trouper. Same with Dad. He’s like the Energizer Bunny. Nothing’s going to stop him.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Kirsten made a note, then asked, “It’s been forever since I talked to Jana. Has she had her baby?”
“No, not yet,” Faith said. The small talk made her feel as if she were playing a silly game to see who would break first. “She looks as if she has an entire family living inside her.” Faith tapped the toe of her shoe on the floor as she tried to think of her sister’s due date. She came up blank. Her gaze fell to her hands in her lap.
More and more often, she found herself playing with her wedding ring, as she was doing now, twirling it slowly around her ring finger. It was loose. She’d have to take it to a jewelry store and have it fitted when she found the time.