by Blake Pierce
She came to the back door and opened the screen. Another door sat behind it, closed. She tried the knob and found it unlocked. She moved quietly, grimacing as she turned the knob all the way. She pushed the door lightly open, just a crack. Concentrating, she could hear Jack Kramer moving around inside. It sounded like he was closer to the front of the house.
With catlike speed that surprised her, Kate slipped through the back door. Her hands gripped the Glock as her heart hammered in her chest. She found herself standing in the kitchen. She could see the living room ahead of her, through the entryway of the kitchen. She could see—
Something came rushing at her from the left, just off of the hallway Jack had gone down to put on a shirt. She raised her Glock but was about a split second too slow. Something crashed into her head. Something hard, something that made a sick thudding noise against her skull.
The pain lasted only a moment. She felt herself slipping away and tried to fight against it. She saw a blurred representation of Jack Kramer’s face as she tried to stay on her feet but his features slid away like mud into the darkness that quickly leapt up to claim her.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Something was stinging her face. Stinging or burning or…she wasn’t sure.
It was faint at first but then it felt like something exploding. Her face went hard to the right. The sound that accompanied the stinging made Kate aware that she was being slapped. This knowledge caused her eyes to snap wide open. She saw that she was in the barn, sitting in an old wooden chair. She tried to stand but found that she was tied to it. She rocked a bit, nearly toppling the chair, before she was slapped again.
She cried out against it and realized that she made very little sound. Her mouth was taped up, her lips drawn tight together. This brought everything snapping into place, helping her to finally get all of her senses about her. Jack Kramer was standing in front of her. There was a maniacal smile on his face as he hunched down slightly to look in her eyes. Behind him, propped against the edge of the barn door, was a hunting rifle.
“You sure are a nosy bitch, aren’t you?” he asked with a smile. “You got the information you needed and left. What the hell did you come back for?”
He raised his hand and she thought he was going to slap her again. Instead, he stepped forward and cupped her by the back of the head. He leaned in closer, their noses less than three inches apart.
“If it makes you feel any better, you did find her,” he said. “She’s here. Right under our feet if you can believe it.” With that comment, he stomped on the floor. The creaky boards beneath them rattled a bit and a plume of dust kicked up. Behind it all, Kate thought she could hear some sort of muffled complaint—perhaps from a feminine voice that was also taped shut.
“I’m glad you came, Kate. I really am.”
He stepped back away from her again and showed her the ID and badge he had apparently taken from her while she had been knocked out. He tossed them on the floor at her feet where they slid against the wood. He then reached behind him and pulled her Glock out from the waist of his pants.
“This,” he said, “I’m keeping. I might just put a bullet between little Mercy’s eyes. I wonder what sort of things might happen to you if a bullet from your gun is found in her head. I thought about doing it this morning with my old rifle,” he said, nodding to the rifle Kate had seen propped against the edge of the barn door behind him. “Then it would be all over. I could be done with this fucking mess I somehow ended up in.”
He seemed to think about this for a moment before he reached into his pocket and pulled out the lock-pick she carried in her inner pocket. “This seems a little old-school, I think,” he added.
He tossed the pick to the floor, where it bounced somewhere out of sight. He then hunkered down in front of her and placed his hands on her knees. He caressed her there, rough enough to let her know that she was likely in some very big trouble.
“I’m very glad you came,” he said again. “I never really knew what I was going to do with Mercy once I had her here. I certainly wasn’t going to just hand her over to her stupid father, now was I? That girl is somewhere way beyond sexy but…you know, I’m a man of high moral standing. I’ve been fighting it…I have…but I just can’t do anything like that to her. But you…shit, I think you’re probably older than I am. Fifty? Fifty-five, maybe? And there’s a whole lot of things I want to do to Mercy that I think I could manage to do to you just fine.”
A million things went pouring through Kate’s mind in that moment. First, she wondered how long she had been knocked out and what he had hit her with. Her head didn’t hurt too badly at the moment, but given the vicious slaps he had given her, that did not surprise her. She then wondered how long it would be before DeMarco got worried and came out to help. And lastly, she wondered if Mercy Fuller was indeed in this barn, right under her feet as Jack had suggested.
He suddenly reached out and cupped her face in his hand. He leaned in again and Kate was certain he was going to kiss her. “I can call in sick,” he said. “I’m already late…so I can call in sick and you and I can have some fun together. And maybe when I’m done, you can tell me what I need to do with Mercy to make sure the FBI doesn’t come looking for me. Because make no mistake about it: if you have any hope of leaving this place alive, you sure as hell aren’t going to let anyone know what you found out here…who I’ve been keeping.” He smiled at her again, revealing teeth that indicated he, too, had been enjoying some of the same drugs as Nick Sanders. “Do you believe me. Kate?”
She nodded, but only because she knew it was her only chance. If she was going to get out of this, she had to make him think he was in control.
Not just for her sake, but for Mercy Fuller’s as well.
***
Mercy had sat as still as a stone when the man had brought the lady into the barn. She had to sit. The cellar was more like a crawlspace. It wasn’t even tall enough for her to stand up in…which made it very hard to move around on her tied legs. She figured there might be four and a half feet between the floor and the ceiling—probably closer to four.
The man had been speaking to the woman angrily, but would chuckle every now and then. He had even spoken to Mercy, too, letting her know they had some company. Mercy had no idea who the woman was or why she was here…not until he had started ranting, letting the woman—Kate, apparently—know what he planned to do to her. He mentioned the FBI and how she had better stay quiet.
She’s with the FBI, Mercy thought. My God, I might get out of here after all.
It was a faint glimmer of hope. After all, the agent was now tied to a chair, silenced with the same tape that was around her face, and being slapped around. It was a desperate situation and it dawned on her that there were now two of them. They could maybe work together and…
Mercy looked to her right where something had fallen through the cracks of the floor a few moments ago. The man had been showing Kate that he had her badge and ID, her gun, and something else he had called old-school. Whatever that had been, it had bounced on the floor almost musically over her head before rolling through a crack in the floor and striking the dirt floor.
She’d thought nothing of it at first but was now thinking that if her abductor had taken it off of the agent, it might be useful. Mercy walked over to it, shuffling her legs in what she was sure must be a very comical way since they were still tied together and she could not stand up completely. She craned her neck to see where the woman was in position to the thing that had fallen. Mercy could see slight movement through the boards just a few feet overhead and to her left. She then looked away and to the floor. It was much darker down here than it had been on the barn’s main floor but she could make out the basic shape of it.
She wasn’t sure what it was at first, not until she got down on her knees. She was able to reach down and pick it up, again thankful that her captor had taped her wrists together in front of her rather than behind. She clumsily turned the object around in her
fingers, unsure of what it was. It was long and slightly cylindrical, just a little longer than a key. The head of it was almost shaped like a key and that was the clue that told her what she was holding in her hands. It was some sort of tool to help pick locks.
She felt defeated. The tool was absolutely useless to her. It wasn’t like she was tied together with locks, now was it?
But after that initial defeat passed, she realized that if she could angle her fingers right and maybe bend her wrists awkwardly, she might be able to puncture the loop of duct tape that had been placed around her wrists.
It took her a few moments to bend her fingers just right. She dropped the pick several times in trying to find the right position. When she had it, she shuffle-stepped over to the wall. It was mostly dirt just like the floor but with wooden struts running up the side here and there. She braced her back against one of these struts to take the burden of standing on her tied-together legs and started trying to push the head of the pick through the tape.
Above her, the man slapped Kate again. The sound surprised Mercy, causing her to drop the pick once more. With tears brimming in her eyes, she bent down to pick it up.
You can do this, you can do this. Just concentrate…
She took a deep shaky breath and started again. She pushed until her fingers ached but it did not seem to be working.
But then she felt a slight bit of give. She pulled the pick back carefully, pinched between the knuckled of her pointer and middle fingers and then lowly pushed it forward again.
She heard the slight pop as the pick push through the tape. She carefully continued to push until she felt the pick brush against the skin of her inner wrist.
She started to saw with the pick, working her way upward. She knew that if she sawed at least half of it, she’d be able to tear free. But it was slow work and the more she tried at it, the more she sweat. And the more she sweat, the harder it was to saw. But she had to…she had no choice. And as she did, she listened as her captor rambled on over her head.
Each word was like a dagger as he started to talk about her parents but even then, she focused on sawing through the tape with the little pick. Even when she could barely see through the tears that started to spill, she sawed and sawed with her sweaty, trembling fingers.
***
The thing that scared Kate the most was that she did not think Jack Kramer was crazy. Not in any real definable way. He apparently had issues with women, as evidenced by his holding two captive and currently beating the hell out of one who just happened to be fifty-six years old. But crazy…she wasn’t so sure.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Jack said. “That idiot told me about this estranged daughter of his but there was another one…a daughter that he told me just sort of slipped away. But one night over beers, I got it out of him. Someone had stolen her from him, some family in a shithole called Deton. He said he wanted to get her back but I knew he never would. That would be responsibility…that would be catering to someone’s needs other than his own. But I started to think…what if I used the story as blackmail? What if I found the couple that took her and asked for some money? They pay up or I’d go to the news.”
He smiled, perhaps at what he thought of as the genius of the plan. He started to pace, walking over to an old work bench along the side of the barn. He picked up something from it, something that looked like an old hammer. He hefted it in his hand and came back to her. He showed her the hammer as if he were offering it to her as a gift.
And then he brought it down hard just above her bent knee. The pain was immense, and she was thankful that it only hit meat. It wasn’t a vicious blow, not one that he was using to seriously hurt her, but a rover of static-like shocks went blasting through her leg.
“You’re tough,” he said. “That’s good. You and I…we’re going to have a lot of fun.”
He licked his lips, using the hammer to trace a line from the bottom of her throat to just beneath her breasts.
“I didn’t want to kill them,” he said. “I thought they were actually going to give me the money. Started to talk real serious about it. But then the husband got all mouthy and scared. We got into a fight and I killed him. Shot him right in the throat and then in the head. Only had one bullet left for the wife. I put it in her belly and then clubbed her to death with the butt of the gun.”
He looked almost remorseful here. But after a moment of what Kate thought might be his form of self-reflection, he shrugged. “I had to get rough with Mercy. Punched her in the stomach then punched her in the face. She went out like a light. After that, it was easy. Walked right through the backyard with her over my shoulder and straight to my truck. I parked a pretty good distance away, on some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Hell…a town like that, no one saw me come or go. I came in and left like a fucking ghost.”
The exposition was almost gratuitous. But Kate had seen this before. He was trying to talk himself up. He was trying to convince himself that he was smart…that his smarts back in Deton (as well as his savagery, perhaps) had gotten him out of there without leaving a trace. If he could relive that high, he would probably convince himself that raping and killing and FBI agent was well within his wheelhouse, too.
“So now the question is what to do with little Mercy. Do I just keep her? I don’t want to kill her. Truth be told, killing her parents wasn’t what I thought it would be. I’d only killed once before…an old homeless drunk that tried to mug me. I don’t enjoy it. But I had to. If I had have just left the Fullers’ house that night and—”
He was cut short by a sudden pounding noise. The entire floor felt as if it was shaking. For a brief moment, Kate wondered if the shoddy floor was actually collapsing.
“What the hell?” Jack said.
He looked to the right. Kate’s eyes followed his gaze and she saw the slight rise in the floor, as well as the old rusty hinge that was mostly embedded in the floor.
A trapdoor, Kate thought. Or an old cellar door or something like that. Mercy might indeed be down there.
As if in response, the floor seemed to quake again. Kate saw that it was because something was hammering against that door. It jumped up, banging the latch and the hinge that kept it closed. Kate figured if something struck it hard enough from the other side, the whole thing would just splinter away from the hinge and the floor.
It’s Mercy, Kate thought. But what the hell is she doing?
Jack let out a small roar as he stormed over to the door. As he neared it, he reached to his back, for the Glock. He leaned down, taking a key out of his pocket, and unfastened the lock—which, Kate saw, was just as old and battered as the one she had seen on the back of the trailer that sat behind her.
Kate could see what was going to happen. He was going to open that door and shoot her with a bureau-issued firearm. This was going to end terribly.
And she was also very aware that she may not live to see how it all played out.
***
Mercy was hunched down, waiting. The tape from her wrists and mouth were in a pile on the dirt floor to her right, beside the ropes she had untied from her legs. She was free, waiting like a coiled snake for that motherfucker to open the trapdoor. She held the lock pick in her right hand, holding it like a very small knife. It felt like a pathetic little weapon but she figured it she struck hard enough, the size would not matter at all.
She heard his footfalls coming towards the door, thundering toward her. Specks of dust and debris fell between the floorboards, raining down on her. He was muttering curses under his breath as he approached. As he drew closer, the trapdoor over her head shuddered in its weak mildewed frame.
She listened as he knelt down and rattled the latch. There was a click as it was freed and then the square of the door was washed in murky light. Mercy felt the muscles in her legs tightening, ready to pounce, ready to do whatever was necessary to get out of here.
Slowly, his face came into view as he peered down.
Mercy wa
sted no time. She sprang up fast and hard, bringing the lock-pick with her. Her eyes were closed but she felt the pick slam into his face. His scream was what forced her to open her eyes. When she did, she saw him teetering on the edge of the frame. The pick had taken him just below the eye and her hand still held the handle. With a final scream, Mercy shoved forward even harder. She felt bone give away and something soft starting to also yield behind that.
He tried to retreat, but Mercy had one last burst of bravery. As he was floundering around, trying to make sense of what happened, Mercy grabbed his left arm, still propping up his weight on the edge of the trapdoor frame, and pulled.
He came crashing down through the doorway. His left leg struck her shoulder but she barely noticed. He was still screaming, his hands going to his face where the lock-pick was still sticking out.
Mercy wasted no time in watching him. She reached up and grabbed the frame of the trapdoor. She planted both hands on each side and pulled herself up. She did it with such frantic energy and nerves that she nearly catapulted herself out of the cellar. She came out with such force that she toppled over, her legs striking the entryway to the cellar. She wheeled back around and slammed the trapdoor shut. She saw the lock and slammed the U-bolt home, trapping him down there.
Directly in front of her, about ten feet away, was the FBI agent. She was bound to a chair with rope and her arms were tied together with the same duct tape that had been around her own wrist only a few moments ago.
She moved so quickly to the agent that she stumbled and almost fell. Her captor’s screams continued to belt out from the trapdoor, cursing and wailing, screams of horrendous pain and bloodcurdling hatred.
The agent—Kate, Mercy remembered again from having heard her captor say it—was shaking her head as Mercy approached her. Kate nodded quickly to the door, trying to get Mercy to escape. And God help her, Mercy nearly did. But she could not leave this poor woman here—this woman who had come to save her. There was no way Mercy could leave her behind.