by J. J. Stone
She tossed what she needed into the backseat, pushed herself back over it, and repeated the process until she was back at the front of the car. Ada placed the medical kit on the floor behind the driver’s seat and tucked a few bottles of water into the back pockets of the front seats. She placed one of the rolled up blankets against the door handle of the driver side passenger door, creating a prop for James’s head to rest against.
When the middle seat was ready, she turned back to James and tried to devise a plan for getting him out of his seat and into the back. He was easily 200 pounds of dead weight. Even in an uninjured state, Ada would struggle to lift him. After a few moments of thought, she arrived at the only solution she could see fit. Keeping the back of his seat secure with one hand, Ada reached down and released the seat’s tilt handle with her other hand. His body weight instantly pushed the seat back into her hand and she struggled to prevent the seat from flattening.
Ignoring her throbbing muscles, Ada carefully lowered the seat in a controlled fall until the top of the headrest touched the middle seat. She released the tilt handle and stepped onto the middle seat. She positioned herself directly behind James and squatted down. Her hands grabbed handfuls of the front of his pullover and she gave her first gentle yank. After five full seconds of straining, his body had moved toward her a few inches.
It was four whole minutes before she managed to guide his limp body into the middle seat. Once she’d arranged him, Ada yanked on the driver seat’s tilt handle once more and the seat back flew upright again. She leaned back against the passenger seat for a moment and fought against the aches and throbs of every muscle in her body. Her tears returned as the reality of their situation hit her. They were trapped in a mangled car in the middle of nowhere and one of them was barely breathing. The one who knew about getting out of situations like this. The one who Ada would give anything in the world to be able to see wake up and form a getaway plan.
She looked down at James, stretched out across the seat, and felt a sharp shot of hopelessness. He still looked dead, despite the now steady but shallow rising of his chest. The left side of his face was puffed out with deep purple bruises and peppered with seeping punctures where the window had pierced his skin. There was a wide gash a few inches back from his hairline that was languidly painting the side of his face and the seat with fresh red dribbles of blood. The slashes on his neck were still bleeding, though not as rapidly. His left thumb jutted out at an unnatural angle, probably broken as a result of his grip on the steering wheel.
“I don’t know what to do,” Ada cried softly to him. She sank down completely onto the floor as her tears turned into sobs. Deep hopelessness flooded her entire being.
Something under the car settled and groaned, startling Ada out of her grief. A flash of panic coursed through her and she scanned all the windows, straining to catch even the slightest movement. Inky blackness was all that she found.
The panic left her mind and made way for a wash of clarity. Her tears stopped, and her mind began prioritizing her next steps. She yanked the medical kit to her and sorted through it, pulling out everything that looked like something she might need. Some unknown force powered her forward as she went up on her knees beside James and began gingerly sliding glass fragments out of his facial wounds. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know where they were, or that she’d never felt so helpless in all her life. James needed her help, and she would give it to him.
——
Brenda brought the SUV to a controlled slide of a stop and turned it off. “Looks like someone might actually still be here.”
The two-mile drive from the police station to the gas station had taken almost half an hour. Despite Dade’s insistence that he had been joking, Brenda had driven the entire way, white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole time. They had managed to get behind a snowplow trying in vain to keep the roads clear.
The agents stepped out of the warm cocoon of the SUV and cautiously made their way into the gas station. The customary chime as the door opened caught the cashier’s attention. He glanced up from the small TV behind the counter and nodded at them. “You must really need gas.”
Dade flashed the clerk a toothy grin and pulled out his badge. “We’re actually here to ask you about the boy that was found here. Were you working that night?”
The clerk frowned and perched himself on his bar stool behind the cash register. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but what kidnapped boy?”
Brenda glanced at the TV and the radar image of the blizzard flashing across the tiny screen. “The boy who was found in your parking lot.”
The clerk shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I think you have the wrong place.”
Brenda and Dade simultaneously frowned at the man. Dade retrieved the scrap of paper with the address the hunter had provided and showed it to the clerk. “This is your address, correct?”
The clerk leaned forward from the stool and squinted at the paper. “Uh … yeah, that’s our address.” He crossed his arm as he sat back. “There wasn’t a missing boy here, though.”
Brenda pulled up a photo of Jake on her phone and presented it. “So you never saw this boy in your parking lot? Never saw this man,” Brenda scrolled to an image of the hunter, “pick the boy up and take him to the police?”
The clerk perked up at the picture of the man. “Oh, that’s Travis.”
“Travis?” Dade frowned and cocked his head slightly. “Not Eli Seran?”
“Nope, that’s Travis. Travis Smith. He lives about an hour from here now, but he used to live a few minutes away. Came in here just about every day.” The clerk scratched his head, shifting his gray wool beanie up and down over his forehead. “I haven’t seen Eli in a while. Keeps to himself mostly.”
“Why would Travis list Eli’s home address as his?” Brenda asked.
“I think that’s who he’s living with now.”
Dade and Brenda exchanged confused looks. “So you’re sure that Travis hasn’t been here in the last day or so?” Dade asked the clerk.
“I swear. I can show you the tapes, if you’d like.”
Brenda looked from the TV to outside. “We’ll come back for that. We need to head back to the station.” She gave the clerk a tight grin and pushed through the glass doors of the gas station, Dade right behind her.
“OK, what the hell?” Dade asked as they climbed back into the car.
“I don’t know.” Brenda started the SUV and slowly pulled away from the gas station. Another snow plow was making its way toward them, headed for town. Brenda waited for it to pass before crawling out onto the road behind it. “I don’t like this, though.”
Dade scratched his scalp, his hair ruffling in his fingers’ wake. “Me neither.” He looked at Brenda, who gave him a quick sideways glance before putting her eyes back on the road. “Deacon and Ada walked right into something, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
CHAPTER 13
Pain raced from the tips of his body and collected in the center of his chest, building into a crushing burn of total agony. Caught in the groggy limbo of semi-consciousness, James wished he could just fall back into the numb nothing he had been floating in, but his body was too far into the process of coming back to life. His face was the first part of him that fully regained feeling. It felt numb but not from pain. His brain triggered his lungs, and the air that whistled in through his nostrils was cold, almost biting. He gritted his teeth and willed his eyes to open.
His right eye revealed a dark haze; his left eye revealed nothing. Panicking, James blinked in an attempt to clear his vision, yet the left eye remained blind. He moved to rub his hand over the eye, and a stab of pain blossomed sharply in his shoulder, drawing a coarse groan from the back of his throat. With his right eye, he glanced down as far as he could without tilting his head and saw that his right arm was pinned against his chest by a
sling. The pain now radiating from his right shoulder was making him see spots and he slowly blinked his right eye a few times to clear them away.
James tried to open his mouth but his lips felt like they were held together with superglue. He pushed the tip of his tongue against the back of his lips, but his tongue felt like a thick wad of cotton. Frustrated, James bent his left arm slowly and used it to leverage his upper body forward a few inches. Searing pain split across his ribs and he cried out again, his lips ripping apart with the force of his exhale.
“Don’t move,” Ada said from somewhere. Hearing her voice calmed the sheer terror building up inside him. He felt her hand clamp down around the back of his head and then felt her pull his left arm out of its right angle. She gently lowered him back into a reclined position then placed something against his cracked lips. “Try and drink some water.”
James could have cried as the cool rush of water bathed his parched mouth and tongue with moisture. He gulped as slowly as he could, wincing slightly as the cold water trickled down his throat and into his stomach. He turned away from the bottle after a few large draws and gave his body a moment to adjust. “My left eye … I can’t see.” His voice sounded like he was trying to talk around a mouth full of gauze.
“It’s the bandage,” Ada said. “I couldn’t figure out a way to cover your gash without having the bandage run across your eye.”
Ada’s fingers gently slipped under the fabric covering his left eye and tugged it up as much as she dared. Dim light shone up from the floor of the car, casting her face in a cool white wash. As his left eye slowly focused, he looked up at Ada and asked, “What happened to your face?”
She brushed her hair over the large bruise running down the right side of her face. She brought a flashlight up from the floor and shone it toward his face, mindful to not point it directly at his eyes. “I don’t look nearly as bad as you do.”
“Why can’t I sit up?” James’s voice was growing stronger with each word he forced out of his still-dry throat.
“Judging from the bruises, you’ve probably fractured a few ribs on your left side. Maybe broken them.”
“And my arm?”
“You dislocated your shoulder. I tried to set it as best I could.”
James reached toward his face and barely touched his fingertips to the bandages before he winced and bit back a string of curses. “How bad is my face?”
“You shredded it against your window.” Ada wiggled the water bottle in front of him. “Try to drink some more. It’ll help you feel better.”
“Help me sit up.”
“Your ribs—”
“Help me sit up.” James hated growling at her but he wasn’t going to be babied.
“I’ll do it as quick as I can,” Ada said as she slid her hand under his left arm and shoved upwards.
James clenched his jaw tight to prevent the inhuman wail from leaving his mouth as Ada moved him as much she could. He tried to help her nudge his body upright a little further by leveraging his feet against the slippery leather of the seat. After a small eternity, his back was against the door and his eyes were brimming with tears he couldn’t fight anymore. When he opened his eyes to look at Ada, he felt the warm trails slip down his cheeks but didn’t care. “Thanks.”
Ada’s face pinched with sympathy as she watched his tears drip down. She held the water bottle out to him, but his stomach lurched at the thought of drinking more. “No thanks.” He scanned the windows he could see. The SUV was shrouded in unnatural darkness. “We’re inside somewhere, aren’t we?” James asked.
“Yeah.” Ada picked a silvery emergency blanket up off the floor of the car and draped it over him. “We’re in some kind of shed.”
“Great.” James watched Ada drape another blanket around herself before returning to her perch in the passenger seat. She leaned her cheek against her seat and looked at him. The mounting panic in her hazel eyes conveyed volumes. “I guess we were moved here after the crash,” he said.
“There are drag marks on the floor of the shed.” She reached over to the driver seat and retrieved a bagged loaf of bread. “We have supplies, too. A little pile of stuff right outside the car. I almost stepped on it when I got out to look around.”
The gnawing dread in the pit of James’s stomach grew. “Did you look at the tires?”
Ada nodded as she placed the bread back. “The back tires look like they exploded.”
Or were shot. James shook his head, trying not to wince at the movement. “This whole thing was planned.” When Ada inhaled sharply and pulled her blanket tighter, James quickly changed the subject. “What else is there besides the bread?”
“Peanut butter and a few bags of chips.”
The queasiness in James’s stomach was still lurking, yet he knew he needed to try to get something in his system if he wanted his strength back. “Can I get some bread with peanut butter?”
Ada busied herself with slathering peanut butter across a slice of bread. She held the folded slice out to him and watched him take a hesitant bite. James forced the food down his throat and decided to wait on taking a second bite. He felt Ada’s stare and met it, recognizing the telltale sheen glazing her eyes. “What?” He asked softly.
“I thought you were dead.” Ada’s voice was barely above a whisper. “You looked horrible. You weren’t moving, you were barely breathing.”
“How long was I out?”
Ada shrugged. “I don’t know. Our phones are gone and the car’s dead, so I have no way of telling time.”
If their phones were gone … James groped around his hip for his holster.
Ada reached over into the driver seat and held up his holster. “I had to take it off.”
James noticed the holster’s lack of gun and mentally crossed his fingers. “Did you take my gun out of it?”
“No,” Ada said, tossing the empty holster back into the seat.
“Dammit,” James said. Phones and gun? Definitely premeditated. “Did you move me out of my seat?”
Ada nodded. “I needed more room to see how bad you were.”
“You’re lucky my back or neck wasn’t broken. I’d be suing you for moving me.”
Ada paled. “I didn’t even think about that.”
James realized his sarcasm had gone completely over her head. “You know I’m kidding about the suing, right?”
“Yes.” Ada rolled her eyes then sobered. “I shouldn’t have moved you, though. Not until you’d woken up, at least.”
All the talk of movement caused a gnawing need to change positions to tingle through the lower half of his body. Despite the pain he knew would come, James slow-motion swung his legs off the seat and gasped as the shift reverberated across his ribs. After he collected himself, he sat up and locked a firm gaze on Ada’s pale face to focus on something other than the spinning in his head. “How bad are you?” he asked her.
“I got a face full of airbag. And I think my right ankle might be sprained.” She pulled the hair away from the right side of her neck and showed him a wide stripe of blue bruise. “This is from the seatbelt.” She let her hair fall back and rested her chin to the side of her seat’s headrest. “I would have been a lot worse if you hadn’t pinned me back against my seat.”
James looked down at his immobile right arm. “That’s how this happened.”
“Thank you.”
The wispy lilt in her tone struck his heart. He didn’t say anything to her, just gave her a single nod and faint smile. He couldn’t remember holding her back, but it didn’t surprise him that he had.
They sat in an oddly comfortable silence before Ada broke it. “What are we going to do?” she asked, her eyes staring off into the floor of the car.
“Is it still snowing?”
Ada shrugged. “We’re locked in here and ther
e aren’t any windows.”
James began to scrape his hand through his hair and stopped as soon as the pain started. He slowly lowered his left hand as the pain subsided. “How much food is there?”
“A few jars of peanut butter, a couple more loaves of bread, and around five bags of chips. There’s still half a flat of water in the trunk, too, and some medical supplies and emergency stuff, like the flashlight and blankets.”
“Remind me to give Dade a raise for putting all that crap in the back.”
Ada rolled her eyes and looked outside the car. “So, someone wanted us here.”
“Looks like.” James peered out a window and replayed what Ada had told him. The tires had been blown out. Somehow the SUV had been pulled into a shelter of some kind. Whoever had taken them had left enough food for them to be able to ride out the blizzard. Either this was a wary good Samaritan, or someone who had led them right into a well-executed trap. James’s gut told him it was the second theory.
He snuck a glance at Ada and wished he hadn’t. She had sunk down into her seat, pulling her emergency blanket around her body like a protective barrier. The dread on her face was swiftly draining the life from her eyes. A completely foreign urge to wrap his arms around her made James blink a few times in sheer shock. He watched her for a few more moments before he had to glance away. The last thing he needed was for her to notice him staring.
“Tell me about New York.”
James snapped his head back toward her and almost cried out as his neck popped sharply. “What?”
Ada tipped her face back toward him. “Tell me about growing up in New York.” When he didn’t answer her, she swallowed and tried in vain to hide the quiver striking her lip. “I can’t think about all of this anymore,” she said in a voice so frail James thought she might actually shatter. “Please. I need a distraction.”