by Karen Leabo
Not if she could help it. No way was she going quietly. What was the goon going to do, shoot her in the middle of a crowded zoo? He pulled her to the door, peeked outside to see that the coast was clear, then pulled her out with him. She stumbled and barely righted herself before falling.
He put his arm around her waist. The other hand remained in his jacket pocket, a grim reminder.
Christine’s gaze darted around wildly. There was no one nearby, no one to appeal to for help. She made a snap decision—she wouldn’t go one step farther with this thug. She opened her mouth and screamed with every cubic inch of breath in her lungs.
“Shut up, would you?” He cuffed her head, hitting her sore jaw. “Damn, you’re a mouthy bitch.”
Just then a group of noisy Cub Scouts, squealing and shrieking the way children do, entered Amazonia. Their noisy entrance camouflaged Christine’s screams of distress as the kidnapper dragged her along, but she just screamed that much louder.
“Ryan! Help! Fire!”
Ryan was there in an instant. He had to have been lurking nearby, she thought later, keeping a close watch on her. But right now, all she felt was pure relief. Ryan immediately figured the situation correctly. He gave the man a mighty shove. At the same time, Christine kicked him in the shin, then stepped on his foot. His grip on her arm loosened and she pulled away.
Ryan tried to grab him, but the man shook him loose and bolted through the entrance. Some Cub Scout stragglers, and their leader, stopped and stared.
“Something wrong?” the leader, a young, bookish-looking man in his thirties, asked.
“No, we’re fine,” Christine immediately answered. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“If you say so. Come along, boys.” He herded his charges into the building, giving the couple one last, suspicious look over his shoulder.
Ryan opened a door marked Entrance Only and ushered her outside, into the bright sunshine and cool, fresh air. No one seemed to care.
“Are you really okay?” Ryan asked, putting a protective arm around her. “Did he hurt you?”
She shook her head.
“What was that all about?”
“A, um, mugger, I guess. I don’t know. He just grabbed me, and I panicked.”
“You got a great set of lungs, I’ll give you that. Let’s go talk to the police. They have a station right here at the zoo—”
“No. I don’t want to involve the police,” she said, her voice firm. That was all she needed.
“But that guy’s a menace. What if he hurts someone else?”
“He won’t.” Realizing her certainty sounded odd, she elaborated, creating the fantasy as she went. “He’s a friend of my boyfriend’s. I’m sure Robert sent him.”
“That’s ridiculous. How would he have found you?”
“He’s probably been following me all along.”
“From when you jumped out of your boyfriend’s car last night?” Ryan’s skepticism was apparent.
“He was with us in the car,” she said brightly.
“And he jumped out after you, and...”
“Followed me. Or Robert followed me in the car. I don’t know how he found me, but he did.” There.
“And you still don’t want to contact the police?”
“No. Robert has friends in high places. He would make things even harder for me, and no criminal charges would stick. Look, no police, okay?”
“Okay, okay. I just want to understand here.” His voice softened. “You sure you’re okay? I saw him hit you.” He ran one finger lightly along the curve of her jaw.
It would have been so easy to lean into him, to offer herself up for another kiss. But that would be insane. She was engaged. Not that she intended to remain that way for long, but a woman with class would not line up a replacement for a fiancé she had yet to dump.
She shied away from Ryan’s touch. “So, I’ll have a new bruise on top of the old one. Nothing’s broken.”
He pulled his hand back. “Okay, fine. Have you had enough of the zoo?”
“I guess so.” The zoo was proving hazardous to her health.
“Let’s head for the exit, then.” He paused to study a map. “We can stop and see the seals on the way out. If any animal can cheer you up, it’s a seal.”
Christine smiled, despite her misfortune. Ryan was right. Seals were funny.
On the way to the seals and sea lions exhibit, she burst into tears.
Chapter 5
Ryan felt something akin to panic as he witnessed Chrissy’s breakdown. He was worthless when it came to crying females. He still remembered all those nights he’d listened to his sister, Josette, pregnant with a rapist’s baby, crying herself to sleep at night. He could hear her through the cheap walls of the apartment they lived in with their parents.
He’d been eighteen, on the verge of manhood and independence and freedom, while she’d been trapped in a situation she’d asked for—or so she was told over and over. He’d wanted to go to her, comfort her, tell her everything would be okay. But he hadn’t been able to make himself do it. He’d been terrified that he would fail, that he would make her feel worse ... or that he was wrong, and nothing would ever be okay for her again.
So he’d cowered in his own room, put the pillow over his head, and done nothing.
He would do better with Chrissy.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said to her, leading her to a park bench. Even though he was quaking inside, he was determined to give her some comfort. He removed her sunglasses, pulled her against him and let her cry on his shoulder. “Are you hurt? Should I get you to a doctor?”
“N-no,” she sobbed. “I’m o-okay.”
“You don’t sound okay.”
The crying storm didn’t last long. After a minute or two, her sobs slowed down. She sniffed away the last of the tears, wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and hiccuped. “I’m fine. Just shaken up. It was a delayed reaction.”
“I think we should go to the police,” he suggested again. He didn’t really want to involve the authorities, because that would mean giving up his exclusive. But Chrissy’s reticence intrigued him. He hoped that if he pressed her, she would cave in and tell him the truth.
She sighed. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve been playing a very dangerous game, and I almost lost.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked innocently.
“I haven’t exactly been straight with you. In fact, I’ve pretty much been lying through my teeth. I hope you won’t be too mad.”
“Hmm ... that depends.”
“On what?”
“On why you lied, and what the real truth is.”
She thought for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip. “I lied because I wasn’t sure I could trust you. I was scared and confused. But now that I’ve gotten to know you, I can level with you.” She sat up straighter, and there was a determined gleam in her eye. “I wasn’t drunk last night. I was drugged up.”
“Oh?” He tried to sound as if this were no big deal to him, that he encountered illegal drugs every day. “What was it, heroin?” He’d heard heroin was making a comeback. “Coke? LSD?”
“Good heavens, no! Not that kind of drug. I don’t even know what it was. It came out of a syringe, and it was given to me against my will.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
“My name’s not Chrissy Green, it’s...it’s Christine Greenlow. My father is Stan Greenlow, a senator from Pennsylvania.” She stared at him, waiting for a reaction.
Ryan pretended ignorance. “Name sounds familiar, but I don’t read the papers that much.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, I was kidnapped from my father’s home three days ago by some environmental terrorists. They call themselves the National Allegiance to Something-Something-Something—it spells out NATURE. They’re mad at my father about some stupid legislation, and they wanted a million dollars from him to help clean up this wildlife habitat. They kept me for about forty-eight hours, I guess, although my sense of time is a littl
e messed up. Then I escaped, but they drugged me just before, so that’s why I was wandering around in a daze when you found me.”
Mentally Ryan rolled his eyes. He’d been prepared for another made-up story from her, but was she ever bad at creating fiction. Environmental terrorists? She’d probably heard about her supposed kidnapping, as told by Stan Greenlow, and now she was devising this hokey story so her father wouldn’t be proved a liar.
Ryan didn’t buy it for a minute. But he had to be very careful. He needed to dig down to the truth, but he couldn’t risk alienating Chrissy. He wanted this story, bad.
“That must have been terrible!” he said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “How did you get away?”
“First I kicked this guy in the... Well, you know. Then, when they drugged me, I pretended like I was unconscious so they wouldn’t bother tying me up, and when they left the room I jumped out a window. From the second story. I landed in a bush—see the scratches on my legs?”
He gave her long, elegant legs a brief perusal, preferring not to dwell on them. He’d seen enough of them last night to provide him with a month’s worth of fantasies. Their shape, their texture, were branded into his memory.
“And then what happened?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember much after that although some of it is coming back. I have a vague recollection of talking to a scruffy-looking man on the street, and then trying to get away from those boys who thought I was a prostitute or something—”
“Those ’boys’ were members of the Pit Bulls,” he reminded her.
She shrugged again, seemingly unaware of the gang’s deadly reputation. “Anyway, you know the rest.”
“That’s an extraordinary story, Chrissy. I mean, Christine.”
She smiled, her eyes still a little misty. “You can keep calling me Chrissy if you want. I kind of like it.”
Good, he thought. He had a real hard time thinking of her as anything else. “I just have one question.”
“Yes?”
“Why haven’t you called the police?”
“Well, I... Um, I don’t really know, exactly,” she said, clearly hedging. “Something happened to me during the time I was held captive. Maybe it’s the drugs, but I’m just not myself. I haven’t been thinking too straight.”
That was an inadequate explanation if he’d ever heard one.
“I was going to call them,” she continued, perhaps sensing his skepticism. “But I started thinking about all the questions, and the reporters—I really can’t stand reporters. They’re so nosy, and they think they own you just because you happen to have money and your father’s a public figure. One time a reporter asked me what size bra I wore!”
“Pretty tacky,” Ryan said, inwardly smarting from her criticism. As a reporter, he’d seldom had anything to do with celebrities or politicians. But he couldn’t deny that he’d at times been intrusive, annoying and even nosy, asking the most uncomfortable questions.
Even now he was wondering...what size bra did she wear? He’d guess she was a B cup. But he wouldn’t ask her. A bazillion Primus magazine readers didn’t need to know that. He had a few scruples.
“Anyway, you were so nice, letting me borrow your clothes, feeding me breakfast. If I’d gone to the police, I would have had to explain that I spent the night at your house, and it would have sounded so tacky, and I just didn’t want to face reality yet. You’d have been on the hot seat, too, you know.”
“So you were protecting me?”
“In a way.”
“Hmm.” There was a long silence, which grew to uncomfortable proportions. He broke it. “You know what I think, Chrissy?”
“What?”
“I think I like the abusive-boyfriend story better.”
Every muscle in her body—at least all the ones pressed against him—stiffened. “Excuse me?” She sounded outraged.
“Don’t get all hot and bothered,” he said soothingly. “I understand, really I do, and I don’t blame you a bit. I can picture it now.... You got tired of the Washington society scene, the responsibility of always being respectable, the senator’s perfect hostess. You went a little bit wild, hanging out with a fast crowd. Some drinking, a little coke. But the whole thing spun out of control. You got stuck in the fast lane, didn’t know how to get out.
“Maybe there was a boyfriend, someone totally inappropriate for you, putting the pressure on you. You started forgetting your obligations, staying out later and later. Then you didn’t come home at all.”
Ryan was just getting warmed up. It was the kind of story he loved to write, filled with human emotion, relationships, mistakes, regrets.
“Your father had to explain your absence somehow,” Ryan continued, “and he couldn’t very well tell the truth. So he fabricated the kidnapping. The story addressed all his problems, and it brought him some publicity and public sympathy.
“You got wind of the story—you might have read my newspaper this morning—and now you’re backing up Dad’s claims. Is that pretty close to the truth?”
He’d imagined Chrissy wilting as she was hit with the unvarnished facts, amazed at his deductive abilities, maybe even turning to him for help in changing her life around. Instead, she pulled away from him and turned the full force of an angry green gaze on him.
“That’s what you think, huh?”
“It’s not so far from the first story you told me, Abusive boyfriend, booze—”
“I made that part up! What I just told you is the truth, every word.”
“I’m not blaming you. I’d like to help you. I’ll take you home to your father. You can make up something to satisfy the police, say it was a misunderstanding. That’s more or less the truth, anyway.”
“That’s not the truth! There was no party, no abusive boyfriend, no drinking. It was a drug the kidnappers gave me with a needle. Look, I’ll bet you can still see the mark on my arm.” She frantically rolled her sleeve up, then turned her arm this way and that, peering at her own creamy flesh.
Ryan found himself peering, too. She was incredibly flawless, even in bright April sunlight.
“There. Right there,” she said triumphantly.
Ryan looked. She was pointing to a tiny red mark that could have been anything, even a self-inflicted pinch or scratch. “Ub-huh.”
“They posed as UPS men, and they grabbed me off the front porch of my father’s house.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Damn it! I knew there was a reason I didn’t tell you all this in the first place. You wouldn’t have believed it then, either.”
“You have to admit, Chrissy, it’s a crazy story. Can you show me even a shred of proof? Can you take me to where you were held? If you were really kidnapped, why didn’t anyone take credit or contact your father?”
“They did! They demanded a million dollars. Only for some reason that part didn’t get in the paper.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, just forget it.” Abruptly she stood and began walking away.
“Wait, Chrissy! There’s no reason to get angry.”
“I happen to think there is.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll go with you, make sure you get there safely.”
“No, thanks.” She shook off his hand when he tried to physically stop her. A young couple with a baby cast curious glances his way, both of them frowning with disapproval. He backed off. Short of throwing her over his shoulder fireman-style, as he’d done last night, he couldn’t stop her.
Fran reappeared at his side. “What did you say to tick her off?”
“Nothing! All I did was express a bit of skepticism when she told me this cock-and-bull story about environmental-terrorist kidnappers. I was very tactful...”
“You?”
“...but she was mad that I didn’t hang on her every word.”
Fran appeared thoughtful. “Wait a minute. Did you say environmental terrorists? As in a group that calls
themselves NATURE?”
“Um, she mentioned something about that.”
“These guys are all over the place! They tried to bomb the EPA, sabotage oil-company freighters, all kinds of stuff. Kidnapping a senator’s daughter would be right up their alley.”
“Fran, you don’t actually believe she was kidnapped, do you?” Ryan asked, feeling the first prickles of unease. Chrissy couldn’t be telling the truth. That guy who tried to grab her was either her pusher or connected with the Pit Bulls.
“It’s not likely,” Fran admitted. “Still, shouldn’t we follow her?”
“Oh, I plan to,” he said. He’d never taken his eyes off of her. But he wanted to make sure she didn’t spot him. “C’mon, let’s go. It’ll be interesting to see just where Miss Chris-Chrissy goes.”
He felt only a twinge of remorse at having thrown away the fragile trust that had started to build between them, the camaradrie...the kiss! All of it was based on lies anyway, both his and hers.
Chrissy’s anger billowed around her like a fog, dense, palpable. But it dissipated quickly, leaving her spent, disappointed and afraid. Where could she go from here? She’d better just call the police, she decided. That horrible man might still be lurking around—the terrorist guy, not Ryan. Ryan wasn’t horrible, just infuriating. He’d had no trouble believing her when she told one whopping lie after another. So why couldn’t he have believed her when she trusted him with the truth?
There were pay phones near the zoo’s exit. She paused in front of one, gathered her courage, lifted the receiver and dialed 911.
“This is the 911 operator. What is your emergency?”
“This is Chrissy—um, Christine Greenlow. I was kidnaped but now I’m free and I need to talk to the police, because someone’s still after me. I’m at the zoo.”
“The...zoo?”
“Yes. I know it sounds crazy, but someone tried to grab me in the women’s rest room.”
“Are you in immediate danger, ma’am?”
“I don’t know,” Christine said impatiently. Why had she ended up with the one person in the city who had never heard of her and knew nothing about her disappearance? “Could you just send someone to pick me up?”