by Linda Ladd
This time Claire did listen and said nothing. No need to get beaten up right off the bat. It was gonna happen, sooner or later, but that didn’t mean she had to instigate it right now. He knew why she ran, that it was to get the kid away from his horrible sister. He wasn’t stupid. He didn’t care about the child, but he didn’t feel the need to be cruel to him, either. Jaxy hurt others for her own warped pleasure, and he knew that, too.
“Wait here for me! I’m going after that little brat!” cried Jaxy, taking off at a run across the field.
Max saw fit to put the brakes on that idea quickly enough. “Get back here right now, Jaxy. Let the kid go. We don’t have time to catch him now. We’ll get him later. Father’s been waiting for us to bring the woman to him. He won’t like another delay.”
Jaxy stopped in her tracks a few yards away and started whining, but she obeyed and headed back without further argument.
“Get up,” Max then said to Claire, grabbing her by the back of her T-shirt and jerking her up to her feet. He pulled her up with such force that her feet actually left the ground. He was strong all right. No wonder Jaxy didn’t want to irk him. He got hold of Claire’s cheeks with his thumb and forefinger hard enough to leave some serious bruises and forced her face up so that she had to look him directly in the eyes. “You try anything like that again and I’ll lock you in a metal trunk in the sun for so long that you’ll wish you were dead.”
Claire said nothing, but she knew he would do it. That was one of his favorite torture techniques. According to Black’s file, he had done that very thing and, plenty of times, cooked people to death inside that hot box. Claire dying in that kind of agony wouldn’t help Black escape. She nodded, tried to look docile and sorry and hangdog, but all she could think was that she wanted this guy dead, too. She wanted them all dead. Painfully dead, one after another.
“Where’s Black?” she said then. “I was told I’d get proof of life once I got here.”
“You’ll get what I say you get,” he said, still calm as a halcyon sea on a clear summer day. “Now shut your mouth and get in that jeep.”
So Claire shut her mouth and got in that jeep. Jaxy sat in front with Goon One a.k.a Ronald. Max sat in back with her. Goon Two, Barto, stayed with the plane with strict orders to find the kid. She sat back and memorized the directions they took. She might have to find her way back to the airstrip and commandeer their airplane. Black could fly them out if he wasn’t hurt too bad. It was pitch black now, no lights whatsoever, not even the muted pink glare of the lights of Marseilles reflecting off the clouds. They drove down a dirt road that wound through the dark trees and it gradually rose up in elevation until she could hear the sound of the sea. Waves. Crashing and boiling against rocks. That’s what it sounded like. Like it sounded when they were in Tahiti. They were on the coast somewhere now, probably due west of Marseilles, just like Black’s GPS signal had indicated. The headlights illuminated the road with two long smoky beams ahead of them, but it was a large and deserted area through which they drove.
Claire looked out into the blackness at the side of the road and hoped that poor little Rico was not too frightened of the dark. He was safer there, even alone, than in Jaxy’s clutches. She wondered how a woman could be so inhumanely cruel to a little tiny waif of a child, but she had seen many people do many horrific things in her life and on her job as a homicide detective. Claire was intrinsically jaded now to the worst kinds of evil, cruelty, and depravity. And these people appeared to be perpetrators of all of those things, and probably worse.
But now she had grown quite calm. She was in the same place as Black. Booker and the others were well on their way to save them. They were apparently skilled at this sort of hostage extraction, had done it many times, she figured, so all she needed to do was survive until they saved the day. She should be able to do that. She had to.
The jeep rumbled on, jouncing and bouncing, and then suddenly there appeared to be a big hole in the ground ahead of them, and then the car canted down and entered a wide tunnel. It was constructed of stone, and she wondered if Soquet worked out of an underground lair where he planned and committed his atrocities and murders for hire. Within minutes, they had come up and outside again, and Claire realized they were now inside some kind of courtyard. It was big and there were walls rising up on all four sides. It looked a lot like the satellite image of the chateau but somehow different, too. Maybe they’d come in from a hidden entrance of some kind because they hadn’t passed through the front gate. She tried to remember everything they passed because when she got away she needed to be able to get her bearings.
One room, high up in the building, had lights on and that was probably where they were holding Black. She stared up at it, her heart in her throat, and wondered what they were doing to him in that room right now as the jeep drew up to a stop in front of a flight of steep steps. Jaxy got out and ran up the steps as if on a mission. Probably to tattletale to Papa on Max for being so mean and not letting her kill Claire. Then Claire was jerked out and walked between two guards, trailing Max and Zeus, the devil dog, up the steps and to an unknown fate.
Killing Black
Each time Black felt panic begin to set in, he filled his mind with images of Claire and how good it was going to feel when he got back home. It was just a matter of time, he had to believe that, he had to hold out just a little longer because she was still alive, he was sure of it. If she were really dead, they would’ve made sure he suffered as he saw her die while watching what they had done to her. He knew Soquet that well. Marcel never planned anything halfway. His abductions were meticulous and gone over for many months in advance, laid out orderly and to the nth degree. If Claire were dead, he would have shown Black proof of it or a video showing her screams of pain and last dying breath. He was a sadist; he would want Black to witness it up close and personal.
So he banished that worry from his mind and tried to think about only good things while he was strapped to that chair, things he loved, things he wanted to get home to, anything to get his tortured mind off the physical and mental stress he was really going through. And that meant Claire. He spent some time thinking about how she would look in her wedding gown. What her dress might look like since she’d made such efforts to keep the design from him. How she had looked those sunny days straddling a surfboard with those long, tanned legs of hers when they were in Tahiti. How happy they’d been there for those two fantastic months alone. How beautiful she was. How soft her skin was, how much he loved to hold her and kiss her. He burrowed deeper into those daydreams, took himself down into the deepest depths of those memories, trying to recall their recent conversations, their lovemaking, how it felt to touch her, to be touched by her, anything that would take him away from what was being done to him.
Through the long hours of utter misery, Black’s only real refuge and relief came from the knowledge that Claire was safe at home. That these monsters would never get their hands on her, would never torture her the way they were torturing him. He felt secure in that, too. But what if that video of her cabin exploding had not been doctored? What if she had been inside, innocently waiting for him? What if she were dead? Killed in a bomb blast, just like Soquet’s wife had been? That would be the way Soquet would think. Tit for tat. Payback. No, Black couldn’t let himself think that way. No way. Claire was fine. She was home in Missouri, worrying about him as much as he was worrying about her.
Black forced down a hard swallow, licked his dry, cracked lips, so thirsty now that he was beginning to feel dizzy and unable to concentrate. He would be rescued, he thought dully. Soon. Just hold on, hold on. He tried to think about that and nothing else, but the chair had grown very hot from the lamps, the metal burning him through his clothes. It was so sweltering hot inside the room now that he could barely breathe. It hurt his lungs to inhale the heated air. He sought to cage his mind again, think of other things. Used his training to affect mind over matter. Sit calmly. Don’t beg for relief or for water, or for
anything else, or they would turn up the intensity and make it ten times worse for him. He knew that.
So he sat still and attempted meditation and serenity while waiting for their next tactic to come down on him. Soquet probably wanted Black to plead for mercy, was most likely waiting for him to. Maybe he should. But he knew better. He had studied Soquet long and hard because he knew the man would come after him again. His young and beautiful wife, Lorraine, had been his whole world, his treasure; she had been everything he held dear. He felt about her the way Black felt about Claire. So Marcel was driven with the need for vengeance. He would increase the torture as soon as he thought Black was ready to break. Black had to remain stoic. Slowly, with single-minded effort, he sought to subjugate his mind back into serene acceptance of whatever happened until he eased down into a sort of dazed, semiconscious state.
When he started to awaken again, it came from a hard blow on the side of his head. Disoriented at first, he couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then he saw the girl. Jaxy. She clamped her left fist in his hair and jerked up his face. “Hello there, handsome. I’m baaaack. You miss me? How we doing today? You enjoying your little vacation with us yet?”
Black stared up at her. His vision was off now, blurry; he could barely see her. So he squeezed his eyes shut. She slapped him again. Harder this time. Across the cheek, jerking his head to one side. He ground his teeth together and vowed he would kill her with his bare hands if he ever got loose. He was gonna take her down to the ground and throttle her until she was dead.
“Oh, my, but don’t you look absolutely livid, doctor? Now you know how it feels to suffer the way my mama had to, the way I had to, and poor, poor Daddy. But guess what, we are just getting started with you. We have a new little treat for you today. One that’s gonna make you feel sooooo much better.”
Black kept his mouth shut. His vision had cleared up some, and he was wary of the cruel and satisfied look in her dark eyes. She held out her open palm. He saw the two sugar cubes lying there. Pink ones. She held them down in front of his eyes, taunting him with the new threat. For the first time since he’d been captured, Black felt fear, true and anxious fear of what she had put into that sugar. He tried not to show alarm. If he showed that, they would use it on him again.
“Know what this is?”
“Sugar?”
His voice rasped, throat totally dried out from want of water. He licked his lips again. But the idea of drugs was terrifying. If he was incapacitated with drugs, he could no longer control what he said and did by his own force of will. His body would react to the chemical properties, and he would no longer be able to remain unaffected and stoic. He would become like putty in their hands.
“Nope. Guess again.”
“What is it, Jaxy?”
“Oh, come now, doctor. You’re a psychiatrist, are you not? A good one, so they say. You played my mama like a fiddle, I know that much. You pulled her into your web and fed her a pack of lies that got her killed. Now we’re going to help you feel the pain that she felt. That we felt. That’s only fair, don’t you think?”
“I never told her lies. I told her the truth about your father and what he did for a living because she deserved to know. Your father is the one who told her lies. And I didn’t kill her. He did.” Black stopped and wet his lips. “He’s the one who put that bomb underneath Lorraine’s car, not his terrorist friends paying her back for talking to me. Marcel did it. He took revenge on her for betraying him, and he took your mama away from you. Not me, I had nothing to do with her death. Think about it, Jaxy. When would I have done it? How would I have gotten a bomb under her car with all Marcel’s security around your estate? Who’s the expert bomb maker in your house? Who had the opportunity and the motive?”
Jaxy’s face flushed dark, and she veritably shook with anger. She slapped him again, hard enough to bloody his nose. “Shut up, you hear me? You did it. Father would never have hurt Mama. Never. He loved her. He still loves her, so you shut your mouth. Shut up, or I’ll kill you right now!”
Black said nothing. This was not good. This girl was mentally deficient, cruel, angry, and uncivilized. She was mentally defective like few others he’d seen. She might kill him now, just like she said. No telling what she was going to do next. But the drugs she held in her hand would be his undoing.
Jaxy took several minutes to calm down, still agitated, pacing around the room. When she came back, she was a little calmer. She smiled down at him, apparently getting ready to enjoy herself now. “All right, doctor, let me tell you all about this sugar. That pink stuff. Well, sir, that is LSD. You’ve heard of that, I’m sure? It’s an amazing drug. It should make you forget all about everything. All your aches and pains should just disappear. You’re gonna feel really good and happy as a lark. Once you build up your tolerance a bit, then you’ll graduate to the next level. You know, the hard stuff, like ecstasy and heroin and oxycodone and meth. That’s when you’ll become totally addicted, totally dependent on us. That’s when you’ll do anything, anything at all, just to get a hit. That’s what you have to look forward to, doctor.”
“Go to hell, Jaxy.”
Jaxy laughed. “Oh, now, here we go. Look how nasty you can be when you get scared.” She slapped him again. Black clenched his jaw, wanting to kill her about as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. “You ought to be thanking me,” she continued. “This is going to take your mind off your suffering big-time. You know, lack of water and food. Claire Morgan being dead, all that good stuff.”
But then the taunting was over, and Jaxy grabbed his head and held him still while she forced two sugar cubes into his mouth, both saturated heavily with the hallucinogenic drug. He tried not to ingest them, but they dissolved almost at once inside his dry mouth. Black struggled not to swallow, but it was useless. He could feel the doctored sugar sliding down his throat. So he sat still, not wanting his thunderous heartbeat to speed up the effects of the drug. It didn’t take long for him to start feeling the drug’s properties, either. But he already knew what was coming. He’d treated patients who took acid for the wild trips it provided. He knew what LSD could do to a person’s brain and body. To his perceptions.
This much of a hallucinogen would gradually take over his mind and cause him to distort reality, experience living nightmares, especially if the trip turned bad. He also knew that more often than not, a person’s reaction to the drug depended on his state of mind when he ingested it. And Black’s state of mind was in a very bad place, a virtual hell of anxiety and confusion. He was being tortured mentally, and that would make his acid trip even worse. It would not take long before he would be unable to control himself anymore, think straight, or use his will to survive and resist. He would be helpless. And he was right. It didn’t take long because the dose had been big, too big. The last rational thought he had was of the girl’s crazy laughter. It seemed to go on and on, loud and echoing and sneering and cruel and then the sound turned purple and blue and yellow and came alive inside his head, like a monster made of rainbows and digging deep into him.
Chapter Eight
The house into which Claire was taken was huge. It appeared to be some kind of old castle or fortress of some kind, with thick walls carved from dark gray stone. It didn’t seem to look exactly like the pictures she’d seen of the chateau, but they’d brought her inside from an underground tunnel and the darkness had thrown her perspective off. She hoped to God it was the same place where they were holding Black. Inside, the ceilings were high and wood-beamed. The halls were wide and dim and cool, tiled with large black slate squares and lined with unlit open sconces. Jaxy had not reappeared; off doing God only knew what. But that bitch didn’t have Rico, thank heaven. Max had a firm grip on Claire’s upper arm as he led her into what appeared to be some kind of banquet hall. The furnishings, however, were modern, almost homey, with plush red couches and ornate tables with tall lamps with drum-shaped, fringed brown shades. Great big blue and red and gold rectangular Pers
ian rugs lay over most portions of the tiled floor. It looked almost like a personal domicile of sorts, Rico’s home, probably, commandeered by the devil’s monsters that came calling in the night.
As she was marched through the wide expanse toward the far end of the room, she continued to get her bearings, judge distances, and locate hiding places along her eventual escape route. Max, Barto, and Ronald were actually acting a bit cavalier with her now, no handcuffs, no leg irons, no rough stuff to speak of, not yet, and that surprised her. These people did not handle prisoners with kid gloves. They wasted no time starting the mental and physical abuse, and it didn’t end for a very long time, if ever. Not according to Black. So why were they giving her slack all of a sudden?
As they walked, Claire found that shelves lined one wall, all set with many family photographs in black and white frames. She examined the people in them as she was prodded past. Most appeared to be of Rico and his family. A pretty blond woman, most likely his mother, and a tall, dark-haired father, with a younger Rico riding on his shoulders. This was their house all right, their property. Is that why they had been killed? It did make sense in a terrible sort of way. The place was more than isolated, certainly not anywhere close to the outskirts and suburbs of the city of Marseilles. She wondered how and when they had taken the chateau and murdered the boy’s parents. And why? Was it all in preparation for Black’s abduction? Or a serendipitous opportunity to find a secure place to torture him? That didn’t make sense to her, either. But these people were crazy, all three of them. She had to remember that and react accordingly.
When they reached the far wall of the big hall, it was filled with antlers and stag heads and crossed swords. She was jerked to a stop in front of a wide and arched, hand-carved, dark wood door. Max went inside and left her standing outside between the twin goons. Nobody said anything. The whole house lay in an odd, noiseless hush. She looked up the wide staircase to one side of them with its carved bannisters and newel posts and found that it led up into the pure darkness of the second floor. Black was up there somewhere. Suffering. She was sure of it.