Ggggggggggggg…
And that engine wouldn’t last long. If it did, the shackles would give and release her. Either way, Kerri guessed she had only a few minutes more of life, and she’d spend it dangling like a fish on a hook—some bound bimbo, the perennial damsel in distress.
Live by the sword, Kerri couldn’t help but think, unable to do anything other than watch and wait and pray for a painless death, even if she deserved much worse, though she couldn’t imagine why.
Ggggggggggggkakakakakakakakak…
The pressure around her ankles was quickly relieved and the chain reversed direction, once again lowering Kerri down safely from the ceiling, but with deadly intent toward the water tank below.
The two men kept exchanging blows, the brutal battle becoming clearer the closer Kerri got to the tank. She tried to swing to one side and then the other so her body might overshoot the tank on either side and be lowered safely to the floor. The men kept fighting, her body kept swinging, and the chain lowering her farther…farther…
Kerri hit the top of her head against the top rim of the tank, and she gaped with fear as her head lolled into the tank and the chain lowered her back toward the water, and a torturous death. Her lungs were exhausted, her entire body ready to give up the fight.
No, Kerri silently swore, I won’t give up! I won’t die, not here, not yet, not until Harden tells me! Not ’til then!
Kerri’s head dipped into the water, the unmanned chain lowering her all the way down. The weight of her legs pressed her down to the bottom of the tank, her bound arms helpless, her torso unable to bend or twist her upward at all.
The only thing to do was hold on as long as she could, and then let go.
She opened her eyes, and even through that water and the haze of her dying senses, from that cramped upside-down perspective, she could see Harden punching Elias into submission, then running to the control near the tank.
He’s going to do it, Kerri told herself, hold on, he’s going to do it!
But the chain didn’t tighten; no grinding sound underscored her rescue. Kerri wasn’t moving an inch, unlike the last few bubbles that escaped her nostrils and wriggled up toward the surface.
Good-bye, Harden, good-bye, my love…
Bang! Bang! The plexiglass walls shattered and water rushed out the side of the tank, pulling Kerri’s limp body out with the rush of the escaping tide. She fell into Harden’s arms, his voice urgent and loving, calling her name as he tapped her cheek.
“Kerri, Kerri! Wake up, Kerri, wake up!”
Chapter 17
Kerri stirred, her eyes refocused, and her lungs cramped around a lethal cargo of water. She coughed and gagged, water pouring out of her mouth in an unruly splash. Harden rolled her forward and patted her back, then quickly unbuckled the two leather sleeves binding her arms. There wasn’t even time to take the sleeves off as Harden scrambled to one of the several tables around the room—shackles and whips and other articles splayed around.
Harden tossed a pair of shackles to Kerri and crossed to Elias’s barely stirring body. “Get his legs.” Harden flipped him over and lashed up his wrists, buckling those shackles closed. Kerri sat stunned. “Kerri, get his legs, goddamnit!”
Kerri knew time was of the essence and shook off her exhaustion. She locked the leather shackles around his ankles, buckles securing him beyond any escape.
Harden jutted his head across the room, where several black robes hung from hooks. “Grab two,” he said, sending Kerri scurrying across the dungeon to retrieve the robes, putting one on and handing the other to Harden, who quickly put it on.
“Help me pick him up.” Harden and Kerri stood the almost unconscious Elias on his feet, and Harden hoisted him over his shoulder.
They crossed the dungeon and pulled the door open. Gunshots rang out in the rest of the church, people screamed and ran, and the chaos grew louder. Even in the confusion of her near-death experience, Kerri could tell that Don Paulie’s men had been alerted to the messenger service being cut off and that they’d stormed the church.
Kerri said, “Harden, if we go out like this, he’ll be shot!” Harden glanced at Elias over his shoulder, backing into the dungeon with Kerri by his side. Harden dropped him clumsily onto the concrete floor. “Harden!”
“It won’t kill him.” Harden glanced around the dungeon, crossing to a table and retrieving a long, leather whip. He tied the whip several times around and between Elias’s ankles. They turned for the door, but Harden dropped the whip and went to the body of the guard who’d been drugged but not shot. He pulled out the guard’s gun, gave him an extra kick in the head for good luck, then crossed back to Kerri and Elias. “Can you shoot?”
“Not in real life!”
Harden rolled his eyes. “Okay, you gotta help me drag this son of a bitch out to the car.”
“Right, got it.” Harden handed her Elias’s bound ankles; they were heavier than she expected. They dragged him to the opened door, shared a quick kiss, then stepped out into the hall.
Bam! Bam! Gunshots echoed from the sanctuary and down the long hall of the east wing. Harden led them, one hand on the gun and one dragging his ankles along with Kerri. They made good time, until one of Elias’s tuxedoed guards stepped out of a room and glanced around, catching sight of them. He drew, but Harden was faster.
Bam! Bam, bam! Kerri couldn’t help but flinch, cringing and turning away, but she peeked up to see the guard falling back, three red holes in his white shirt.
Harden said, “Hurry!” and they dragged him down the hall toward the newly fallen guard. Something caught Kerri’s eye behind them, and she turned to see another guard staggering toward them, already wounded, dazed, barely on his feet even as he raised a handgun on them.
“Harden, behind you!”
Harden dropped Elias’s ankles into Kerri’s hands, turned, and shot another two shots; the guard snapped back, lifeless. Harden shot again, the gun dry-clicking several times.
Harden turned and tossed the gun away, grabbing Elias’s ankles and, with Kerri, dragging them farther down the hall. Once at the body of one fallen guard, Harden said, “Get his gun,” and Kerri did, the weapon just a few feet from his dead, empty hand.
She handed him the gun, took Elias’s ankles again, and followed Harden into the sanctuary.
Smoke was thick in the sanctuary, drifting in from the west wing of the church complex. A few tuxedoed guards lay dead, as well as several unfamiliar men in tracksuits, one or two in black leather dusters. Kerri kept her head down while she and Harden dragged Elias’s unconscious body across the sanctuary, with voices and gunshots muffled in the distance, and heat and smoke rising.
A guy in a red tracksuit ran at them and drew his gun, but Harden said, “Wait! We’re Paulie’s guys!” This gave the man in the tracksuit pause, and Harden said, “We got Paulie’s package; we gotta get outta here!”
The guy looked around, lowering his gun. “Okay, yeah, right, this way!” He turned toward the door, but two gunshots sent him jerking to the side, collapsing to the floor of the sanctuary in a pool of his own blood.
Harden turned and fired into that direction, but was answered only with silence. Finally, a metallic clack rattled from that smokey corner of the sanctuary, and Kerri and Harden both had to assume he’d killed the man, or at least removed the gun from his hand.
There was no time to think about it anyway.
Orange flames started to crackle as they caught the red velvet drapes, a sudden whoosh filling the sanctuary with a wave of dark gray smoke. Kerri’s eyes were burning, smoke filling her lungs, her head beginning to spin.
“Keep going,” Harden called out as if sensing her distress, “we’re almost there!”
Kerri pushed on, her legs weak and Elias seeming to get heavier as they dragged him along. The doors to the lobby only seemed to get farther and farther away—errant gunshots echoing, a police siren whining in the distance.
Harden shouted, “We gotta get outta
here before the cops arrive or we’re all dead!” Kerri nodded and secured her grip on the whip around Elias’s ankles, a useful handle for an almost impossible task.
They finally made it to the lobby doors, pushing blindly through. In the lobby, several more men lay dead, none of them appearing to be black-robed patrons. The lobby wasn’t deep, only a few yards, and it wasn’t long before Harden and Kerri pushed out into the glaring sunlight.
Kerri and Harden looked around as they scrambled down the steps. Elias hit his head on the stone steps, wincing and groaning, but Kerri glanced back and muttered, “Suck it up!” They got to the curb and looked around, but no car came for them from either direction—the police sirens getting louder, smoke wafting out of the church complex behind them.
“Where are they?” Harden could only shake his head, glancing in each direction. “Harden, what should we do?”
“Start draggin’ his ass across town, I guess.” A little red Fiat came racing up the street, honking its little horn furiously. Kerri and Harden turned to flag it down, just as gunshots rang out from the church.
Harden turned to see one last tuxedoed guard limping toward him, shooting recklessly and causing pedestrians to scatter and scream on both sides of the street. Harden put two bullets into his chest—the last of the clip—just as the Fiat skidded to a stop in front of them. The door opened and Kerri dragged Elias in. Harden was quick to pile in behind Elias, slamming the door closed behind him.
“Go,” Harden barked at the driver, “for Chrissake, go!”
Chapter 18
The Fiat tore down the streets of Amsterdam—narrow and winding and cluttered with that dense, Danish architecture. With the steep concrete drop-off into the canals, the narrow streets and bridges cluttered with pedestrians, there was no margin for error.
Gunshots rang behind them. Kerri and Harden ducked down before turning to peek out the rear windshield of the little car, cramped with Elias between them. He was stirring, his eyes blinking and a slow moan leaking out of his throat.
“At least he’s alive,” Kerri said, another gunshot shattering the windshield. She and Harden ducked, Kerri yanking Elias’s head forward, as it smacked against the back of the driver’s seat. “For now.”
The Fiat turned hard, the pressure throwing Kerri off her seat into Elias and both into Harden. Kerri shouted at the driver, “Take it easy up there, pal!”
The man in the passenger seat turned and glared at Kerri; her blood ran cold for reasons she couldn’t quite discern.
Another sharp turn in the other direction forced all of Elias and Harden’s weight onto her, pinning her against the little car door. Not having had time to put on a belt, Kerri realized that if that door flew open, she’d be thrown out of the car and be dashed against the street at high speed in the middle of dense traffic.
It would be a terrible death, but at least it would be quick.
But another sharp turn took the pressure off Kerri. But outside, a crowd of pedestrians screamed and scattered as the Fiat tore through an intersection, one car screeching and crashing into another in their wake.
“Jesus Christ, take it easy!” But they ignored Kerri, facing forward with cool resolve, unbothered by her protests. Kerri and Harden exchanged a worried glance as the Fiat sped on through those winding streets.
Kerri couldn’t help but think about Mark McCall, her first husband, and his last chaotic moments in a pharmaceutical daze, careening up that winding Mulholland Drive, stoned and speeding, angry at a fight he’d just had with his wife, Kerri Abernathy.
But Kerri’s imagination was shattered by the reality of the speeding Fiat tearing through the streets of Amsterdam. Mark was already dead, but Kerri’s and Harden’s lives were in the balance, and theirs weren’t the only ones.
The Fiat wound up behind some young woman on a scooter, her long hair flying out from under her helmet. She glanced behind her at the speeding Fiat, weaving and trying to get around her. But she was insecure on the bike, nervous in the traffic, and couldn’t seem to find room to pull over or get out of the way.
So she just drove faster, honking her little horn and trying to wave them back. But the Fiat honked louder and drove faster while the scooter swerved and wriggled, barely holding onto the road.
Kerri shouted, “Stop it, you asshole! You’re going to kill her!”
That’s when the man in the passenger seat pulled a handgun out of his jacket and pointed it at Kerri, sending a wave of shocked horror through her. He pointed it at Harden too, then at Kerri, neither of them saying a word.
On the street in front of the Fiat, the woman on the scooter finally cut to the side, smashing into a fruit cart which erupted in an explosion of fruit and wood and metal and oil, the woman flying up off the scooter and tumbling on the sidewalk.
Another sharp turn once again pinned Kerri against that door, and behind their pursuers skidded and crashed, the thick metallic crunch and skidding tires telling Kerri everything she needed to know about what happened behind the Fiat.
What was happening inside the Fiat was still a complete riddle to Kerri, but one that was about to be solved in the most terrible way possible.
She asked the man in the passenger seat, “Who are you? You’re not one of Don Paulie’s men.”
“Don Paulie?” He laughed, his accent so thickly European that Kerri could barely recognize his English.
“But I know you,” Kerri said, “I know I do.”
“From the mountain,” the man said, over-enunciating and still barely getting it out, “in Switzerland, the mountain.” He held up his gun, smiled, then lowered it again, on Kerri and then Harden.
It flashed in Kerri’s memory—the face of the two men on the ski lift behind her, the men she was certain were chasing her.
“You were following us in the park the other day,” Kerri said and the man nodded.
Harden said, “You’re from Sicily. And that’s where you’re taking us.”
The man in the passenger seat said, “Last time, we don’t get paid, you see? This American woman, la Blanca, she…um, how do you say? She take a dirt nap. But we still got to get paid, yes? The krauts will pay a lot of money for you three. Then they kill that fat American boss; we move in. It’s, how do you say, a win and a win.”
“I’ll pay you,” Harden said, “name your price. Whatever White Gold Escrow’ll pay, I’ll double it.”
The man shook his head in disgust. “You Americans…you think you can buy the whole world, eh? But we do not trust America, you see? Not anymore! We trust our own; we stick with our own.”
Harden made his move, lurching forward and grabbing the man’s gun. Kerri ducked out of the way as that gun wavered, one shot blasting inside the car and making the driver swerve. The car hit a curb and jostled everyone inside, the gun going off again. Kerri screamed, the heat of the blast filling the Fiat, the window nearest to Kerri shattering with the blow.
Harden and the passenger kept wrestling with the gun; another hard swerve from the panicked driver jutted the handgun forward and toward him just as it blasted a third shot. The driver’s skull burst open in a cloud of red mist, his body smashing against the driver’s side door and then slumping forward.
Kerri flashed again on Mark’s last ride, one she often imagined herself to have been on. In countless nightmares, she had been helpless in that careening car, unable to do anything but hold on and pray that the car didn’t go over, before it did as it always did, plummeting her and Mark to their shared deaths.
The Fiat swerved, unmanned and out of control. Kerri grabbed the gun too, the passenger still a lethal threat and the Fiat run wild, deadly to anybody in its path. People screamed; the car jostled as it hit another curb. The gun shot again, and Kerri managed to reach to the front seat and pull it out of the man’s hand. It flew back and out of the shattered door window behind Kerri’s head.
The shot rang in Kerri’s ears, shaking her brain in her very skull, almost pushing her eyes out of her skull from the
sheer pressure of the blast.
Harden lurched for the man while the Fiat rambled over the embankment and flew over the concrete drop-off and into the canal. The car seemed to hover in mid-air for just a split second, engine gunning, the water waiting below. Kerri knew in that fraction of a moment that her dreams had been premonitions, warnings of a fate she couldn’t escape, no matter how far she ran, or how fast.
The car hit the water hard, throwing Kerri and Elias and Harden forward, piling into the front seat and down onto their last adversary. Harden had already been reaching for the man’s neck, but the forward motion and the hard surface of the water forced the conflict, and the man’s neck snapped in Harden’s grip. The man lay still with his partner, but by then the Fiat was tipping over and sinking upside down into the canal, taking Kerri, Harden, and Elias with it.
Water rushed in from the shattered window and rear windshield, the force pushing all three of them back, deeper into the car. Daylight vanished as the car sank, all sound replaced by the echoing churn of a watery grave.
The canal water was dark and briny, mossy and filthy. Kerri’s eyes stung, heart pounding in her chest. But once the pressure leveled off, she could wriggle out from under Elias. She placed her foot at the rear windshield, pulled it back, and kicked hard. The already shattered glass gave a bit, but it took a second and then a third try to dislodge enough glass to give them an exit.
Kerri slipped out first. She managed to slip out of the windshield, the trunk of the car wobbly above and threatening to tilt down on her. Kerri turned to pull the dazed and motionless Elias out, grabbing him by the collar of his robe and disentagling him up out of the opening.
Kerri pulled him through the windshield, the trunk tilting above them. She held on tight to his lifeless body, swimming hard as her air ran out. She finally managed to loosen him free of the trunk and up toward the surface with no time to lose, invisible needles stabbing into her lungs.
Billionaire Benefactor Daddy: A Single Dad & Virgin Romance Boxset Page 87