“You’re not exactly known for dropping bombshells on me like this though. I wasn’t expecting it is all. It’s a bit of a shock.”
“You sound like my bank account, Porter.”
The line went dead and I was left with my silent phone, a pile of vegetables to be chopped, and steak fajitas to make for two.
The screen flashed to life with a buzz one more time, displaying the time and a message from Holly. Five o’clock on the dot.
Just leaving the office. See you soon!
“Shit!” I got back to chopping with a vengeance and tossed the strip steak into the frying pan. I doused it in olive oil and spices and waited for it to start sizzling. I didn’t want the veggies to be soggy, so I had to wait until the meat was nearly done before adding the bell peppers and onions.
I sent off text messages to Parker, Preston, and my mom to tell them my retirement was official and poured myself a glass of wine. I flipped the meat in the pan and stepped around the corner to set up the bar with plates and a wine glass for Holly. I was down to ten minutes until she was due to walk in the door.
I added the veggies to the pan and prayed that everything would come together nicely in the end.
I tossed the tortillas in the microwave at the last minute and filled the wine glass I had set out for her.
Hot plates, silverware, and containers of food slid into place at five thirty-one and I stepped back to survey what I had put together for her. Something was still missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I glanced around the room hoping that something would trigger an idea.
“Candles!” I snapped my finger as the idea hit me and ran into the bedroom. I grabbed two of the tapers Holly kept on the windowsill but never lit and carried them back into the living room dining area.
Once they were burning brightly, I shut off all the lights, grabbed her glass of wine, and took up residence in the entryway to wait for her to get home.
I checked my phone compulsively for the next ten minutes.
No texts and no phone calls came through.
I finally broke down and hit the call button. It rang six times and went to voicemail.
“Holly, where are you, beautiful? Call me back.”
I disconnected the call and placed her glass of wine back on the counter. I gathered up the rapidly cooling food and put it in the oven so that it would stay warm.
A text went out moments later saying the same thing my voicemail had and I began to pace. It wasn’t like Holly to be late home without saying anything. We had a schedule and, until that point, neither of us had deviated from it without some kind of notification.
Something wasn’t right.
I called her phone again and got the same reaction: Six rings and voicemail.
I pulled up Mitch’s number and dialed.
“Porter?”
“Yeah,” I felt like a total fuck tard calling him, “Hey, have you seen Holly?”
“Not since she walked past my desk at five o’clock. She was in a huge rush. Said she was meeting up with you.”
“That was the plan, but she’s not home yet.”
“Wait,” I could hear his confusion even over the phone, “You didn’t pick her up?”
“No,” I didn’t like where the conversation was heading, “I had lunch with my brother and came straight home to start cooking dinner for her. She texted me on her way out of the office to let me know she was on her way, but I haven’t heard from her since.”
“Porter, her car was still in the parking lot when I left.”
My stomach sank.
“Do you think Becks picked her up?”
“Maybe. Want me to call her and check?” I could hear the panic edging into his voice.
“Would you?”
“Of course!”
“Thanks, Mitch. Let me know as soon as you know anything?”
“You got it, handsome.”
The line went dead and I cursed under my breath.
Pacing a hole in the floor was starting to seem like a pretty legitimate prospect. I laid out a track around the couch and began making laps. It was somewhere around the tenth lap that my phone rang.
“Tell me something good, Mitch.”
“Becks hasn’t heard from her either,” he sounded more freaked out than I was, “I don’t like this, Porter. Becks and I are on our way over. We’ll set up a plan of attack and go from there.”
The other line beeped through, “Gotta go, Mitch. The other line’s ringing.”
I hit the green button to answer the intruding call, “Hello?”
“Porter!” It was Becks, “I’m on my way over there. Have me a glass of wine ready and call me the moment you hear from her if she contacts you before I get there.”
“I’d love to if you and Mitch would stop tying up my phone to tell me that you’re on your way here.”
“See you in three minutes,” and the line went dead.
I continued to walk circles around the couch and didn’t bother breaking my stride when Becks stormed through the door like a tornado.
“Wine me,” she demanded.
“The glass on the counter is all yours.”
Mitch was right behind her.
“I brought wine!” he announced, waving the bottles above his head like war banners.
“I called her phone six times on the way over here. I got voicemail every time,” Becks told us, “She’s never ignored me that many times in a row.”
“I called her too,” Mitch said, “Six rings and voice mail.”
“Fuck!” I roared into the room for lack of anything better to say. Becks and Mitch both jumped at the sound of my voice.
“What the fuck, Porter?” Becks yelled, holding a hand to her chest, “Are you trying to kill us? You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“Holly is missing, Becks, and I can’t do a fucking thing about it! I don’t even know where to start looking and it’s been an hour and a half since any of us have seen her. She could be fucking anywhere by now!”
“Have you called the police yet?” Mitch asked in an attempt to calm me.
“I thought about it on my way over here,” Becks said, “but they won’t start looking for her until she’s been gone for at least twenty-four hours. She’s an adult and won’t be considered a missing person until then.”
“What if she doesn’t have twenty-four hours, Becks?” Mitch was beginning to fall apart right before my eyes and I needed to do something to rein us all back in.
I needed to give them something to do to keep them occupied.
“Let’s start looking then. Someone should stay here in case she comes home. Maybe she lost her phone. Becks, think you can handle that?”
She nodded her agreement, “Wine will keep me company.”
“Mitch, you start back at the office. Search every square inch of that property and find me something to work with. If she’s missing, there’s gotta be a clue as to where she went. People don’t just vanish without a trace.”
“I brought the wine, how come I don’t get to stay at the house? Why do girls always get the easy jobs?”
Becks and I just stared at him until he agreed and stormed out the front door.
“What are you gonna do, Porter?”
Now that the question was there to be answered, I wasn’t really sure.
Unfortunately, I didn’t need to think very hard about it. My phone vibrated in my hand and I nearly dropped it in my haste to read the text that had come through.
It only took two sentences to bring my world crashing down around me: If you want to see her again, you’ll be here by 7:30. 5873 Pierpont Ave.
I called the number that had sent the text as I ran out the door. It went straight to a generic voicemail.
“This had better be some kind of sick fucking joke you son-of-a-bitch or I’m gonna rip your balls off and stuff them down your throat until you choke on them!” I screamed into the phone.
Mitch had almost closed the door to his car when I
flew down the steps and b-lined it for the driveway.
“Porter!” he yelled, “What’s going on?”
“Get inside with Becks!” I yelled back as I climbed behind the wheel and threw my phone across the cab as my Land Rover roared to life and peeled out of my spot in Holly’s driveway.
I had eighteen minutes to get all the way across Los Angeles County.
The world around me blurred as I slammed on the gas pedal and tore through the neighborhood.
Seven minutes.
The stench of old motor oil and sawdust hung so heavily in the air that I had to fight the urge to gag. I knew I was close to the ocean because I could taste the salt, thick and briny on the air. It felt like there was a pillow pressed over my face though, so none of my senses were clear. It was all a massive, awful jumble.
Someone nearby was slurring and groaning. The pitiful sound echoed off distant walls and high ceilings, further disorienting my groggy brain.
Eyes, Holly. You have eyes. Use them.
I focused every iota of concentration I had into opening and focusing my abnormally useless eyes.
I felt them flutter open, my brain told me they were open, but I couldn’t see anything.
Dammit, Holly. You’ve gone blind. You couldn’t have picked a better time to lose the use of your eyes?
My eyes weren’t the only things that had stopped operating properly. My arms and legs didn’t seem to be communicating with my brain either.
Was I in a horrible car accident? Am I a half-deaf, fully blind, quadriplegic woman now? Wait, am I drooling?
A sharp slap across my cheek cleared some of the cotton in my brain and the brilliant bursts of color that erupted in the darkness forced me to question whether or not I had actually gone blind. The cogs in my head began to turn again, informing me that my arms and legs did in fact still have feeling in them. I could feel the rope that fastened me to the chair cutting into my wrists and ankles.
Hearing came next. It became painfully clear to me that the pathetic noises filling every inch of spare space in my head were coming from my own mouth. What’s worse is the fact that I was uncontrollably begging some invisible assailant to let me go.
“You’re not going anywhere,” a quiet voice hissed in my ear. Those four words snaked around the inside of my skull like an electric train on a track. With each pass they grew louder until they became a dull roar that nearly drowned out the sharp click of receding steps.
All at once, my senses came into sharp focus and my brain finally received the messages my extremities were sending it.
I was tied to a chair, blindfolded, covered in bruises, and I had, in fact, been drooling on myself. Waves of nausea rolled through my stomach and sharp jabs of pain tore through my entire body.
I peeled my sandpaper-dry tongue off the roof of my mouth and formed what sounded to me like a complete sentence. In reality, it was a bunch of indistinct slurring with one clear word thrown in for good measure: “Why?”
“That,” my captor screeched, “is the million dollar question, isn’t it?”
The clear sound of stilettos clipping back in my direction added a spark of terror to the agony I felt in every inch of my being.
My head was ripped backwards by my hair and before I could scream, something was stuffed in my mouth and tied in place.
“You don’t get to speak to me you fucking slut!” Another slap across the face punctuated the tantrum, effectively driving her message into my brain like a railroad spike.
“In brighter news,” her voice went from psychotic to almost amicable, “he hasn’t shown up yet which proves my point that he really doesn’t care if you cease to exist. Conveniently enough for me, I would really like to see you not exist anymore. My only hurdle now is deciding how to make that happen. I think I’ll give him a little more time while I make up my mind. There needs to be some kind of incentive that will both encourage him to show up and keep me entertained enough to keep you alive. He needs to see the end of you. For the sake of motivation on all sides of this triangle, I have informed him that for every five minutes he’s late, I will be breaking one of your fingers. If I run out of fingers, you run out of time. Oh look, four minutes have gone by already. Which finger would you like me to start with?”
I tried to plead with her through the cloth gag in my mouth as she ran a single, slender finger down each of mine. It was like a twisted game of This Little Piggy.
“Let’s start small,” she whispered. Her mouth was so close to my ear I could feel her breath as it brushed over my cheek.
She pried the pinky finger of my right hand out of its balled position and held it wrapped in her palm for a moment, “This is probably going to hurt.”
I could hear the cruel smile in her voice as she said the words and I screamed as loud as my hoarse voice would allow. She stood there, my pinky in her hand, silent, until I stopped wailing and broke down into sobs.
Then there was a sudden pressure accompanied by a gut-wrenching crack as she violently shoved my pinky flat against the back of my hand.
I might’ve screamed, but the cotton had returned to my brain. I was sure I had tipped over in my chair from the world listing so sharply to the side, but I never felt myself hit the floor.
I continued to sob as my body worked through the shock and my pinky began to throb.
“For some reason,” she began to pace around my chair, “I thought you’d be stronger than this. I’m disappointed in how little fight there was in you. I expected thrashing and swearing and yelling, but all you’ve done is mumble and whine and beg. You don’t deserve him. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. That’s why he’s not here. He’s probably happy I’m taking you off his hands. I’m not sure what he thought he saw in you but clearly, the illusion has been broken. Now Ryder can get back to his normal life—the life that didn’t have you in it. The life he made with me.”
Who the fuck is this crazy bitch?
My brain kicked into survival mode and I tried to think of ways to keep her talking without actually engaging her in conversation. The only thing I could think to do without the ability to speak was to struggle. I had to put up the fight she wanted and keep her from getting bored.
I tried to rock the chair side-to-side and back and forth. I pulled against the restraints holding me in place as hard as my exhausted limbs would allow, but nothing budged. In the end, I was only able to violently shake my head and scream against the gag in my mouth.
It wasn’t much, but it seemed to do the trick.
“That’s more like it,” she leered, “still a pretty pitiful display, but at least it’s something!” A tiny electronic beep went off somewhere in the room and she clicked her tongue, “Another five minutes down and still no Ryder. Shall we just go in order?”
She pried the ring finger out of my weakly balled fist and without waiting for me to stop fighting, slammed it backward until my fingernail touched my wrist.
The larger bones filled the air with a louder crack than my pinky had and sent an immediate blaze of pain up my entire arm. I screamed until my voice gave out and tried, against my better judgment, to lash out at her with my feet. I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness at some point. However, when the agony of my middle finger being snapped five minutes later wracked my body, I was most definitely awake.
She had my thumb gripped firmly in her hand when a door somewhere in the distance slammed. We both froze. I even held my breath, straining my ears in hopes of hearing something, anything, that would tell me my savior had come.
The silence hung in the air between us like darkness, deep and seemingly impenetrable. I didn’t need someone to drop a pin to tell me how quiet it was, I could hear the bitch’s heart pounding in her chest.
The longest ten seconds of my life passed in this manner before the best sound in the world finally rang through the space as clear as a bell.
“Holly?”
It was Porter’s voice.
He had finally come for me.
I thought I heard a muffled voice, but by the time my own voice had faded it was gone.
“Holly, babe,” I shouted, “If you can hear me, I need you to make some noise! I can’t see anything in here! Tell me where you are, sweetheart!”
The loud hum of industrial lighting filled the air as a single bulb against the far wall blazed to life. I could make out two figures—one was slumped over in a chair, and the other was standing beside the first holding its hand.
My feet pounded against the concrete before I even realized I was moving.
When I was close enough to make them both out clearly, my heart stopped as I skidded to a halt.
Holly was bound to the chair, limp and bleeding from the corner of her mouth and nose. I could see the sickly yellow of a fresh bruise forming beneath the blindfold over her eyes. Duct tape held her wrists, ankles, and shoulders to a heavy steel chair that had been bolted to the floor. Four of the fingers on her right hand were bent at grotesque angles and her thumb was captured in the palm of a finely manicured grip.
“Vanessa?”
“Hello, Ryder.”
My brain struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. I looked back and forth from one woman to the other, trying to make sense of it all.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” Vanessa announced happily, “We can finally put an end to all of this madness now! You don’t have to retire anymore! I’ve taken care of it! You can come back to me and we can go back to the way things were!”
Vanessa jerked Holly’s thumb backward and dropped her hand like it was an empty hamburger wrapper. The weak yelp of pain that came out of Holly shot straight through me, shredding my heart like razor blades through paper.
“What the fuck Vanessa?”
I moved to help Holly, but before I could take two steps Vanessa had reached behind her and pulled out a handgun. She pointed it at Holly’s head.
Okay… So too much coffee can make aerobics instructors snap. Good to know.
I froze and put my hands in front of me.
Porter (Dick Dynasty #1) Page 19