Buttercup propelled her toward the door.
It was chilly outside—mid to high forties. Downright arctic by Lucy’s admittedly wimpy standards, especially since the only thing between her pampered hide and the elements was a pair of mismatched flannel jammies.
A nearly full moon provided the only illumination. Her five-acre property was isolated from her nearest neighbors by dense woods and a quarter-mile cobblestone driveway. She’d always appreciated the solitude. Until tonight.
The tender soles of her feet found every sharp pebble as Buttercup and Blossom half dragged her toward a dark sedan parked out of sight of the house. Bubbles jogged ahead to pop the trunk.
She screamed beneath her gag as the men hoisted her and dumped her on top of a tire iron and a set of jumper cables. The trunk also held a coil of rope. Buttercup hogtied her with practiced efficiency, lashing her ankles and tethering them to her wrists by a short length of rope behind her bowed back.
Bubbles leaned into the trunk to taunt her, now that those lethal feet were safely restrained. His nose was a pomegranate. The moonlight turned all that blood to black warpaint. “I’b gudda hab sub fud wid you, bij. Just you wait.”
The other two exchanged a look. Buttercup elbowed Bubbles aside to blindfold Lucy with an oily rag.
The trunk lid slammed shut. She heard car doors open and close. The vehicle rocked and settled. The engine rumbled to life, turning the trunk into a vibration chamber.
Trussed as she was, Lucy couldn’t keep herself from pitching to and fro as the car started rolling. Her stomach lurched. Oh yeah, she thought, that’s just what I need right now. A geyser of ice cream, popcorn, and bourbon, with only her nostrils for an exit.
She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths, forced her mind to function. Why would anyone want to kidnap her? Correction: Why would two anyones want to kidnap her, these trick-or-treat maniacs and whoever hired those two whiny chuckleheads who came late to the party?
When had it become open season on Lucy Narby?
She had to keep her head, no matter what happened. It was her only chance.
Don’t panic, Lucy commanded herself, right before something small and furry crawled up her pajama leg.
Chapter 2
WILL KITCHEN DIDN’T have long to wait. The racket in the trunk commenced before he was halfway down the drive.
“Josephine didn’t waste any time.” Fergus removed his Blossom mask. He tossed it and Will’s Buttercup mask into the backseat, where Mick sat nursing his busted beak.
“It probably smells the popcorn on her.” Will pushed the sweatshirt hood off his head.
“Think she’ll be okay?”
“Josie or Lucy?” He turned onto the two-lane that wound through this affluent community on Long Island’s North Shore.
“Wee thing’s apt to get squashed.” Fergus cocked his head, listening to the commotion.
“I can always swing by a pet store later.” Will shrugged. “One white mouse is as good as another.”
Mick snickered. “I’b telleeg Tob.”
Tom was Will’s son, and Josephine the Mouse belonged to him. Josie was an exceptionally sociable beast who’d been trained to scamper over the hulking bipeds who populated her simple world and exhume treats tucked into the odd pocket or cuff. Will had borrowed the animal earlier in the day and put her on half rations, wanting her hungry when she met his captive, who was scared to death of rodents. Lucy, of course, had no way of knowing the varmint terrorizing her was in fact a child’s harmless pet on the prowl for a Cheez Doodle or Reese’s Piece, but willing to settle for some of the popcorn she smelled.
He hoped Lucy didn’t flatten the thing in her frenzy to escape it, because he’d never get away with pulling a switcheroo on the boy. No freshly minted pet-store mouse could hope to pass for fat and friendly Josephine.
A fresh bongo riff from the trunk prompted Mick to pound his feet on the floorboard. He hollered, “Watch out, Lucy. That rat’s gudda bite your tit off,” followed by that braying laugh of his. “Tell it to leeb sub for be.”
Fergus glanced at Mick, then at Will, meaningfully.
Mick Jagger Drinkwater was Will’s nephew, being the noisome spawn of Will’s half sister Judith, who’d taken time off after graduating from Emerson twenty-five years earlier to embrace the groupie lifestyle and thereby “find herself.” She found herself pregnant by a third-rate guitarist with profound pharmaceutical issues. With only a handful of evasive maternal hints to go on, Mick had convinced himself he’d been sired by Keith Richards.
If anything, the frantic thumping in back was getting worse. Maybe Will should have padded the trunk.
“The lass is a firecracker.” Fergus wagged his bushy eyebrows. “Gave us some kind of workout, she did.”
“Can’t say we weren’t warned.”
“No, can’t say that. It was fun,” Fergus said, “till Mutt and Jeff showed up.”
“It would seem our client hired two teams.”
“That’s how it looks. But why?”
“I intend to find out.” Will glanced at his nephew in the rearview. “Clean yourself up, Mick. Get that blood off your face.”
“Later.”
“Now,” Will said. “We could get stopped. I’ve had enough nasty surprises for one night.”
“What about her?” Fergus asked. “Slammin’ around back there. I mean, I know we can handle it if some cop pulls us over, but who needs that?”
Will said, “She’ll run out of steam.”
“Hope not,” Mick snickered. “Not till I’b had my fud.”
“Listen, lad.” Fergus glowered over his shoulder. “I don’t know what you think is goin’ on here—”
“Fug you.” Mick spat on a dish towel he’d swiped from Lucy’s kitchen and scrubbed his face. “Loog what the bij did to me. I’b entitled.”
Fergus sent Will another look, a look that expressed more eloquently than words ever could just how ticked off Fergus was, what a bratty loose cannon Will’s nephew had proven to be, and what the hell was Will going to do about it.
Will didn’t leave him in suspense. He met Mick’s gaze in the rearview. “Your part in this is over.”
Mick stopped scrubbing. “What?”
“You’ll still get paid.”
“No way.” Mick grabbed Will’s seatback, got in his face. “I bid id on this thig from day one. You can’t kick me out now that the fud part’s starteeg.”
“Back off. You’re bleeding on the upholstery.”
“Goddabbit, I’b id on this. I’b a natural.”
Mick was a natural something. Maximum-security guest of the state, something along those lines. So much for doing Judith a favor. No more nepotism. Next time Will would write a check to one of his sister’s charities.
“This is not negotiable,” Will said. “I’m dropping you at your mom’s place. You’ve got to get that nose fixed up. She’ll take you to the ER.”
Mick pounded the back of Will’s seat. “You habit heard the ed of this.”
______
THERE IT WAS AGAIN. That scream. Reflexively Lucy turned her head toward the sound, though she was still blindfolded, still gagged with tape, and still securely bound, now tied hand and foot to a hard wooden chair.
She’d heard the scream a handful of times since her arrival here—wherever here was—about an hour and a half earlier. It was muted, as if from several rooms away, and at first she’d thought it was part of the background music she was being subjected to. Christina Aguilera at the moment, whining about being underappreciated, at about 150 decibels. Or was that Britney? Funny, Lucy wouldn’t have pegged Buttercup and his crew as fans of timeworn peroxide pop. Misogynist rap, perhaps. Heavy metal, for sure. Either one of which Lucy would gladly choose over this loathsome crap. Only, how could she forget it when it was blaring in her ears nonstop?
She ached all over from her struggle in the house, not to mention the one inside the car trunk, where she’d tried without success to evad
e that rat or whatever the horrid thing was. How had it even found its way inside the car? At least she’d left it behind when they’d hauled her inside.
There it was again. Another short, hoarse scream. What were they doing to that poor woman? It definitely sounded like a woman, and she was obviously suffering terribly. Lucy swallowed hard, wondering if the same agony was in store for her.
The ride from her house had taken over an hour, with one stop along the way. She’d heard a car door open, then slam with some force. A voice outside the vehicle had spat, “Fug you, man. Fug you and that bij. You’ll be sorry, both of you.” Bubbles. He’d punched the lid of the trunk as the car backed up and turned onto the road.
They’d ejected Bubbles. One small mercy in a terrifying ordeal.
At least she was finally warm, though she had yet to stop shivering.
Lucy had been doing some thinking. Her abductors had possessed her house alarm code and presumably a copy of her key. They knew about her birth control pills, her only regular medication if you didn’t count Cherry Garcia. None of which was public knowledge, and all of which pointed to your basic inside job. Unless her son, John, had gone completely batshit, that left his father. She didn’t want to consider that Frank might be behind this, but who else could it be?
Yet why would he do such a thing? It was true that twenty years of marriage entitled her to a hefty settlement, but she’d never known her husband to be either tight-fisted—with her at least—or vindictive. And if, for the sake of argument, he preferred widowhood to divorce, wouldn’t he simply have hired someone to do the deed right there in her home? Make it look like the proverbial robbery gone bad?
Lucy had married too young as an act of rebellion against her hippy-dippy upbringing, exchanging “I do’s” with the first buttoned-up, golf-playing, proper-fork-using, upwardly mobile M.B.A. she could strong-arm down the aisle. By the end of their four-week Italian honeymoon, she knew she’d made The Biggest Mistake of Her Life. Problem was, somewhere between the Colosseum and the Bridge of Sighs, her young bridegroom had planted his hardy seed, and hadn’t Lucy sworn she’d never subject any child of hers to the kind of undisciplined, anything-goes single-parent household she and her sister, Ethel, had endured?
Add to that the fact that her mother, Savannah Moss, a.k.a. Savannah Banana, an unreconstructed peace-and-love throwback, had actively lobbied against the marriage—well, against marriage in general. Savannah would have been smug as hell if Lucy came crawling back after less than a month of wedded bliss.
So she’d stuck it out, and as the years piled up and one decade slid into the next, she’d settled into a kind of passive dependence. Her existence was safe and comfortable, if not particularly stimulating. When Frank’s business travel increased to the point that he was away more than he was home, she found she didn’t resent it as most wives would. In fact, she looked forward to the respites from having to pretend theirs was a healthy, satisfying marriage.
The dissatisfaction was purely one-sided. Frank would happily have gone on forever the way they were. He didn’t deserve to be hurt. He might not be the most exciting husband, but aside from a few irksome personality quirks, he possessed nothing she could point to as a fatal flaw. He was attentive, honest, and neat. Not to mention an outstanding provider. He’d never raised his hand to her in anger. In fact, they never argued. Frank was a good father, and not the type to cheat on her. He respected—one might even say revered—the institution of marriage.
And yet their relationship had been flawed from day one. She’d hoped they would grow closer over the years, that this pleasant young man she’d chosen to share her life would, in time, become her soul mate. But that deep attachment never materialized. She’d sensed a polite distance between them from the beginning, as if some crucial part of him were destined to remain hidden from her. For the longest time Lucy assumed it was her fault, that she was deficient as a wife. She bent over backward to apply corrective measures. Romantic vacations. Shared hobbies. Couples therapy. She even took a massage class, hoping to literally pound some closeness into their marriage. All in vain. Over the years, the polite distance widened into a gaping chasm.
She told herself she was simply asking too much, her expectations warped by Hollywood and her own girlish fantasies. But as time passed and she witnessed the emotional intimacy other couples enjoyed, she could no longer delude herself. Her marriage was sick. And no, it wasn’t her fault, though it took her twenty years to realize it.
Telling Frank she wanted a divorce was the most painful thing she’d ever had to do. She’d waited until he returned from yet another extended trip to KrunchWorks’ Midwest distribution facility in Chicago, then broke it to him as gently as she could. He’d been stunned, dumbfounded. He’d never seen it coming. Lucy regretted the misery she was causing him, but now that she’d taken the long-overdue first step, she was damned if she’d back down. Forty wasn’t too old to start over, to see what her life could have been, could still be.
As for John, now that he was in college, the whole broken-family thing was less of an issue. That wouldn’t have been the case if she’d succumbed to Frank’s desire for a big family. In a rare display of assertiveness, she’d drawn the line at one child, despite his constant cajoling those first few years to fill their big house with little Narbys. She’d denied her husband the brood he’d always wanted: something else to feel guilty about.
Frank had moved into a studio apartment in Queens close to KrunchWorks company headquarters. He called her every day, the consummate sales professional using all the powers of persuasion at his disposal.
Was it possible? Could her husband of twenty years—the father of her child—be behind her abduction? What could he gain by bringing her here, except perhaps to keep the bloodstains off the antique Ispahan carpet?
Lucy forced herself to put aside these questions for the moment and concentrate on her first priority, which was, simply, survival. Second on the list was escape. She would cooperate and appease and, just maybe, get away from this horrorfest with her hide intact.
A door banged open. Lucy yelped beneath her gag. Footfalls—two sets of them—approached her. Then silence. They were in the room with her. What were they doing? Why didn’t they say something? Do something?
No, that’s okay, she thought. Don’t do a damn thing. Whatever these creeps had in mind, she’d just as soon never find out.
A voice inches away made her jerk. “What was that all about back there, Lucy?” It was Buttercup. The man in the gray hoodie. The Grand High Poobah of this operation.
A perplexed grunt made it past the tape sealing Lucy’s mouth. He ripped it off. She managed not to scream this time, but only through force of will. Did people really have their crotches waxed?
“What kind of game are you playing?” he demanded.
“What? I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lucy’s heart banged painfully.
“What did I tell you, lad?” It was the big Irishman. “She’s a stubborn one, all right.”
“I asked you a question,” Buttercup said. He was behind her now. “Don’t play stupid.”
“I’m not, I swear.” She craned her neck to face him, despite the blindfold. “I—I really have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean, ‘game’?”
Two big hands slammed onto the chairback and tipped it backward. She cried out. His voice was a low growl near her ear. “Like they say in the movies—we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way.”
He let the chair drop forward. The front legs hit the floor with a thump. If Lucy hadn’t been tied to it, she would have sprawled onto the floor. Couldn’t they give her a hint, for God’s sake? How did they expect her to think with some perky bimbo warbling about losing her cherry at head-throbbing volume?
“The lass is trying,” Blossom said, from farther away now.
“I don’t think she is,” Buttercup said, still behind her. “I don’t think she’s trying at all. I think she n
eeds a little incentive.”
“Oh, lad.” Blossom sounded dismayed, even a tad alarmed. “Not that. There’s no call.”
“What?” Lucy cried. “Don’t! Please. I really am trying—”
Something dropped onto her head. Something small and solid and warm, with tiny feet that scampered down her hair and under her collar.
“No! Get that thing off me!” She jerked wildly, arching her back. Only Buttercup’s grip on the chairback kept her from pitching face-first onto the floor.
“Get it off! Get it off of me!” The little beast was perched on her left nipple.
“If you insist.” Buttercup started to slip his hand into her pj’s.
“Don’t you dare!”
The animal, excited by the commotion, ran down her torso and leg. Lucy heard one of them intercept it. Not to squash it or trap it, but to cuddle and coo to the damn thing.
“Did that great loud harpy frighten you?” Blossom’s gruff Irish brogue turned syrupy. “Poor wee beastie. Here you go, Josie. A little treat I swiped from Quint. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“You sick bastards.” Lucy couldn’t stop herself. “What was that for? Just to terrorize me?”
What was that thing anyway, a gerbil? Some harmless hamster? It made little difference. Lucy was pathologically terrified of rodents. Mickey Mouse or plague-ridden rat, it was all the same to her. Her captors had no way of knowing that, of course. Lucky guess on their part.
The source of her phobia was no mystery. It could be traced back to the winter of her tenth year and the foul Gladsome Farm, one of a series of die-hard hippy communes Savannah had drifted into and out of during her daughters’ impressionable years. The specific middle-of-the-night incident involved a sleeping pallet placed amid disintegrating barrels of flour and oats, and about eighty million voracious field mice.
“I expect answers when I return.” Buttercup leaned in close. His warm breath tickled her ear. “Josephine has friends.”
Lucy heard them moving toward the door. “Wait! Why are you doing this? What do you want?” No response. “Did you call my sister? My mother? I’ll give you their numbers. They’ll pay!”
Snatched Page 2