“Sure I do.”
“Will calls it a SIG-Sauer. Such an ugly name. Eet is real. I show you.”
“That’s not—” Lucy gasped as something cold and metallic kissed the side of her neck.
“You are thinking thees is not a gun,” the woman said. “You are thinking eet is something else. A lipstick perhaps.”
“No. No, I believe you. It’s a gun. I’ll behave.”
“Bon. Come now.” Frenchie prodded Lucy with the weapon. “Thees way.” She directed her through the open doorway and down some sort of hallway. They pushed past a swinging door. The floor under Lucy’s bare feet changed from smooth linoleum to a gridwork of cold porcelain tiles. The acoustics of the place told her where she was even before Frenchie steered her into a stall.
Lucy groped for the door latch and fumbled blindly with her jammies, not daring to dislodge the blindfold. What was this place, a school? If so, they couldn’t be too far from civilization. She could be in the middle of a town. This building could be on a major road, although she doubted it. She’d listened hard since her arrival, straining for hints as to her location. At one point she’d heard a far-off police siren and briefly entertained a fantasy of the entire Nassau County Police Department rushing to her rescue. During lulls in the music, she’d made out birdsong, but muted.
“You are lucky to be a woman, madame. The men . . .” Frenchie lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sometimes they make them use a coffee can. Barbare. Ah. But I say too much. Will is always telling me I say too much. He says that is why my name suits me.”
And that would be what? Chatty Kathy? Lucy flushed the john and, with Frenchie’s assistance, found a sink and soap dispenser. She tilted her head in Frenchie’s direction. “You seem like a . . . a nice person. Can I ask you something?”
“Certainement, madame.”
Lucy leaned in close. She whispered, “Why was I kidnapped? Who’s behind this? What are they planning to do to me?”
Her companion laughed delightedly. “You are a naughty one. And so convaincante.”
While Lucy struggled to recall her high-school French, she heard it again. That pitiful, far-off shriek. Frenchie appeared not to notice.
Back in the room, the woman removed Lucy’s blindfold. Lucy blinked at her austere surroundings. She was in a black box of a room, about twenty by twenty feet. The walls, door—even the acoustic ceiling tiles and the plywood nailed over the windows—were painted flat black.
A lone wooden chair occupied the center of the room—her butt was on intimate terms with that hard seat—and a thin, bare mattress lay in one corner. That was it in the way of furnishings, if you didn’t count the pair of speakers mounted near the ceiling—dispensing Britney now, with her profound, soul-searching admission that oops! she did it again. About a dozen iron rings, some with chains attached, studded the floor and the cinder-block walls.
Signs of wear marred the walls and hardware, telling Lucy she wasn’t the first resident of this dingy little torture chamber. What kind of operation were the Powerpuff guys running here, to require this kind of setup? Was this some sort of kidnapping mill? Did they advertise in the yellow pages or was it all word of mouth?
Frenchie was still behind her. “Oh! Where is my head? Don’t turn around yet.” Lucy heard her fumbling with something. “Eet is the details that are important. Will is always telling me this. I must keep in mind the details. All right, madame. You may turn around now.”
She did, and saw a woman with big, frosted hair adjusting the blond Bubbles mask, crumpled now where Lucy’s heel had made contact last night.
Frenchie wasn’t a young woman. The mask concealed her face, but the crepey, sun-damaged skin and flabby muscle tone—what Savannah called “underarm dingle-dangle”—were revealing. Lucy was thinking mid-fifties. Late forties at the very least. The legs, on display below a body-hugging minidress, were Rockette-perfect.
No, I didn’t see her face, Officer, but she’s French and she wears the costliest perfume in the world and it wouldn’t kill her to do a few triceps presses.
“Are you hungry?” Frenchie asked.
“I guess.” Being kidnapped and terrorized always piqued her appetite.
Lucy didn’t notice the food tray near the door until Frenchie gestured toward it with the pistol, the same ugly gray-black semiautomatic Will had brandished last night. “Breakfast, madame.” She swung the gun in an expansive gesture, her finger on the trigger the whole time. Lucy had to remind herself to keep breathing. She looked at the tray. She saw her birth control pills and . . . Was that what she thought it was?
Frenchie said, “You have here wheatgrass juice and bulgur mush. Very nutritious, oui? Very cleansing to the system.”
Lucy was well acquainted with wheatgrass juice and bulgur mush. As a child, she’d known nothing but this kind of macrobiotic crap; Taco Belle and Pizza Hut may as well have been in the next galaxy. She’d been as much a captive back then, to Savannah’s loopy counterculture lifestyle, as she was now to her abductors. She hadn’t tasted real food until she’d lit off on her own at age seventeen.
If Lucy were home, she’d be tucking into a Western omelet with nice oily home fries and about a half pound of bacon right about now. Or maybe she’d have gone out to Wafflemania for a Belgian waffle à la mode and a heap of sausage links. Either way, there’s be about a gallon of hot black coffee on the side. Her stomach whined like a spanked pup.
“Is something wrong, madame?”
“No. No, of course not. It looks—” prechewed “—very nutritious.”
“You must finish all of it, of course.” Frenchie wagged the gun at Lucy, whose heart squirmed into her throat, presumably to make itself a smaller target. “Every bite. You understand?”
“Yes. Fine.” I’ll make all gone with the bulgur slop, you silly tart.
“Bon appétit.” Frenchie disappeared through the doorway. The lock turned with a decisive click.
______
THE DOOR TO 1602 Jefferson Court swung open, revealing a tall woman in her mid-thirties with curly chestnut hair. She was about seven months pregnant. A toddler clung to her leg, begging to be picked up.
Wesley McIntyre offered a disarming smile and a passable Latino accent. “Mrs. . . .” He pretended to consult his clipboard. “Narby? Anne Marie Narby?”
“Yes?” The woman crouched and lifted the whining child with a grunt, settling her on her hip. She reached into a pocket of her maternity tunic for a tissue to scoop twin ropes of green mucus off the girl’s flushed face.
“I’ve got one about that age,” Wesley said, winking at the tyke, who hid her face in her mother’s shoulder, then peeked out again and rubbed her eye. “What is she, two? Two and a half?”
“Nineteen months.” Anne Marie Narby shifted her burden. “This one’s a moose. What’s this about?”
“Mrs. Narby, my name is Carl Ramirez. I’m with the volunteer fire department here in Egerton.” Wesley tapped his pen on the generic fire department patch he’d sewn onto the left breast of his navy baseball jacket. Egerton was a middle-class suburb of Chicago.
“We gave.”
“I know that, and the department is grateful for the support of community residents like yourself. Reason I’m here, every family that makes a donation, we offer a free inspection of all their smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.”
“Thanks, but we don’t need anything like that.” She was already backing up.
Wesley halted the door’s swing with a meaty hand. “Is Mr. Narby home?”
“No. He’s working.”
“Your husband works weekends? Hey, I know what that’s like.”
“He travels to New York a lot. For business.”
“Well . . .” Wesley gnawed his lip, studying his clipboard. From inside the house came a burst of rancorous noise—kids squabbling over a video game, by the sound of it. “See, it was Mr. Narby that scheduled the inspection. He was worried some of your equipment is obsolete.”
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“He was?”
“Can you tell me this, Mrs. Narby? Is your kitchen fire extinguisher the ABC multipurpose type?”
Mrs. Narby frowned. The child fussed to be let down, and her mother wearily complied.
“I’ll be in and out in a jiffy,” Wesley said. “Two, three minutes, tops.”
“Mom,” a boy called from the depths of the house. “Where are the Ched’r Wheelz?”
“There’s a case in the basement,” Mrs. Narby called. “Don’t make me run the stairs.”
“Kid’s got good taste.” Wesley patted his paunch, chuckling. “Those things are my downfall.”
The little girl rubbed her face on her mother’s pants leg, smearing snot. She raised her chubby arms again, whining. Stepping past the threshold, Wesley went to lift her. “Ya mind?”
“She’s got a cold,” Mrs. Narby warned.
“I should be worried? After all the bugs my kids’ve brought home?” He swung the tot into his arms. She detonated a big, juicy sneeze right in his face. He laughed. “Bulls-eye.”
Forty-five minutes later, Wesley waved goodbye from the front porch, gingerly so as not to drop any of the dozen bags of Ched’r Wheelz Anne Marie Narby had pressed on him. He found the nearest Burger King drive-thru, parked, and dug out his cell phone.
“What are you eating?” Joe demanded.
“Grilled chicken sandwich. No mayo. Side salad.” Wesley licked Whopper residue off his fingers and hammered home the last of the fries.
Joe wasn’t buying it. “They’re going to have to let out your tux, you know that, don’t you? You won’t be able to squeeze into it by December. And there’s that little matter of your cholesterol? Are you drinking plenty of water at least?”
“Uh-huh.” Wesley pried the lid from his thick shake and sucked down a wad.
“When will you be home?”
“Can’t get a flight out of O’Hare till morning.” Bad luck. He’d hoped to get back to New York in time to derail Frank Narby’s rescue mission; he’d had no luck getting through to him by phone. In light of what he’d just learned, he didn’t want the idiot getting himself killed just yet.
“Last-minute flights. Hotel. This has turned into an expensive trip.” Joe made that little fretting noise Wesley had always found both endearing and exasperating. “We shouldn’t talk long. These are roaming minutes,” Joe said. “Chicago’s out of your calling area.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s an investment. This one’s gonna pay for the wedding, Joe.”
The line was silent a moment. “Are you serious?”
Wesley laughed. “It’s just like I figured.”
“I do not believe it. That weasely son of a bitch. What’s that slurping sound?” Joe was on full alert now. “You got a thick shake, didn’t you? Grilled chicken my ass.”
“Okay, I’ll get off now.”
“No!” Joe said. “Tell me everything.”
“I don’t have all the juicy details yet, but it seems old Frankie tied the knot with the second Mrs. Narby twelve years ago. Big Italian wedding. I saw the album. Only—whoops!—he forgot to divorce the first Mrs. N.”
“How embarrassing.”
“I love it when you giggle,” Wesley said.
“Shut up. That was a manly chortle.”
“Frank and Anne Marie didn’t waste any time. They’ve got five cookie snatchers, age one and a half to eleven, with number six on the way.”
“Oh my God, that poor woman,” Joe said.
“She’s raising them in a crappy little split-level with a postage-stamp yard.” Wesley tore open a bag of Ched’r Wheelz. “It’s Dogpatch, Joe—a free-range kiddie farm. You could fit Anne Marie’s whole house into Lucy’s greatroom, practically. Guess there wasn’t much bread left for family number two.”
“So he, what, commutes halfway across the country from one family to the other?”
“Basically. Company headquarters and East Coast distribution are in Queens. Midwest facility is out here in Chicago. Guess where he’s been spending more and more of his time.”
“And Lucy doesn’t suspect a thing?”
“Nope, and neither does Anne Marie,” Wesley said. “If Narby had half a brain, he’d let Lucy cut him loose like she wants and thank the god of bigamous fools she never found out. But he’s determined to keep them both, and that’s good news for me and you. Next time you talk to the caterer?”
“Yeah?”
“Cancel the Korbel. Tell him to lay in Dom Perignon.”
Chapter 5
“SHE LIKES YOU,” Will said.
Lucy jerked her head away as her captor, still in the ridiculous mask and gray hoodie, brought the fat white mouse close to her face. She would have jumped up on the chair, but seeing as she was shackled hand and foot to the rough black wall, that wasn’t an option.
Somewhere between the bulgur gruel and the wheatgrass chaser, she’d decided there was something fishy about this whole operation. This latest scenario was a case in point. If Lucy were to kidnap someone, she’d refrain from turning her victim into a living depiction of every corny dungeon cartoon she’d ever seen, the ones with bearded, bedraggled prisoners exchanging bon mots while dangling by their wrists.
Not that she was actually dangling. Her arms were stretched over her head, secured to iron rings; her feet, similarly restrained, were nevertheless on solid ground. Will had carefully calibrated the length of chain and degree of slack. It was as if he wanted her uncomfortable, but not too uncomfortable. Dungeon Lite.
It was just Will this time; the big Irishman was absent. The background “music” still blared, the same vacuous lyrics in the same jailbait voices, the same synthesized rhythms assaulting her over and over and over. At least Will had dropped that bizarre “What kind of game are you playing?” business, though if Lucy had her druthers, she’d take the interrogation over the rodent any day.
Will let the little varmint crawl on his hand. A shudder racked Lucy. Josephine, they called the thing. Someone’s twisted idea of a pet. Hadn’t these sick creeps heard of dogs and cats? Lucy would sooner cuddle up to a rattlesnake than willingly touch something like that.
He moved the animal so close, its twitching whiskers brushed her cheek. She choked out a sob. She looked into the beast’s pink eyes and felt her nutritious, cleansing breakfast begin to rise.
“Please . . .” she pleaded in a tiny voice. “I can’t . . . can’t breathe.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. Here, she wants to give you a kiss.”
Lucy’s panic bubbled over. She screamed and thrashed, pulling hard against the iron shackles.
“All right, take it easy.” Will backed up a step. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” He brought his left hand up to seize the mouse as it moseyed up his right forearm, and that was when she saw it.
He was missing a finger. Specifically, the pinky of his left hand.
A change seemed to come over him. She sensed him mentally switching gears as he deposited Josephine on the bare mattress. He reached into the pocket of his sweatshirt and tossed the mouse a handful of KrunchWorks O-Zings, onion-flavored extruded potato rings—Lucy recognized them instantly—which Josie pounced on with unalloyed ardor. Lucy shuddered and averted her eyes.
Will pulled a key ring from the pocket of his jeans and unlocked a small metal panel set in the wall, revealing several electrical switches and knobs. He flipped one and the music died, right in the middle of Britney’s breathy confession that she’s a slave for you. The abrupt silence, after about eight hours of warbling bimbos, was such a relief, Lucy practically wept with the sheer visceral pleasure of it.
Will planted a palm on the wall next to her head. He leaned in, just a little. “Better?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
He tucked back a strand of dark hair that had fallen over her face. His smoky voice got smokier. “You know, things don’t have to be so hard for you here.”
“Oh.” Her voice was barely audi
ble. “No?”
“Your stay could be much more enjoyable.” He trailed a fingertip down her throat and idly traced the vee collar of her pajama top. His eyes locked on hers through the mask’s twin holes. “For both of us.”
Lucy’s throat constricted as he moved closer still. He smelled good, dangerously seductive. Like a man-flavored birthday cake. He dipped his head to her temple and slid the mask up. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt his humid breath stirring the short strands along her hairline.
He smoothed back her hair and pressed a delicate kiss to the tip of her ear. She emitted a little gasp. “You like being in control,” he whispered, “out there.”
Since when had she ever been in control of anything? she wondered, but then he brushed his lips along her jawline. It felt good, and that was bad. Their chests touched. She tried to squirm away, but the chains and Will’s hand on her waist kept her pinned.
“But you’re not out there,” he said. “In here, I call the shots.” He nibbled the base of Lucy’s neck. The ripple of pleasure shocked her. His hands moved on her body, lightly fondling, his touch sensual but not overtly intimate. Her eyes drifted closed.
They flew open when she heard the scream—the same hoarse, agonized cry as before, louder now that the music was off.
The sound had the effect of a fire hose at full throttle. What on earth was she doing, responding to this maniac? If this was the Stockholm syndrome, it sure as hell hadn’t taken her long. Eight hours had to be some kind of world record for getting hot for one’s captor.
Will continued to nuzzle and caress her.
“Don’t,” she said.
His voice was a husky murmur against her throat. “Am I going to have to gag you again?”
“Please.” Her voice quavered. “Stop. This is . . . I don’t want this.”
“I think you do.” He kissed her collarbone, while toying with the top button of her pj’s. “I think you want it hard and fast against this wall.”
“No.” Tears of panic clogged her throat. “Please. Don’t do this.”
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