B00CCYP714 EBOK

by Bradshaw, R. E.

  If Bladen had any doubt about what kind of offender held her captive, the crack of a whip behind her took care of that. As he worked himself into lather, her captor used it to punctuate his sentences. Bladen shrank from the sound, losing hope with each thunderclap of leather.

  “That guy was a hack.” Crack! “He had Rainey Bell in his grasp twice and he ends up with a hole where his chest used to be, courtesy of that little bitch Katie Meyers. Did you see her at the conference, the blond pretty one? She’s the other cunt he let escape. Did you know she and Agent Bell are raising triplets and claim to be married? I have my parental rights dictated by some feminist bitch in a black robe, and those dykes are lickin’ pussy with three kids under the same roof. That’s fucked up. That judge is on my list, too.” Crack!

  Bladen needed to slow the escalation of his temper and distance herself from the object of his rage, Rainey Bell. The words gushed from her in a trembling whisper, “I don’t know Agent Bell. I only saw her at the symposium. I didn’t know the blonde was with her. I’m not even a feminist.”

  He was too invested in his rant to hear her. His monologue grew louder and more agitated, the whip cracks more frequent as he circled her.

  “They flaunt those kids like poster children for the lesbian movement. It makes me sick.” Crack! “And Agent Sexy is supposed to be some great profiler. She let that guy abduct her. How good can she be?” Crack! “Then she’s supposed to be protecting little Miss Meyers, but instead, she almost got them both killed because she didn’t see him coming, again.” Crack! “She let Dalton Chambers nearly kill her from death row. Behavioral analyst, my ass.” Crack! “She couldn’t profile my dog.” Crack! “I’m right under her nose and she doesn’t even see me, even questions my existence.”

  Caa-rack! The whip wrapped around Bladen’s calves, trapping her legs together. She howled as the sonic boom rendering tail snapped to a stinging stop. She jerked and kicked in an attempt to shake it loose, but it was futile. He snatched the whip, pulling her feet out from under her, and snapped restraints around her ankles, before clipping them to an unseen fulcrum in the floor. His moves were precise and efficient. Bladen knew she was not his first victim nor would she be his last, unless she somehow made it out of here alive. Agent Bell had been correct. Escape was highly unlikely, but it was Bladen’s only hope.

  She started babbling rapidly, her tears tangling in her words. “My name is Bladen Asher. I have to be at the elementary school in the morning. I’m a student teacher this semester. It’s my first day to lead the class. I have to show up. And my parents—my parents, they are going to be worried if I don’t call.”

  He moved around her, so close she could smell him.

  Bladen switched to a desperate plea for reason. “I haven’t seen you. You can let me go. I don’t know anything about you, except you don’t like that Rainey Bell person.”

  The whip fell away from her legs. She felt his hand run up her side, like a lover tenderly caressing his mate. She shivered against his touch, her breathing fast and shallow—terror-stricken.

  “Shh,” he whispered next to her ear. “I know all about you, Bladen Claire Asher. I know where you live, the classes you take, where you work, what you eat, what time you go to bed, and that Patrick and Ginny Asher love you very much. You had just finished speaking with them, when we began our little game.”

  Just when she thought she could not be more horrified, Bladen realized the depths of her captor’s iniquity. He had stalked her, planned her kidnapping, and now he held her prisoner in what she imagined was an underground bunker. She knew she should not let him see her fear, but knowing and doing were two distinctly different things when faced with a whip-wielding maniac.

  “How—how do you know all that?”

  He grabbed a handful of her thick brown hair, yanked her head back, and growled, “Because you’re mine.”

  The lights flashed on, blinding her at first. Bladen blinked the room into focus, as he turned her so she could take it all in. Multiple medieval looking torture devices surrounded her in a small concrete-block room. Her eyes darted from the apparatuses, designed to elicit pain and degradation, to the man who would use them on her. Glowing yellow eyes glared at her from behind a black-leather mask.

  Bladen gasped as he released his grip on her hair and raised the whip in the air. Her voice mere trembling whispers, she asked, “What are you going to do to me?”

  Sadistic laughter skipped through his answer. “Whatever the hell I want.”

  CAA-RRRACK!

  #

  In another part of the Triangle, Rainey Bell was having a little long overdue Mommy-and-me time with Mommy, when her cellphone began to ring just after ten o’clock.

  “Don’t answer that,” Katie said sharply, sweeping Rainey’s phone off the table.

  Rainey chuckled at Katie’s desperation. “I can’t answer it, now. I think you threw it in the hamper.”

  Katie kissed Rainey’s neck. “They’ll call back,” she whispered.

  Triplets and a demanding schedule meant they rarely had the time or the energy for sex. The kids turned one year old on Christmas Day, just fifteen days ago. Rainey had only one problem with her children. Rain or shine, no matter how long a night it had been, the Bell-Meyers triplets rose at dawn. Rainey thought she had seen the sunrise over the lake every morning for the past twelve months. She no longer set an alarm. It wasn’t necessary. No one could sleep through those three crying during the first months, and now, no one dared sleep if any one of them were awake.

  The house was a labyrinth of baby locks and little fences. Rainey never imagined that crawling babies could cover so much ground. Anything breakable was now at least three feet from the floor, but still not safe. The triplets were on the cusp of gaining more independence and had begun taking their first hesitant steps alone. None too successfully, but they were pulling up and buzzing around while holding onto the furniture. Six tiny feet running through the house was just around the corner, something Rainey looked forward to with mixed emotions. She and Katie could barely keep up with them as it was and collapsed into bed exhausted at the end of every evening—but not tonight.

  Katie began the stalking the moment Rainey arrived to help with the nightly feeding and bathing. She was a woman on a mission to get laid, and Rainey was happy to indulge her. There was a lot of winking and ass grabbing in between the assembly line of baths, diapers, shoving feet into pajamas, and the removal of some of the strained peas from Rainey’s thick hair. Weather, the only girl and leader of the triplet army, thought it quite amusing to throw food and was quickly teaching her brothers, Timothy and Mack, this skill. Once the triplets were tucked into their cribs, Rainey slipped next door to the master suite with the intention of removing the rest of the kids’ dinner from her hair. When Katie caught up with her, the plan for a shower and Rainey’s clothing were done away with rather quickly—strained peas be damned.

  The phone stopped ringing at some point. Rainey wasn’t sure when, since Katie was providing ample distraction. She was kissing her way down Rainey’s body, her blond head about to disappear under the covers, when the hamper erupted with an alarm fit for a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant. Startled into sitting position, Rainey nearly bucked Katie off the bed.

  “What the hell?” Katie exclaimed, wrestling with the cocoon of covers encasing her.

  Rainey scrambled from the bed. “That’s the emergency app. Something’s wrong.”

  “It sure as hell better be,” Katie said in frustration.

  Rainey dug into the hamper, retrieving her phone. That alarm meant someone was in trouble, someone she cared about. Rainey loaded the emergency notification application on the phones of everyone in her tight circle of friends and family. Sliding her finger across her phone’s screen silenced the alarm and revealed a satellite image, with the standard distress message from Junior, and a blinking red dot pinpointing his location.

  Rainey squinted at the dot, enlarged the map to verify her
suspicion, and then whispered, “Oh, Jesus. Junior is at Maybelline’s.”

  Katie hopped out of bed. “Is that bad?”

  “It probably isn’t good. I can’t believe he went without Mackie or me.” Rainey hit the callback link on the phone, while looking for the clothes Katie had so recently removed from her body and thrown about the room.

  When Junior answered, he did not wait for salutations. “Rainey, you have to come. Now.”

  Rainey was not pleased. “Why did you try to pick up Maybelline on your own? You know better, Junior.”

  Junior defended himself. “Mackie is with me. He told me to call you. I did, but you didn’t answer. So, I sent the emergency signal.”

  “Where is he? Let me talk to him,” Rainey said.

  She put the phone on speaker, set it down on the bedside table, and continued to dress. A nude Katie brought Rainey a clean shirt, after having retrieved the baby food-covered one from the hallway. Rainey smiled with the memory of how it got there. Her smile disappeared immediately with Junior’s next words.

  “She shot him, Rainey.”

  Katie’s gasp accompanied Rainey’s hurried questions. “Was he wearing his vest? Is he all right?”

  “She shot him in the vest on his left side, lower part of his ribcage. I didn’t see any blood, but he went down. He was having trouble breathing.”

  “What hospital are they taking him to?”

  Junior hesitated, before answering, “We got a problem, Rainey. He’s still in the house with Maybelline. He made us leave him there.”

  “You left him in there, alone? What the hell, Junior?”

  Rainey began buttoning her shirt frantically, while Junior explained. “I got a tip from Bobo that Maybelline had come back home. He said he didn’t see anybody else at the house. But Rainey, there was a mess of kids in there when we went through the door. Maybelline pulled a gun, started waving it around and ranting about wanting to talk to you. We couldn’t use the Taser on her. She was holding a baby. Mackie tried to talk her down, but the gun went off. He was only a few feet from her. It was a .44. I don’t think she really meant to shoot him, but she went wild after that. Mackie told us to get out.”

  Even with a level-three ballistics vest to stop the bullet from penetrating his chest wall, Maybelline could have caused some serious damage. The kind of damage a sledgehammer could do to a ribcage, like broken ribs, a punctured lung, internal bleeding. He was more than Rainey’s partner. Mackie was her guardian angel and filled the shoes of his old friend, her father, when he was killed almost four years ago. Mackie loved Rainey fiercely and she him. She could not lose him.

  She steeled herself and tried to ask calmly, but felt the tremble in her voice. “So he’s talking? Have you called 911?”

  “Yeah, he’s talking, but with the trouble he’s having breathing, he can’t say much. The cops are already here. The negotiator and the ambulance should be here any minute, but I’m afraid they’re going to wait around ‘til it’s too late.”

  Rainey wanted the door kicked in and Mackie taken to a hospital. Any number of things could be killing him by the second. They needed to get him out of there. She was at least twenty minutes away from Maybelline’s house, and that would be at record speed with traffic. Rainey took a deep breath and let the emotion subside, switching gears from concerned family member to the FBI agent she once was.

  “Let them do their jobs, Junior. It’s out of our hands now. I’m on my way.”

  #

  Rainey’s Dodge Charger SRT8 was the physical embodiment of her personality—dark and fully loaded. Its specifications said it would do zero to sixty in four-point-five seconds. With the added body armor and ballistic glass piling on weight, her tricked-out custom ride achieved that speed a little more than five seconds after she cleared the guard shack of her gated community. She pressed down hard on the accelerator, the digital readout of her speed passing sixty and climbing rapidly, as she raced north toward Durham. If a cop tried to pull her over, he would have to follow her to Maybelline’s house. Mackie would walk through fire to get to Rainey if she needed him. The least she could do was spend the night in jail for evading the police when he needed her.

  She checked in at the office and saw Mackie nearly every day, but did not keep up with the daily activities of the bond business. When Katie became pregnant with the triplets, Rainey took a step back from chasing fugitives. She now spent most of her time working from home as a private investigator and a consultant with local law enforcement, defense attorneys, and prosecutors. Rainey was happy to be using the skills her years with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit afforded her, and Katie was ecstatic she was no longer kicking open fugitives’ doors. She was even speaking to her mother again. Rainey’s personal and professional lives were in the best condition of her forty-two years.

  Mackie and Ernie had been with the bond business, bequeathed to Rainey by her father, since its inception. Miles Cecil McKinney, Mackie, was Billy Bell’s best friend and Vietnam buddy, as well as current forty-nine percent owner of Bell’s Bail. Ernestine Womble, the sixty-nine-year-old office manager and the backbone of the business for thirty-seven years, practically raised Rainey. It was at Ernie’s not so subtle urging that they moved from the isolated Jordan Lake location to the more populated area of Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Since the move, the number of bonds they wrote swelled. Rainey wasn’t sure if it was the economy or the move, but the bail bond business was hopping.

  In the middle of her personal happiness and the expansion in business, Rainey was having difficulty shaking the thought it could not last forever. The truth of her life was that the other shoe always fell. Rainey hoped she was merely being paranoid, affected by the daily threat of Ernie’s imminent retirement. She had decided it was Ernie’s way of preparing her for the time when it would be a reality. She did not know how she would cope without Ernie behind the front desk. There would be no replacing her. They broke the mold after Ernestine Womble took her first breath. There would never be another like her.

  Rainey was also worried about Mackie. He was sixty-one years old and slowing down, not to mention he was overweight and his knees were giving out. Junior, Mackie’s nephew, and a few other runners did most of the fugitive recoveries without the six-foot-six, more than three-hundred-pound bear of a man ever leaving the office. She could not imagine why Mackie would have gone after Maybelline without telling her, and worse, not verifying who was in the house. It wasn’t like him to be caught unaware.

  Flying down the two-lane blacktop as fast as she dared, Rainey was consumed with guilt for not being there for Mackie. He had been sick with a virus back around Christmas, missing the triplets’ birthday party because of it. He was having a difficult time getting back up to speed, but Rainey had not noticed it affecting his decision-making. Mackie did not make mistakes like walking in on a desperate bail jumper in a house full of kids. It just did not make sense.

  The phone ringing through the sound system stopped her analysis of Mackie’s behavior. She glanced at the touchscreen display in the center of the dashboard for the caller ID. She pressed the answer button on the steering wheel, activating the hands-free communication system.

  “Rainey Bell.”

  She recognized the smooth good ol’ boy drawl of the Durham County Sheriff’s Office negotiator, as soon as he started to speak.

  “Sorry to drag you out at this time a night, Rainey,” he said, in his slow, deliberate delivery. “Captain Wiley Trainer, here. I’m told you are aware of the situation.”

  People who mistook Wiley’s accent and measured manner of speaking as a sign he might be a bit slow were mistaken. He was as wily as his name implied. His ability to remain calm, while those around him experienced adrenaline overload, made him an exceptional negotiator.

  “Yes, I’m on my way,” Rainey answered, falling behind traffic on the two-lane state road. “Dammit!”

  “What’s that?” Wiley asked.

  “Traffic. I’m getting bog
ged down by traffic.” Rainey turned the emergency flashers on, honked the horn, and roared past two cars, before pulling back into the right lane. At times like this, she missed the blue lights and siren she once had at her disposal.

  “From the sound of that engine, you can get here quick. Let me have somebody meet you up on I-40 and bring you in,” Wiley suggested.

  “That would be excellent,” Rainey said, flooring the six-point-four liter Hemi V8 engine around another car. There was a sharp curve to the left coming up, and then a mostly straight shot to the on-ramp of the interstate. “Tell them I’ll be at the on-ramp from state highway seven-five-one in about five minutes, driving a black Charger. Tell ‘em to turn on their radar. I’m the hot one coming at them,” she shouted over the engine roar, as she paddle-shifted down and banked into the curve.

  Rainey heard Wiley’s muffled arrangements for her escort. She powered the Charger through the apex of the curve and rocketed out the other end, happy to see no other brake lights ahead.

  After a moment, Wiley’s voice was back in the speakers. “You keep it between the lines, Rainey. I need you here.”

  “What does Maybelline want, Wiley?”

  “She wants to talk to you. I told her you were coming. Talked to Mackie, too. He’s hurt, but breathin’. I got her to give up most of the kids and one of her adult daughters, but she still has the baby, a toddler, and the other daughter in there with her. Angeline, I believe it is. She stayed behind. Said she wasn’t leavin’ her sister’s baby in the line of fire, and her two-year-old would not leave without her. So that’s where we stand.”