“It’s not a well-maintained track,” Jack complains as he pushes a bush out of his face.
He walks forward, through the scrub, through the reserve, along the back of the yards. Numerous dogs bark and yap as the men pass, but they continue down the track, looking for the entrance to their destination.
“I’ve seen you beat four men into the ground in a bar fight, I’ve seen you take on gangs in a shoot-out, and I’ve seen you walk into hostile rooms full of knives, but never, never, have I heard you this scared.” Bill laughs. “It’s just the reserve. There’s nothing out here.”
“There is, Bill. There are all sorts of things out here – animals, traps, criminals. I would much rather be walking through ‘Death Alley’ with a backpack full of hundred dollar bills than walking through here. At least out there, you know how the people are going to react. Here, you have no idea. It’s all the unknown out here.”
Bill laughs again. “I never thought I would see the day when I’m braver than you!”
“Just remember, I’m the one with the gun. I could bury you out here.”
“You couldn’t do that.” Bill laughs. “You’d be too scared without me here.”
They continue through the woods, past the hooting owls, along the tracks, up the hills, and past the trees.
“It shouldn’t be far away.” Jack slows his walking. “There. Just ahead.”
They peer over the six-foot fence, looking for any movement in the house. There’s a light on in the living room, the flickering of a television left on, but at two o’clock in the morning, there’s no other movement.
Bill draws a deep breath as the moonlight bathes the area in front of them.
Careful not to make any loud noises, they jump the fence, sneaking up to the house.
“The door to the basement has been used recently.”
“How can you tell?” Jack’s hushed voice sounds panicked as they kneel in the shadows, behind a small bush.
“Look how well-maintained the trapdoor is. There isn’t a weed overgrowing any of it. This isn’t a forgotten-about place. Someone has just placed a few branches over the top of it in an attempt to hide it. That basement is well-used by somebody.”
“Which means that person could come back at any moment.”
“Come on, Jack. It’s not like that. Now is not the time to be scared.”
“No, Bill. It is. We could be shot out here, and our bodies would never be found. Never. No one would ever find our bodies, and no one would know anything about our deaths.”
“I’ve got a GPS on my phone.”
“That’s not much good when we’re dead,” Jack complains. “We’ve found it now. We know it’s here. Let’s go back to the car, and come back during daylight.”
“Not a chance.” Bill steps forward into the clearing, flashlight ready. “It’s time to go in now.”
Chapter 31
He didn’t lock the door again.
But that didn’t matter. She had figured out a way to open it without his forgetfulness. She could lift the handle from the inside, pushing the door upwards.
Gathering a loaf of bread, a bag of apples, and three books into her sack, she makes the steps towards freedom.
This is it.
She won’t turn back for anything. Even if he comes at her, she will run. He’s gotten old, and she’s gotten faster, and if out of reach from his long arms, he would never be able to catch her.
With the sack slung over her shoulder, she steps up towards the door, pushing gently against it. With peering eyes, she pops her head out to see her surrounds. No movement. No one here.
Judging by the location of the moon, he would have to be asleep now. She’s sure of it.
Still on the inside, she lets the door close for a few moments. She takes one final look at her surrounds, blowing a final kiss to her home.
This time, she won’t run from the noises.
She can take whatever is out there.
She can be brave, strong, unrelenting.
She has to be.
Whatever wickedness is out there; she will challenge it. She can punch it. This is her turn now. Her time to be free. Her time to feel the sun on her skin.
Whatever the world has to throw at her, it has to be better than waiting for another man to take her.
She pushes the basement door open again, slow enough to not make any sounds.
She steps out, hoping for the cover of darkness.
But a flashlight shines in her eyes.
Chapter 32
“Who are you?” the male voice whispers to her.
The girl doesn’t answer.
Too shocked, too blinded by the light blaring in her eyes.
“Is anyone else here?” Jack Grayson steps forward towards the girl almost pinned to the outside door of the basement, stunned by the flashlight.
She doesn’t answer.
It’s the first time she’s heard a new voice in a long time.
“It’s ok,” Bill whispers as he steps towards the girl. “We’re not going to hurt you. We’re your friends.”
Jack Grayson’s hand moves to his hip. No young girl would be down in a basement by herself. Bill rests his left hand on Jack’s arm, calming him, urging him not to draw his weapon.
“We’ve come to look in the basement.” The girl before them is unwashed, dirty, and her hair is long and frazzled. She looks like she hasn’t washed in years. “We’re not going to hurt you, but you need to be very quiet.”
Bill’s index finger goes to his lips; trying to keep the conversation discreet. He knows something in this situation isn’t right. She looks too wild, too unkempt, to be a girl who just stumbled upon the basement. He steps towards the silent girl, holding his arms out wide.
Jack follows, one hand still on his hip, the other holding the flashlight, studying the house for any potential movement.
As he steps closer to the girl, the first thing to hit him is the smell.
“How long have you been here?” he whispers, but the girl doesn’t reply, still too shocked by the presence of the men.
“I don’t like this, Bill,” Jack mutters over his shoulder. “Something isn’t right here. This isn’t normal.”
With his flashlight, Jack leans down into the open door, scanning the inside of the basement.
“There’s a bed,” he whispers, then turns back to the girl. “Is this where you sleep?”
The girl nods.
He draws a deep breath; the situation is becoming bleaker by the second.
“Bill.” Jack nods towards the small basement home. “We have to go.”
“What’s your name?” Bill whispers, hands still open, stepping closer to the girl.
The girl stares at him. The only person she has talked to for years is her captor. It crosses her mind that these are the men that are going to take her, and her entire body stiffens.
“What’s your name?” Bill asks again.
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m not here to hurt you.” He places a caring hand on her shoulder. “I’m here to help, but I need to know your name.”
“It’s…” she mumbles, trying to remember her full name. “It’s...”
“What’s your name?”
“Amy Wu.”
Chapter 33
“Amy Wu? Are you sure that’s your name?”
“Yes,” the girl replies. It’s the first time she has heard her name out loud in a very long time.
Bill looks at Jack, still standing at the entrance to the basement, his mouth opened in shock.
“How old are you, Amy?” Bill leans forward.
She shrugs again.
“Amy, how long have you been here?”
“Most of my life.” She feels the tears beginning to well in her eyes, overwhelmed by all the new stimuli.
“It’s ok.” Bill rubs a reassuring hand on her shoulder. He kneels down next to her, calming her with his slower tone of voice. “It’s ok. We’re here now.”
; He looks back at Jack, mouth still wide open.
“Who else do you live here with, Amy?”
“No one.”
“No one? Does anyone else come here?”
“Just him.”
“Who is ‘him’?”
“I don’t know his name. He comes once a week, leaves me food, keeps me safe.” Her arms fold across her chest, eyes looking down. “I love him. Please don’t hurt him.”
“We’re not hurting anyone, Amy.” He looks at Jack and nods.
Jack draws the gun from his hip holster, turning towards the back door of the house.
Bill keeps the tone of his voice low. “Is he part of your family?”
“Family?” She looks at Bill with large, round eyes. “I don’t have a family. I’ve just got him.”
“We should leave,” Jack states, coming closer to his friend and the girl, uncomfortable with the situation. “This isn’t good. We have to go.”
“Not yet,” Bill replies, desperate for more information.
“Bill,” Jack says over his friend’s shoulder, “right now, we have to get this girl out of here. Everything else can wait.”
“I agree that we have to go.” Bill stares down inside the concrete basement. “But I need more information first.”
“Bill, it’s enough,” Jack says, back turned to the house behind him. “We really have to—”
Whack.
Chapter 34
Jack Grayson drops to the ground, hit hard from behind.
A large silhouette is cast behind them.
“You really should have listened to him, Bill.”
“Terrance Marshall.” Bill knows the voice well, but still, he points the flashlight at the older man’s face.
“Get that thing out of my face.” Terrance grumbles as he picks up Jack’s gun from the ground.
With his vision blurry, Jack rolls onto his side, looking up at the large man now holding his weapon. The light from the living room window shines on Terrance’s face, highlighting his lack of emotion.
“I knew you would come to save me!” Amy shouts, moving towards him, and Bill puts his arm out, preventing her from going any closer to the man.
“Don’t move.” Bill stands tall. “I need to understand what’s happened here.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Amy Wu has been presumed dead for five years. There are many, many questions to answer.”
“You can ask all the questions you want,” Terrance says, waving Jack’s gun in his hand. “Doesn’t mean I have to answer them. Now, you three, inside.”
Bill assists Jack to his feet, holding him under the arm. Jack is still too far away, and his mind too fuzzy, to make a move on Terrance.
Loosely holding the weapon, Terrance studies the two tall men as they walk towards the back door to Terrance’s house, Bill’s hand placed on the girl’s shoulder. Rubbing the back of his head, Jack opens the door, his eyes taking a few moments to adjust to the bright light inside, before he leads them all into the house he searched only days ago.
Terrance escorts them into the living room, but then places the gun on the kitchen bench, and slumps onto his worn couch.
Confused, Jack picks up the gun, and then looks at Terrance.
“You can keep the gun,” Terrance states. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it either. I’ve done enough damage with those things. I have one more problem to solve, but you’re not it.”
With her eyes wide open, Amy looks around the house.
“The house is so beautiful,” Amy says in wonder, not to anyone in particular. Her head spins at all the extra luxury that she’s never seen. “There’s so much space.”
Jack and Bill look at each other, confused. “You haven’t been in here?”
“No.” Her voice is filled with innocence. “Never.”
Bill’s attention turns to Terrance, who’s looking down at his hands, shoulders slumped forward. “Start talking, Terrance.”
“If you’re going to shoot me, just do it already. I deserve it,” Terrance mumbles, wiping a tear from his eye. “I’m dying, you know. You might as well finish me off now. When all this comes out, I’ll be a dead man anyway. There’s no way I’m going to survive this one.”
“Don’t say that.” Amy turns, but again, Bill holds out his arm, stopping her going any further. “Please don’t say that. You can’t die.”
With love in his sad eyes, Terrance lifts his head to look at Amy, the girl he has protected for so long, the girl he has raised in the basement, the only meaning that he has left in his life.
“That’s why you wanted your ashes spread in the yard. So I would find Amy.” Bill lowers his arm.
She runs to Terrance’s side, hugging him, stretching her skeletal arms around his large torso.
“I didn’t want to leave her down there alone. If I died, I didn’t want her to be alone in the world. That’s why I left the basement door unlocked, just in case something happened to me.” He pats Amy on the back as she holds him, her head snuggled into his chest. “And I knew that you would take care of her, Bill. You’re a good man, and I knew you would have done the right thing.”
“You’d better start talking about why she’s here.” Jack’s grip on his gun is firm but still pointed towards the floor.
Terrance looks at Bill, then back to the girl who won’t let him go.
“I was hired to…” Drawing a long breath, he pulls her arms off him and leans forward, coughing deeply.
“Steady.” Jack takes a step forward, the gun now focused on the torso of the felon.
“Don’t worry, I’m not that stupid. I have nothing to gain by taking you out.” Terrance shakes his head.
“Go on, Terrance. Continue your story.” Bill places his hand on Jack’s arm, indicating that he should lower the weapon.
“Five years ago, I was doing a lot of work for Kevin. I made some bad decisions, decisions that I still regret to this day. That’s when someone approached me to kidnap Amy. I didn’t know that they wanted to kill her; I thought they were just going to use her for ransom. I didn’t like Kevin, so I jumped at the chance, but when I found out what they wanted to do, I got so angry. I left them by the side of the road. I didn’t know what else to do, so I bought Amy here.”
“Who? Who hired you?”
“I can’t tell you that. But I will tell you that they thought that Amy had died. The day we kidnapped her, we had an argument. They shot at my car, and I told them that Amy was dead. For all these years, they believed me.”
“Who was it?”
Terrance shakes his head, leaning both forearms on his knees. “When the police wouldn’t arrest Kevin for Monty’s daughter’s accidental overdose, the rumor was that Monty was going to kill Amy, but someone else stepped in first, and offered me $500,000 to help kidnap her. They knew that Monty would take the fall for the crime. I agreed because I thought that was all it was going to be – a kidnapping. But then they said that they were going to shoot her, and I lost it. I couldn’t let another innocent girl die.”
“So you kidnapped her yourself?”
“I brought her here. I thought it was only going to be for a few months, while I figured out what to do. I couldn’t take her back to her parents’ house. How could I explain to Kevin what I’d done? He would have killed me on the spot.” Terrance rubs his hand over the top of his head. “And then I figured it out.”
“What were you going to do?”
“I had to kill two people, and I had to start with Monty Lee. If I let Amy go, then Monty would just hire someone else to kill her, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. He was hell-bent on revenge for the death of his daughter. The best way to keep her safe was to hide her away from those people that were trying to hurt her.”
“But instead, Monty lost a second daughter to Kevin Wu.”
“I know,” Terrance says with remorse, chin almost on his chest. “I didn’t want that, and I didn’t expect that. I felt so bad, but all I knew was that I had t
o keep this girl safe. I did my best. I made sure she had books, and I was even looking for an old television for her. I tried to keep things normal.”
“Normal?” Jack scoffs. “Kidnapping a girl and hiding her in a basement for five years is not normal. This is not a normal childhood. You’re a murderer and kidnapper. Who knows what you did to her?”
The normally angry Terrance Marshall doesn’t respond. Feeling defeated, his time for anger has long past.
“How long were you going to keep Amy here?”
“As long as it took.”
“So, Monty wasn’t only running from Kevin, he was also running from you.” Bill works through the timeline. “And it was you that shot at his house, almost killing his wife and child.”
“It was. He knew I turned on him, and he knew I was going to hunt him down. I’ve been looking for him for a very long time, but in my old age, I’m slowing down. I don’t have enough steam left to find him. And only once I had taken Monty out of the picture, could I turn to the second person.”
“Why?”
“Because as soon as I took out the second person, I would have been killed. There was a guarantee on that.”
A moment of silence falls over the room, Bill and Jack considering how to move the situation forward.
“I told Monty that you sent me there after him.”
“You found him?”
“In the mountains, near Wrightwood, on a settlement within private property. There was an old house surrounded by five caravans – looks quite the ideal life in a commune. But he became very angry when I mentioned your name.”
“I went there, and I didn’t see him.”
“And he’s been stalking this house. I saw him here earlier today, watching your place.” Jack lowers his gun.
“A black pickup truck? Tinted windows?”
Jack nods.
“I saw it just outside before I went to sleep tonight. I thought it was strange, just sitting there, and I knew something was up. Thought it might have been you guys – that’s why I wasn’t sleeping that well.”
A Time for Justice_A Legal Thriller Page 14