“Yes.”
He shoved her down and spread the blanket over her. “Don’t move and don’t make a sound. If you force me to kill him, it’ll be just like you pulled the trigger.” He slid the door closed and locked it.
A moment later, his voice came softly to her from the driver’s door. “He’s young, about your age. Probably has a wife and kids.”
You asshole! I hope you forgot to remove the freaking ski mask.
What should she do? Should she cry out and hope for the best? Despite the fact that he treated her well overall, she instinctively knew he could be ruthless. Although he probably didn’t want to kill an innocent man, he just might do so in order to save his own sorry ass.
The police officer wouldn’t be expecting anything, thinking this was just a routine check on a driver possibly having car trouble. Her kidnapper however would be poised and ready for anything. If she cried out for help, the officer would be dead before even realizing anything was amiss.
Then, for the rest of her life, she’d have to live with the fact that she’d caused his death. Of course, the rest of her life might be measured in mere days. Nevertheless, the policeman would still be dead, his family grieving for him.
The vehicle came to a stop beside the van. “Good afternoon,” said a male voice.
“Afternoon, officer.”
“Car trouble?”
“No, sir. Just stopped to stretch my legs. I’ve been driving since five this morning.”
“Where you headed?”
“Wyoming. Going to visit an old Army buddy.”
She’d been right. They were headed west.
“I thought you looked ex-military,” the cop said. “I was Army too. Did four years, three of ‘em in Iraq.”
“Fourteen, eight in Afghanistan,” her kidnapper replied, and she filed that bit of information away as well.
“No shit?” said the cop. “You speak the language?”
Her kidnapper began speaking in another language and, by the effortless way the words flowed off his tongue, she knew he was fluent.
“Damn,” exclaimed the cop. “You sound just like a rag-head. You know, when I was over there in Iraq—” He broke off abruptly as his radio squawked.
A feminine voice came over the crackling radio, saying something Larissa couldn’t make out. “Ten-four,” the officer replied. Then, to her kidnapper, “I gotta check out a domestic disturbance. There’s a storm headed this way, so you be careful.”
“You, too,” her kidnapper replied.
As the policeman — possibly her one and only chance for survival — drove away, she burst into tears of frustration. What a goddamned fool she was. If she survived this ordeal, she’d see to it that the kidnapping asshole spent the rest of his life in prison, in a cell right next to Sparrow’s.
She should have taken a chance and trusted the cop. After all, he’d been aware of the dangers of the job when he became a police officer. But if he’d died, the burden of his death would have rested on her, and she doubted she could have borne the weight for even a moment.
A key sounded in the lock and the side door slid open. “You just saved that man’s life.”
She angrily wiped her eyes. “And killed myself in the process.”
“Stop being melodramatic. You’re not going to die.”
“Yes I am! You’re just too stupid to realize it. Or maybe you just don’t care.”
“I’m not taking you to the maintenance man. The man who hired me doesn’t look anything like the man you described.”
“Maybe Sparrow used an intermediary,” she challenged. “He’s the only one who could have hired you.”
“There’s no one else who’d have an interest in you?”
“No!”
“I’m not as gullible as you seem to think. You never shot anybody. You’re a liar, and not a very good one.”
“I’m not a liar, and I did shoot him!”
When she held his gaze without blinking, a shadow of doubt slowly crept into his eyes. “I’m being paid very good money to transport you,” he said finally. “How would a maintenance man get that kind of money?”
“How would I know. Maybe he robbed a bank. Maybe he won the lottery.”
“We need to get going. Lie down so I can secure you.”
“He’s going to kill me,” she said miserably, hating him with every fiber of her being. “And when he does, it’ll be just like you pulled the trigger.”
* * * * *
As Chase quickly restrained her feet, she angrily refused to look at him, green eyes brimming with tears. He wanted to touch her, to stroke her skin, to slide his fingers into her hair and kiss her, to comfort her and tell her that everything would be okay. It was only with the greatest effort of will that he refrained from doing so.
When he pulled back onto the expressway, the sky ahead was lowering. Sheet lightning pulsed dully in the western sky, followed by a faint rumble of thunder. They were driving straight into the storm.
The incident with the state trooper had been much too close for comfort, and he would be eternally grateful to her for not doing anything to alert the officer to her plight. He could have easily disarmed and restrained the man, giving them sufficient time to get away. The problem would have arisen when the officer subsequently failed to respond to his radio. His fellow troopers would have quickly mounted a search and, once they’d found him, the trooper would have given a detailed description of both him and his vehicle.
Larissa was so quiet that he asked, “Are you all right, back there?”
“I’m just great,” she grumbled. “You should give me a sleeping pill.”
“No.”
Intermittent flashes of lightning brightened the rapidly darkening sky. He deeply regretted having to tell her that he’d kill the officer and it pained him that she now believed him a cold-blooded killer. He regretted even more telling her that she would’ve been the one responsible for the officer’s death. However, not only had the lie been necessary, it had been successful. He comforted himself with the reminder that she’d lied to him, was still lying to him.
No matter how much she denied being married, no matter how much she denied knowing where he was taking her, she was lying. He’d seen the portrait and Keswick knew too much about her. He badly wanted to confront her with what he knew, but there were forty thousand very good reasons for not doing so.
From behind him, she asked, “Why’d you stay in Afghanistan so long?”
Goddamn it. He’d suspected she’d been able to hear his conversation with the state trooper, but he disliked having that assumption confirmed. “I’ve never been in the military, never been in Afghanistan. That was a lie constructed for the trooper’s benefit. You think I’d give him real information about me?”
“What are you, some kind of adrenaline junkie?”
“Larissa—”
“And now that you’re back in the States, you’ve resorted to kidnapping in order to get your fix?”
“If you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to gag you!”
Thankfully, the threat was sufficient to quiet her. Jesus. Her intuition was downright scary. Hell, being an adrenaline junkie was practically a prerequisite for joining the Special Forces.
He had loved how the danger of going on missions made everything seem so profoundly intense that he could feel the rapid and steady rhythm of his pulse, the very flow of the blood through his veins.
He’d loved how the adrenaline would sharpen his vision to the point that everything seemed edged in glass; how his hearing and his sense of smell seemed to increase; how he became intensely conscious of things even at the periphery of awareness, seemingly able to focus his attention on a nearly microscopic level.
The feeling had been magical…
Right up until the moment everything had started going wrong.
It had all begun when their team, along with two young and jittery intelligence officers and a team of Afghan soldiers, had geared up for a four-da
y mission into enemy terrain to neutralize Taliban forces. Just after dark, they’d piled into a Chinook helicopter and lifted off. Hugging the contours of the rocky peaks, the pilot took them up the side of Abas Ghar, and set the chopper down just above the timberline, in enemy territory.
The men spilled out wearing night-vision goggles, the pilot lifted off, and they began humping along a mountain ridge. They’d traveled perhaps two miles when, with absolutely no warning, mortars were exploding around them, live fire snapping by their heads. He took a round through the shoulder and, as he turned to bolt for cover, an explosion lifted him from his feet before slamming him to the ground.
Bleeding heavily from his gunshot wound, his back lacerated by shrapnel, he crawled for cover. Pinned down, the men dug in and laid down return fire, while the insurgents continued to fire and lob mortars at them from behind an escarpment above.
Little Mike slapped a pressure bandage on his wounds, and then the two men slipped around an outcropping of rock, and moved stealthily through the darkness, circling up and behind their attackers. Relying on bladed weapons until their presence was discovered, he and Little Mike managed to eliminate all ten insurgents.
After destroying the enemy’s weapons, Chase and Little Mike returned to the rest of their team, to find that Dago Joe and The Wizard were dead, along with one of the intelligence officers and four of the Afghans. Every single survivor bore wounds of varying severity.
The Wizard had been carrying the radio. Both he and the radio had taken a direct mortar hit. They field dressed their injuries and, with no way to call for an evac, at first daylight started down the jagged mountain slope. Roach carried Dago Joe’s corpse. Travis carried The Wizard’s. Mad Dog was alive but had one broken leg and a gunshot wound in the other. Disregarding his own wounds, Chase lofted him over his shoulder, fireman-style and, with the Afghans seeing to their own dead and wounded, everyone started the spine-jarring trek down the mountain.
Halfway down, they stopped to catch a bit of rest in a ditch.
Waking a short time later with his clothes stiff with his and Mad Dog’s mingled blood, Chase stubbornly insisted upon carrying Mad Dog the rest of the way. Travis and Roach lifted the now-unconscious man, draped him over Chase’s shoulder, and the team continued on. When they stumbled upon a path barely fit for donkeys, Chase was nearly delirious from pain and blood loss.
An unmanned Predator drone had been in the air the whole time, sending video feeds by satellite link to the ground control station. They humped down the mountain past bombed-out homes and abandoned cottages and, by the time they reached the base of the mountain, support troops were there waiting for them. The injured and the dead piled into a convoy of up-armored Humvees with Mk 19 grenade-launchers mounted above, and headed back to base camp.
Chase awoke eighteen hours later in a makeshift hospital, sutured, bandaged, and hooked up to an IV drip. Mad Dog was in the bed to his immediate right, Travis to his immediate left, along with eight other men, both Americans and Afghans.
Fancying himself a comedian, Little Mike was the youngest of the group and Chase’s closest friend. Not confined to the hospital tent by his injuries, Little Mike nevertheless spent most of his time with the wounded keeping everyone’s spirits up.
A week later, Chase and Mad Dog were still in the hospital when Eduardo died on a relatively simple mission.
Ten days after that, they lost Spider. As the oldest man among them and the one with the most missions under his belt, Spider had seemed nearly indestructible. He didn’t die, although all agreed it would have been better if he had. A lucky shot from a sniper’s rifle paralyzed him from the neck down.
A superstitious lot, the men started to believe they’d fallen under a curse.
Then, during Chase’s first mission after his discharge from the hospital, on their way back to camp after a three-day mission, Little Mike accidentally tripped an anti-personnel mine. He should have died outright, for there hadn’t been much left of him below the waist.
Little Mike had a scheduled leave coming up in two weeks to return to the States to marry his pregnant fiancé. As he unholstered his Colt .45, he said to Chase, “Tell Pearl I love her, and that I’m sorry.”
Clutching Little Mike’s free hand, Chase promised, “Count on it.”
With a cry of “De Oppressor Liber!” Little Mike put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Chase and Travis both sobbed unashamedly. Mad Dog went into a screaming rage. Inscrutable as always, Roach, the only Native American among the group, calmly assisted the others in returning Little Mike’s remains to camp.
Replacements arrived, of course, to take the places of the men they’d lost. But for the old-timers, things would never be the same, and Chase could see he wasn’t the only one battling depression.
Roach was the first to come up for reenlistment, and the big Native American surprised everyone by declining. “I’ve seen too many friends die. I’m outta here.”
Travis was the next to turn in his uniform.
Three of the new guys died and, when it was time for Chase to re-up, he declined as well, and joined Roach and Travis in Los Angeles.
Six months later, Mad Dog had shown up on their doorsteps.
He missed that life terribly at times, but he knew that, had he stayed in Afghanistan, he’d now be dead. Or, like Spider, worse than dead. Disturbed by the path his thoughts had taken, he said, “You’re very quiet, Larissa. Are you all right back there?”
“If you’ll recall, you told me to ‘shut the fuck up’.”
“I meant on that one particular subject.”
A light rain began to fall. Far ahead of the vehicle, lightning scarred the bellies of purplish-black clouds that loomed like great, malevolent beasts. Great peals of thunder rolled across the sky, and the wind had picked up until its fury now battered the vehicle with gusts that rocked it from side to side. It whipped the branches of the trees lining the highway into such a frenzy that flying debris kept clogging the windshield wipers.
“Do you intend to keep driving in this weather?”
“I’m looking for a suitable motel as we speak.”
Ten miles outside of Amarillo, he found one. There were more cars in the parking lot than he would have preferred, and many — too many — curtained windows glowed warm and golden with light from within but, with the storm rapidly approaching, that was to be expected. He parked a short distance from the office, and climbed into the back where Larissa allowed him to gag her without protest, then jogged to the office, squinting against the grit churned up by the gale. Violent gusts whipped at his clothing, while the electricity in the air crackled along the hair on his arms.
The clerk had a portable radio tuned to the local weather report and, as if Chase might not have noticed, solemnly informed him, “We got us a bad storm rollin’ in.”
None of the rooms had kitchenettes but, at his request, the clerk allotted him the room farthest from the office. He pulled to a stop before their room, avoiding the evenly spaced pockets of illumination thrown by the overhead halogen lamps. Fortunately, the room directly adjacent to theirs was vacant. For now, at least.
Overhead, thunder broke violently and the sky suddenly ruptured, turning the light rain into a steady downpour. Within seconds the blacktopped parking lot glistened like a serpent’s scales and, on the highway beyond, passing cars spewed up plumes of water. He was thoroughly drenched by the time he got the vehicle unloaded.
Climbing into the cargo compartment with Larissa, he removed the hobble and the blindfold, but left the gag in place. Draping the blanket over both their heads and letting it hang down far enough to conceal the gag, he helped her out of the van. With one arm clutched tightly about her shoulders and the other holding up the front edge of the blanket, he led her into the room.
The hard, leaden downpour beat a fierce tattoo on the roof while the wind howled and blustered at the window. Thunder rolled across the sky with the sound of giant boulders. Drop
ping the drenched blanket by the door, he turned to Larissa. Spangles of rain sparkled in the lush ebony hair that cascaded to her shoulders. He removed the gag and, once they’d both toweled off and changed into dry clothes — her into blue stretch pants and sport bra, and him into pajamas — they had a brief but unheated argument in which she disputed any need for the hobble. He refused to relent and, once he’d finished tying the rope around her ankles, he pulled her to her feet and into a close embrace.
She immediately stiffened. “Let go of me.”
“No.”
She struggled to free herself from his pinioning embrace. “Let go, asshole!”
He held her until she finally gave up. Cupping her chin in his palm, he lifted her face to his and traced the fullness of her lower lip with his thumb. “I want to thank you for not forcing me to kill that man.”
Finally, she relaxed against him, arms hanging at her sides. He inhaled the delicious feminine scent of her and the feel of the hard nipples poking him in the chest made him want her with an urgency that once again surprised him. When his erection began insistently nudging her, he reluctantly released her.
She grabbed her bag of toiletries and hobbled into the bathroom, where she stood before the mirror, running a comb through her damp locks.
The room was small, accommodating only a double bed that sagged in the middle, a single nightstand, a dresser with a cracked mirror, and a small table with two chairs. He set the portable hot plate on the dresser’s battered top and plugged it in. Larissa hobbled out of the bathroom and paused to watch him pour canned soup into a pan. A smile dimpled the corners of her mouth, and her voice had a teasing, sexy quality to it as she asked, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”
The Heart Has Reasons Page 12