A Trace of Hope

by Blake Pierce

  “Maybe I’m a ghost, Wasson,” Keri said, taking another step forward. “If you don’t drop the knife right now, that’s what you’ll be.”

  “I paid good money to make the pig’s kid squeal,” he screamed, his voice rising crazily. “I paid good money!”

  In his excitement, his hand moved and he nicked the girl slightly. Keri watched a trickle of blood dribble down her neck. She looked at Wasson and took a deep breath.

  He opened his mouth, ready to shout again, when she fired.

  The bullet hit him in the middle of the forehead and his eyes widened for a fraction of a second before the force of the shot sent him flying back onto the bed. The knife still rested in his clenched fist.

  Keri allowed herself to really look at the girl closely for the first time. She was completely naked and had several pieces of duct tape tied to her mouth. Her hair was blonde, pulled back in an elaborate braid. Her face was heavily made up, although her tears had created long rivulets of mascara running down her cheeks.

  Keri followed the wet, black lines back up to her eyes and stared into them. They were rimmed red around the edges from crying but in the center was the same familiar green she knew from both her memory and her dreams. They were the eyes of her daughter.

  It was Evie.

  Keri gasped, refusing to cry, reminding herself that they were far from out of the woods yet. She started to move toward her daughter when there was a rattle at the bedroom door. Then a banging sound as someone tried to slam into it.

  Keri turned back to Evie and helped her off the bed.

  “Stay behind me,” she said.

  A gunshot sounded and Keri saw that someone was firing at the door handle. She turned back to Evie.

  “Actually, why don’t you hide behind the side of the bed?’ she instructed.

  Evie nodded and crouched on her knees at the edge of the bed. As satisfied as she could be, Keri returned her attention to the door, which someone was trying to smash open. The chair was holding them back, but only temporarily.

  Keri ran to the door and managed to get behind it right as someone smashed it open. The momentum sent the guy stumbling into the room and Keri had an easy shot, firing at his back, then immediately slamming her body against the door, making contact with the second guard entering the room.

  As soon as she heard the second guard smash into the doorframe, she dove forward into the room and rolled over. She was just in time to see the guard, having regrouped, shoot into the door where she’d stood only a moment earlier. As he swiveled his head in her direction, realizing his error, she fired at him, nailing him in the neck.

  He stumbled backward into the guard behind him, who was just pulling his trigger at that moment. Unfortunately for the man in front of him, who got in the way of the shot, the bullet lodged in his lower back. Before the third guard could get off a second attempt, Keri had dropped him with a chest shot.

  She scrambled to her knees, looking for movement from any of them or any sign of other guards in the hall. She heard a groan to her right and glanced over. The first guard through the door, the one she’d gotten in the back, was still alive but seemed unable to move. He was coughing up blood. Just to be safe, she kicked away the gun lying inches from his fingertips.

  Then she closed the door again, although with the lock blown off, it was a pretty useless gesture. Keri started to walk over to Evie again when Keith’s voice came over her earpiece once more.

  “Keri, if you can hear me, the guards are scattering. SWAT is breaching the estate and everyone is making a run for it. It’s a madhouse. I hear the head of the security team telling his guys to pull out. So hopefully, you shouldn’t encounter any more of them.”

  Keri started to fumble in the robe for her headset. She wanted to ask if Ray was okay, if he’d survived his diversion mission. But it was gone. Maybe it had fallen when she’d jumped balconies or when she was rolling around. Either way, it was nowhere to be found.

  Evie poked her head up from behind the bed and Keri’s attention immediately returned to her.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said, walking toward her. “All the bad guys are gone now.”

  But Evie, the duct tape still over her mouth, shook her head. It had been six years since Keri had seen her up close but she recognized the look of fear in her daughter’s eyes. Something wasn’t right.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Evie jabbed her head slightly to the left, at the wall of the bedroom, as if to say “over there.”

  Apparently not all the bad guys were gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Keri looked at the wall. As she did, something Keith had said a few minutes earlier popped into her head. Looking at the floor plans for the house, he’d described the third-floor bedroom as massive.

  But this bedroom, while definitely spacious, was far from massive. In fact, when she’d been out on the balcony, she’d noticed that it seemed to extend far beyond where the wall currently stood.

  “Behind the wall?” she mouthed silently to Evie.

  Her daughter nodded. Keri desperately wanted to pull the tape off her mouth, to hear her child’s voice. But she worried that focusing on anything other than the immediate threat at hand could put them both at risk, so she fought the urge.

  Instead, she turned and looked at the wall, letting her eyes travel along its entire length, intent on finding anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t take long to find the cameras.

  She saw them at both corners of the wall, where they met the ceiling. They were tiny, circular, and painted to blend in but easily noticeable once one was aware of them. Keri glanced around and saw them at the other two corners of the room as well.

  She stepped closer to the wall and tapped it softly. It felt like typical drywall. Glancing back at Evie, she saw her daughter nod at a section in front of them. Keri turned back around. The only usual item in that area was a long vertical painting framed to the wall. The bottom of it stood about two feet above the floor and it extended five feet up from that.

  Keri walked over to it and stared at the ornate gold frame that jutted out from the wall. Without pausing to think, she grabbed the frame and pulled. There was a click and it opened out toward her, leaving a doorway-sized gap.

  She stepped back and to the side, waiting for a gunshot or for someone to dive through the hole. No one did. Part of her considered just grabbing Evie and running downstairs, letting the SWAT team deal with whoever was in there.

  But what if whoever was in there escaped and came back after her later? If this person was part of the plot to kill Evie, they had to be captured now. There might not be another chance.

  Choosing to act rather than mull over the option, Keri dove through the hole, completing a roll and coming to a stop in a kneeling position. She surveyed the room, which appeared to be empty apart from a huge desk with a bank of monitors that showed the bedroom and the rest of the house.

  She looked at the screens and saw the chaos on the floors below. There were dozens of people running along the expanse of green lawn in their tuxedos, trying to escape the main gate on foot even as police cars streamed through it. People were scurrying to their limos, which had been blocked in.

  Multiple men in red blazers had their hands up or were being cuffed by uniformed officers. SWAT officers were slowly working their way through the house, hallway by hallway. But Keith had gone radio silent. And she didn’t see Ray anywhere.

  But she did see movement out of the corner of her eye and looked at one of the monitors that showed the bedroom she’d just come from. The angle showed both the bed and, in the background, the bathroom.

  Someone had just pushed open what appeared to be a secret door behind a full-length bathroom mirror and was stepping out. It was a man with a baseball cap pulled low to cover his face.

  Keri glanced into the corner of the room she was in and noticed something she’d missed before. There was a small gap in the far wall that exactly matched the spot where t
he mirror was in the bedroom. Someone had been hiding in the gap and waited until Keri had come in here to sneak over to the bedroom side, where Evie was waiting with her back to him.

  Keri turned and dashed back toward the bedroom. As she leapt over the two-foot rise, something collided into her, slamming her into the back wall, She felt the gun fall from her hand as the breath escaped from her body.

  As she started to slide down the wall, she saw the hand of the baseball-capped person reach for her weapon. She managed to thrust her right leg out to kick it away as she slumped to the ground. It slid under the bed.

  The man in the cap looked at it for a second, then seemed to shrug and hurried over in the direction of the guard Keri had shot in the back, whose gun was still lying several feet away from him.

  Keri, her breath still hard to come by, struggled to get to her feet. She’d never reach him in time. She could only hope this guy was a bad shot as she started toward him. But before she took her first step she saw that Evie had already started running in the same direction. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back so she did the only thing she could: she threw herself at the man in the cap, slamming into his back and sending them both careening past the gun.

  Evie rolled several times before coming to a stop in front of the bedroom door. The man in the cap hit the far wall hard with his shoulder but didn’t fall down. He gathered himself and turned around as Keri rumbled toward him. As he turned toward her, she saw that he’d lost his cap in the collision, and she could see his face clearly for the first time.

  Looking back at her, with a twisted smile on his face and a malevolent gleam in his eye, was Jackson Cave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Keri barely had time to process who she was charging at before she slammed into him, knocking him up against the wall. Unfortunately, she also slammed the left shoulder she’d tweaked on the balcony, sending a sharp burst of pain down her left side. It was enough for him to wriggle free and dive for the gun.

  But instead of grabbing it, he accidentally knocked it toward the open balcony door. It skimmed the hardwood floor of the bedroom and out onto the balcony tile, where it stopped, resting about a foot from the edge.

  Cave got up and ran for it, with Keri right behind him. He had just stepped outside when she caught up to him and leapt onto his back, knocking him hard against the metal railing. She heard his body hit it with a brutal thud and felt her own body slam into his a moment later. They both sank to the ground in a heap.

  Keri saw Cave reach desperately over in the direction of the gun. The back of his hand bumped the barrel and sent it skittering over the edge of the balcony. He didn’t seem to realize what had happened and kept patting the tile.

  Keri rolled off him and grabbed the sliding door handle to pull herself to her feet. Cave glanced down, saw that the gun was gone, and began to reach for the railing to yank himself up.

  He had gotten up to mid-crouch when Keri barreled into him, this time with her right shoulder forward. She made solid contact and felt his ribs compress when they met the unforgiving railing behind him. As he started to slump, she raised her right knee to meet his face and connected cleanly with the bridge of his nose. He fell to the tile, face first, his arms and legs splayed out at his sides.

  Keri bent over, resting her hands on her knees, desperately sucking in massive gulps of air. It took twenty seconds of this before she felt strong enough to speak.

  “You hated me that much, Cave?” she spat, shaking her head in disbelief. “You wanted to watch in some private room while your pervert client murdered my daughter on TV?”

  Cave tilted his head slightly and looked up at her from the ground.

  “You ruined my life. Why shouldn’t I ruin yours…Detective?” He said that last word with such disgust that Keri realized how much of an effort it must have been for him to hide the vitriol in all their prior conversations.

  “I didn’t ruin your life, Cave. I just wanted my daughter back. You’re the one who traffics in sexual slavery, who sells little girls for money. You chose your path. And even this morning, I offered to walk away from all of it, if you returned her to me.”

  “You weren’t serious,” Cave hissed venomously, as he slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. “You were just trying to play me.”

  “Maybe I was. To be honest, I’m not even sure myself. But if Evie had shown up at my door, I’d have had a tough call to make. Instead, you tried to have me killed.”

  “I almost regretted that,” Cave admitted, grabbing the railing and pulling himself back to his feet. “I wanted you to get to look into your daughter’s lifeless eyes and know you’d failed her. Signing off on your execution meant I lost that. But look at us now, Detective. I guess I got a second chance.”

  “No chance, Cave. She’s safe. And you’re finished. Where you’re going, you’ll be the one bought and sold. I’ve got a friend who can make it happen.”

  “You mean your friendly neighborhood ghost, Thomas Anderson?” Cave asked mockingly, standing fully upright now, oblivious to the blood running freely from his nose. “I wouldn’t count on him. He choked to death on his own tongue about an hour after you left him last night—a real shame.”

  Keri started to take a step toward him, the bile rising in her gut. But something in his expression made her stop. He continued.

  “And as for Evie, do you really think she’s safe now? Come on, after everything she’s been through? No matter what happens to me, even if she never faces another nasty man for the rest of her life, she’ll always have the memories; the nightmares. She’ll always have that degraded face looking back at her in the mirror. She might be safe from the bad guys out there. But is she safe in here?” he asked, tapping his head. “I give her a year, tops.”

  Keri pretended not to notice the cold shiver that ran down her spine, ordered herself not to let this man bait her into giving him the easy way out. She was a cop, a detective with the LAPD, and she was going to bring in her collar.

  “Jackson Cave, you are under arrest for the…you know what, it’s too much to list. For now, you’re just under arrest.”

  She stepped toward him, debating how physical she’d have to be without cuffs. But as she did, he lunged at her and she saw, almost too late, that he had a small switchblade that he must have snuck out while he was getting to his feet.

  He had jumped at her with more energy than control and she was able to sidestep him at the last moment, swinging her right fist down on his forearm hard. She heard the knife clatter to the tile as she swung up with her right elbow, clocking him under the jaw and sending him careening backward.

  Cave’s back hit the top bar of the railing and his momentum sent him tumbling over backward. Keri managed to grab his left leg and slow him enough for him to grab the bottom bar of the railing before gravity ripped his leg from her grasp.

  He clung to the bottom bar, trying to get a good grip on the cold, slick metal as his body swung out in an arc over empty space before careening back hard against the outer edge of the balcony. He was barely holding on. Keri reached over and extended her arm.

  “Give me your hand, Jackson. I’ll pull you up. Let me help you.”

  Cave looked up at her and for a moment he had the same expression as when she’d mentioned his brother, Coy—as if he was studying her, trying to determine whether to believe her sincerity or not. But it was gone in a flash and she knew what conclusion he’d drawn.

  “Oh, Detective,” he said, almost pityingly through gritted teeth, “you’re the one who needs help. You think this ends with me? I’m just a spoke in the wheel. You have no idea how high this goes. Watch your back, Keri.”

  And then he let go. She didn’t see him land but three seconds later she heard a stomach-turning crunch and then silence. She slumped to the tiled floor of the balcony, allowing herself a minute to recuperate before rolling over and looking for her daughter.

  To her surprise, Evie had already stood up and walked across the bedroom to
the balcony door. She was wrapped in a blanket from the bed. Keri saw that she was no longer handcuffed and realized she must have found the key. She had also pulled the duct tape off her mouth. Evie stood at the balcony door for what seemed like an eternity, just staring down at Keri.

  Finally, she stepped outside and gingerly sat down beside her mother, tucking the blanket over her shoulders so that it covered both of them. Then, without speaking a word, Evie leaned over and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  The next few hours went by in a blur. Keri and Evie barely had a moment alone together before the SWAT team burst in. They didn’t really try to talk anyway. Mostly they just held each other. Even as they were taken to the hospital in ambulances, had IVs put in their arms, and were wrapped in thermal blankets, they didn’t let go of each other’s hands.

  Keri learned that Ray was alive. He’d already been transported to the same hospital as them with a grazing gunshot wound to the left forearm. He hadn’t wanted to go but SWAT wasn’t in a negotiating mood and basically forced him into the ambulance.

  Apparently he had gotten the red jacket security team’s attention by firing several rounds into the air above the Festival Hall crowd, then leading the guards on a chase to the pool house, where he’d locked himself inside a supply pantry and held off multiple attackers until the cavalry arrived. At some point in the excitement, he’d lost his headset, which explained his lack of communication.

  Keith had lost communication because he’d been arrested. When the police found a random guy sitting in a parked car half a block from the estate with a headset and a laptop, they decided to take him into custody and sort it out later. He’d subsequently been released.

  There was a brief lull after Keri and Evie had been triaged at the ER and determined not to have life-threatening injuries but before the doctors came in to do more thorough exams. Mother and daughter sat in mobile hospital beds next to each other, separated from the world by a thin, puke-green curtain. Neither of them spoke for a while.