Australia, which was only a flight to Thailand.
Thailand, where you didn’t have to worry about stings and searches. Where anything in the world was for sale, and you weren’t confined to looking. You could touch. You could get it as young as you wanted, as much as you were willing to pay for. Including that perfect blend of innocence and skill, of big eyes, soft skin, barely there curves, and thrillingly tiny, expert hands and mouths and bodies that only wanted to please you, that would do anything you asked.
Henry hadn’t known about Thailand, but he’d known enough. Henry hadn’t had any limits, ever. So when he’d seen a too-hasty click of the mouse after walking in unexpectedly? He’d sat down across the desk, stretched his legs out in front of him in those expensive boots he’d loved to wear, flaunting the fact that he had more money than you did, and said, “Man, I’m thirsty. Get me a glass of water, will you?” And then—he’d looked.
The killer couldn’t forget that moment. Coming back in with the bottle of water and seeing Henry sitting behind his desk, clicking the mouse and laughing.
“God damn it,” he’d said. “Who knew? Mr. Buttoned-Down? Mr. We Can’t Do That? Mr. Conservative? With a thing for the little Lolitas?”
“Shh,” the killer had hissed, shutting the office door. “For God’s sake.”
“For God’s sake?” Henry had laughed some more. “For God’s sake? I don’t think so.” He’d gotten up then, had started to walk out of the office. “I thought I had something to say, but damned if I didn’t forget it. You chased it right out of my head, because now I’ve got something better to think about. Going to take me a while to digest this.”
“What are you going to do?” the killer had asked. He’d heard himself beg and had raged at hearing it.
“I don’t know,” Henry had said. “I haven’t decided.”
Which was why, that night, after the worst day of his life, the killer had parked down the street and waited on one side of the garage for Henry to come home. Why he’d followed him inside and confronted him. Had reminded him that he knew what Henry had done, too. He knew Henry had a son, and he knew—well, he suspected—how that son had been conceived. And he’d threatened to share it.
Henry had laughed again. Had laughed at the threats, and had threatened himself. Threatened so much worse.
“Hell, I’d do it just for the entertainment value. Know what? I think I will do it. Thanks for the idea.”
“But who had the last laugh?” the killer said aloud now. “Who?”
He’d dropped back, lost in his thoughts. He was halfway up the grade, and he had no idea where Hallie was. Not behind him, anyway, on the four-lane road. He’d have noticed passing her, at least.
Pay attention, he thought, even as he rounded a corner and saw oncoming headlights swerve, heard a horn blare, caught the flash of taillights going sideways across the highway.
He’d caught up. And it was working.
“How bad is that mouth?” Hallie asked when she got Mac in the car and swung out into traffic.
“It’s OK.” Mac’s voice was listless.
Hallie looked across at her for an instant before concentrating on the traffic again. “I had braces,” she said. “You don’t have to be brave for me. It hurts after you get them on. It’s all right to admit that it hurts.”
“How long did it hurt for?” Mac asked.
“First couple days are pretty achy,” Hallie admitted. “And then it hurts less, and by a week, it doesn’t hurt at all.” She believed in telling the truth to children. If you didn’t, all that happened was that they didn’t trust you. Besides—if you told them it wasn’t that bad, and then it was that bad, what did that do? Made them think they were babies, that they were weak. Better to admit that it hurt and let them feel strong for enduring it.
“Did they give you some ibuprofen?” she asked Mac.
“Yeah.”
Hallie could have used some herself, as a matter of fact. As if Mac had picked up on it, she asked, “Is your head still feeling bad?”
“Yes,” Hallie admitted. “It is. It’s been a long day, I guess, being back at school, and then my appointment. How could you tell?”
“You’re rubbing your head,” Mac said, and Hallie dropped her hand hastily.
“My dad said he wanted to drive you,” Mac went on after a moment, “but you wouldn’t let him.”
“Nope.” Hallie pulled onto the highway, putting her foot on the gas with relief. She wanted to get home. She wanted to lie down and sleep for about a day. “I would’ve had to skip sixth and seventh period again.”
“I had to skip anyway,” Mac said. “It would’ve been better if we’d had a sub. Then there wouldn’t have been homework.”
“Well, yes,” Hallie said, “it would’ve been better for you. But your class deserved to have their teacher back, don’t you think?”
“Besides,” Mac said, “you wanted to be independent.”
That earned her another look from Hallie. “I did. How do you know?”
“I heard my dad tell my grandma on the phone. Anyway, it’s important for women to be independent. My mom was independent. She always said that an Army wife had to be able to stand on her own two feet, and that was good, because everybody ought to be able to do that anyway.”
Hallie chose her words with care. “Your mom sounds like a smart woman.”
“She was. My mom was awesome. When she got sick, though, she didn’t like that my dad had to do everything. Especially because she was pregnant.”
Hallie had to concentrate to hear Mac’s words. They were mumbled around the braces, and the girl’s voice was fading some anyway. She was sleepy, worn out from her day, just like Hallie herself.
She cracked the window a tiny bit, letting the cold air rush in. There. That was better, and her head even cleared enough to think about what Mac had said. “Your dad told me about losing your brother,” she finally said. “And how hard it was when your mom was sick, and when she died.”
She heard only silence for a long moment and wondered if Mac had fallen asleep. “I thought she was going to be coming home,” Mac finally said. “I knew she was very sick, but I thought she was coming home. With my brother. I thought I was going to get to be his big sister. But they didn’t come home.”
Hallie’s head was pounding with pain, but so was her heart. She lowered the window a little more, focused on the red taillights from the semi ahead of her, on staying in her lane around a wide curve, which took too much focus, and said, “I’m so sorry. That must have hurt so much.”
“She made my dad laugh,” Mac said. “He used to smile all the time. When he came home after his deployments—I remember he was always smiling. And after she died, he stopped. I tried to get him to smile, but he stopped.” She sighed. “My head really hurts. It really hurts.”
Hallie didn’t stop to think if it was all right. She took a hand off the wheel and squeezed Mac’s. And then a wave of dizziness overtook her, and she had her hand on the wheel again. A blare beside her startled her, and her hands jerked, and the car swerved to the right. Toward the hill that rose steeply on one side.
“Whoa,” she said shakily when she had it under control again. “I’m sorry.”
Mac didn’t answer, and Hallie wanted to look at her, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road.
Slow down. She was in the right lane. She could go slower. She lifted her foot from the accelerator, watched fuzzily as the speedometer needle dropped from sixty to fifty.
There. That was better. Fresh air. She opened the window halfway, gulped in great lungsful of air, shook her head, and then was sorry she had. Her head hurt as if a hammer were pounding into her skull.
Another blare from a horn as a car went past her. She looked at the speedometer again. Forty-five.
No hurry. Slower is safer.
She was so tired. So tired. She’d pull off for a while, maybe. She’d sleep.
Wait. Mac was in the car. She couldn’t do that
. She’d pull off, and then she’d call Jim to come get them. That was it. She should have let Jim drive. She wished he were driving now.
There was no place to pull off, though. She was still on the grade.
The thought was still in her head when she registered the sign. Slow Vehicle Turnout. Registered it as it was going by, that is.
Watch for it. There’d be another one. Wouldn’t there? She couldn’t remember.
The cars were passing her in the other lane as if she were standing still. One horn blare after another, and the sound, the white lights—they hurt her head.
Speed up. Get to the top. The speedometer said forty now. She pressed her foot down, watched it go to fifty. To fifty-five.
It was too cold. She was shivering. She pressed on the window switch, and the air got warmer. But there were white lights coming at her. Right at her. She took her hand off the window switch and heard a screech of tires from somewhere far away.
Following the white line. Focusing. Following it.
She woke up to a horrible, shuddering impact. And then she was headed the other way, trying to turn the wheel. Seeing the white lights coming at her. Stomping with her foot for the brake, spinning the wheel, trying to get away from the white lights. The tires were screeching, horns were blowing, and she was going the wrong way.
A long moment when they were jolting over something rough, then another impact. A hard hit, and everything was swinging around, and they were flying. Flying, and spinning, and tumbling. Over and over.
The car was full of crashing noise. Like a ride. Like a roller coaster. Like being in the ocean, in a wave.
She didn’t like roller coasters. She didn’t like waves. She didn’t like this. She wanted it to stop.
And then it did.
She woke up. Her head hurt. Her ankle hurt more. Everything hurt. But it was quiet.
Mac. She tried to look to the side, but there was something in the way. Something white and soft, right in her face.
Noise on the other side. A voice. Scared. Thin.
“Hallie? Hallie! Are you OK?”
Mac, Hallie thought again. Mac’s in here. Get Mac out. “I’m OK,” she said. She did turn her head, then, even though it hurt. And there was Mac. It was dark in the car, so dark, but Mac was there, and she was talking.
“We have to get out,” Mac said. “In case the car explodes. Dad says . . . you have to get out if you smell gas.”
“Right.” Hallie pushed past the pain in her head, her ankle. Her fumbling fingers reached for the door handle, and she tugged at it, but nothing happened. And she wasn’t sitting right. She was pulled all the way to the right. Why was that?
“The doors are locked,” Mac said. “My door’s locked. And it’s the ground outside. There’s snow. I’m on the ground. I’m on the snow.”
She sounded panicked, and Hallie forced herself to concentrate. It was cold. Really cold. And the car was on its side. “My window’s broken,” she realized. “We can climb out of that. Get your seatbelt off.” She fumbled for hers, but couldn’t find it. Panic for a moment, then she figured it out. “Feel down your chest,” she told Mac. “Trace it down. Then punch the button.”
“I did,” Mac said after long seconds. “I got it off.”
Hallie did it, too, but the moment she did, she was falling down. Falling into Mac, the pain in her ankle blossoming like a starburst as her foot hit the center console.
Mac cried out, and Hallie said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” She was losing it. The pain . . . Focus.
“I’m going to try to climb around you,” Mac said. “I can push past the air bags.”
There was something else, now, though. A voice from outside the car. “Hallie. Hallie. My God. Are you all right?”
A face in the window. Someone she knew, looking down at them.
“Get us out,” Hallie said.
The face was smiling. Holding something. Something that was in the car now, coming at her.
“No! Daddy!”
Mac, Hallie thought, and swiveled fast toward her as an iron fist hit her shoulder. Hit her hard. Broke her.
Jim was running down the hill, his boots eating up the ground, faster than he’d gone since he’d been running through desert sand.
This wasn’t sand. It was snow, and it was deep. He was running as fast as he could, but he wasn’t getting there. Like being in a nightmare, but this wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.
He’d gotten a jump on the rig fast, as it had turned out. A guy coming out after his own appointment, climbing into a Dodge Ram of his own. A quick battery charge, and Jim had been on the road, wishing he’d insisted on driving both Mac and Hallie home, no matter what Hallie had said.
Never mind, he’d thought. He’d catch up to them. And he had.
He’d seen the brake lights flashing red, heard the horns blaring from three curves below on the grade.
Somebody in trouble up there. He’d reached for the emergency light beneath his seat on the thought, had punched the window down, slapped the light on the hood, and turned on the siren.
He had a light and siren on his personal vehicle because he headed up the SWAT team, and he might need to get somewhere fast. He’d never had to do that yet, but he’d needed to do it now. He’d inched out to the left, had forced the cars over, and had been seven or eight cars back when it had happened.
A small sedan in the left lane, swerving into the curb lane and clipping another car, then swinging around across oncoming traffic. Narrowly missing cars that braked hard to avoid it, and headed straight for the edge. Straight for the guardrail.
The end of the guardrail. Nothing to hold it on the road. The car had clipped that, too, and then it had been gone.
Within ten seconds, Jim was on the shoulder, grabbing a flashlight and a fire extinguisher, diving from his vehicle and running across oncoming traffic to the guardrail, leaping it and powering down the steep slope, eating up the ground.
The car had rolled. He could see it down there, tilted up on one side. The passenger side. And he’d recognized it as it had gone over.
Hallie. Mac.
That was when he heard a sound to freeze a father’s bones.
“DAAAADDDDYYYYY!”
He hadn’t thought he could go faster. He did.
Somebody else was there ahead of him, and there were others behind him, too. He could hear the exclamations, the curses as they slipped in the snow.
He was close now. Somebody was leaning into the car as Jim slid down the final four feet.
Mac’s voice again from inside. “No! No!”
“Mac! Wait!” Jim was shouting, and the figure at the window turned, and Jim saw his face in the moonlight.
Bob Jenkins. Holding something in his hand.
“Oh, thank God,” Bob said. “Help me get them out.”
“Daddy!” It was Mac’s voice again. Panicked. Sobbing. “Weapon!”
Bob stepped back, and Jim saw the hand with the tire iron swinging back.
“You son of a bitch.” Jim’s hand, the one carrying the fire extinguisher, swung out and clipped Bob on the side of the head. The other man went down like a felled tree, but Jim didn’t even watch him fall. He was already at the car window, dropping the extinguisher, shoving the flashlight into his pocket.
He almost bumped heads with Mac. She was pushing herself up, scrambling through white pillows. Air bags. Jim got her under the arms and was lifting her free, right out the window.
“Hallie,” Mac sobbed as she came. “He hit her. He hit her. Get her out, Dad. Gas.”
He’d already smelled it. The distinctive odor of leaking gasoline.
“Give her to me,” a voice said at his back. “I got her, man.”
Jim turned with Mac in his arms. The first would-be rescuer had reached the wreck, a big guy in a feed cap and a jacket. Now, he held his arms out. “Give her to me,” he said again, and Jim passed Mac over.
“Get her up the slope,” Jim said. “Up to the road. Get back. This
thing could blow.”
There were others coming, too, but he forgot about them as he looked down into the vehicle. Hallie was wedged down into the passenger side, and she was moaning.
“Hallie,” Jim said. “Climb up to me. Come on, baby.”
“I . . . can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t. He hit me.”
Jim was already half into the car. Wedging his shoulders through the window, pushing off. He felt a fellow rescuer’s hands gripping his lower legs and giving him a shove downward, and he was reaching for Hallie.
“Give me your hands, baby,” he said. “Give me your hands.”
He got one of them. He had to feel around for the other arm, and when he grabbed it, she screamed in agony.
He yelled over her screams, “Pull us up! Pull!” and felt himself rising, taking Hallie with him. He banged his head on the window coming out and barely felt it. His feet were hitting something soft—the person who’d been pulling him—and he was tumbling, bringing Hallie with him. And they were free of the car.
“Help me with her,” Jim said. “Everybody else—” His voice rose to a shout. “Out of here! Get out! Up the hill!” A few dark figures were still headed down the hill, visible against the snow, but the smell of gas was all around him, hanging in the cold air. Too dangerous. He’d come back for Jenkins once he got Hallie clear.
He got to his feet and picked up Hallie’s shoulders, and she was still screaming. “Get her feet,” he snapped to the guy who’d been pulling him. “Run!”
He and the other guy—a young man, and strong—were kicking their way up the slope fast, taking Hallie with them. Almost high enough.
Get her clear, Jim was thinking in one instant. Go back for Jenkins. The next moment, the pressure wave hit him, and the heat.
“Down!” he started to shout to the other man. Explosion.
The words weren’t necessary. They were knocked down anyway. Him. The other guy. And Hallie.
LOVE HARD
Jim climbed to his feet. Thirty feet below him, the car was a fireball, orange flames shooting high into the night.
Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4) Page 43