Lost

by Laura K. Curtis

  “Creates addicts,” Tara spat.

  “Very good. Now, who else knows?”

  “I have no idea. Getting the word out was Jake’s responsibility. He had access to the computers.”

  Samuel and Deborah exchanged a glance. They’d circle back to this topic, Tara felt certain. “And what do you know about the distribution network?”

  “Distribution?” Fuck. If she told them the truth—that she and Jake had never even considered distribution—they’d have no reason to keep her alive. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly . . . and changed the subject.

  “This is pointless. Your whole precious scheme is going to go down because Jake found the antidote. When your drug doesn’t send people spiraling into a fatal depression as soon as they stop taking it, it loses considerable value. If I were you, I’d pack in the whole operation now.”

  “Suicide was a side effect, not a desirable outcome,” Samuel corrected her. “We didn’t name our experiment American Dream for nothing. It won’t just provide us with the American Dream, those who take it will believe they’re living the dream, too. So, yeah, getting off is hard. And we were talking about distribution.”

  “How did you avoid getting addicted yourself?” Tara asked Deborah. “You drank the tea when you ate with the Chosen.”

  “Distribution,” said Samuel, but Deborah shrugged.

  “Addiction isn’t bad as long as you have a steady supply of the drug. That was the whole point. It can cloud your thinking, though, so we made sure that the antidote could be taken prophylactically.”

  “That’s enough of your damned questions.” Samuel grabbed her left hand and slammed it down on the table. He leaned hard on her forearm, holding it in place with the side of his torso. She yanked on his hair with her right hand and, when that had no effect, tried to shove him away.

  “Dis. Tri. Bu. Tion.”

  Tara gritted her teeth and slugged him from the awkward angle as hard as she could, then tried to wedge her right hand between the two of them to grab his throat, but Deborah seized her right hand and wrenched it up and back, behind her head.

  Time rippled, slowing, speeding, as Samuel took the needle-nose pliers and pried up the edge of the nail on Tara’s forefinger. The cold metal felt almost like a balm against the sudden sweat on her skin.

  “Common wisdom dictates you pull off a Band-Aid as quickly as possible,” he said, bending the nail back slightly, then sliding the pliers down to get a better grip. “But we’re not common. Are we?”

  He wrenched, and she screamed.

  • • •

  JAKE PACED THE floor of his room at the hotel where Lucy, Ethan, and Harper and his men were all staying. Lucy had stocked the room with plenty of food and drink, but she’d still insisted he order room service the minute she got him inside.

  “You need your strength. I’ve sent Ethan to buy you some better clothes. Not that those scrubs aren’t lovely, but the good people of El Paso are already looking askance at us.”

  Yeah. Not like he’d missed the side eyes he’d gotten checking in wearing the pale green pants and shirt they’d given him at the hospital and with both eyes black-and-blue. Or the subtle shifting people did to stay away from Trey and his buddy, Marco.

  So he’d eaten, and he’d waited for Ethan to bring him fresh jeans. And then he’d showered and changed and rested as much as he could with Lucy calling every hour to be sure his concussion was okay, and now it was afternoon and he was damned well ready for action. But they still didn’t know who’d taken Tara, or where. Harper had called a meeting, which would be held in Jake’s room in another ten—no, eight—minutes.

  He rolled his shoulders back and forth. A few kata would be good to get him back in shape, see how his reflexes were doing. Maybe after the meeting.

  A knock at the door, and Lucy and Ethan came in, followed by Trey, Marco, and Harper. Trey set up an easel in the corner of the room, and they all took seats where they could see it. Harper handed him a map, and Trey shook it out and clipped it to the easel.

  “Okay, here’s what we know: Of the bigwigs among the Chosen, two escaped—Francis and Samuel. Kevin Reasoner says there was a woman who stayed in the main house, too—Deborah—and we haven’t found her, either.”

  “She ran the medical side of the drug concern,” Jake said. “Like Owen Stephenson, she had a medical degree. She counts as a bigwig.”

  “Noted. So that’s three. They went down a tunnel in the office, and we tracked them across the river into Mexico.” He put an X on the map. “They’re in a building here. It’s a private home, but it’s big. And it sits smack in the middle of almost seven acres of property outside of Ciudad Juárez. Unfortunately, the land around Juárez is inhospitable. Scrub, desert, rock, with too few trees for reliable cover and the occasional house with occupants we don’t want to endanger. We can’t go in heavy, and sneaking in will be problematic.”

  “Not to mention crossing the border carrying weapons,” Ethan said.

  “That’s not an issue,” Harper said. “We have contacts in Mexico who can provide whatever we need. Advantage to working in private sector.”

  “So we get to Mexico, then what?” Jake stared at the map, trying to remember the landscape of Mexico. The last time he’d been there, he’d been working a case with the Mexican police, a border-crossing killer who’d given him nightmares for weeks thereafter. He had left the police station only rarely. He’d certainly never ventured into the countryside.

  “We’re going to drive in because—despite the off-putting black eyes and bandages of Agent Nolan, here—we’ll attract less attention telling them we’re taking our buddy who’s just been in an accident on a vacation than we will hitting customs any other way. We’ll meet up with Miguel, our contact, in Juárez. He’s found a rental apartment about ten miles from the mansion. We can run the op from there, but too many civilians live there for us to go back once we’ve extracted the asset.”

  “Tara. Her name is Tara.”

  Trey didn’t even glance at him. He inked a spot on the map. “This is the apartment building. There’s virtually nothing on satellite as far as cover between it and the mansion. But if we go in this direction”—he indicated with the pen—“there are more trees and fewer houses. Still far from ideal. Most of what I am calling trees are actually bushes.

  “But we have no idea how many people are at the mansion. Miguel did a drive-by and said he saw at least a dozen, but couldn’t identify innocents versus targets. If we needed to eliminate everyone, that would be no problem. But we can’t. And we can’t afford to wake the entire area by choppering in to grab her, because there might be far more soldiers involved than we know. So we’re going to have to sneak in, extract, then call the chopper and fly out.”

  “You’re just going to casually cross the border in a helicopter?” No wonder LEOs hated Harper if he pulled that kind of shit on a regular basis. “You don’t think that will be a problem?”

  “Nope. The mansion is a hundred miles from the border. I have no intention of crossing in the chopper. But sat photos show a host of vehicles around that house, and we can’t possibly outrun them all without air support. So—and I think you’ll appreciate the irony here—we’ll fly out, take the river by speedboat, and land right in the middle of the cleanup operation on the Stephenson property.”

  Well, yeah, he could appreciate that. Every branch of law enforcement would have representatives combing the compound. Tara would be completely safe, no matter which of the Chosen remained on the loose.

  “When do we leave?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Harper answered.

  “Why not tonight?”

  “Because arranging the types of things we need is not precisely easy. Even for me. Besides which, three guys heading to Mexico for fun are a lot less suspicious in the morning. And you won’t be able to approach the house u
ntil after dark tomorrow, so there’s no rush.”

  “Fuck. I don’t have my passport.” He hadn’t even thought about it.

  “I do,” Lucy said. “I brought it down to Twin Oaks as soon as you asked me and Ethan to come.”

  He sucked in a deep breath, let his muscles ease as she dug through her purse and handed him the slick booklet. “Thanks.”

  A few more odds and ends and the conference was over. Harper and his men left, but Lucy and Ethan lagged behind.

  “Are you certain you’re okay to go?” Lucy asked. “You look like hell.”

  “I have a mirror. But I’ll be fine.” He looked into her blue eyes. “I fucked up, Luce. Big time. I can’t—I can’t do this again.”

  “Don’t count her out, Jake. Tara Jean Dobbs is one of the strongest women I’ve ever known. Even when she was just a kid, she was that way.”

  He held on to that assurance the whole time he lay in bed, waiting for dawn, waiting for the call that would tell him it was time to go. He held on and hoped that, this time, he would be enough.

  • • •

  TARA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS when cold water slapped her across the face. She had—thank God—passed out still tied to the chair before Samuel and his pliers had even finished removing her nail. Fainting hadn’t done much for her ego, but at least she hadn’t had to live with sharpest of the agony any longer. Her whole hand throbbed, and she wanted to vomit from the unceasing streaks of fire that shot up her arm from where it dangled limply at her side. They hadn’t bothered to bandage the finger, so blood dripped steadily down into a pool on the floor. Splat. Splat. Splat.

  Heat swelled up over her body, followed by ice.

  Samuel stood over her, holding a bucket, Deborah beside him.

  “That was fun,” he said. “Now that you understand the situation, perhaps we can have a more productive conversation.”

  She shook her head.

  “Now, now.” He reached for her hand.

  “Can’t talk. Gonna puke.”

  Quickly, he stepped back.

  “Go get her a bottle of water,” said Deborah. Samuel hesitated, then turned on his heel and left the room.

  The moment he was gone, Deborah leaned on the table with both hands. “Samuel likes pain, you know. He likes the particular smell of it coming out of your pores. And he’ll get tired of your fingernails eventually. He always does. If you think you feel sick now, wait until he’s broken a few of your bones and refused to set them. There’s no point in holding back.”

  “Fuck you,” Tara managed.

  “Now, me,” Deborah continued, “I prefer more humane methods. I can make you feel good. I can make you forget all about what he does to you. All you have to do is tell me how much you found out. Every detail you know.”

  Tara pressed her lips together.

  Deborah shook her head. “Stubborn. You’re the only one who will suffer, you know. It’s not as if your silence hurts us.”

  Samuel returned with several bottles of water. He uncapped one and handed it to Tara. She didn’t want it. What if they’d tainted it, the way they had the bottles in isolation? But she needed to stay hydrated at the very least. The body could last only three days without water, and she had no idea how she would get sustenance once she escaped.

  She took a few small sips. Despite the ache in her hand and the shocks that traveled up her arm, her stomach settled a bit.

  “Time to talk,” Samuel said. “How much did you tell your Fed buddies about product distribution?”

  “I told you, I don’t know what Jake managed to communicate. You didn’t give us a lot of free time. And you were watching him on the computer.” She shivered, waited out a wave of nausea and sweat. She needed to keep them talking. Maybe, just maybe, even if she couldn’t escape, the FBI could shut down the entire operation by using the information Jake had sent to Ethan. If they could trace the distribution, they might even make their way back here, though that would require cooperation from the Mexican government.

  Stall.

  “But why do you care what he knew? Surely the government will know it soon enough when they analyze the data on your computers from the compound. Or are you counting on the fire having destroyed them all? That’s a big risk, isn’t it?”

  “The fire did its job,” Samuel said.

  “Shush,” Deborah hissed. She narrowed her eyes at Tara. “It doesn’t matter why we want the information. We do. So let’s assume he sent out everything you knew before your friends invaded our private property. What would they know about our network?”

  “Nothing.” It was the safest answer. If Samuel and Deborah believed they could continue as they had been, they had a far better chance of being caught. If they holed up and stopped talking to any of their people on the outside, the police might never find them.

  “Bullshit. What brought you to the ranch in the first place?”

  “Andrea.”

  “That was your cover. Who tipped you to what we were doing before you moved to Twin Oaks?”

  “No one. I moved to Twin Oaks. I became friends with Andrea. She joined you. Or do you think she was undercover, too?”

  “No.” Deborah made the word last a full second. “But you could easily have befriended her because you knew about John.”

  “I didn’t. I came to the Chosen looking for her. Ask Owen. I didn’t know she was dead until after I got there.”

  “Owen.”

  “What, do you call him ‘capo’ or whatever the Mexican equivalent is now that you’ve moved to Mexico and shown your true colors?”

  “The Leader. Yes. No, we don’t call him ‘capo’.” Deborah’s fumble confirmed Tara’s belief that Owen wasn’t the real power behind the drug sales, despite his title. “But you know his name. So you didn’t just come to the Chosen to find Andrea.”

  “I did. But as you pointed out, I used to be a cop. And if you’d done your research well enough you’d know it was ‘used to be.’ So I tend to look before I leap. I researched the Chosen and found out the current Leader was Owen Stephenson. Mildly sociopathic, pathologically narcissistic, God complex. But, fuck, I’ve dealt with men like that in all walks of life. This guy was just living his delusion a little louder.”

  “She’s fucking lying.” Samuel rapped his pliers on the edge of the table.

  “Why would I lie? It’s too easy to check! I found the cemetery. That’s the only reason I even started investigating. If you’d let Andrea live, none of this would have happened.”

  “No way. Not with your FBI friend showing up a few weeks behind you.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Tara snapped, “do you think we would have done that intentionally? If we’d been together, we would have come up with a far better cover. Andrea disappeared, so I came looking for her. I disappeared and he came looking for me. As you say, we were friends.” The thought came with physical pain almost as intense as the one in her hand. Poor Jake.

  “No way.” Samuel reached for her left hand, and she waved it around trying to stay out of range, still trapped in the chair. Fire raced down her finger as the air swished by, and it was pointless anyway. There was nowhere to go.

  Chapter Eleven

  AGAIN, TARA WOKE to water in the face.

  “This passing out shit won’t save you forever,” Samuel informed her.

  A bubble of hysteria formed in her throat. “Sorry,” she choked out. He’d taken her center fingernail this time, and if the thought of raising her hand wasn’t so painful, she’d have flashed it at him.

  “Leave her to me,” Deborah said. “I’ll get it out of her. And if my way doesn’t work, we can always go back to yours.”

  Samuel gritted his teeth, then shrugged. “What the hell? The Leader wants that information.”

  Deborah left the room, and Samuel leaned against the table. “Who’d have believed a f
ucking cop would have such a weak constitution? I thought for sure you’d be more fun to play with.”

  So glad to disappoint you. But Tara didn’t dare speak the words. She had no desire to trigger Samuel’s temper.

  “We read a lot about you and your boyfriend when we finally got your last names,” he said. “It makes what’s about to happen so much more entertaining. It’s a damned shame he’s not still alive.”

  Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t ask. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, with his sister and all, having a junkie for a girlfriend would have been absolute poetry.”

  Fuck. This was not how she wanted to go down. She tried to remember what she’d learned about heroin use as a patrol cop. Generally, unlike meth heads, junkies wouldn’t fight you. They’d be too relaxed to do much of anything. But a junkie in withdrawal was like a wounded animal: approach with caution. Would she be able to get out of the cuffs if Deborah injected her? Would she lose all desire to?

  “I’ve told you guys everything.”

  “Too bad you’re a cop. If you were Jane Doe who hadn’t spent the last two months lying to us, even after your stint in isolation, you could maybe convince me of that. But now? No way.”

  Deborah reentered the room with her little black leather case.

  “I hear heroin makes you throw up,” Tara said. “You could at least untie me so I can get to the toilet.”

  “How long’s this going to take?” Samuel asked.

  “We should be able to question her in ten minutes.” Deborah studied her. “But she’s right. With our luck, she’s going to puke. So get ready to untie her the minute it hits her system. We’ll leave her for a bit, go get some dinner, come back. She’ll be good and wasted for at least four hours.”

  Four hours. That wasn’t so bad. If she sobered up after four hours, it would be the middle of the night and she could work the wires in the window loose. They wouldn’t bother checking on her then.

  Samuel grabbed her arm and slammed it down onto the table, causing her bloody fingers to slap into the metal. Despite herself, she screamed as the shock of pain traveled up her arm.