Alibi Island

by SLMN

  She recognized the smell from Gary’s car.

  She shifted forward a little, by snaking her knees and relieving the pressure of whatever had been digging into her spinal column. The wave of fear that rolled over her, fuzzed up her brain and made her start to tremble.

  What was happening?

  Why was this happening?

  Her heart started thumping in her chest, and she felt a trickle of sweat move from her temple onto her cheek. At least she hoped it was sweat. She was in trouble. She’d been abducted. And maybe the liquid that was now moving down the side of her face was blood.

  Oh, God. Please don’t let it be blood.

  Lainey hated blood in any form, which considering she dressed like the uber-est of uber-Goths, was somewhat of a drawback when exploring the internet for changes to her look. God those Goth chicks liked blood.

  She felt bile rising in her throat. Even the thought of blood was nauseating to her.

  Oil. Engine oil. Burnt engine oil.

  Think about that. Think about anything except…

  Gary was a boy on the outer edge of her social circle. Two years older—from a family which had some money but nothing like the Ralston’s or most of her friends—Gary was a hanger on. He’d driven some of the others around in his four-year-old Camry. When Lainey had gotten into it the first time, she’d never been in a car so old before. It was beat up, there was a split in the dash, the windows needed a wash, but it was a ride. Best of all it was non-descript enough not to draw attention, when it was rolling into town.

  Gary was not the smartest tool in the box, and he didn’t realize that his constant chauffeuring would never lead to him dating Lainey or any of her friends. But while he was driving them around, they weren’t going to make him think any different.

  So good old dependable Gary would turn up when they wanted their own Personal Uber, and he would drive them downtown, or anywhere they wanted to go. He’d even wait with the car in the parking lot while they got themselves into the clubs with their fake IDs to dance and drink illegally. Gary never complained, because if he did there were a thousand other guys Lainey or her friends could use for the task.

  Gary knew his place.

  One night the Camry had sprung an oil leak. The smell of burning hydrocarbons on the engine and the thick gout of smoke from under the hood made Lainey and her friends exit the car toot suite, leaving Gary by the side of the road while they booked a real Uber.

  It was a smell that had clung to Lainey’s blouse and hair for the rest of the evening. They all refused to let Gary drive them again until his car was fixed and he could promise them it would never happen again.

  Gary got the car fixed. He wasn’t going to miss out on driving Lainey around.

  It was that smell that filled Lainey’s nostrils now. If she hadn’t been so terrified about what had happened to her, she would have been incandescently pissed off that she had been thrown into the trunk of a car even older than Gary’s Camry and left there.

  That was better.

  Although she was still scared and didn’t know what was happening or why she was in the trunk of the car, her thinking was clearer. It helped to move her thoughts away from when the panic rose, back to stuff she could remember. Stuff that made her feel better.

  Lainey didn’t know how long she’d been in the trunk because after the men had bound her ankles and her arms behind her back they’d put a sharp-smelling pad of cotton wool to her mouth, and that was the last thing she remembered. They must have put the tape over her mouth to stop her screaming when she woke up.

  It had worked.

  The tape was so tight and she could feel it had been wound all the way around her head so tightly that she couldn’t even move her jaw. It was locked in place, and it had been done by someone who knew exactly what he’d been doing.

  And who had done it?

  And there was the panic again.

  The constriction of her breathing by the tape across her mouth meant her nostrils needed to work overtime to not promote the feeling of panic. But in the hot and confined space her nostrils were not coming up with the extra breath her anxiety was demanding.

  No.

  Think.

  A tumble of images blossomed open in Lainey’s mind. She remembered giving the nod to Sven that she was leaving the compound and that she expected him to deal with the surveillance cameras. She’d swapped out her family cellphone for the one she kept in the false bottom of her black leather handbag—making sure to not only turn off her family cellphone, but to crack the back of the phone and remove the SIM card.

  She didn’t want her father to speak to any government types who would be able to tell him where she was going that night based upon passive signals from the SIM card. It wouldn’t have been so sensitive if she’d been busted going to a club in town, but tonight she was supposed to be meeting Jake for the first time. He had booked a room at the Sheraton, and they were going to spend the night there. Lainey planned to consummate the relationship they’d been having for the last four months, by putting the first score on the doorpost of her virginity.

  It was not as if she’d been saving herself in the sense that she wanted to wait until she was older, finished college, and was ready for that kind of deal. No. There just hadn’t been the right kind of guy yet.

  Not like Jake anyways.

  There were plenty of guys at school who would have jumped through fiery hoops to lay down with Lainey and be her first. In fact, she kinda enjoyed making them want to jump through the hoops so much that they’d have set fire to them themselves—but none of them had the poise, the strength, and the presence of Jake. Just the tone of his voice on the phone, or the endless hours spent on messenger meant Lainey had become more and more convinced she wanted to offer herself up to Jake.

  She wasn’t scared of losing her virginity, wasn’t apprehensive about how she would perform, or concerned about what Jake would think of her. She had confidence in spade, clubs, hearts, and diamonds too. No, she just wanted it to be right, and she wanted it to be with Jake.

  When Jake said he’d be travelling to Houston with his dad on a business-slash-pleasure trip, her heart skipped all the beats, and then started jumping over the other members of the band. Jake told her that his dad would be cool with him spending the night away. That night could be spent in a suite near the top floor of the Sheraton and that it would be insane to spend that time with her. There was no pressure he’d said; whatever happens, happens.

  “But I want it to happen,” she’d said, nearly breathless.

  “And so it will, baby. It will.”

  The three days after they’d made the arrangements, and he’d confirmed the hotel booking, it had felt like time had broken down and stopped moving forward.

  Lainey had been unable to concentrate on anything. TV bored her. Music didn’t cut it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone but Jake, and she had several fights with her mom about trivial and stupid things. In fact, everything that wasn’t Jake related was trivial and stupid.

  She planned and changed the plans a million times over about what she would wear. She flirted with the idea of changing out of the Goth look completely, having her hair return to blonde and going wholly for the naïve virgin look.

  She got as far as booking the hairdresser to come to the house and complete the dye job, but then cancelled at the last minute. Jake had been the one to encourage the black and the fishnets and the Nightmare Before Christmas look. He’d told her a million times how much he dug it, so she’d decided that it would stay, but she ordered new boots, an even more micro mini skirt, and a savage bra that would lift her whole body to another level. When she finally tried it all on in the full-length mirror of her bedroom, she had absolutely killed it.

  She was going to murder out there.

  The day had been blisteringly hot, without a cloud in the endless blue, making Lainey’s Gothly look even more incongruous anywhere except a graveyard on a winter’s night.

  She k
new Sven would be watching her on the cameras, as she walked down to the steel gates that led from the estate onto the compound surrounding the house. As she approached the gates, they opened silently and she walked through them out onto the estate road. Jake said he didn’t want his car to be seen by anyone. That made sense, considering there were servants, gardeners, and ranch hands who could have seen the car and who could have circumvented the deal she had with Sven, reporting directly back to her parents. The least information she allowed to get back, the better.

  The estate around the house was basically a cattle ranch her father maintained for show rather than for any real sense of wanting to be involved in the production of beef.

  There was a small herd that was tended by a farm manager and ranch hands. Her father didn’t get involved, other than occasionally, to put on a flannel shirt and muss up his hair some to have his photograph taken in front of a feed barn. Those pictures would be circulated on his campaign website to impress the voting farmers of the state. The Class One election was looming, and “Farmers are voters too,” Huey Ralston would announce to anyone who would listen.

  The walk off the ranch would take 20 minutes to reach the far gate on Luxor Street. It was called a street, yet it was nothing more than a tributary feed to the main Houston expressway. The only traffic it saw most days was the Ralston residence staff coming into work or Lainey’s mother and father going to or returning from charity, masonic, or political events. Sometimes all three at once.

  Lainey wished she’d taken a bottle of water with her, but she didn’t want to mess up her lipstick that had been precisely applied—and removed and reapplied three times—until it was just right. It gave her mouth the fullness of a plum, with the sheen of ice. The only time she wanted to mess up her lipstick was when Jake slipped his tongue between those lips and kissed her deeply.

  Lainey had imagined that moment a thousand times since they’d arranged the place to meet on Luxor. She wasn’t going to say a word to him. She was going to reach up, put her hand on the back of his neck, and pull down his beautiful mouth to plant it on hers. And she was going to kiss him into the middle of next week.

  It was that ambition that drove her booted feet along with mechanical regularity. The heat thrummed against the top of her head and stung the areas of skin exposed on either side of the straps of the fishnet dress.

  When she reached Luxor, she checked her secret cell for messages from Jake. Disappointingly, as she stood by the scrubby bushes on the other side of the gate, she found Jake had not messaged at all. To add to her disappointment, he was not already there, waiting for that kiss.

  Lainey thumbed open WhatsApp and sent Jake three question marks.

  She waited.

  There wasn’t even a tree to stand under, offering shade in the killing heat. She could feel the track of a bead of sweat start to move between her shoulder blades, along her spine to pool in the small of her back. The sun beat down even harder as it moved towards midday. She started to wish she’d brought extra sunblock out with her.

  And that drink.

  Her brain was just about to boil over in her head when Jake’s reply pinged through WhatsApp: “Two minutes.”

  And she was back in the room. Well, on the road.

  Lainey stepped away from the brush towards the road, looking in the direction of the Houston expressway—the way from which she expected Jake’s car to arrive.

  But there was nothing coming. That was weird.

  In the other direction, Luxor. Its grand name giving the impression it was more important that it was in reality—which in some respects made it the perfect name for a road leading to a Ralston property—led away in the opposite direction to Bumfuck, TX.

  So when Lainey saw the approaching grille of a dusty blue 2011 Buick Lucerne, she was not so much weirded out as taken completely off guard. The sun was shining directly on the grill and the windshield of the Buick, making it impossible for Lainey to make out who was inside.

  She remembered clearly the smell of it as it drew up, however.

  That smell of burnt oil, the tang of hot metal, and the aroma of cheapness that pervaded the Lucerne was now giving Lainey pause.

  All of a sudden this didn’t feel right at all.

  Jake was the son of a rich businessman. His dad had a Ferrari, she’d seen it on Facebook. They lived in a huge colonial on the outskirts of Dallas. Those pictures dripped money. Jake dressed like money. He spoke like money.

  So when a plethora of doors opened simultaneously and three men, all in their thirties and or even forties got out, the panic clapped in her heart like thunder. Their hair was messy, their chins were stubbly, their shirts grubby with dust and sweat.

  Lainey took a step back, misjudged the brush at her ankles, and keeled over backwards.

  The driver of the car—in his thirties with dark bushy eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a thick gold earring in his left ear— said, “Hello Pippa,” in Jake’s voice and reached down to pick her out of the dirt by the front of her blouse.

  “I don’t…who…?”

  “You mean you don’t recognize my voice?” The man who wasn’t Jake said. The grown, ugly, sweaty, unshaven man—whose breath smelled of tobacco and garlic, whose eyes were quick and black, the man who had a thick network of old white scars in the side of his neck?

  He was Jake?

  Lainey was lifted up onto her feet. One of the men, a paunchy mustachioed Mexican with a squint, was unravelling thick silver duct tape from a roll in his hand. He was biting at it with gold-capped teeth.

  Jake-Not-Jake pushed Lainey facedown onto the hood of the Buick. The metal was scalding through her clothes. Her arms were pulled behind her back and taped by one of the men, while the third—a bald heavy set white guy with neck tattoos of dragons—did the same with her ankles.

  “Stop! Please! Stop!”

  And that’s when the cotton wool pad was placed over her mouth and the world went dark.

  Lainey’s heart was beating too fast again. The thing that was sticking in her back had shifted, or her body had and it was hurting again.

  The heat inside the Buick trunk was unbearable. Her mouth was so dry she was unable to swallow and the liquid— notbloodnotbloodnotblood—rolling down her face was increasing in regularity with every passing moment.

  The swell of panic would no longer be settled by thoughts of Gary’s car or Jake-Not-Jake. There was a tide of fear rising in her now that had nothing to do with being abducted, but had more to do with the encroaching claustrophobia of the oven-like trunk, it’s building heat getting ready to roast her alive.

  Such was the smash of her heart against her ribs and the twisting agony of anxiety in her gut, that Lainey nearly cried with joy as the trunk lid was popped open and the sunlight flooded in, blinding her with its intensity.

  If it hadn’t been for the muzzle of the pistol being aimed at her face, Lainey might have thought that she had been visited upon by a welcome salvation.

  6

  The door opened, and Sven’s bleary-eyed face peered out into the gloom of the corridor. When he met Passion, his eyes did the fucking hell she’s gorgeous thing, and his face changed from indifference to intense curiosity without shifting a gear. The Swede had a good eight inches on Passion’s 5’9 frame, and as he moved behind the crack in the door his sideways travel seemed to go on for longer than humanly possible.

  This was a big man.

  The door closed, and Passion heard the sound of two chains being unhooked before it opened again. Sven was naked from the belt of his shorts to his beard and long, dirty blond hair.

  If Sven ever had trouble getting work as a butler/bodyguard, Passion could totally get him work in her cover industry as a model.

  Sven would get a lot of gigs.

  “Yes?” he said with Scandinavian succinctness.

  So Passion told him, and he let her in.

  Sven had been living within the Ralston Compound for the last two years since leaving Särskilda Opera
tionsgruppen. The apartment where Passion had found him in was small, light and airy, and had no furniture. Sven had only moved in last night.

  In the center of the living space—with access to two bedroom doors, an open plan kitchen, and a short corridor to the bathroom—were two open suitcases, a camouflage rucksack, an empty shoulder holster, and a tuxedo hanging from a hook above the door frame.

  “I would offer you coffee, Ms. Durant, if I had any coffee, cup, or kettle.”

  Passion liked him already, and not just because of the way he looked. He carried himself like a man who knew he was hotter than a landing on the sun, but had the air of humility that goes with someone who knew they were also far from perfect on the inside.

  “I was a fool. Oldest trick in the book, and I fell for it. She knew there were no housecams in the cellar, so she picked the only public place where she could pull her blackmail. I should have gone to Mr. Ralston immediately. Not to save my ass, you understand, but because it was the right thing to do for the family. Whatever the girl’s faults and dishonorable conduct, if she has been abducted, and even worse hurt, I don’t think I could forgive myself.”

  Passion could feel Sven’s genuine concern for Lainey coming through loud and clear.

  “It’s just you hear so many stories of men overstepping the mark with young women, using their positions of power to get their sexual kicks—the story she would have taken to Mr. Ralston would have been all too plausible. But as I said, I’ve been a fool.”

  Passion pulled a Samsung Tablet from her bag, turned it on and started flicking through a succession of pictures. “These are from the friends list on Alaina’s official Facebook account. We believe she’s got another account, probably under another name. We haven’t yet been able to find it. Can you tell me if any of the people she has as friends on this profile have turned up at any of the parties she held at the house?”

  Sven crossed his arms over his chest, the muscles in his forearms rippling agreeably. As each picture moved past, he shook his head.