Alibi Island

by SLMN

  Huey shook his head again, reaching off the table with his right hand, to adjust the front of his pants, where his erection was pressing painfully against his fly.

  His heart was beating. His mouth was dry. His body throbbed with possibility, and that made him horny as hell.

  He reached for the desk phone and dialed a number he’d never seen written down. One that he’d never written down himself. One that he had been instructed to commit to memory.

  Rosa answered at the third ring, but Huey could still hear Brenda screaming.

  “My name is Carla.”

  The blond-haired woman pulled the seatbelt across Lainey’s lap as the Gulfstream taxied toward the runway. Jake-Not-Jake had thrown Lainey over his shoulder, deliberately flashing her backside at Dragons and Mustache. “Eyes on the prize, boys.”

  He slapped one cheek of her ass smartly, the sting making Lainey’s back arch with shock. “And what a prize, huh?”

  The Gulfstream had rolled to a halt. Dragons and Mustache pushed the steps up to the door as it opened. The uniformed pilot and co-pilot, all aviators and slicked back hair, descended and began connecting a fueling rig to the aircraft. They did this with practiced hands, as if it was a journey and a ritual they had completed dozens of times.

  Jake-Not-Jake then pulled down Lainey’s skirt to cover her underwear and taken her towards the plane. “Word of advice kid: if you think I’ve been a horror, you ain’t seen nothing yet. These people play for keeps, and you’re just meat to them. I like your spirit, and I enjoyed reeling you in. It’s not like I don’t have a conscience, but the money kinda gets in the way of one. But, if you’re going to get through this, just do as you’re told. Trust me, it’ll make it all a whole lot easier on you.”

  Lainey felt close to tears again. She could feel the links in the chain that held her to everything she knew snapping one by one. Her head bobbed away from the Buick as Jake-Not-Jake carried her towards the aircraft.

  The hangar was rapidly filling with the smell of kerosene, and Lainey’s eyes were stinging with it, making her feel like she was crying even more. “Please,” she said to Jake-Not-Jake’s back and near skipping feet. “My daddy is rich. He’ll give you more than these people will. He’ll double it. You could say you found me in a car somewhere unconscious. I won’t tell anyone the truth I promise. Please, Jake, please!”

  Jake-Not-Jake patted her backside again and gave it a squeeze, “Honey, I love it when you beg.”

  Inside the Gulfstream, no expense had been spared in the custom conversion. It was all cream leather, deep pile carpets, and panels of beechwood, polished and highly varnished. It was less a luxury airplane and more a luxury yacht.

  “Just one?” said the voice of a woman.

  Jake-Not-Jake slid Lainey off his shoulder into a cool leather seat and for the first time Lainey could see the woman who was speaking. Striking, tall, platinum blonde and looking at the teenager as if she’d just stood in something the dog had left in the yard.

  Jake-Not-Jake smiled. “Yes, just the one for now. We have five more operations ongoing, and we’ll reel them in. But this one is special, and that’s why I called you in ahead of schedule.”

  The blonde looked Lainey up and down in the seat, her expression not changing. “Pretty I suppose, well-proportioned, but special? How?”

  Jake-Not-Jake paused for dramatic effect, and then announced his surprise like a ringmaster in the circus.

  “Carla, I give you… Huey Ralston’s daughter. She was using a fake ID. I thought she was just another crazy little rich girl wanting to get her freak on. But her smartphone had been cloned…”

  The woman’s eyes blazed. “What? And you still took her? Are you fucking insane? Remember what happened to the Philippine’s crew, Daniel. Rosa just has to wave her finger and…”

  “Chill, baby, chill. We dealt with the clone and the cloner already. He saw the error of his ways, and decided to take his own life. It was tragic.”

  “As will your demise if there’s a security breach.”

  “It’s done. We have the cloned phone, the boy’s phone and we’ve wiped everything from his iCloud. It’s over.”

  Carla put her hands on her hips. She looked like she was trying to contain her anger, but it was still spilling out of her eyes. Lainey felt it pouring out of the woman. A small muscle twitched on the woman’s cheek. Lainey had the impression this was a woman who walked a line between calm and simply astonishing expressions of violence. And that it didn’t take her a lot to flip from one to the other.

  Lainey resolved to take Daniel’s—now she knew his real name—advice and play along. Feeling like a commodity and piece of meat to be bought and sold, gave a new precariousness to her situation. She threw possessions away all the time, once they had outlived their usefulness, and that was something right now she was not willing to become. Not trash.

  Daniel bent down, and kissed Lainey on the cheek, “There’s also something that puts the icing on the cake?”

  “Oh?”

  “Jake was gonna be her first.”

  The blond arched an eyebrow. “Oh, really? Dressed like that and you were going to be the first in?”

  “It’s all a front, isn’t it Lainey?” Daniel ruffled Lainey’s hair and smiled like he was telling a child she could have a pony. “She’s just playing at being a grown up. Not the real thing. Not by a long shot. Kinda dumb, when all is said and done, to have fallen for Jake so hard. I’m almost sad not to have followed through.”

  “I bet you are. Okay, I’m still not convinced the security on the island hasn’t been compromised, but I’ll get the comms team to look into it. I’ll need the phones.”

  Daniel reached into his pocket and pulled out Lainey’s Pippa iPhone and Gary’s Samsung. They’d been taped together with the same insulation tape they’d used on Lainey.

  Carla took the phones and tossed them onto a seat.

  “All that leaves…” said Daniel.

  “Yes, yes.” Carla’s irritation was still there on show. She pulled her own phone from the breast pocket of her jacket and thumbed the screen.

  “And…a…bonus for such a worthwhile catch?”

  “I’ll need Rosa to authorize that, but the baseline should be in your account now.”

  Daniel was already looking at the screen of his smartphone, his eyes lighting up at what he saw there.

  “Bingo.”

  And that was that.

  Lainey had made the fall from independent teenager with a life she controlled and a lifestyle any one of a million other girls would have killed to have lived just for a day, to simply a piece of property. Bought and sold for money.

  “I said pay attention.”

  Lainey snapped out of the cold repulsion of her situation and focused on the woman. “I just want to go home.”

  “You are. To your new home.”

  Lainey felt her bottom lip trembling. She didn’t want to show this blond-haired monster in an expensive suit, that she was scared. She didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. But I am more scared than I’ve ever been in my life, she thought to herself. Her heart was fluttering in her chest, and she was sure that vibration would be transmitted up to her neck for the woman to see.

  It had all moved so fast. It was so incredible she almost expected to wake up from a nightmare of epic proportions. But it wasn’t a dream. This was all too real. They had groomed her over weeks, they had killed Gary in front of her, and they had ‘five other operations ongoing.’ There was a succession of girls, just like Lainey, out there falling for Jake—keeping it from their parents and inching blindly toward their doom.

  Their professional set up—with its gangs of men acquiring victims, a Gulfstream Jet, and a comms team—felt nothing other than massive. A conspiracy that stretched from Houston to the Philippines and all places in between. Lainey felt less than a commodity now. The realization hitting her was just a tiny part of a voracious machine throwing girls like her into its jaws at a constant rat
e and chewing them up. What happened to the girls they had already taken? What happened to those which they needed to be replaced?

  A dark depression hit her.

  It wasn’t just the call for tears; it was the sense she’d become entirely inconsequential. That her dreams, ambitions, needs, and desires were now secondary to the people: this Rosa and her teams who now owned her.

  Carla sat in the seat next to Lainey, buckling herself in after smoothing down her suit where it had wrinkled up against the leather.

  “I can see the sheer hopelessness of your situation is sinking in, Lainey. I may call you Lainey, may I?”

  Lainey could do nothing except nod. There were no words she could put into her own mouth that could decode the utter collapse into grief and loss she was feeling.

  Carla patted her knee. “Of course, I’ve seen it dozens of times, that which you are now experiencing. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes not until we reach the island, or even then beyond that. The very stupid, the ones lacking the very basics of self-awareness take the longest. But I find those young women who appreciate…if you will, who embrace the complete hopelessness of their situation early on, have the advantage. The island can be survived. You’ll never leave of course, but you can survive if you have the pragmatic mindset to accept what is happening at the earliest juncture.”

  Carla was saying all this like she was reciting a shopping list, or ticking off items on her to-do planner. She smiled again, down at Lainey. The smile of an aunt taking her niece on a trip to the zoo.

  “Don’t see it as losing your life, Lainey…see it as gaining a rapist.”

  12

  “There’s no way he killed her.”

  “Isn’t that your guilt talking, Passion?”

  “I don’t feel guilty, Bryan. Gary Malcolm was a stalkery little slime ball with way too much time on his hands and an unnatural interest in spyware, but he was not a killer.”

  The speakerphone made the noise of disapproval. Passion sat back in the Hyundai’s driver seat and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten angry with him and over promised. So maybe I feel a little guilty. But there was nothing stopping him going to the police after he left me and fessing up. Nothing at all.”

  “There was nothing stopping you from suggesting it to him either.”

  That stung.

  Bryan continued, “I must also update your staff profile to include your immense ability to self-justify almost any screw-up.”

  “I’m going to off you, Bryan.” Passion cut the call.

  The Hyundai was parked about three miles from the Houston suburbs. Passion had stopped to gather her thoughts before going to see Huey Ralston. Stephen Crane had given her the go ahead to come over, but she had to “prepare herself for the immense grief being suffered by both parents” and “not do or say anything that would make their situation worse.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t, but I do have information that will be of great interest.”

  “Unless it leads to the body, I doubt it will be of any interest,” Crane had said before hanging up. Passion thought about calling him straight back and demanding to know how Crane had known her real name yesterday at the Court House. It rattled her more than she’d realized now that she thought about it. With the full-on pace of the investigation of Lainey’s disappearance, she hadn’t given it any time at all. But now it was itching at the back of her mind.

  Certainly Ralston had not let on that he thought she was operating under an alias. Very few people knew her real name. In fact, she could count on the fingers of one hand who called her “Passion” or “Ms. Valdez” these days. Saying “Jennifer Durant” was so second nature to her now that she almost introduced herself by the name, even to people who knew better. It was ingrained.

  There had been plenty of traffic going back the Court House as Crane moved away; perhaps she’d misheard him in the rumble of traffic.

  Maybe.

  But still it itched.

  Back to the present.

  Gary’s suicide and note would have sent police down the wrong path. It wouldn’t be the first time, and conversely it might help Passion’s investigation. While the police were using their resources for dragging rivers and trying to find the murder scene of a killing, Passion was absolutely sure it never happened. At least while their activity moved in the wrong direction, it gave Passion a chance of digging deeper into the Pippa Graves profile.

  There may be messages in the clone dump which reveal where the rendezvous between Lainey and Fake-Jake had taken place—where most certainly the teenager had been kidnapped. But Pippa may have told someone; a girlfriend perhaps. Maybe she’d been excited and bursting at the seams about meeting her new love? It was a long shot, but Passion made a mental note to look at the Pippa profile after her meeting with the Ralstons to look into who the most likely subject would be based upon messenger and phone logs.

  Passion drove the last three miles to the Ralston residence with her head full of possibilities and conjecture.

  Lainey was still alive. She was sure of it.

  The jungle simmered in the equatorial heat of summer. It was heat that slapped Lainey in the face and drenched her in sweat as Carla led her from the Gulfstream, down the steps onto the blistering concrete. Carla had cut the tape around her legs an hour into the three-hour flight so that Lainey could get up and walk around, returning some feeling to her legs.

  “It’s not like there’s anywhere for you to go.”

  Carla had also unwrapped the duct tape from around Lainey’s wrists, replacing it with handcuffs. This time her hands were secured in Lainey’s lap, so that she could sit back in the chair, rather than having to lean forward the whole time.

  Feeling had come back slowly into her limbs, but there had been pins, needles, and cramps. Carla rubbed Lainey’s wrists and ankles. “Just because I’m the bad guy here, doesn’t mean I want to see you suffer,” Carla said with a smirk. “Well not yet anyway.”

  Lainey was used to Houston heat, but that was nothing like this on the edge of the jungle. The air was thick with moisture, as if it were already raining, yet it was just humidity. The runway had been cut out of the virgin rainforest and had the half-finished look of something that didn’t need to be used that often, or one that was many years old. The strip was cracked and full of weeds.

  There was a refueling rig under a rusty corrugated shack, and a large tank of fuel on wheels that was attached to a Dodge truck, almost as rusty as the shack. There were a few people in grubby uniforms milling around in the heat—putting chocks against the tires of the Gulfstream and getting ready to refuel.

  “Wait,” Carla said, as the heat from the runway began to seep through even the thick soles of Lainey’s boots. Carla gripped tightly to Lainey’s arm above the elbow. “Let them come to us. That’s what we pay them for.”

  From behind the Dodge, an ancient Jeep painted army surplus green growled into life and pulled into view. The driver turned the vehicle towards the Gulfstream and trundled towards it.

  If she was going to do it, Lainey figured she’d have to do it now.

  As the Jeep pulled alongside them, she took advantage of the first time in over 24 hours that she didn’t have her ankles and knees taped together and exploded into movement. She crashed her shoulder into Carla. With a surprised yelp the tall blond crashed into the hood of the Jeep, her head bouncing back comically. Carla slithered to the concrete with a soft thud.

  Lainey took off. Her legs pumped and the soles of her boots thumped on the concrete. She expected to hear shots, or hear shouting, but there was nothing.

  Perhaps the slapping of her boots on the concrete was drowning out any other sounds.

  Perhaps she was too valuable of a commodity now to be shot.

  She didn’t care either way.

  As the sun beat down, and the humidity drenched her body she passed the corrugated shack and the fuel tank with ease. Lainey worked out every day in her gym. Sh
e had stamina and she had strength, even after being cooped up in the trunk of the Buick with her limbs tied. That hadn’t diminished those powers.

  The jungle was just another forty yards away as Lainey pelted towards it. She didn’t have a plan or a strategy. There hadn’t been time to formulate one. All she could think of doing from the moment Carla had freed her legs, was getting away.

  In the jungle she’d be able to hide. Maybe she could get to a village, raise the alarm. Maybe even get to a road. Anything, as long as she was away from the madness.

  Twenty yards.

  She could hear voices shouting. Lainey couldn’t make out the words, but the voices didn’t sound commanding, like they were ordering her to come back, they sounded panicked. Scared even.

  No matter. She had to get away. She couldn’t stay with Carla and be transported to wherever the final destination was. She was getting to the jungle and she was going to…

  Lainey ducked as the treetops head of her exploded with bullet fire. Branches shattered, leaves flew up. It was if there was a giant among the trees, and he was shaking the trunks with his mighty hands.

  The bullets were being fired from behind her, over her head. Warning shots.

  That sealed it. She was definitely too valuable to kill.

  Lainey had a chance—a real chance—of getting to the edge of the airstrip and jumping up the slope into the trees.

  Another barrage of shots from machine pistols. Some flew into the trees, some into the dirt on either side of her full-on pelt towards the thick greenery of the jungle.