Page 57 of A Future To Remember

I scowled and tried to grab it from him. “Come on, Hernandez. Stop playin’.”

Oscar held the check away from me, tucked his credit card into the small binder it was in, and handed it to the server. When she left to run the card, the junior agent looked at me squarely and said, “I’ve got backpay comin’, remember?”

I sighed. “Then I still owe you for all the vacation days you’ve taken.”

He cocked his head at me. “Why do you believe you owe me anything?”

I stared at him, confused by the question. “What’re you…kidding? You’re out here missing work, your fiancée, and your life, all to help me find my wife.”

He shook his head. “No, sir. I’m not.”

“You’re not?”

“Nope. I’m out here missing work, my fiancée, and my life because Cooper’s my friend. Hell, she’s one of my best friends. The fact that she married you is inconsequential. She’d look for me the same way I’m looking for her in a heartbeat, so, here I am, and here I’m gonna stay until we find her and bring her home. Sir.”

That earned him a grateful half smile, which was all I had energy for.

We left the bar shortly after and I offered Eggy some steak, but he only sniffed at it before burying his nose back in the blankets. “Dammit,” I muttered as Oscar pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road.

“He’s not eating?”

“No. He ate a little this morning, but nothing since then.”

“He seemed perky when we were interviewing Gwen, though.”

I nodded, but my already troubled thoughts were clouded with guilt and worry for this twelve-pound noodle of a dog. “It’s getting bad, Oscar,” I said after a long silence.

“I know, sir.”

I sighed, leaning my head back against the headrest. “He’s got probably a week left in him.”

“Then we’ve got up to six days to find her. Sooner, if we’re lucky.”

I turned my head to eye him skeptically. “Ever the optimist, eh?”

He grinned. “How the fuck else are we going to get through this, Dutch?”

It wasn’t lost on me that he’d finally called me by my first name, and I knew he’d done it to drive home the point that we couldn’t allow ourselves the luxury of despair right now. We had way too much work to do and the clock was ticking.

CHAPTER 13

Her

I was so fucking cold. Covering me was a blanket that smelled of sweat and piss, but I was pulling it tight around myself. I was shivering so hard that the blanket kept shifting, and the only reason I was still awake was because I had to adjust the blanket every few minutes.

As my teeth chattered, my gaze lifted across the room, first to where my sheepskin coat was crumpled in the corner. They’d yanked it off me the night before they left, and I had no way to reach it now, with my ankle chained to the metal loop screwed into the cabin wall. I longed to feel its warmth.

And I didn’t even have my thick, red sweater to keep me from feeling the bite of the cold.

That was also across the room, where she lay, curled into a similar ball with my sweater wrapped around her bone-thin shoulders. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing, and I’d long since stopped calling out to her.

We’d been left behind two days ago, each chained to a loop on opposite walls. The fire had died out once we’d used up all the wood, which was hours ago, and the place was unbearably cold. I had no way of knowing if we’d been abandoned, and I also didn’t know if it was better that way or if they came back and began the torture all over again.

I knew I was dead either way. Was it better to just give up now? Or hang on and fight?

Shivering violently, I hugged my shins with my legs pulled up tight, making myself into the smallest ball I could manage. Anything to conserve body heat. Beyond being cold to the core, I was so sore. So beaten, battered, and bruised. My face throbbed from the sucker punch I’d gotten right before they left. They were always sucker punching us. They made a game of it.

I tried to give them nothing in return. Just be a zombie, I told myself. Don’t feed them what they want, which was to see my fear, my pain, my humiliation again and again and again.