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It was too difficult to drag Becker by his shirt so I got him by an ankle and tugged.
“Keep your head up,” I said to him. “I don’t want to go to all this effort only to give you a concussion.”
I managed to get him out the kitchen door and into what might pass for a yard. It was mostly hard-packed dirt and scrub grass and garbage. The driveway leading up to the house was dirt, and we were surrounded by woods. I had no idea where we were. I tried getting Becker up again, and he was able to stumble to the tree line. I walked him far enough into the woods so he would be hidden, and I left him there.
“I don’t think Pooka is coming back,” I said, “but stay hidden just in case. I’m going for help.”
I limped down the driveway, got to a paved two-lane road, and still saw nothing but woods. No houses. No cars. No 7-Eleven. I had a dilemma now. If I heard a car coming, and I went out into the road to wave it down, I ran the risk of it being Pooka. No guarantee that he’d still be in the white van. Also no guarantee that anyone other than Pooka would stop. I looked like something from a horror movie. My one arm was covered in caked-on blood. My jeans were torn and blood soaked. My hands were shackled and the thick chain was still padlocked onto the cuffs. A small chunk of wallboard was attached to the end of the chain.
I was at the edge of the driveway, trying to decide to walk left or right and a black SUV came into view from my left. I stepped slightly into the road so the driver would be sure to notice me. I was fighting the drug and the blood loss, working to stay focused. The SUV slowed and stopped just short of where I was standing. Black Porsche Cayenne. Tank behind the wheel. Ranger out of the car and running toward me. I would have done more sobbing, but I didn’t have the energy.
Ranger wrapped his arms around me and held me close against him. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
“How did you find me?”
He reached into the front pocket of my jeans and removed the key to the Macan. “GPS key tag,” he said. “You had your car key with you.”
“Becker is at the other end of the driveway. He’s not in good shape. He’s been drugged and had blood taken from him. And probably he’s been infected with plague.”
Ranger looked down at my arm with the needle marks.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Babe,” he said, so soft it was barely a whisper.
He took a universal handcuff key out of a pocket on his cargo pants and opened my cuffs. He looked at the chunk of wallboard still attached to the chain and raised an eyebrow.
“Pooka might be a brilliant biologist, but he doesn’t know a lot about construction,” I said. “If he’d drilled the bolt into a stud I couldn’t have gotten free.”
“I’m sure it still took some muscle to get this out of the wall,” Ranger said.
“I was motivated.”
Ranger tossed the cuffs and the chain into the back of the SUV, and Tank drove us up the driveway to the ramshackle house.
I led Tank and Ranger to Becker, and we got him out of the woods and unshackled. Tank folded the backseat down and stretched Becker out in the Cayenne cargo area. Ranger and Tank did a fast walk-through of the house. We left Tank on the property to wait for Rangeman backup to arrive, and to keep everything secure until the police took over. Ranger, Becker, and I left in the SUV.
“Did you call Morelli or did you call dispatch?” I asked Ranger.
“I called dispatch. Morelli is unavailable.”
“Did Lula call you?”
“Lula called everybody. Fortunately I was on the list because no one else would have thought of the key fob. You could also have been tracked through your phone, but you left it behind in your messenger bag.”
“I ran out of pockets.”
The woods disappeared after a half mile, and we were in a lower income neighborhood of small bungalow-type houses.
“Where are we?” I asked Ranger.
“South Trenton. This street runs into Broad. Blatzo lives one street further south. We’ll be at St. Francis in less than ten minutes.”
I looked back at Becker. His eyes were closed. His breathing seemed regular.
“How’s he doing?” Ranger asked.
Becker kept his eyes closed, but he gave me a thumbs-up.
