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Speaking of which … I focused on the sounds in the room. Someone was in here with me. I could hear footsteps. Confident ones. Moving right to left. Something crackled, plastic wrapping removed off an unknown item. Dario. Was he here also? Had she had more people in the house, waiting? Did they take him?
An item was moved, the long squeak of friction sounding against the floor. I struggled to open my eyes. One of them moved a smidgen, enough to give me a hazy look at white concrete. I couldn’t see her, but my senses seemed to be returning. I strained again to open my eyes and was rewarded with a wedge of light, a cloudy figure nearby. The Realtor. She was bent over something, her long blonde hair draped close to the floor.
She came closer and stopped before me. I tried to lift my head but it didn’t move. From this angle, I could see one ripped knee on a pair of faded jeans. I thought back, of her welcoming us into the house, the conservative skirt and blazer. She’d changed. I wondered when she did that. I wondered how long I’d been drooling all over the place and hanging here like a broken marionette puppet.
Her foot lifted and I saw the black combat boot it wore. My eye opened a little bit more and I managed a blink. She pushed her boot into my chest and the treads of the shoe bit painfully into my breasts. I wheezed out a pained cry.
Ah. So, I could talk. My tongue twitched, and I managed to pull it into my mouth, swallowing a painful gulp that did nothing to ease my thirst. Why was I so thirsty? How long had it been? An hour? A day? I had no concept of time.
“Water.” My voice didn’t sound like me. It sounded old and feeble. My tongue felt sandpapery and this must be how a cat feels, all of the time.
She laughed and I tried to figure out what she was laughing about. Had I said something? I couldn’t remember.
She pulled back her boot from my chest and my eyelids finally worked, dragging apart.
DARIO
Uniforms swarmed the mini-mansion, LVPD in white letters that seemed to scream at him from every vest. Dario stood in the grand living room and made the call, his fifth in the last hour. Finally, this time, the man picked up.
“I can’t keep holding your hand with updates. We’re working on this. You have to be patient. This guy—”
“She took Bell. Kidnapped her.”
There was a beat of silence, then the federal agent spoke. “Bell Hartley? Who took her?”
“A blonde. Tall. We had an appointment to look at a house. She tied up the realtor and posed as her. I stepped out of the house to talk to you, and that’s when she took her.”
“Is there blood?”
Dario knew what the man was really asking. After all, Gwen’s killer hadn’t been concerned with kidnapping. Death had been the focus there. So why, this time, was it different? The woman would have had plenty of time to shoot Bell and take off. But she didn’t. She took Bell with her. Why?
He shook his head. “There wasn’t any blood. A shoe—Bell’s sandal—was left behind. And her purse was tossed in the tub with the Realtor. Nothing else. There’s a highway that runs adjacent to this house. It looks like she took her there and had a car waiting.”
“This doesn’t make sense. Do you think she was hired? That she’s the one who hit Gwen?” Agent King asked.
Dario pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to remember something, anything, about the woman who had let them into the house. But any woman had paled next to Bell, and his eyes had swept over her without looking, her greeting barely acknowledged, her chatter about the house, the bedrooms, the lot—all ignored.
She had been blonde. Fairly tall. A thin muscular build. That was all he could remember about her. A sketch artist would be arriving any minute to work with him on a drawing, and he was coming up blank with regards to her face. Had he shook her hand? Looked her in the eye? Introduced himself?
“Dario? You there?”
He tried to refocus on the conversation. Do you think she was hired? That she’s the one who hit Gwen? He shook his head. “I don’t know. Who the fuck would want to hurt her now that Hawk was dead? I don’t know—” He shook his head. “I don’t know what is happening.”
It didn’t make sense. Hawk’s goons were all hired muscle. There was no devotion among his crew, no personal interests in his successes, other than the promise of a paycheck. With his death, the money stopped. Any jobs in progress would have died with the vanishing of their reward.
