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“Drink this.” A bottle was suddenly thrust against my mouth.
I moved my head to the side and clamped my lips together. Not because I was brave and stubborn but because I was afraid. Because I still couldn’t see I had no idea what this asshole was going to try and shove down my mouth.
“It’s water. Drink it or the hood goes back on.” And then in the spirit of comic book villains everywhere, he said. “This can go easy or this can go hard. Trust me, you want easy.”
And I wanted easy.
While I sipped from that cold clear water, things became into focus.
I had been taken.
I had been abducted from Aunt Betty’s house.
I had been punched and hooded and thrown into a vehicle like a sack of potatoes.
Then I had had a needle stuck in my arm.
I had been kidnapped and drugged and brought…where? Why?
The unrelenting power of the unknown sucked me into a vortex of terror and to a place where murderers and rapists and monsters resided. My wrists and ankles were tied to a bed and my face was enshrouded in a hood. I could be anywhere; they could do anything to me. Anything at all. They could torture, maim, even bury me alive and no one would ever know. No one would ever find me. I hadn’t even lived my life and it was going to be over. I was going to suffer a horrible and violent death. I was going to become another statistic somewhere on a wall…
“What the fuck?” My captor bellowed out and when he leaped off the bed the whole frame shook. “Did you fucking piss yourself? You fucking bitch. I got your piss all over me. I’m gonna fucking kill you.” He rammed the hood back over my head, but this time he held it taut at the neck. The fabric was tight over my face so that when I tried to inhale all the heavy fabric got pulled into my mouth effectively sealing off my breathing. Then he began to beat me. Hard blows to my ribs and stomach. Vicious kicks to my back and legs until I passed out from the pain and lack of oxygen. I came to again just long enough to feel the sting of another needle in my arm and then nothing.
Awake again, I blinked in the light of the dim room. My first thought was that I was in a prison cell. A dank, dark cell with small, rectangular windows so dirty with grime that you could barely see the bolts that had screwed them shut.
My second thought was that I was not alone.
Kid
It had been seventy-six hours since Liddy had been taken. Four hours past the deadline into no-man’s land. Every tick of the clock took her further away from me. I don’t know how I hadn’t lost my shit a million times over.
Or maybe I did know.
My dad kept a watchful eye. He hovered and paced and chain-smoked right along with me. And Jules Bonny was a goddamn machine. Except for some furrowing of his brow or a ferocious grunt now and then, he pretty much kept himself at this intense kind of even keel baseline that put me at ease. I had heard that he had been a medic in the corps and had started the clinic at the Hells Saints Compound. I wasn’t sure he had much of a bedside manner, but I was damn sure he’d gotten the job done. Rumor had it that the stoic bastard had also beat a pretty severe heroin addiction back in the day.
If the rumors were true then his wife, Glory, was no shrinking violet either. Word had it that she had not only been the daughter of a Hollywood mogul but had also been an all-nude dancer in Vegas for the mob. It was also a known fact that Glory Bonny had once saved Raine Montesalto’s head from getting bashed in by a guy they both had been boning.
“The fact that I’m going doesn’t mean I’m leaving you on your own, brother.” Jules clapped me hard on the shoulder. “But ain’t too proud to say that my end is a dead end. Came here to do what I do and did it. I know that you’re freaking out with frustration and serious worry but try and look at it this way…we know where she isn’t. And believe it or not, that is really good information to go on. Eliminating the Jackals is big. Now the next step is to regroup and refocus our energies. I’m going to keep working on this, like I said.
“We’ve gone fucking nowhere. Three fucking days and she’s still out there.” I slammed my hand against the wall and felt the concrete wall hit back. Pain radiated up my arm and it felt so good, that I hit the concrete again. And again.
Jules watched me bust up my hand for a few minutes and then said, “That right there is what I call self-indulgent bullshit. You just wasted five minutes beating on your hand, yourgunhand, blaming yourself for unknowns. My advice is to ice that fist, take a breather, get your shit together then come back and look at this with a fresh pair of eyes. Once I get back home, I’m gonna run what we have past my brother, Hal. He was MARSOC and might be able to bring a different view on things. Gonna call in Diego, Reno, and Crow too. Dream fucking team right there. In the meantime, you keep your shit together and your eyes on the endgame. I’ll be in touch, and when I do, I expect you’ll have something for me other than a busted-up fist.”
Then Jules packed up his shit and was gone. I did my best, my very best, not to see his leaving as a betrayal or feel that hope went out the door when he did.
Liddy
Steel bunk beds lined the two walls across from me. On the third was a toilet and a sink bolted to the concrete walls. There was a heavy wooden table but no chairs. The front of the room was a wall of chain links from floor to ceiling and reminded me of something you might see in a storage area or a zoo. Young women, some no more than girls moved around the room with slow, measured steps. Their voices muted, their eyes vacant, their thin bodies draped in dirty torn dresses and their skin painted in dirt and deep bruises. My eyes moved rapidly over the women, but only a few of them looked back at me.
We ranged from teens to mid-twenties with no commonalities that I could see. Blondes, brunettes, white skin, brown skin, black skin…short, tall, thin, big-breasted, small-breasted…we all were much more different than the same.
As I looked on at the poor, pitiful creatures, it occurred to me that nothing here screamed alike. The hours that I had spent on the couch watchingCriminal Mindssurfaced dully in my brain. There was no pattern here, nothing that good ole Dr. Spencer Reid or Penelope Garcia would be able to put their creative minds together on and rush in at the final five and save the day.
Hours passed while we all stared at each other. There were few uttered words, and I realized that our native languages were as varied as our looks. We communicated in our silence, through looks and gestures, and tears. We comforted each other with sad eyes and gentle hands.
The dying light behind the grime-encrusted, small barred windows began to fade. Another long hour seemed to pass before the door to our cage opened with a clang and in walked two men. One balanced a tray of thin soup and bottled water. The other was heavily armed with an assault rifle held cross body, a gun on his right hip, and a taser on his left.
Overkill much on the weaponry? I almost laughed out loud as the neurons began to fire again in my brain and brought about a hysterical sort of clarity. All of us altogether probably didn’t equal half this guy’s muscle mass. And that’s not even adding in the dazed zombie look about us or the apparent lack of ability to communicate with each other enough to formulate a semblance of an escape plan. But still there he stood before us, armed to the teeth.
