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“Oh yeah. You’re going to want to get down there.”
“I’m on it.” Howard punchedEND and stuffed the phone in his pocket. He splashed cold water on his face to perk himself up, and scrubbed his teeth with such force his dentist would cringe. He ran a comb through his hair, but he didn’t have time to tame the stubborn colic that sprang up after each pass. He tossed the brush on the counter and called it good.
“Honey?” He turned to find his wife standing in the door watching him, her arms folded over her chest, her eyes filled with concern. “Is everything okay?”
Kissing her on the forehead, Howard pushed past her, searching out his shoes. “Everything is fine,” he said distractedly. Had he left them under the bed or somewhere downstairs? “But I have to get down to the hospital.”
Tugging her robe on, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Her body language was stiff, and her eyes tracked him around the room. “Is this about one of your cases?”
“Yeah.” Where was his wallet? And his keys? He patted his pockets and scanned the room, finally locating them on the highboy.
“I wish you could tell me what is going on,” she said, a small crease forming between her pale brows.
Howard stopped midstride to look at her. “I wish I could, too, Faye,” he said sincerely. “But until the case is closed…”
“Yeah, I know,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You can’t talk about it.”
Howard stared at her for a long time, wondering what the right thing to do here was. He could tell his wife was upset, hated being left in the dark, but that was the nature of his job. A part of him wanted to tell her everything, it wasn’t like she would blab it to the world, but it wasn’t a risk he was willing to take. His detective side was pulling him toward the door, but he fought it long enough to reassure her.
“Are we alright here?” he asked, clasping her shoulders.
She reached up and patted one of his hands. “We’re fine. I knew what I was getting into when I married you. It’s just hard sometimes, you know?”
He nodded solemnly. He knew all too well, but there was nothing to be done about it. “I have to go,” he said, kissing her briefly before he spun and was out the door.
***
Randy cruised down the darkened country road at a steady pace, searching intently for the illusive path that would lead him to his wayward wife. His trip had been delayed a bit, but if there was one thing he had learned while on the force, it was that you never went into any situation unprepared. So, he had stopped off at a little mom and pop hardware store for a pair of heavy duty metal cutters, thanks to the information that his tracker had passed along to him.
Now, he was killing time turning around and around, traveling the same two mile stretch of highway until he recognized every stick and stone along the way. He was preparing to do a U-turn again, when he caught headlights in his rearview mirror. Pulling onto the shoulder to get out of the way, he allowed the car to pass.
“What the…” Randy sat forward, squinting out the window as the car’s headlights caught on a rough clearing that he knew he’d passed by several times before. It was so subtle; no one would ever know it was there unless they knew to look for it. There were no markers or anything, just a patch of bare ground canopied by trees and surrounded by wild bushes that helped mask its appearance.
He knew instantly it was what he was looking for.
Making sure no cars were coming, Randy turned the truck down the beaten path, taking it extra slow to dampen the sound of his arrival as much as to spare him from a bruised ass. If anyone ever managed to stumble upon this sorry excuse for a road, they’d be so afraid of breaking an axle or popping a tire, they’d turn around again.
There was only one reason Randy could think of that a man would go to these lengths to keep himself hidden, and that meant he had some skeletons of his own in his closet. “What are you hiding from?” he muttered, then cursed when his tire slammed into a particularly deep pothole.
He didn’t know how long he’d been driving at the two-miles-per-hour pace he’d set, which still seemed to be too fast for this road, when the glow of artificial lights broke through the trees. Excitement roared inside him as he pulled the truck to a stop at the side of the road, not bothering to hide it. Why should he? He was here to retrieve his wife, after all.
As he walked up the expansive lawn, his bag of supplies slung over his shoulder, his feet light on the grass, Randy sized up the house. It wasn’t anything spectacular on the outside, but from what he knew from the Intel he’d received, it had enough going on inside to make up for it. Lights were on in every room in the house. Every curtain on the first floor was drawn, preventing him from seeing in as he rounded the house to the back where he was told the cellar doors would be, marking his entrance into the house.
Thanks to the lights inside and the glow of the moon overhead, his path was easy to follow. A very sturdy set of doors leading into the ground appeared as he rounded the back of the house and Randy whistled low when he set his eyes on the heavy duty chains wrapped tightly around the handles. This guy wasn’t playing around. Whatever he was protecting against, he was sure that his security didn’t stop at a set of chains, but he would have to cross that road if and when he came to it.
Dropping the heavy bag on the ground in front of his feet, Randy unzipped it and fished around for the cutters. Tool in hand, he placed his foot on one door and bent to line up the blade with the metal. When he had explained to the man at the store what he needed the cutters for, he expected him to lead him to some glorified pinchers. Instead, he had been pointed to a motorized hand tool with a rotating diamond edge blade. As he clicked it on, he worried briefly about the noise it created, but it made such quick work of the lock that he was done in no time.
Tossing the tool back in the bag, Randy ducked between the doors and began his descent into the pitch black basement below. In a few short minutes, he would be holding his wife in his arms again.
