AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I got out and walked around the car to the driver’s seat, my nerves starting to get the best of me. I’d been involved with a few hostage situations, but never without a team. Then again, that wasn’t true. I’d saved that one woman when responding to a domestic violence call. But I’d been sober and had practiced on the firing range the week before.
The last time I’d fired a gun was when I’d killed Dylan Carpenter.
Suck it up, Buttercup.
I needed to save Ava. I didn’t have time for this self-pity shit.
I pulled back onto the road and drove the few hundred feet to the old Peterman warehouse entrance. The parking lot was empty except for two cars—a beat-up Toyota Camry and a white Jeep Cherokee.
If I’d had any remaining doubts that Eddie Johnson had been killed by Ava’s kidnapper, they would have quickly evaporated.
I parked next to the front entrance and pulled the flashlight out of my glove compartment. After tucking the gun into the waistband of my jeans at the small of my back, I got out of the car, flicked on the flashlight, and walked right up to the door.
I wondered if I should slow down and give Malcolm time to catch up, but decided I wanted to get some answers before they killed me. I suspected whoever had left those notes would be eager to explain.
Or at least I was counting on it.
The front door was locked, but the glass was knocked out. I bent down and climbed through, glass crunching under the soles of my ankle boots.
I’d just announced my presence.
I didn’t let that slow me down as I walked through an empty room toward a door. It was unlocked, so I opened it and peered around the corner. It opened to an empty twenty-foot hallway with another door at the far end.
I considered pulling out my gun, but I wasn’t any kind of sharpshooter, even at peak performance and sober. My best bet was to count on Malcolm to provide my backup and focus on finding Ava.
Hopefully, alive and unharmed.
Turning off the flashlight, I opened the door and peered into the darkness, letting my eyes adjust. A glow appeared in the distance, and I could make out empty metal shelving that stretched up to what had to be a twenty-foot ceiling.
“Harper, I know you’re here, so no use hiding,” a deep voice called out. “I have someone here who wants to see you. Tell her, Ava.”
“Harper?” a scared voice called out.
Ava had likely never heard of me before, so her kidnapper must have told her something about me.
I headed down a long aisle toward the light and came to a halt when I saw Ava Peterman wearing pink pajamas. Her hair was tangled, and her face was pale. Duct tape was wrapped around her chest, binding her to a rickety old office chair. Her wrists were taped to the chair arms. Her legs were too short to reach the base or the silver pole connected to the wheels, but her ankles were bound together.
A man stood about ten feet behind her, his face and upper body in the shadows.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, stopping at the end of the aisle.
“Wrong question,” the man said ominously. “Shouldn’t you be asking who is doing this?”
“Does it matter?” I said dryly. “Ava looks relatively unharmed, so let her go and maybe we can call this a misunderstanding.” There only appeared to be one person with her, which made me feel a hell of a lot better. We stood a chance, especially if Malcolm made it through the back.
The man began to laugh as he backed up into the shadows. “Let’s play a game.”
The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?” I asked, taking a step closer. “All the notes were a game.”
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” he asked, his voice moving to my right in the darkness. “But you weren’t very good at it.”
“What can I say?” I said, taking another step closer to Ava and trying to casually look around the room. I was at the end of multiple aisles of shelves. Stacks of pallets were arranged in front of me, spaced about six feet apart, giving Ava’s kidnapper plenty of places to hide. She was in the middle, exposed. “I never claimed to be good. Just persistent.”
“But you only found me because I led you here. Don’t you want to know who I am? Don’t you want to know who bested you?”
He wanted me to ask, but I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure. He sounded too young to be Barry, but then again, I hadn’t expected the father to be the kidnapper.
