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Hamlet helps, and so did Maria De Angelis.
With Lucas as her brother, he’d taught her to be more prepared than a boy scout. She had an emergency roadside kit in her trunk, a set of jumping cables, and even a flare or two. She might not be able to help the driver herself, but she was sure she had something that would do the trick.
Obviously expecting her to keep on driving by, the driver kept their head bowed. Turning only slightly when Maria braked, parking alongside the sedan, she couldn’t really make out any features from her side of the car, though the drive did rise up from their crouch.
That sealed it for her. Grabbing her phone in case either she or the driver needed it, she released her seat belt and unfolded her tall, lanky body from the coupe. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she closed the door.
Over the sedan, she saw the driver’s head turn her way as the door clicked shut.
Their face was shadowed from the hood. Maria still couldn’t make out any features, but that didn’t stop her from smiling again as she walked around both of the cars.
“Buonasera. Good evening. I thought you might need some—eep.”
It all happened so fast. As she came around the back end of the sedan, something caught her attention. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a big, bulk figure rise up from the back seat of the sedan. Like someone was hiding… but now they weren’t.
Whether the distraction was on purpose or not, it didn’t matter. It gave the driver the chance to move.
Before she could rip out a scream, one hand clamped over her mouth. The other? He—and from his build and the way he moved, she thought it had to be ahe—held a small syringe tucked beneath his thumb.
This time she did scream. They sounds were muffled against his white skin, though this close, she was finally able to get a good look at his face… and screamed again when all she saw was black fabric staring back at her.
The driver’s face was covered, and as he warned her not to fight back, his voice was purposely distorted so that—in her fight—she couldn’t tell if she knew him.
But he called her Maria. He knew her name.
Whatever was happening, it wasn’t a chance attack, and she would’ve aimed a kick right for his nuts if it wasn’t for the big guy who climbed out of the back seat of the sedan.
Now him… she recognizedhim.
Nathaniel Boone. Tommy Mathers’s former bodyguard, and the man who interrupted Grace’s wedding to Rick with a fistfight that only ended when Grace herself pulled the trigger on Natalie’s gun.
For such a brawn man, he moved quickly. With the masked man’s fingers digging into her cheeks, she couldn’t break free. She tried anyway, gasping when Boone moved to her back, gripping her shoulder, holding her in place.
The masked man clicked his tongue. “Maria… I told you not to fight. Don’t make this any harder than you have to.”
She ignored his warning. Thrashing her head, trying to escape Boone’s iron-tight hold, she yelped again when the masked man jabbed the point of the syringe into her neck, injecting her with whatever was in the vial.
He waited a moment for the contents to do something. When Maria’s eyes started to droop, her whole body feeling like it weighed a thousand pounds, he nodded. She watched the black shadow of his face bob, seeing two of them, her two feeling too big for her mouth.
She wanted to scream.
Couldn’t.
She wanted to escape.
Couldn’t do that, either.
And when the masked man looked over her head, telling Boone to put her in the coupe before someone saw what was going on, she wanted to cry—and was unable to.
The whole exchange had lasted maybe two minutes. Not a single driver on the highway stopped to see why two men were carrying an incapacitated woman back to her car, and understanding how different the outside was to Hamlet, she didn’t expect that they would… even if she wished they did.
The last thought Maria had before the drugs took her under was a deep regret that her Louisville slugger was tucked under her bed instead of in the backseat of her coupe where she could really, really have used it.
CHAPTERTHREE
“Heading out, sheriff?”
Sly glanced across the station house, halfway done with pulling his jacket on. He hadn’t needed it earlier at the beginning of his shift, but with the sun setting and late September being cooler than usual this year, he figured he would shrug it on before going outside.
