I wasn’t really good at doing nothing, I was kind of an action girl and sitting around waiting was not my style.
Nevertheless, I pulled my cop’s daughter shroud around me, not impenetrable but it would do the trick in a pinch. I sat on my couch, pulled my heels up on the seat, rested my cheek on my knees and waited.
* * * * *
Looking back, it was kind of an idiotic thing to do.
Not that I should blame myself too much, it wasn’t like cars exploded in front of my house every day. Not to mention, I was a little wired, what, with the love of my life who I’d finally hooked up with, done the deed with and started living with, out there escalating hostilities.
In my defense, Vance didn’t say anything about not going outside if there was an explosion that shook your house, made your windows buckle and was so loud, it made you think your ears were bleeding.
I wasn’t totally stupid. I did look outside first. There was a car on fire in the middle of the street, burning debris everywhere. The car didn’t explode, it exploded and bits of it were all over the road, the sidewalk, even in my front yard, wrecking Stevie’s beautifully tended legacy. There were people shouting and running around. And anyway, what kind of neighbor would I be if I hid in the house if someone was out there, hurt, burned, whatever.
Not to mention, that someone could be Lee.
I thought, with all those people, I’d be safe.
I was wrong.
I nabbed the stun gun (my premier choice in weaponry), unlocked the door, unlocked the security door, did a scanning sweep of my porch and stepped outside.
I got to the edge of my porch, which was where they took me down.
* * * * *
This kidnapping was entirely different from the one before and the one before that.
I came to in the backseat of a car, legs bound at the ankles, wrists bound behind my back with the added dimension this time of being gagged.
With hindsight, and a lot of time to lie in the back of the car thinking, the explosion was not a very ingenious tactic of getting me to expose myself. In fact, it was kind of crude.
I’d fallen for it though so what did that say about me?
We drove for a long time, I couldn’t see much and I didn’t try. Cherry had been nearly exploded the day before so the minute a call came into dispatch about a car going up in flames in front of my house, the Denver Police Department, and Lee and his boys, would be all over it like flies on doo doo.
I couldn’t imagine someone hadn’t seen me being carted away, seemingly unconscious.
I couldn’t imagine they’d be far behind.
I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t rescue me.
You live, you learn, unfortunately, all my life, I’d always learned the hard way.
* * * * *
It seemed like we were driving forever, maybe it was half an hour, maybe longer, when we finally started to do some turns, obviously coming off the highway. The car slowed, there were streetlights then there were none. Then, we hit a gravel road, drove for a few minutes and we stopped.
I was yanked out of the backseat by my ankles and thrown over a shoulder in a fireman’s hold. I didn’t see much, it was late, dark and we were well out of the city so dark meant dark. I could tell we were in the mountains though.
Shit.
I was carted into a cabin and thrown on the couch, then arranged in a seated position.
When the new goon moved away, I could see Terry Wilcox was sitting opposite me in an armchair.
It was a nice cabin, very swish, the kind of rental for upper, upper middle class Texans to hire when they felt like a change of scenery. Two guys were with us, both steroid-fuelled, like Goon Gary, Terrible Teddy and The Moron but I had never seen these guys.
“Take off her gag,” Wilcox ordered.
Both of the guys were dark-headed, one darker than the other and taller and maybe hitting the pharmaceutical websites a little too hard. He came forward and took off the gag. The minute he did, I realized how tight it was because my cheeks hurt. I opened and closed my mouth to exercise my cheek muscles.
Then I glared at Wilcox. “That hurt.”
“I’m sorry, India. Precautions. We can’t be too careful, can we?”
Was that a dig at my idiot act of walking out of my house and into the clutches of the villain?
My eyes narrowed.
I knew I was an idiot, I didn’t need this guy rubbing it in.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
He ignored me. “Don’t worry. We don’t have to wait too long. The plane will be ready soon and we’ll be leaving.”
Uh-oh.
Did he say “plane”?
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You and I are going to disappear. We’re taking a long vacation.”
I stared at him.
I wasn’t getting a good feeling about this.
“I don’t want to go on vacation with you,” I informed him, I thought, unnecessarily.
“You’ll enjoy yourself.”
My eyes got wide. “Enjoy myself?”
“Shopping, eating in the finest restaurants. I’ll get you anything you want. We’ll go wherever you want. I’ll show you the world.”
Wow, Lee wasn’t wrong. This guy was nuts.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said, I don’t want to go on vacation with you.”
“We’ll spend time together. You get to know me, you’ll like me.”
Yep, totally nuts.
“You kill people,” I told him.
“I do what I have to do to get what I want.”
Holy crap.
“I don’t like people who kill people. They’re creepy. You’re creepy.”
Perhaps I should have been more careful with what I said but it was like he had selective hearing and he chose not to hear that part.
“We’ll have to stay out of sight for awhile. I have a friend who’s letting us use his lovely house, on the beach in Costa Rica.”
Oh my God.
This guy was talking about lovely beach houses to a woman he kidnapped.
Totally a nut.
“You’re creepy and icky,” I broke in, hoping to get through to him. “I don’t want to go to a beach house in Costa Rica with a creepy, icky guy who looks like Grandpa Munster.”
He continued to ignore me and my insults. “You can sunbathe every day. I’ll buy you two dozen bikinis. I think six months, maybe more. Then, perhaps, we’ll go to Paris.”
“I’m not going on vacation with you. I’m staying here,” I announced.
At this, he smiled his oily smile.
Serious euw.
Time to get down to it.