Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (19 page)

Candice didn’t say anything, and I looked up to see her brow raised. “Six?” she repeated. “That’s pretty impressive, Sundance.”

I grinned. “Word must be spreading.”

Candice nodded. “What time will you be through?” she asked next.

“Four. Want to pick this up then?”

Candice offered me a sly look. “Methinks you’ll be hungry after your sessions. We can grab a quick happy-hour snack and give Jamie until five thirty to get home from work.”

“You don’t want to just call her at home?” I asked. “I’m sure I can get her phone number off her release form.” I made all my clients sign release forms listing their names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers just in case.

“No,” Candice said. “I find that catching your subject a little off guard helps get the truth out of them, and showing up unannounced at their house usually puts them exactly in that slightly nervous, very talkative state that I like.”

I shrugged. “Okay. I’ll be done at four, and I should be ready to go by four fifteen or so.”

Candice yawned. “Great. I’m gonna head home and catch some Zs. I’ll pick you up downstairs at four fifteen.”

“Deal,” I told her, already turning back to the candles. I heard the front door close not too long after that, and within a few minutes after that my first client had arrived.

The day with my clients passed quickly. Despite the fact that I’ve been doing this for almost a decade, it’s still rare to hit every reading out of the park. Still, that’s always what I go for. I give every single client my all because they pay me well and because I want them to have a good experience. It puts a lot of pressure on my shoulders to deliver an accurate and authentic reading, but it also forces me to remember that I’m providing a service, not a favor. I want every client to feel like a million bucks when they leave, but some people are just never satisfied, and that’s a hard thing to accept.

My last client of the day was like this. I’d provided her with what I thought were some really good hits, but she failed to see them as such, only grunting a little here and there when I asked if what I was saying was making sense to her.

At the end, when I turned it over to her for questions, she asked me why I hadn’t said anything about her bakery in France.

I did this mental
Say what now?
and asked what she meant by that.

“It’s my dream to open a bakery in France.”

Thinking maybe I’d missed something important, I scanned the woman’s energy again. Nope. No bakery. In France or otherwise. “Do you bake?” I asked her, nearly regretting it the moment it came out of my mouth.

“A little,” she said, dropping her eyes to the floor.

Her answer gave me pause, but only because…well, where do you go with
that
? “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not sure I understand this. You only bake a little and you want to open a bakery in a country famous for its bakers?”

Her frown deepened. “Well, I’d take lessons,” she snapped. “I mean, if Julia Child can move to France and become a successful cook, why can’t I do the same?”

Because you have no savings, don’t speak French, and don’t even know how to bake, you fool!
is what I
thought
. What I
said
was, “Ah. Well, if that’s your dream, then lessons are a terrific place to start!”

Luckily, by then we were short on time, and the session ended just a minute or two later. Relieved to see her out the door, I blew out all the candles, powered down my computer (ignoring the red blinking light on my phone that indicated I had voice mail), and locked up my office, vowing to return calls first thing in the morning.

I made it downstairs and to the parking garage by four ten and allowed myself a nice cleansing sigh. It’d been an intense but mostly good day. And my hips didn’t even hurt that much, which was a great sign given all the sitting I’d done.

While I waited for Candice to swing by and pick me up, I rolled my shoulders and rocked my head from side to side, listening with satisfaction to the pops as my neck cracked. I closed my eyes to work out the final kink and heard a car roll up. Had to be Candice. Giving my head a final good roll, I opened my eyes to see that a black SUV with smoked-out windows had stopped right in front of me.

I felt a jolt of alarm, especially when the rear door opened and out stepped a virtual ogre of a man. Bald-headed, with a round face, spare chins, and small ears that stuck out away from his head, he came right up, grabbed me around the waist, and began to lift me toward the car.

I screamed and brought my cane down on his head as hard as I could. He uttered a guttural sound and squeezed me around the waist tighter. The way he held me put pressure on my pelvis, and I screamed again, but this time in agony. I brought my cane down again and again and heard a loud crack as I watched it break in two—the lower half skittering across the pavement.

With a grunt the ogre practically threw me into the SUV, climbed in after me more quickly than his size should have allowed, and slammed the door.

“GO!”
he shouted to the driver, and the car took off. Before I could even right myself, I realized I’d just been kidnapped and looming over me was one angry brute with several welts the size of plums rising on his bald ugly head. Welts I’d put there.

“I am so fecked,” I whispered, officially scared down to my toes.

Wouldn’t you know it—Shrek actually nodded, right before reaching out to grab me again. A moment later my world went dark.

I
don’t know if I was relieved or even more ticked off by the hood being rudely shoved over my head. My abduction was happening so fast that I was having a hard time even making sense of it. One minute I was closing my eyes and bracing myself for what I thought was some serious manhandling, and the next my eyes were open and I couldn’t see a thing. My hands were quickly bound up too, but they’d been tied in front of me and not very tightly.

I was then hauled off the floor and propped up in one of the seats. My abductor then strapped me in with the seat belt. Of course, his courtesy stopped there and he gave me a rough shake of the shoulders and ordered me to sit still.

I detected a British accent. Figured. He looked like a beefy English rugby player.

We drove for what felt like a very long while. Of course, if you’ve ever spent time with a hood over your head, even five
minutes can be an eternity. The hood was hot, and it was hard to get enough air—especially given the panicked cadence to my breathing.

I’d tried asking questions at first, and that was met with stony silence. Then I tried to remember the turns, right and left and how far apart. Maybe I could get to my cell and make an emergency call?

But I had no idea where my purse had ended up, or even if it’d made it into the SUV. In those first panicked moments, I only remembered whacking Shrek, not if I’d thought to keep my purse with me.

Also, I tried to avoid thinking too far ahead to when the SUV stopped. They tell you if you’re attacked to never, ever,
ever
get into the vehicle to be driven to a second location, because it’s likely to be somewhere remote with no one around to hear you scream.

That thought petrified me, and it was hard to think through it. Plus, I knew that Shrek wasn’t alone—someone was driving the SUV, which meant I officially had at least two abductors.

But why had I been abducted in the first place? Was this a random kidnapping? And then I thought about another abduction and my blood ran cold. Could it be that Shrek was the same man who’d taken Kendra? And then a detail came to me, blooming in my mind like a firework; the ogre had been wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, and black dress slacks. I closed my eyes to concentrate, and sure enough, the image was clear in my memory. He’d been dressed more for a business meeting than for a kidnapping.

Which meant he was likely a professional. Hired by someone else to grab me. That thought made my cold blood turn to ice.

If this is the first time you’ve read about me, you might be surprised to learn that I’ve made a few enemies over the years. Why, just a few months before, I’d made a whole host of very powerful enemies when I’d been recruited by the CIA for a top secret mission abroad. And a few of the very powerful people I’d encountered on the mission had actually been killed.

Was this payback for my participation in that mission?

Or did it have to do with my current work with the FBI?

Or was I right and this was somehow connected to Kendra?

All three scenarios weren’t likely to end well, but the more I could figure out before my hood came off and I met my true abductor, the better.

I thought about trying to talk to the guy next to me and fish for details, but I had a feeling Shrek wasn’t going to utter one more word, and he certainly wasn’t going to give me any details about who’d hired him. So I did the only thing left to me. I calmed my butt down and turned on my radar.

I got a series of impressions, most of them confusing. I could feel the anger from the ogre filling the small space in the backseat. I knew he seriously wanted to throttle me, but he was holding back, and for that I was quite relieved.

The energy coming off the driver was even weirder; he felt super nervous. Like he’d never abducted anyone before and he couldn’t wait to get to our destination so his part in this could
be finished. And judging by a slight shift in his energy, I had a feeling we weren’t far from reaching the journey’s end.

I then tried to figure out whom they were taking me to, because by now I was convinced we were going to meet someone, and as I checked on that, I felt positive that I’d recognize the organizer of this little soiree. That of course gave me no comfort. I’ve met some pretty big assholes (the no-swearing rule doesn’t count if you’ve just been abducted) in my crime-fighting career.

Anyway, the best that I could hope for was to talk my way out of trouble, or look for an opportunity to escape. Both would require full use of my radar, which would then require me to remain calm. I’m not so good with calm, but I did my best to breathe slow and easy and wait for their next move.

It came sooner than expected. Pretty much at that exact moment I could feel the car make a sharp left turn. We went up some sort of fairly steep incline and paused, and I distinctly heard the sound of a parking-ticket machine buzzing off a ticket. There was another pause; then we zoomed forward, up another steep ramp, making another sharp left. This pattern repeated for several more turns.

I counted the turns, expecting to head to the roof, where there would be the least number of cars and witnesses. By my count there were at least five stories, and sure enough the light beyond my hood brightened slightly as we came out into daylight again. We were definitely on the roof.

The SUV halted just a few seconds later, and I heard the sound of a gearshift being put into park before the engine was cut. I then felt hands at the seat-belt buckle by my hip,
and reflexively I struck out with my bound hands. It was like punching a brick wall, and I’m pretty sure I hurt my wrists more than I hurt my abductor.

Once the seat belt was off, I was yanked roughly to the side and pulled out of the car. Of course I fought for all I was worth, but the ogre just hoisted me up in the air and tossed me onto his shoulder. The indignity of it got to me more than the discomfort of being thrown caveman-style over his shoulder.

My head bobbled and I yelled, but I knew the hood was muffling the sound. Plus, we were at least five or six stories up—who was gonna hear me?

The daylight through the hood dimmed again, and cool air wrapped itself around me. I suspected we’d just entered a building. The walls felt close, and I guessed that we were walking down a long hallway. We stopped rather abruptly again, and I heard three loud knocks. Shrek was probably knocking on a door to allow us entrance. It took a few moments, but then I heard the sound of the door being opened, and the ogre was in motion again. And then I heard someone say, “A hood? Really, Hugo, is that necessary?”

I was then eased down to the floor and the hood was yanked off my disheveled head. I took one look at the person who’d called Shrek “Hugo” and lunged forward, yelling,
“I’m gonna kill you!”

But unfortunately, it was a scene right out of the elevator again. My hips gave out and I fell ineffectually and pathetically to the floor.

I sat there for a good couple rounds of huffing and puffing,
so angry I could scream (again) and ignoring the hand that was outstretched to me by my big, beefy abductor. “Go to hell, you son of a bitch!” I snapped, slapping his hand away. (Trust me, the situation called for a little potty mouth.)

“Abby,” I heard the criminal mastermind say with more than a hint of disapproval.

I blew out a breath as much in anger as to puff away the hair in my face and turned my narrowed eyes on the person now sitting calmly in a leather chair across the room. “You too, Cat,” I snapped. “You can go to hell too!”

“Is that any way to treat your sister?”

Holding up my bound hands, I yelled,
“Is this?”