Ransom River (42 page)

“Let her go,” she said.

“You got no say anymore.”

He went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. From downstairs, Suit Two called to the Nightcrawler.

“Hadzic. Come here a minute.”

The water gushed into the tub. Boone said, “I got this. She won’t act up. Not when her little bed partner’s licking her wounds.”

The Nightcrawler looked like he doubted the wisdom of leaving the room.

Rory dug her nails into her palms. “Don’t hurt Petra again. I’ll do whatever Boone wants. Just don’t hurt her.”

Boone sneered. He may have thought it was a smile. He may have thought a sneer and a smile expressed the same feeling: pleasure at other people’s pain.

Rory held still, trying to look compliant and submissive and beaten. Trying not to feel compliant and submissive and beaten.
Keep it together.
She did an inventory sweep of the bedroom. Floor, desk, bookcase. Window.

Suit Two called to the Nightcrawler again.

The Nightcrawler said, “I’m going to lock the door and take the key with me.”

He walked out, shut the door, flipped the key from outside, and thumped down the stairs.

Petra said, “They said if I screamed they’d slit your throat.”

Boone pointed at her. “Not a peep out of you. This isn’t your show.”

Rory backed toward the desk. Boone grabbed her by the shirt. She gasped. He pulled her off balance against him and began backing her toward the bathroom.

“Twenty years, cuz. Twenty fucking years; did you truly think you could get away with it forever?”

He shoved her backward through the bathroom door at the sink. She hit the counter and knocked over bottles and containers. They clattered to the floor and into the sink. The bathtub was halfway full, the water pouring out in great gulps, loud and turbulent.

Boone pointed at her. “Don’t move.”

He took out his phone and smoothly thumbed the controls. He was breathing audibly. She cringed back against the counter.

Still looking at the phone, he said, “Tell me where the money is or you get waterboarded. Like the witches of Salem. Full-immersion baptism.”

She pressed herself back against the counter. A bottle of rubbing alcohol had fallen into the sink. She could smell it.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

He glanced up, alert.

She had a hand on the bottle. The other in her jeans pocket. She picked up the bottle and with one ragged motion flung it on Boone’s face and shirt.

“What—”

She flicked the lighter and threw it at him.

The flames lit silently. They were nearly invisible, ghostly white and violet wraiths that jerked and picked at his shirt and hair and face.

He shouted in pain and crashed backward toward the door, pawing his
skin. Eyes shut, arms frantic, he hit the wall. Rory ran at him, pulled her right arm back like she was spiking a volleyball, and smashed his head against the doorjamb.

She ran past him into the bedroom. She grabbed a pen from the desk, pulled off the cap, and jammed the pen into Boone’s ear. He shrieked in agony.

“Petra, the window,” she said. “We’re getting out.”

The roof was steeply raked—the eaves over the living room. The drop to the lawn was probably fifteen feet. She had only a second. She pressed her back against the heavy bed frame and lifted it, groaning, a couple of inches from the floor. Though the electrical cord was twisted tightly around Petra’s wrists and ankles, it was knotted only where it had been looped around the foot of the bed. Petra slid the makeshift rope underneath it and was free. She shook loose from the cord and stumbled to her feet.

“Quick,” Rory said.

Petra staggered to the window and forced it open. Boone was canted against the bathroom wall, eyes streaming, ear bleeding. He’d stopped spinning and attacking himself, so he was probably no longer on fire. Rory picked up her brass Thai Buddha. She swung it with everything she had and slammed him in the face with it.

The blow shook her arm. He yelled and bent double and brought his hands to his face. “
Bitch.
”

Petra wobbled onto the sill and crabbed her way to the roof.

Boone swung at Rory. She slammed him again with the Buddha. He staggered back into a shelf and knocked it down. Knickknacks and photos toppled across his shoulders.

He had dropped the phone to paw at his eyes. She scooped it up.

“Petra, get to the tree,” she said.

Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

She wound up as if she were preparing for a hammer throw, and she swung the Buddha at Boone one more time.

Karma might be a bitch. But Buddha packed a punch.

The statue connected with a dull thud. Boone dropped to the floor. He couldn’t see. His face was battered. He reached out blindly and tried to grab her. She jumped on his knees. He screamed.

She picked up the desk chair and shoved it under the doorknob. From the hall outside the room, the key rattled in the lock.

She climbed out the window. The huge old avocado tree that shaded the house was twenty feet along the roof from the windowsill. Petra was halfway there, hands against the shingles, sidestepping toward it.

Rory hurried. Her running shoes slipped on the shake tiles. “Climb down the tree and we’ll get to my car,” she said.

She heard the Nightcrawler shout at Boone. “Move the chair.”

Petra reached the end of the roof. She needed to jump to the tree, and fast, but struggled for balance.

Rory caught up with her. “Come on.”

She held tight to Petra’s hand. A large branch was three feet away, but Petra could barely see through her swollen eyes.

Shaking, she said, “I don’t know if I can.”

“We jump or get killed,” Rory said.

Without even a breath Petra threw herself at the tree. The branch shuddered and the leaves shivered and she grabbed hold and shimmied aboard it.

Rory leaped a moment behind her.

Back at the window, Boone shouted, “Those
bitches.
”

She steadied herself on the swaying branch and shot a glance at the street. Her hopes crashed.

The Subaru’s hood was up. That had to mean one of Mirkovic’s men had ripped the wires out.

“Shit.”

She nodded the other way, toward the orchard behind the house. “We have to run. Hurry.”

Petra grabbed the trunk of the tree and stepped onto the top of the fence. It creaked and swayed under her weight.

On the roof, feet scrabbled across the shingles.

“Go,” Rory said.

Petra dropped the six feet to the dirt beyond the fence. Rory swung out and threw herself over the fence after her. She landed hard and went down. Her right leg twanged with pain.

Petra hauled her to her feet. Behind them, they heard the sound of men in pursuit. They ran into the orchard and toward the hills.

R
ory held her arm around Petra and ran across the cool earth beneath the avocado trees. Petra panted and stumbled to keep up. Rory was running as close to flat out as she could but felt Petra dragging, her stride uneven. Petra’s face was battered and she held one arm against her ribs as though she’d been kicked. Hard, and probably repeatedly.

“Run,” Rory said. “I have you. Just run.”

Petra nodded. She sounded like she couldn’t get a breath. Shame tightened around Rory’s chest like a chain. Petra had been drawn into this mess because of her. Hurt because of her.

She chanced a glance back. Across the field, Suit Two was climbing over the fence, headed this way. Distantly she heard an engine rev. It had the heavy rattle of Boone’s wrecker.

Mirkovic’s men probably didn’t know the terrain. But her cousin certainly knew this orchard went on for half a mile, and that a dirt road bisected it not far ahead.

She fumbled Boone’s phone from her back pocket. She dialed 9-1-1.

“I’m in the orchard behind Miravista Road,” she told the dispatcher. “I heard gunshots from the Whistler house. Hurry. Men are chasing two women into the orchard behind it.”

She didn’t wait for the dispatcher’s reply. She hung up, kept running, and thought,
Crap—what’s Seth’s number?

She punched it in. The display jumped around as she careened over the
uneven ground. Petra stumbled and nearly went to her knees. In Rory’s ear, the number began to ring.

And ring. She pulled Petra along.

Seth’s voice mail kicked in.

“Get to my neighborhood,” she cried. “Get the feds. Mirkovic and his men are after me and Petra. Boone too, on wheels. Seth, please…”

She grimly held the phone. There was something else. She had seen a glance between Mirkovic and the Nightcrawler—when Boone mentioned the baby. It was a quick connection, a message wordlessly understood. They were thinking:
Get the kid.
If they got little Addie, they would have leverage over Boone and Riss.

And she’d seen something worse in Mirkovic’s eyes. Something visceral and territorial.
The kid.
When Boone said Addie’s name, Mirkovic got a look that said,
Mine.

Rory had seen the way Mirkovic reacted to Boone. She felt with nasty certainty what Mirkovic must think: Boone was a loose missile, a heat seeker. Promising Rory to him as a hunting trophy had failed to keep him on their leash. They wanted something to hold over his head until they could dispose of
him
…and on the phone he’d given them the answer. The baby.

Riss would be the most potent bargaining chip. But Mirkovic wanted the little girl too.

“Seth,” she said, her voice rough, “get somebody to Amber’s. One of the kids is Riss and Boone’s little girl. I think Mirkovic’s going to go after her. This whole thing’s coming apart and they’re desperate. They’ll use anything and anybody to get an edge.” She fought for breath. “If Mirkovic can’t get me, maybe he’ll try to use Riss as leverage with Lee. But think what they might do to Lee’s grandchild.”

Petra stumbled again. She was just about running on empty.

“And the cops. Xavier’s on the take,” Rory said. “Seth, get help.”

Petra straightened, limping, her face contorted with pain. “What you said…”

“It’s all true.” Every awful word.

Petra slowed. “Go on. Go to your aunt’s house. I can’t go any farther.”

“No way.” She tightened her grip on Petra’s hand and pulled.

“Run. Get help. I’ll hide,” Petra said.

“I can’t leave you here alone.”

Petra dropped to a walk. She was going with everything she had, but she was at only half strength to begin with, beaten and bruised. “I can’t. You go.”

Near panic, Rory put her hands on Petra’s shoulders. “They’ll find you. Look around. There’s nobody out here. They’re trained men and they’ll track you and narrow it down until they have you cornered up a tree.”

Petra’s lip trembled. Rory looked back the way they’d come. She couldn’t see or hear Mirkovic’s thug, but the trees seemed to shudder.
He’s there.

She needed to get to a populated spot. Even Boone wasn’t such a wild dog that he’d kill her in front of an audience. Not before he got the money. They needed a store, a post office, someplace public.

But Petra looked spent. A sob welled and fell from her lips.

Rory nearly lost it. “I’m sorry. Oh, honey.”

She squeezed Petra’s hand and pulled her along. They reached the dirt road that cut through the middle of the orchard. Rory listened, heard no vehicles, slowed, peered right and left.

Nobody. No help either.

She paused, looking around. Which way? And then she tried to take an overhead view of the landscape. The orchard, the river…and past it, fields and eventually a shopping mall. A mile, maybe.

“Give it all you’ve got and we’ll make it to Rock Creek Plaza.”

They stepped from between the trees onto the dirt road. And Boone’s wrecker turned the corner about a quarter of a mile away and headed toward them.

Petra jumped. “Oh God.”

“Run.”

She didn’t look back, just peeled out, nearly dragging Petra across the
road and into the trees on the other side. Boone’s engine gunned, throaty and loud.

The phone rang in her hand. She was running too hard to get a look at the caller ID. She put it to her ear.

“Rory? Where are you?”

It was Seth. Her spirits leaped and her heart beat harder.

“Orchard behind the house. Heading north. Petra’s hurt. We need help. Now.”

Petra turned and looked back.
Bad idea,
Rory thought. Lot’s wife tried the same thing and it went poorly.

“Boone’s in his truck, after us,” Rory said. “Closing.”

Seth sounded like he was driving. “Help’s coming. I’m on my way.”

“We’ll reach Old Ranch Road in a minute,” she said.

Petra said, “He’s coming…Oh, Rory…”

Rory said, “Did you hear that?”

“Keep going,” Seth said. “Just keep going. I’m coming.”

Petra said, “No—Boone’s driving off. Where’s he going?”

Around,
Rory thought. Getting out of the orchard so he’d have a clear run at them. He knew they were headed for the road and the safety of civilization on the far side of it. If he could get there first, he’d cut them off. They’d be pinched between him and the suit who was pursuing on foot.