Rock Chick 01 (51 page)

He opened the
duffle and started to put stuff on my dining room table, announcing
each one as he set it down. “Gun, Glock, loaded. Extra clip. Taser.
Stun gun.”

I stared at the
weapons on my table and then back to Vance.

“Lee says you
know how to use them,” he said.

I realized his
statement was a question and I nodded.

“Lock all doors
and windows after I leave. You don’t open the door to anyone unless
it’s Lee, Mace or me. Even if you know them. Got me?” Vance
asked.

I nodded, then
he nodded.

“Where’s Lee?
What’s happening?”

“This will all
be over soon,” he said instead of answering. He went to the door,
stopped and turned to me. “Close your blinds.”

“Hang on a
second.” I went after him and grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t go.
“What the fuck is happening?”

He looked at me
a beat, likely trying to guess my reaction to whatever dire news he
was about to impart.

Then he decided
that he could share.

“Lee’s
escalated hostilities, Wilcox has done the same.”

“What does that
mean?” I asked.

Again, he
looked at me a beat.

Then a slow,
arrogant, unbelievably handsome, shit-eating grin spread across his
face.

“That means,
tonight we’re gonna have fun.”

With that, he
left.

I stood staring
at the door thinking it didn’t sound fun at all.

Where the Hell Was Lee?

After I’d locked my doors and windows, closed
my blinds and stopped myself from hyperventilating, my phone
rang.

I ran to it hoping it was Lee, falling on the
phone like a crazed woman who’d been on the Atkins Diet one day too
long and just entered a bakery.

It was Ally.

“Do you know what’s going on?” she asked.

“Escalated hostilities, on both sides,” I
answered, wanting to talk to Lee, see Lee, hear from someone that
Lee was okay even if it was a disembodied communication from a
higher deity.

“What does that mean?” Ally went on.

“Hell if I know.”

And I didn’t want to know. I was deep in my
Denial Fortress, way deep.

“Do you want me to come over?” Ally
asked.

“I’m not allowed to open the door to anyone
but Lee, Mace or Vance,” I told her.

“Says who?”

“Says Vance.”

“Since when do you do what you’re told?”

“Since the words ‘escalated’ and
‘hostilities’ entered my vocabulary and I finally told your brother
I love him and he’s living with me and I might be pregnant with his
child and I haven’t seen his cabin in Grand Lake yet and his office
is not safe anymore and –”

“All right, all right, I get it,” Ally cut me
off. “Call me when you know something.”

“Gotcha.”

I hung up and stood in my living room and
stared at the weapons on my dining room table.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

This was all my fault.

Well, maybe not
all
my fault, it was
mostly Rosie’s fault but if something went wrong, I’d feel
responsible. This wasn’t the kind of something that could go wrong
like jumping in a car with ten dollars in your pocket and a half a
tank of gas and driving to Colorado Springs in hopes of going to a
bar, not getting carded, and meeting hot, soon-to-be-fighter-pilot
cadets from the Air Force Academy, an endeavor doomed to fail (and
I would know as I was the voice of experience on that kind of
thing, how do you think I got my t-shirt?). This kind of something
meant guns and bullets and Brody in the surveillance room where,
outside the door, grunts of pain could be heard.

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.

“Listen,” I said, changing tactics and
leaning forward to show my sincerity, “I’m really um…” I was losing
it, I couldn’t think of a suitable lie. I couldn’t remember the
last time I couldn’t think of a suitable lie. I just went with the
first word that popped in my head, no matter how hard it was to say
it. “Honored that you like me and everything but I’m in love with
Lee. I’ve been in love with Lee since I was five. We’re living
together. We’re going to get married, eventually, when he asks me.
He has it all planned out.”

“I’ll help you forget Nightingale,” Wilcox
told me.

Okay, seriously, this guy was nuts. Even if
he wasn’t a weird, creepy, icky, scary bad guy who killed people,
there wasn’t a woman alive who would forget Liam Nightingale,
especially if she’d seen him naked.

And what was taking Lee so long? He should
have stormed in here and saved the day by now, surely. I was
somewhat experienced with being kidnapped and now was about the
time for a grenade or tear gas or Lee to saunter in looking badass
and pissed off and scaring everyone into doing what he wanted.

“Perhaps you should be asleep for the first
part of our journey.” Wilcox broke into my somewhat fevered
thoughts.

I realized my mistake at once. I’d been
spending so much time talking to Wilcox, I hadn’t paid attention to
the Steroid Sidekicks. One was walking toward me, carrying a loaded
syringe.

I stared at him coming toward me and I felt
the chill of fear.

This was just like in those movies, where
they tranquillized the heroine and she woke up lying on silk
pillows wearing an
I Dream of Jeannie
outfit and finding
herself a member of a harem where all the other girls hated
her.

I didn’t want to be a member of Terry
Wilcox’s harem, even if I was the only one.

My mind filled with colliding thoughts and I
realized I had two choices, let him drug me and sleep through my
(hopeful) rescue or, well, I didn’t know what my second choice was,
considering my extremities were tied together.

I was fond of naps but only those I took
myself or fell into naturally, not those induced by overdeveloped
henchmen.

I watched him come at me and did the only
thing I could do, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to go down
without a fight.

I rolled to the floor, rolled into him and
took him off his feet. He fell over and hit the deck with a grunt
and an oath.

I kept rolling to get away from him and
struggling to get out of my bounds.

This, surprisingly worked (almost). My hands
must not have been tied very well because they started to come
lose.

Once I dropped Bad Guy Number One, Bad Guy
Number Two came at me, I rolled to my back, lifted my legs and as
Tex and The Kevster suggested, I aimed right between his.

I missed, but nailed him in the thigh with a
good deal of force and some seriously pissed off attitude. He
staggered back and went down on a knee.

I kept struggling to get my hands free,
reared up with a crunch of the abs that would do any personal
trainer proud and found my feet. With my momentum and weight, feet
and arms still bound, I toppled over and hit him, head to the chest
and we both went down, rolling and struggling, him trying to get a
hold of me and me squirming like crazy.

I was beginning to get ticked.

Where.

The hell.

Was Lee?

Finally, I freed one hand from the bounds and
shook the other one free of the rope and started fighting in
earnest.