скачать книгу бесплатно
But there were only retreating footsteps.
And the knowledge that she wasn’t alone anymore. There was someone in here with her, sitting on the floor now, making muffled but urgent sounds.
She turned toward the sounds, knew there were tears streaming down her own face, and felt horribly guilty for hoping it was another captive like her. “All right, all right. I’m coming.” Holding her hands out in front of her, Stevie moved slowly closer, until her hands bumped against a head. She turned her palms inward, running them lower, down the sides of a face, and felt the blindfold around the eyes, the tape over the mouth, and then lower, as the poor thing sat perfectly still, shivering. It was a girl. Had to be a girl. Stevie got to the hands, zip-tied together behind her back. The Asshole, as she’d taken to thinking of the kidnapper, had cut the zip tie partway through. She bent it back and forth until it gave and the newcomer’s hands pulled free.
The girl whipped them around fast, and Stevie stepped backward, waiting for her to remove the tape herself. “What the fuck is this?”
Stevie said, “I don’t know. I’ve been here... I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe.”
“Bullshit. This is bullshit.” The other girl went to the bars, and just as Stevie had done when she’d arrived, she shook and screamed and pounded and pulled. She didn’t beg or cry the way Stevie had. She sounded strong, sure of herself, confident. Everything Stevie wasn’t.
Eventually she stopped fighting the useless door, and paced the cell instead, back and forth.
Stevie was sitting on the bottom bunk hugging her sweater around her and waiting until it felt like time to talk. Eventually she tried. “My name’s Stevie. Um, Stephanie.”
The pacing stopped. She felt the girl looking at her. Eventually she said, “Lexus.”
Stevie nodded. “How did you get here?”
“Fucker grabbed me right off the damn street is how I got here. Threw me in a van, tied me up and tossed me here.” She shuffled a little. “You?”
“Same.”
“He come in here? He do anything to you?”
“No. Nothing. He shoves food through the bars every little while. Never says a word. It’s creepy. I’m not even sure if it’s a man.”
“Oh, he a man all right. I grabbed him by his balls before he got me bound and gagged, put a hurt on him he won’t forget. Piece’a shit. I get the chance again, I’ll rip ’em right off.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“Don’t look to me like you see anything,” Lexus said. “You blind, girl?”
Stevie nodded.
“Shee-it, you get all the luck, don’t you?”
“Looks like.”
Lexus came to the bunk, sat down beside Stevie. “A’right, then. We look out for each other, you and me. We got no one else. We got to get out of this shit, you follow?”
“I do. Maybe between the two of us we’ll find a way.”
“Ain’t no maybe about it, girl. We will.”
Stevie felt a rush of relief. There was no doubt in her mind that Lexus was older and wiser and stronger than she was. She’d been reassuring herself that her father had enough clout and connections to be turning the planet upside down to find her from the outside. Now she had help from the inside, as well. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, immediately clapping a hand to her mouth.
“Yeah, that makes one of us. Not how I ’spected to be spending my eighteenth, you know?”
“Your eighteenth...birthday?”
“Uh-huh.”
She wasn’t older, then. Maybe stronger, maybe braver, but not older. She was just a kid. Stevie’s conscience gave her a needle-like jab. She should be comforting the teenager, not leaning on her. She was almost three years older.
Hell. Okay, all right, might as well show her around the place and see if she came up with any ideas. Stevie got up off the bunk and pulled the box from underneath. “This is everything we own. Pitcher, glasses, spoons, some washcloths and some hairbrushes.”
She felt the other girl come around to crouch beside her, heard her pawing around in the box. “Four glasses. Four spoons. Four hairbrushes.” Lexus paused, took a breath. “Four beds in here. Four blankets.”
“I didn’t realize... Lexus, do you think...?”
“I think he’s gonna open that door at least two more times, Stevie-girl.”
Stevie nodded. “Okay. Okay, then we’re gonna have to figure out how to take advantage of that the next time he does.”
* * *
Even though we had Myrtle with us, we didn’t go to a drive-thru window for lunch. We headed instead to the Park Diner, ordered take-out and took it with us to a bench nearby with a view of the Susquehanna River. I liked that I could hear its rushing flow from where we sat, and I liked even more that I could see it. Bodies of water had fascinated me since I’d got my vision back. I live across the dirt excuse for a road from a lake—okay, a reservoir, but it looks like a lake—so I get plenty of time to study it. Rivers were an entirely different creature. The countless colors, the eddies and swirls, the constantly shifting patterns, the frothy bits and the way the sunlight reflects like diamonds when it hits just right.
I sat there, relishing my club sandwich with added hot sauce and sipping my Diet Coke, staring at the water until a paw on my leg reminded me I was not alone.
“Sorry, Myrt.” I tore the other half of my oversize sandwich into Myrtle-sized bites and fed her one of them. “Good, huh?”
Myrt swallowed it whole and whacked my shin again. And I knew what she was saying with her sightless brown eyes. How would I know if it’s good? That bite wasn’t big enough to tell. More, please. And by please, I mean now.
I sighed. I hate depriving her of people food when she likes it so much.
Mason was ripping the cellophane wrapper from the pack of styluses we’d picked up at the drugstore. “You should carry dog food,” he said. “Diet dog food.”
“Shut up. She’s not fat.”
“The vet said—”
“The vet is partial to skinny dogs. Greyhounds and Chihuahuas. For crying out loud, he owns a whippet.”
“Is his whippet good?”
I had broken off another bite and was handing it down to Myrtle, but I stopped in midmotion to send him a grimace. “That was terrible.” I didn’t tell him that I’d made the same joke in the exam room.
“I liked it.”
“Snarf!” said Myrt.
Mason smiled at her. “See? She agrees with me.”
“No. She wants her sandwich.” I obliged my dog, then said, “That’s all, Myrt. It’s all gone.”
She tilted her head to one side at the words all gone. Her least favorite words in history, besides go to the vet. Then she sighed heavily and collapsed, because bulldogs don’t lie down, they just drop. I knew that she knew I was a liar, and she knew that I knew that she knew it.
Mason whistled softly, drawing my attention away from both my dog and my guilt trip. “What?”
He was looking at the phone, holding it with his napkin and using the stylus to touch the screen. “She’s been calling Jacob Kravitz. Frequently.”
“Jacob,” I said, reviewing the details he’d given me on the way over here. “Oh, Jake. Wait a minute, isn’t that the ex-boyfriend?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. Doesn’t sound all that ex, does it? How about the current love interest? Kirk what’s-his-name?”
“Mitchell Kirk. And yes, there are two. One incoming, one outgoing.”
“Sounds like trouble in paradise.”
“All the calls to Jake were outgoing. Less than a minute each.”
I nodded. “So she was calling him. Maybe leaving him messages. But he wasn’t answering.”
“Or calling back,” Mason said, tapping the screen with the stylus but not saying much, until he finally seemed satisfied and dropped the phone back into its plastic bag. “Nothing much on there. Nothing that jumps out at me, anyway.”
I looked at my watch, grinning because I didn’t have to feel it. Yes, still, after almost nine months of being sighted. Hell, I still smiled when I opened my eyes every morning and found I could see. I’d had no idea just how much I’d been expecting the transplant to fail, my body to reject the new corneas the way it had all the others, and my world to be plunged back into darkness all over again, until I noticed just the other day that I’d stopped expecting that. There had been some kind of bowstring tension inside me. Waiting for the axe to fall, that sort of thing. And then one day I noticed its absence. Such a different feeling. Like I’d become seventy pounds lighter overnight.
“Rache?”
I realized I had been staring at the ticking second hand. “Sorry. I was just wondering what’s taking Amy so damned long.”
“I’m here, I’m here!” she called from about fifteen feet away. She was scurrying toward our bench with a paper bag in her hand. She wore a black T-shirt dress with a neon green geometric design over leggings and black leather boots. She had spiked her purple-and-black bangs with more gel than usual, and her nose stud was winking in the sunlight. “Sorry I’m late. My mother called just as I was heading out the door. What’s the emergency?”
Myrt lifted her head at the sound of Amy’s voice. She was one of Myrt’s favorite people, probably because Amy was the one who’d rescued her and brought her to me, then used skillful emotional manipulation to trick me into falling in love with the mutt. I don’t know exactly how. Introducing us, I guess.
“It’s all good. How’s your mom?”
“Excellent, as always. Sends her love, says she’ll send you that stuffing recipe from Thanksgiving. She won’t, though. She never shares her secret recipes. Says I’ll get them all when she’s dead.” Amy took a seat on the bench next to ours, opened her bag and took out a bag of chips. She ate one, gave one to Myrtle and flashed the bag at me when I scowled at her. “It’s all right, see? They’re baked. And it was just one.”
“You know by the time each of you and everyone else in that dog’s life gives her ‘just one bite’ it adds up to a couple of extra meals’ worth of food a day,” Mason said. “At least.”
“Life’s short. Dieting only makes it seem longer,” I said.
“Oh, that’s a good one, Rache. We need to put that one on a mug.” Amy yanked her smartphone from her bag, wiped her fingers on her black spandex leggings and started tapping the screen. “‘Life’s short. Dieting only makes it seem longer.’ Rachel de Luca.”
Mason frowned at me.
“She’s working on some new merchandising for me. We’re adding mugs and mouse pads to the affirmation cards and perpetual calendars.”
He tightened his lips and nodded. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and was afraid he thought I was greedy. Well, hell, maybe I am. If there’s more money to be made, I’ll go for it. But I share. A third straight off the top to Uncle Sam to pay for bombs and guns, of course. And I give bushels to my charities on top of that.
“So, Amy,” he said, turning his full focus to my assistant. Hard not to. “I wanted to talk to you about last Thanksgiving.”
She stuffed her cell phone back into her oversize bag. Black. Of course. “When those two pervs snatched me off the side of the road?” she asked. Then she looked up at him. “How come? Did you finally catch the second guy?”
“No. Just want to keep it fresh in my mind.”
For a detective, he was terrible at deception. Amy saw right through him. “You didn’t catch him. Then there must have been another kidnapping.”
“No,” Mason said at the same exact moment that I was saying, “We’re not sure yet.”
He shot me a quelling look. I waved a dismissive hand. “What? Like she’s gonna go Tweet it to the world?” I looked at Amy sternly. “This is strictly hush-hush. Spill it and you’ll nix Mason’s shot at the chief’s job.”
“You told her that, too?”
“She’s my personal assistant, Mace. I tell her everything.”
“Yeah,” Amy said. “Nice job in the sack, by the way.”
He looked like he was gonna pass out before I said, “I don’t tell her that, for crying out loud.”
He closed his eyes and gave his head a rapid shake.
“So, Amy,” I said. “Yes, a girl is missing. And the truth is, she might just have run off. But I keep getting a feeling it has something to do with what happened to you.”
“And we all know better than to ignore her feelings,” Mason added, probably relieved that I hadn’t blurted out Stephanie’s name, address and phone number while I was at it.
“I am so dying to help out on a case,” Amy said.
“You’re not helping out. And it’s not a case.”
I clapped a hand onto Mason’s thigh. “You are helping out, and it’s not a case yet. But it might turn into one if she didn’t leave voluntarily. So if you can stand to go over it one more time...”
“I was driving to my mother’s in Erie for Thanksgiving,” she said, nodding. “I stopped for gas and noticed these guys in a white pickup pulling in behind me. I went in for the restroom and some snacks for the drive, and when I came out, they were still there. Not buying gas, not shopping, just sitting there.”
“Right. We saw the surveillance footage,” Mason said. “What do you remember about the second guy?”
“It’s all in my statement,” she said.
“I know, but you might have left something out that didn’t seem important, or remembered something since. Maybe there’s something you thought you told us but didn’t. Just humor me, okay?”
“Okay.” She ate another chip, handed one down to Myrtle, then took her sandwich out of her bag and unwrapped it slowly. “I didn’t really look at the guys in the truck at that point. I just sort of noticed the truck was there as I left. I didn’t get any bad vibes until I saw them pull out behind me. And even then, I thought I was just being a drama queen.”
I nodded and said to Mason, “She can be a real drama queen sometimes, so that adds up.”
Amy threw a chip at me. It landed on the sidewalk and Myrtle snapped it up before it settled. “Then my tire went flat. I still wasn’t overly concerned, until they pulled over in front of me. That’s when my alarm bells started going off. I snapped a quick pic of the truck with my phone and slid it under the car just in case.”
“Remind me how smart she is if I ever even consider letting her go, Mace.”
“I promise.” He nodded at Amy to keep going.
“After they dragged me into the truck, the driver dropped the second guy off. Do you need me to describe them again?”
I looked at Mason to answer that one. He shook his head. “No, the driver’s dead, and we have the sketch you and the police artist did of the second guy on file. We’re just trying to figure out why they took you. Did they say anything that might be a clue? Maybe something you’ve remembered since the incident?”
