A Twist of Betrayal (4 page)

The idea was lost when he suddenly grabbed her and dragged her across the seat, pulling her out of the van. “I think they’re gone,” he said.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she begged. “Please just let me go here. You can just drive away—”

“Shut up,” he snapped again. His acid breath touched her, making her cringe. “Or I’ll hit you again.”

At least he didn’t threaten to kill her. She should be thankful for small favors but couldn’t stop her knees from shaking. And since he still had the gun in his hand, she wouldn’t take the chance to fight him. She was too afraid for the baby and herself.

Justine’s nose throbbed from the last blow, and the threat was enough to quiet her for a few seconds. “But you don’t need me,” she tried to convince him, forcing her voice to remain calm and even and quiet as she hoped his words in the parking lot had been an exaggeration. “You got away like you wanted with all the money, and you don’t need me anymore. Just leave me here.”

For the first time, she looked around to see where ‘here’ was. And she recognized her surroundings immediately. Her kidnapper had brought her to Lakeside Campground. They were completely alone. The campground was closed for the winter season and wouldn’t be open for six months. She and Dan had camped there several times in the past six years. Dan had asked her to marry him here.

She couldn’t think about that now.

The man with the beard pulled her up against him. She felt the hardness of him and tried to shrink away, only to find it impossible.

“I’ll take this.” His breath hit her face, and her stomach twisted into a knot.

To her disgust, she felt his hand at the juncture of her legs. For two horrible seconds, she thought he was going to rape her, but then he moved his hand, picked the pocket of her jeans, and took her cell phone. He slipped it easily into his own pocket.

His hands on her sent terror though her in cold waves. Then he pulled her toward a second van hidden in the nearby trees. She couldn’t let him put her into his van.

“Please let me go—” she tried again. “You don’t need me anymore. By the time the police find me, you’ll be miles away.”

He stopped and looked at her, and Justine recognized unmistakable determination in his eyes. “I already told you—the entire robbery—it was all staged just so I could get my hands on you, Mrs. Franklin. I’ve been following you for long time, watching and waiting for the right moment.”

His words along with the knowledge that he had targeted her, pierced her like a knife and filled her with a sick feeling. Despite the gun, she had no choice but to fight now. There was no way she could let this man take her.

“If it’s because I tried to defend someone you know and lost, you have to know I did everything I could…”

His laughter rang through the empty campground.

It took all her will power to look him in the eye and keep her composure. She told herself she’d defended worse criminals in the courtroom. She just was never alone with any of them. “You can’t do this. Whatever your reason, you’re only making things worse for yourself. Right now, all you’re facing are robbery charges.”

She forced her voice to remain even and knew better than to tell him that kidnapping charges had been known to carry the same penalty as murder. “If you let me go unharmed right now, right here,” she continued, “I think things would go much easier for you when you’re caught—”

“
When
I’m caught?” he said, pulling her even closer to him. His length touched hers, and Justine experienced a soul-ripping invasion of private space at the contact. “I’ve got someone who can help me. Someone on the inside. So who says I’m getting caught?”

Someone on the inside?
“In case you’re caught,” she corrected herself.

“I’m not getting caught,” he said. “So it probably doesn’t matter what I do to you, does it?”

His words, as well as the possible truth of them, sent more terror through her.

“No!” She kicked out at him at the same time.

He was forced to let go of her as he let out a loud grunt of pain. But Justine didn’t get far as he grabbed her by her ponytail and pulled her back against him. He spoke right into her ear. “Don’t try that again, Counselor. I might enjoy hurting you.”

He leaned closer, as if to bury his nose in her hair. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Of course you might enjoy it, too. From what I understand you like a change of pace from your
husband
now and then, right?”

What? How could he know?
She wasn’t even certain of things. No one knew. No one but her and…

Justine didn’t move, forcing herself to remain absolutely perfectly still. She could dwell on that later. Now she needed to escape and survive and get back to Dan. She didn’t want to give in, not even enough to nod that she understood.

They reached the van, and he slid the side door open. “Get in,” he ordered.

It was then that Justine’s heart dropped to her feet.

From through the trees, not too far away from the direction of the highway, she heard someone call her name.

“Justine!”

The sound took her by surprise, and her abductor stopped and looked around, too. Then the voice registered, and Justine saw what might be her only chance to escape. She didn’t waste the precious time trying to figure out just how Dan came to find her.

Justine took her only chance. “Dan!”

An instant too late, the man with the beard clamped his dirty hand over her mouth. “That husband of yours is good. But then we both know that, don’t we?”

“Justine!” Dan called again, his voice growing closer.

The man holding her tried to pull her into the back of the van. But Justine fought him now with all her strength, kicking at him and pulling against him, knowing Dan was so close. She had no choice but to ignore his gun. She thought he was consumed in the fight and forgot about the gun in his hand, too. She didn’t know how Dan had found her, but all that was important just then was that he was coming to her rescue.

She was suddenly terrified and relieved at the same time. Together, she and Dan could face this man. She didn’t have to do it alone.

At the same time, Dan was stepping into danger. Dan might be from Chicago and an experienced police officer, but his experience for the past five years was small town—traffic accidents, small time vandals, an occasional breaking and entering, and drunk teenagers.

Suddenly, her abductor pulled her in the opposite direction, away from the van. “I just wasn’t quite ready for him!” he growled in her ear.

What? She wanted to ask, but she never got much of a chance. With one strong arm around her, he lifted her off the ground and kept her quiet with a hand pressed against her mouth. Despite her efforts to break loose of him, her kidnapper was twice her size and strength. But Justine never quit fighting him even though she worried he’d hit her with the gun again and knock her out cold. Then she wouldn’t be able to help Dan, wouldn’t be able to call out to him again if she got the chance, wouldn’t be able to warn him of the danger he was walking into.

As if she weighed nothing, her kidnapper half carried, half dragged her into a nearby clump of trees where he forced her to her knees. “If you try anything—anything at all, I’ll give him a lot of pain. It’ll slow me down and make me change my plan, but I’ll do it. You decide. You’ve got about three seconds.”

He held her in her place by grasping tightly to her hair with one hand and held his gun ready in the other as he looked in the direction of Dan’s latest call.

“No!” Justine tried to fight against the powerful hand that kept her on her knees, but any movement merely sent new waves of pain through her already throbbing head. She no longer cared about the gun in his hand or the fact that it was mere inches from her. She only cared about Dan running into a trap where he had no chance. “Dan, he’s got a gun!” she called.

Then as if he hadn’t heard her warning, Dan came into the nearby clearing, only a few feet away.

Chapter 4

After Justine slammed the door and left for the supermarket, the house was as still as a tomb. Dan stood for a long time in a state of shock. Then he swore out loud and threw the grout-sodden rag he’d held in his hands across the room where it left a gray smudge on the newly painted white wall.

The hell with it
, he thought. In a matter of less than five minutes, his life had gone from heaven to…to…to something horrible. He muttered another curse before he stooped down to finish the grout job at his feet. He had no idea what else he should—or even could—do. Justine had just thrown a wrench into what he thought had been the works of their entire life together. It brought the truth before his eyes.

He wished to hell he could look the other way.

He couldn’t.

Without thought, he finished the grout job before it began to dry into an unfixable mess at his feet.

Justine’s parting words bit at him like sharp painful teeth. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. He couldn’t forget that she was pregnant. The fact itself was a shock to his system. But what surprised him most was that the idea of a baby wasn’t too hard to accept. He supposed the idea of a baby depending on him scared him more than anything. And most of all, he thought, even though it was buried deep beneath the shock, that Justine betrayed him.

He laughed out loud, his harsh laughter ringing throughout the silence that threatened to suffocate him. Could he raise the baby she carried? Could they work through this?

Hell, he wanted to.

Everything they’d done so far was worth fighting and working for, right? He loved her. He thought she loved him.

He knew it was going to take work, but he was willing.

When Justine didn’t come right back, Dan fought a nagging feeling that something was wrong as he cleaned up the mess. He couldn’t take back the damning words he’d said to her, nor was he certain as to what he should say to her when she came home. Justine was probably over at Hannah Harlome’s right now trying to think it through. But the feeling that something more, something worse than their argument, was wrong refused to leave and was even stronger when he finished cleaning up. With a heavy sigh, he threw all the tools and rags into one of the buckets he and Justine had used. He picked up the bucket as a powerful, but a strange thought touched him. Like cold fingers wrapping around him, he knew. He just knew his worst nightmare was about to come true. Justine was in trouble.

It was more than just the feeling that something happened to Justine. It was the feeling that he was going to lose her in some way. He refused to dwell on the possible idea that after all the things they’d said to one another, he already might have lost her in more ways he could imagine. He hadn’t really meant the things he’d said, he knew. They had just been a cover of sorts against his true feelings.

She was his life. He couldn’t imagine not sharing this house with her. He didn’t want it without her. He couldn’t imagine not sleeping with her. He was just going to have to make her see his side of this situation, that’s all.

But what side was that? For a moment he wasn’t certain.

But where was she? She should be back by now.

Absently, more to ease his own mind, he dialed Harlome’s phone number. Hannah answered on the second ring, and he could hear one of Hannah’s children crying in the background. Hannah’s greeting sounded as cheerful as ever.

“Hey, Hannah? I was just wondering if you’d heard or seen Justine? She left for the store a short while ago, and I expected her back by now. I thought maybe she might have stopped by at your house on her way home. She didn’t answer her cell,” He lied. He hadn’t even tried to call her, thought it would be a stupid waste of time after their argument. He forced his voice to remain casual as if he and Justine hadn’t just had the worse fight of their marriage, as if her not coming home was nothing out of the ordinary. His throat was tight with worry and remnants of pent-up anger, it had been hard to get the words out.

“No, I haven’t seen or heard from Justine,” Hannah said.

“Thanks,” he said, doing everything in his power to keep his voice sounding lighter than he felt. “If she happens to stop in, just let her know I called. She’s probably got her phone on vibrate or something. I’ll keep trying her.”

He hung up and realized he still held the grout bucket in his hand. And that horrible feeling that something was terribly wrong still threatened to choke him. Dan dropped the bucket, and it hit the new tile with a heavy thud that echoed through the house.

“Justine…”

His truck was parked out front, and Dan raced to the front door with every intention of driving up to the grocery store and finding her. He had no idea how he knew something was wrong. He just did. He needed to get to his wife, and he needed to reach her
now
.

There would be plenty of time later to work out the unwanted pregnancy and all the hurtful words. But first, he had to find Justine.

Dan stopped short upon pulling the front door open.

Steve Harlome stood on his doorstep, his finger poised at the doorbell just ready to ring it.

“Justine?” Dan said, the single word coming out full of breath and nearly just as full of pain. His chest suddenly hurt, and it affected his voice.

Steve swallowed hard and started to speak, but not quickly enough.

“What the fuck?” It came out without him thinking. He forced a breath to calm his racing heart. “Something happened, didn’t it? Tell me what’s happened to my wife!”

“She was taken hostage,” Steve said bluntly, and Dan clearly heard his forced control. “By a guy who robbed the grocery store.”

“Hostage? A robbery at Mike’s Supermarket?” He bit his tongue to keep from asking what the fuck again. This was small-town USA. Robberies and hostage situations did not happen here, not since he’d been here anyway. “Where are they? Where is
she?
” A sharp blade of terror sliced through him, causing his knees to feel weak. He should have known something like this was bound to happen. This might be a small town, but she was the wife of a police officer. That made her a target. If it wasn’t enough, the fact that she was a public defender did. What if some defendant didn’t like the job she did for him?