Bait (42 page)

The hit man? She didn't know. But her heart was beating very fast.

She watched through her lashes as he walked across the garage—now that Zelda had moved on, she could see that she was inside a multicar garage, though only a blue Ford F-150 pickup truck was currently parked in it—toward another man, who was sitting at one end of what looked like a workbench built into the far wall of the garage.

“So, how do we do that?” the other man asked, chewing. This guy was thin, wiry even, too thin to be the man who had attacked her in New Orleans. He was maybe in his early thirties, with thick black hair and big, loose lips and a receding chin, and he wore a short-sleeved blue shirt. She could only see him from the chest up, because he was seated at the table, so the rest of him remained a mystery.

The heavy man shrugged. “Torture her, I guess.”

“You torture her. I'm eating.”

The heavy man looked around at her. Horrified, she just managed to remember to breathe.

“Hell's bells, Fish, why me? I had to carry her in here. She's no feather, that's for sure.”

Maddie would have felt insulted at that if she hadn't been so scared.

“Because I'm eating, lunkhead. Can't you see? Me— eat.” He took a huge bite out of what looked like a fast-food burger.

“What about me? I'm hungry, too.”

“Torture her, then eat.”

“My food'll be cold.”

“You can put it in the microwave.”

“Shit.” Lunkhead sighed. Then he came toward her, and she felt her blood run cold. “If I have to torture her, then you have to shoot the dog. I don't do nothin' to dogs.”

“I don't know why you brought the damned thing anyway.”

“Because it was there. Because it was barking. Another couple of minutes, and everybody in the damned factory would have been coming out to see what was going on. Lucky I was able to grab hold of its leash. It would have given us away.” Lunkhead was standing over her now, and Maddie concentrated on emptying her mind of everything, imagined being in a calm, serene place, concentrated on her breathing.
In out, in out.
Like in her dream.

She shuddered.

“I saw that,” Lunkhead said triumphantly. He reached down, grabbed her under her arm, and hauled her roughly upright, his fingers digging painfully into her flesh. “Come on, I know you're awake. Don't make me hit you.”

That was said so casually that she knew it wasn't an idle threat. Her eyes flew open, and she sucked in a deep breath as she tried to find her balance. But with her ankles bound and her feet numb, she couldn't. Her shoes were gone, she realized, as her bare feet made contact with the cold floor. She couldn't get her feet squarely beneath her, and she had a feeling that, even if she could, they wouldn't support her weight. Unable to help herself, she sagged heavily against him. He was soft with flab and smelled of cologne. He didn't feel like her attacker, either.

Unless her senses were deceiving her, the hit man wasn't in the room.

Not that that meant she was in the clear. It just meant that multiple people seemed to want to do her harm.

“Over to the table.” Lunkhead gripped her tighter and started dragging her in the direction he wanted her to go.

She gave a little hop, then, overbalanced, fell heavily forward onto her knees. Her kneecaps banged into the concrete. It hurt, and she cried out.

“Get up.” Lunkhead loomed over her.

“I—I can't.”

He kicked her, his shiny black loafer making brutal contact with her thigh. Pain exploded up and down her leg. She yelped, crumpled.

“Now try.” He reached down to drag her upright again.

“My feet ...?”

The disorientation she'd experienced on first regaining consciousness was totally gone now. In its place was pain and a hard cold fear. This guy's casual brutality told its own tale—he had no qualms about hurting her. He would have no qualms about killing her.

“Oh, jeez, untie her feet. She's not going anywhere,” the man at the table said.

“Yeah.”

The fingers digging into her arm let go. Maddie hit her knees again, then toppled forward, barely managing to twist enough to smack the concrete with her shoulder rather than her face. She cried out again as pain shot through her knees, her hip, her arm. Then, as she lay, panting, on her side on the concrete, she saw something that made her temporarily forget both pain and fear.

Sam was sprawled on his back on the concrete floor not far from where she lay. His eyes were closed, blood trickled sluggishly from a corner of his mouth and smeared his white shirt, and his arms were stretched over his head. Eyes widening with horror, she saw that he was handcuffed to the truck's bumper.

“Get up,” Lunkhead said again, and hauled her upright. The rope around her ankles had been cut—she caught a glint of silver as he refolded a serviceable switchblade and stowed it in his pocket—but she had been so focused on Sam that she hadn't even realized that he was doing it.

Was he badly hurt?
That was her first, instinctive thought. Then, as she was forced to walk on her tingling, throbbing feet, she remembered that she hated him.

But not enough for this.

“Sit down,” Fish said when Lunkhead had dragged her, hobbling, to the workbench. It was table-height, made of unfinished planks, with an open toolbox and various tools jumbled together and shoved toward the wall. Fish's lunch was spread out in front of him on a sandwich wrapper: a half-eaten fish sandwich, a couple of unopened packs of tartar sauce, fries, and a large soft drink with a straw and a lid. Moby Dick's, Maddie saw from the other small, white bag that waited near the edge of the table with its top rolled shut. This, clearly, was Lunkhead's meal, which he had not yet had time to eat. Three cheap plastic chairs had been pulled up to the workbench, one at each end and one in the middle. Lunkhead pulled out the chair in the middle and shoved Maddie into it. Fish was to her left, Lunkhead behind her chair. If she glanced sideways, she could see Sam.

She was terrified, she realized—and not just for herself.

A door opened at the rear of the garage, and Zelda, lucky dog, disappeared beneath the truck. A man stood in the opening, scowling at them. He was stocky, bald, and dressed in dark suit pants, a striped dress shirt, and tie. The hit man? She didn't know. There was no way to tell. But the build was right. Her heart started slamming against her ribs in quick, panicked strokes. Her breathing suspended. Would he come in now and kill her? If he did, there was nothing she could do. No escape ...

Be calm,
she told herself.
Focus.
Behind the new arrival, she could see the outdoors: a strip of concrete and, beyond it, grass and the crowded trunks of a stand of skinny pines. Where were they? Impossible to tell.

“You know what we just heard on the police scanner, shit-for-brains?” the guy in the door demanded. “An APB for the fed. What the hell did you have to dick around with him for?”

“I told you, we didn't have any choice,” Lunkhead said. “He came around the side of the truck just as I was throwing the dog in. He saw me. He was going for his gun.”

“If I hadn't been right there to clobber him with that tire iron, he would've had us. I didn't even have time to pull out my stun gun,” Fish chimed in.

“Yeah, we weren't expecting him. Had her, had the dog—then here he came. What are you gonna do?” Lunkhead shook his head and shrugged.

“Well, idiots, you just escalated our problems, big-time. They wouldn't have looked that hard for her. They'll look like hell for him, and now we got no choice but to kill him. Just make sure, when you do it, that you get rid of the body someplace where it's not gonna be found. Chop it up or something and bury the parts separately. Got it?”

Maddie went all light-headed.

“Yeah,” Fish said.

The man in the doorway turned his head sharply, as if he heard something. Then he disappeared from view, leaving the door ajar. The light outside had the mellow, golden quality common to a summer evening. The trees cast long shadows toward the east, which told her that sundown was nearing. The meal Fish was eating and Lunkhead wasn't must be supper.

The terrible thing was, freedom was less than twenty feet away. It might as well have been a thousand miles. Two men inside, undoubtedly armed and clearly ready, willing, and able to kill her. At least one man outside, and probably more.

And handcuffed to a truck, one man whom, Maddie realized, she wasn't willing to leave behind even if she should somehow get the opportunity to run.

“He's pissed,” Lunkhead said to Fish, sounding glum.

“Yeah. Well, we better be getting them what they need, then.” Fish looked at Maddie. His eyes were cold now, and hard. Fear tightened her stomach, dried her mouth. He could kill her, she realized, and go right back to eating his fish sandwich. “This is all your damned fault,” he said to her. “Why the hell didn't you just stay off TV?”

Maddie was so surprised by his comment that she forgot, for a moment, to be afraid. “What?”

“TV. What kind of stupid person who's on the run goes on TV? You got us all in trouble here.” He looked at Lunkhead. “Cut her hands free.”

Maddie felt her stomach clench.
Why does this not sound like good news?

“What? What?” she said, as much to keep them talking as for any other reason. Lunkhead was using his knife on the rope that bound her wrists. She could hear the sawing sound it made, feel a painful increase in pressure as the rope dug tighter into her skin. “What are you talking about? I never went on TV.”

Fish looked at her with disgust. “You got some big business award. Velasco saw it on the news. He's one of our guys now, but he used to live in Baltimore and he recognized you. Said he remembered you because you were such hot stuff. Only you had some trouble, and you were supposed to be dead. He kept wondering about it, and finally he gave the guys in Baltimore a buzz. Then all hell broke loose.”

Her hands were free now. The blood flowing back into them made her fingers tingle and throb painfully. She scarcely noticed. All this—
all this
—because they'd run a clip of her receiving the Chamber of Commerce award on the evening news?

Talk about your butterfly effect. She would've had to laugh if she hadn't felt so much like crying.

Fish grabbed hold of her wrist and put her hand down on the table. Maddie was still looking at her outstretched fingers in surprise when he picked up a hammer and brought it down hard on her pinkie.

She screamed, snatching her hand away. Smirking, he let it go. The pain was blinding, intense, made even more horrible because it was so unexpected. Her stomach turned inside out. She went all woozy. If Lunkhead hadn't been behind her, holding on to her shoulders, she would have fallen sideways out of the chair.

“That's just a sample of what's going to happen if you give us any problems,” Fish said. He'd already put down the hammer, Maddie saw, as her vision cleared enough for her to be able to see again, and was taking another hungry bite out of his sandwich. The pain, coupled with the smell, made her want to vomit. “That stuff you said you had—I want to know where it is.”

“What stuff?” Maddie cradled her injured hand close to her chest. She was nauseated, dizzy. The end of her pinkie was purplish and already starting to swell, and blood welled into a small cut beside the nail. Maggie realized it was where her skin had split, and felt cold sweat begin to ooze from her pores.

“Don't play dumb.” Fish was eating his sandwich as though this was the most ordinary of conversations. “The stuff you told Mikey you had. When you called him.”

“When I called ...” Mikey being Bob Johnson, of course. It wasn't so much that Maddie was slow on the uptake, although pain and fear certainly were having some mind-clouding effects. It was that she could see where this was going all too clearly. If she didn't tell them what they wanted to know, they'd continue causing her pain until she did. If she did tell them, she would die.

Fish put down his sandwich and reached for her hand again.

“No,” she gasped, cold sweat drenching her in waves. She cradled her hand tighter against her chest while Lunkhead, behind her, bore down harder on her shoulders. “It—I'm just not thinking so clearly because—because you hurt my hand. I know what call you mean. A-One Plastics. When I called them, right?”

“That's right,” Lunkhead said behind her. “You shouldn't go around threatening people, you know. Nobody likes that.”

“Shut up, would you?” Fish growled, shooting Lunkhead a look. Then, to Maddie, “I'm gonna ask you one more time, nice, then I'm gonna smash another finger. Where's all that evidence you said your dad took?”

Maddie's stomach cramped. Ice-cold terror shot through her veins. But terror wouldn't help her. Calm, clear thinking probably wouldn't, either. But it was all she had, so she fought back the terror and went with the calm-and-clear thing. They were in a garage, which was obviously attached to a house. The door the man had left open led to a parking area. Beyond it was—someplace better than here. If she wanted to survive, what she had to do was make it to the door and run.

They were armed, she was almost positive. They'd shoot her in the back if she was able to outrun them. But she'd rather die trying to escape than be tortured until they killed her.

Sam. She couldn't leave Sam. Glancing sideways, she discovered to her surprise that his posture had changed. His body was in the same position as before, but his muscles seemed to have tensed. And she couldn't be sure—his lashes still fanned his cheeks—but she was almost positive that he was looking at her.