Duck (Rebel Wayfarers MC Book 8) (22 page)

With a soft smile curling the corners of his mouth, Mason stared down at his son, his gaze going to his wife as she stirred in the bed. A woman he had fought to hold, had struggled to bring back to herself, encouraging her, reassuring her with every step that he was in this with her, side-by-side.
Mine. Worth every moment, every effort. My Willa
, he thought and found himself easily able to define the feeling flooding him. Love.

Something doesn’t add up
, Duck thought, pacing off the dimensions of the room again. The cop car had been the first clue, and then he’d found the building next to it filled with a dozen other puzzles he had to piece together. False trails, red herrings to pick through to find the ones with real importance. The ones that didn’t scream ‘Look At Me.’ The office for the storage facility, which on the surface seemed unremarkable, but once he was inside, things felt…off. Nothing obvious. Just
off
in a way he couldn’t define, but which set his nerves on edge, so he
had
to pay attention.

The room looked like it had recently been occupied by a tidy squatter, which was an oxymoron in his book. Dirty towels were neatly folded in one corner of the room, laid on top of a cushion taken from the couch. Newspapers disassembled, the parts reassembled into piles of similar assortments. Section ones, section twos, and advertising sections, all piled into squares. The papers, torn but tidy, arranged randomly on the floor along one long wall. Ripped and sagging furniture squared with the straight lines of the walls, impotent lamps precisely lined up with the center of the tables, electric cords stretched out on the floor, ends plugged into nothing.

Pegboards on one wall held row upon row of keys, at first glance giving the impression of random arrangement. Upon closer inspection, if paying attention, it was possible to see the groupings matched the furniture in this room and the adjacent one.

Duck was paying close attention. Absolute attention.

Three keys together represented a couch, another similar set stood for the desk. Even the towels were accounted for, the jumbled piles of paper. Everything just right, even the things which should be wrong…too much so to be randomly arranged.

Empty lines of pegs were the walls, straight and in place. All but one. One of them was misplaced. So, he paced off the distance, counting, pacing, and repeating.

He stood, first looking at the peg wall, then swinging to look at the room. If the arrangement of the keys matched the contents of the room, with the groupings arranged to scale, and those empty lines of pegs were walls…then one of the walls he was looking at in the room didn’t exist, and there were about eight missing feet from that side of the room.

Making his way along the wall, he thumped with his fist, feeling stupid. This wasn’t a fucking TV show where he would miraculously find a hidden door leading to the evil mastermind’s torture chamber. It was a fucking storage unit rental place in fucking Las Cruces, and he was an unemployed enforcer for a fucking motorcycle club, not a goddamned detective.

He paused his advance, thumping hard against the same place on the wall, then moved his hand down a foot and thumped again. It sounded different, hollow. Running his fingers along the surface, he found a ripple, an unevenness in the drywall. Bending over, he looked closely, fingers and eyes working together to find a seam, a well-hidden join in the surface he could trace with his thumbnail. Reaching down further, he trailed his fingers across the bottom of the wall where it stood on the floor. There was a cool draft there, blowing outward across his skin.
What the fuck?

Down on his knees now, feeling like time was stretching around him as his blood ran cold, he realized the wall was not for support. No, not this wall. It was hiding something, he just had to find out how to get into the space behind it, find out what it was sheltering. Fingernails scrabbling along the floor, finding no purchase, but that draft of air remained fresh and steady, taunting him with the sure knowledge that
something
was there. Remembering the kitchen cabinets in his grandmother’s house, he found one edge of the wall section and used the tips of all four fingers and his thumb to push in.
Click
. The top corner sagged out, and he quickly repeated the motion on the bottom corner.
Click
.

Shuffling backwards, he rocked back over his heels, still on his knees as he stared at the opening. It was small, only about three-foot square. Small enough you would have to crawl through it, small enough to feel tight in ways that were uncomfortable. Constricting access, it would expose you as you entered, seemingly a contradiction. It gaped open a few inches on its own, the dark sliver appearing along the vertical edge beckoning to him.
I feel like Alice, only I don’t have any fucking dope to make me smart
, he thought, reaching out with one shaking hand and easing the door open. Heavy; his hands and arms felt like they weighed a thousand pounds and he was filled with heart-pounding terror at what he would find.
I’ve got to
be
smart. Something isn’t right. I need to find it, figure it out
.

No doubt now this was a door, and—
thank God
—the smell rolling through the opening was sweet, not a stench to roll your stomach. No, this smelled of rich earth, dug deep, well-watered and fertile. Vaguely chemical laden, but not overwhelming. Glancing around behind him one last time at what he now realized was a waiting room—a holding cell for would-be rescuers—from this new angle he saw there was a medium-sized something shoved underneath the couch.

He scrambled, making his way quickly over there, dragging out a worn and weathered canvas bag. Not locked, not zipped, just the placket folded over the open top. Easy entry. Without thinking, he reached blindly inside the bag, fingers fumbling, finding a cold, metal cylinder and another object, warmer wood. He gaped the mouth of the bag open, gripped the metal and pulled out a flashlight, and then looked inside to see a small tool, like a child’s garden spade. Wood and steel pretending to be a useful thing, more of an excuse to spend time with someone who loved gardening. Someone who loved to dig in the dirt, running fingers through loamy soil, finding treasures to share with a little one in the form of wiggling worms and tightly curled grubs.

Reaching in for the tiny spade, he heard a crinkle and stretched the opening of the bag wider, looking inside again. A piece of paper. He was unfolding it when his phone rang, the sound inside his head startling because he had forgotten about the earpiece. Reaching up to tap the button, he straightened the last fold to read the words just as he heard Myron’s voice say, “Pinto’s got squat. You find anything, Duck?”

Eyes fixed on the paper in his hand, he didn’t answer for a moment, pulse jolting erratically, his breathing coming faster the longer he knelt there, reading and rereading the oh-so-brief message written in bold stripes of black ink. Absence scrawled in loops and swirls; lack as promise. He could feel the words’ weight through the paper, the pen having impressed deeply on the material, nearly punching through in some places. Unreadable Braille. Handwriting, small and cramped, even and unhurried. The author took their time with no fear of discovery, no need to rush. One more piece of the riddle to toss down, clues gobbled up by Duck’s brain like bread on the shore of a pond.

As if from far away, he heard Myron’s voice barking a question, “Duck, you there, brother?” Duck sucked in a harsh breath, then another, Myron evidently hearing that because he shouted, “Brother, talk to me. Tell me. What the fuck’s going on?”

“I got her.” There was a sudden increase of noise on the phone but he couldn’t focus on that. It didn’t come close to hitting the scale for attention. “I got her.” He sucked in a breath. “Jesus.” Another breath, urgency pounding through his veins. “I don’t got her, but I got her. I gotta go. I gotta get her, brother. Get someone here, Myron.
Fuck
, get them here. I gotta get to work. She ain’t gonna die, man. Not like that. Not alone, not like this.” He didn’t wait for Myron’s response, disconnecting the call. He knew the man could track the device within a three-foot radius, and also knew his brother would spin up help just as fast as he could fucking dial it in.

Looking down at the joke of a spade in his hand, he stared at it for a moment as panic and adrenaline fought for dominance within his chest, and then he worked hard to stifle it. Successfully forced it all down, shoving it deep as he shifted his gaze back to the paper.

You coming in shut down her air. She’s got three hours.

Taped to the paper below the message was a picture of a young Mexican woman with light blonde hair. She lay contorted, legs curved tight to her body, curled up on a rag of a blanket. Taken through a pane of reinforced glass dividing the area in the picture into two spaces, the photo showed her position was reminiscent of the human remains in Pompeii, mummified by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius. Lying on her side, arms tucked in front of her face, hands wedged underneath her head. With dark bruising on her jaw and cheek, she was isolated in a glass cage, waiting.

Fuck
.

Spade clutched tightly in one hand, he took a picture of the paper with his phone, then texted it to Myron. He took another picture of the doorway, then one of the room in general, sending those on their electronic way as well. He set a timer, and then shoved the phone deep into his pocket and crawled towards the opening, dragging the canvas bag behind him.

Flipping on the flashlight, he shone it into the dark recesses of the area hidden by the false wall to find his nose hadn’t misled him. The floor behind the wall was dirt, loose and dark, damp with water, it spread evenly from wall to wall, the space about eight-feet wide and fifteen-feet long. On the far end, a pipe stuck up from the dirt, pale and bone white in the glow cast by the flashlight. Vent. Air. Silent.
You coming in shut down her air.

Before going another inch, he impatiently scanned the area for traps, not trusting his senses which were telling him nothing was waiting. His muscles screamed for him to move, to get started, but he had to be sure there weren’t any more pieces to unravel. That there weren’t things lying along the path to trip him up, because he couldn’t make a misstep here. This was coloring within the lines, faced with an unthinkable consequence if he got it wrong. Scanning one last time, he knew there was nothing. No snares. This wasn’t a ruse. There was nothing to be found except the one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around. Nothing except a girl who would die if he didn’t dig her up in time.
Think
, he raged at himself.
Think, you bastard
.

He knew the vent wouldn’t be by the entrance to the buried cell, it would be in the room with the girl. His brain shifted into a higher gear, thoughts racing as he tracked down the facts, lining them up like the pegs on that goddamned board in the waiting room. Jumping from clue to clue, leapfrogging past only to circle back to be certain.

The girl will be behind the glass and away from the door, contained so the motherfucker can come and go without worrying about her escaping. The door will be behind the glass from the girl. Farthest end from the vent. Nearest the crawl through.

Bringing the paper up again, he shone the light on it, looking at the picture, studying it.

She’s got three hours.

Isabella was young. Not yet twenty, she stood five foot six, weighed about a hundred forty.
Look at the space she takes up
, he thought,
look at the space around her
. From what he could see in the image, that made her end of the room about five-foot square, because while she had curled into a tight ball, trying hard to protect herself by presenting a smaller target, him knowing her stats meant he could gauge the room size.

He glanced back at the peg wall, studying the just-right way things were lined up. Precisely arranged. Organized. Controlled.
Motherfucker likes things symmetrical
. Knowing that about her abductor, looking at the picture, knowing how big her space was, he knew the whole set-up would be a rectangle, knew it would be five by ten, or there about. Broken cement showed where the foundation had been removed, and he looked around at the dirt floor then up at the grooved, metal walls, gauging the size of the empty, barren space between the four walls in front of him.

Eight foot by fifteen foot.

The math was easy, easiest part of this whole fucking puzzle. Give it five square for the prison, five square for observation. The still-silent vent was set out about two feet from the far wall. That would put the front of the room at least three feet from the crawl through on this end. He drew a mental line.

Foot and a half out from either side to find the edges of the space, dropping into the middle would put him four feet from the long wall nearest him. Then, checking the angle, he looked at a spot three feet from the end nearest him, noting where it intersected the other line. That was where he would start, and fuck him if he was wrong. Fuck him. If he got it wrong and killed her with his stupidity.
Fuck
. If he was wrong.

Think
.

Go over it again. She couldn’t afford for him to be wrong. He couldn’t be wrong, so he wouldn’t be.

Spend two minutes of her three hours to make sure you don’t fuck this up.

He looked down at the ridiculous fucking spade nearly swallowed in his hand, and then back out over the expanse of dirt. Seeing, but not seeing, instead, he saw her bruised face, eyes closed in a mockery of rest, curled up protectively, fending off her demons. The demon who’d brought her here and laid hands on her. Made her life a fucking puzzle to be solved. Her survival a fucking game. He saw Watcher’s face as he looked when talking about his family, lines softening, and voice taking on an indulgent tone when he spoke about his girl. She was loved. Smart, sassy, cute, and loved. Watcher’s princess, his treasure. And someone was trying to steal that away.