Middle of Nowhere (47 page)

“No shouting!” he cautioned.

She shook her head. Prayers were not a part of her psychologist’s tools, but she prayed silently nonetheless. As long as that gag remained on, she had no way to effect change.

Her prayers were answered. Flek stepped forward and unknotted the rag.

For a moment she said nothing, savoring the fresh air, and not wanting to rush him. When she did speak it was gentle and soothing, almost a whisper, devoid of fear or the trembling rage that she felt inside. She said, “We may be too far away from a cell tower. Maybe if we got closer to town.. .. Maybe then the reception would improve.”

Flek surveyed the area. Looked at her. Looked back at the sky.

There were so many places to start with a personality like his—drug-induced and filled with bloodthirsty rage and revenge. But it was a bit like those action films where the hero has to cut the right wire or the bomb explodes—to come after him from the wrong angle was to incite that rage, not defuse it. It was not something one jumped into lightly. She tried to strip away her own emotions, to work past her own agenda, and see this patient clearly. Right now, clarity of thought was everything.

He looked back at her.

She said, “Fresh batteries help. I have a spare battery in the bottom of my purse.”

Perhaps he had overdone the glow plugs. Or perhaps on some level he knew the kind of trouble he had just brought onto himself by making contact with Boldt, by announcing his kidnapping of a police officer. Whatever the case, the man didn’t seem to hear her, his own internal voices too loud for her to overcome.

“We could try to get closer to town,” she said. “You could cuff me to the door. I don’t need to ride in the trunk.” If the Morse Code had been seen, then police were looking for this car. The closer to town, the better.

If he brought her inside the car with him, then she had a real chance at freedom, cuffed to the door or not. At the right moment she might deliver a properly placed kick to the head and end this.

“I could look for the towers while you drive.” She didn’t want to mention the phone’s signal meter, because for all she knew the signal was perfectly fine out here. She wanted his attention on solving the problem, not assessing it.

She opted for silence, allowing his fuzzy logic to sort out her suggestions. To push too hard was to push him away.

“I’m going to put the gag back on, and you’re going to lie back down. We’ll drive closer to town.”

To beg or plead was to admit subservience, and her job was to convince him of their partnership, to make herself needed and wanted. She fought off the temptation to whine and grovel. She took a breath and said calmly, “But when you reach him, he’s going to want to hear my voice. Count on that! You know he will, Abby. And what then? Stop by the side of the road and pop the trunk? What if someone drives by? But a man and a woman in the front seat of a car—what’s so suspicious about that? I’m trying to help you, Abby. Obviously, I want to live. I think he’ll do what you want. I really do. But he’s going to want to hear my voice.” She added, “You could make him release Courtney. Have her delivered somewhere. It might take a little time—”

“Shut up!” he roared, his eyes floating in their sockets. Dizzy. Dazed. He shook the phone again, pulled it close to his face and pressed a couple buttons. He held it to his ear, yanked it away in frustration and ended the attempted call with a final stab of a finger.

“You fuck this up,” he warned her, “and you will know so much pain you will wish you were dead. You will
beg
me to kill you.” He grinned wickedly. “And I won’t. Not until I’m good and ready. Not until I’ve had every inch of you.” He added, “You ask Courtney about that. She knows.”

He stepped forward. Daphne could taste her impending freedom.

“O
sbourne can’t kill the system, Sarge,” LaMoia reported from the passenger seat, “but they can lock a phone out from the entire network—all the carriers—and that’s what he’s done: He’s locked out both Matthews’ and the number we have for Flek. Both phones will get a circuit-busy signal.”

“Flek is known to carry more than one cloned phone,” Boldt reminded. “He’s
got
to kill the system.” Samway had said he had only the one, but Boldt wasn’t convinced.

LaMoia repeated the request into his phone and then listened. “Don’t work that way,” LaMoia said. “AirTyme’s one of three carriers. Only some of the towers are theirs. They attempt an AirTyme handshake first, but if that fails, it’s rerouted, first come, first serve—the call’s going to go out.”

“What about the location?”

“A couple minutes more to pinpoint it exactly, but we know it came from off-island.”

“My phone’s good to go?” Boldt asked.

LaMoia checked and awaited an answer. “That’s affirm, Sarge.”

Boldt flipped open his phone, pulled his notepad from his jacket and dialed a number, all with one hand. LaMoia maintained the open line to Gaynes. They crossed the bridge at Agate Passage. Still on the phone, Boldt pulled the car over in a park and ride just ahead of the signage for the turn to Suquamish—Indianola.

He listened more than he talked, and then hung up the call. “You know how I feel about coincidence,” he told LaMoia.

“What’s up?”

“Poulsbo PD never made contact at the restaurant, but they have this nine-eleven call reporting a taillight of an old Eldorado sending SOS out its right blinker.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“They observed our request for radio silence, but still alerted their cars via their MDTs,” mobile data terminals. “Nobody caught sight of the Eldorado. But the caller reported that it turned off three-oh-five here,” he said, pointing to the intersection not a hundred yards down the road. “North, toward Suquamish.” Boldt added, “I say we trust this one. If it’s right, it buys us a hell of a lot of time over running out to Poulsbo and back.” Boldt looked out at the dark road. “If it’s wrong information, or if it’s Flek trying to mislead us, then we lose any possibility of a jump on him.”

“Old Indian saying,” LaMoia replied, his jaw wired, his words sounding drunken. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

“That certainly helps a lot,” Boldt said sarcastically. But it did help; it briefly lightened the moment.

“I can see her doing that, Sarge. The SOS. You know? Who else but Matthews? You know her better than anyone. What do you think?”

Boldt pushed down the accelerator and turned right at the intersection. North, toward Suquamish.

“T
his thing is out of hand. Does it feel that way to you?” Daphne asked. He didn’t know handcuffs. He’d clamped the left cuff way too tightly to her wrist so that her hand felt cold and her wrist felt broken. She winced with pain every time the car bumped, which on the dirt road was every few yards.

“No talking.” He said this, but lacked the authority of his earlier insistence. She knew he wanted to talk, needed to talk. It was the only way for him to build his confidence.

“Have you thought about why we’ve pursued you?” she asked.

“To fry my ass,” the driver answered.

“You see? It is out of hand. That’s not it at all.”

“Right,” he snapped. He reached for a beer. It was his fourth.

“Have you thought about how Davie would play this?”

“Don’t you talk about him!”

“He wouldn’t know how to play it, would he, Abby? Because Davie wasn’t like you. Davie took the straight road. Davie was doing fine until you talked him into letting you hit that delivery.”

“Shut up!”

“There’s a tower,” she said, pointing through the windshield. Sweet and sour—she needed to be both for him, play both roles herself, one moment the accuser, one moment the accomplice.

Flek slowed, but kept driving. He tried the phone and once again nearly lost his patience. He reached over the backseat and fished in her purse and came out with her phone. Same reaction to his attempt with it.

Daphne didn’t believe in coincidence—Boldt had trained her not to, along with every other detective with whom he’d worked over the years. If the circuit was busy, then that was Boldt’s doing. And if that was Boldt’s doing, then she still had hope.

“What the fuck am I thinking?” Flek said. He sped up the car. It had finally occurred to him, she realized, to use a pay phone. She had wondered how long it might take him to see this. Get him into town—Boldt was on the same page as she.

The clock continued running in her head. Osbourne had said triangulation took time. Did they have a location on her? Was there a radio car waiting around the next corner, and three more coming up their tailpipe?

“My guess is Davie would encourage you to work it out, not get yourself killed.”

“I told you to shut up!” He shoved the beer can onto the dash so that it wedged tightly between glass and vinyl. He tugged the gun from his waist and extended his trembling arm toward the floor of the car.

“No!” she hollered.

But Flek pulled the trigger, shooting her left foot. The bullet traveled through her and out the floor of the car. “That’s one!” he shouted madly, saliva spraying from his wet lips. “I got eight more in here, and I’ll use every damn one before I bother to finish you. NOW YOU SHUT UP!”

For a moment she felt no pain whatsoever, her brain frozen with shock. But then the burning began. It raced up her leg, through her gut, and she vomited.

“You disgusting bitch!” he screamed at close range, beating her with the butt of the gun, directly on the wound he’d caused with the bottle.

Her head swooned, but she struggled for consciousness and managed to sit herself upright and turn her head slowly to face him. The burning in her left foot was now an inferno. She could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. “What now, Abby?”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“You’re going to have to bandage that, or pull a tourniquet, or I’m going to bleed out on you. And then what? Then I’m a dead cop, and Boldt isn’t going to deal with you. You’re damned if I die, Abby.” She needed to speak but could barely find the strength. “You . . . know . . . that, don’t you?” Her words were long strings of stretched taffy, her mouth disconnected from her brain. The purple goo loomed at the edges of her eyes, pulsing with each tick of her heart. She pushed it back, but it consumed her, determined to shield her from this pain. For a moment she maintained consciousness. She thought she saw a phone booth up ahead. A streetlight in the rain. But then the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over her head, and all hope was lost.

T
he fix on the transmission point for Flek’s first call came only moments after Boldt turned right off 305 and onto Suquamish Way NE, a minute or two after Daphne had been shot.

Reading from the back of his hand where he’d scribbled notes, LaMoia said, “The exact fix is North 47 degrees 45.45 minutes, West 122, 36.2 minutes. Give or take forty feet.”

“In English,” Boldt requested.

“A couple hundred yards east of something called Stottlemeyer Road NE. It’s in the north end of the Indian Reservation.” LaMoia fished the official SPD road atlas from the glove box where it was required to reside, and leafed through the nearly three inches of pages at a blistering speed. “You know what, Sarge?”