Текст книги "Striking Distance"
Автор книги: Pamela Clare
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 23 страниц)
“There went that theory. I’ll pass this along to the police. I’m on my way to the cop shop now anyway. Hunter called to say that Edwards’s social worker showed up insisting that Edwards couldn’t have done any of the things the FBI claims he did. She says he had trouble tying his shoes and struggled to live independently.”
How had Petras and his crew not ascertained that key fact?
Javier knew why.
They’d found exactly what they’d expected to find at Edwards’s apartment and hadn’t bothered to look deeper. Just as they’d done with Ali Al Zahrani.
Javier held the phone to his ear with his shoulder, loading a spare magazine with anti-personnel rounds. “Edwards may have been involved in this, but the man we’re looking for is able-bodied and fit. It can’t be a coincidence that Edwards had a beef against Laura. That has to mean something. Are we sure the alibis for his two surviving buddies are airtight?”
“I’ll get on the phone with Miami and Detroit now.”
“I’m catching a cab to the newspaper. I’ll stay with Laura until we can figure this shit out. Whoever he is, he’s still out there, and that means she’s still in danger.”
Javier ended the call, then dialed Laura’s cell.
No answer.
He left a message. “Laura, stay at the newspaper. Don’t go anywhere. Stay away from the windows. The man in the footage is not Edwards. I say again, stay at the paper. I’m on my way.”
He checked his Walther PPS and secured it in his shoulder holster. The fit wasn’t perfect, but since he didn’t have his SIG, it was going to have to do. Then he grabbed the spare key that Laura had left him, picked up the CD, and headed down to the street.
* * *
LAURA LET THE call go to voice mail, the traffic on I-25 demanding her full attention. Holly had a theory that Denver’s infamous Mousetrap was actually a psychology experiment gone awry, and this morning, Laura thought Holly might be right. There certainly seemed to be enough road rage going around.
“Hey!” She braked to avoid colliding with a car that had just cut across three lanes of traffic, heading for the I-70 exit. “Idiot.”
Twenty minutes later, she found herself staring at an expanse of undeveloped land. Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, it had probably once been pastureland. Now it was simply vacant, its scant cover of grass dry and brown. Realizing she must have made a wrong turn, she read through the directions once again, only to find that she’d followed them precisely. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that her browser’s maps app had been incorrect.
She stopped the car and saw that the call she’d missed had come from Javier, who had left a voice mail. Afraid she was going to be late to her meeting with Mr. Hollis, she dialed Joaquin first, hoping he’d had better luck with his GPS. His phone had just begun to ring when she heard the sound of an approaching engine. Thinking it might be him, she looked up—and saw a black van hurtling directly toward her.
There was no time to react, no time to be afraid. The van hit her head-on with bone-crunching force, knocking the breath from her lungs, as something hit her hard in the face—the air bag.
Stunned, she struggled to regain her breath, reaching for her cell phone, which had flown out of her hand and lay on the passenger-side floor along with the contents of her purse, including her loaded SIG.
Then a man jumped from the van.
In his hand was a rifle.
CHAPTER
29
JAVIER REACHED THE newspaper to find that Laura wasn’t there. With a knot of dread in his chest, he tried to reach her on her cell again.
No answer.
He looked out across a busy newsroom. “I need to know where Laura is.”
No one seemed to be sure.
Sophie looked over at him, still typing. “She left about a half hour ago. I think she went to meet Joaquin for a photo shoot with one of the soldiers for her VA story. Try reaching her on her cell.”
He felt his teeth grind with the effort not to shout. “I need to find Laura
now
. Her life is in danger, and she’s not answering her cell.”
That had their attention.
Javier was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. He instinctively fell back on that. “Sophie, call Joaquin. Find out whether Laura is with him and where they were supposed to meet.”
Sophie nodded.
Javier walked over to the desk he assumed was Laura’s—the one with balloons—and looked for a notepad that might have an address or phone number. There were several manila folders, pages of transcribed interviews, handwritten notes and spreadsheets, but no address. He roused her computer from sleep and found what he was looking for—a maps application showing an address and directions. “Is this hooked up to a printer?”
“It should come out there.” A red-haired man pointed to a bank of laser printers on the other side of the room.
Javier clicked Print and retrieved the page from the printer, half-listening to Sophie, who was speaking with Joaquin now.
A big man with curly gray hair stepped out from behind a closed office door labeled “Editor.” Laura’s boss.
“What’s going on out—”
Javier met his gaze, held up a finger for silence, then looked over at Sophie, who’d just ended the call. “Sophie?”
“Joaquin says she went to meet with a veteran named Ted Hollis, but he can’t find the address she gave him. His GPS says it doesn’t exist. He admitted he hasn’t updated for a while. He’s tried calling Laura, too. No answer.”
Javier didn’t like this.
Wherever she was, Laura was alone.
He needed to get to her now. “I need to borrow a vehicle.”
“Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on?” the editor asked.
Sophie answered, her face pale. “Laura may be missing.”
Alex stood, tossed Javier a set of keys. “Take mine. It’s a black Chevy Tahoe. I gassed up this morning. There’s body armor and an AR-15 and two loaded thirty-round mags in the back.”
Javier wasn’t even going to ask why Alex carried all that shit. An asshole like him probably needed it for self-defense. He caught the keys. “Thanks.”
He was on his way downstairs when McBride called.
“You with Laura?”
“No. She’s not here. She left a half hour ago, and she’s not answering her cell.”
“Son of a bitch!” McBride brought him quickly up to date—and the news wasn’t good. “I pulled up the files on the other men involved in the shakedown scheme and called our Miami and Detroit offices. While I was on the phone, Edwards’s social worker caught sight of the files and pointed to one of the men—Theodore Kimball.”
“He’s the one who was declared dead.”
“Right, but his remains were never recovered. The social worker swears she saw him at Edwards’s place a few weeks back. He said he was Edwards’s old army buddy. She says he introduced himself as Ted, but didn’t give a last name.”
¡Puñeta! Fuck!
Javier’s heart gave a single hard knock, fear flooding his veins like adrenaline. “The man Laura was supposed to meet is named Ted Hollis. I’ll bet my ass that’s him. I’ve got the address, and I’m on my way there now in a borrowed vehicle.”
Javier gave McBride the address and directions.
“That’s north of Denver in an undeveloped area of Adams County,” McBride said. “Hang for a minute, and I’ll pick you up in my car.”
“I can’t wait. If he’s got her, Laura doesn’t have much time.”
As he ended the call, the thought jabbed at him, a splinter in his mind.
She might already be dead.
* * *
“WAKE UP, LAURA. Rise and shine. It’s time to die.”
At first, Laura thought she was dreaming, but dreams didn’t come with throbbing headaches. She struggled to open her eyes, panic threading sluggishly through her veins. The voice was familiar. But something wasn’t right.
Someone pulled her hair, forced her head up, and gave her head a little shake, pain making her scalp tingle and temples throb. “Open your eyes.”
A man’s blurred face swam into view, blue sky and steel beams above him.
Where was she?
She’d been on her way to meet Joaquin. She’d gotten lost. There had been open fields and then . . .
The black van.
It had struck her car, and a man with a rifle had come for her. Ether. He’d drugged her and dragged her away.
She’d been abducted again.
Blind terror surged through her, her heart slamming painfully in her chest, her eyes coming open. But she must still have been drugged. Nothing she saw made sense.
She was sitting tied to a chair in a room that had no ceiling, a building without a roof, nothing above her but steel girders and sky. In front of her was a partial wall with openings in the shapes of a wide door and windows that looked out onto a lake.
Was it some kind of partially constructed building?
A hand slapped her cheek, the pain sharp.
“There you are. Come on. Snap out of it.”
Ted Hollis.
She recognized his voice now.
He loomed over her dressed in olive-colored workman’s coveralls, blue nitrile gloves on his hands, and a baseball hat on his head with little lights sewn into the bill.
Infrared LEDs. The sniper.
Ted Hollis was the sniper.
Her pulse thrummed against her eardrums, fear making her sick to her stomach. Or maybe that was another side effect of the drug.
He reached for her face. “I guess I can take this off. There’s no one out here to hear you scream anyway, except for me, of course, and I enjoy that.”
He tore something from her mouth, pain making her gasp.
A piece of duct tape.
She swallowed, her mouth dry, whether from the ether or terror, she didn’t know. “Wh-where have you taken me?”
He smiled. “Don’t you recognize me, Laura?”
“Mr. Holl—”
“No, that’s just an alias.” He smiled, clearly satisfied with himself. “I’m Theodore Kimball, one of the soldiers whose lives you destroyed.”
Her mind raced, trying to put the pieces together. Wasn’t one of Edwards’s coconspirators named Theodore Kimball?
Yes.
So Ted Hollis was Theodore Kimball.
She fought her fear. She’d been through this before, and this time she was not going to let it break her. If this was her last hour on earth, she would live it as much on her own terms as she was able, no matter what he did to her. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing her afraid, the control of hearing her plead for her life, the thrill of seeing her buckle under his cruelty. Well, she wouldn’t give it to him.
And with that decision, she felt herself relax, her mind clearing.
“I understand now why you didn’t want Joaquin to take your photo.” It was perfectly clear in hindsight. “You were afraid I’d recognize you. There was no reason to worry. You have a forgettable face.”
“You may have forgotten my face, but I haven’t forgotten yours.” He took her chin roughly in his hand. “All these years of living off the grid, pretending to be dead—I thought about you every day.”
She jerked her chin away. “It’s a good thing you’ve had so much practice being dead, because by tonight you’ll be dead for real.”
He backhanded her, the blow leaving her dazed, the taste of blood filling her mouth. “Don’t threaten me, Laura. I’ve been a dozen steps ahead of the cops this entire time. They still haven’t figured out half the shit I’ve done to cover my tracks.”
“Like framing poor Ali Al Zahrani?” The startled look on his face told her she’d been right about that. “They know. They just haven’t made it public yet.”
He glared at her. “You’re lying.
“I was the one who figured it out. Those searches all took place when Ali was at work. He couldn’t have been responsible for them.”
There was a spark of alarm in Kimball’s eyes, but he quickly hid it behind a grin. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I haven’t yet told you what I plan to do with you. Aren’t you curious?”
Another attempt on his part to regain control.
“Let me guess. You want to kill me. Is that supposed to be a surprise? You’ve been trying—and failing—for weeks now.”
“Oh, much longer than that.”
A shiver slid down her spine at the tone of his voice.
“You and I are going to have a little conversation. After that, I’m going to kill you and set this house on fire. All of this is wired to blow at a touch of a button.” He held up a device with a gray button in its center and gestured toward gasoline cans she hadn’t noticed before. There were dozens of them, including one on each side of her chair. “Out the windows behind you, I have an unobstructed view of the only road into this development, so if the cops
do
show up, I’ll have to push the button early and let you burn alive. Either way, by the time help arrives, you’ll be incinerated.”
The thought of burning alive revived her fear, left her fighting panic. “You really need to listen to me and leave here while you can.”
“Did you give Al-Nassar a hard time, too? I doubt it.” Kimball leaned down and caught Laura’s face between his palms, forcing her to look straight into his eyes. “I’m the one who handed you over to him. It was me, Laura. Every time he raped you, every time he beat you, every time he humiliated you, that was
me
.
“
I
did those things to you.”
And Laura realized she was staring into the soulless eyes of a sociopath.
* * *
JAVIER CAME AROUND the corner and saw Laura’s car just ahead.
¡Madre de Dios!
The front end was crumpled, the driver’s-side door wide open.
He glanced around, saw nothing and no one, just open fields. He drew his Walther and stepped out of the SUV, moving in on Laura’s vehicle. He knew he’d find one of two things—Laura’s dead body or nothing at all.
Keeping his distance—her car might be rigged to blow—he circled the vehicle. It was years of working as a special operator that kept steel in his spine, kept his stride deliberate and even. The SEAL part of him responded tactically, even while the man inside him wanted to shout for her, to tear the world down in a mad rush to find her.
She wasn’t there.
The breath left his lungs in a gust.
There was still a chance she was alive.
Hang on,
bella
.
He moved closer to the car, looking for blood or any sign of explosives. McBride had called him to fill him in on the details of Kimball’s service record. It seemed the bastard had tried and failed twice to make it into Army Special Forces before Laura’s investigation had ruined any chance he’d had of getting beyond regular enlisted ranks. Javier was willing to bet Kimball considered himself quite the operator—a strategist, a badass, a cold-blooded warrior. He did have some skills. He’d managed to fake his own death, to disappear and stay hidden for almost seven years. But he lacked experience and discipline—something Javier could use to his advantage.
Javier spotted Laura’s handbag on the passenger-side floor, her cell phone and .22 SIG beside it. And his hope that they’d be able to use her cell phone to locate her vanished.
¡Coño! Damn it!
He noticed something on the dashboard—a wad of gauze. He reached for it, raised it to his nose, and caught the faint scent of . . .
ether
.
He called McBride. “I found her car at the address I gave you, but she’s gone. Her car is totaled. Her cell phone is here and her firearm, too. It looks like someone struck her head-on, then drugged her with ether. I see traces of black paint on her hood and front bumper. There’s no blood. I’m guessing he snatched her and ran.”
“Son of a bitch! I’ve already contacted the Adams County sheriff and put a BOLO out on Kimball. I’ll have units there in twenty minutes.”
“Does that social worker have any idea where he might be staying?”
“No, but we’ve been contacting every lodge, hotel, and no-tell motel in the Denver area in search of anyone fitting his description. So far we’ve found nothing.”
And then it struck Javier.
“You said this location is in Adams County. Where have I heard Adams County mentioned before?” Before McBride could answer, Javier remembered. “The dynamite. It was stolen from a construction site in Adams County, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“How far is that construction site from where I’m standing?”
“It’s going to take me a minute to dig that up.”
“Call me back when you find it. Send me that address as well as some kind of overhead view of the area.”
He ended the call and walked back to Carmichael’s SUV. In the rear storage compartment, he found a halfway decent Kevlar vest, an AR with seriously fucked optics, two loaded magazines, and about fifty spare rounds of 5.56. He carried them to the front seat of the vehicle, removed his shoulder holster, and strapped into the Kevlar. He’d just adjusted the shoulder holster and fastened it in place when his cell rang.
“Yeah.”
“The site is about a mile north of you, and, Corbray, I think you’re right. I diverted an Adams County traffic helo to do a distant flyby, and they spotted what looks like a black minivan parked between two of the houses.”
Laura was there. Javier knew it.
If she was still alive, she needed him now. If she wasn’t . . .
He couldn’t even consider the possibility.
Javier fought to stay on top of his own adrenaline, his own fear, checking the firearms. “I need to know more about that site.”
“The development is an old gravel mine that’s being converted into a lakefront community with luxury homes. The mine pit itself has already filled with groundwater. The houses aren’t completed yet. I’m sending you a satellite image now.”
Javier looked to the north. “I can see the lake from here. Its southern end is about three hundred yards north of my position.”
He set the AR aside and studied the image McBride had sent. The lake was roughly kidney shaped with houses in various stages of construction scattered along the far bank. There was one road in and out. No trees, outcroppings, or shrubs to hide behind. No ravines in the artificially created landscape. Near the mouth of the development, large excavation equipment sat idle beside a trailer that was probably used as an office. To the north and east was open pastureland.
“Where was the van parked?”
“They said they spotted it between the two houses at the northernmost tip of the lake—the two that are more fully built.”
Javier assessed the situation. He could take the road, but Kimball would see him coming almost immediately. That might provoke him into killing Laura, if he hadn’t already. Or Javier could take a route that Kimball wouldn’t expect.
“SWAT is already on its way. I’ll be at your position in about ten minutes. SWAT should arrive in fifteen to twenty.”
“I’ll have her by then. I’m going to swim underwater across the lake and come up behind those two houses. There’s a concrete pipe that spills from the lake into a nearby irrigation ditch off the road to my left here. It was probably built to carry away overflow. I can enter the lake that way so that he won’t spot me climbing over that embankment.”
“Corbray, listen to me. You’re taking a big risk. It’s March, and this isn’t San Diego. The water in that lake won’t be much over forty degrees, if that, and it looks to me like you’ll have a least a half mile to cross.”
“Hey, this is my job, remember?”
It
was
risky. The water temperature would begin to affect him immediately. Swimming underwater meant going for several respiration cycles at a time without fresh oxygen. The combination wasn’t a good one. It wasn’t unheard of for a SEAL to suffer shallow water blackout and drown even under better circumstances.
But Javier had more experience than most SEALs, and he had powerful motivation. If he failed, the woman he loved would die.
“I’m telling you to wait, Corbray. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
But Javier’s gut told him Laura didn’t have ten minutes.
He disconnected the call, stripped off his coat, clipped the AR to a harness on the Kevlar—and set off for the concrete pipe at a run.
* * *
EGO.
That was the key to buying herself time. Kimball was a true narcissist. Some part of him wanted her to appreciate how hard he’d worked to kill her. Some part of him wanted her to be impressed.
Laura fought to hold herself together, fought to see beyond the loathing in Kimball’s eyes, the joy he so obviously felt to know she’d suffered. “I’m supposed to believe you were behind my abduction just because you say so?”
He told her the story. How he’d bolted in the middle of the ambush that had pinned down his platoon in Fallujah, angry and humiliated by the sentence he’d received. How he’d gone into hiding, made his way to Pakistan. How he’d seen her one night as she entered her hotel. And how the idea had come to him.
“I realized I could get back at you. I was going to be a Green Beret, and you ruined that for me.”
“You ruined that for yourself. You broke U.S. law, shamed your uniform, stole from innocent people. I did my job. I expose the truth.”
He struck her again, the blow leaving her dizzy.
“You should have sided with us—with your own countrymen. Instead, you stood up for the enemy.
You
are the traitor.”
Don’t argue with him.
She didn’t want him angry. She wanted him to talk about himself.
She struggled to clear her head. “H-how did you know where I was going to be?”
“I followed you every day for weeks. I ate in the same dining room, stayed in the same hotel, drank at the same bar. You even said hello to me once when you bumped into me getting out of the elevator. But finding out your plans—that was the real trick.” He leaned down and grinned at her. “I did a favor for someone, who hacked your phone and turned it into a roving bug.”
Laura had heard about that kind of technology, knew federal law enforcement sometimes used it, transforming the mic in someone’s cell phone into a listening device that operated even when the phone was off. “You heard every word we said.”
He stood upright, still smiling. “I picked the time and place and made contact with some of Al-Nassar’s men. They took it from there.”
So Derek Tower had been right—in a manner of speaking. She had been betrayed to Al-Nassar by a fellow American who’d gotten her location straight from her. But it hadn’t been her fault. Not that there was any comfort in knowing that now.
“I thought you were dead. He’d claimed he’d killed you.” Kimball reached out and slid his fingers into Laura’s hair. “But I guess he wanted to keep you for himself.”
Laura shuddered. “It must have been a shock to find out I was alive.”
“You were alive, but you weren’t the same, were you, Laura?” He knelt down beside her, speaking in that same sad, sympathetic voice he’d used in her phone interviews with him. “I enjoyed hearing about all the things that had happened to you. Then you came back to the U.S. and started living a normal life again, while I was working my ass off doing black ops for hire.”
“You decided you had to kill me.”
“Exactly. Took me a while to get here. I had to sneak into the country, get a fake ID, pull some cash together. Sean remembered me, helped me out, gave me a place to stay, a place to work.”
“He helped you.”
Kimball laughed and got to his feet. “He barely knows his own name. I drove him from place to place, gave him money, sent him in to buy supplies for me. He thought we were making fireworks. We talked about old times, but he couldn’t remember much. I got him some replica firearms that fire pellets. We played with those indoors. Then his damned social worker came around, and I knew I had to get rid of him.”
Understanding hit Laura, making her sick. “You set him up. You sent him after Javier knowing Javier would kill him.”
“I painted the tip of my handgun orange, loaded it. I knew your SEAL boyfriend went for a run every morning. I watched, and when he set out, I went after Sean. We meant to catch him on his way back but he went a different route. I followed, dropped Sean off at the store. Sean thought we were still playing. ‘See him?’ I said. ‘He wants to play, too. Just walk up to him and shoot. Score one for the team.’”
Laura felt sick for both Edwards and Javier. “You
used
Javier to kill Sean.”
“Your boyfriend is good at killing. He got rid of a loose end for me. Oh, don’t look so horrified. That’s what a good Special Forces operative does. We work behind enemy lines, move in the shadows, turn one person against another, kill when we must. I would have made a great Green Beret.”
She glared up at him, her stomach churning, rage, disgust, and terror coiled so tightly inside her she couldn’t tell them apart. “A
real
Green Beret wouldn’t screw up making ANFO. Or murder an innocent teenager to hide his own tracks. Or use a wounded friend the way you used Edwards. You’re nothing but a loser, a psychopath who blames everyone around him for his own mistakes!”
This time when he struck her, she saw stars.
CHAPTER
30
JAVIER SURFACED, EXHALED, inhaled, his lungs aching, his body chilled to the core. He had about sixty meters to go. He took another breath, then propelled himself beneath the surface once more, willing his body to relax, his mind focused on swimming swiftly and smoothly through the murky water. He couldn’t be sure how deep the lake would be on the other side. It wasn’t much deeper than five feet here. At some point it would be too shallow to conceal him. He would have to be ready to bring it from that point on.
He’d gone maybe thirty or forty seconds when his fingers and feet brushed the bottom. Carefully holding his position, he lifted his head above the water and took a breath, watching, listening. He heard a man’s voice coming from the house slightly to his left. The structure had plywood walls on the ground-floor level, but no windows and no doors, just openings that stared out at the lake. If he’d had some overhead support, he might have known where Kimball had her, what kind of weapons Kimball had, which direction Kimball was facing, but he didn’t. He’d have to take his chances and be prepared for anything.
Realizing there was no background noise to mask the sounds of his movements, he army-crawled quickly and quietly to the shore, dragging his body through cold mud, his bones aching, his muscles stiff and sluggish. The water had been colder than he’d expected it would be. But then water was
always
colder than he expected.
A woman’s voice.
“You set your bogus interview to coincide with the explosion.”
Laura.
She was still alive.
Thank God!
“I wanted to hear you die. I listened to you scream when the bomb went off, just as I listened to you scream when Al-Nassar’s men dragged you away.”
¡Me cago en su madre! Motherfucker!
Javier locked down his anger, tried to channel it toward action. He unclipped and dewatered the AR-15, his gaze fixed on the house as he watched for movement, for shadows, for any sign of Kimball’s location. It sounded to him like they were just on the other side of this thin plywood wall—which meant they would hear him unless he was very careful.
“You managed to startle me, but that was all. You killed that poor kid for nothing. Know what that makes you? A murderer and a coward.” Laura was doing her best to act calm, but Javier could hear the fear in her voice.
There came the sharp sound of a hand hitting flesh.
Hang on,
bella
. You’re not alone.
Javier set the AR carefully aside, then soundlessly drew the Walther PPS from his holster and made certain it, too, was drained.
“You’d better watch it, bitch. I have your life in my hands!” Kimball was shouting now. “Why do you even give a shit about that kid?”
Javier took advantage of the increased noise level to click off the safety on the AR-15 and move, positioning himself against the wooden wall near what would have been a doorway. His response times were slower than they should be, and he knew he must be hypothermic. He’d have to plan for that.
“The whole country is going to care about him when the truth comes out. How do you sleep at night? Do you see the faces of the people you’ve murdered?” She was trying to keep him off guard, trying to keep him talking.
“You think you’re so brave, but I know you’re not. I’m going to prove it to you. See what I brought?” The bastard laughed. “I knew you’d appreciate it. You’re afraid now, aren’t you?”
“Y-yes, I’m afraid. I’m afraid you’ve made a very big mistake.”
“The only reason you’re still alive is that I can’t decide how I want to kill you. Once you’re actually dead, I won’t get the chance to do this again. I want to do it right, to enjoy it. I can either listen to you scream while you burn to death, or I can watch your face as I cut off your head. But I can’t do both.”
“How frustrating that must be for you.”
Javier closed his mind to what he was hearing and crept into position, peering around the corner, taking in the scene at a glance.
Kimball stood with his back toward Javier, a large serrated bread knife in his hand. Laura was bound by duct tape to a chair in front of him. A half dozen gas canisters were placed strategically around the room, two of them flanking Laura.
Did they contain fuel or ANFO? Were they rigged to blow?
Javier had no idea. He drew back, working the plan through in his mind, visualizing each step of it, taking his own sluggishness into account.
“I know you were terrified by the thought of Al-Nassar cutting your head off like this. But isn’t it better to die this way than to burn to death? What do you think?”
“I-I think . . . you should run . . . while you can.”
Listen to her,
pendejo
.
Javier made his decision, his muscles tensing.
It was time to bring the pain.
* * *
LAURA COULDN’T STOP herself from shaking, fear stealing her breath, making her pulse race. She’d run out of time, and she knew it.
They weren’t going to find her. Javier probably knew she was missing by now. One way or another he would find her car—either by tracing her cell phone or by getting the address from Joaquin. He’d call Zach, Marc, Julian—but they would be too late. They would only learn what had happened to her after firefighters reported discovering a charred body in the ashes of this house and the ME identified her remains.
A wave of despair washed through her, the hope that had held her together unraveling thread by thread.
Kimball moved to stand behind her. He fisted his hands in her hair and forced her head back, pressing the rough edge of the blade against her trachea and carotid artery. “If I cut your throat here, you’ll suffocate, bleed out, die fast. But if I start here,” he said, tilting her head to the side, moving the blade to press against the muscles at the back of her neck, “you might last a little longer.”
Laura’s mind raced as Kimball tormented her with his words, thoughts chasing one another through her mind.
