Porter (Dick Dynasty #1) (26 page)

“Have you called the police yet?” Mitch asked in an attempt to calm me.

“I thought about it on my way over here,” Becks said, “but they won’t start looking for her until she’s been gone for at least twenty-four hours. She’s an adult and won’t be considered a missing person until then.”

“What if she doesn’t
have
twenty-four hours, Becks?” Mitch was beginning to fall apart right before my eyes and I needed to do something to rein us all back in.

I needed to give them something to do to keep them occupied.

“Let’s start looking then. Someone should stay here in case she comes home. Maybe she lost her phone. Becks, think you can handle that?”

She nodded her agreement, “Wine will keep me company.”

“Mitch, you start back at the office. Search every square inch of that property and find me
something
to work with. If she’s missing, there’s gotta be a clue as to where she went. People don’t just vanish without a trace.”

“I brought the wine, how come I don’t get to stay at the house? Why do girls always get the easy jobs?”

Becks and I just stared at him until he agreed and stormed out the front door.

“What are you gonna do, Porter?”

Now that the question was there to be answered, I wasn’t really sure.

Unfortunately, I didn’t need to think very hard about it. My phone vibrated in my hand and I nearly dropped it in my haste to read the text that had come through.

It only took two sentences to bring my world crashing down around me:
If you want to see her again, you’ll be here by 7:30. 5873 Pierpont Ave.

I called the number that had sent the text as I ran out the door. It went straight to a generic voicemail.

“This had better be some kind of sick fucking joke you son-of-a-bitch or I’m gonna rip your balls off and stuff them down your throat until you choke on them!” I screamed into the phone.

Mitch had almost closed the door to his car when I flew down the steps and b-lined it for the driveway.

“Porter!” he yelled, “What’s going on?”

“Get inside with Becks!” I yelled back as I climbed behind the wheel and threw my phone across the cab as my Land Rover roared to life and peeled out of my spot in Holly’s driveway.

I had eighteen minutes to get all the way across Los Angeles County.

The world around me blurred as I slammed on the gas pedal and tore through the neighborhood.

Seven minutes.

The stench of old motor oil and sawdust hung so heavily in the air that I had to fight the urge to gag. I knew I was close to the ocean because I could taste the salt, thick and briny on the air. It felt like there was a pillow pressed over my face though, so none of my senses were clear. It was all a massive, awful jumble.

Someone nearby was slurring and groaning. The pitiful sound echoed off distant walls and high ceilings, further disorienting my groggy brain.

Eyes, Holly. You have eyes. Use them.

I focused every iota of concentration I had into opening and focusing my abnormally useless eyes.

I felt them flutter open, my brain told me they were open, but I couldn’t see anything.

Dammit, Holly. You’ve gone blind. You couldn’t have picked a better time to lose the use of your eyes?

My eyes weren’t the only things that had stopped operating properly. My arms and legs didn’t seem to be communicating with my brain either.

Was I in a horrible car accident? Am I a half-deaf, fully blind, quadriplegic woman now? Wait, am I drooling?

A sharp slap across my cheek cleared some of the cotton in my brain and the brilliant bursts of color that erupted in the darkness forced me to question whether or not I had actually gone blind. The cogs in my head began to turn again, informing me that my arms and legs did in fact still have feeling in them. I could feel the rope that fastened me to the chair cutting into my wrists and ankles.

Hearing came next. It became painfully clear to me that the pathetic noises filling every inch of spare space in my head were coming from my own mouth. What’s worse is the fact that I was uncontrollably begging some invisible assailant to let me go.

“You’re not going anywhere,” a quiet voice hissed in my ear. Those four words snaked around the inside of my skull like an electric train on a track. With each pass they grew louder until they became a dull roar that nearly drowned out the sharp click of receding steps.

All at once, my senses came into sharp focus and my brain finally received the messages my extremities were sending it.

I was tied to a chair, blindfolded, covered in bruises, and I had, in fact, been drooling on myself. Waves of nausea rolled through my stomach and sharp jabs of pain tore through my entire body.

I peeled my sandpaper-dry tongue off the roof of my mouth and formed what sounded to me like a complete sentence. In reality, it was a bunch of indistinct slurring with one clear word thrown in for good measure: “Why?”

“
That
,” my captor screeched, “is the million dollar question, isn’t it?”

The clear sound of stilettos clipping back in my direction added a spark of terror to the agony I felt in every inch of my being.

My head was ripped backwards by my hair and before I could scream, something was stuffed in my mouth and tied in place.

“You don’t get to speak to me you fucking slut!” Another slap across the face punctuated the tantrum, effectively driving her message into my brain like a railroad spike.

“In brighter news,” her voice went from psychotic to almost amicable, “he hasn’t shown up yet which proves my point that he really doesn’t care if you cease to exist. Conveniently enough for me, I would
really
like to see you not exist anymore. My only hurdle now is deciding how to make that happen. I think I’ll give him a little more time while I make up my mind. There needs to be some kind of incentive that will both encourage him to show up
and
keep me entertained enough to keep you alive. He needs to see the end of you. For the sake of motivation on all sides of this triangle, I have informed him that for every five minutes he’s late, I will be breaking one of your fingers. If I run out of fingers, you run out of time. Oh look, four minutes have gone by already. Which finger would you like me to start with?”

I tried to plead with her through the cloth gag in my mouth as she ran a single, slender finger down each of mine. It was like a twisted game of This Little Piggy.

“Let’s start small,” she whispered. Her mouth was so close to my ear I could feel her breath as it brushed over my cheek.

She pried the pinky finger of my right hand out of its balled position and held it wrapped in her palm for a moment, “This is probably going to hurt.”

I could hear the cruel smile in her voice as she said the words and I screamed as loud as my hoarse voice would allow. She stood there, my pinky in her hand, silent, until I stopped wailing and broke down into sobs.

Then there was a sudden pressure accompanied by a gut-wrenching crack as she violently shoved my pinky flat against the back of my hand.

I might’ve screamed, but the cotton had returned to my brain. I was sure I had tipped over in my chair from the world listing so sharply to the side, but I never felt myself hit the floor.

I continued to sob as my body worked through the shock and my pinky began to throb.

“For some reason,” she began to pace around my chair, “I thought you’d be stronger than this. I’m disappointed in how little fight there was in you. I expected thrashing and swearing and yelling, but all you’ve done is mumble and whine and beg. You don’t deserve him. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. That’s why he’s not here. He’s probably happy I’m taking you off his hands. I’m not sure what he
thought
he saw in you but clearly, the illusion has been broken. Now Ryder can get back to his normal life—the life that didn’t have you in it. The life he made with me.”

Who the fuck
is
this crazy bitch?

My brain kicked into survival mode and I tried to think of ways to keep her talking without actually engaging her in conversation. The only thing I could think to do without the ability to speak was to struggle. I had to put up the fight she wanted and keep her from getting bored.

I tried to rock the chair side-to-side and back and forth. I pulled against the restraints holding me in place as hard as my exhausted limbs would allow, but nothing budged. In the end, I was only able to violently shake my head and scream against the gag in my mouth.

It wasn’t much, but it seemed to do the trick.

“That’s more like it,” she leered, “still a pretty pitiful display, but at least it’s
something
!” A tiny electronic beep went off somewhere in the room and she clicked her tongue, “Another five minutes down and still no Ryder. Shall we just go in order?”

She pried the ring finger out of my weakly balled fist and without waiting for me to stop fighting, slammed it backward until my fingernail touched my wrist.

The larger bones filled the air with a louder crack than my pinky had and sent an immediate blaze of pain up my entire arm. I screamed until my voice gave out and tried, against my better judgment, to lash out at her with my feet. I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness at some point. However, when the agony of my middle finger being snapped five minutes later wracked my body, I was most definitely awake.

She had my thumb gripped firmly in her hand when a door somewhere in the distance slammed. We both froze. I even held my breath, straining my ears in hopes of hearing something,
anything
, that would tell me my savior had come.

The silence hung in the air between us like darkness, deep and seemingly impenetrable. I didn’t need someone to drop a pin to tell me how quiet it was, I could hear the bitch’s heart pounding in her chest.

The longest ten seconds of my life passed in this manner before the best sound in the world finally rang through the space as clear as a bell.

“Holly?”

It was Porter’s voice.

He had finally come for me.

“Holly?” I yelled into the shadows of the massive warehouse. My voice echoed loudly off the walls as I strained my ears for any kind of response.

I thought I heard a muffled voice, but by the time my own voice had faded it was gone.

“Holly, babe,” I shouted, “If you can hear me, I need you to make some noise! I can’t see anything in here! Tell me where you are, sweetheart!”

The loud hum of industrial lighting filled the air as a single bulb against the far wall blazed to life. I could make out two figures—one was slumped over in a chair, and the other was standing beside the first holding its hand.

My feet pounded against the concrete before I even realized I was moving.

When I was close enough to make them both out clearly, my heart stopped as I skidded to a halt.

Holly was bound to the chair, limp and bleeding from the corner of her mouth and nose. I could see the sickly yellow of a fresh bruise forming beneath the blindfold over her eyes. Duct tape held her wrists, ankles, and shoulders to a heavy steel chair that had been bolted to the floor. Four of the fingers on her right hand were bent at grotesque angles and her thumb was captured in the palm of a finely manicured grip.

“Vanessa?”

“Hello, Ryder.”

My brain struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. I looked back and forth from one woman to the other, trying to make sense of it all.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Vanessa announced happily, “We can finally put an end to all of this madness now! You don’t have to retire anymore! I’ve taken care of it! You can come back to me and we can go back to the way things were!”

Vanessa jerked Holly’s thumb backward and dropped her hand like it was an empty hamburger wrapper. The weak yelp of pain that came out of Holly shot straight through me, shredding my heart like razor blades through paper.

“What the
fuck
Vanessa?”

I moved to help Holly, but before I could take two steps Vanessa had reached behind her and pulled out a handgun. She pointed it at Holly’s head.