Sting (3 page)

“And Jordie Bennett went missing at the same time.” Grasping the gravity of the situation, Morrow removed his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “We didn't obtain her cell phone number until about ten minutes ago. This is Friday night. Everybody's out. But we finally reached her office manager. She gave us Ms. Bennett's number and we've been calling it.”

“Let me guess,” Hick said. “Nothing.”

“Not even voice mail.”

“Our unsub would be smart enough to take the battery out so it couldn't be tracked,” Joe said. “Did you find a phone on Mickey?”

“Negative,” Morrow said.

“No doubt he lifted that, too.” Joe put his hands on his hips and swore softly. “This unidentified companion of Mickey's is beginning to worry me.”

T
he otherwise innocuous sound had the impact of a gunshot. Jordie froze.

When the first click was followed immediately by another, she realized what they signified.

From the driver's seat, he had flipped a switch that released the child safety lock on the backseat door, then flipped it again to relock it, and, by doing so, mocked her futile attempt to get the door open.

About an hour earlier, she had been roused from unconsciousness by a dull ache on the side of her head. A self-preservation instinct had cautioned her not to let on that she'd come awake. Up till now, she'd thought she'd played possum well enough to fool him into believing that she was still out. Apparently she hadn't been as convincing as she'd thought.

She was the fool, not he.

After waking up and assessing her situation as best she could without opening her eyes, she'd determined that she was lying on the backseat of a traveling vehicle with her hands and feet bound.

Moving incrementally and as silently as possible, she'd discovered that if she extended her legs just so, she could reach the backseat door with her bare feet. With increasing frustration and muscle strain, she had been covertly trying to lift the lever with her toes, all the while thinking that her abductor was oblivious.

Knowing now that he was on to her, and more than likely had been all along, despair, fear, and anger coalesced into a moan.

After coming to, and as soon as some of the residual muzziness had cleared from her head, she'd realized that this wasn't her car. Her cheek was resting on cloth upholstery. The familiar texture and smell of her car's leather seats would have provided her with a small measure of security, but, as it was, this car was as unknown to her as the driver, their whereabouts, and their destination.

No longer needing to pretend to be unconscious, she opened her eyes and blinked them into focus. She had only the dashboard's glow for illumination. No city lights shone through the backseat window. There were no lighted signposts or overpasses indicating that they were on a major highway, no headlight beams coming from the opposite direction. She could see nothing beyond the window glass except black sky and a sprinkling of stars.

Which was as good a view as any to let her try and block the mental images of the overweight man aiming a pistol at her forehead, then of his facial features disintegrating, his hard fall to the ground, his blood spreading toward her feet as rapidly and darkly as spilled ink.

She remembered staring into a pistol at point-blank range and hearing the second man say,
My half just doubled
.

Upon waking, her first thought had been amazement that she was still alive.

Rather than shoot her, the tall one must have knocked her unconscious, perhaps with the sound suppressor on his pistol, and abducted her from the scene of the brutal murder that she had witnessed him commit. Leaving her now to wonder why he hadn't also killed her. Wouldn't that have been more practical and expedient than kidnapping? So why had he kept her alive?

Speculation on his motives brought on a surge of panic and, because stealth was no longer necessary, she began struggling to free her hands. They were restrained at the small of her back by something thin but incredibly strong that bit into her flesh. Her efforts to get loose grew more frantic.

“Cut it out.”

The unexpected command from the driver's seat startled her, and for a moment she lay perfectly still. Then she said, “Go to the devil,” and renewed her tug-of-war to work her hands free.

But after five minutes, she was bathed in sweat, which the car's AC rapidly turned to ice water. She conceded that no matter how strenuously she worked at it, the struggle was futile and would result only in exhaustion and raw, bleeding wrists. She forced herself to lie back on the seat, took several deep breaths through her mouth, and willfully tamped down her panic.

Thinking more calmly, she tried to isolate a single advantage that she could exploit, and soon realized that whatever was binding her feet was softer and more giving than the hand restraint.

Lifting her head, she looked down the length of her body and was forced to swallow rising gorge when she saw the dark spatters on her white top.

Dried blood. The dead man's blood.

She shuddered but didn't allow herself to think about how he'd died. If she did, fear of meeting the same fate would paralyze her mentally and physically.

Steeling herself to look beyond the grotesque stains on her clothing, she saw that a camouflage print bandana had been knotted around her ankles. She began grinding her feet together, trying to stretch the cotton cloth and create enough give in it so that she could possibly free her feet, and then—

Then what?

The backseat door would still be locked and inescapable.

She could kick her abductor in the back of his head. A well-placed, surprise kick might stun him for a precious few seconds.

And cause him to crash the car.

Or provoke him into killing her sooner rather than later.

Perhaps she could distract him somehow. If she made a noise, maybe pretended to choke, or did something that would force him to stop the car, and then if he opened the backseat door to check on her, she might stand a chance of getting out and running if—

There were a dismal number of
if
s, and none of the options held much promise of success. But, dammit, she wouldn't just lie here to be dealt with when he felt like it. She wouldn't make it as easy for him as his previous victim had. She wouldn't be dispatched without giving him a fight.

However, she also knew on an instinctual level that this man wouldn't be easily tricked or overtaken physically.

When she'd left the bar, the parking lot had been dark and, she'd thought, deserted. Rushing footsteps over gravel had alerted her to the approach of her two attackers. In the nanosecond between her spinning around and the pistol being fired, she'd recognized both from having seen them in the bar just a few minutes before: the heavyset man who hadn't made any kind of memorable impression on her; and
him
, who had.

As he'd walked past where she sat at the bar, they'd made brief eye contact. She remembered his above-average height, an unhurried but somehow predatory stride, a severe face, and eyes sharp enough to cut diamonds. She'd had a visceral reaction to that incisive gaze and had quickly looked away from it.

She should have heeded that intuitive warning of danger, but at the time, she had mistaken it for another type of reaction, another kind of danger.

Any sudden movement of her head caused the throbbing to sharpen, so now she gingerly angled it in order to get a clearer view of him. Above the driver's-seat headrest, she could see a swirl of hair on the crown of his head. She remembered it being long and untidy. It looked darker in the blue ambient light of the dashboard than it had beneath the amber, smoke-fogged fixtures inside the bar.

Visible through the space between the two front seats was a portion of his right arm, sleeved in blue chambray. She recalled that the shirt had pearl snap buttons. The cuffs were rolled back almost to his elbows.

He hadn't impressed her as being particularly muscle-bound, not a body builder type, but evidently he was strong enough to carry her to his car, because she certainly hadn't made it here under her own power.

Reluctantly, she admitted how difficult it would be, if not impossible, for her to physically overcome him.

No, in order to survive, she must somehow outwit him, and in order to do that, she couldn't operate in a vacuum. She needed information, and he was her only resource.

She cleared her throat. “Congratulations. You have me. Who are you?”

For all the response she got, he could have been deaf.

“Do you have a destination in mind, or are we just putting distance between us and the scene of the crime?”

He remained silent, registering no reaction whatsoever.

“How long was I out?”

Nothing.

“Hours?”

When he still didn't respond, she said, “Actually, it doesn't matter. The police will have quickly deduced that you murdered that man in cold blood and kidnapped me.”

Stone silence.

“By now, they'll have launched a full-scale search. Kidnapping is a federal crime. So not only the local authorities but the FBI will be in on the manhunt, and they won't give up until they find me. And they
will
.”

“I give them three days.”

Since he hadn't responded to anything else, she was momentarily taken aback to hear his voice again and even more alarmed when she realized that he had gradually braked. As the car slowed, he steered it into a right turn.

Once they were off the highway, the view through the car window changed. Their headlights danced crazily across overlapping treetops that obscured the view of open sky. For fifty yards or so, rocks knocked against the undercarriage as the car jounced over deep potholes.

“Three days minimum,” he said. “By that time, I'll be back in Mexico, sipping cerveza and shopping fishing boats.”

“What about me?”

He stopped the car, shifted it into Park, and turned to address her through the space between the seats. “You won't be going to Mexico.”

That blunt declaration caused another surge of gorge in her throat.

He cut the engine, switched off the headlights, and got out. The dome light came on when he opened the driver's door. Jordie blinked against the sudden glare that shone directly down on her.

He opened the back door and ducked his head inside. Again she felt the bite of his razor-sharp eyes. The overhead light cast harsh shadows on his face, emphasizing prominent cheekbones and unsmiling lips.

Without saying anything, he closed his fingers around her left ankle. At his touch, she yanked her knees up, freeing her feet from his grasp, and then tried to drive them into his face. He jerked his head back just in time. Her heel barely clipped his chin.

She tried again. He stayed just out of reach. On her third attempt, his hand shot out, grabbed her ankle, and roughly pulled her feet against his chest, where he kept them in place with one hand while, with the other, he picked one of her sandals from off the floorboard and worked her foot into it. He secured the tiny buckle with the same detachment with which he'd fired a pistol into the back of his cohort's head.

“You're going to kill me, aren't you?”

That cold gaze lifted to meet hers. “Not inside the car.”

When both her sandals were on, he backed out of the door and shut it. He went around to the other side and opened the door behind her head. Reaching in, he cupped her underarms and hauled her out.

As soon as he set her on her feet, he turned her to face him. “Don't try any more dumb stunts like trying to kick me.”

“Go to hell.”

As though she hadn't spoken, he said, “I'm curious. If you
had
gotten that door open with your toes, what were you going to do? Try to worm your way through it without me noticing? Was that your plan?”

She didn't honor him with a reply, only glared up at him.

“And say you had cleared the door, what then, Jordie?”

Her knees nearly buckled when he spoke her name.

Of course, if he had taken her purse when he kidnapped her, he would have read her name on her driver's license and credit card. Right?

Wrong. Because both bore her full legal name, not the familiar nickname Jordie.

He knew her.

Most despairing, however, was that it came as no real surprise that he'd called her by name. When she saw the grim pair striding toward her on the parking lot, she'd realized instantly what their purpose was and who had sent them.

The only thing she didn't know was
Why now?

“You didn't think it through too well,” he said, continuing on that thread. “We were going over seventy miles an hour. If you'd opened that door, it would have sounded like a wind tunnel.

“And say you had managed to wiggle out, you'd have landed on the pavement like those bugs on the windshield.” He gestured toward it. “
Splat
! I'd have had to stop and scrape you up, which would have been time-consuming and messy as hell.”

“Why bother to stop and scrape me up?”

He replied without a blink. “Because in order to collect my money I have to produce your body.”

W
ell, she'd asked, hadn't she?

And he'd told her, answering the question without hesitation or inflection, without even a taunting lilt. More frightening than a voice scratchy with menace was one entirely devoid of emotion. It was characteristic of the cold-blooded way he'd shot the other man.

She swallowed with difficulty. “Who was he? The man you killed.”

“Mickey Bolden. Killer for hire.”

“He was hired to kill me?”

He just looked at her.

“Now you'll do it alone.”

His expression didn't change.

“Who hired you?”

As expected, he didn't answer. Not that he needed to.

She said, “I suppose I should be flattered that I merited two hit men. Did you and Mr. Bolden often work in tandem?”

“First time.”

She looked at him with surprise.

He gave a shrug of complete indifference. “His retirement was overdue. He'd gotten comfortable in the job. Sloppy. For instance, when you walked into the bar, he told me to relax and go with the flow. Said your showing up there tonight was just a coincidence.”

She saw the bait for what it was and said nothing.

“But see, I had a problem with that coincidence theory.”

She didn't ask the nature of his problem, but he told her anyway.

“For one thing, that joint out in the sticks isn't exactly your kind of place.”

His tone was a shade judgmental, reverse snobbery, which put her on the defensive. “You have no idea what my kind of place is.”

“Well, there you're wrong, Jordie. I did my homework. I know a lot about you.”

The probable truth of that statement disturbed her greatly, but she held her silence and her ground, keeping her gaze as direct on him as his was on her.

“Even without doing the homework, I'd know that a woman like you doesn't socialize in bars that cater to trailer trash. I also had a problem with your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? Jackson?”

“Last name Terrell. Mickey told me all about him. Said he dropped you like a hot potato at the first sign of trouble. Cut and run like a regular heel. That true?”

She remained stubbornly silent.

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “I wasn't talking about him anyway. I was talking about the guy who joined you at the bar tonight.”

She sputtered a short laugh of disbelief. “That jerk? He was a total stranger.”

“He was all over you.”

“Not by invitation.”

He tilted his head. “You two didn't set a time and place to meet?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it, clammed up, and didn't tell him anything.

He raised an eyebrow. “You were about to say?”

“I was about to say
fuck you
.” She didn't stop there, either, but gushed a stream of invectives. He withstood the tirade without blinking, but when she began repeating herself, he pressed his index finger lengthwise against the center of her lips.

“Stop it.”

She stopped, as she had stopped struggling against the hand restraint when he'd told her to, more because of the chilling voice in which he'd issued the order than because of the order itself.

Her lips held his attention for several moments. Perhaps he was watching them turn white from the pressure he applied. Then gradually he withdrew his finger and his eyes moved back up to hers. “You've got some mouth on you, Jordie Bennett.”

Again, it was the manner in which he spoke as much as the words themselves that caused a shakeup of her insides. She didn't think he was referring strictly to her language, and the implication of that paralyzed her. By the time she remembered to breathe again, he was crouched in front of her, loosening the bandana from around her ankles.

The instant the knots came undone, she was off like a shot.

She got all of three feet from him before he hooked his arm around her waist and jerked her to a sudden halt, then spun her around to face him. He was furious. “Don't think you can outsmart, outtalk, or outrun me. You can't. Try and you'll only make yourself miserable.”

“You're worried about my
comfort
?”

“I'm not being paid to torture you.”

“Just to kill me.”

“That's the job description.”

She gulped in a harsh breath. “Then why didn't you do it on the parking lot when you shot your buddy? Why drag it out, why this…this…
torture
? Why am I still alive?”

He lowered his face closer to hers. “Because your skin is worth a hell of a lot more than Mickey settled for, and I haven't negotiated my deal yet.”

Like everything he said, his words were candid and to the point. At least now she understood why she was still breathing.

He gave her a little shove that put space between them. “Besides, I gotta take a leak.”

He grasped her elbow and propelled her slightly ahead of him along the uneven gravel track which was pressed upon from both sides by dense woods. Beyond the dim glow provided by the car's interior light, the surrounding darkness was impenetrable. She picked up the stench of stagnant water, sensed life-forms watching them from nests overhead and from hidey-holes in the underbrush, and felt the ghostly brush of insect wings against her arms and face.

Paralyzing fear encroached on her again, as did the teeming darkness. The darkness she could do nothing about, but she must keep the self-defeating fear at bay. Information, she reminded herself. Without information, she had no hope of escape.

“Your half doubled when you killed your partner.”

“If you remember me saying that, I must not have hit you very hard.”

“With your pistol?”

“It was a tap.”

“Hard enough to knock me out.”

“Your eyes rolled back, your knees gave out. I caught you on my shoulder as you slumped forward. Had to juggle you so I could get your and Mickey's phones. But I managed to come away with both of them.”

While she tucked away the knowledge that he had her phone, he was saying, “I carried you to the car.”

“Where you tied me up.”

“No, I drove five or six miles before stopping to do that. When I stretched you out in the backseat, you groaned a couple of times but didn't wake up. I used a bottle of water to wash off your face. That didn't bring you around, either.”

She glanced down at her stained top. Her face would have been similarly spattered with… She didn't want to think about the matter he had washed off her. Nor did she want to think about him washing her, touching her, handling her.

They were getting farther away from the car and the weak circle of light it provided. The ground had turned spongy. The heels of her sandals sank into it with each step, making walking difficult. Whenever she stumbled, his hand tightened around her elbow to help her regain her balance, but he never let go and continued to prod her forward.

Perhaps he'd only said that about negotiating a deal to put her at ease, to get her to cooperate, go peacefully, so he wouldn't have to exert himself overly much to finish the job.

Keeping her voice as steady as possible, she said, “You'll be caught, you know.”

“Not anytime soon. They don't know what I'm driving.”

“They'll get a description of the car from someone who saw you leave the parking lot.”

“No one did. I made sure of it. I went a full mile before turning on the headlights, and, anyway, I didn't meet a single other vehicle on that backwoods road. When I stopped to tie you up, I also changed the license plates. That precaution was well worth the few minutes it took. I switched them from Louisiana to, uh, Arkansas, I think. Or was it Tennessee?”

“If you had states to choose from, you went prepared.”

“Credit goes to Mickey. Before we set out for Tobias he stashed a collection of extra plates in the trunk.”

“That doesn't sound like someone who'd grown sloppy.”

“His ego was more bloated than his belly. Thought he couldn't be caught. That kind of arrogance is a recipe for disaster. He drew attention to himself, made himself memorable. If you're a hit man, those are bad habits.”

“Won't executing him draw attention to you and make you memorable?”

He actually chuckled. “No doubt.”

“That doesn't concern you?”

“No.”

“It should.”

“It doesn't. Here.” Suddenly, he steered her off the uneven track and into tall weeds.

Her heart clutched. Despite her vituperative outburst of only a few minutes earlier, she was now in the grip of mortal fear and couldn't hold back a whimper. Was he raising his pistol? Would she hear the click when he pulled the trigger? Would she experience pain? Or just…nothingness?
Please God.

She would appeal to God for her life. She would
not
beg
him
to spare it.

When they drew even with a stout hardwood, he began unbuttoning the fly of his jeans with his free hand. She looked up at him, unable to conceal her dismay.

“What?” This time, there was a taunting quality to his voice which matched the tilt of one corner of his mouth. “I told you I had to take a leak. Wha'd you think?”

“You know what I thought, you son of a bitch.”

Her anger seemed to amuse him. He made a derisive sound and turned slightly toward the tree. “Unless you want an eyeful, better close them.”

She did and didn't reopen them until he said, “Okay, it's safe to look.”

He had buttoned up but was now digging into the front pocket of his jeans. Her heart tripped when he withdrew a knife. It was small, but a flick of his fingers released a wicked-looking blade. “Turn around.” She hesitated, causing him to frown. “You want your hands freed or not?”

She was still mistrustful, but the promise of having her hands loosed was too enticing to resist. She turned her back to him and wanted to weep with relief when the knife snapped through the plastic grip. As she came around, she shook feeling back into her hands. “Thank you.”

He slid the knife into his pocket. “You can go behind the tree.”

Realizing now why he had unbound her hands, she shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

“Scared of snakes? Bugs? Or are you just bashful? Too ladylike? What?”

“I'm not going.”

“I know you have to. You drank that wine.”

In truth, she'd been uncomfortable since she'd regained consciousness.

He waited for a ten count, and when she still hadn't moved, he said, “I don't want you peeing in the car.”

“I won't.”

“That's right, you won't. Because you're doing it here, and you're doing it now.”

She shook her head again.

“We don't have time for this, Jordie, so here's the deal. You can step behind the tree or stay here, and I'll watch. You can undo your jeans and pull them down, or I'll do the honors. Doesn't matter to me either way, although choice number two has its appeal, because then I'll know something I've been wondering since I saw you atop that bar stool, and that's whether or not there's anything under that denim except you. I could find out anyway, but my mama raised me better, so I'll let you decide, and you've got exactly two seconds to make up your mind. One.”

The indignity of relieving herself was preferable to wetting herself. And if he was worried about her doing it in the car, he didn't plan on killing her right away.

“Two.”

The longer she stayed alive, the greater her chances of escaping or being rescued.

His knuckles pressed against her navel as he slid his fingers into her waistband to undo the top button.

She gasped. “All right.”

He withdrew his hand with less expedience than he'd shoved it in. She turned around and took a couple of steps away from him before he caught the hem of her shirttail and pulled her back.

“I trust you have better sense than to try and run,” he said. “Look around. What's out there? Total darkness, swamp, marsh, sword grass, gators, razorbacks, wild dogs, panthers, water mocassins, insects, all sorts of critters that bite and suck blood.”

She yanked her shirttail free. “I might stand a chance of surviving all that. Do I have any chance of surviving
you
?”

He looked down at her, his eyes uncompromising, not a glimmer of warmth or compassion, nothing that gave her hope. After several seconds, he hitched his chin toward the other side of the tree. “Hurry up.”

For all the reasons he'd cited, she realized the foolhardiness of trying to escape. If she managed to outrun him long enough to reach the main road, he could easily chase her down in the car before someone else came along. If she eluded him in the darkness of this swamp, without water, direction, or any means of protecting herself, she had little chance of surviving before she could find help or help could find her.

With haste and as little thought as possible, she did what was necessary. When she came out from behind the tree, he clasped her wrist and slipped another plastic cuff around it. “Please,” she whispered.

For several seconds, he stared at the ugly red marks the restraint had left on her skin, then looked into her eyes. “Tell me about the boyfriend.”

“Oh, for godsake!”

“He have a name?”

“I'm sure he does, but I don't know it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Save the cute and sassy for somebody who'll appreciate them. Doesn't cut it with me. Now, I'll ask you again,
what's his name
?”

“I don't know. I swear. If he told me, I don't remember.”

“Why were you meeting him there tonight?”

“I wasn't!” With defiance, she returned his doubtful stare, but she was the first to relent. She lowered her gaze and addressed one of the pearl snaps on his shirt, saying quietly, “I've told you the truth. He was a stranger who came over and offered to buy me a drink. I told him no thank you.”