A SMALL SPOT of light was all Robert could see when he opened his eyes. He was enveloped in near-complete darkness and confusion.
He took several deep breaths to clear his head. Some kind of sedative was pulling him down, back towards sleep. To fight it, he rotated his shoulders, stretched his legs as much as possible, and flexed his back muscles. He tried to move his arms, too, but they were bound behind his back.
He would need to figure out as much as he could about where he was, then formulate a plan for getting the hell out.
His left side felt cold, chilled by the floor. It felt he was lying on the floor of some building…no, some kind of vehicle. Robert felt movement, so maybe a truck.
He took several deep breaths and listened for a moment. Not a truck, a boat of some kind. He heard the deep hum of motors and the sound of water sloshing against the sides of the craft.
With a struggle, Robert sat up. His legs were free, but numb from having not moved for a long time. How long? Could it have been more than an hour? More than a day?
As his head cleared, he remembered the last seconds before he blacked out, and his mind rewound the events leading up to the blackout: pulling up to his house, driving on Sunset Road, buying a shirt at the GAP store in the mall…and a black SUV in his rear-view mirror.
Have I been abducted?
Instinctively he knew the SUV had something to do with this, and that the SUV has something to do with the barge he saw on the waterway.
Loons, my ass.
Soon, Robert could see the faint outline of a door to the room, but he couldn’t tell how much space he had around him, or if there were things on the floor nearby that would trip him. He reasoned that whoever had abducted him would soon come to ask questions, so he fought the needles of pain shooting through his legs and slid himself across the floor towards the spot of light coming under the door.
Once there, he rolled onto his knees and stood up. Leaning against the wall and working out his sore muscles, he thought about what to do next and how he might escape.
His upper chest was sore—they tased me, he remembered. That’s good, he wouldn’t be feeling the aftereffects for long. His left arm and shoulder hurt, bruised from his fall out of the truck.
And there was something a little sticky on the side of his face. He must have hit something falling to the ground.
Gotta tell Alicia, he thought and focused his concentration on making that happen.
He wasn’t going to be able to fight back when someone came to the room with his arms tied behind him, so he tried to gauge how his captors had him trussed. The binding felt thick, more like a small rope than plastic ties, he decided.
He slid along the wall to measure the size of the room. He made it all around the room, ending back at the door when the door latch jabbed his hip. He remembered taking two steps to the first corner, four steps to the next, another two steps, then two steps before hitting the door knob.
A neat rectangular room, about six feet by eight feet. No other doors, no windows…a closet.
Robert felt around the latch to try to open the door—or at least hook the rope tying his hands on to try to cut it. The latch wouldn’t budge and was too short and rounded to cut the rope.
He extended his foot, sweeping it in an arc to check the floor. Nothing there.
An empty closet.
As he leaned against the wall, voices and footsteps sounded outside the door. The sounds grew louder, then passed. It must be a hallway, and a hallway on a boat always leads to an exit.
Robert listened carefully, waiting for more people and hoping to catch a word or two of the conversations.
The sound of several heavy boots approached without anyone speaking. The boots stopped outside the door and Robert heard keys jangling. He stepped forward and dropped to his knees. A single light overhead turned on, momentarily blinding him just before quick turns of the key and latch opened the door.
Three men stepped inside. Two men locked onto his arms while the third stepped back to watch.
“Alright, Barney Fife, let’s go.”
The two men nearly lifted Robert off the floor, forcing him through the door and down a hallway lined by other doors that looked like the one he’d just been forced through. The hallway ended at a “T” and the men pushed Robert to the right before pushing him through a door that led to a larger room.
He glimpsed distant lights through a door window on the shorter hallway, telling him only that it was night. He didn’t get a good enough look to tell how far the lights might be, but it was clear he was somewhere offshore.
The two men dragging Robert along forced him into the single chair set up in the room, then stepped away and stood glowering at him. Robert looked the third man, clearly the leader, in the eye.
“Before we go any further, I want to check something. You do know I am a White Sands police officer, right?”
The man paused, and for a moment Robert thought he was going to ignore the question.
“Yes, I do.”
“I see.” That was not good. “What do you want?”
“You’ll know soon enough.” The man slowly stood and walked to a phone mounted on the wall, near the door. He picked up the handset and said something into it.
Robert studied the room. Like the closet he’d been in, this one was empty—or at least it looked like it had been empty until they placed the table and chair in it. The room appeared to have been unused for some time: spots of peeling paint revealed rust underneath and darkened the ceiling and walls; more rust encircled windows covered in aluminum foil along one wall.
“Hey, quick question: when does the buffet open? I’m starved.” He looked around at the men, hoping to see a reaction to his comment, but was met only with their blank stares.
He would have to find a means of escaping. If these men knowingly abducted a police officer, there was little chance of them letting him go. They intended to kill him, Robert knew. Probably as soon as they found out some information they needed from him.
Robert forced himself to stay calm, taking controlled breaths. He kept his own face masked, hoping to keep his captors unaware that he knew where their plans would lead.
The third man walked back to Robert and stood behind him.
“You’re a cool one, aren’t you? Not a feather ruffled.” The voice was harsh, but sounded like it took an effort. Robert thought of a lieutenant he’d met in Iraq named Twitles who was insecure in his command and compensated by speaking loudly to try to impress the hardened men and women in his command. His soldiers called him “Twit” but over time, it became “Twat.” This guy was like that weak lieutenant, Robert decided. Lieutenant Twat.
Lieutenant Twat stepped around to Robert’s right side. In a flash, he slapped Robert’s right ear hard, his flat palm smashing against it. A bright flash of pain jolted Robert. His ear rang and throbbed in pain, and a small trickle of blood began running from his earlobe.
“You ruffled now, motherfucker?”
Robert steadied himself. He had experienced the temporary deafness of explosive devices blasting within feet, and the lingering ringing and pain it left in the ears. This wasn’t as bad as that, but he worried the compression from the slap had ruptured his eardrum.
“What do you want?”
Lieutenant Twat stepped around to face Robert. He seemed ready to say something when the door behind him opened and closed suddenly and loudly, and rapid steps approached.
“The fuck happen to him? Why is he bleeding?”
A new voice—this must be the person in charge of this group.
“I, uh, thought he was still drowsy, so I woke him up.”
Asshole.
“Get out of here. You…” Robert noticed one of the two guards who had carried him the room stiffen. “Get out, too. Go check the cargo hold.”
“Yes, sir.” The guard exited the room, following behind Lieutenant Twat.
“Let’s try this again,” the new man said in a deep, rumbling baritone voice. He stayed behind Robert and didn’t step into view. “How does that sound, Patrolman Gulliford?”
Robert knew this routine. They aimed to ply him by alternating between a good guy and a bad guy. He thought about what this all added up to—their quasi-military demeanor combined with their apparent training in vehicle chases and abduction made him conclude they had some experience.
But there was something undisciplined in their actions, something not quite right. Probably not the retired pros, instead these seemed like guys who weren’t able to get into the military for one reason or another, but still yearned for a military experience and training.
New-Man-in-Charge was pacing.
“Do you know where you are, Patrolman Gulliford?”
“Somewhere offshore.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“I’m guessing we’re on an accommodation barge I saw on the Intracoastal Waterway make an unscheduled stop in White Sands a couple of nights ago.”
The pacing stopped. “Good guessing. You can understand why…”
New Man sighed heavily. “Who did you tell about what you saw and heard?”
Robert snorted. “I’m a cop. I wrote a detailed report at the end of my shift, with a description of the barge, the location of the stop, the time you stopped, the sounds I heard. Everything. That’s what police do…we check out things and write reports.”
“Did you go back to where the barge stopped?”
Robert wasn’t going to tell New Man about the scrap of cloth he found or the footprints there. “No.”
The other guard stepped towards Robert and punched him hard on the jaw. Robert spit blood, then turned and looked at the guard to study his face.
“You’re lying,” New Man said. “It won’t help you to lie to me.”
“Won’t help? Are you telling me I won’t get room service tonight?”
New Man finally stepped around to face Robert. Robert looked in the man’s eyes and knew this one was different—this guy was not an inept soldier-wanna-be. He had hard eyes belying years of combat.
And he was huge. His neatly-shaved head was like a tan bowling ball; the eyes were small, dark holes.
“Before we’re done, we will know how much you told your chief and how far we have to go.”
New Man stepped back out of view. He told the guard to wait and then left the room.
Robert waited for half a minute, then began moving his arms up and down behind his back, as if sawing against the chair frame. The guard noticed and stepped behind him to check.
When the guard bent closer to look, Robert flung his head back as hard as he could, knocking the other man down. He quickly bent forward and sprung himself up and back, holding onto the chair behind him. He landed the chair and his full weight on the guard’s head.
The guard lay still—he was unconscious or worse. Robert spun around to check for a knife or something sharp on the guard’s belt. Spotting a knife there, he turned and grabbed at the sheath holding the blade.
The knife fell and Robert searched for a few moments before finding it again. It was difficult, but Robert pulled the knife into his hands and slipped the tip of the blade beneath the rope.
As he pushed the knife into the rope, it stretched and tightened on his wrists. Robert could only move the knife an inch or less with each thrust, but he could feel the rope giving way.
Confident he’d soon have the rope cut, he worked his way to his feet and scrambled to the door. The knife cut through the last strands of the rope. His freed arms dropped weakly at his side and the knife fell to the floor.
Just then, the door opened, and Lieutenant Twat stepped in. He was just through the doorway when Robert raised his left leg and kicked him under the jaw with the ankle boot. The hard plastic crunched against the man’s chin, sending him back against the hallway wall, where he fell in an unconscious heap.
Robert picked up the knife and stepped over the still man.
“I am ruffled now, jackass.” He lifted the boot to kick the unconscious man, but stopped himself.
Instead, he turned and ran to the door leading out of the boat, pushed the door open and jumped off the deck into the water below.
Without a thought, he began swimming as fast as he could towards the lights visible on what he guessed was the shore. Robert kicked as hard as he could, but wasn’t moving––the ankle boot was keeping him from fully using his foot to swim so he stopped and raised his foot out of the water to yank on the Velcro straps holding the brace on his foot.
His ankle resisted when he turned to swim again, sending painful reminders of the damaged tissue. He ignored the pain and pushed himself ahead as quickly as he could.
The barge continued moving upstream for a few minutes before Robert heard the motors shut down. After a moment of rumbling, the vessel changed direction. Robert was swimming steadily but allowed himself to look back. When he did, he saw the lights of two drilling rigs past the barge—he was in Mobile Bay.
That was good, but he also noticed something else: the boat was the barge he’d spotted two nights ago.
And it was now turning to come back towards him.