There was something calming about sitting in the drive-through line of a Starbucks, Jack thought. You can’t go anywhere. You’re not required to try to move things along—because you can’t. You might as well just sit back and let it take the time it takes. That was so different from how he normally lived his life that he actually found a perverse pleasure in being trapped in the line.
Amidst the enforced serenity, Jack noticed that there was a thin pulse of unease throbbing in his shoulders. Like a lot of cops, he didn’t automatically dismiss hunches or gut feelings.
They’ve panned out too many times to ignore.
Whatever it was, this feeling that something wasn’t right was constantly, unobtrusively in the background. Like the omnipresent hum of an air conditioning unit.
When he paid for his stake-out munchies he glanced at his wristwatch. He’d been gone a little more than two hours. Mia didn’t have to answer her phone—and he fully expected she was still mad at him and wouldn’t—but he’d at least tell her what he was doing.
He pulled into an alcove in the parking lot but before he could text Mia an incoming phone call filled his screen.
Diane Burton calling.
He sighed and pushed Accept. Why not? Today was clearly his day to have every woman he ever cared about hate his guts. Bring it.
“Hey, Diane,” he said into the phone, eyeing his double shot latté next to him.
“Jack, I’m in trouble.”
His hand froze midair as he reached for his drink. She did not sound like herself.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I need you, Jack,” she said, her voice a bare whimper. “I just need you for one night…to talk. I swear to God if you don’t come, I’ll kill myself.” She broke down in sobs.
“Diane, Diane,” Burton said. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I’ll come. Are you home?”
Crap. Was she serious? Should he call 911?
“You’ll come? Oh, Jack, I need you so desperately, I don’t think I can handle it. I swear to God, I don’t…” And the tears again.
“I’m on my way, Diane. Do not, I repeat, do not do anything stupid. Do you hear me?”
A sniffle from the other end of the phone. “Yes, Jack,” she said meekly.
“Stay on the phone with me until I get there, do you hear me?” He pulled out of the parking lot and headed in the opposite direction of Doraville.
“I’m so sorry to be so much trouble…”
“You’re not any trouble at all. I’m glad you called,” Burton said as he nicked the tail end of the yellow light and sped through the red to merge onto I-285. It was before rush hour but it was still packed and the flow of traffic was well over seventy miles an hour.
Suited him just fine.
“You still there, Diane? Stay with me, girl. Describe to me what you’re doing.”
Had she ever struck him as the type who might do something like this? As long as he’d known her, had she ever even hinted at being suicidal?
“I’m sitting here at the dining room table, the one you made for us when we were first married, and drinking wine. I’m drinking as much wine as I can drink.” She broke down into incoherent tears again.
“All right, sweetie, well, save some of that wine for me, okay? I’ll be there in less than five minutes. Drink water until I get there. Better yet, don’t go into the kitchen at all. Just sit tight.”
“I’m so sorry about what I did, Jack. So, so, so sorry.”
“What did you do, Diane?”
“With Tommy.”
Tommy?
“Tommy, our lawn boy. I have no idea what came over me. I was possessed is all I can say. He was so sweet and kind and I…and I…oh, I just want to die! I threw away my life. I threw it all away and now I just want to die!”
“Stop talking like that, Diane. You hear me? It would break my heart and you don’t want to do that to me, do you? Do you?”
“Would…would it really, Jack? Oh, my God, would you really care?”
Was this all bullshit? Was she really suicidal or was he going to pull up and find her in a towel holding a martini glass?
“I care enough to strangle you myself if you try to do something like that. I better not find any knives or shit like that when I get there. Just you and me, right, Diane?”
“Oh, Jack, you don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”
He arrived five minutes later, slamming the car into park and bolting into her house—a twenty-year old traditional on a quiet Dunwoody street. Why she would choose to surround herself with tennis wives and families after they split up was a mystery to Jack. He was pretty sure, since he had to dodge four moms pushing strollers on the way here, that it probably had a hand in bringing about today’s hysterics.
His assessment of her condition wasn’t exactly the towel and the martini glass, but neither did he think she was in any danger of killing herself. She met him at the front door and he opened his arms. She fell into them and when he closed his arms around her, she snaked her hands up to his face and neck in a lover’s embrace. He used the opportunity to break her grip by picking her up and carrying her into the house and putting her on the couch.
“You sit,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.” When he spoke, his eyes fell on his Army Beretta M9 laying on the coffee table. He picked it up without a word and stuck it in the small of his back.
“Thank you so much for coming, Jack,” Diane said. Her makeup was intact and while it’s true she wasn’t wearing sweat pants, in her jeans and wool pullover, neither did she look like she was expecting to seduce someone either.
Once in the kitchen, he checked the gun. It was fully loaded with one in the chamber. Without emptying it, he returned it to his back belt and poured boiling water over instant coffee he’d scooped into two mugs. Glancing into the living room, he saw Diane was sitting quietly, waiting.
He brought two coffee mugs back to the couch and sat down next to her. He handed her one.
“We’re going to talk it out, Diane,” he said to her, wondering where in the hell he was channeling Oprah from. “And when you’re done. When you’ve said what you have to say, we’re going to be fine, you and me. Okay?”
Diane held her coffee mug with both hands and sniffled. “But we’ll still be finished,” she said.
He held her chin in his hand so she had to look at him. “We’re going to do this thing, Diane. Not so we can piece back together a broken, unhappy marriage but so we can both remember why we cared about each other.”
“I love you, Jack.”
“I love you, too, Diane. Okay? I always will.”
She took a long sip of her coffee. “I’m sorry I called all hysterical and said I was going to kill myself.”
“It’s my fault. We should have talked before now.”
She looked at him with a faint hint of a smile on her lips. “You did kind of drive me to do it. And then blindsiding me at the coffee shop a couple of days ago...”
“I know, I know. That was stupid and I’m sorry. Okay?” He patted her hand and put his coffee mug down. “But I have an important surveillance that I have to do tonight and if it was anything else I’d drop everything but there is a woman whose life is possibly in danger and now that I know that this woman’s life…” he touched her knee, “isn’t threatened, I can go attend to the other.”
“So many people need you, Jack.”
“I’m not blowing you off, Diane and I’m not leaving if I detect any hint that you’ll harm yourself if I go. But if you can handle it, I need to move this talk to another night when I can give it my all.”
She nodded and wiped her tears from her face. “I’ll be okay, Jack,” she said. “Now that I know you’ll come back to me and we’ll talk it all out.”
As he got up to leave, she grabbed his hand. “Jack, that thing I said to you when I was leaving the coffee shop.”
“About you and Dave?”
She nodded and looked at him and he realized she didn’t want to tell him but she also didn’t want any more lies between them. He hesitated and then took a long breath before he went to her and kissed her on top of her head. “It’s okay, Diane,” he said. “It’s over and done. Forget it. I have.”
“He…he asked about you…when we were together.”
The image of Dave came to mind and Burton worked hard to push it away. If he was going to forgive Diane, to get past what she did, he couldn’t do that remembering Dave, remembering why he hated him.
Why did I hate him?
As Diane stared up at him, her tears starting again, it suddenly occurred to Burton that sleeping with his wife aside—a crime Burton had been blissfully unaware of at the time—he still couldn’t put his finger on why he detested Kazmaroff.
“What did he ask you about?”
“Did I know why you hated him? He said he knew you did before he even opened his mouth so it wasn’t something he said or did…”
I always hated him. That’s true. I hated him from the beginning. How could that be?
Burton turned toward the door and when he did he spotted the framed photo on the mantel. A panoply of images came crashing through him as visceral and real as his ex-wife sitting on the couch watching him. Images of his last stint in Iraq. With the guys. The guys who had been more like brothers to him than his own siblings. Ketchum, Davey, Marley, Fatso and Grub.
And Beaner. The memory of the face of the young lieutenant from Boston came to Burton so swiftly that he felt his insides heave as if he were taking a ride too fast with too many sharp curves. He grabbed the back of the sofa to steady himself.
“Jack? Are you okay?”
Dear God how could he have erased that man from his memory? How is it possible to know someone for eighteen months, to live with them, laugh with them, care about them, love them—and then never call their faces or their names to mind for seven long years afterward?
“Jack, you’re scaring me.”
He turned and looked at Diane, the guilt and tears of her recent confession still wet on her face. Diane and Dave.
Holy. Shit.
His legs gave out and he sat down in the tub chair by the couch with a thump.
Dave and Beaner. That was it. He stared at the photo. How could he not have realized the similarities before?
Well, obviously on some level, he had.
The two of them were peas in the same pod. Not in looks so much but definitely in manner and the way they carried themselves. Both were arrogant and cavalier, both blond, both too cocky for their own good.
And in Beaner’s case—that would include every person in his platoon.
“I have to go,” he rasped out to Diane. “I’m sorry.” He got to his feet and stumbled to the door. He could feel her right behind him.
“Are you sure you’re alright to drive, Jack? Was it something I said? I don’t know why I had that old gun out. I wouldn’t have used it.”
“I know, Diane. And I’m fine.” He turned to her in the doorway. “I meant everything I said. We’re going to come out the other side as friends. Okay?” He touched her arm and rubbed it lightly. “Go to bed.”
She smiled sadly at him and nodded. “Same old Jack,” she said. “Always giving orders.”
It wasn’t Dave at all. It was never him.
Feeling a sense of clarity he hadn’t felt in years, he dialed Mia’s number as soon as he climbed in his car. The call went straight to voice mail. Fine, you can be as pissed at me as you want. He found Jess’s number and hit it as he pulled out onto Clairmont Road heading to I-285 and her house.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jess, this is Jack Burton.”
“Why, hello, Jack. I’m glad you called.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. I thought it was a good idea for Mia to spend the night there tonight.”
“Oh, lovely. I’ve missed the company, I must say. Although little Daisy does go a long way to making up for having a house full of people.”
Traffic began to slow a good mile before the exit off of I-285 to Peachtree Industrial. Burton saw a red tailed hawk circling high above and wondered what in the world he had spotted in the way of prey on a six-lane highway.
“Can you put Mia on for a sec?” he asked.
“Mia? She’s not here. I thought she was with you.”
The feeling that had been nagging him in the back of his mind came roaring to the front.
“I dropped her off at your place three hours ago,” he said tersely. “Is your car in the driveway?”
The phone went briefly silent and Burton had an image of Jess running to the front room, the phone clasped to her breast, to peer out the living room window.
“Yes, my car is still here,” she said gasping. “Is everything okay, Jack? Is Mia okay?”
Jack drove past the pummeled remains of someone’s family cat on the side of the road.
****
The thing that woke her was the cold. If not for that, Mia was sure she could have ignored everything else. The pain, the insistent, grinding ache in her shoulders. She came up, clawing and breathless, from the dark bliss of oblivion, urged relentlessly on by the biting cold that wouldn’t let go of her.
“Come on, babe,” a voice near her said. A blast of onions and apples accompanied the words. She opened her eyes to see his face close to hers.
Dave’s best friend.
“Wake all the way up, beautiful,” he said, his lips only inches from her face. “I need you awake for this.”
She didn’t want to be awake but her eyes widened as she looked over Keith’s shoulder into the darkness. Even moving her head that little bit shot a bolt of agony up through her arms and down her back.
She was chained with her arms over her head, her feet flat on the bare cement floor. When she jerked her arms to try to get them down, the pain cascaded down her back.
How long had she been here?
She looked wildly at Keith. “Help me,” she whispered, her voice wobbling with fear and the cold. A chill trickled across her stomach and looking down, she saw that she was wearing only her panties. She wrenched again at her arms held firmly by the cuffs over her head and twisted her head to try to see her surroundings.
“Help you?” he said, laughing, his face a cavern of bad breath and chipped teeth. “I put you here, beautiful. I’m going to help myself, is what I’m gonna do.”
“Why?” she gasped. “Why are you…why…”
“Why am I doing this?” He reached out and cupped both her breasts with his hard hands, twisting the nipples as he did. She recoiled and convulsed to escape him but he held her tight. “Why am I taking ownership of Dave’s little sis?” He dropped his hands and bent down. When he straightened back up, she saw that he held a small leather whip in his hands.
“Because I’ve always wanted to, that’s why,” he said, snapping the whip against his hand. “You know how long I’ve thought about this moment?” He leaned in close and when she turned her face away, he grabbed her chin and pulled her back to him. “Ever since the moment your brother broke my nose because I said you had a fine ass.” Without taking his eyes off her face, he reached down and grabbed the elastic band of her panties and jerked them down to her knees. “And now that ass is mine.”
Mia closed her eyes and when she did, she felt her head spin as if the drug wasn’t done with her yet. She clenched her eyes tightly, hoping, praying she could force herself to pass out.
“No, you don’t, beautiful,” Keith said, slapping her face. “I need you awake for this part.”
He turned her from him and she could see that they were in some kind of warehouse or underground room. The walls were cinder block studded with a few shelves of boxes. There was a small set of stairs that led to a landing and a door…
She heard the crack of the whip before she felt it and at first she didn’t recognize the scream that followed as hers. A trail of fire crawled across the back of her hip and bottom and she didn’t have time to react more before she heard the whip snap again. This time, she knew what to expect and she twisted her hips to avoid it. The whip caught her high on her waist and snaked down her ass.
“You move around, girl, I’ll beat you anywhere I can hit you—your stomach, your face, your tits. Trust me, you’re gonna wanna take it on the ass. Fewer nerve endings there. Now hold still or I swear I’ll cut you to ribbons.”
Mia focused on the door and waited, willing herself to stand still. She looked at the door and imagined someone coming through it…any minute now…someone coming through it to help her, to save her.
Every lash stung worse than the last until she was sure he was hitting her harder with each stroke. She felt her own blood trickling down her legs where he was opening up welts he’d already made on her ass and she clutched the bare metal of the cuffs that kept her vulnerable and open to him. She could hear him speaking to her but she closed her thoughts to what was happening in this cellar. All she could see was that door...
When she awoke, it was quiet and this time what awakened her was the pain in her shoulders. She staggered to her feet to relieve the agony of her shoulders carrying her weight and she gasped in pain as she did. She must not have been out very long and when she twisted around to see where Keith was, she heard the flush of a toilet behind the door at the top of the stairs.
Will I live through this? Does anyone know where I am? Have I been here for days or hours?
“Awake, I see,” Keith said as he opened the door and came down the stairs to her. “That drug I gave you is unpredictable. When you wouldn’t take it in the drink, I had to go to Plan B and I wasn’t sure you’d be awake enough for this. My God, you’re beautiful.” He stopped a few feet from her and seemed to be honestly appreciating what he saw.
She was totally nude, her arms stretched out over her head, her face streaked with mascara, tears and sweat, her back a bloody latticework of welts and bruises.
He took out his cellphone and snapped a picture of her, then walked behind her to take it from that angle.
“Yes, please,” Mia said hoarsely, her acceptance of her torture and death now vying with her anger and mounting hatred of this man. “Please make it as easy as possible for them to build the case against you.”
He studied the screen of his cell phone before looking up at her. “These’ll keep me warm on many a cold night,” he said, grinning. “And the best part? No one will ever know I have them, or what happened here. No, correction. The best part? Your buddy Burton will be on the hook for it.”
Mia tried to focus past her fear. Even helpless and almost certainly soon to be dead, as long as she could talk, she had some hope. But the pain, the remnant effects of the drug, and her own terror were all coming together to make it difficult to understand him.
“You think the cops will think Jack did this?” she said. Her lip was swollen from where he’d slapped her.
“You know he hated your brother, right? Probably gets stiff just thinking of Dave dead.”
“Like you?”
“Oh, baby, I love your fire! When we get down to doing it, I’ll uncuff you so you can really struggle. God, I’ve imagined this so many times…”
“The cops need evidence to pin this on Jack.”
“Oh, they’ll have evidence…and something better,” Keith said, picking up the whip again from where he’d dropped it. “They’ll have your accusation.”
“Why would I accuse him? That’s mad.”
“You will because first, after being missing for two days, when you are finally found in Jack’s garage, battered and raped, and the police ask you what happened…wait for it…you won’t remember any of this.” He waved the whip to take in the confines of the small cement floored warehouse.
“I…I won’t remember?”
“That’s right, beautiful. I injected you with a very special concoction of Ecstasy and Kit-Kat or Ketamine.” He glanced at his wristwatch with a dramatic flourish. “I figure I have about two more hours of playtime before you fade out on me and become totally unresponsive to…my attentions. After that…” He shrugged. “You won’t remember a thing.”
She rattled the cuffs over her head, the anger building in her. “You think I won’t remember this? You’ll never get away with it.”
He leaned in close and snaked a hand between her legs and held her there. “This ain’t my first rodeo, honey,” he said, squeezing her until tears of pain sprang into her eyes. “You won’t remember a thing. I’ll call the tip in that I saw Burton carrying what looked like a rolled carpet into his garage and I’ll make sure he doesn’t have an alibi that’ll stand up for the time period. Then, I’m sure your lawyer, your mother and the rape counselors—I hear they’re very good—will all help convince you to testify against him.”
He released her and smiled. “And I’ll have my photos of our time together to enjoy again and again…until I arrange for a repeat performance which, trust me, beautiful, I will.”
Is this possible? He’s done this before? And nobody knows?
She shivered and gripped the ends of the chains that held her arms over her head. Two more hours, he said. Two more hours and then it’s over. I can last that long. Please God, let me last that long.
“Ready for round two, beautiful?” he said as he grinned and slapped the whip in his hand.
Burton drove straight to Jess’s, parked and walked the perimeter of her house before coming inside. There was no evidence that Mia had been forcibly taken and every reason to believe she had left on her own.
Jess met him in the living room with a tray of cake and coffee. The little dog nearly leaped into his arms when he walked in the door. He put them both aside briskly and began to pace Jess’s small living room.
Where would she have gone? If she was on her own steam, where would she go? Carol was dead, and he had just come from Diane’s…
Trish.
It wasn’t much but it was all he had. He didn’t have Trish’s cellphone number so he called Information and got it. The phone rang and rang. Who doesn’t carry her cellphone with them? he thought impatiently as he waited. Did he even know a woman who wasn’t constantly checking her phone to see who had called?
“This is Trish Barnes’ phone,” a familiar voice said on the other line. “Who’s this?”
“Karen?”
“Jack?”
“What are you doing with Trish’s phone?”
“What I’m doing is screening her calls while she lies in a hospital bed a few breaths shy of a coma.”
Burton heard a faint voice in the background say, “Don’t exaggerate, Karen. I’m fine.”
Karen spoke to Jack. “She is not fine. That turd of a husband of hers broke her arm.”
“Who? Keith?”
“Yes, Keith. This time he put her in the hospital. I’m forcing her to bring charges against him.”
“Where is he?”
“Who knows? But they’re out looking for him.”
The voice came back stronger from the hospital bed. “And he’ll be madder than ever when they find him.”
Karen turned from the phone to speak to Trish. “Him being mad is not something you need to worry about ever again, Trish. Do you understand me?”
Burton heard a muted response from Trish but couldn’t hear what she said. “I was hoping maybe Trish had heard from Mia today,” he said. “She’s gone missing.”
Karen spoke to Trish. “Did Mia Kazmaroff call you today?” She came back to the phone. “She says no. She was too busy getting the shit beat out of her to take phone calls. I hope they nail that bastard to the Lawrenceville water tower.”
“When did he attack Trish?” It wasn’t much to go on but if Mia went to talk to Trish, maybe she got in the middle of something? Or maybe she found Keith instead?
“Four hours ago. Why?”
Yeah, the timeline fit. Mia had been missing for three. But how would the two meet up?
“Hold on, Jack, I just remembered when Trish called me, she had to use the landline because she couldn’t find her cellphone at first.”
“You think Keith took it?”
“Well, I’ve got it right now so he didn’t take it with him, but he definitely moved it from her purse where she usually keeps it.”
“Karen, do me a favor and check out the recent calls, will you?”
A moment passed as she scanned the list of calls on the phone. “Shit,” she said.
“She called, didn’t she? Mia called?”
“No, it’s an outgoing call, Jack. Keith called her about three and a half hours ago.”
Burton turned and stared out the picture window in Jess’s living room. She and the dog had retreated to the kitchen to make dinner and give him the quiet he needed on the phone.
Why would Keith call Mia? Why would Mia agree to meet him?
“Jack?”
He snapped his attention back to the phone. “Yeah?”
“Trish wants to know why you think Mia would have called her.”
“It’s not important.”
Karen gave a sound of disgust. “It’s because she suspects Trish, doesn’t she? That woman is certifiable. Come on, Jack. Trish? Seriously?”
“Can you ask her if there’s any place Keith might go, you know, to be alone or lick his wounds? They got a cabin up in the mountains or something?”
Karen turned away to speak to Trish and it was all Burton could do not to urge her to hurry. Finally, she came back to the phone. “Sorry, Jack, no. She says they never went anywhere and trust me, Keith isn’t the kind of guy to lick any wounds. He has no conscience whatsoever.”
“Okay, well, thanks, Karen, and tell Trish thanks too and I hope she feels better.”
He hung up and sat in the living room, holding his phone, as the light leached from the sky. It got dark by five o’clock these days. He knew, if Mia was in trouble, every minute was critical.
Jess came to the opening from the kitchen, a mixing bowl in her hands, the little dog at her feet. “Is it too soon to report a missing person?” she asked quietly.
He knew she knew the answer to that as well as he did.
“I’ll find her, Jess,” he said.
“I know.”
He stood up and looked back outside the window but there was only darkness. Why would Keith want her? What was Keith’s state of mind? Had he just lost it? If Karen put Trish’s feet to the fire about the domestic abuse charge, that could finish things for Keith in the department.
Could make a man pretty desperate…
Fact is, Keith was Dave’s partner in crime as far as using Ecstasy and screwing the world. Did they have a falling out? It would explain why Carol—the other part of the threesome—might not live too long to tell any tales. Especially if she knew who killed Dave…
“Jack?”
He looked away from the window and saw Jess pointing to the coffee table where his phone was vibrating. He picked it up and looked at the screen.
“Hey. You think of something?”
“Trish said maybe Keith might go to their storage unit.”
“A storage unit?”
“She says it’s really more like a small warehouse space. They were trying to start an eBay business and they—”
“The address, Ange. What’s the address?” He was jogging to his car before he even finished speaking.
“Four ten Orleans Court. It’s off of Johnson Ferry in East Cobb.”
Burton knew it wouldn’t help to get pulled over for speeding and he didn’t have time to explain if he did. He hesitated to call 911 on a crime he wasn’t sure was being committed and then decided he couldn’t be hated any more than he already was downtown.
It was the week before Thanksgiving and the traffic jam during rush hour between Doraville and East Cobb was almost not navigable. He forced himself not to jump on the Perimeter—what had been an average speed of seventy miles an hour this afternoon would have ground to a stop by now. He would have to take surface roads, blow past every stop sign that wasn’t attached to a school bus, and hope there wasn’t construction on top of the usual delays.
Doraville to East Cobb the week before Thanksgiving? He’d be lucky to make it in an hour. He called in a suspected B&E and gave the address for the storage facility. If Dispatch checked his phone number and ID’d him, they might pass that information on or they might not. If they did, he hoped it didn’t result in them cancelling the 911.
He checked his GPS to confirm the address was where he thought it was. As crazy as taking Holcomb Bridge to Roswell was in order to get to East Cobb, it was even crazier to take the more direct route of Abernathy Road since that went right past the second biggest mall in the southeast and was the whole reason for the crap traffic this week in the first place.
Assuming the traffic cops had their hands full, he pulled out of his lane of stalled traffic on Mount Vernon and drove onto the sidewalk to reach Holcomb Bridge. There he gunned it, expecting and getting seasoned Atlanta commuters’ forbearance.
Spend six months in Atlanta traffic, he thought, as he swerved around an ill-placed fire hydrant, and you’ve seen it all.
He knew the back entrance to Johnson Ferry and thanked God for it. Coming from the south, Johnson Ferry, the main artery through East Cobb and the tract home neighborhoods of Woodstock and Roswell, would be jammed for at least two hours with everyone coming home from work. Nobody came at it from the north heading south—not at six in the evening unless you were some poor sap working the night shift on Pill Hill.
His GPS told him that Orleans Court was a dead end street and when he finally turned into it, careful not to squeal his tires in the process, he saw the only business on it was a warehouse of storage facilities. And not a single cop car in sight.
Damn! Did they ignore his call or were they all playing by the rules driving through Atlanta rush hour traffic?
The parking lot was empty but he knew that didn’t mean anything. Most of these places had rear parking for their loading docks. He turned to the back and saw a lone truck parked there. He stopped four spaces away, hopped out and opened his trunk.
He grabbed his bolt cutters and ran to the garage door directly in front of where the truck was parked. In his experience, people really were as stupid as they acted. Trying to silence the pounding of his heart and the panting of his own excited breaths, he stood by the door and put his ear to it.
Nothing. Not movements, not voices, not footsteps.
He licked his lips and tried to listen harder, to block out the hum of traffic on Johnson Ferry, and the deafening, urgent fear that resounded in his head that told him he was too late and this was not where she was…
When the scream came—muffled and coated with agony—through the door, he nearly dropped the bolt cutters. Recovering quickly, he positioned the cutters and snapped through the heavy padlock, then tossed them aside and raked up the garage door, spilling light into the darkened back loading bay in incremental slices. He bent down and slipped under the door before it was fully raised, reaching for his gun before he realized he’d left it in the car.
She was kneeling in the middle of the room, her arms chained over her head and fastened to a pulley that would allow her to be lifted and lowered. She was nude, her head slumped forward on her chest, her hair a curtain shrouding her face.
He ran to her, looking around for Keith, but they were alone. Glancing up he saw a door at the top of a small set of stairs. A door that was slowing self-closing behind whomever had just fled.
A small moan from Mia resolved his brief indecision. She was alive. She could testify against Keith. Burton didn’t need to chase him. He found the winch that controlled the pulley attached to her chains and gently released it until she crumpled to the cement floor. He ran to her, stepping over an electric cattle prod, and gathered her into his arms. With one hand, he pried his cellphone out of his jeans pocket and called for an ambulance.
He heard the truck start up outside and drive away as he gently touched her face. Her body was bloodied and covered with bruises but he couldn’t tell from how many wounds.
“Mia,” he said softly. “Darlin’, can you hear me?”
It was all he could do not to race after Keith, pull him out of his truck and beat him to death. A pounding in his ears blotted out any background noise as the fury pulsed through him. He exhaled a long breath and lifted her onto his lap tugging a section of hair from her battered face.
“Talk to me, baby,” he said. “Come on, Mia.”
He felt the tension release from his shoulders when her eyes fluttered open, at first hesitantly and then, groggily, but open.
“There’s my girl,” he said, his heart pounding with relief. “I’ve got you now. You’re safe. You’re going to be fine.”
What the hell had that monster done to her? His eyes fell on the cattle prod and he saw that his hands were slick with her blood.
“Jack?”
She was trying to look at him, trying to focus. She winced in pain and gave a little cry.
“It’s okay, Mia, I’m here,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“What…what happened?” she asked, her voice slurred. “Where am I?”
“You…you just…” Never mind, he thought. Plenty of time later for questions and answers.
She moved in his arms and even in the dark he could see thick welts and cuts across her breasts and hips. Gently, without jostling her too much, he shrugged out of his jacket and tucked it around her.
“Jack,” she said again, whimpering softly, as her eyes began to close, “what happened?”