Abandoned: A Thriller (42 page)

Apparently, some things can still bring the rain.

I thought I’d never have this chance again, and now I do, and I’ve just understood how much I want it, how deep that need, how great the ache.

“Sorry,” I choke, unable to keep the tears from coming.

“Don’t be silly.”

I let the tears come.

I think about my search for the soul on the drive home. Everyone has their own answer. Father Yates, the priest at Callie’s wedding, has his. The Buddhists have theirs. When I was a girl, I had mine. I had it with a certainty and innocence too powerful and too pure for me to consign to mere naïveté. Is there something we know when we’re young that we forget when we’re older, or is it all just a process of looking behind the curtain, finding that what the young call cynical the old call reality?

The question I’ve been asking myself most is: Why do I care?

I rub my belly, trying to sense the life growing there, to commune with it.

I care because of you.

I care because of the truth I saw in Dr. Rand’s office, that Alexa would be Alexa whatever her form. Is that proof of the soul?

Nothing answers me, but I am content that I’m getting closer.

I consider going by the office but decide against it. Alan will call me if Dali contacts them again. James and Callie will call me if anything else develops.

“Screw it,” I say out loud, and laugh. I’m a little giddy. Once again, my hand finds that spot on my tummy. “I’m going to be a mom again, baby. Young again at forty-plus. Can you believe that?”

We need milk, and I pull into the supermarket parking lot, humming “Blackbird” by the Beatles. Mom always loved that song. She could sing it too, high and sweet. I stare out through the windshield, remembering her sitting at Dad’s feet, smiling and singing as he played the guitar. It makes me smile too.

It would have been nice if she could have known her grandchildren.

I’m not sure what it is right now that makes me think of her instead of Dad. Maybe it’s because Mom always seemed to find it just a little bit harder to be happy, and when she did find it, she found it in her family.

I continue to whistle as I close the car door.

Something hard touches my lower back, and a voice whispers in my ear:

“Make a wrong move, Special Agent Barrett, and I’ll shoot you right here and walk away. You’ll die, I’ll live. You know who I am, so you know that I’ll do what I say.”

I freeze in place. My heart starts to hammer so hard I think it’s going to punch its way out of my chest. I feel slightly nauseated.

“Dali?” I croak.

How did my throat get so dry so fast?

“We’re going to walk to my car. You’re going to get in the trunk. Fight me and I will not only shoot you, I’ll go to your home and I will kill your adopted daughter and your boyfriend. Do you understand?”

A million thoughts whirl through my head, things to say, bargains to make. The gun nudges me, pushing all that aside. “Yes,” I whisper.

He reaches under my jacket and takes my weapon. He unclips my cell phone from my belt.

“Walk forward.”

We walk no more than ten feet, arriving at a blue Toyota Camry. The trunk is already unlocked.
How’d he know I’d be here? He didn’t. He was following me. Why?
“Open it,” he orders. I comply.

“How long have you been following me?” It’s a useless question, but as I peer into the darkness of the trunk, I think about Heather Hollister, living for eight years in the dark, and I am overwhelmed by terror, atavistic and instantaneous.

“Get in or you die and your family dies with you.”

His voice is flat, emotionless, almost bored. It’s the boredom that convinces me more than anything else. I scan the parking lot briefly. A man is walking to his own car, bag of groceries in hand. He’s talking on his cell phone and pays us no mind.

I crawl into the trunk and whip around to catch a glimpse of Dali. His face is swathed in gauze. He pauses for a moment, looking down at me.

“People look away from a burn victim,” he says, and then slams the trunk shut.

I hear nothing, and then I hear a muffled voice, followed by two spits that I recognize as silenced gunfire. More nothing, then some scuffling sounds and the car door slams. The engine starts. We’re in motion.

It had to be the cell-phone man. He must have seen a guy with his head covered in bandages stuffing a woman into the trunk of his car. He said something and Dali shot him without hesitation. I have little doubt he’s dead. Dali is a creature of precision and pragmatism, and it’s only practical to become good with a gun.

I pray that someone’s noticed all this, that a patrol car was driving by and saw it go down, something, anything. I put my hand on my belly and I pray to the God I don’t believe in.

I don’t even know if you’re there, but if you are, please, do something. I’m not asking you to part the Red Sea. He shot a man in a public parking lot, you know? Just give me a cop or a concerned citizen with a cell phone. Please.

As time goes by, I understand just how far away we must be from the parking lot by now. I hear no sounds of pursuit. I slump into myself.

I go silent, smell the faint odor of gasoline, and try to get ready for the moment when he opens the trunk.

The car slows down and stops. It idles, waiting. I hear the sound of something moving, something mechanized. A gate?

I’d tried to get some idea of how long we traveled. I was surprised at how difficult that was to do with no watch, in the dark. There’s no sense of distance. I had tried to count the seconds but kept getting lost in my own fear.

The panic is crippling. I don’t know if it’s better or worse for me than it was for Heather Hollister. I have more training. I know what I’m up against. I’ve been under fire and have survived more than a single attack on my life.

None of it seems to be helping. Images of my rape and torture at the hands of Sands, images I thought I’d put to bed long ago, rise in my mind. My heartbeat is out of control and I’m close to hyperventilating.

I attended a conference once for law-enforcement personnel. It had various lectures on a variety of subjects: personnel, firearms, interrogation, etc. I attended one entitled “The Psychology of Fear: Conquering the Flight Urge in Combat Situations.”

The speaker was a man by the name of Barnaby Wallace, an ex-Delta Force operative turned Special Forces instructor turned private consultant.

The problem in most situations where fear takes over is a lack of training on the subject itself, or improper training. We’ve promoted the idea in this society that fear is found only in cowards, men who aren’t worth the title of men. We’ve promoted the concept of being ashamed of fear. In World War Two the Russkies approached it from a more practical angle: You could choose between the guns of the soldiers behind you—which would kill you for sure if you ran—or the guns of the enemy in front of you, which you might still survive.

The history of the military is one of dealing with fear. We train soldiers to “obey orders, no matter what.” Desertion is frequently a capital offense, punished by a firing squad.

What’s it all show, though?
He’d leaned forward a little to emphasize his point.
Obviously, that fear is a natural response. In fact, in my years of command, it was always the fearless men who gave me the most trouble. They generally had a screw loose.

The audience laughed, and you could sense in that laughter a low relief, as though we were all being given a sudden pass on some hidden shame, a time we’d felt fear and had to hide it.

Fear is probably one of the oldest biological imperatives. It was developed to keep the organism alive. Fear demands flight from the stronger opponent, because, at the animal level, might does tend to make right. The bigger opponent will generally be the winning opponent.

Things have changed. We can think, and because we can think, we can create advantages that nullify the size or superior armament of the enemy. At this level, fear still serves a purpose, but only if we learn to harness it for our own ends.
He smiled.
Fight or flight, everyone’s heard that one, and it’s true. Fear was designed to encourage us to run, but it had a fail-safe: If running wasn’t an option, it delivered the adrenaline we’d need to put up a good fight. So there’s a flip side to fear. It tells you that you’re in danger, that you need to get your shit together quick, and that you need to either retreat, or fight, or die.

So the first step of conquering your fear is to embrace it. It’s telling you something.
Listen.
Don’t resist. That’s the first mistake, and it’ll be the one that kills you. You’ll be so distracted trying to push that fear aside that you won’t notice the guy with the gun ’til he’s right up on you. Fear freezes us first, and that’s a problem in a combat situation.

You have to take fear out of the instinctive level. It’s just an indicator, like a speedometer or your blood pressure. Apply your intellect to
the indicator. Observe it. What’s it telling you? Is flight the answer? Could be. How about fight? Maybe. Observe it, embrace it, intellectualize it. When you do that, fear becomes a tool, nothing more or less, and you lose no forward motion.

Stop treating fear as a defect or something alien. It’s probably the oldest part of you.

I close my eyes and force myself first to breathe and then to examine my fear. Why am I afraid?

Number one is the visceral answer: because of what Sands did to me. I’ve been in the hands of a madman before. It almost destroyed me. It’s happening again, here, now, and the possibilities terrify me.

I examine this and throw it aside. It’s neither pertinent nor helpful. Dali is not Sands. There’s no indication that he’s a rapist. His attitude with Heather Hollister seems to have been that of a zookeeper with an animal. He might beat me, but he probably won’t fuck me.

My heartbeat slows a little bit.

Second: Heather Hollister herself. She wasn’t a weak woman, but eight years alone in the dark drove her crazy. She was a strong woman, a competent, confident police officer; now she picks holes into her skin and talks in circles like a child.

I group this one with the third and fourth. Third: Dana Hollister. What if he decides to lobotomize me in the same way? What if he makes the darkness last forever? And, finally, fourth: He could just decide to kill me.

These things, on the advice of Barnaby Wallace, I embrace. They’re real. They make sense. They are things that could actually happen and thus are the problems to solve.

My heartbeat and breathing have both returned to normal.

Thanks, Barnaby. You go on the Christmas list, if I make it out of here cognitive.

So, fight or flight? Which makes the most sense in this situation? I tick off the factors in my mind. He’s got the weapons, which gives him a distinct advantage. If he’s had military training, he’ll be conversant in close quarters combat. The most troubling thing is his experience. He’s been doing this for years. He knows what to expect when that trunk opens.

Flight, then. But how?

I remember what Heather Hollister said. She’d been ready to jump
out and attack when the trunk opened. She’d been pepper-sprayed and stun-gunned for her efforts. It was the most obvious tactic, and the first one he’d be braced for.
Jitter-step.

It was one of Kirby’s words. She’d challenged me to a little hand-to-hand combat one weekend, and I’d accepted. I prefer my gun but am aware it’s not always an option, and I knew my jujitsu could use some serious updating.

We had a good time, and Kirby, as it turns out, was a good instructor. She was skilled but never brutal, and she was able to explain everything she did. At one point I thought I had her. I’d caught her from behind, in a headlock, and she was straining hard to escape. She suddenly relaxed, sagging, then strained again, then sagged further, then strained again. It was confusing, and I found myself off balance, struggling to anticipate and react. In the midst of this calculation, she went from straining a little to a huge burst of resistance that threw me off utterly. She surged forward and flipped me over her shoulder. I landed on my back, hard.

Kirby had grinned down at me as I struggled to catch my breath.
Jitter-step, Smoky-babe. One step up, one step down, one step up, one step down, and then, just when they think they’ve got your rhythm, make it two steps, see?

The car moves forward again.

I decide to make my move as I’m climbing out of the trunk, when my back is to him. It should be when I seem the most vulnerable and off balance. I’ll pretend to struggle with the exit, as though I’m lightheaded or faint. I’ll try once, fail, try twice, fail, and on the third time, rather than fail, I’ll kick back, catch him with a foot, and run.

I hope.

The quality of the sounds has changed. They are subtly deeper, as though they contain an echo.

A garage. We’ve pulled in to a garage.

I take a few deep breaths to steady myself and chant one of the phrases Barnaby used later in his lecture. It had seemed cheesy at the time, but it helps me now.