Helpless (35 page)

She took the storage key from the key slot and put it in the pocket of her jeans. She took out her cell phone, thinking she’d text Lindsey to ask what she should do next. Her hand brushed up against the rippled metal of the toppled Coke can. The contact summoned her back into the moment. God, how had she lost track of the time!

Jill was in the process of shutting down the image application when Mitchell entered the room.

His mouth fell open when he saw what she was looking at. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Jill’s heart pounded so fast that she felt it might burst. She set her cell down on the table. She wanted to look as innocent as possible. But she felt the flash drive in her pants pocket, with all the images that she copied to it, like a hot coal searing the skin of her leg. “I was just trying to check my e-mail,” she managed to say.

“Don’t lie to me,” Mitchell said, closing in. “I can check the recent activity, you know.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Jill said, though her voice wavered the way it did just before she cried.

Mitchell, undeterred and unconvinced, stepped even closer. Before she could slip past him, he had his hands wrapped around her neck. Jill’s eyes bulged in their sockets as he began to squeeze.

“What did you see?” he growled in her ear. “You were just supposed to be using the Web browser, not snooping around my files.”

With one hand Jill tried without success to push Mitchell away from her. She stretched the fingers of her other hand and hoped beyond hope to find her phone still in reach.

Mitchell tightened his grip around Jill’s neck. He didn’t seem to notice her hand, and she found her phone. She tried to relax as she brought the phone to her side and out of Mitchell’s view. Mitchell wasn’t squeezing her neck anymore. But he kept his hands there, holding her immobilized.

Jill felt the ridges of the phone. By touch and memory she pushed the right button to redial the last number called. Jill almost never used her phone to make phone calls. Texting had become her communication method of choice. But she remembered whom she last dialed. The phone began to ring in her hand, but Mitchell didn’t hear it, because he was yelling at her again.

“Did you see anything? Answer me?”

“No.”

The phone rang and rang.

Mitchell let go of her throat. “I need to think ... need to think... .” Mitchell let out a heavy breath. He was still blocking her way out of the alcove.

The phone kept ringing. Jill covered the speaker with her hand. Mitchell was still pacing. He didn’t hear the rings.

“Just take me home, okay?” Jill said.

“I can’t do that yet. I gotta think. That was really stupid of you, Jill.”

Mitchell turned around and put his hand to his head. He walked out of the alcove and back into his bedroom.

Jill faked a move to her left and went right, emulating her best soccer technique for getting by an aggressive defender. Mitchell wasn’t fooled and positioned his body in such a way that he effectively blocked the door—her only exit out. Jill knew there was no way she’d get by him.

She heard a click and a voice, which gave her a pulse of hope that she’d escape from this alive.

“Jill? Honey, is that you?”

She didn’t answer her father, though, because Mitchell had turned around. He was coming toward her again.

Chapter 53

T
om tensed and gripped his cell phone tighter. He pressed the phone hard to his ear because he couldn’t hear the caller otherwise. The ringing had awoken him from a deep, drugged-induced slumber, and it took him a moment to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming now.

It took less time, though, to realize that the voice he’d just heard belonged to his daughter. He called her name again, but something in the few words he picked up made him stop speaking so he could listen.

“Mitchell ... don’t worry ... saw nothing ... Don’t be angry... .”

Tom sat upright in his hospital bed, quicker than he should have moved. Blood rushed to his head. An intense pain exploded from behind his eyes, painting his vision white. He sat still until the pain receded into something he could breathe through again.

“Jill, honey, is that you?” Tom asked into the phone. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

Tom’s voice sounded weak. His throat was parched. Worse than the thirst was the constricting fear wrapped tight around his chest, telling him something was horribly wrong.

A nurse making her nightly room checks glanced at Tom with concern. Tom pointed frantically to the phone pressed to his ear and motioned her back into the hall.

This could be nothing,
he thought. What did Jill once call it—
ass dialing
—when you accidentally called somebody because you sat on the cell phone in your back pocket? Maybe that was all this was. But what had caused the urgency in what few bits of conversation he actually could hear?

No, he had instincts for this sort of thing, and a growing certainty that this was a call for help. The next four words that he picked up, spoken in his daughter’s stricken voice, confirmed those suspicions in the gravest of ways.

“Please ... don’t hurt me... .”

Tom slid his feet off of the bed. He stood on shaky legs. Had he heard her right? God, where was she? He wanted to scream to her to talk to him but didn’t say a word. What if the person she was talking to didn’t know she’d called him? The situation could escalate if her assailant became aware that she’d dialed for help. But he needed to know her location before he could take action.

Tom took his first few steps in hours and stumbled. He nearly toppled over the food tray by his bed. His IV was still attached. He turned and frantically pressed the call button, summoning the nurse he’d just shooed away.

“Get this IV off me,” he demanded. “Please, do it now. It’s important.”

The nurse looked at him in confusion but failed to take a single step. Tom put the phone tight against his lips and whispered, “Jilly-bean, give me something. Say something. Tell me where you are. Come on. Tell me.”

He held his breath, willing himself to become calm so that he could focus all his energy on listening. Compartmentalizing fear was a battlefield requirement Tom could access in a way similar to muscle memory.

He removed the tape that secured the plastic IV tube to his arm, oblivious to the painful pull against his skin as it lifted. There was tape on his wrist, too, which he unsecured with the same haste. Tom had dressed war wounds before, so he knew to shut off the flow of medicine before extracting the needle stuck into the back of his hand. Blood flowed, but less than Tom had expected. Now he needed to find his clothes.

“Sir ... Mr. Hawkins ... you haven’t been discharged.”

Tom covered the phone’s receiver before he spoke. “Where are my clothes?”

“Mr. Hawkins, Dr. Prince wanted you here overnight for observation.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not happening anymore. Get me my clothes.”

Tom’s expression communicated his intended threat: “Your way, or the easy way.” The nurse responded by handing Tom his street clothes, which were folded inside a pinewood wardrobe.

Though his legs were wobbly and his balance dramatically compromised, Tom managed to keep the phone close to his ear while he dressed. The pain wasn’t too bad. It was hardest to ignore when he looked down to pull on his jeans and put on his shoes. The room spun as though everything in it were water in a bathtub going down a drain. He shook his head to refocus his thoughts, but that only ignited embers of pain into a flash point.

Gritting through the agony, Tom managed to catch something Jill said.

“Mitchell, take me home ... please... .”

Take me home. Where could they be?

When Tom was fully dressed, the duty nurse objected once again. “Mr. Hawkins, we can’t authorize your leaving.”

Tom staggered toward her, pushing his way by the woman, who blocked the door. “You don’t have to authorize it,” he said. “Just don’t try to stop it.”

He would have taken the elevator down from the third floor but didn’t want to risk dropping the connection. He could call Jill back, but he worried that the phone’s ringing might put her in deeper peril. So he took the stairs, though his steps were shaky and each footstep felt just the way he expected it would after surviving a major car accident.

Horrible.

“Jilly, come on. Give me something, and I’ll come get you,” Tom whispered into the phone.

The more he moved, the stronger he felt and the faster he moved. He exited through the stairwell door and into the deserted parking lot of Catholic Memorial Hospital.

Tom stood statue still, with his eyes closed and the phone to his ear. He waited for something that would inspire his next move. Some tidbit of information he could act upon. He remembered the GPS location app installed on Jill’s phone. Tom accessed the FamilyWhere app on his Android-powered smartphone, and when he got what he wanted, Tom felt a thousand miles away, though at best he was only a short cab ride’s distance from her.

“You’re scaring me... . I’ll scream... .”

Tom heard Mitchell Boyd speak for the first time, and the boy’s words pierced him with fear.

“My dad’s in his office. He can’t hear you scream.”

Tom saw a cab pulled to a stop by the emergency room entrance, some fifty yards from where he stood. He raced over to the cab, careless of the pain that exploded inside him with every stride.

The cabdriver acted surprised that it was Tom who had jumped into his cab.

“Hey, I’m here for a Mrs. Wilcox. You her?” He let out a mocking laugh; obviously, the answer was no.

“Yeah, I’m her,” Tom said. He gave the driver Roland Boyd’s home address. The driver appeared ready to protest, but one look at Tom in the cab’s rearview mirror must have convinced him that Mrs. Wilcox could find herself another ride. Once the cab got moving, Tom closed his eyes tight and cupped the phone to his ear with both hands. “I’m coming, baby girl,” he whispered. “You hang on, and I’ll be there soon.”

“Can you drive faster?” Tom asked the cabdriver.

“If you pay the speeding ticket.”

Tom thought better of it. “No. Don’t get pulled over,” Tom said. “Get me there as fast as you can.”

Tom leaned back against the cab’s hard vinyl seat and closed his eyes. His headache was worsening.

His mind sped through different scenarios. He needed to formulate a plan with the best odds for success. Sergeant Brendan Murphy had single-handedly made it a no-go to contact the Shilo PD.

Tom called Roland’s home number. Roland answered on the third ring.

“Roland, it’s Tom.”

“What do you want, Tom?”

“Is my daughter there?”

“She’s here.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s with my son. They’re in his room, hanging out. How are you feeling?”

“Roland, I need you to forget about our issues. I need you to just think of me as a father. Forget anything else you suspect, or believe. Now, Jill called me. She sounded like she was in trouble. Can you please go check on her?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Roland! Please. Just check on her.”

Roland sighed into the phone. “Hang on,” he said.

One minute passed ... then two.

Roland got back on the phone. “They’re fine,” he said.

“Did you speak to my daughter?”

“She said she was fine,” said Roland.

“Did you see her?”

Roland sighed again. “No. The door to Mitchell’s room was closed. But they said they were fine.”

“Roland, I need you to check again. I need you to open the door to the room and make sure she’s all right.”

“You know what, Tom? I’ve got other things to do with my time than listen to your paranoid delusions about my son. I think whatever pain meds they gave you have gone to your head. You have a good night. Glad you’re all right. Now, get some rest.”

Tom didn’t say anything more. Roland had hung up on him.

Chapter 54

T
om decided his course of action well before the driver turned his cab onto Route 101A. The cab took the right-hand exit for south Shilo. Tom had no plans to try and reestablish contact with Jill. But when he got to Roland’s home, he’d attack the way an unconventional warrior was trained to wage a war.

The three characteristics of Navy SEAL mission planning were bottom up, extremely flexible, and short fused. By the time conventional forces finished developing their preliminary course of action briefs, a SEAL could be geared up, out the door, and engaging the enemy. Tom had been trained to think fluidly, to respond to information that could lead him from a dry target to one of high value.

Roland’s mistake was failing to establish visual confirmation of Jill’s well-being. Tom knew something was wrong. He’d heard the panic in her voice. He had no choice but to assume Jill was under duress when she claimed to be fine. That meant she needed to be extracted from the threat.

That was his one and only mission.

Tom kept his plan simple. He would enter through the front door with force, address any threats encountered, and exit with his daughter the way he came in. If there was time, he’d devise a backup plan before engagement. He’d learned that almost no plan survived first contact with the enemy. One of the SEALs many mottos evoked their ruthless determination. “The only easy day was yesterday!” His daughter was the objective. Anybody who stood in his way would be met with violence of action.

From what Roland had relayed, Tom believed his daughter was in Mitchell’s bedroom. He suspected the two were alone. Mitchell wouldn’t have risked attacking Jill otherwise. But if anybody became an obstacle, Tom would act decisively to ensure that the objective was safely extricated from the premises.
No, not the objective,
Tom reminded himself.
His daughter.

Tom could drain himself of most emotion.

Just not all of it.

Tom mentally constructed a probable sequence leading up to his daughter’s phone call. Jill had gone to Mitchell Boyd’s house.

Why?