Missing Lynx (30 page)

Ski-Mask reached around me under my arms; Maria took my feet by the shackles, and they rushed me, without a fight, down to a vehicle waiting in the driveway, and threw me in the back like a bag of garbage.

Twenty-Nine

I
was stunned - in shock. I needed to keep my head together. I needed to figure out where they were taking me, count off minutes, pay attention to turns, get a plan together. Now I’d only be protecting myself; I wouldn’t be endangering anyone. Those were my thoughts, when the sharp hypodermic needle pricked my arm. My muscle burned from the liquid being plunged into my tissue. Little by little, my world went foggy.

Time passed. The drugs made lucid nightmares that I could taste with my hands and hear with my eyes. Like a trip down the rabbit hole, my senses were on a wild teacup ride, spinning uncontrollably. I rumbled and bounced in the back of the van. It was hard to breathe through the bag. Coming out of the medicated-fog, with my mind starting to function again, terror consumed me. I needed to keep myself distracted — needed to visualize good outcomes.

Help had been moments away. They would free Gater. Gater would have Iniquus fully mobilized. Striker would be there by now.

My phone was shoved into my bra. Iniquus could follow me through the GPS. No wait. I didn’t have my smart phone. Tammy had called me on my personal phone, which was an older phone that would need a phone call to ping off a tower to get a very generalized location – nothing specific and nothing immediate. With no GPS, Iniquus would be triangulating pings from the cell towers. And then I remembered my phone ringer was on. If someone tried to call me, Maria would find my phone on me and right now it seemed like my only hope. Did she pat me down when I was unconscious? I rolled onto my belly and felt the hard case of the phone press into the flesh of my breast. No. I still had it. Surely, Iniquus would ask the phone company to do something. Forward my calls. Something. . .

I needed to get a grip already - and trust in my team.

It turned out that I was right to speak only English around Maria. She felt comfortable talking openly with the man, Hector, in Spanish. He sounded like a paid thug - not invested in the mission. Maybe I could work with that at some point.

“Stop worrying, already,” Maria ordered. “No one saw your face. No one knows anything about you. Just take us to the airport, and help me to get her on the plane. She won’t even be in the States. She won’t be a threat.”

What the…not in the States? A plane?

“What about now? You keep using my name. Stop calling me by my name.”

“She’s drugged. She can’t hear us. Besides, she doesn’t know Spanish. She won’t be able to distinguish your name from any other word I’m saying, so stop making issues.”

“What about my van? Surely someone saw it. What about that guy who came out on the porch when we drove away? He looked at us pretty hard.”

“Who? Manny? He’s an idiot. Don’t worry about him. Look, if you’re really concerned, call the police in the morning and report the van stolen, then ditch it somewhere. It’s not your damned van anyway – you said it was your girlfriend’s. Tell her it was stolen and put it in the woods.”

Manny was on the porch? Manny wasn’t an idiot. He was hyperaware of the comings and goings of our neighborhood. He has an ex- who disappeared, and he was always afraid she might resurface and take his boys. Our street was pretty protected. There was no reason for through traffic; if you were on Silver Lake it was because you lived there, or you were visiting, not driving through. Hope. A bright light. Manny would notice a van at one in the morning. That was what I told myself at any rate. Maybe the police had issued a BOLO already. Maybe they’d find us before we reached the airport.

I took the clasp of my handcuffs and started scratching as best I could, unseeing, and behind my back, into the paint on the floor: “skylinks.” Hopefully, this would be legible and cryptic enough that Hector and Maria still wouldn’t realize I understood them. I knew it was a long shot; but if the van had been in the neighborhood long enough, then the license would be in a log that Blaze and Jack kept while running a sweep of the area. If they could find the van, they would do a thorough search; they might find my name and know to look for me…far away. Shit. Even if all the “mights” came true, would this help? No.

It seemed like we’d been driving a long time. That dimmed my hopes. We’d stopped for gas. Surely if they’d planned to drive any kind of distance, they would have started with a full tank. Okay, say fifteen miles to the gallon, twenty-gallon tank - we had gone about 300 miles. Are you kidding me? If that were true, then I had been out for hours.

It sounded like Hector was paying at the pump. That was good. Very good. If Manny had the van plate, or Tammy or Iniquus did, then they could trace the owner. If they looked for the owner, she could name the boyfriend, and they could get the credit reports and have his card numbers. The computers would pick up his transactions. Iniquus would know I was – well, wherever the heck I was. Help could be on its way right now. Yes, right this minute a police alert could be going out. My friends from my police department would be calling in favors – they’d be searching for me as if I were one of their own. Someone would find me before I got to the airport.

Again we drove. Again we stopped for gas. Again we drove. I had been playing as if I were still drugged. I thought that was safest, and also put Maria and Hector at ease so they’d do their most talking. I was too uncomfortable; I had to go to the bathroom. I needed something to drink. My hands and feet had swollen in the tight restraints.

I moaned loudly. “Consuela? Are you there, Consuela?”

“What?” she asked in English.

“I need to go to the bathroom badly. I need some water.”

She conferred with Hector in Spanish. I guess this was the part they hadn’t figured out. We stopped. Hector took the bag off my head. I could see out the front window that we were at an old mom-and-pop station with the bathrooms on the side. Maria went in for the key. She brought back some bottled water and two packages of peanuts. Hector swung the van around pulling up next to the girls’ bathroom. Maria opened her van door and then opened the bathroom door – effectively screening me from view.

“Make a sound, and I’ll cut your tongue out of your head.” Leopard eyes sliced at me, hard and glittery.

Hector had to help me; he half carried me out of the back of the van. I reflexively looked down at the license plate: SNK OIL.

My legs were numb from lack of circulation. Maria unlocked my hands, and I quickly considered my options. If I had any use of my legs, I knew I could have made a good try for freedom. I was still woozy; my knees buckled under me. Hector ended up having to take me into the bathroom; I couldn’t manage it on my own.

I would like to say that Hector was a gentleman and turned his face to the door while I lowered my jeans, but that wasn’t the case. He gawked, and smirked, and watched everything I did with a leer. I took a chance, and used my sleight-of-hand skills to take out my phone and turn the ringer sound off. Hector was pretty much focused on other parts of me as I lowered my hand beside the toilet. I turned my phone on and dialed 911, then quickly disconnected before a voice could come out of the receiver. I prayed that it was long enough to ping over the cell tower, that Iniquus would know about where I was and was now sending the Calvary.

I set my phone on silent mode and stuck it back in my bra. I yanked a clump of hair out of my head to leave in the van as DNA evidence. I wouldn’t be able to reach my head once I had the cuffs back on. As I finished up in the bathroom, Hector stared at me, glassy-eyed. He licked his lips, making me nervous for my immediate safety. I was depending on Maria’s authority, whatever that was, to keep Hector’s lascivious hands off me.

As Hector put me back in the van, I looked around to see what I could see. The sun was almost directly overhead, it was close to noon. That meant we had been driving for about eleven hours. The cars parked across the back of the station all had Florida plates. We must be on 95 heading south. There was nothing else to see, and no one around to see me. No one would be making a sheepish call to the police to say they saw something unusual; a shackled woman was being thrown in the back of a van. 

We sat for a few minutes while I ate my peanuts and drank a bottle of water, then they cuffed me behind my back, and we took off. The bag was back on my head. I lay on the cold, dirty, metal floor and prayed

Thirty

I
woke up to hard hands on me. They pulled me from the back of the van by my ankles. I could smell pine trees. A flock of geese honked in the distance. I was hoisted up like a bag of potatoes and slung over someone’s shoulder. Hector’s? I had seen his face when I was in the bathroom. I was afraid that that meant he would want to kill me, but he seemed satisfied to dump me unceremoniously into an airplane seat and buckle a belt around me.

Another door opened, and I heard Maria talking to the pilot in Spanish, “The package is tightly wrapped. You won’t have any problems with her. There will be a guard from the prison at the airport to pick her up. Remember - you want your money? You get her there on time and in good condition.”

“Done,” came a man’s voice in front of me.

As we flew, I couldn’t talk to the pilot to get information. I tried a few words, and he told me clearly, “No English.” I listened to the radio instead, trying to get a grasp on where we were headed. My pilot wasn’t staying in contact with a tower. He didn’t call in when we took off, and he never reported our position.

I had no sense of time and no sense of direction. I slumped in the seat, dazed and confused, struggling to get enough air through my bag. The plane bucked across uneven ground - this was not a normal runway landing. This was a field landing, rough, and nauseating. I knew we were in a prop, not a jet, by the sound of the engine.

If we left from Florida, how far could we possibly get? It depended on how big this plane was. It felt substantial. I was sitting behind the pilot so it wasn’t a two-seater. It might have been reconfigured with extra fuel bladders; still, we wouldn’t have the fuel range to fly far. Four, five-hundred miles? Maria said I was leaving the States. The best they could do was to get out into the Caribbean to an island somewhere.

I heard the pilot make noises on the side of the plane. Refueling. It sounded like he was using a hand pump. After some time, the pilot opened my door. He touched me, and I keeled over. I wanted to see how much this guy wanted to deliver his package in good condition. I made choking noises, and went silent. Sure enough, Pilot panicked. He grabbed the bag off my head and unfastened my hands from behind my back. He rubbed circulation back into my arms.

I listened to the radio. I could hear pilots talking to a control tower. Isla de la Juventud. I was in Cuban territory. That preempted any thoughts of escaping. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck in Cuban territory with the possibility of being charged with espionage. With my Iniquus credentials… well, things were looking dim. I was going to have to try my escape at our next stop – if there was a next stop.

Pilot worked hard at bringing me back around. Now that an escape wasn’t on the table, I was done playing with him. I blinked my eyes open. The pilot let out a sigh of relief, handcuffed me again — thankfully in front of my body — and put me back in my chair - this time without the bag.

We didn’t take off. We sat on the runway. I wondered if we were waiting for someone here. I desperately hoped this wasn’t our final destination, and that he was waiting to do a transfer. Day turned to night. There was the sound of an engine, and lights bounced toward the plane. My heart stammered in my chest. Now what? The pilot got out and spoke with someone. They weren’t talking about me. They were talking about boxes. The pilot didn’t want the man to approach our plane. He would transfer the boxes himself. I counted twenty, not that it mattered to me. I guessed I needed something to do with my mind. Terror was an insidious emotion. Even this little distraction was helpful.

Come morning, the pilot opened a brown paper bag and ate breakfast. He had bread, cheese, and a couple of juice boxes. I had been more than 36 hours with only a bag of peanuts, but he didn’t offer me anything. I was faint from the heat. I asked for some water, pretending to painfully search for and finally come up with the word
agua
. The pilot pulled out a plastic bottle and handed it to me. It wasn’t particularly clean, yet I couldn’t have cared less. My throat was parched.

The pilot jumped out and made a check of his plane. We took off again. Now I could see some of the instrumentation; we were heading southwest. Not good.

We were in the air for hours. As we descended, I scanned the terrain for clues, for possibilities. This time we landed at an actual airport, not some drug smuggler’s secret grass strip. The airport was small, though, and not in the best of shape.

The door opened to a uniformed guard. He unbuckled me. I had been dozing with my head down. Damp and limp, the effects of Maria’s drugs still hadn’t fully worn off. He brushed my hair from my face and took a good look at me. I was obviously not a threat. He released my cuffs and the shackles on my feet. The guy’s partner protested.

“Are you kidding?” the guard asked in Spanish, “You’re worried about this little thing? Look at her. She’s half dead, and it will be easier for us to get her out of here if she can walk out on her own.”

Well, that was optimistic. I couldn’t walk at all. My legs had lost all feeling hours and hours ago. It took the two of them, on either side of me, to half-carry, half-drag me to their truck and push me in, to sit between them. They handed the pilot a fat envelope. He saluted and took off again. I never heard the pilot’s name.

No one talked while we drove. I begged my body to cooperate –to focus and stay lucid; I needed to know how to get back to this airport. We drove about half an hour, never making a turn. 20 kilometers - that’s about twelve miles – less than a two hour run. Hah. There was my optimism again.