I looked around the room, trying to ignore his question. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Chris mumbled and left the room, leaving me standing there, alone.
I needed to find her. I had promised her I wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and I had broken that promise. I rushed out the door and got into my truck, speeding across the city to her apartment.
I had been back at her apartment for a little over an hour, doing my best to recall all that she had told me. I had looked through everything, trying to find anything that may help us find her, but I came up with nothing.
I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, grabbing a bottle of water. I leaned against the counter, cracked it open, and took a drink. Then I glanced down at the table. A mass of credit card statements lay in a pile on the table.
I walked over and picked the top one up, noticing a red circle on the one charge, and beside that a large question mark. I frowned and picked up the next statement and looked at the charge. Nixon’s Storage for seventy-five dollars was circled on multiple statements. I grabbed the other statements that lay underneath and saw the same charge on the past seven statements. I recognized the name from somewhere, and I pulled my phone from my pocket, doing a quick search for Nixon’s Storage.
My heart was immediately in my throat. I was sure it was the same storage facility I had been at a month earlier on the outskirts of Merlot. I quickly dialed the number and waited while it rang.
“Nixon’s storage,” a said.
“Hi, I am wondering if you can tell me if there a storage unit registered to the name of Becca Scott or a Jace Taylor?”
“I’m sorry, unfortunately, due to client confidentiality, I cannot give out that information.”
Irritated, I hung up the phone and made a tight fist. Then I thought back to the strange encounter I’d had there. There had been something about the guy I’d dealt with that hadn’t sat right.
Deliberating no more, I immediately dialed Chris’s number and told him what I’d found and asked him to meet me over at the shop.
Becca
My head pounded as I struggled to open my eyes. I had no idea where I was; everything was dark. I tried to move my arm to wipe at my eyes. Immediately, I felt something bite into my wrists, stopping me from trying to move my arm. A loud bang came from somewhere close by. I froze and listened hard. I heard someone swear under their breath.
Panic really set in. I struggled to try to bring my arms around, but again, something dug into my wrists sharply, causing me to cry a little. They were tied together. I tried to move my feet, but the same thing happened as something sharp seared its way into my skin around my ankles.
Another loud bang caused me to jump. I lay there breathing hard, doing my best not to panic, when I felt someone put their hands on my ankles and pull me roughly into a sitting position. Instantly, I felt pain shooting up my back, and I got dizzy. I could feel myself falling backwards, but instead of letting me fall, I felt someone grab my arm, holding me up. The bright light ripped through my eyes as they ripped the blindfold away. I closed my eyes tightly as a sharp pain ran through my head.
“Open your eyes,” the deep voice drawled.
I tried again to allow my eyes to adjust, finally doing my best to blink a little, but I could barely see. I blinked once, twice, and then a dark silhouette of a man stood in my view. I couldn’t make out who it was as my eyes still hadn’t adjusted yet. I kept blinking, finally realizing that at the moment he was paying no attention to me. He disappeared only to reappear once again, carrying something that he sat down on a wooden table. I blinked hard, my vision returning more to normal, and I looked around. I recognized nothing and had no idea where I was. I once again struggled to move but couldn’t. The anxiety building in my chest was unbearable, and I could hardly breathe. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry, and then I realized that not only did I have tape over my mouth, but someone had shoved something in it—a rag perhaps. Once again, I tried to pull my hands to the front to rip the tape off so I could scream, but again something bit sharply into my wrists, this time causing my eyes to water.
I rested against a wall, looking around, and I realized I was sitting in the back of some vehicle. Another loud bang came from somewhere out of my line of view, and then the same man stepped into view and attached a wire to something.
The man turned and looked my way. His face was covered with a balaclava. My heart rate increased as he took a couple of steps towards me and picked me up as if I were nothing, flinging me over his shoulder. The pain in my head and back made the room spin, and I had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I was roughly thrown down into a chair and faced a tall man. He said nothing, just walked across the room to a bench and stood with his back to me.
I swallowed hard; my throat was now so dry it hurt. I tried to remember how I had gotten here. I remembered the bomb threat being forced to leave my office, people running in every direction when one of my coworkers grabbed me and led me towards the stairwell. I remembered calling Grant and falling behind everyone else. Oh my God, I was supposed to meet Grant. I imagined him waiting for me, panicking when I didn’t show up. Then I remembered being grabbed me from behind as I opened the door to the back parking lot, and everything went black. An arm around my neck and a sharp blow to the head was the last thing I remembered.
I looked over at the tall, masked man and watched as he turned slowly to face me. He stood there for a moment, his eyes running over me, and then he took a step forward.
“So, you’re finally awake. I didn’t even hit you that hard,” he said, running his forefinger down my cheek.
Chills ran through my body. I knew that voice anywhere. He stepped forward and roughly ripped the tape off my face, pulling the rag that had been shoved into my mouth with it. A large gasp of air caused me to cough. I tried to speak, but my throat was so dry it only made me cough more.
He stood there, towering over me, laughing.
“Jace?” my hoarse voice finally rang out.
“Who the fuck you think it is?” he said, pulling the balaclava over his head.
I glanced around the room. It had no windows but was full of boxes and furniture. A white, windowless van sat parked across from me, the back door open. I looked to the large metal roller door, and a chill ran through me. “Where are we?”
“Never mind where we are.”
Fear ran through me and I looked around, noticing a camera up in the room’s corner we were in.
He pulled a chair around and straddled it, sitting down in front of me. He studied me for a moment before he followed my line of view up to the camera. He turned and looked back at me, laughing. “Oh, princess, you think I am that stupid? Those have been deactivated. Your boyfriend won’t be able to come and save you.” He chuckled.
Alarm bells rang out in my head. Did he know Grant?
“What...what do you want?”
“You, you’re what I want, but not in the way you might think.” A slow smile spread across his lips, and I saw a glimmer in his eye I wished I hadn’t seen.
“What?” I couldn’t help but let out a sob. His words only made me cry more.
“Stop your crying, you cheating bitch.” He stood up and paced in front of me for a couple of seconds before sitting back down.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“What are you going to do to me?” he mocked, then turned around and paced in front of me for a couple of seconds then turned back to me. “Well, after I have my way with you, which I will have, by the way, I’m going to kill you. I want your brother to suffer. To suffer the way I did when he killed my brother.”
“No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head, my eyes filling with tears.
Jace stood up and threw the chair he’d been sitting on across the room, the sound of it smashing into a pile of stuff causing me to jump. “ENOUGH!” he screamed, walking to me and picking me up, throwing me over his shoulder.
I felt myself go flying, and then I landed
on my back onto something soft. I looked around through teary eyes and noticed I was on a bed. I looked to where he was standing near a makeshift table. He picked up a knife and a roll of duct tape and held it up for me to see.
He walked over to me and knelt onto the bed.
“No, please, Jace, get away from me,” I cried, doing my best to squirm away from him. “I’ll do whatever you want,” I begged.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he mocked again. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for those words to come out of your filthy little mouth?”
I used my legs to squirm my way up to the top of the mattress away from him, but one hand on my leg and a rough tug and he had pulled me back down to him.
“Please, we can talk this through,” I begged.
“Becca, enough. It’s too late. I gave you the chance many times to do as I wanted. It was impossible, and you left me no choice. Now shut up.”
I let out a cry for help, screaming at the top of my lungs. My throat felt like it was on fire.
He pulled a piece of tape from the roll quickly, and without another word, placed it over my mouth, muffling my cries for help. He then picked up the knife and held it up against my cheek, slowly pushing the cold steel against my hot skin.
“No one is here. No one is coming or you. You get that. All your brother is going to find is his sister’s mangled body, that is it.”
I froze as the tears poured. My chest burned from trying to suck in air that wasn’t there. He placed his hand on my shoulder, holding me on my back, and I felt his hand at the waist of my jeans. He flicked the button open with his fingers, and then he took the knife and cut the zip tie from around my ankles.
Grant
I pulled out front of my shop and checked my phone for a message from Chris, but there was nothing yet. I climbed out of the truck and walked over to the front door, inserting the key into the lock.
Screeching tires caught my attention, and I turned to see Chris pull his truck into a parking space behind mine and jump out of his truck. “Hey, man, what did you find out?” he yelled as he came running toward the front door.
I held up the credit card statements and pulled the door open. “You need to look at these,” I said as I rushed into my office as fast as I could and handed the bills to Chris for him to look at while I shuffled through the invoices on my desk.
“What is this?” he asked, staring down at the red circles and question marks that stood out on the pages he held in his hand.
“I asked her to go through her credit card statements and circle anything she didn’t recognize. FUCK!” I shouted as I slammed the pile of invoices I had been going through onto my desk.
“Okay, so did he steal her card?”
“I think so. I called Nixon’s Storage. They wouldn’t give me any information, but I also know the name of the place. I am sure I did an install there a few weeks back, in one of the lockers.”
Chris looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I glanced around my office and saw another stack of invoices sitting on top of the filing cabinet. I reached for it and began sorting through the papers again. “I really need to get these files in order,” I mumbled.
“So why don’t we go check the place out? It’s just on the outskirts of Merlot.”
A surge of adrenaline rushed through me as I stared down at the invoice halfway through the pile. There it was. I had been there. I handed Chris the invoice, and then a note on my desk caught my eye: disconnect Nixon Locker Cam.
“You installed a camera inside of a storage locker?” he questioned, looking at the invoice.
I heard Chris, but all I could do was stare down at the note that sat on my desk. I could remember Gale standing in my doorway talking to me about it when Becca had called. I had rushed to her and forgot to disconnect the feed.
“Grant? Did you hear me? Who the hell would want to pay for a monitoring feed inside of a locked storage locker?”
I pushed past Chris on my way back to my monitoring room, ignoring his question. Would this guy really be this stupid?
“Grant, would you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”
I flipped the monitor on and cycled through the feeds, my heart pounding as I came to the one I was looking for.
“Grant, please, we are wasting time here.”
I looked over at Chris and pointed to the monitor. There in front of me, on the screen, was Becca. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was point to the monitor as I watched some guy kneel between her legs and hold a knife up to her cheek as she cried. A surge of anger rushed through me. I wanted to tear the guy limb from limb, and I worked hard to calm my anger.
“Holy fuck,” Chris whispered under his breath as he stood watching with me. “We’ve got to go.”
Chris tore his cell phone from his back pocket and dialed as he ran out of the room. I could hear him talking but couldn’t move from where I stood. Every nerve in my body was on fire as I stood watching the screen. Watching as the girl I had loved my entire life lay on a bed crying, scared to death. Her captor moved out of sight, moments later back into sight on the screen. He knelt on the bed, gripping her by the legs, pulling her closer to him. I flipped the feed to see what the rest of the room looked like. I studied the items on the table, and that was when I noticed a makeshift bomb.
“Grant, let’s go. My boss is going to meet us there,” Chris called.
It was all I could do to tear myself away from the monitor and headed out the door.
“Police are on their way.”
“We have to hurry. There is a bomb,” I gritted.
I rushed out the door, locking it behind me, and ran to my truck.
We pulled into the parking lot of Nixon’s Storage. Emergency vehicles were everywhere, and we approached the officers at their command post.
“What do we know?” Chris’s boss asked.
“She’s in there. There is a bomb just inside the door on a table. It’s a homemade job. I used to deal with these all the time when I was overseas. They are pretty easy to dismantle,” I said, fighting my urge to run in there and save her.
“Grant, calm down. You aren’t going in there,” The captain said, holding his hands up to calm me.
“Do we know whose locker it is?” Chris asked, crossing his arms across his chest.
“Belongs to a Jace Taylor, known alias for Steve Mann,” the sergeant answered, looking directly at Chris, giving him a knowing look.
I glanced in Chris’s direction, his face going pale at the mention of the name. Chris said nothing. He just stood there staring back at his sergeant.
“Chris, you care to tell me what is going on here?” I questioned, my hands forming into tight fists.
“Steve Mann was the younger brother of the gang member I took out a few years back,” Chris murmured. “He got into some trouble with me after his brother died. He was granted bail maybe ten months ago, but he’s not supposed to be in this area.”
This was all a setup to get back at Chris. I frowned, my anger rising in me again.
Suddenly, a loud scream, followed by a loud bang, rang out from inside the storage garage. It cut the tension mounting between Chris and me and instantly, the officers, myself, and Chris ran in the direction it had come from.
Becca
“Stop screaming. I told you there is no one here who is going to save you.” The words gritted through Jace’s clenched teeth as he held the cold steel of the gun to my temple. “That was a warning shot. Another scream and I promise I will make this one count.”
He covered my mouth with another strip of tape as he held my now-free hands over my head with one of his. He placed the gun back on the mattress beside me and continued trying hard to force his free hand into my pants.
Suddenly, a bang at the door pulled his attention away from me. He ripped his hand away, grabbed the gun, and got up off the mattress. I scurried away, balling myself up into the farthest corner I could get.
“Who’s there?” he calle
d out.
Another cling against the door was all I could hear.
“Everything okay in there?” I heard a voice call out.
Jace turned to look at me and held his finger up to his lips, signaling for me to be quiet. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly as the tears rolled down my cheeks.
“I heard a loud bang in there and am just checking to make sure you are all right?”
“Everything is fine,” he barked out. “Just dropped something,” Jace lied.
I glanced to the side doors and realized that Jace had forgotten to lock the roll door from the inside, which meant that whoever was on the outside could get in if they tried.
“You sure? Do you need any help?” the voice asked from the other side of the door.
I sat there praying someone lifted the door and noticed that Jace was now staring at me and turned to follow my line of sight. His eyes practically bulged out of his head when he noticed the door had not been secured. He took a few steps towards the door and did his best to lean over stuff that was in his way to reach the lock. I reached around, ripping the tape from my mouth, and let out a cry for help while Jace fought to make his way to the latch.
Jace turned in my direction and raised his gun just as the door was lifted.
“Drop your weapon.”
A shot fired out. I rolled into a tight ball, and then a burning pain flooded my body. The last thing I remembered was falling off the mattress before I passed out.
Bright lights shone into my eyes, and a dab of something cold and wet touched my forehead. Immediately, a surge of panic flew through me, and I flung my arms in front of me to stop whoever was there, a searing pain ripping through my arm causing me to stop.
“Whoa, whoa, calm down,” I heard, as I felt firm hands grab hold of mine. “Shh, it’s okay, you’re okay.”
I slowly calmed and allowed my view to come into focus. A doctor stood in front of me. “Becca, I’m Dr. Ava Moody, and you are at St. John’s Hospital. We are treating you for a bullet graze to the arm and a few minor cuts and bruises,” she said, taking a step closer to me and continuing to dab at my head.
Saviour Boy (The All American Boy Series) Page 6
