Eye of the Nightingale

by R. D. Hunter

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  These servers were very secure, except for a tiny master command that allowed access to anything in its system. It was a backdoor and I’d have never known about it if King hadn’t told me the last time we checked in. He also gave me the password. It took the computer less than a minute to boot up.

  I inserted the little flash drive and began browsing. There it was. All of it.

  Receipts for fictional services rendered. Invoices for procedures that were scheduled only on paper. And a laundry list of all the money that had come in and gone out in the last two years. It was in the six figures, and every bit of it went in Lowry’s own pocket.

  I allowed myself a grin. Gotcha, you bastard. There was way too much stuff here to print off. I’m talking volumes of data, each more damning than the last. So, I did the next best thing. I copied, pasted and emailed it to myself. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I emailed it to King too. Why be greedy?

  With my mission accomplished, I loaded everything back in the fake drawer just like I’d found it, made sure I hadn’t left any telltale signs of my little visit and vamoosed.

  I heard Jenny’s bubbly laughter float down the hallway. She was still laying it on thick to the pervert in the office, but his hope was being replaced by annoyance since she wasn’t putting out. I flashed her a thumbs up as I slipped by and she nodded almost impercepively. She’d join me in a minute.

  I made my way downstairs, humming the entire time. Once again, no one was around to ask what I was up to and I walked out and through the front doors before anyone even knew I was there. The parking lot was empty, so I skipped the last couple of steps to the car.

  Tomorrow was going to be a new day for Sunny Pines and the residents here.

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  With the information I’d found, King would be able to nail Lowry to the wall and use his skull for a goblet. With a new man in the seat of power, the abuse and neglect I’d seen here would no longer be swept under the rug. It’d be dealt with in the only way that made any sense; harshly.

  I was so giddy I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me. I was so cut off from outside stimuli that all I felt was a brief surge of excitement, right before a foul smelling cloth was clamped around my nose and face. It was the freezer all over again.

  I kicked and struggled, doing my best to dislodge the attacker. It was no use. My arms and legs became heavy after only a few seconds and my thoughts were mired down in heavy cobwebs. I vaguely recognized the effects of anesthesia taking hold.

  I knew who it was, but terror still gripped my heart when I heard Lawson breathe into my ear. “Gotcha, Bitch.” Then everything went dark.

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  Chapter Twenty Two

  Pain brought me back to life. Pain everywhere. Enough that it made me open my eyes and instantly wish I hadn’t. I was in the back seat of a car going somewhere at a very fast pace. My hands and feet were bound with what appeared to be fishing twine and it hadn’t been done gently. I couldn’t feel any of my fingers and my toes already had pins and needles in them. I’d been gagged too, which was unfortunate because I had quite a bit to say right then. None of it pleasant.

  Someone up front was talking. I recognized Lawson’s voice at once. “Finally got her. No one to save her this time. No one’s gonna interrupt us. You hear me, Bitch?

  We’re gonna have loads of fun together, you and me. Gonna make you wish your Daddy never squirted you out.”

  To my surprise, someone answered him. “Let’s just get this over with. No funny stuff.” It was Randy, the bully from the cafeteria. He must have been the one to let Lawson into Sunny Pines. I knew he was a creep and a half, but I hadn’t expected him to go this far down the road to scumville.

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  Lawson cackled and I felt the car swerve radically. “It’s all funny, my friend.

  Yep, gonna be a laugh riot when we get there.”

  Panic crawled inside me and laid an egg. This was no bluff. If I didn’t get away I would suffer unimaginable torment at Lawson’s hands and death would come as a gift. I had to get away.

  I struggled with my bonds, but all I got for my efforts was a deep throaty laugh from Lawson. “Look who’s awake,” he said, reaching back to give me a little slap. “You just save your energy, Bitch. We got a long night ahead of us.”

  I tried giving him the finger, but the numbness had taken hold to such a degree that it was impossible. So I glared as menacingly as I could. He wasn‘t impressed.

  “Hey, keep your eyes on the road,” Randy said. “You wanna get us killed?”

  Lawson chuckled. “Relax. Only one person gonna get killed tonight. And it ain’t gonna be us.”

  “Just pay attention.” Randy was agitated and far from comfortable with current events. I got the impression he was in over his head. Knocking around senior citizens and skimming off the top whenever the opportunity presented itself had been his thing.

  Kidnapping, assault and murder was above his pay grade.

  That gave me the glimmer of an idea. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had. And if it didn’t work, I was no worse off than I was now. I was still going to die.

  I focused on Randy’s agitation. It was just below the surface. He didn’t try hard to hide it. I strained with every force of will I could muster to poke and prod that agitation until it started to grow and fester.

  Desperation gave me strength I didn‘t know I had. Soon, Randy started squirming

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  in his seat. His hands clenched and relaxed in his lap. Lawson’s voice was grating him. I was making headway.

  I really amped up the pressure, trying with everything I had to stoke the fires in his head into a full blown rage. And I had just the target for him to take out his aggression.

  “SHUT UP! JUST YOU SHUT THE HELL UP!” he roared.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Lawson asked, glancing at his partner in alarm. It was the wrong thing to say.

  Randy reached back and planted a beautiful right cross on Lawson’s jaw that snapped his head around and caused him to grunt in pain. In an instant, the two men were fighting like animals, the steering wheel all but forgotten.

  It all happened so quickly. One second we’re cruising along at better than sixty miles an hour over smooth asphalt. The next, the world is turning upside down as the car hit the ditch and went flying end over end, finally coming to rest.

  Something crashed hard into the side of my head and, once again, awareness left me. I must have only been out for a few seconds because the car was still shaking when I came to. I hurt everywhere, having been thrown around the cab like a rag doll. The car was on its roof and I lay in a crumpled heap on the ceiling. Not a good place to be.

  I could vaguely make out the shapes of Lawson and Randy still safely buckled in their seats. Neither was moving. Now was my chance. My only chance.

  I wiggled a little bit, testing the extent of my injuries. Pain lanced up and down both sides of my chest. I knew I had one or more broken ribs. I tasted blood in my mouth, but it didn’t seem to be coming from my lungs, so I didn’t think they’d been punctured.

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  My vision was blurry, I had trouble focusing and my head hurt like a sonofabitch.

  Possible concussion there. Otherwise, aside from still being bound and gagged in a wrecked car with two murderous psychos, I was in tip-top shape.

  All I wanted to do was lay there and go to sleep. The pain in my extremities was fading to a dull ache and I actually felt like I could catch a couple Z’s if I tried hard enough. This was dangerous. My body was probably going into the first stages of shock and if I faded out now, it was entirely possible I’d never wake up.

  So I rallied every ounce of strength I had and forced my eyes to stay open. First things first. I needed to find something to cut myself loose. Considering the amount of broken glass
and twisted metal all around me, that didn’t prove too difficult.

  Most of the glass was in little bits, too small to do anything other than dig into my skin. Fortunately, the passenger door frame was bent at an awkward angle and one corner jutted out dangerously. I carefully positioned my bound wrists against it and began to saw up and down. It wasn’t easy. More than once I felt the metal digging into my skin rather than the fishing twine and before long, my wrists were slick with blood. But I felt the strands loosening and, after a few minutes that felt like hours, they came apart with a snap.

  I wasted no time in jerking the gag out of my mouth, licking my parched and cracked lips and going to work on my ankles. It took less time to get them free, but that was helped by the fact that I heard groaning and movement coming from the front seat.

  My two kidnappers were coming around, and I doubted they’d be happy to see me freeing myself.

  With my bonds cut, I started dragging myself through one of the busted windows

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  and towards the open, night air. If I could just get outside I could find help, or at least get a running start.

  A scream burst out of me when I felt a hand clamp around one of my ankles and hold tight. “Hey, Bitch. Where’n you think yer goin,” a slurred voice said. It was Lawson. Judging from the way he spoke and the confusion I felt rolling through him, he was in even worse shape than me. But he was still aware enough to know that his prize was getting away, and was more than capable of finishing the job here and now if he thought he wouldn’t get another chance.

  He started to yank me back in the car and I used my free foot to mule kick him with all my might. It wasn’t much, but there was a meaty sound as my tennis shoe hit something soft and fleshy. Lawson grunted and the grip on my ankle relaxed enough to allow me to shake free. I crawled for my life.

  Once outside, I found myself on the side of a steep hill. The car had vaulted over a guard rail, rolled a couple of times and was leaning up against two trees that had stopped its decent. The roadway and my best chance of survival was about thirty feet up the embankment. I heard Lawson yelling in pain and outrage and the shift of metal as he struggled to free himself. That was enough motivation for me. I got to climbing.

  Normally, this wouldn’t have been a difficult feat. The ground was firm, but not hard and the terrain wasn’t so steep that I had to search for hand or foot holds. But this wasn’t a normal situation.

  I was hurting everywhere. The pins and needles in my hands and feet were rapidly turning into hot daggers as the circulation returned. My head was throbbing so bad I wouldn’t have been surprised if it decided to spontaneously combust on the spot. All that,

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  combined with the trauma I’d already suffered from my time in the deep freeze and the energy it’d taken out of me to ignite Randy’s anger, had pushed my body to the limits of its endurance. I couldn’t take much more punishment.

  Halfway up, my knees gave out and I was obliged to start crawling the rest of the way. Reaching the top became my life. If I made it, I lived. If not, I’d die on the side of this hill with no one being the wiser.

  Almost there. Ten more feet. Then five. Just as I crested the top and relief started to sink in, a huge weight landed on my back. Pain lanced up and down my chest and I heard at least two of my broken ribs grind against each other. I tried to cry out, but all the air had left out, leaving me with no way to verbally express this new anguish.

  Something grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. “Where ya goin, Bitch? We still got a date tonight.”

  Lawson rolled me over and straddled me. I was done. I couldn’t move if I tried.

  All the strength had gone out of me and I just prayed the end would come without too much pain involved. But as a nasty grin split Lawson’s grizzly face from ear to ear, I knew that wouldn’t be the case.

  “Thought you were pretty lucky, huh?” he said. The left side of his face was covered in blood, but his emotions were so amped up right I didn’t think he even felt it.

  Even if I’d been rested and in top physical and mental shape, I don’t think I’d have had much of a chance getting through that mire of anger and violence. I wasn’t even sure Jonah could have toned him down.

  “You and me gonna have some playtime,” Lawson continued, beginning to paw at my face with his right hand. “I’m gonna show you what you’ve been missing. Then I’m

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  gonna make you beg. Teach you your place.”

  Right. Sure. Whatever. Let’s just get it over with.

  Something buzzed by my ear. I didn’t have the strength or the inclination to swat it away. It landed on my bare arm and a fresh, hot burning sensation lanced into my flesh as its stinger bit into me.

  A bee. There was a bee’s nest nearby. A wild thought shot through my hazy mind.

  Could that be my salvation?

  A thin hope began to form in my mind. I closed my eyes and reached out with my empathic senses, setting Lawson and his psychotic rant well into the background.

  Yes, there they were! Just a few feet to my left. It was a swarm, a colony of hundreds of tiny little lights of instinct. I sensed them buzzing around underground, irritated by the commotion Lawson and I were making. That was the ticket.

  I focused on that irritation, fanning those pinpricks of light into a roaring flame.

  There nest was in danger. That was the message I sent. It was weak. I knew it was. But it was enough to ignite their protective instinct into overdrive and I felt them swarm out of their hole in the ground.

  The big one! He’s the danger. He’s after your nest. Wants to kill you and take over.

  I don’t know how much got through, but the result was beyond even what I expected. Lawson had only a half second to look up with an “Oh” expression before hundreds of pissed off insects armed with stingers lit in on him, almost completely covering him from head to toe. Some landed on me by mistake, but I welcomed the sharp little spasms of pain they brought with them. Because whatever I was feeling, Lawson

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  felt a hundred times worse.

  He screamed in agony and began flailing uselessly in the air around him. Panic welled up in him and bled through into me. I was too weak to do anything about it, though, and just ground my knuckles into the dirty to keep some semblance of sanity.

  Lawson continued to wail as he got up and started running. I don’t know where he thought he was going. There was no water nearby. No sign of anything that could dissuade the little soldiers from their target. I guess he thought if he could just get far enough away, they wouldn’t chase him anymore.

  In his muddled state, he chose the easiest path where he could make the best time; the roadway. What he failed to do, however, was check to make sure there was nothing coming. There was.

  A semi-truck carrying heavy machinery plowed into Lawson’s flailing form.

  There was a sickening crunch, a moment of surprise then anything I could sense of Donald Lawson was gone. The truck’s brakes screeched into the night as they locked down, jerking the huge vehicle to a skidding halt.

  I heard the door open and close as the driver got out. Even from here, I could feel his dismay and fear. He’d hit someone. He’d hit and killed someone. His life was over.

  “Help,” I called out. My voice was as weak as the rest of me and I had to take a few breaths before trying again. “Help. I’m down here. Please, help me.”

  That got his attention. I felt him coming towards where I lay, then a bright flashlight shone down on my still form.

  “Holy Hell,” I heard the driver say. “Miss, what happened to you? Was that your husband there? Oh, God! If it was, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I swear.” I heard and

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  felt him choke up.

  A smile found its way to my face. “Believe me, he wasn’t my husband. And if you hadn’t kille
d him, he’d have probably killed me.”

  The truth began to dawn on my unwilling rescuer as he took in the state of me.

  “You mean he…?”

  I nodded. It hurt. “Yeah. There’s another one in the car just down the hill. They kidnapped me.” The night became heavier and I knew I couldn’t talk much longer.

  “Think you can get an ambulance on the way?”

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  Chapter Twenty Three

  The trucker, whose name was Bradley Green, did his civic duty. He called every emergency service within a twenty mile radius. Soon, blue and red lights lit up the area like it was the fourth of July. I didn’t see any of this, though. My last vestiges of strength gave out and I didn’t remember anything more until the next day when I came to in the hospital.

  Jenny was the first face I saw, of course. She was sitting in the chair beside my bed reading a magazine. She closed it when she heard me groaning and held a glass of water to my lips. It was the best thing I’d ever drunk and I sucked it down greedily.

  “Five minutes,” she said. “I take my eye off you for five minutes and you get shanghaied and run through a demolition derby.” It was all a front. She was shaking from head to toe, but I felt her relief at seeing my eyes open.

  “To be fair, it was more like ten minutes.”

  “Care to tell me what happened?” I told her, leaving nothing out. I didn’t have the strength to lie. When it was over, she came over and gave me a warm hug while being as

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  gentle as possible.

  “You had us worried, Chick,” she said, wiping tears out of her eyes. “Everyone was looking for you. I thought King was going to call in the National Guard.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “I know for a fact he has a little clout with the President.”