Fatal Game

by Linda Ladd

  “Something bad is going on. We need to―”

  He stopped in mid-sentence and stood up quickly when his executive assistant, Miki Tudor, tapped on the open door, looking highly apologetic. “Mr. and Mrs. Hammons are out here, Nick. They say it’s urgent. They’re really upset. You better see them.”

  Mr. Hammons didn’t wait for Miki to usher him inside. He pushed past her. “Rico’s gone! Somebody took him!”

  Black’s muscles went to rock, but then he knew―he knew in his heart. Claire and Rico both disappearing at the same time was no coincidence; they were both in trouble. Maybe together. Probably together. Probably connected to Claire’s homicide case. Which involved a psychopathic murderer. His heartbeat went into overdrive.

  Across from him, Booker was on his feet, too, and he looked every bit as worried as Black did. Trying to remain calm, Black was more concerned with what had gone down. “Tell me what happened. What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “We were down at that winter festival out at the mall, you know, the one with the Ferris wheel. He went to buy us some cotton candy and didn’t come back. We were just yards away from that booth, Dr. Black, holding our spots at a picnic table. He was standing there in line at the booth one minute, and we glanced away to watch the carolers, and then when I looked back he was simply gone. We found three cones of cotton candy on sidewalk. He’s in trouble. I know it. I don’t know what to do!” His voice had grown increasingly panicky. He looked about ready to have a heart attack.

  Black’s heart was knocking against his chest, too, but he forced it down. He had to find Rico and Claire, and he had to find them now. “Okay, calm down. I’m going to find him. Try not to worry. This is my friend, John Booker. He and I will handle this. You need to get down to your suite and stay there until I bring him back.”

  “How are you going to find him? Who would take him? He’s such a sweet boy,” Mrs. Hammons said, now in the office with them, too. She was crying and distraught. When her husband put his arms around her and held her close, she buried her face in his coat.

  “Rico’s got a GPS chip in his arm, just in case anything like this ever happened. It’s going to give off a signal, and we can track him, wherever he is.”

  They both looked immediately relieved. “Did somebody take him? Is that what you think?”

  “Has he been kidnapped?” Sally’s voice was verging close to hysteria.

  “I don’t know what happened. But it’s possible. Try not to think the worst. I’m not going to stop until I find him and bring him back here, don’t worry about that.”

  “We tried and tried to call Claire’s number, but she’s not answering. Is she all right?”

  “How long ago did you try to call her?”

  “On the way over here, when we couldn’t find him. The phone just rang and then went to voicemail.”

  “Okay, listen closely: I need you to go down to your suite and sit tight until you hear from me. There’s not a thing you can do until we get him back. Maybe he just got lost somehow. Carnivals are crowded. Or maybe he just got distracted by something he saw in a store window.” None of that was remotely possible, of course, and Black knew it. Rico was a very smart little kid. He acted twice his age most of the time. He had guts and resiliency like no other child that Black had ever seen. Rico didn’t know about the GPS chip, but Black had made the kid promise to always keep his phone with him. Rico would’ve called Black immediately if he had gotten lost or needed help of any kind―unless he was restrained or prevented from calling, and that’s what Black was afraid of. It was the only thing that made sense. Same with Claire.

  Black hastily ushered the Hammonses out of his office, still trying to calm their worries as best he could, but without much avail, not with his own nerves jumping around and threatening to flame up out of control. This was not good. He and Booker had to get on the road, right now.

  Minutes later, they were inside his weapons room, arming themselves. Then, not long after that, they were in the back parking lot, inside Booker’s Jeep. Black was in the passenger’s seat, staring down at Rico’s GPS blinking on his phone.

  “He’s been abducted, goddamn it to hell,” he muttered softly, so angry he could barely speak. “I promised him he’d be safe here with us at the lake, Booker. I thought he was. I thought it was okay for him to go out with the Hammonses. I can’t think who’s got him. Who’d want him enough to do this kind of thing?”

  “Maybe the grandparents are in on it. They have to know how wealthy you are. Maybe all this is a grab for the ransom. Maybe their accomplice is holding him.”

  “No way. You saw their faces. They’re terrified that he’s in danger. Somebody else took him. We’ve got to get to him quick.”

  “Where is he?”

  “GPS puts him about ten miles north of the lake. It’s mainly just woods out there, I think. I’m not all that familiar with the area. We need to get there fast, and I need to find Claire. She’s still not picking up.”

  “You think the same people have her, too, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do. And I’m pretty sure whoever killed that girl in Claire’s homicide case is the one who has them. They may have Jonesy Jax, too. He was with Claire, and there was an FBI guy working with her, too. Claire wasn’t sure she could trust him, so maybe he’s in on the whole thing, as well. Oh God, I can’t believe this is happening again.”

  Within minutes, they were off the hotel grounds and on their way. Black kept calling Claire but got no answer. He called the sheriff’s office and was told they were getting no response, either. Black told them to put out a BOLO on her and Rico, stat. When he called Jonesy’s suite again, he finally got an answer: Candi picked up. She sounded as if she was stoned out of her mind, but managed to tell him that Jax had left with Claire and the Fed about three or four hours ago. He hung up and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. A lot of terrible things could be happening to her. Three hours spent in the company of a homicidal maniac who nailed his victim to a wood bannister. God help him, it was happening again.

  Chapter 22

  Claire came back to awareness slowly, feeling extremely weak and nauseous. Her mind was fuzzy, but her first realization was that she was shivering with cold. Then she realized that her wrists were bound together and her arms were stretched up over her head. That’s the moment when she remembered Jonesy Jax―right after that, she recalled Bob Brady.

  Oh God, Brady was the killer and he’d drugged them both with some kind of dart. She could still feel the drug, clouding her mind and warping her thoughts, making her feel woozy and strange and as if she was going to throw up. But she knew she had to shake that fog off, and shake it off fast. She had to think straight, because she was in a world of hurt. She didn’t know how much yet, but she was going to find out as soon as she forced open her bleary eyes and looked the devil in the face.

  For the first few moments after regaining her faculties, she did not want to do it. Couldn’t make herself face what had to be some extremely bad odds. She didn’t want to see what was happening around her, either. She did not want to face Brady or know what he was doing. But she could hear voices, and it sounded like two men talking to each other. They were not far away from her.

  “Okay, Claire, man up, pull it together before it’s too late,” she told herself firmly, it came out weak and muddled up. Brady had taken her Glock; she couldn’t feel the weight of it under her arm. She shifted her rightfoot enough to realize with a sinking heart that he’d also found the .38 snub nose in her ankle holster. She was completely unarmed. Not good. She sucked in a deep breath, held it inside a second to calm her racing pulse, and told herself firmly that she could do this, that she’d gotten herself out of plenty of tight scrapes before. With monsters just as bad as the one who she feared had her in their control right now. Just do it, do something. Just get yourself free. You have to do it, so go ahead and do it now.
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br />   It still took a few minutes to garner the courage. When Claire forced herself to open her eyes, she wished she hadn’t. She was in some kind of big, open room, but her vision was a little off―everything still looked blurry. The voices were still there. Somewhere nearby. There was a different sound, too, in the background but also close. It sounded like a repetitive sloshing of water—swish, thud, swish, thud, over and over, with spattering and splashing, as if water was raining forcefully down into a pool.

  She struggled desperately to clear the cobwebs in her head. Once she did that, she realized that she was in some kind of gristmill, the old-fashioned kind with the big waterwheel. That’s what she’d been hearing. It was directly in front of her, and very big, maybe twelve feet high and three feet wide, turning very slowly, with lots of creaking and grinding and groaning of ancient wood. There were steps leading down to a lower floor on the right side of the wheel. Okay, there was a way out, right there in front of her. No door, no lock. And there was a big pool of water around the wheel, it looked like. If she recalled, wheels like that had to roll down into a river where the current pushed it around and up again. Another escape hatch, maybe. She shut her eyes again and tried to force herself calm.

  A moment later, Claire blinked away the drug daze impeding her vision and tried to focus on the gristwheel again. It was chugging away, the top rolling forward and down like a Ferris wheel and plunging back into the pool below, or stream, or whatever it was. Then she blinked some more and caught her breath in horror as a body suddenly appeared out of the water, slowly coming up, lashed to the wheel. The head appeared first, and oh God, it was a woman. She was bound to the wheel with ropes. Her body looked frozen solid from the frigid water, her skin white and limbs rigid, but her eyes were open and staring straight at Claire. Then the woman’s body rolled up over the top with the turning wheel, her feet disappearing down the back. Then it rolled on, and to Claire’s horror, a second body appeared tied to the other side. This time it was a man, dressed in a dark suit and tie, a huge red wound on his forehead, the blood frozen in streaming icicles down over his face. His body was frozen, too, eyes hidden under the red ice as he rolled upward and disappeared. Claire stifled a groan, not wanting to see those bodies when they came around again. That was probably what Brady was going to do to her: strap her on a wooden wheel and roll her down into icy water, over and over until she either drowned or froze to death. It was a cruel and medieval method of torture, and she was going to die on that thing, if she didn’t do something about it.

  That’s when Claire’s heartbeat jump-started and sped into overdrive, beating so hard and fast against her breastbone that her body actually moved with it. She had to get loose before somebody strapped her to that wheel! She pulled at the bindings above her head. Her arms were attached to an open ceiling beam. The ropes held tight. Her feet were barely touching the ground but her captor had left them unbound. Okay, that was a good thing, maybe. That gave her the opportunity to kick.

  At that point, Claire made herself suck it up big time, and she inhaled a deep, cleansing lungful of air and tried hard to tamp down her quick-rising panic. Okay, think, Claire. Bob Brady had her. She had to be smart. She had to look around and gauge the situation. She had to see if he was acting alone, find where he was and how she could escape him. So she forced herself to do that. Didn’t like what she faced.

  Off to her right, she could see three other people inside the big room. They were sitting several yards away at a big, round table. There were four chairs, and some kind of game board sitting in the middle of the table. One place left. Her place, she feared. They were waiting for her to wake up and then she was going to have to sit in that empty chair. The game board could only mean small Detection tokens jammed down into body orifices.

  Claire squeezed her eyes shut, and let herself be scared to death for a few seconds. Then she pulled it back under control again and tried to figure out what to do. She opened her eyes but only to a mere slit. She did not want them to know she was awake, because right now they weren’t paying any attention to her. She turned her head slightly and scanned the other side of the room. Over to her left, there was a table sitting against the back wall near a window. She could see her holsters and weapons lying on top of it, both the Glock and the .38. If she could get loose somehow and make it to them, she might have a chance. She chanced a glance back at the two psychopaths, but they hadn’t been watching her. They were too busy torturing their captured rock star.

  Jonesy Jax was sitting in the chair facing her. It looked as if his wrists were tied down onto the table somehow. He was groaning out loud, as if in awful pain, and rolling his head around on his shoulders, maybe fighting to stay conscious. The other two guys were sitting close on either side of him. Neither was bound. They were the nightmare duo, she guessed. She recognized the man on Jonesy’s left right away: that was Bob Brady. The other guy had on glasses―he was the one she’d seen playing chess that day in Games Galore. They were the killers, some kind of tag team from hell. They were smiling at each other, talking, laughing, having a good old time as Jonesy suffered terrible fear and groaned with pain.

  Okay, Claire thought, squeezing her eyes shut again. You cannot panic. You cannot go to pieces. Okay, okay, hold it together. Black was going to miss her and track her with GPS. Unless the killers had disabled her phone, or thrown it away on their way back to this hellhole. They probably had done that. They had showed exemplary skills at the game of murder so far. She knew that, if only from the modicum of clues left behind at the Heather Jax homicide scene. Practiced and proficient killers, for sure, both of them. Who they really were didn’t much matter anymore.

  Buckeye and Shaggy would surely report her missing when she didn’t show up at the morgue. Or at least call her to find out why. She never missed appointments without calling them first. That would alert them, and they would contact Black and he would come and try to find her. But she couldn’t count on help arriving in time to save her life, or Jonesy’s―no way could she just hang there and wait. She had to use her head to get herself out of this godawful mess, and she had to save Jonesy, too. In no way was he capable of getting free on his own. He was already injured and moaning with pain. Claire only hoped he had some residual courage somewhere inside that he could summon up when he needed to. She was going to need his help to get them both out of this hellhole.

  Subtly, she exerted more pressure on the ropes, testing their strength further. They still held fast. Apparently her movements hadn’t been subtle enough―Bob Brady had seen her moving.

  “Well, well, now, look who’s awake, and just in time for game night,” he said in a loud, sarcastic voice. Brady scooted back his folding chair and swaggered over to her while his partner sat watching. He was grinning at her, real friendly-like. He stood right in front of Claire for a moment or two, just staring into her eyes. “Hey there, good lookin’. Bet you’re not feeling so hot right now, are you? That dart had some potent drugs in it. Our own special recipe, made just for victims like you.”

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

  Brady only smiled. “Ah, don’t you worry. You’ll know all our secrets soon enough, I promise. You’re not gonna like them, though. I suppose you noticed our frozen FBI agent over there on the wheel? He’ll come up again in a second, if you missed the show. There’s a lady, too, that we grabbed the other day, just for practice with the tranquilizer gun, you understand. Didn’t want to get it too strong for you to survive. Both of them are losers. They didn’t take to Live or Die well at all. In fact, they were downright terrible at it. Maybe you’ll do better. Hope so, for your sake. I’d like to keep you around for a while, if that’s okay. I’ve got some fun plans for me and you. You shouldn’t’ve treated me so badly, my love. It’s gonna cause some blow back on you in the next few days, you know.”

  After that, Claire kept her mouth shut. Right now, she had to be careful. These guys were lunatics, and she had fa
ced off with these kinds of sicko freaks before. She did not want to get him rattled too soon, so she just stared back at him and attempted to look unafraid. He chuckled softly, and then he pulled a twelve-inch butcher knife off a sheath strapped to his thigh. “Okay, game time, sweetheart. Come along now. I’ve got a feeling you’re gonna give us a run for our money, more than most of the idiots we’ve invited to play with us.” He leaned in close and put his tongue in her ear. She jerked her head away, and then he whispered softly in a rasping voice meant to frighten her. “I wanna play a game. And I wanna do things to you that you just won’t believe. You see, Detective, I saw those pictures of you. That’s why I chose you.”

  Claire set her jaw. “Untie me, you creep. If you want me to play games with you, get ready. I’m good at games. I’ll give you a beatdown at anything you want me to try.”

  Brady looked surprised, and then laughed. “Oh goody, we got us some fire in our girl. I do so like that about you, Claire. I saw it from the beginning. Guts and gumption and always on full display. Better not push your luck, though. Junior over there, he is definitely not as into you as I am. Push the wrong buttons on him, and you’ll end up tied to that wheel before Jonesy even gets his turn.”

  Then he raised the knife. Claire tried not to cringe as he swiped the sharp blade through the taut rope holding her arms aloft. She sagged, but her wrists were still bound together as he jerked her up by one arm and shoved her roughly toward the card table. He slammed her bodily into the empty chair and sat down beside her.

  “Hello, Detective,” said the man he’d called Junior. He was staring intently into her face, a slight smile curving his lips. “You already know Lucky here, so I guess I ought to introduce myself, too, before the games begin.”