The sounds of the road underneath ended, and the hum of the engine cut off. Someone had turned off the vehicle.
Her captor.
Feeling her way down her body, Reggie tried to figure out what she could do. There had to be a way to get free. Her eyes were covered, her mouth gagged, her limbs tied, but there had to be something.
If only she were smart enough to figure it out.
There was a grunt and the sound of a foot landing on the floor of the vehicle, a hollow, metallic sound. That was not the noise that a footstep would make in your typical Suburban or Escalade.
Was she in a van? That would make sense. There seemed to be nothing underneath her body other than a rubber mat, which would jibe nicely with a paneled van.
“You’re awake, don’t try to pretend,” came the voice.
It always seemed like her captor was happy to see her, almost chipper in a way. But today there was an underlying tension there that she couldn’t identify.
“It won’t be much longer, Officer Black.” The man sighed. “I hate being so formal with you. I like Regina so much better. And Reggie? Such a wonderful nickname. Spunky. Do you mind if I call you Reggie?”
There was a choice here. She could continue to be a passive participant in this story, or she could step in and try to effect change.
As far as she was concerned, that wasn’t really a choice. If there was something to be done, she wanted to do it, even if it ended up being the wrong thing.
So she answered him in the only way she could. She nodded her head.
“You don’t mind? Really?” There was a catch in the man’s voice. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
An idea sparked in Reggie’s brain. A way in which she might be able to get under her captor’s skin. It was a risk. A terrible one. In so many ways almost worse than the idea of being killed and chopped into parts to be scattered around the US.
It would also be tricky. She would have to tread a fine line. Stepping off could make things worse.
She almost chuckled to herself. Would have, if laughing wouldn’t have caused her to choke herself. How much worse could it really get right now?
So she took the plunge.
First, she moaned. A low sound, barely at the edge of hearing. But it wasn’t a moan of pain. Not exactly.
She was drawing on the real pain that was there in her shoulder. And it was important that her captor interpret it as pain, but the plan was to plant another idea entirely. That was the seed.
Now to water it.
Arching her back just a bit to accentuate her breasts, she moved her body in a sinuous fashion. Not too much. Not enough to arouse her captor’s suspicion. But perhaps enough to…
“Oh, Reggie. I’m sorry,” the voice said. Was it her imagination, or did it sound huskier? “You must be so uncomfortable.”
She felt the air in the vehicle shift as the man knelt down by her side. His arm slid under her, and she felt his hand tremble against her lower back. His breath was warm on her neck as he tried to shift her position, to allow for her to stretch out a bit more.
“There,” he murmured, and there was a definite hitch in his voice. “Is that better?”
Reggie nodded, making sure the movement was slow and sensuous. The air seemed to almost grow thicker as she sought to ensnare him. The key was not to pretend to be sexy, but to reach out and seduce him. Each action was both less overt, but with more intent behind it.
The man cleared his throat. “I need to put you back to sleep now, Reggie.”
She made a sound like a whine, ending with a question… almost an invitation. Would he understand the implication? Would he respond?
“I can’t, Reggie. I just…” he blew air out through his lips.
Allowing her body to sink back, she put all the disappointment she could into the collapse. Her abductor might be psychotic, but he was also quick on the uptake.
Now she waited. She’d put the bait on the hook and had dangled the bait. All that remained to see was whether or not he decided to bite.
“Maybe if I just…” He moved even closer to her, bending down close.
She felt a tugging at the back of her head, and suddenly the binding around her mouth loosened and the gag was removed.
Sheer bliss flowed through her. It was almost impossible to express how much of a relief no longer having that gag tickle the back of her throat was. She released a breath that almost ended up being a sob.
“How does that feel?” he asked.
She tried to speak and couldn’t for a moment. Then she managed one word.
“Good.” Her voice was husky with disuse. Would that play to her advantage, or would she just sound like a frog? “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Reggie. I’m sorry about… all of this.” He let out a long breath of air. “I said that it never should have been you. I said. But…”
“I know,” she murmured. “You don’t want to hurt me.”
“I don’t. I don’t,” he assured her. “And that’s not the plan, so you don’t have to worry. You’re not supposed to be hurt.”
Plan. He wasn’t working alone. And her abduction was intended to do what? Send the team out looking for her? Bring them all together?
Or was it more specific?
Joshua.
Humpty’s real fight had always been with Joshua. From the very beginning, it had been personal, and that trend was continuing. Someone had observed them from the start, continued to observe, and had come to the conclusion that the best way to get to him was through her.
Problem was, that person was absolutely right. And Reggie could not allow it.
She wondered if that same observer knew about Sariah. Understood that in taking Reggie, they hadn’t just enraged a drunken former FBI agent, but that they’d forced two of the greatest minds in law enforcement to work together.
Someone was going to be sorry.
Her captor shifted and coughed. Signs of impatience. There was somewhere he had to go, something he had to do. Before, she had been distracting him from that task and he had enjoyed it. But now she had stopped.
There were sounds of him standing. He was about to move away, but she hadn’t quite gotten what she needed yet.
Now came the difficult part. Now that she could speak, it would be even more difficult to communicate desire to him without him growing suspicious.
“My shoulders ache so badly,” she whispered.
He groaned in response. “I know. I know. But what can I do about it?”
An idea struck her. It was a long shot, but it was something that she’d seen demonstrated before. Something that she might be able to pull off.
“What if you just retied my arms in front of me? That would be so much more comfortable.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. It seemed he was thinking over what she had said. In her imagination she could envision him trying to find the problem in doing it.
Finally, he moved in toward her once more. She could feel his proximity. He leaned close to her ear.
“When I let your arms lose, you won’t try anything, will you?”
She shook her head, no. No, of course not. A definitive shake of the head.
There was a hesitation. A murmur from him.
“Her arms will still be bound. And her legs. She can’t leave. And she’ll be so much more comfortable.”
It was a quiet whisper, just at the borders of her hearing. She wasn’t positive that she had even heard it at all. But the breach of sanity that lay beneath that whisper sent a chill down her spine and raised gooseflesh on her arms, in spite of the heat inside the vehicle. She was playing a very dangerous game here.
There was a metallic click. It sounded like a knife blade opening, and for a split second Reggie panicked, thinking he had realized what she was up to. That he was going to keep her from affecting him further.
But then he slid his arms around her, reaching toward her back. Toward her arms and the zip tie that wa
s there. Logic would have dictated that he turn her over, so the fact that he was finding a way to get closer to her physically was another indication that what she was doing was working on some level.
Time to up the ante a bit more.
As he reached around her, she arched her back to help him, but at the same time brushed her chest against his. For the first time, she blessed her mother’s side of the family and the endowment she had received there. Her movement had been slight, but it appeared to have been enough to cause an effect. Once again, his breathing grew ragged.
And then her arms were loose.
Another rush of pleasure. The stiffness in her shoulders from the unnatural position was partially released, and the blood began to flow once more through her arms.
It would have been the perfect moment to attack. He was close, his neck exposed. She could have clamped her hands around that throat and squeezed until he passed out.
But there was the knife.
Better to continue as they were, continue to build his trust. Not risk getting that blade shoved into her kidneys. That would be a good thing to avoid.
So she waited while he placed another zip tie on her wrists, this time leaving them in the front. That was good enough. It was what she’d been aiming for. No need to risk everything while he was armed and she wasn’t.
She had a plan.
Her captor grunted. “I hope that helps.”
She nodded, and forced her chapped lips into a smile for him. It was impossible to see his response with her blindfold on, but his tone as he spoke again was warm.
“I have to do some things now, Reggie. I don’t want to go, but I have to. You understand?”
“Of course I do,” she whispered back, and was going to leave it at that. Then she had a wild impulse and added, “And don’t worry. I’ll be waiting for you.”
There was a sharp intake of breath, and she wondered if she had gone too far. But then he spoke again.
“You have no idea how much that means to me, Reggie.”
And then he was gone.
She waited until the engine started back up before worming her way up to a sitting position. Her hands extended in front of her, right where she had needed them.
Time to put her plan into action.
CHAPTER 11
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Joshua said to the man who was lying prostrate in front of him.
The words stuck in his craw. This was the man who had tried to take him, his dog and his sober companion out into the barren Oklahoma landscape to kill them or take them captive. And while he still wasn’t quite sure how he felt about his sober companion, he was pretty attached to Bella.
Well, and to himself. Maybe.
The man at his feet turned his head, apparently not wanting to take part in this particular conversation. Well, fine. It wasn’t like Joshua was going anywhere at the moment. And his trussed up turkey wasn’t headed out anytime soon, either.
They had all the time in the world.
Except, of course, that they didn’t. That was the ticking time bomb that kept sounding in the back of Joshua’s mind. The longer Reggie was out there, the more likely it was that something bad would happen to her.
He pushed the thought out of his mind. It was time to be present in the here and now. Keep his focus on the task at hand.
Shit.
That sounded like something Leslie would say.
“Here’s the thing,” Joshua confided to the man, sitting down so that he was much closer to the driver’s face. “I think you’re a good guy. I don’t think you’re someone that’s taken a trip to the dark side.”
The man’s face was still turned away, but Joshua could see that his statement had created an effect. The figure next to him had stopped moving. It almost seemed as if he had stopped breathing.
Maybe Leslie was right after all.
“You’ve been told that I’m a bad person, right? That your orders to get rid of me or kidnap me or whatever… that you were taking care of a bad apple.”
Again, there was no overt response, but the lack of a reaction was telling. The driver was listening, at least.
“Here’s the thing… whoever told you that was right.”
The man shifted, his face slack, but his body tensed. He seemed to be listening. And not just because he couldn’t help it. This looked like it was active.
Good.
Joshua continued. “I’m an alcoholic son of a bitch who pushes away anyone that tries to get close to me.” The man beside him stirred a bit at that. “I was an absentee father and husband, and my actions led to my family being slaughtered by a madman. I am a monster.”
There was an intake of breath behind him. Leslie was responding to what he was saying. Her body was engaged in what he was saying.
If he was getting to her, maybe he was getting to this guy. Then Joshua realized what he was really doing here, and another possible reason for his sober companion’s reaction a second ago.
He was following another of Leslie’s mantras. Open yourself up by admitting your weakness, thereby showing your true strength. Another lesson learned from little-miss-flowy-skirts back there.
This was really starting to piss him off.
Whatever. It seemed to be working.
“But what you need to know is that you’re being messed with. Someone on your team… probably the one who gave you this order… is a worse guy than me.”
The driver’s face went hard once more. Joshua was losing him.
“I know it’s hard to believe, but please listen to me. I’ve been tracking this killer for years. He’s cunning, he’s patient and he does his homework.”
Joshua watched the driver’s face, studying every tic for meaning. Right now, it was almost impossible to know what was going on. The hardness was gone for the most part, but it wasn’t like he was seeing a softening there, either.
“He hurts people. He uses people,” Joshua said, allowing his pain to reverberate in his voice. “Think about this for just a second. How much do you really trust the guy who’s giving you the orders?”
A crease appeared between the man’s eyes. That had gotten to him.
“Have you known him for years, or did he just appear on the scene?” Joshua hazarded a guess. It was a shot in the dark, but it felt somehow… right.
And for the first time since Joshua had started speaking, the driver looked over at him. Joshua had found the vein, and it was time to start mining.
“He’s new on the team. Someone that was put in charge of you by someone else you trusted?”
Joshua couldn’t be sure, but it looked almost like there had been a bit of a nod that time. Was he starting to get answers out of the man?
“Look at me for a second,” Joshua begged, then he stopped. “No. Don’t look at me. I’m a mess of a human being. I’ve already told you that.”
He turned to point at Leslie, standing behind him. One finger extended to her, Joshua urged the man on the ground to turn his attention to the woman there.
“But not her. Take a look.” As he urged the driver to see Leslie, Joshua was forced into observing her as well. “Look at the way she dresses. Her face. Her eyes. Is that someone who’s gone bad? She practically radiates goodness.”
Much as he hated to admit it, Joshua only spoke the truth. Maybe that was why she bugged him so much. He couldn’t take the woman’s purity. His own tarnished soul rejected it out of hand.
“This is not someone who would be hanging out with someone who’s dirty. She’s clean. Every part of her.”
There was a long pause, and then the man spoke. His speech was hesitant, but the tone was unmistakable. He was starting to believe what Joshua was saying.
“What… I can’t just…” He cleared his throat. “What if I’m wrong?”
That was something Joshua had an answer for. “If you’re wrong, you won’t be held accountable. Just say I beat the truth out of you.”
“But you didn’t,” he murmu
red.
“What?”
“You didn’t beat it out of me,” the man said to himself. He turned his face to stare into Joshua’s eyes. “You could have. I expected it.”
His gaze went from Joshua to Leslie and back to Joshua. And there, inside his stare, Joshua felt like he could see the man’s soul, all the conflict between what he felt was true and what he’d been told to do.
And then his gaze lowered.
“I’ll hate myself if I’m wrong,” he whispered. “But I don’t think I am.”
He lifted his head back up and took a deep breath. Then he smiled and let it out.
“Get me my phone. I need to make a call.”
* * *
Reggie lifted her hands up above her head and brought them down hard against her stomach. As she did so, she pulled her hands away from one another.
The zip tie dug farther into her flesh. She could feel liquid dripping from her wrists. It had to be blood, but she tried to tell herself it was just sweat. Just sweat. Not blood. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
The guy that had demonstrated this trick had made it look so easy. One fluid motion and he was free, the zip tie snapped easily in two.
Jerk.
But thinking back to that moment made Reggie realize that she had left out an important part of the equation. There was a fundamental difference between the way that his tie had been put on and Reggie’s.
Reggie’s captor was trying to be as nice to her as he could be. So when he’d retied her hands in front of her, he’d left as much slack as he dared. Tight enough to keep her bound, not tight enough to cut off her circulation.
So she did something counterintuitive. Reaching her hands up, Reggie took the end of the zip tie in her mouth and tightened the band down as much as she could.
She could feel the nylon of the tie digging into the wounds she’d created there with her first few attempts. It was painful, but the thought of getting away so that she could keep Joshua safe fueled her.
Then she raised her arms once more, pulling them down toward her stomach and thrusting her elbows out to the side in a chicken-wing motion. She used all of the strength she had left in her dehydrated and exhausted body.
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