The man in the mirror appeared to be giving that question deep thought, as the door to the treatment room opened and Traci Vargas limped inside on her crutch.
Dent sighed as he looked at her. Although her injury was far from life threatening, it had caused her to lose her weapon, and again, only the timely intervention of Jessica White spared her life.
“Why the sad look?” Traci said.
“Wilson filled me in on what happened to you after I passed out. If not for Jessica, Stevens would have killed you.”
Traci kissed him.
“I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.”
Dent kissed her back as he caressed her, and the man in the mirror had the answer to his question.
“I love you, Traci Vargas.”
“I love you too, Jack Dent.”
“Marry me?”
“What?”
“Marry me, I don’t want to live another moment without you as my wife.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course,”
Traci kissed him again.
“I’m done thinking. The answer is yes.”
***
A hundred miles away, in the pre-dawn hours, Jessica walked across the rain-soaked lawns of suburban homes as she searched for an object of opportunity.
She was looking inside the cars parked in driveways, searching for one whose owner had left the key inside the ignition. After looking into over a hundred vehicles, she spotted one up ahead and knew that her search had ended.
It was a black, Chevy Tahoe parked halfway unto the curb and its headlights were still on, but its engine off. She opened the driver’s side door and saw the key dangling from the ignition, as the strong scent of alcohol wafted about her.
She climbed inside and started the engine, while lowering the hood on her raincoat. The vehicle protested at first, but soon came to life, and the dull beams of its headlights shined with renewed vigor, as she eased it off the curb and away.
She made two consecutive lefts, then traveled eight blocks and pulled into the parking lot of a twenty-four hour supermarket, to park beside her car.
After transferring her things into the Tahoe, she consulted her directions and headed west. When she reached her destination, she saw that she was all alone and set about preparing her trap. When she was done, she sat upon a wooden bench to wait.
She knew that he would not come during daylight hours for fear that he’d be spotted, what she didn’t know, was whether he had come and gone already, but she doubted that such was the case, because the area was devoid of any tribute to remembrance, of his favored gesture of love.
Still, she had no doubt that he could not just flee without one last goodbye, and so she waited, and hoped that her intuition would prove itself right.
At 4:27 a.m., he crested the hill and stopped in his tracks when he saw her, before dropping the flowers he was carrying and taking out his gun, to whirl about in search of pursuers. His left arm was in a homemade sling in order to take the pressure off the wound in his shoulder, a wound that Jessica had given him.
“It’s just you and me, Rob,” she told him.
Stevens stood there in the gently falling rain and stared back at her. She was apparently unarmed, as her gloved hands rested upon her knees and her hooded raincoat was cinched tightly about her waist. After visibly relaxing, he smiled.
“Just you and me, at last,”
CHAPTER 20
Inside the Maynardville Prison, order was being restored by dozens of National Guardsmen, Immigration, and DEA agents, and even a scattering of homeland security officials, as emergency workers fought to control the fires and give relief to those injured.
Szabo’s boss, a man named Curt Baker, was sitting with him and Szabo inside the warden’s office.
Baker had many questions for him and he answered them patiently. He had spent enough time around government bureaucrats to know that protesting against their procedures would only lengthen the time it took to walk through them.
He had called both the house phone and his wife’s cell phone and received no answer.
He had left no messages, either.
He had to assume that he’d been declared dead, and he had no way of knowing if Carly had intercepted his message. As far as he knew, Jessica believed him a victim of whoever brought that chopper down.
And so, he would sit through Baker’s questions, answering each of them as best he could and then he would make his way home and find out what life had in store for him.
As the first hint of daylight peeked above the hills, Szabo stood up and gestured for him to follow as Baker was in mid-sentence.
“Let’s go, it’s time for you to go home.”
Baker protested.
“What? But Steve, I haven’t finished with him yet.”
“You’ve finished Baker; the man’s been through enough for Christ’s sake,”
“I’m your boss, you know? It’s not the other way around.”
“A twist of fate that will someday be corrected,” Szabo said, and Baker smiled.
“Go!” Baker said. “Just go, hell, we’ll be sorting this mess out for weeks.”
He followed Szabo through the aftermath of chaos and found himself climbing up an inner staircase. When they emerged, they were on the roof, and a black helicopter sat ready for take-off.
Szabo pointed at the chopper, and spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of the engine.
“That’s your ride home. The pilot is a buddy of mine, he says he can drop you off at the college in your town. They have a helipad atop their administration building.”
He stared at the chopper, but made no move towards it.
Szabo put a hand on his shoulder.
“After what you went through the last time you climbed aboard one of those things, I wouldn’t blame you for being skittish. If you want, I can find you a car?”
“No, the chopper is fine, in fact, it’s fitting.”
Szabo shook his hand.
“I’d break out of prison with you anytime, buddy.”
He smiled.
“Same here,”
A minute later, he was in the air and, at last, headed home.
***
Inside Our Lady of the Saints Cemetery, Jessica sat atop a wooden bench, upon a hill, before the grave of Marie Stevens.
Rob Stevens approached the grave from the rear and laid down the bouquet of roses he carried.
“Every week,” Jessica said. “Every week for nineteen years you purchased roses for her grave, but that ended right about the time you met me, didn’t it?”
Stevens ignored her question and asked one of his own.
“How did you get here, Jessica? The only vehicle in the area is that Tahoe parked down by the caretaker’s shed.”
“That’s mine, I stole it.”
Stevens chuckled.
“Why, Doctor, where did you learn how to do such a naughty thing?”
“My husband taught me.”
Stevens then pointed to his wounded shoulder by using the barrel of the gun.
“You were drugged, twenty feet away, and you still managed to hit me. Where did you learn to shoot that well?”
“My husband taught me that too,”
“Is he really still alive or was that just more of your wishful thinking?”
“He’s alive, and he’s also the reason I’m here.”
“What do you mean?”
“After last night, I know that you won’t stop, that you’ll keep coming, and that next time you may actually kill him.”
“I have nothing against your husband... or Juliet... if things had been different... they were in the way, they were simply in the way.”
“I’ll be with you, Rob, I’ll go wherever you want, but the price is my husband’s life. You have to promise to never try and harm him again.”
Stevens placed his gun back in his holster and walked over to stand before her. Jessica looked up into his eyes and in the
moon’s luminescence, saw the light of madness shining, afterwards, she marveled that she had never glimpsed it before.
“You’ll be mine? Do you mean that?”
“I don’t have a choice, do I? Eventually you would come after me again.”
“Am I really that hard to take?”
Jessica broke eye contact and spoke to the ground.
“The other night, in your bedroom... I nearly gave in.”
He reached down and lifted her chin.
“Come with me now.”
She stood and found that their lips were inches apart. As Stevens leaned in to kiss her, she caressed his face in her gloved hands and stepped on the button that was concealed by a scattering of leaves.
Rob Stevens’ stiffened as spittle flew from his mouth, and the electrode pads attached to the palm of Jessica’s gloves delivered a shock from the modified defibrillator hidden beneath her feet.
Once the charge was spent, Stevens dropped to his knees, stunned, and Jessica grabbed the pistol from his holster and placed it against the side of his head. She then leaned over and whispered in his ear.
“My husband has taught me many things, including the fact that the element of surprise is the greatest weapon of all.”
And then she pulled the trigger.
Stevens’ corpse tumbled backwards atop the grave of his long-dead wife, afterwards, Jessica reached down and placed the gun near his hand.
She took off the insulated gloves and they dangled by wires from the sleeves of the blood-splattered raincoat, which she also removed, before spreading it out atop the ground by the bench. Next, she unearthed the defibrillator and placed it atop the raincoat.
When she had the bundle in her arms, she took one last look at Rob Stevens, and then walked down the hill.
She got into the backseat of the Tahoe and cleaned herself as best she could with a towel and bottled water, then she climbed up front and changed into fresh clothing, before driving back to her car.
In the rear of the supermarket were a line of dumpsters, and in the second one from the left, she rid herself of the trash bag containing the bloody raincoat, and the defibrillator.
Within minutes of leaving the supermarket parking lot, she was on the road home and the sun was just beginning its ascent, signaling the coming of a new day.
CHAPTER 21
He surprised himself by falling asleep in the chopper, but awoke as they flew over the lake that nearly claimed him.
As the chopper set down, he saw that a familiar face had come to greet him, and after thanking the pilot, he walked over and shook his hand.
“Hello, Jack.”
The chief clapped him on the shoulder.
“Welcome home!”
Szabo had called ahead to make sure that there would be someone to greet his arrival, and as the chief drove him home, he filled him in.
***
“Stevens?”
“Yes, the son of a bitch had us all fooled.”
“And you say he’s still on the loose? Jack, I tried to reach Jessica earlier and she didn’t answer.”
“Don’t worry, she’s fine; Traci spoke to her not more than an hour ago, before Agent Szabo called.”
“That’s a relief,”
When they reached his home, he told the chief that he would walk in from the road and thanked him for the ride.
Jack grinned.
“I understand, you want to be alone. Give Jessica my love, and don’t worry about Stevens, he can’t run forever.”
He waved goodbye to Jack and then began walking down the driveway.
***
Jessica had just opened the front door as Traci Vargas was ringing her cell phone. She snatched the phone up from the coffee table she had left it on and told Traci that she had been out taking a drive, to try to sort through things.
When the call ended, she went up to the guestroom and cleansed it of anything that belonged to Stevens. When she came upon a smiling picture of Stevens with Juliet, she wept.
As she was placing the trash in the garbage bin, the dog’s ears perked up as he sniffed at the breeze, and a moment later, he went charging up the driveway.
She followed along as she wondered what had so captivated him, and as she rounded a curve, she saw him.
She ran to him with tears of joy streaming down her face and he crushed her to his chest. After the longest embrace of their lives, they parted, and she reached up and ran a hand along his beard while searching with her eyes for injuries.
“I’m fine,” he told her, as he wiped away her tears.
“Carly got your message, but even without it, I never gave up hope.”
“Jack told me while he drove me here; he also told me about Stevens.”
Jessica kissed him as she took his hand.
“We’ll talk, but later, right this moment, there’s only one thing I want you to know.”
“What’s that?”
She brought his hand to her lips and then placed it upon her stomach.
As the significance of that action dawned on him, he opened his mouth in surprise.
“Really?”
She smiled. “Really,”
He began to laugh, and it was the truest sound of joy that she had ever heard.
Next, he lifted her in his arms and carried her to their home, as the dog danced along at their side.
A PLEA
Thank you, precious reader, for spending time with TAKEN!
I hope you enjoyed the book. If you did, please consider writing a review. Without reviews, an author's books are virtually invisible on the retail sites. Let other readers know what you thought! You can leave a review by visiting the book's page and I will greatly appreciate it.
Thank you!
—Remington Kane
THE BOOKS OF REMINGTON KANE
The TANNER Series in order
INEVITABLE I - A Tanner Novel - Book 1
KILL IN PLAIN SIGHT - A Tanner Novel - Book 2
MAKING A KILLING ON WALL STREET - A Tanner Novel - Book 3
THE FIRST ONE TO DIE LOSES - A Tanner Novel - Book 4
THE LIFE & DEATH OF CODY PARKER - A Tanner Novel - Book 5
WAR - A Tanner Novel - Book 6
SUICIDE OR DEATH - Book 7
TWO FOR THE KILL - Book 8
BALLET OF DEATH - Book 9
MORE DANGEROUS THAN MAN - Book 10
TANNER TIMES TWO - Book 11
OCCUPATION: DEATH - Book 12
The TAKEN! Series in order
TAKEN! - LOVE CONQUERS ALL - Book 1
TAKEN! - SECRETS & LIES - Book 2
TAKEN! - STALKER - Book 3
TAKEN! - BREAKOUT! - Book 4
TAKEN! - THE THIRTY-NINE - Book 5
TAKEN! - KIDNAPPING THE DEVIL - Book 6
TAKEN! - HIT SQUAD - Book 7
TAKEN! - MASQUERADE - Book 8
TAKEN! - SERIOUS BUSINESS - Book 9
TAKEN! - THE COUPLE THAT SLAYS TOGETHER - Book 10
TAKEN! - PUT ASUNDER - Book 11
TAKEN! - LIKE BOND, ONLY BETTER - Book 12
TAKEN! - MEDIEVAL - Book 13
TAKEN! - RISEN! - Book 14
TAKEN! - VACATION - Book 15
TAKEN! - MICHAEL - Book 16
TAKEN! - BEDEVILED - Book 17
ALSO
THE CONTRACT: KILL JESSICA WHITE - Taken!/Tanner - Book 1
SLAY BELLS
REDEMPTION - Someone's taken her
DESOLATION LAKE
LEARN ABOUT NEW RELEASES FROM
REMINGTON KANE
http://www.remingtonkane.com/contact.html
Did you love The TAKEN! Series - Books 1-4? Then you should read Taken! - The Thirty-Nine by Remington Kane!
From REMINGTON KANE
The author of The TANNER Series
Taken! - The Thirty-Nine - Book 5
There's a mysterious killer on the loose in Detroit and so far he's slain five innocent women and left the police and the FBI stumped for answers
/> When Jessica White and her husband are called in to help, they soon find themselves in danger, and in the end, one of them will become the killer's next victim.
The THIRTY-NINE is the first TAKEN! novel, and old fans of the short story series will love it, even as new fans come to enjoy the doctor and her husband.
The THIRTY-NINE takes place in both the present and the past so that new readers of the series will be brought up to speed, while old fans of the short story series will discover a greater depth to the series' origin.
Read more at Remington Kane’s site.
The TAKEN! Series - Books 1-4 (Taken! Box Set) Page 43
