GRIFFIN

by Paula Cox

  They turned onto a road with a few potholes. More than a few. It felt more like an exploded minefield—a typical desert road. Then it hit her: she didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. They could be halfway across the country right now. Maybe in another country altogether, like Mexico!

  Something told her no. It was somewhere remote, but it didn’t feel like Mexico. Okay, enough stalling. If she didn’t do this now, she might be in a far worse situation soon.

  A couple of fake sniffs for distraction...wait for a rough bump...no, an even rougher one, so rough he’ll be cursing the road...

  The car’s underside scraped on the gravel. She flung the point of Dax’s blade into the man’s jugular. Used the heel of her other hand to jam it all the way in. The half-formed sounds he made were stilted, manic, like the confused airbursts from someone drowning. He reached for her without looking, so she jumped onto the seat and fended him off with kicks.

  The driver shouted in a foreign tongue. Christ, if he stopped the car she’d be history. She reached for the dying man’s holster tucked into his pants, fumbled the catch. He was in no state to stop her. His hands clasped over the wound; he was quickly bleeding out. Tiana managed to wrench the Beretta out of its pouch and, cocking it on the turn, fired once at the back of the driver’s seat.

  He reacted with a hard left. It threw her into the dying man, and his head cracked the side window. The car started to overturn, as though it was on a steep slope. She wrapped her arm around the seatbelt and tried to wedge herself in behind the dying man. The next thing she knew, they were upside down, and she was on top of him.

  She listened in horror as the driver’s door creaked open and the driver crawled out. After a couple of heavy, shuffling steps, there was a thump on the ground outside. Both the back doors were centrally locked, so she squeezed through to the front and opened the passenger door. Beretta still in hand, she climbed out...

  They were at the bottom of a short but steep, sandy verge between the road and a line of palm trees. She limped around the car, ready to empty her clip into the driver. But when she got there, he was already dead. The thump she heard was the driver falling sideways. His head had hit a tree root. And the bullet she’d fired earlier had gone right through his chest.

  Tiana stared for a while, not really comprehending what she’d done. What she’d been forced to do. It was fully dark now, and there was a nip in the air. She searched the driver for ID, or some other clue as to whom he was working for. Nothing. She tried the glove box. Still no luck. Then the other, blood-soaked man in the back. A totally icky no-joy—even his cell phone was smashed.

  So she was left with the vehicle’s navigation system, which still worked, and the coordinates and names of the last five places entered into the system. The previous one was Cassie’s address. The one before that was exactly the same as the new destination, the place these men were taking her.

  Tiana’s heart sank as she saw the coordinates, both current and intended, were practically the same. Way out in the Mojave Desert, she was almost at her abductors’ destination. The lights of a settlement blazed up the road ahead. It looked like a ranch or a hacienda. And on the road were three pairs of headlights, snaking toward her through the night.

  She thought about running for cover, maybe into the trees. A voice from the tree line stopped her cold. “Drop the gun, Miss Crowe!”

  She obeyed.

  “Now walk away from it.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Bernal said you’d be trouble.” The man was wreathed in darkness, but she could tell he was surveying the crash. “A brave try,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re too late. We have you now. And we’ll make you pay for that.”

  ***

  Inside the white stucco walls of the estate, it was like an oasis: green everywhere, with ponds and attractive fountain features that made Tiana lick her lips with thirst. Six men had ventured out to retrieve her. They weren’t nearly as rough as the assholes in the sedan, though, at least not yet. And they didn’t need to be. She was completely at their mercy now. It would be a long time before help arrived, if it ever would. Did the tracking signal even work over such long distances? This far out in the desert, she might as well be on the moon.

  She recognized the two men Dax had thrashed outside the courthouse. One was wearing a neck brace. He pointed at her, then lightly punched his own palm, as if to say, I’m going to enjoy taking you apart. The other man’s black eye and busted lip hadn’t fully healed. He just glared at her, which was equally threatening in its own way.

  Whatever they had in store for her, she prayed it would be over quick.

  Those two, plus the man who’d found her back at the crash site, ushered Tiana inside a large, white Mediterranean-style residential building with a red-tiled roof. They took her downstairs. She imagined a dungeon awaiting her, but instead found an enormous, lively rec room. A pool table, video arcade games, pinball machines, a hot tub in the corner, gym equipment, and one of those virtual reality full-body rigs she’d seen demoed at a charity science expo one time. It was the ultimate man cave.

  Yes, Isaiah Bernal had done very well for himself. Getting fighters hooked on performance-enhancing drugs and then taking bribes to fudge the medical test results, he’d made a small fortune. Corruption was a lucrative racket.

  “How many lives have you wrecked to pay for all this?” she called, as he approached from the far end of the room, unlacing his kickboxing gloves. He was sweaty after an intensive workout. Good thing the air conditioning was working.

  “If you’re talking about Thad,” he replied, “I never made him do anything he didn’t insist on doing himself. Is it my fault he overdid it?”

  “Sure, he never did anything halfway. But then, that’s how you operate, isn’t it, Isaiah? You, and sleaze balls like you? You make out you’re helping fighters achieve their dreams when all you’re really doing is turning them into ticking time bombs. Thad was always obsessed with winning; he’d have done anything to keep fighting and keep winning. And he might have self-destructed on his own. I don’t know. We’ll never know. But one thing I know for certain is that you helped it happen. You, his doctor, his best friend—you helped to destroy him!”

  He was silent while he wiped his face, neck, and underarms with a towel, and Tiana thought that maybe she’d struck a chord in him, maybe got him to see himself in a new light. At the very least, he had to be suffering a pang or two of regret, knowing his best friend had killed himself like that, and that he was in some way responsible.

  “Thad and I were under no illusions about the parts we played,” he said rather cryptically. “To be honest, you were the only one who didn’t get it, Tiana. And you still don’t. Thad always liked that about you, how naïve you were. He said you were like an antidote to all the cruel shit out there.”

  Through Tiana’s hardest defenses, a shot to her heart. Proof that Thad had loved her, just as she’d always known. Which made the whole thing all the more tragic. It also made Isaiah Bernal’s betrayal all the more contemptible. Her heart would always be wounded, but thanks to Dax, and Cassie, and Shana and Len, she’d learned that it could heal over that wound, and that after healing, her heart was even stronger because she knew she was loved. She’d forgiven herself for Thad. And right now she was in love with a man who was strong in all the ways Thad had been weak. That was why she could harden herself to Bernal and his threats, because Dax was with her. Inside her. That would be her best defense in this, her fight to stay alive.

  To stay alive long enough for him to come rescue her.

  “Me? I never did see the virtue in being naïve,” Bernal went on. “Children are naïve, but they have no choice. They don’t know how the world works. But when a grown man or woman is naïve, it tells me they’ve been too afraid to take the world on. They’re spineless. And when a man like Thad says he prefers a naïve woman as a partner…that tells me he’s weak. He was a helluva fighter in the ring, but he was weak outsid
e it. He let the world get the upper hand, and in the end he couldn’t take it. He let it beat him. Why do you think he tried to kill you, Tiana?” The guy was so full of himself, he even paused for emphasis before answering his own rhetorical question. “I’ll tell you why: it was because you represented everything that was weak about him. He hated himself, so he hated you, too, in the end. You were the destructive force in his life because you encouraged him to be spineless.”

  Yep, if the Devil had taken a stab at rationalizing Thad’s suicide, he’d have probably spouted the exact same bullshit. It steeled Tiana. She might be naïve about a lot of things, but she knew self-deluded crap when she heard it. This bozo was full of it.

  “Are you going to talk all day, Isaiah? My hourly rate might have to go up if I have to listen to any more of that horseshit.”

  He twitched a smile, then nodded to his goons. They grabbed hold of her so that she could barely move. “Bring her,” he said. “But not too rough. Not yet. Something tells me she’ll break sooner than she thinks.”

  Yeah, we’ll see about that, asshat.

  They took her over to the gym area, where several punching bags of various types and sizes lay on the laminate wood floor. Attached to the ceiling were four strong-looking metal brackets, onto which the bags ought to be hung. Instead, Bernal had attached ropes to two of them.

  “Strip her,” he told his men.

  One of them, the man with the neck brace, grinned as he took hold of her hips. “All the way?” he asked Bernal.

  “What are you, an animal?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Same as last time,” Bernal told him. “And no more. She’ll break without that.”

  Tiana tried her best to hold a stoic poise and expression while they undressed her, but her heart was thumping. She mashed her lips together. Her near-panic breaths rushed loudly in and out through her nostrils. All the while Bernal looked on, holding the ends of the towel draped around his neck.

  They stripped her to her underwear. Then they tied the ropes around her wrists, tightened them until they bit, and hoisted her onto her tiptoes.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  “No, I’m certain. There were two men and a black Mazda sedan,” Cassie’s neighbor, an elderly woman named Josephine Owens, insisted for the third time. Her husband, Charles, had a differing opinion. Their bickering was wasting time, but Dax had no choice but to let them hammer out the truth between them. This was the only lead he had on Tiana’s abduction, so it had to be reliable.

  “Listen. I was closer than you,” Charles told his wife. “I was clipping the hedge out front, and I’m telling you it was a limo. And there were three men.”

  “Hooey! How could you see from there, with all those parked cars blocking your view? I was at the front bedroom window. I saw the whole thing—well, not the whole thing—there were a couple of trees in the way—but I had a pretty good view.” She took Dax by the hand. “If you want my advice, sunshine, try the Franklins and the Gardners. They’re both on the other side of the street. Big on Neighborhood Watch, that kind of thing. The definitely have CCTV, but I don’t know if it’s on during the day.” She pointed out the exact houses, then roved her bony finger across the row of properties up the street. “Let me see. Who else might have…?”

  “Ben and Jennifer had it installed a-ways back,” Charles added, looking up the street. “They’re, let me see, four-five-six houses up on our side. There might be others as well, but those are the ones we know about. They had a big meeting last year about security, right after those three burglaries on the same night. It panicked some folks, so they went and bought those fancy little cameras you can monitor online or some damn thing.”

  “I know what you mean,” Dax said. “There’s an app you can use on your smartphone. It streams the live video feed, so you can keep an eye on your property even when you’re not there.”

  “Yeah. I have no idea what you just said,” Charles admitted, “but you get the picture.”

  “So to speak,” his wife added.

  “Me and Josephine don’t go for that techno stuff. Hackers can always find ways round it. Nothing like a good old shotgun to make a burglar fill his pants, I reckon. There’s no way round that, is there.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I guess not,” said Dax. He waved to Cassie while she ran across the street. “Okay, I’ve gotta go,” he told the old couple. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No worries, sonny,” replied Charles. “Good luck. Go find that limo.”

  “Sedan!”

  Leaving the bickering behind, Dax rushed out to meet Cassie, who was waving a small piece of paper at him.

  “We’ve got a California license plate number!” she said breathlessly. “6UBY706. The police can find her with that, right?”

  “Wow, good work. How did you—?”

  “The Gardners. They have state of the art security. Always a camera watching their driveway and the street outside. Linus rewound the footage to the time Tiana was taken. It only took a minute. It showed the car slowing just before my house.”

  “A black Mazda sedan, right?”

  “Yeah. A Mazda 6. Dark gray though. How did you know that?”

  “The Owens. Remind me to move into this neighborhood if I make it through this.”

  Cassie stared at him. “You’re not going to the police, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. Not if I can find her on my own.”

  “Why not?”

  He ushered her over to his Jeep. “Because they have to follow rules. I don’t.”

  “You think you can…find her on your own, I mean?”

  “More or less.”

  “One of your Marine buddies?”

  Dax smiled at her, then kissed her on the forehead. “Tiana’s lucky to have you.”

  “Right back at you. You be careful, okay, tough guy? Bring her back safe.”

  “Scout’s honor.” He climbed into his car, lowered the window when she held up the scrap of paper with the license plate number on it.

  “Something tells me you were never a Boy Scout,” she said.

  “No. They usually don’t give out badges for what I do.”

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Will do. If you don’t hear from me by this time tomorrow, go to the cops.”

  “Copy that,” she said, then walked back to her house.

  Dax checked the GPS alert app on his Smartphone for the umpteenth time. Still no signal. Tiana had not activated her panic button. He wouldn’t be able to track her using his phone anyway, even if she did activate it—he’d need a laptop to access the secure program—but it would tell him when the signal went live.

  He drove straight to his weekend house in the Hollywood hills. His weapons were locked in a safe there. On the way, he rang Monte, who, as an engineer and a communications officer in the Corps, knew his way around tracking software and internet search engines much better than Dax did.

  Luckily, he picked up.

  “Hey bud. Listen, I’ve got an emergency here. No, no, it’s not me who’s in trouble. It’s Tiana. She’s been taken. Yeah, less than an hour ago. Eyewitnesses, but they weren’t close enough to ID the kidnappers. We do have a make and number on the car though. Yeah, it’s a black two-thousand-thirteen Mazda 6 sedan, California plate license number Sixer-Uniform-Bravo-Yankee-Seven-Zero-Sixer. You want to read it back? Yep, you got it. Think you can find out whom it belongs to? That’s great. Give me a call when you’ve got something. Oh, and one more thing. I need you to keep a lookout for Tiana’s GPS distress signal. Yeah, I fitted it to one of those bracelets, you know, like that informant we worked with in Basra. No, she hasn’t activated it yet. But in case she does, I’ll need someone to catch the signal on a live mapper as soon as it appears. Okay. Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’ll email you the URL and the password. Sure. Let me know as soon as you’ve got something. Cheers, bud. I owe you one.”

  After tearing up the miles to his timeshare home in the H
ollywood hills, Dax changed into a pair of cargo pants and a gray lightweight thermal henley shirt, a comfortable, practical ensemble, cool enough for driving around in, warm enough for night-time temperatures. He wouldn’t be coming back until he found Tiana, no matter how long it took.

  Next, he packed his gym bag full of weapons and ammo: three side arms, an assault rifle, assorted knives, a couple of stun grenades, and his trusty shotgun. Also a pair of night-vision goggles that he referred to as his NVGs. He stuffed a first aid kit in as well, just in case. Then he grabbed his laptop, a few bottles of water from the fridge, a couple of snacks, and put them all in his Jeep.

  Logic told him the best thing he could do now was wait for Monte to contact him, but his adrenaline was pumping like mad. No way could he stay in one spot. If he did he’d probably wind up punching the fucking walls. Better to keep moving, keep driving, just throw himself into the hunt.