Overcome with joy and anguish, I sobbed all the way there.
41
It was almost two days later, dusk, and I stood in the exact spot where the nice couple had picked me up, naked and broken. A gentle breeze blew against my face, and I turned to watch the setting sun paint the clear sky a few final strokes of pink as it dipped lower. A yellow glow illuminated rippling water across Lake Buchanan. The locals had informed me more than once in my two-day stay in Burnet County that despite the recent flooding rains, the lake was still thirty feet under its normal level.
“Excuse me, miss.” A member of the county sheriff’s department had just finished climbing up the hill, his chest lifting rapidly. He pulled up next to me. “Whew. That’s a hell of a drop.” He removed his cowboy hat, wiped his forehead. “Not sure how you got yourself up that incline in that terrain with no hiking boots.”
His gaze fell upon my arm, which was set in a thick cast, hanging in a sling.
“You’d be amazed what you can do when you think you might die.”
“Indeed.” He smiled and then walked off. The narrow road was lined with police and sheriff cars, fire and rescue trucks. A helicopter buzzed overhead. I craned my neck to see it fly by.
“Does this scene bring back bad memories?” Stan had just walked up. He’d been in his car having a private conversation with his FBI cousin, Nick.
I scanned the landscape, where shadows began to win the battle over light. Then I spotted the car at the bottom of the hill. A plethora of uniforms and at least two police dogs milled about the wreckage.
“I’m okay.” I tried to take in a breath, but my sore ribs put up a roadblock. “They haven’t found any sign of Milton?”
“As you know, they found the car about twenty-four hours ago. More than fifty officers from various departments have taken part in the search. We don’t have a great picture of him yet, so we used your description and put out an APB in all surrounding counties. So far, no real leads have come in.”
I nodded, trying to ascertain the level of concern I should still have while trying to keep my pulse steady.
“Oh, by the way, Nick got confirmation that Kim Wheeler is dead.”
I glanced at him, then looked back into the canyon.
“Guards found her hanging by a belt loop in her jail cell in New Jersey.”
The news of her death didn’t move my emotional meter one iota.
Stan’s phone rang, and he held up a finger. “Maybe we’ll get lucky on Milton,” he said before turning his back to me and taking the call.
I tried to listen in, but all I heard was Stan saying “Yep” over and over again. Ending the call, he flipped back around, his hands at his waist.
“Someone catch him running down Highway 281?” I said in a sarcastic tone.
“Hardly.” He scratched at his whiskers. “The call was from Bryant, my eyes and ears down below. Apparently, a team was prepping the car to begin hauling it up to the road when they found something in the wreckage.”
“What?”
“His foot.”
Breath emptied from my lungs. “How?”
“They found a scalpel in the brush. Apparently, he severed his own limb and then somehow got out of there. Not sure if he hitched a ride. Maybe he got to the lake, found a boat, and made it to the other side before we could alert everyone.”
A knot formed in my gut.
“I don’t want you to worry. He’s not coming after you. If anything, he probably bled out and drowned in the lake.” He paused for a second, looking out across the hills.
“We found two more bodies back in the city. The ME’s office thinks he killed them right after he attacked Zahera.”
“How do you know it was him—”
“Rats and carved messages.”
“What did the messages say?”
“The first one said ‘never;’ the second said ‘leaving.’”
“I am…never leaving.” I looked at Stan as tears bubbled in my eyes. “That’s what he was trying to tell me the whole time…that he’s never going to leave me alone.” I swallowed back some emotion.
“Ivy, you have my word that we won’t stop until we’ve exhausted all possible avenues. We’ll find him, alive or dead. He’s in our crosshairs now. On top of that, the FBI has him on their most-wanted list.”
That gave me a small degree of comfort. “Is that what your cousin told you?”
He nodded, unwrapped a piece of gum, and shoved it in his mouth.
“No candy bar?”
“Nah. Nick started bragging about what good shape he was in, how he’s training for the Boston Marathon. I gotta start somewhere, so every time I get hungry for a candy bar, I’ll stick gum in my mouth.”
“Sounds like a plan.” My voice had little energy, perhaps because I was still getting over the shock of the whole thing.
An older-model Toyota drove up. Saul got out of the driver’s seat, and then he opened the door for Zahera and Cristina. My young ECHO employee ran up to me, but stopped short before hugging me. We touched hands, and she smiled. As Zahera gingerly walked toward me, I pointed at the turban.
“They cut off part of my hair. No way I was going to walk around without making a fashion statement.” She leaned in and air-kissed my cheek, then her eyes scanned all of the visible cuts on my face and neck. She just shook her head.
“I feel like I need to wrap my entire head in an ace bandage.”
“I should have never left you alone,” Cristina said, her eyes scanning my face.
“You’re not my bodyguard. I’m just glad you’re okay. For a while I wondered if there was some way he’d gotten to you first.”
She smirked. We’d already talked briefly yesterday. I’d learned that she had lost the charge in her cell phone from Snapchatting with her friends about the crazy mess with Anika in South Padre. A typical teenager action. I had no hard feelings. We’d also talked about Beatrice, and why she never said anything about knowing me when I was younger. Beatrice had called Cristina when she learned what I’d been put through. “She says she wasn’t entirely sure it was you at first; but since she’d moved on and saw that you were doing well for yourself, she didn’t feel the need to bring up old memories that might be painful.” Everyone had been avoiding the past, not just me.
“I think we need to create a no-shave zone at my place,” Zahera said.
“Camp Tapper,” I said, trying to think about creating happier memories.
“Hope you don’t mind having two roomies, at least for a while,” Cristina said to Zahera.
“I’m game, but once Ivy and I heal up, I’m paying for a full-day spa visit. We owe it to ourselves.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
Saul walked up. “How are you?” he asked with kind eyes.
“Sorry I was an ass to you the other night.”
“I deserved it.”
We all stood there and watched the sun set. No words were spoken.
But I knew my life would never be the same.
IN Doubt
An Ivy Nash Thriller
Book 3
Redemption Thriller Series - 9
(Includes Alex Troutt Thrillers, Ivy Nash Thrillers,
and Ozzie Novak Thrillers)
By
John W. Mefford
1
Even before I’d fully woken, my mind was rolling in a vortex of despair.
A coarse tongue licked my cheek. With what bit of energy I could muster, twisting in my sheet away from the warm spot in my bed, I swatted my black Persian cat off the side. He meowed in protest, just as he’d done repeatedly for the last two months, as I’d slowly enclosed myself in a protective cocoon away from the rest of the miserable world.
Shut the blinds, lock the doors, don’t answer the phone, turn off all electronics. Escape.
This was my way of ridding myself of the blinding stress. I was searching for relief. But the more hours of the day that I spent bottled up in my apartment, the more I sun
k into an endless abyss of depression and anxiety. Even in my darkest moments, though, I knew ninety percent of my problem was self-inflicted.
I had allowed a man to torment me, to alter every facet of my being. Even worse, I knew it would never end. Not until he finally had his way. Not until I was dead.
He had the control. He had the power.
But as much as I hated Milton Weber, I hated myself more.
My eyelids quivered from lack of sleep while a jackhammer did its thing on my forehead. The headache hurt so badly tears bubbled in the corners of my eyes. But that was as far as they went. There weren’t enough tears left to spill. If there had been, maybe they would have assisted in detoxifying my body from all of the anger, the self-contempt, the paralyzing fear that had run rampant through the deepest recesses of my mind, destroying brain cells and any chance that I would give myself even a brief respite from the anguish.
I reached over and turned the bedside clock to face me. Red digits showed the time as 3:34. Was it a.m. or p.m.? Looking toward the window, I could see a soft glow through the blanket that hung in front of the shade. It had to be daytime.
I’d been kidnapped twice in two months by the same warped man. During the last horrific event, I’d been drugged, de-robed, and hogtied in the backseat of the car. I awoke to find Milton struggling to keep the vehicle on the road in a Texas-sized rainstorm as we climbed hill after hill in the middle of nowhere. I regained my faculties and concluded that I wouldn’t subject myself to another torture event—even if that meant dying in the process. I bypassed every rational thought and somehow forced Milton to lose control of the vehicle. We careened down a rocky embankment. I lived. He escaped—minus his foot, which he had apparently sawed off at the ankle. Authorities had not been able to track him down. It was as if he’d never existed. As if I’d made it all up.
That was what one person had hinted, some woman named Pearl Griffin who wrote the Nothing But the Truth blog. I’d never met this lady—one of many anonymous creatures born from the hate-mongering Internet—but for whatever reason, she’d made it her life’s mission to publicly humiliate me, as if what I’d been through wasn’t enough. It was as if she watched me through a crystal ball, cackling every time she sent out a scathing post to her nomadic followers, twisting screws deeper into my temples. With no real way of fighting back—at least not until Milton was found and the truth uncovered—I was constantly reminded of my inability to control my life. There had to be irony in the fact that my life had come full circle—as a child I had been nothing more than a disposable pawn in someone else’s twisted games.
I’d begun to question my own sanity. Was there any way I could have conjured up these crazy kidnapping stories to the point of mutilating myself—a way of dealing with the traumas from my childhood, including when I’d accidentally killed Milton’s dad, Frank? But then I would look in the mirror and see the carvings on my back—now visible in red scar tissue. It was a message from Milton that said I’d never be free of his haunting wrath.
In all, I had lived in seventeen foster homes by the time I graduated high school. I’d had parents who acted with negligence and parents who resembled monsters. Frank was a monster, especially for a scrawny thirteen-year-old with no living family members. But Milton Weber was far worse. He put his dad to shame in terms of evil. And now I’d allowed my memories to serve as a platform for Milton to rule my world.
And there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. The sun would turn into dust before the debilitating tentacles of fear, anger, and anxiety would loosen their grips on my mind.
This latest spiral had gone on for three, four days. I’d lost track. Just after reuniting a little girl named Emma with her daddy—her mentally-unstable mother had kidnapped her and then tried to sell her for drugs at a truck stop—I shut out the world again. I should have been filled with joy that I’d helped locate the little girl and get her home safely.
But it had the opposite effect. Emma now had safety and love. I’d never experienced any of that as a child, and I’d stopped trying to convince myself that I ever would.
A clanging noise got my attention. My eyes shot open as my breath stuttered. A singular thought shattered my fragile core: Milton had found me once again.
2
With my racing pulse ticking the side of my neck, I froze. Milton had come out of hiding and somehow found me in my new apartment on the north side of the city. I was as sure as dead.
Forcing out a breath, my eyes settled on the closet across the room. If I tiptoed in that direction, I might be able to make it there without him seeing see me through the small crack of the bedroom door. But I couldn’t move. I was completely frozen, except for my trembling. And I knew that by not moving, by not doing something to fight back, I was essentially inviting myself to be the featured guest in Milton’s latest torture party.
Disgusted at myself, I bit into the side of my cheek until blood trickled down the back of my throat.
I looked to the floor and couldn’t find Zorro. Did that bastard have my precious Zorro? Panic rippled through my veins.
I coiled up even more tightly, as images of past abuses pummeled my mind. The covers pressed against my face, my entire body shuddering with dread. With my eyes glued to the doorway, I tried to swallow. I nearly choked on a bloody breath. Twenty seconds into the clip of past horrors, a shot of reality pierced my haze of fear.
The gun.
I’d purchased my first handgun four weeks earlier. My unworked muscles strained from the stress of simply reaching over to my bedside table and pulling open the drawer. The grip of the Luger LC9s still felt foreign, but it gave me an instant jolt of confidence and energy. Rolling out of bed with minimal noise, I tiptoed across the shag carpet, my fingers wrapped around the grip. As I made my way to the door and set my hand against the frame, the only thing I could hear was the drumroll of my heartbeat.
I raised the gun to my waist, silently repeating to myself, I have the power. I have the power. Anything to overcome my fear. To fight back. To never again let Milton or anyone else control me or my thoughts.
I paused for a quick beat—the place was eerily quiet. Part of me wanted to call out for Zorro. But knowing my luck, Milton would be just on the other side of the wall, and he would stick his hairy hand around the corner and grab me by the throat before I knew what hit me.
Should I test my theory by just shooting through the wall?
Stupid move, Ivy. That would waste your bullets and reveal your exact location.
I leaned toward the opening of the door, each inch of movement feeling like I was tearing scar tissue. With my weight on my toes, I hopped into the living room, pulling my gun up to eye level.
The room was empty other than for Zorro, who was perched on the windowsill, his tail flapping against the blanket that dangled from the ceiling.
Another clang. I squeezed my eyes shut for a brief second. “Shit,” I said, shuffling over to the window. I picked up Zorro and used the end of my gun to pull back the blanket and the blinds. I saw immediately that the noise came from the metal line tapping the flagpole outside my window, the Texas flag whipping in the May wind.
“God bless America,” I chided myself, hoping the outward expression would rein in my reckless imagination.
Zorro dug in his claws, and I released him. He trotted toward the kitchen, and I bent over, hands on my knees, my back aching from so many hours lying on a ten-year-old mattress. I noticed my attire—charcoal gray sweats, socks, a holey T-shirt that hung just above my knees. I picked up a waft of something foul. Probably me, since I hadn’t taken a shower in at least a couple of days. Brushing my teeth had also become optional. I put a hand to my hair and could tell my frizzies were out in full force.
Forcing myself back to a standing position, I rubbed gritty, tired eyes. The whites of my eyes probably had more red lines than one of my college English papers. How the hell could I be tired? I’d done nothing for days.
“What am I doing with
my life?” I yelled.
I took in a full breath. It felt like my chest might cave in, and I coughed. What was I, twenty-eight going on ninety-eight?
How long could I keep this up before I literally crumbled into nothingness? How long would he allow me to live?
As Zorro meowed at the pantry, signaling his desire for food, I was overcome with a feeling of complete helplessness. I couldn’t actively rid myself of this monster, Milton. He was a ghost. Who knew when he’d return to my life? Was it possible that he’d never return? I’d given all the control to him, even though he only played the role of an actor in the malicious theater of my mind.
I dropped the gun on the couch and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. The more I rubbed, the more they itched. And I didn’t have the discipline to stop.
A pounding at my front door.
My hands went from rubbing my eyes to scooping up the gun. I ran to the entryway and struck the door with the butt of my gun four times.
“Who is it?” I set my feet and held the gun with two hands as I’d been taught in my safety courses.
Screw safety. I was about to blow splinters of wood through the torso of the maggot on the other side of the door.
“I said, who’s at my fucking door?”
“It’s me.”
A girl’s voice, my ECHO employee. “Cristina?”
I unlatched the five deadbolts and pulled open the door.
“We’ve got major problems.” Her big, brown eyes stared at my gun, and then she walked inside. “Not the least of which is your paranoia.”
I shut the door and locked us in.
3
After returning the Luger to the drawer of my bedside table, I returned to the living room to find my seventeen-year-old employee inspecting my home décor with a skeptical air.
The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 1-3: Redemption Thriller Series 7-9 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 49
