by Barbara Gee
Even though they now had a pretty good idea of the perimeter, the search area was still huge. Tuck put out a ‘be on the lookout’ to all law enforcement agencies in the area, but there was little else they could do until they had more information.
His phone rang and when he saw it was Detective Anderson, Tuck was hopeful for some good news. Instead, Ryan told him that the men they had been tailing had snuck out through a restaurant kitchen and disappeared. The two cops who had been assigned to them were combing the area, but weren’t hopeful.
Whatever their role had been, either decoys or accomplices, Jimmy’s mission had been accomplished and so he had called his men off. The two had likely plotted out the kitchen escape well in advance, under the assumption that they were being watched.
And thus another lead had come to naught.
Much as he dreaded receiving the promised video link, Tuck knew it was their only chance for clues. The problem was, Jimmy knew that as well, and he would no doubt be careful. The man was much smarter than his carefully crafted country hick persona would indicate. He wouldn’t knowingly take any chances, and that didn’t bode well for Madison.
Chapter 5
Maddy closed her eyes and prayed. The last few hours had been a nightmare come to life, starting with the knock on Libby’s door. The peephole had revealed the building superintendent, whom she had heard earlier in the empty apartment.
Maddy opened the door and the woman smiled widely. “So sorry to bother you, Ms. Simon,” she said, obviously not realizing she was speaking to Maddy. “This gentleman is considering renting the unit next door. I was telling him how beautifully you’ve decorated your place and he requested a quick peek to get an idea of the possibilities, since the two units are laid out almost identically. Could you spare a few minutes?”
“Well actually, I’m not—”
Before Maddy could explain the case of mistaken identity, the tall, skinny man standing behind the super made a quick chopping movement to her neck and she dropped to the floor. Maddy’s brain barely had time to register that she was in danger before the man shoved his way into the apartment, a gun pointed at her head.
“Not a word, lady. Not a single damn word. And if you scream, you’re dead.” He took a phone out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons, continuing to stare balefully at Maddy who stood frozen, her heart pounding and her mind racing. A moment later another man appeared, this one shorter and muscle bound. He bent down to drag the unconscious woman into the apartment where she couldn’t be seen by passing tenants, then closed the door.
“So here’s how this is gonna work,” the first man said, waving his gun. “You’re comin’ with us. Right now. We’re all three gonna walk out of this building together, all nice and quiet. If you try to scream or get anyone’s attention, my man Chuck and me are gonna start shootin’. I don’t care who we hit, women and children are just fine with me, the more the better. And them dyin’ will be on your head, cuz all I’m askin’ is for you to keep quiet and go along with us. So it’s your choice, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it. Let’s go.”
Maddy tried to stall. “I’m not wearing any shoes,” she said quickly. “It’ll attract attention if I walk outside wearing only socks.”
“Chuck, go get some shoes from the closet. Now!”
The man headed down the hall and Maddy protested. “But this isn’t my—”
“Shut up!” the man roared. He walked over and pointed the gun at the unconscious woman’s head. “In case you didn’t notice, we’re in a hurry, here. One more word, one more, and this lady dies. You got that?”
Maddy clenched her teeth, desperately trying to figure out what was happening and how she could stop it. The other man returned with a pair of Libby’s tennis shoes. Maddy tried to take her time putting them on, but the man with the gun pressed it to the back of her head and said she had exactly five seconds to finish.
Maddy’s instinct was to resist now, before she put any innocent people at risk. As they opened the apartment door she tried to make a break for the kitchen, where her cell phone lay on the counter. If she could dial 911 and then throw her phone into another room, leaving the connection open long enough to be traced……but the muscle man tackled her before she even got close.
“Are you crazy, lady?” the skinny guy hissed. While his partner held Maddy immoveable, he turned and pointed his gun at the head of the still unconscious building superintendent. “Right now she’s still alive. One more move from you and I’ll double-tap her quicker’n you can say pretty please. You understand me?”
Maddy nodded, feeling helpless and hating it.
“Now you and Chuck are gonna walk out of here and get on the elevator while I stay right here. If I don’t hear from Chuck in three minutes, I’m gonna assume you tried some funny business, and this nice lady dies. If you make it down to the lobby with no problems, Chuck will call and let me know and I’ll join ya’ll down there, where I know good and well there’s gonna be plenty of people we can shoot if you change your mind about coming along with us. You understand what I’m sayin’?”
Maddy just glared and his temper rose. He walked over to the prone woman and stood over her, his gun aimed at her temple.
“Do you understand?” he ground out, his black eyes cold. “You either say yes sir and get your ass out the door, or no sir and watch her die. Either way you’re comin’ with us. It’s up to you how many people die on the way.”
Chuck gave Maddy a hard shake. “Answer the question,” he muttered.
“Yes sir,” Maddy spat.
“Three minutes,” Skinny said, a humorless smile stretching his thin lips.
She had no choice. No one would die on her account. She wordlessly accompanied Chuck down the hall to the elevator and they descended to the building’s lobby, which was of course busy with people coming and going on a Friday night. Fighting tears of anger and fear, Maddy waited and tried to look normal while Chuck called his partner with the okay to come down. She wondered whether he would leave the superintendent unharmed, or if he would shoot her just for the fun of it, with Maddy being none the wiser.
“We’re parked around the corner,” Skinny muttered when he stepped off the elevator and joined them. Maddy walked silently through the lobby, her eyes on the floor, making sure she didn’t do anything that might bring harm to the innocent people around them. When they got to a nondescript tan sedan, Chuck opened the back door, making sure she could see that the gun in his pocket was pointed at a group of passing teenagers.
Getting into the back seat of their car was the hardest thing Maddy had ever done. She knew she was most likely signing her own death warrant, but there was no alternative.
Skinny climbed in beside her, grinning. “Welcome to hell, Ms. Simon,” he said, shoving a needle into her thigh and depressing the plunger.
Maddy gasped in shock, and passed out.
When she woke up, Maddy found herself lying on a dirty cement floor all in a heap. She must have been carelessly dropped there while her abductors waited for her to sleep off whatever it was she’d been injected with.
She had the presence of mind to stay still, not alerting anyone to the fact that she had regained consciousness. Her face was turned toward the wall so she couldn’t see anything, but she heard several male voices from across the room. One voice she recognized as belonging to her skinny abductor. Another voice was rough and demanding, with a strong backwoods accent, and the man who went with that voice was obviously in charge. The third man was apologizing all over himself for not having something ready in time.
Maddy kept listening, and was eventually able to deduce that the apologetic man was attempting to do something technical with cameras and computers, and it wasn’t going as planned.
“You got ten more minutes, Abe. If you can’t get it figured out by then, you get what the girl gets.”
“It’s all hooked up and ready to broadcast, Jimmy, I just wish I had more time to cover our tracks. I’d like to ju
mp around to at least another ten servers to make sure we can’t be traced, but with you rushing things, I don’t have time.”
“Do what you can in ten minutes and then it’s show time. We won’t be here more than forty-eight hours, so I ain’t too worried about the Feds tracing us. That fuckin’ Tucker Simon is an idiot anyway. He won’t be trackin’ us nowhere.”
Maddy’s breath caught when she heard that name. Tucker Simon. She knew who that was, it was Libby’s older brother, the FBI agent. Libby had lots of family photos scattered around her apartment, and most of them included Tucker. Maddy had looked at them many, many times when Libby wasn’t home. Tucker Simon was the most attractive man Maddy had ever seen, and she’d often imagined what it would be like to meet such a man in person.
Once, early in their friendship, Maddy had picked up a photo from the coffee table and casually asked Libby about her brother, what he did and where he lived.
Libby took the photo and smiled as she looked at it. “He’s a big, bad, FBI Special Agent. He works out of the Charlotte office. Now that I’m back North Carolina I get to see him every few weeks. When I lived in DC, I’d only see him a few times a year.” Replacing the photo on the table, she had grinned at Maddy. “Maybe I should introduce you two. He’s older than you, but only by seven years. I’d love it if he found a nice girlfriend, but he doesn’t seem to have time for it.”
“He looks kind of intimidating,” Maddy had observed, secretly wishing Libby would follow through on that idea.
“Hmmm, I guess he can be,” Libby admitted. “But he’s hands down the best man I know.”
As Maddy laid on the cold hard floor now, she tried to figure out why she had been taken, and how Tucker Simon fit in. After a few minutes of thinking things through, she was pretty sure Tucker must be after the mean, angry man called Jimmy, and Jimmy obviously thought she was Libby. As such, she had become Jimmy’s tool for convincing Tucker to go away.
She heard footsteps approaching and she quickly closed her eyes, gasping when the toe of a boot connected sharply with her hip.
“You awake there, sweet thang?” It was Jimmy, and Maddy suppressed a shudder. He kicked her again, harder. Maddy rolled away from the wall and drew her knees up, glaring at him.
He squatted down in front of her, his smile baring yellowed teeth behind thin lips. “You ain’t the one we really wanted, but you probably figured that out already,” he said. “I think you’ll do, though. Tucker Simon won’t want to let me kill an innocent little thing like you, so that’ll put him in a bind. I’ll have me a puppet on a string in no time, just where I want ‘im.”
Maddy remained silent and he gave a short, cackling laugh. “You surely were at the wrong place at the wrong time, sweet cheeks. Too bad you’re gonna pay the price Tucker Simon’s sister should be payin’, but nothin’ I can do about it now. Might just as well enjoy myself. And the good news is, my good buddy Tucker is gonna be watchin’ every minute of it right as it goes down.”
Reaching out, Jimmy ran a stubby finger down her cheek, his piggish eyes hot and shiny. Maddy recoiled, shuddering in revulsion and trying not to show evidence of the fear coiling through her.
“It’s not gonna be a great night for ya, sweet cheeks, but it’s for a noble cause.” He turned around and grinned at the men behind him. “Ain’t that right, boys? Don’t ya think this little gal should feel pretty dang proud of herself for helping me get back to my home state?”
“Dang proud,” Skinny agreed. “Let’s get this show on the road. You ready, Abe? Your ten minutes has done come and went.”
“If you want to start, we’ll start, but I’d prefer more time,” Abe replied, sounding stressed.
Jimmy stood and clapped his meaty hands together. “Get everyone in here. Russ, you and Zeke string her up. Arms above her head, ankles to the ring bolts in the floor.”
Skinny and another man grabbed her. Maddy pulled back and kicked at them but they easily subdued her, hauling her upright and tying her up as ordered. With her arms stretched up over her head, Maddy had never felt so helpless and vulnerable. She watched warily as Jimmy approached her again, his smile hideous. He slapped a piece of duct tape over her mouth, then walked all the way around her, grunting with satisfaction.
Stopping in front of her, he gave her another evil grin. “I’ll take the tape off when it’s time for you to talk. Don’t want you getting’ any ideas about sayin’ anything till I say it’s time. Now get ready, sweet cheeks. You’re ‘bout to be a star.” Turning, he waved his hand in a circular motion. “Roll it, Abe. Let’s say hi to my friend Tucker.”
Maddy closed her eyes and prayed. She prayed for courage and strength. She prayed that she could somehow figure out how to thwart Jimmy’s evil plans. She prayed for Libby, that she wouldn’t feel guilty about whatever was going to happen.
And she prayed for Tucker Simon to come and save her.
Chapter 6
When his phone buzzed almost three hours after Jimmy’s phone call, Tuck opened the text message with dread. One of the other agents, approached.
“Is it the link?” Dan asked.
“Yeah,” Tuck said, forwarding the text to Emma so she could open the site from her laptop and project the video onto the wall. Meanwhile, their tech guys at Langley would be working to trace the link. Maybe they could trump Jimmy’s man and zero in on the broadcast location.
Tuck felt sweat rolling down the middle of his back. He closed his eyes and said a prayer for the poor girl who found herself in Jimmy Callahan’s clutches through no fault of her own. He hoped for her sake that she wasn’t especially attractive, as he knew from experience that Jimmy was particularly violent with the pretty girls.
Jimmy might be a near genius when it came to his criminal endeavors, but physically he was a short, stout, ugly man. His unfortunate porcine appearance, along with his impotence, put a huge chip on his shoulder, and his favorite way of feeling better about himself was dominating a beautiful woman with his fists and other tools of the trade. Baseball bats, rebar, golf clubs—Tuck had talked to women who had seen it all. Some had managed to recover physically, others were crippled or disfigured for life. All of them were terrified of Jimmy Callahan, and not a single one had ever agreed to testify on the record, even when promised protection.
And now, that animal had Libby’s best friend.
Tuck shoved his chair away from the table. “I need some air. Come get me when it starts.”
He left the room and went out through the back door of the building, into a small courtyard protected from the surrounding lots by a high brick wall. Taking long breaths of the cool evening air, Tuck tried to prepare himself for what was coming.
He knew Jimmy was going to call him out and make it personal. Even though Jimmy had failed to get Libby, he would take advantage of the fact that he still had an innocent girl to use, and he would make sure Tuck knew she was suffering because of him.
She would suffer because Tuck hadn’t succeeded in putting Jimmy away when he’d had the chance. That knowledge had his stomach churning acid and his heart thudding painfully.
That poor girl.
Thinking about what she faced was almost unbearable, and Tuck had to draw on strength he wasn’t sure he had to keep from sinking to his knees. Weakness didn’t come easy to him, it never had. He possessed formidable physical and mental strength, but right now he felt defeated and helpless and yes, weak. He wasn’t sure he could face what the night held in store, and he detested the unfamiliar feeling of inadequacy.
“Hey, Tuck.” Emma Malone’s soft voice came to him through the darkness.
“Has it started?” he asked, his voice full of dread.
“Not yet. I just wanted to come out here and tell you to stop blaming yourself. I know that’s what you’re doing, and it’s wrong, Tuck. You did everything humanly possible to lock Jimmy up, and you did it right. You were brilliant, you caught him when no one else could, and your case was foolproof. You had no way of knowing he’d pa
id those cops off. No one did. I know you think you should have seen it coming, but you’re not a superhero, Tuck.”
Tuck turned to face her, hands on his slim hips, his handsome face haggard. “If I think about it logically, you’re probably right, Em. But logic doesn’t always rule, and I feel responsible. I should have considered the possibility that Jimmy had cops on the payroll. I shouldn’t have trusted the local guys with so much.”
“That’s ridiculous, Tuck. We work with locals all the time. We don’t have enough agents to do it all ourselves. Tell me this,” Emma said, approaching him and digging her pointer finger into his chest. “If the tables were turned and I was the one on your end, wouldn’t you be standing here telling me to stop beating myself up? Wouldn’t you be telling me it’s ridiculous to use hindsight to second guess everything I’ve done?”
Tuck sighed. “I don’t know, Em. This case has made me question everything, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I have what it’s going to take to end it. I honestly don’t know if I can take Jimmy down, and yet I can’t let him win. He’s brought Libby into it, and now this poor girl.”
“We’re all in this together, Tuck, and this is our chance. Jimmy Callahan is going to screw up, I can feel it. He’s too angry at you, and it’s going to make him careless. You just have to keep your cool and outsmart him. And you will, Tuck. I know you can do it, and we’re all behind you a hundred percent.”
“I don’t know if I can watch the video,” Tuck confessed, his voice low and strained. “That poor girl. She must be scared out of her mind right now.”
“You can and you will,” Emma said crisply. “You know Jimmy better than anyone, and that girl needs you to watch and listen for something that’s going to help us find her. And make no mistake, Tuck, it’s Jimmy Callalan who is responsible for whatever happens to her, not you. Not you. You’re the good guy.”
