kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller)

by Chesler, Rick

Then, when Tara was forced to return fire to the kidnapper inside, the van driver reached his gun out the window, aiming for Dave, who threw his truck into gear and rammed into the UPS van. He impacted the driver’s side in the middle, denting it severely. He then backed up to the house and angled the wheel all the way left. He rammed the truck forward once more, hitting the van again.

  Lance reached the cover of Dave’s truck as the gunman let loose a trio of silenced rounds. Each of them ricocheted off the pickup in a melodic series of percussive impacts as the projectiles hit different parts of the vehicle’s bodywork.

  Then Dave was pulling his truck out into the middle of the small grass yard, honking the horn, hoping to attract the attention of neighbors who would call the police. Kristen waved an arm out the window, beckoning him and Tara to hurry up. Dave crossed the driveway and rumbled over a hedge separating his yard from the next.

  Seeing that he was being left behind, Lance bolted for the truck while the UPS van driver began to back out. Tara let loose another shot into the house to keep the shootist inside at bay and then she too ran for Dave’s pickup while the van’s driver maneuvered his vehicle.

  First Lance and then Tara dove into the bed of Dave’s pickup, Tara yelling at Lance to lie flat as she did the same. The assailant came flat out running out of the house, shooting at the pickup. His shots ricocheted harmlessly off the tailgate as Dave accelerated out into the empty street at a crazy angle—Lance and Tara rolling around painfully in the bed—before corralling the truck into a lane. Behind them, the gunman from the house jumped into the UPS van as it plowed across Dave’s yard and the sidewalk onto the street.

  Tara's anxiety for the situation she now found herself in was acute. Fleeing from armed kidnapping suspects in the presence of untrained civilians, with no way of summoning immediate backup. And Lance. He was dangerously unstable. He'd killed a man without knowing it and then had wanted to kill him again. She was sure he would have pulled the trigger had she not intervened. The shell attack she could dismiss as self-defense—certainly defense of Dave—but once Lance had the gun the assailant had been unable to function. Not to mention it was Lance himself who had apparently caused this mess.

  The UPS van was not far behind. Dave and Kristen could see it looming in their rear-view mirror. Tara slid open the small divider window and yelled up into the cab, keeping her head down. “You guys okay?”

  Both replied in the affirmative.

  Tara asked Lance if he had a cell-phone.

  “No, it got wet in Kauai, remember?” Tara shouted again through the divider, asking Kristen and Dave if they had a cell-phone.

  “I left mine on the laptop table in Dave’s house,” Kristen said. “Got the laptop, though.”

  “Left mine on the kitchen table,” Dave said, before adding,

  “Hold on back there—gonna try to lose those guys.”

  Tara stayed low in the truck bed, her Glock at the ready. She decided that so far, Dave’s evasive driving skills were okay, though she wished she were behind the wheel. Dave accelerated down the residential road, but the big van was gaining on them. Then Dave took a sharp corner without slowing and Lance was jostled over something sharp that jabbed his ribcage. Keeping one hand on the bed’s rail to keep himself from flying out if they went over one of the many potholes that dotted Hawaii’s roadways, Lance looked down and saw a long black stick with a point on one end. It also had rubber surgical tubing and a trigger.

  A speargun.

  The big brown van rounded the corner and then sped into the straightaway. There were cars parked along the street here, and a few cyclists and pedestrians could be seen. Dave was unwilling to go any faster for fear of losing control of the vehicle.

  The pair of kidnappers rammed their disguised van into the pickup’s tailgate.

  Lance wailed in agony as his already broken finger was wrenched from the pickup’s bed rail by the impact of the collision. A shot ricocheted somewhere off the truck’s cab. Only Dave’s head was exposed to the line of fire because he was driving. Tara returned fire by raising only her gun hand above the truck bed, with a single shot that pierced the van’s windshield. But still the van kept coming. Tara realized she must be running low on ammo. She opened the magazine. Two rounds remained.

  Dave slowed the truck to negotiate an approaching left. As he did, the van slammed them again. In the back, Lance stretched the speargun’s high tension rubber bands back as far as he could until they settled into a notch, their deadly potential energy waiting to be unleashed. Tara saw him and grabbed the weapon away. “I’ll handle that,” she said. The speargun was a lethal weapon, but one which would offer only a single shot. With her depleting ammunition, she needed all the resources she could get, and she was not willing to leave them in the hands of dangerous citizens such as Lance.

  They heard the attack van accelerating for another ramming maneuver. Dave shouted, “Hold tight!”

  The van was only a few yards behind them, about to hit. Tara raised the spear gun. Aiming for the windshield in front of the driver’s head, she was about to squeeze the trigger when they hit a small pothole, causing the underwater weapon to bounce in Tara’s hands as it went off.

  It gave her great satisfaction to see the driver and the passenger put their arms in front of their faces in a defensive position. But her pride was short-lived as she watched the tip of the spear glance harmlessly off the metal part of the van above the windshield, caroming off into the street.

  In short order Tara felt the tug of the loose spear, still connected by its tether to the gun from which it was fired. The unloaded gun was yanked from her hands. She watched as the long wooden shaft did what its own projectile had not—smashed into the van’s windshield—cracking it across the driver’s side before falling away. The van pulled back as the assailants assessed the damage and possible further threats.

  Not the devastating impact Tara had hoped for, but it was something. Dave was able to make the left turn without incident. “Was that my speargun?” Dave asked.

  “Yes,” Tara shouted back. “Any other weapons in here I should know about?”

  “No,” Dave replied.

  “If you do have any it’s okay. This is the one-time-only Tara Shores Amnesty Program. Even if they’re not registered, I’ll look the other way.”

  “Sorry,” Dave said. Tara went back to monitoring the UPS van. In the cab, Dave saw Kristen look at her watch with a concerned expression.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “The sequencing lab results of the bioluminescent cells might be ready by now.”

  Dave came to an intersection with a larger artery, stop-lights regulating moderate traffic. He looked in both directions and then his eyes brightened.

  “Does your laptop have a wireless card?”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn it on, get it ready.”

  Kristen checked out the rearview mirror, where the ominous brown van was again looming larger. Dave took a right onto University Avenue.

  “I don’t think we should stop anywhere with these guys behind us,” Kristen advised.

  “We’re not gonna stop. There’s a row of coffee shops up ahead on the right. They all have free Wi-Fi. There might be just enough time for you to access your e-mail and download the lab file.”

  Kristen immediately reached down and grabbed her laptop, powering it on.

  “How much further ‘til the hot spot?”

  “Two blocks. But don’t mess around. You might have about thirty seconds to do this once we reach the end of the shops, so just get on there and download the file. No checking your horoscope or the stock quotes or anything like that.”

  Kristen chuckled in spite of the situation. “Okay, I get it. Wouldn’t want to see Alacra’s share price right now, anyway. Just try and slow down a little bit when we pass the shops if you can.”

  From the truck bed, Tara could see that their two pursuers had donned ball caps and big, dark sunglasses. She noticed that there wa
s no front license plate on the van. At least the crack in their windshield from the speargun was large enough to cause a glaring reflection. She hoped it would get them pulled over, but there were no police cruisers in sight.

  “Okay...” Dave warned. “Coming up right...here. Go, connect!”

  Kristen didn’t even bother looking up at the row of coffee houses with their clusters of tables set out in front of them. She stared at the wireless connection icon on her screen, seconds feeling like eons while it flashed “Connecting...” Finally it signaled “Connected to CoffeeNet1” and she brought up her Internet browser...only to be greeted with a password security prompt.

  “It wants a password!” Kristen said.

  “Oh yeah,” Dave said, glancing over at the shops on his right. They were about halfway down the row of shops already. He eased up on the accelerator. The brown van closed the distance between them.

  “I know it. They give it away to anyone who’s a customer, and they don’t change it that often, I was just in there a few days ago. The password is...” He racked his brain while they rolled on. Kristen eyed the rapidly fading shops, fingers poised over the keyboard.

  “Killer Java, all one word. Killerjava,” he repeated.

  Kristen entered the string. “I’m in,” she declared.

  “Hurry,” Dave reminded her.

  She navigated to her web e-mail and logged in. They reached the end of the line of shops. “You’re gonna lose signal soon,” Dave said.

  “Should be the most recent mail. Here it is. Downloading!”

  “How big is the file?” Lance called from the bed.

  “Only one meg. Got it! I got it!”

  And just then her Internet browser disconnected from the web mail site, displaying a ‘page not found’ message.

  “Okay, put it away for now. I’ll try and get us somewhere safe so we can look at it without being shot at,” Dave said. Kristen agreed, closing the laptop and setting it on the floorboard.

  “Maybe we’ll get pulled over for having people riding in the back,” Kristen hoped aloud.

  Dave shook his head. “It’s actually not illegal in Hawaii to ride in the back of a pickup, like it is in California,” Dave said.

  They continued down the gentle slope toward Waikiki. In the truck bed, Tara turned around to address Lance.

  “Tell me what you know about these people. Who are they, how can we get rid of them?”

  Lance said, “I’ve never seen those two guys before—I don’t think they’re the same two guys who were out on the boat, do you?”

  Tara shook her head. “No, different guys. I got an okay look at them after Dave and I dropped you and Kristen off at the pier.”

  “They’re hired thugs, I guess,” Lance conjectured.

  Traffic lightened ahead and Dave punched the accelerator, allowing him to switch lanes and pass a slow moving work truck filled with day laborers. After a series of decisive lane changes, he had put three cars between him and the UPS van. A major intersection appeared a block in the distance, underneath a highway overpass jammed with vehicles.

  “Where are we going?” Kristen asked.

  Dave shrugged. “Not sure. Right now we're headed toward Waikiki and the beach. I think we're pretty safe with all these people around, so I'll just keep heading this way unless you have a plan B.”

  She did not. Neither did Tara. Traffic slowed to a crawl beneath the overpass as the UPS van closed to within two cars. Island music blared from a nearby car stereo, its melodic strains doing nothing to alleviate the tension of the pursuit.

  Dave drove on, doggedly pursued by the boxy van which was held at bay through his occasional, sporadic lane changes and the threat of Tara's Glock. Then the roadway cleared somewhat and Dave accelerated to fifty miles per hour. When he reached the turnoff to Waikiki, however, Dave swore. A road crew had blocked it off, and traffic was being detoured along the mauka, or mountain side of the Ala Wai Canal, toward the community of Hawaii Kai and Diamond Head.

  “We're going with the flow,” Dave announced, turning onto Ala Wai Boulevard with the rest of the traffic. The UPS van was now three cars behind them. They crawled along toward the famous volcano until Dave saw a sign for Diamond Head Road. He took it.

  A two lane blacktop wound up the side of the extinct volcano, the whitecapped ocean below to their right. They climbed the steep road with the UPS van four cars back. As they crested the hill, two of the cars between them and the van turned off into a parking lot where surfers prepared to hike down the rugged trail leading to the windswept beach far below, leaving the van only two cars behind. Tara kept her Glock with its precious last two rounds at the ready.

  The ride down Diamond Head Road took three minutes, and was uneventful. When they reached the bottom of the grade the road opened up to four broad lanes. Dave hit the gas. The UPS van fell back.

  They rolled through a pleasant suburban neighborhood until Dave saw a sign reading “Koko Marina.” He followed its arrow, turning right.

  “Maybe we lost ‘em!” Lance called from the back. But a brown rectangle appeared in the rear view mirror. “They saw us make the turn,” Kristen said. Tara considered her options. She could now order Dave to pull over so that she could jump out, enabling her to find somewhere to call for reinforcements. But then she would be out of contact with the primary case elements: Lance and the kidnappers. She was still armed. She opted to stay in the truck for now and see what develops.

  Dave continued straight until they came to a stoplight where they had to turn either right or left onto a waterfront street. To the right the road curved quickly out of sight, following the coast. To the left they could see the masts of sailboats bobbing at their slips in the marina.

  The light turned green, but Dave could see the UPS van pulling up three cars behind them. Now Tara, who had been trained in vehicular pursuit tactics, advised Dave through the cab window. “Dave, just sit here until right before the light turns red—we want to leave them stuck at the red,” she said as the car behind them began to blare its horn. She didn’t like being within firing range. Dave complied, pretending to look for something down on the seat. More horns blared. “Tell me when it turns yellow.”

  A driver behind them leaned out the window and shouted obscenities.

  Dave waved an arm at him. “Nobody drives aloha anymore.”

  “Yellow,” Tara hollered. Dave waited until the light turned red, then shot through the intersection, just making the left before the oncoming traffic. In the back, Lance rolled painfully into the side of the bed, but held on. Amazingly, the car behind them made it too, tailgating Dave’s truck through the turn, but the UPS van was stuck behind the second car, whose driver had wisely refused to go. Kristen and Dave high-fived. “Good job,” Tara called from the back.

  And then she realized how complacent she’d been toward the pursuing van. She watched as the passenger stood up and walked into the rear cargo area. When he returned to the front seat, she was horrified to see the unmistakable outline of a submachine gun. The kidnappers were taking no chances on having them survive. The man leaned out the window with the automatic weapon. Tara, hating to do it in traffic, but seeing no choice, fired one of her last two remaining rounds at the man. She saw a bright spark fly off the right-side mirror. The gunman ducked back inside. She had bought a few seconds at most, for even with a full clip, she was hopelessly outgunned. Once he opened up with the automatic weapon, people would die.

  Then Tara spotted a large yellow vehicle up ahead in their lane. She told Dave to catch up to it. Not looking forward to a barrage of automatic weapons fire any more than Tara, he accelerated past a car on his left, then caught up to the strange looking vehicle.

  “What is that?” Kristen asked.

  “Duck boat!” Dave exclaimed, pulling alongside a boxy yellow contraption that looked sort of like a safari bus, but with six wheels. Clearly a touring vehicle of some sort, with a gaggle of Japanese vacationers aiming cameras from open air seats under
a canvas canopy.

  “It is the Duck boat!” Tara said.

  “Doesn’t look like a boat,” Kristen said.

  But Tara was plainly captivated with the rolling oddity. As Dave pulled alongside it, Kristen could see a banner hanging from its side, proclaiming “Duck Tours!”

  “What is it?” Kristen asked.

  “No time to explain,” Tara said, glancing over to the right to see if they could get over, “but I think I just found our plan B.”

  …GAAA43TTTC...

  9:54 AM

  Dave accelerated his pickup past the yellow touring vehicle. He slowed just enough to make the right turn into the marina parking lot, tipping the truck onto two wheels for a second as he made the turn. He cast a quick glance to his right, up the street, but the brown van was not there. Still stuck at the red.

  Tara maintained a vigilant watch from the truck bed while Lance grimaced in pain, coddling his broken finger.

  Dave shot across the parking lot, looking for an open space near the water. By the time he pulled into one, the yellow Duck was entering the lot at a leisurely pace.

  “Grab your stuff, get out,” Tara said. “We’re getting on that thing.”

  “Sounds good,” Dave said, killing the engine.

  Kristen watched as the tour vehicle rolled sedately past them across the parking lot. She looked to her right, where a splotch of brown was now visible coming their way.

  “Why? They look like they’re about to stop,” Kristen said.

  “You out of gas?” Lance asked, jumping out the back.

  “No,” Dave said. “Like Agent Shores said, that’s the Duck boat. Kristen, Tara, how much cash do you have? We’re gonna need a lot of cash because we’re going to have to bribe the driver to let us on—you’re supposed to book a tour through a hotel beforehand, and they tour through the area, but we just want the water ride.”