Discovery

by Char Webster

  Nick turned to him and said harshly, “You know damn well. Tony called you in front of me. You led them to Kate’s house and to the kids.”

  Robert was still a little slow to catch on. “Kate had Alex and Zach?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know Kate was the kids’ foster parent. You saw them with her.” Nick challenged. Jason and Ryan were watching the exchange with slightly confused expressions.

  “Nick, I swear. I had no idea Kate’s kids were Zach and Alex. I never saw her kids up close and never had any interaction with them,” Robert told Nick, getting agitated and pacing around. He started asking questions quickly. “What happened to your brother? How did Kate end up with the kids? Why didn’t you have them? ”

  Robert continued. “Damn, Nick, I haven’t seen the kids in over three years. They’ve really grown. I didn’t know the little one was your niece. I didn’t know your brother had another child.”

  “My brother and his wife were killed nine months ago and I’ve been trying to figure out who killed them.” Nick released a big breath and ran his hands through his hair. He wanted to believe his friend so badly. “I really want to trust you,” he told him.

  “Damn, man, I’m so sorry.” Robert told him, sincerely upset that his friend’s family had gone through such tragedy. “No matter what you think about me, Nick, I’m still the same guy you grew up with and the same guy who loves you like a brother. I’m here with our friends to help you, and that’s what we are going to do. We’re going to get Kate and then go find your kids. We’ll have to work out everything else after your family is safe.” Robert held out his hand, hoping that Nick took it.

  Slowly, Nick walked the few steps to Robert and clasped his hand. Both guys looked at each other and finally pulled each other in for a hug.

  “Aww, guys, you’re going to make me cry,” Jason said sarcastically, with some exaggerated sniffing.

  “Do you always have to be an ass?” Ryan questioned. “I could give you something to really cry about.”

  “Oh, trust me, you do, Ry. Your smell brings tears to my eyes.” Ryan pushed Jason and Jason started to laugh.

  Nick welcomed the comic relief and smiled slightly. “They haven’t changed.”

  “I knew you missed me,” Jason told him and punched him in the arm.

  “Okay, enough of the crap,” Ryan told them. “Let’s get back to how we are going to free Kate.”

  ~*~*~

  Kate used to like duct tape. She used it at her house quite often, but she promised herself that when she got out of this mess, she was going to throw out every last roll of it. As soon as she was grabbed and thrown in the back of the moving car, her captor had taped her mouth, hands, and feet together. There was so much tape around her that she would never get out of it.

  They hadn’t spoken to her during the short car ride to their present location. They also hadn’t spoken to her since they had roughly pulled her out of the back seat and dumped her on the cold, dirty cement floor. Her cheek hurt where they dropped her on it. It was probably bruised and swollen.

  She tried really hard to keep herself calm. If she freaked out it wouldn’t do her any good. She needed to keep her head. Kate managed to twist over into a sitting position so she could at least see what was happening. Tony and the guy who grabbed her were talking softly across the huge room. They were not looking at her directly, so she took the opportunity to look around for a way out or a way to cut through some of this massive amount of duct tape.

  She shifted slightly and felt her father’s pocket knife. If she could get it, she could cut her way free. She couldn’t even try to escape taped the way she was.

  Kate noticed them walk her way and decided to put on a show for them. Let them think she was terrified, maybe they would underestimate her. She pretended to shake and cry. She was even able to manage a few tears.

  Tony stayed back, but the other guy grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly. He was looking at her with such menace that she tried to use her gift to calm him and infuse nicer thoughts and feelings, but the guy just seemed to reek of menace and evil.

  He started to scare her when his eyes got a wickedly evil gleam to them. She kept thinking to herself, Don’t let him do whatever he’s trying to do over and over in her head.

  The guy looked at her in confusion and grabbed her other arm. She felt a slight discomfort radiate through her but nothing she couldn’t handle. She wondered what he was doing to her. The guy snarled at her and had a look of extreme concentration on his face. She continued to feel discomfort but she tried to battle that with the calming effect she had.

  He finally got furious because whatever he had been trying to do had failed, and he hit her hard across the face and threw her several feet away. Kate had no idea what had happened. He stalked over to her and roughly pulled the tape from her mouth.

  “What the hell are trying to do to me?” he demanded, grabbing her arms.

  She was scared now. “Nothing, nothing,” she told him. He threw her back down in disgust.

  Ray was stunned and furious. This woman in front of him was gifted. She had to be; it was the only explanation for his gift not to work. It worked on everyone and no one could block him out. She had to have something that he had never encountered before to render his gift useless. He had always been able to inflict horrible pain on anyone he touched, just by willing it. She didn’t even flinch, and he could also feel her trying to change his rage into something calmer.

  He was going to kill Tony for not telling him. He stalked away from her and approached Tony.

  “When the hell were you going to tell me she was gifted?”

  Tony looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  Ray grabbed Tony by the throat and tried his gift on him. The weasel wriggled with pain and sunk to the floor. Ray looked over at Kate lying on the floor watching him with huge eyes. She had just discovered what she had avoided.

  Tony yelled in pain and begged him to stop. Ray gave him an extra dosage and then finally let him go.

  “Tell me everything you know about this woman,” Ray demanded.

  Tony explained how Robert had come to him and asked for the Division’s protection for her and the kids and that Robert wanted to assure their safety.

  “And you didn’t check her out?” Ray was disgusted. Tony was such a waste. He didn’t know how the idiot had survived so far.

  “Keep an eye on her. I have to go check something out.” With that, Ray walked out of the room, got in his car, and drove away.

  Tony looked at Kate and turned away. He wasn’t sure how he always got himself into these messes. His payment wasn’t nearly enough to put up with being tortured at the whim of a psycho. He should have only given the information to Frank. He was a fool to think that he could he could get paid twice for the same info. Going to Ray with it had been a mistake. Now he was stuck with him.

  He needed a drink. He slid a flask out of his pants pocket and took a couple of gulps of vodka. He began to pace around the room, not paying any attention to Kate.

  Kate noticed Tony’s inattention and used that to her advantage. She worked carefully to shimmy the knife out of her pocket. It was difficult with her hands bound tightly.

  After several minutes of working it out slowly and having to stop abruptly a few times because Tony looked her way, she had the knife in her hand. She wanted to smile and shout in triumph, but she held it in. All she had really accomplished was getting the knife. She hadn’t actually used it yet. She prayed it was still sharp.

  She began to quietly and extremely slowly cut through the many layers of duct tape.

  ~*~*~

  The game was crowded when Dawn got to the field. Her son had wanted to go early, but she compromised with him, and they arrived just before warm-ups. She didn’t want to stay any longer than she had to.

  As soon as she parked, Kevin hopped out and ran over to his team. She smiled at his enthusiasm. He loved to play baseball.

  She got out of the ca
r and walked around to the back passenger side door to get Maddy out of the car seat. Just as she opened the door and stepped closer to the car, someone grabbed her from behind and hit her hard on the back of the head. Her last thoughts were that she had failed Kate. Before she blacked out, she watched a large tattooed guy pull a screaming Maddy out of the car and run off with her.

  ~*~*~

  Frank was smiling as he drove off with the third kid. It was so much easier than he thought. He had waited in the parking lot and smiled as he watched Dawn pull in. He had planned to torture the whereabouts of the third kid out of her. He never expected that Johnson would have the little girl. It was his lucky day.

  He whistled all the way back to the place that he had stashed the other two kids. Now all he needed to do was come up with a plan to trade these kids for his daughter.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jason set up a camera to record the movements at the location that they had entered the warehouse. They wanted to see who was coming and going. Ryan hooked up his laptop tablet to the camera so they could all monitor it.

  Robert told the others about the security system that he had noticed around the building and Ryan tried to tap into it. It didn’t seem to be all that high tech, so Ryan told them it would be easy.

  “I guess just breaking a window is out,” Jason complained. “The warehouse next to it is close enough on the one side that we could probably jump from one roof to the next. That would actually be fun.”

  Robert rolled his eyes, but agreed that they could get to the roof of the building next to it with relative ease. “Let’s go up there now so we can assess the access of the warehouse from the roof. If we get up there and jump over but can’t get into the building, it’ll do us no good. Ryan, we need you to go with us this time.”

  “Are you guys armed?” Nick asked. “Ray won’t hold back, and you know that he’ll be armed and won’t hesitate to kill any of us.”

  The guys pulled out various guns and knives and a few other things that they would need. Jason pulled out a coil of rope and wrapped the loop around his shoulder.

  “Ray is the primary target, but don’t underestimate Tony. Ray is levelheaded and won’t panic under pressure. Tony doesn’t have any self-control and will react wildly and unpredictably; that makes him dangerous,” Nick told them.

  Robert checked around the building, and no one was around. The four of them made their way to the building next to the one in which Kate was being held. They broke in easily and made their way to the roof. It was a large warehouse that appeared to be unoccupied, but looked to be in better shape than the one next to it, despite the empty crates and boxes scattered around the floor. A large metal staircase led to an upper level. From the second floor, another metal staircase led up to the roof. The guys quickly climbed the steps and rounded the corner to the roof door.

  Nick was worried about Kate. She didn’t grow up in this kind of world, and he didn’t want her in the middle of the worst of it. He couldn’t lose her; not when she had just stumbled into his life.

  The roof had several large structures on it and a cooling system that provided enough cover for them to not be easily seen. They went from structure to structure, quickly making their way to the edge of the roof.

  Ryan interrupted Nick’s thoughts. “Guys, Ray is leaving the warehouse alone.” He was pointing to the video on the screen. “That makes things way easier. Let’s go in and get her before Ray gets back.”

  Jason put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder to hold him back. “Tony is trigger-happy. If we storm in there, he could hurt or kill Kate or hit one of us.”

  The next building’s roof looked sturdy enough, even though it was much more run-down. There were also several shed-like structures on the top of that building, one of which had a door that must have led into the warehouse. That would be their target.

  “Let’s jump across and see how we can sneak inside,” Nick told them.

  ~*~*~

  Kate was almost through the tape on her wrists. It had taken her longer than she had thought it would because of the angle of her hands in relationship to the knife. It always looked so much easier in the movies. Luckily, the knife was sharp, but her hands kept cramping up and she dropped it several times. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten caught yet.

  She sat up against the wall with her knees up close to the chest. It allowed her to hide the knife between her hands and knees. Once through the tape on her hands, she left it there to look like she was still bound, and started to cut the tape around her ankles.

  Putting the knife between her legs, she cut the back of the tape so what she was doing wouldn’t be obvious. Fortunately, Tony was still drinking out of his flask and not paying much attention to her.

  Kate noticed the alarm system that was activated when they got there, so she would have to avoid the ground floor windows and doors and pray that nothing else was wired to go off. She would have only one shot to escape, so going up to the roof was the only option to find a way out of there. She just had to get that far.

  She didn’t know if Tony had a gun, and she didn’t know what his gift was, so she would have to be very careful. She looked around the warehouse. It was filthy with trash, debris, and broken crates piled up along most of the walls and in some spots in the middle of the floor. There was a loft area that overlooked the main warehouse that had a narrow metal staircase leading up to it. That was where she needed to go.

  Kate inched along the wall, seeking a straight shot to the stairs and not wanting to weave between anything on her way there. Noticing a pipe laying close by, she considered grabbing it to try and knock out Tony, but wasn’t sure if she could pull that off.

  Holding the knife in her fist, she watched Tony. When he was the farthest from both her and the stairs, Kate stood up and ran for the stairs with everything she had.

  When she was halfway there, Tony noticed her running and ran right for her. He tackled her just as she made the first few stairs. She banged down hard against the steps, jarring her whole body.

  “Where the hell are you going, bitch!” Tony yelled with a slight slur as he grabbed her around the waist.

  Kate twisted around, kicked him in the legs, and punched him anywhere her fists landed. She managed to get him to loosen his grip, and ran up a few more stairs. Once again, he seized her legs, causing her to slip and fall a few steps. She scraped her arms on the rough metal and almost dropped the knife, but managed to keep hold of it. He was pulling her down when she twisted around again and stabbed him in the shoulder as hard as she could. He screamed “BITCH!” and let her go, grabbing his shoulder.

  She ran up the stairs as fast as she could go. Her legs were pumping hard when she reached the top. Tony was just a little bit behind; she had managed only to slow him down somewhat.

  The door at the top was locked, thankfully without a dead bolt, so she began to kick it as hard a she could. It was old and rusty, and she hoped that the doorknob lock wasn’t that strong.

  After the fourth kick, and ramming her shoulder into the door, it creaked open slightly. She rammed her shoulder into the door again and pushed it open enough to fit through. She ran blindly out onto the roof while looking back at the door to see if Tony had made it to the top yet.

  She suddenly slammed into something hard that knocked the breath out of her. She would have fallen backward, but strong arms held her steady. She looked up into unfamiliar green eyes halfway covered by light-brown hair. She had just gotten her breath back and was working up to a scream when she was pulled into the arms of another guy—but this one had the blue that eyes she loved.

  Nick hugged her tightly and then pushed her behind his back. Robert rushed the door just as Tony pushed his way out of it. Tony managed to dive past Robert and raise a gun that he had pulled from behind his back. He was just about to shoot at Nick and Kate when Ryan knocked the gun out of his hands.

  Tony dodged Ryan’s attempt to grab him and continued toward Nick and Kate, who were near the edg
e of the roof and ready to jump to the next warehouse. Tony lunged at them and hit Nick’s shoulder as Nick tried to get him and Kate out of the way. Tony couldn’t stop his momentum and continued off the side of the building.

  He managed to grab the edge with his uninjured arm and stay there for a second. Jason headed to the edge to pull him up, but Tony lost his grip a second before Jason could get to him. Tony fell several stories down to the pavement below.

  They all were shocked to see him fall to his death.

  Kate’s knees started to buckle and she crumpled downward, but Nick held her to him. No one said a word for over a minute. They just stared down. Kate was too shaken to say anything. Everything was starting to catch up with her.

  Robert broke the silence. “We have to get out of here quick before the cops show up or Ray comes back.”

  “Yeah, let’s get Kate out of here,” Nick agreed. “We can’t go back to my place. Ray knows where it is. It’s not safe. We will have to find somewhere else.”

  Ryan offered a suggestion. “I have a spot in Northeast Philly.”

  “That works,” said Robert. He looked at Nick. “Follow us.”

  Nick nodded and looked down at Kate. She was shaking, and he wished he could make her feel better. First, they had to get out of there.

  Robert, Jason, and Ryan all jumped to the other roof and were waiting for Nick and Kate. Nick looked down at her and cupped her face. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I was so worried.”

  She managed a small smile. “Yeah. Just a little shaky.”

  “Can you jump across to the other warehouse?” Nick asked, concerned.

  Kate got a slightly annoyed look and said, “I escaped, didn’t I?”

  Nick gave her a half laugh and said, “Yes, you did.” He hugged her tightly again and said, “Okay, on three. One . . .” That was as far as he got when Kate jumped to the other side. She looked back at him with a slight grin.