by Natalie Dean
“Just leave him on the doorstep?”
“Yeah…unless you have a better idea.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. We’re going to go nuts if we don’t get some good sleep somehow.”
She had to admit that was true. It hadn’t really hit until the last few seconds. The moment she’d hung up the phone was the moment when all her exhaustion hit her at once. It had only been hours since Ellie was nabbed, and they’d already figured out where Jacob was presumably hiding her. All they had to do was go over to rescue her. The big problem was that people started falling apart with lack of sleep. Sure, she could still walk around and form some sentences and stuff… but she felt weak, and she doubted she could hit the broad side of the barn with her gun right then.
There was a pause. “Do you think we’ll get her back?”
“Of course we will. You’re an agent, and I’m a professional fighter. What does he have going for him? He’s a half-rate idiot.”
Adrianna was thinking, but he was able to kidnap Ellie…
But she didn’t think that was a good thing to mention right then, so she just nodded at him. “You’re right.”
David, still the most awake one of them by far, drove them back into the city. They told him what they were doing- that they were dropping him off at the police station.
“I’m going to sue,” he warned.
“Go ahead.”
Neither David nor Adrianna cared. Sure, in any other scenario, they would never have interrogated him, nor would they have barged into his house and kidnapped him. But then again… none of the last few hours was just any other scenario. He’d helped a killer kidnap their daughter. So the rules went straight out the window, and they were willing to do whatever it took to find her, regardless of whether or not they would get in legal trouble for it.
The nearest police station was just inside town for the rural community, so David drove up to the parking lot quickly. As early as it was in the morning, almost nobody was there. There were a few cars - a few policemen and people to answer the phone were there, but it hadn’t gotten busy yet.
David unlocked the doors. “Go ahead. Get out.”
Washington scooted out the door. Adrianna watched as it dawned on him that he didn’t have to stay there, that he could just vanish off into the morning light.
“Go for it,” Adrianna suggested. “We don’t have time to deal with you, and you can add trying to escape to your list of charges.”
They never got to discover whether or not he’d stayed because David hit the gas and they were gone before anyone came out of the station. They had a few moments where they could see him in the parking lot, middle fingers raised at them as they drove away.
“Do you think he’ll stay?” David asked, glancing in the mirror. There weren’t any lights. Nobody saw them drop him off.
“Who cares!”
He nodded, forcing a smile upon his weary lips. “You don’t happen to have any safe-houses out here, do you?”
“None that the agency doesn’t know about…”
There were very few safe-houses she’d successfully hidden from the FBI. They were excellent at their jobs. Cat herself had found one or two that she’d been trying to hide. Sadly, though, none of the ones that she had kept a secret were in the country. She knew her time was starting to run out. If Stone caught whiff of Washington being arrested, he’d send out men looking for her and David. She had no intention of being anywhere obvious.
They ended up spending the night in the car. There weren’t any hotels around, and even if there had been, Adrianna wouldn’t have wanted to check in. Hotels were more comfortable than a car, sure, but they were also much easier to track. The last thing she wanted was for Stone to catch up with them before they found Ellie. Then they’d have all the trouble and none of the payoff. Worse - Ellie would still be missing.
So they just pulled off the road and hid in a secluded area on a country road. It wasn’t a well-traversed road. Adrianna saw nobody in the time it took her to fall asleep. David was out immediately. He hadn’t slept since the day before. Adrianna had a couple hours of respite, but he’d been running straight without sleep.
She didn’t even mind the drink holder jabbing into her side. At first, it was irritating to her, but soon enough sleep took control, and she found a way to be perfectly comfortable.
Within minutes, she was fast asleep.
Chapter 9
When she woke up, the sun was high overhead. She wasn’t entirely sure how long they had been asleep. She didn’t notice what time it was when she’d fallen asleep, but she guessed they got three or four hours.
Day one was down.
They had exactly one more day. The governor was coming in tomorrow evening. That’s when he’d be the most vulnerable, and that’s when he would die if they couldn’t find Ellie in time. She couldn’t believe she was even considering killing someone to save another person’s life. It just wasn’t in her nature… but somehow Ellie was different. She’d do almost anything to keep her safe.
Thankfully, they had found the address. It should be an easy matter of going up to the cabin, kicking down the front door, and hopefully shooting the psycho for kidnapping their little girl. Somehow, though, Adrianna doubted it’d be that easy. Every time there was a hostage situation, something ended up happening that twisted everything up. Sometimes hostages died, and other times the changes made it easier to apprehend the kidnapper. She was hoping for the latter.
David was still exhausted. He was snoring in the driver’s seat with the back all the way down and one foot wrapped over the steering wheel. She hated to wake him up, but they needed to get going. Besides, he could sleep on the road.
She knew when he woke up, he’d be grouchy. David wasn’t the kind of guy that woke up cheerily from sleeping. He tended to take an hour or so to really get the gears up and running.
She tapped his shoulder. He didn’t stir. She tried again, a little harder. He didn’t open his eyes, but he exhausted loudly. “Can I help you?”
“You need to wake up…”
His eyes blinked open slowly, then he winced as his body complained from the soreness. “Remind me again why we didn’t stop at a hotel?”
“Because they’re too easy to track,” she told him. “Just switch spots with me. I’ll drive.”
His stomach grumbled loud enough for Adrianna to hear. “I need food.”
She realized they hadn’t eaten in hours. Ever since the night before they’d been running on nothing. Sure, if they had been sleeping the whole time it would be no problem, but they had expended tons of energy. They needed to refuel.
Finally, he crawled out of the driver’s seat and changed spots with her. She could tell by the way he was walking that he was sore. Being a fighter meant fame and fortune if you were good enough, but it also meant your body suffered constantly.
She fired up the car. It felt nice to drive again, to feel the engine purr. It made her feel strong and fast, both of which she actually was in real life, but having the car only reinforced the idea.
She pulled out onto the road. What David had said was true - food sounded delicious, and they would need strength if there were any twists and turns. The kidnapper probably didn’t know they were coming, unless Washington had managed to get ahold of him. She doubted it. Washington’s phone had busted during their fight, and unless he convinced a total stranger to lend him theirs and he just happened to remember Jacob’s number, that meant Jacob was still under the impression that the next day the governor would be killed.
At least that’s what she was hoping. She really didn’t want to get to the cabin with Jacob waiting for them.
Adrianna shook off the sleep as she drove towards the cabin. David fell back asleep right after getting into the passenger seat. The air was fresh and crisp and felt good in her nose to the point where she rolled down the window to smell it.
As she drove, following the instructions on her phone, she glanced over for a second at
David. He was snoring quietly. The air conditioner was pointed at his muscular chest. After making sure that the road was clear, she pushed the AC off him. He shifted but didn’t wake up.
She felt pride wash into her chest. She’d done well to pick David. Accepting his invitation to marry was a big step, but one that she was happier with every single day that she was near him. She’d figured that eventually the novelty of it would wear off, and their life would become commonplace, but she was still running solid. Then again, she was an FBI agent, and he was an MMA fighter. There wasn’t any reason that their life could be boring.
She glanced down at the phone. Five miles. Five miles until they got to the cabin. She jostled him awake. “Five miles away.”
He leaned up. “Five?”
“Yuuup.”
A car passed by them on the way back towards the city, and for just a second, she hesitated. The driver was huge. He could barely fit in the seat. Her powers went absolutely wild for a second. She slammed on the brakes, sending David flying forward. His forehead smashed into the dash. “Augh!”
She spun the wheel to chase the car. She wasn’t sure if it was him, but he was a huge man with a dark soul. She was willing to bet it was worth the shot. If she was right, excellent. If she was wrong, she could apologize and go on about their way awkwardly.
“What the hell?” David snapped, clutching his nose. “What are you doing?”
“I think that was Jacob!”
His eyes flashed violently. Just for a second, Adrianna saw the primal David, a view she had only glimpsed every now and then before his fights. She’d always stepped back when she saw that look.
The car sped up, but David’s car was much faster. Almost immediately, she was right behind him. She saw David whip out his handgun and start to roll down the window.
“Hey!” she looked over at him. “What are you doing? You can’t shoot him!”
“Give me one good reason!”
“One, it’s illegal! Two, Ellie could be in there! Three, we don’t even know if it’s him!”
She was almost sure it was their guy, but if she was wrong, they couldn’t just shoot him. She gunned it to try to make it beside him. The car engine roared, as they caught up with him.
There, cooped up in the car, was none other than Jacob Jackson.
He looked over at them. When he locked eyes with Adrianna, his eyes widened, and he snarled. He was a giant, which had been obvious in the mall but grew even clearer right then. His head was almost scraping the ceiling. He absolutely dwarfed Agent Stone, which was no small feat. All of his features were somehow… wrong, as though someone had taken a bunch of mismatched features - two droopy eyes, one oversized nose, a misshapen chin – and had glued them onto an ordinary man’s head.
“Pull over!” she yelled at him.
He didn’t stop. What he did was reach for a handgun and fired several times at them. The first shot, fired blindly, hit the very end of the car. The second one barely missed David, and the third busted a hole in the windshield. Spider-web cracks spread across the glass, blinding her view. She almost braked, but if she did, she knew Jacob would escape, so she just kept driving.
That she could not allow. She just had to hope anyone coming the other way on the two-lane road would have enough sense to avoid them.
Rather abruptly, in the middle of all that chaos, with Ellie’s kidnapper firing pot shots at them, with David returning fire, and with the whole group driving wildly on a small country road, she realized: she deserved to be a criminal.
She wasn’t sure why it took so long for her to register that thought, or why it had hit her right then, but it was crushing. For a woman that had spent her entire life stopping criminals, to see herself being the one that she would normally be chasing was nothing short of horrifying.
But she didn’t have time to think about that because at that exact moment the tire blew out from the fifth shot. The car swerved wildly. She tried to correct, but between the tire and not being able to see through the windshield, she overcorrected. The passenger side slammed into Jacob’s car.
She immediately spun the wheel back the other way to avoid running him off the road. She still wasn’t sure if Ellie was inside, but if she was, Adrianna was going to do everything in her power to keep them on the road. Unfortunately, it meant that the car she was driving swerved to the right.
There was a brief moment of silence, and the next second they hit a tree.
Adrianna flew forward, through the already broken windshield. She clipped the tree, flipped a second, and slammed into the ground. She skipped across the earth before coming to a stop.
“Auuuuuughhhhh….” She tried to breathe, but her lungs wouldn’t work. She scrambled up, pulling her gun out of her wool jacket to aim at the car, but Jacob Jackson sped off. She cursed, thinking about throwing her loaded gun down before thinking better of it.
She looked back towards the car she’d just flown out of, trying to remember how to breathe. The car’s smoking engine had wrapped around the trunk of the tree. She hurried back towards it. “David! David!”
The passenger door creaked open, and David peeled himself out. There was a sharp gash across his chin, but other than that, he looked okay. He wiped the deep red liquid off, groaning. “Remind me to not let you drive again…”
“I couldn’t see!”
He got away from the car. Its engine was smoking, and the laws of action movies dictated that it would explode. Adrianna wasn’t sure if it would, but she sure wasn’t about to stick around to find out.
As they walked back towards the city, Adrianna spoke. “This is not good.”
It did indeed suck. The kidnapper had gotten away, probably with Ellie unless he’d left her alone at the cabin. Even worse, they had shot at him. They were racking up their list of crimes, and he now knew they were on his trail. He wouldn’t be so careless if they got another chance.
“You could say that again.” She could barely hear David speaking. He was trying to be calm, but she could see he was sizzling underneath. His daughter was kidnapped, he’d just let the kidnapper escape, his car was destroyed, and the police were probably on their way.
Sure enough, a few minutes later Adrianna heard sirens. She strongly considered ducking into the woods, but it wasn’t a smart thing to do. The officers would eventually catch them, and she had no intention of actually running from the police at that point. Ignoring Stone’s instructions to stay away was one thing. Running from the police was another matter entirely.
The police cars appeared on the horizon. Adrianna knew what to do. She walked to the road, put her gun on the ground, and stood in a way that they would know she wasn’t making a move. They’d probably heard that gunshots were being fired. Policemen were people too. Adrianna knew that if she walked into a situation where she knew there were armed suspects, she was much more nervous. She didn’t want the officers to feel that way.
David followed her example, setting his gun down. “I hope you have a plan.”
“Sure do.”
She saw the cars come up and smiled despite herself. They were federal police. They’d probably caught a whiff of them and followed them. That was excellent news. David saw her smiling.
“What on earth are you happy about? We’re being arrested…”
“You’ll see.”
A little-known fact – the federal and local authorities tend to not communicate. She’d watched a documentary one time where a guy had been arrested by the federal government and had escaped. The local authorities hadn’t even known he was wanted.
The cars came to a stop. The officers popped their heads out. They looked like they were pumping with adrenaline. She could understand the feeling better than most people could so she just complied as they arrested her and David. Even if they didn’t know what they’d done to Washington, busting into his house and tossing him out at the police station, they must have heard about the gunshots.
As they were read their rights, Adrianna wa
s formulating a plan. She started wishing that she’d thought ahead. She did not want to escape from the police but at the time of the accident she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She was just thinking about herself. She didn’t want to run. She didn’t want to get in trouble. She didn’t want to get shot.
But it wasn’t about her, not really. It was about Ellie, and the fact was that she had less time than ever now that Jacob had spotted her and David.
So as she rode in the back of the car, feeling like a disgraced FBI agent, she looked over at David. He was still trying to figure out what she was thinking. She signaled her plan with her eyes. She wasn’t entirely sure if he got it, but she couldn’t declare her idea right there in the car.
Whatever happened, it was going to be very dramatic. She was just hoping nobody got shot in the process. And by nobody, she meant that she hoped her and David didn’t catch a bullet while escaping.
Chapter 10
The officers didn’t speak to them while they drove, which Adrianna appreciated. She wasn’t in the mood for chatter. There was only one thing she wanted to talk about, which she leaned forward to tell them.
“The man that kidnapped our daughter was here. He shot at us.” She realized she’d said our daughter. Not his daughter. Ours. It felt good. David didn’t correct her.
“We’re doing our best, ma’am,” came the reply from the front.
“Have you caught him?” she proceeded to explain the look of his vehicle in as good of detail as she could remember but she could tell they weren’t paying attention. They’d caught her and David. They were content to file that one in the report and worry about whoever else was involved later.
“We’re doing our best,” he repeated.
She threw up her shackled hands in exasperation, but she didn’t say anything else. She just sat back in the seat, trying to come up with a plan. She was starting to realize the gravity of their situation.
