“What are we supposed to do?” a man asked, his voice panicked.
“We help. Then we leave,” the captain said.
Kendra was surprised he was even going that far. At least they’d be able to assist the evacuation. Seeing the president speak on this made it all far more real. It was truly happening.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this. We’re working on solutions, so stay tuned for further instructions. We hope to understand more about the activity surrounding Yellowstone’s supervolcano, and will advise on our action plan in the hours and days to come. Godspeed.” The image flashed away to a desk with two newscasters, who looked utterly deflated.
“You heard the man. We need everyone on this. Don’t even think about leaving until we have every damned San Diego citizen two states over. Got it?” The captain’s voice cut over the chatter.
Kendra grabbed her things and headed for a computer, hoping to access the DMV database.
“Can I help you with that?” a man asked. He wasn’t in uniform, but he had the glint of a cop in his eye.
“I need to trace this plate. I need the address,” Kendra told him.
“No problem. It’ll only be a minute,” he said, his fingers flying across the keyboard. It took all of ten seconds, and he printed the address off, passing it to her.
“Thanks for the help,” she told him, snatching Mr. Tesla’s residence. “Did you work with Lisa Tremble?”
“Sure did. Is she okay? Did you find her?” he asked, his face hopeful.
Kendra shook her head. “Not yet. But…” She held the paper up with the address. “I intend to.”
It was raining again outside, and she tucked the paperwork under her jacket, running for her car. A gunshot rang out in the distance, and the now-constant sound of emergency vehicles sang across the air in every direction. With the president’s recent statement, the ever-growing pandemonium was only going to get worse.
Kendra mapped out the address, but it told her to drive directly through town, which she’d found to be endlessly gridlocked. She tried every which way on the NAV, but each of them showed the lines to be dark red, telling her none of the roadways were moving.
She had to make it across town, and most of the people were attempting to merge onto the Eight so they could cut inland, away from the city and the coast. Others were hoping for quieter pathways, and were moving toward the smaller highways on the north and south edges of town. It left Kendra sitting there in the parking lot of the station, wondering where the hell she should go. At the current pace, it told her the normally twenty-minute drive was going to take five hours.
All the work, all the years of effort. Studying harder than anyone at university to earn that damned finance degree from Berkeley, just to make her father proud. What a joke. The same father who couldn’t bear the weight of losing a daughter, and became distant with the one who remained.
Kendra had pushed that aside, her heart growing colder by the year, and she became an agent, hell-bent on finding Carrie, but she never had. Ten years with the FBI. No husband, no real friends, and all she had to show for it was a tiny condo devoid of anything remotely personal on the walls.
She took a deep breath, staring out across the street, hearing the car horns, the sirens, and the thunder rolling in. What was it all for?
She leaned over, tossing the tablet and notebooks onto the passenger seat. It was time to give up the charade. It was time to move away from the coast like everyone else. Three days. This entire city was going to go up in flames before the next seventy-two hours ticked by on the clock, and Kendra didn’t want to be here to see it.
She had a bag of clothes and supplies packed in her trunk. She could just leave. Yes. It was time.
She had a new resolve. No one else might care about what happened to Special Agent Kendra Baker, but she did. She hadn’t worked her ass off all these years so she could sit here and cry about it when times were tough.
Kendra threw the car in drive, checked the passenger-side mirror, and saw a picture that had slid out of the file folder. It was a young woman, a shot from her social media page. Kendra pressed the brake, and pulled it out for a closer look. The hope in her eyes matched Kendra’s own at that tender age of twenty-four. That was around the same time things had started going to crap in her own life.
The woman was a veterinarian, recently graduated. She’d gone missing along with the pile of others. She read the name: Alicia Chang. Alicia smiled in the photo, holding a diploma in veterinary science.
“You can’t let them go.” Kendra rubbed her temples. Her sister would want her to keep searching, to find them before they were killed, either by a maniacal kidnapper or by the harsh elements sure to destroy the West Coast.
She chose the path that gave her the fastest route to Mr. Tesla’s home, anticipating it would lead her there sooner rather than later.
Ten minutes passed, and she was hating her decision. All lanes were filled with cars; no one was obeying the rules of the lights any longer. Cars were randomly running reds, crashing into each other, creating even more chaos.
She turned onto a side street, finding a little reprieve, and made another left, hoping to eventually turn onto the freeway. For now she was moving, albeit slowly, but it was progress. It was a strange part of town, one she hadn’t spent much time in, and the buildings were a little more dilapidated. She passed a few money-lending businesses, a pawn shop, two liquor stores, then conveniently a church, before she spotted the trouble.
The man was clearly high. His movements were too fast, too choppy to be natural, and even from down the block, she could see the entire whites of his wide-open eyes. The gun in his hand flashed around him erratically as he approached a rusty minivan.
Kendra saw the woman behind the wheel try to roll the window up, but he didn’t care. He smashed it with the butt of the gun and yelled at her to step out. Kendra had to act.
She pulled over, jumping out, staying low, and moved around the rear of her own car, crouching as she ran toward the minivan. The man’s yelling was offensive, hard to listen to.
“Get out of the van! I will shoot your children! I will take their bodies with me, and I will eat their hearts! I’m going to let you live, though. So you can remember their faces watching you from the windows as I drive off with them.” He started off screaming his comments, but by the end of his speech, he was casually speaking.
“What do you want? Take the van and leave us alone!” the woman screeched.
Kendra was on the far side of the van now, her heart fluttering in her chest. This was what she was trained for. This was why she spent ten hours a month at the shooting range.
“It’s too late for that, don’t you see? They’re coming. We’re all dead. They’re coming.” The man’s words were clearly those of a drug-fueled mind, but they still sent goosebumps over Kendra’s arms. They’re coming.
“Who’s coming?” the woman cried.
Kendra stood up, peering through the rear window to see the man’s gaze inch up to the sky. His hand rose to point at the clouds, and she knew it was her moment.
She quickly moved around the van, aiming her Glock at the man’s head. “Drop the gun. Get on the ground!”
The man’s eyes opened even wider, if that was possible, and a sick smile spread across his face.
His gun rose in the air, aiming directly at the woman in the van, and Kendra didn’t hesitate. She fired.
It only took one shot. He crumpled to the cement, his gun clattering beside him. The woman was screaming, the kids crying from within the minivan.
Kendra walked over to the madman and kicked his gun away, peering into the van. The middle-aged woman’s cheeks were wet, and three kids howled from their seats.
“Be careful. Do you have somewhere to go?” Kendra asked her.
“Thank… thank you,” the woman stuttered.
“You’re welcome. Do you have somewhere to go?” she repeated.
“Texas. We’re on the list for one of
the shelters near Fort Worth,” she told Kendra.
“Good.” Kendra crouched low, picking up the man’s gun. It was scraped on the side, and she released the magazine, checking if there were any bullets. There were five rounds left. She passed the gun to the woman inside the van. “Protect your family.” Kendra wasn’t sure if this was a good move, but she didn’t have time to worry about the moral implications.
The kids stopped crying; one of them choked back a sob. He stared at Kendra, clutching a toy truck in his hands.
“Thank you,” the woman said again, and tore down the road.
Kendra glanced at the body in the street, but left him there to rot. All she felt was a cold detachment as she slid into her car and kept driving toward the address where the man in the Tesla lived. She needed to get to this home, to find him, and find out where he’d taken those people.
She gritted her teeth as she turned at a four-way stop, and saw the long line of red taillights and heard the symphony of honking horns.
It was going to be a long day.
Fourteen
Andrew
5 Days Left…
Andrew had spent an entire day waiting around in David’s house, eating his food and then cleaning up the subsequent mess to avoid tipping the guy off if he came home. He even returned to his truck in the middle of the day to catch a few hours of sleep. He slept in one-hour increments, setting alarms on his phone to wake him and then leaving it in his pocket on vibrate. He’d only allowed himself to do that because he’d set noise traps in the street to alert him if a quiet-running Tesla cruised past. Beer cans and garbage, mostly, but he’d scattered some broken glass, too, hoping it would puncture the guy’s tires.
But all of those preparations had been pointless. Here Andrew was, almost twenty-four hours later, sitting in the dark at the breakfast table in David’s house. He didn’t want to admit it, but it was time to go. David wasn’t coming back here, and waiting any longer would only ensure that the trail leading to Val grew even colder than it already was.
He checked his phone, an obsessive habit now. No calls from unknown numbers.
A bitter rebuke flashed through his thoughts: Why the hell didn’t I ask for that FBI agent’s number? If he had, at least he’d be able to recognize her call when it came in, or call her to see if she’d turned up any new leads.
Andrew’s heart began to pound with anxiety and frustration. He set his gun down for a second to rub his tired, scratchy eyes.
It was two in the morning on Thursday. That meant Val had been missing for three and a half days. It was too long. He shuddered to think about where she was, who she was with, what her abductors were doing to her and the others they’d taken.
But one thing reassured him: too many people were missing for this to be the work of an everyday vanilla psycho. He ticked off points on one hand: victims were both male and female, of wildly varying ages, and from all across the state—no, all across the country. Wasn’t that what Selena had said? He struggled to remember and mentally kicked himself for never watching the news.
He thought about turning on David’s TV to get an earful of whatever was playing on cable, assuming the guy even had cable. But no; there was still a remote chance that David could come home, and getting shot in the back of the head while he gawked at the news would be a really stupid way to die. Val was counting on him. He couldn’t afford to be stupid right now.
Andrew grabbed his gun and phone charger from the table and stood up. It was time to head for the second address. Maybe both black Teslas were a part of the same operation? Maybe he wasn’t dealing with one car and one abductor, but two.
The guy he was looking for was either David Wilkes, or... He pulled the crumpled receipt from his pocket and smoothed it on his thigh to remind himself of the second address. He had to tuck his gun into his waistband and use his phone’s flashlight to illuminate the piece of paper.
Harry Dorset, 2563 47th Ave., San Francisco.
That was his next stop. Please be there, he whispered to himself, but he knew how slim his chances were at this point. A familiar ache spread inside of him, and suddenly his mouth was bone dry.
Andrew spun around, aiming his flashlight app at David’s refrigerator. The guy had left half a six-pack of beer in there. Salivating at the thought, he warred with himself over reverting to old habits. He drew on his usual source of willpower and summoned Val’s face to mind.
It worked, but it also left him feeling more desperate than ever. What if he never saw her again? What if she wasn’t even alive anymore? He gritted his teeth and shook his head to clear away those thoughts. He couldn’t give up yet. He couldn’t... Andrew realized he was still staring at the refrigerator, but he was frozen in place, unable to turn away. He could have one beer, or even all three. That wouldn’t make him drunk.
But he knew he wouldn’t stop with half a six-pack. He’d dig through the cupboards and find something else, and then he’d wake up blacked out on David’s couch. And if his luck was really shitty, he wouldn’t wake up at all, because David would have come home and put a bullet in his head while he slept off the binge.
All of that flashed through Andrew’s mind in an instant, and he tore his eyes away from the kitchen and the lure of the beer in the refrigerator. He strode back through David’s combined living and dining room, heading for the hallway to the front door.
The beam of his phone’s flashlight app flickered through the dining room. The furniture was ornate and mostly wooden. Maybe this was David’s grandparents’ place. Something caught his eye and he slowed to a stop, staring blankly at a dining room hutch that sat awkwardly in the hall. It was partially blocking the way to the front door. Odd to put a big piece of furniture like that in a hallway.
There was an old tea set inside with floral patterns on it. The hutch sat kitty-corner to a couch, instead of in the dining room where it would have made more sense. Andrew frowned, the placement of the furniture niggling in the back of his mind. He scanned the dining room with his flashlight. There was an empty corner that would have been perfect for the hutch, and a rectangular patch of floorboards stood out in a darker, richer color than the surrounding floor. The hutch used to be there, he realized. Someone had dragged it over here to the middle of the hall.
That was when Andrew noticed the scuff marks in front of the hutch. It looked like it had been repeatedly dragged back and forth.
His eyes widened as he realized what that meant. The hutch was blocking something. Andrew slid his phone into his pocket and dragged the hutch away from the wall. His nerves were tingling with anticipation and dread.
The hutch came away to reveal a door behind it with the knob removed. A deadbolt had been installed instead, and there was a thin metal handle beneath it, both of which had been perfectly concealed by the bulky furniture.
Andrew ran for the side door leading to the garage, burst through it, and grabbed the club hammer and chisel he’d used to break in.
It only took him a minute to open the hidden door. As soon as he did, he set the tools aside and pulled out his gun and phone. He used the flashlight to light the way as he cracked the door open and peered around the ruined door jamb. An unfinished wooden staircase led into a basement, and an awful smell wafted up to greet him.
His sinking feeling turned to gut-clenching horror. Andrew resisted the urge to bury his nose in his sleeve. He could see the faint glow of a light coming from downstairs. Someone was there. Was David with them?
Andrew flicked off his flashlight and began creeping down the stairs. A row of wooden beams came up on his left, and he peered through them.
Now he could see the source of the smell. His heart leapt into his throat, and rage made his whole body shake. His gaze darted, gun and flashlight tracking, his thumb poised to flick off the safety.
The basement was unfinished, the walls roughed in with two-by-fours, so Andrew could see everything in one glance. David wasn’t here, but one of his victims was.
Val.
She was lying in her underwear on a bare mattress in the far corner of the basement. There were bruises on her arms, and she was chained to a two-by-four that was part of an unfinished room’s walls. Dark, sweat-matted hair cascaded over the side of the mattress and splayed on the concrete floor beside her.
Terror and fear uncoiled inside of Andrew, and a ragged scream burst from his lips. “Val!”
He ran to her side, but as he drew near, he could see that it wasn’t her. Too old, too mature, too much body fat, and she hadn’t reacted when he’d called out. Andrew feared the worst as he rounded the mattress to examine her face. Her eyes were shut, one of them purpled and swollen.
A standing lamp was the sole illumination in the windowless basement. Andrew dropped to his haunches beside the woman and checked her pulse. A vein jumped weakly under his fingertips. He shook her gently by the shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered.
No response. He tried again, shaking her harder this time.
Still nothing. She was unconscious, probably drugged, but at least she was alive.
Andrew stood up, surveying the scene. A metal bucket sat to one side of the woman, evidently the source of the smell. On the other side he spotted a half-empty case of bottled water, a bar of soap, dirty towels, clothes, and sheets, along with some scattered boxes of cookies and crackers.
This woman had been chained up and left here like an animal. And based on the bruises all over her, that wasn’t the extent of the horrors she’d endured. Andrew’s lip curled. David Wilkes was his guy, all right, but if he’d done this to one of his victims, what had he done to the others? Andrew’s mind raced. Dark thoughts swirled, and he vowed that if he and David ever crossed paths, he’d make the man suffer. He’d...
He shook himself out of a brutal daydream. He had to free this woman and take her to a hospital.
He went to examine the two-by-four she was chained to. It was padlocked, but maybe he could cut it with some of the tools from the garage.
Final Days Page 11
