by Ranae Rose
They didn’t stay there much longer. Next thing she knew, he was holding her hand – no, taking the car keys from her hand. After he did that, he stood and shut the car door.
A sense of foreboding pierced the veil of her exhaustion. Something was wrong – whatever he was doing, she didn’t like it.
She tried to speak up as he opened the driver’s side door and slipped into the seat, but it was useless. She remained silent as he turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred to life.
“You shouldn’t have been so stuck-up,” he said. “You made me do it this way.”
She was too tired to be as afraid as she should’ve been when all four locks clicked down, driving home the reality that she was an unwilling passenger in her own car with a man she apparently didn’t know nearly as well as she’d thought.
CHAPTER 37
“Sorry y’all, but I’m going to head inside for the restroom. Maybe I’ll catch up with you on the patio later.”
Jackson extricated himself as politely as he could from the group he’d joined on the beach. For a while, the novelty of being out of his apartment and in the company of other human beings had been so fresh that he’d gotten lost in conversation. Now, he was aware that a chunk of time had passed and Belle still wasn’t back with her sweater.
He turned toward the beach access stairs and moved as quickly as he could. The white lie he’d told her colleagues was so they wouldn’t think he was treating her like a child.
He knew better – Belle was so adept at babying him that he knew it was strange that she wasn’t back yet.
The stairs were a bitch, and the ramp wasn’t much fun either. But he made it to the patio, where he scanned the crowd for Belle.
She wasn’t there, but her co-worker with the curly reddish hair was leaning over a small table, a bottle of champagne open on its surface.
“Keira.” He remembered her name at the last second. “Have you seen Belle?”
“She was here just a few minutes ago. Said she went to get something from her car.”
He nodded and went for the steps that led down to the parking lot. He could’ve avoided stairs by passing through the restaurant and out the front door, emerging at the other end of the lot, but he didn’t want to waste time.
Leaning heavily on the rail, he took the steps as fast as he could. As soon as his feet hit blacktop, he started scanning the lot, sweeping his gaze back and forth as he moved toward the end where she’d parked.
When he got there, an icy fist closed around every organ in his chest cavity and squeezed, freezing the breath in his lungs.
Her car was gone.
“Fuck!”
She’d promised to be right back. She wouldn’t have left out of the blue without saying anything to him.
He checked his phone for any missed calls or texts just in case, but there was nothing.
When he called her, he got no answer.
So he called the department, asked to speak to the lieutenant in charge and reported Belle’s vehicle stolen.
“I’ll do the paperwork later,” he said, “but I really need to find that car – at this point, it’s got to still be on the island.”
The lieutenant agreed to have the on-duty officers look for it, and Jackson gave a description of the car, plus its tag number.
He didn’t mention that the car’s owner was missing too. If he did, the lieutenant would think he was freaking out over nothing – that he couldn’t find his girlfriend and was having a moronic meltdown.
If they found the car, they’d probably find Belle too, and he could explain then. Besides, if someone had abducted her in her own vehicle, it technically had been stolen.
He dialed again, quickly. Belle hadn’t been gone long enough to make it over the bridge to Charleston – whatever had happened, she was still on South Island. Every minute counted.
Which meant he needed to get on the streets as soon as possible and find her. Without a car, he was damned to waste valuable time.
He breathed a sigh of relief when Elijah answered the phone. He was the one person he could count on to take his concern seriously.
“Hey, I need you to do me a favor.”
“Sure. What’s up?
“Something’s wrong. Belle disappeared from the party without a word. She said she was going to get her sweater from her car, but the vehicle is gone and so is she. She went to the parking lot alone, and I can’t get in touch with her.”
“Shit.”
“I need you to get to Moreno’s as fast as you can and pick me up. I’m waiting on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.”
“Okay. Be there in ten. You should call the department, too.”
“Already did – reported her car stolen.”
“All right, man. I’ll be there soon.”
Jackson ended the call. Fuck, what would he have done without Elijah?
Elijah got there in under ten minutes, though it felt like an eternity.
Jackson tore open the passenger side door and climbed into the car. “She should still be on the island at this point, but we’re cutting it close. We need to haul ass.”
Elijah frowned. He was probably the only person on the face of the planet who’d take Jackson’s intuition seriously, and in that moment, he was infinitely grateful for that. Anyone else would’ve told him to chill out.
Elijah pulled out onto the street. “There’s a radio under your seat. Turn it on.”
Jackson did so, and soon they were listening in on a police frequency.
“No idea at all where we should look?” Elijah asked.
“No.” Jackson’s alarm started congealing into anger. After all his worrying, all those nights spent by her side in an effort to protect her, she’d disappeared from right under his nose.
It never would’ve happened if he’d walked with her to get the sweater, but he’d been busy running his mouth and hadn’t wanted to suffer any unnecessary trips up or down stairs.
He was a fucking idiot, and if anything happened to her he’d never, ever stop paying for it. A cold sweat broke out on his back, making his shirt stick to his skin.
“I’m hoping a patrol officer will see her car, if we don’t see it first.” Jackson tapped the radio.
They traveled through a haze of streetlight. He kept his eyes open for her blue Honda as he strained his ears for any scrap of direction that might come across the radio. Until then, his overactive heartbeat marked each passing second.
Fuck, what’d happened while he’d been out on the beach? Had she been abducted?
If a stranger came up to him while he was on patrol and said they hadn’t seen their girlfriend for half an hour and were worried, he’d have to use every ounce of his professionalism in order to avoid rolling his eyes. But this was Belle, and he knew her – knew her and knew what had been going on with her lately.
Someone could’ve ambushed her in the parking lot and forced her into her car at gunpoint. Maybe she was even driving. It was less farfetched than someone leaving a giant dildo in her office, or sneaking into her apartment to steal her underwear.
Abductions happened more often than incidents like those. Any cop would’ve known that.
Any cop also would’ve known that he needed to find her, fast. The person who’d trespassed into her office and home was probably a sexual predator, and once a victim got into a vehicle with one of those, shit usually went from bad to much worse.
“Shit.” He clenched his jaw, telling himself not to think of her as a victim.
“Easy, man,” Elijah said. “We’re gonna find her. This isn’t a very big island, and we know every street.”
“I know we’ll find her.” The thing that really worried him was what kind of state she’d be in when they did.
He visually scanned street corner after street corner, building after building. Just when he felt he was about to lose his mind, they got a hit on the radio.
“Blue Honda sighted at the intersection of Ventura and Oasis.
” The officer read off the tag number and noted that the car was traveling over the speed limit.
“That’s her,” Jackson said, his heart in his throat.
Elijah hung a hard left through an intersection and turned the car around, heading for the southeast end of the Island.
“I’m carrying,” Elijah said. “You?”
“Yeah.” And a goddamn lot of good it had done him so far.
Buildings passed in blurs of shadow, and Jackson waited to hear that the officer who’d sighted the car had stopped it.
But that didn’t happen.
“What the fuck?” Her car was an economy sedan, not a stock racer. Why hadn’t it been pulled over by now?
They blew through the intersection of Ventura and Oasis. There was no sign of Belle’s car, but the intersection was at the edge of the West Palms neighborhood – a middle class grid of single family homes and townhouses.
“Let’s search the neighborhood,” Jackson said. If she’d been abducted, maybe whoever had taken her lived here. Why else would they have driven all the way across the island from Moreno’s to West Palms?
Elijah began cruising up and down each residential street. “I’ve got the left side of the street. You watch the right.”
Jackson nodded, straining to see clearly in the darkness. There were streetlights here and there, plus the occasional light left on over a garage or front door, but many of the vehicles were difficult to immediately identify by color. Especially the darker colored ones, like Belle’s.
Because of the limited visibility, he almost didn’t see the blue Honda parked close to the side of a house, all but hidden under a latticed carport.
“There!” His heart slammed against his ribs, and the pulse-pounding thrall of adrenaline gripped him in an instant. He itched to move, his muscles primed, and tasted metal.
Elijah stopped and killed the lights, then the engine. As Jackson threw his seatbelt out of the way, Elijah grabbed the radio and reported their location and requested help.
Where the fuck the officer who’d spotted the car was, Jackson had no idea, but he did know that something was definitely wrong. The car was Belle’s – he recognized the white and orange college parking pass hanging from the mirror, even though the license plate was hidden by shadow.
She’d never mentioned West Palms to him. Mariah didn’t live here, and her colleagues were all at the party. It was virtually unthinkable that she’d have taken off to this random home in this random neighborhood without warning.
Drawing in a deep lungful of air, Jackson opened the car door as quietly and quickly as he could.
When he climbed out, he almost fell – the rush of adrenaline had numbed the pain in his leg, but he was still clumsier on it than he’d once been. Catching himself with a hand on the open door, he resisted the urge to swear.
“Easy, man.” Elijah’s voice was barely audible. “We’re here. We’ll take care of this.”
Before Jackson could breathe a word, the sound of a door slamming cut through the night.
He stiffened, then took off around the side of the home with as much speed and stealth as he was capable of, pausing by the carport just long enough to see that the car was empty. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the night, it was obvious that the two story home was divided into an upper and lower apartment – the brass letters spelling out 509 A by the front door gave it away.
The second apartment entrance had to be around the back.
Sure enough, when he rounded the corner he found a wooden staircase leading up to a door. 509 B. The light above it was off, leaving Jackson and Elijah to climb the stairs in darkness. Jackson moved awkwardly, hugging the rail as splinters snagged his palm.
The landing at the top was small, which made it hard to approach the door safely – there was barely room for them to squeeze to the side.
If a hail of gunfire greeted them, so be it. Jackson had endured that for a total stranger; he’d gladly relive it for Belle, if necessary.
He knocked, and no gunfire came.
Nothing came at all – there was only silence. But he’d heard that door slam. Someone was inside.
His gut screamed that Belle was in there and that he needed to get to her. But logically, he knew that she might just as well be in Apartment A, or that the parking location might’ve been a ruse and she could be in another home, or even in another vehicle and on her way off the island.
His gut cramped as he thought on that, and he pushed the possibility aside for the time being. He needed to worry about the scene in front of him.
A flash of movement caught his eye, barely detectable in the darkness. The curtain in the window to the right of the deck had moved.
Police. The word jumped to the tip of his tongue. Should he call out?
He weighed half a dozen different scenarios in his head. To a stranger, he and Elijah looked like two guys creeping up on doors in the dark. On the other hand, if Belle had a stalker – which now seemed the most likely explanation – that person probably knew exactly who Jackson was.
“Police,” he called.
At that very moment, headlights appeared on the street. A police cruiser stopped beside the sidewalk, a few yards behind Elijah’s vehicle.
Jackson didn’t have any attention to spare for the officer climbing out of the car.
“Police,” he called again, and knocked hard on the door.
CHAPTER 38
Belle couldn’t have kept her eyes open if her life had depended on it. Sound drifted to her from far away, distorted as if she were listening from deep underwater. It felt as if she were floating, but something soft was against her back.
When she tried to focus on the noise, it bled away. Still, there was something familiar about it.
A repetitive banging worsened her headache and made it impossible to focus on what was being said. She could’ve sworn she had a head full of pain and helium.
Something clamped down hard on her shoulder, and the contact tethered her to reality. Opening her eyes halfway, she finally got a look at her surroundings.
White walls cast with the yellow tinge of cheap lighting swam around her, and Zackary’s face loomed in front of her, dominated by his glasses.
The sight of him brought back her anger. When she narrowed her eyes at him, they drifted shut against her will.
Shit.
The banging grew louder – so loud it seemed to shake everything around them, threatening to bring the walls down.
“Police!” She finally made out a word, which was quickly followed by multiple voices. An argument?
“Come on.” Zackary’s voice drowned out the others, and the pressure on her shoulder increased. “Get up, Belle.”
She floated forward, banging her shoulder on a sharp corner. The pain was unnaturally dull.
Then the world exploded around her in a concussive blast of sound fragments.
* * * * *
The door gave way under Jackson’s shoulder, popping out of its cheap frame. The protests of the on-duty officer who’d arrived on the scene were nothing but meaningless noise.
There were no laws governing what he’d do to protect Belle. Whoever had peeked at them from behind the curtain and then refused to open the door had something to hide, and his gut told him that something was her – the woman he loved.
Nevertheless, the first person he saw when he stumbled into the apartment wasn’t Belle.
Instead, he saw a tall, slender kid with dark hair and glasses. Recognition hit Jackson like a lightning bolt.
“You fuck!” The kid was supposed to be back at Moreno’s, at the party. Jackson had seen him there, giving Belle goofy looks of lust.
It suddenly all made sense – the dildo in the office where the kid worked with her and the intrusion into her home. How easy would it have been for the kid to swipe her keys and make copies without her even noticing?
Jackson moved toward the little shit with vicious intent, his heart pounding like a war drum, preparing his
limbs – even his bad leg – to do damage. The kid raised his hands, eyes wide like a deer’s while caught in headlights.
Oh, shit. The expression on his face was easily readable, and Jackson relished his obvious panic.
And then something else caught his eye. Feinting to the right at the last second, he ignored every bit of his training and turned his back on Belle’s abductor.
Because there she was, slumped against the wall in a dark hallway, her delicate body folded at odd angles as her head lolled forward.
His heart stopped, nearly causing him to crash to the ground, and his mouth went instantly dry. She looked dead – gone. The realization threatened to floor him, but he lurched forward, scrambling to her side.
She wasn’t – couldn’t be – dead. She’d probably been drugged, or knocked out cold with a blow. How else would the scheming college kid have gotten her back here?
She wouldn’t have gone willingly.
Mentally repeating that to himself like a prayer, he slid two fingers over the arch of her neck, feeling for the carotid artery. She was fully dressed and there wasn’t a drop of blood on her – good signs.
He was no doctor, no nurse or EMT. It took him a few seconds to find her pulse, and within those seconds, he lived and died a thousand agonizing times.
Then it jumped beneath his fingers, slower than it should’ve been, but steady.
“Call an ambulance,” he said to whoever might be listening.
When no one answered, he snapped his head around, still keeping his fingers over her pulse point, needing to feel every beat.
Elijah had the snot-nosed college kid on the ground and was pulling a pair of cuffs out of his pocket. As he secured them, the uniformed officer stepped through the battered doorway and into the apartment.
His entire body prickling with angry heat, Jackson raised his voice at the officer. “Willard, call an ambulance! She’s unconscious.”
Everything seemed to move in slow motion as Willard raised his radio and requested assistance.
“You gonna tell me what the hell is going on?” Willard asked when he was finished.
