He nodded. “Yeah, that's part of it. It's complicated—like every relationship is. But I can relax around her.” He searched for the right words. “I feel… safe when I'm with her.”
“It's weird,” she said. “I'm both jealous… and not. Because I'm safe, too, when I'm with Dave.” Her lips trembled and tears filled her eyes. “Deck, I can't lose him. I can't.”
“We'll find him,” he promised her. “Just remember to stall, okay? We're getting close—you better pull over and let me out.”
Sophia signaled and pulled to the curb. “Whatever happens,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands, “I'm glad that you're happy. I really, truly am.”
“Whatever happens,” Decker told her, “don't get out of this car.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
What little strength Dave had left was in his legs. He was shaking so much from the fever that his arms were nearly useless, his hands unable to grasp much of anything—and certainly not one of the loose two-by-fours that he'd found in the corner of the basement.
It was exactly what he'd been looking for—a baseball-bat-long remnant of solid wood. Wielded correctly, it could smash an opponent's skull. But he could no longer wield it.
His captors had made a mistake, but it had come too late—except there was Sophia again, dancing in his peripheral vision, a golden flash of warmth and light. Come on, Dave. … “I love you,” he told her. Come on. …
Sophia was circling the park for the second time when her phone rang.
“I told you to park on Barrett Boulevard.”
Stall. She had to stall. “I wasn't sure which side of the park you meant.”
“Just pull over,” ordered the man on the other end of the phone— Stafford, or more likely one of his minions. “Right there.”
Sophia gunned it past an open parking spot. “Right where?”
Don't get out of the car went hand in hand with don't park the car.
Decker had said to keep it moving, but she'd just learned something valuable from that interchange. According to Jimmy Nash, she currently wasn't on the part of the street visible via the webcam on top of the fountain.
Which meant that the man on the phone was able to see her without that camera. Translation: He was nearby.
“Park and get out of the car,” came the order. “And walk north on Barrett Boulevard.”
Where was he? Or more likely they. If she were going to grab someone from a public park, she'd need muscle and she'd need a driver. And she'd need some kind of cargo van. Or a vehicle with heavily tinted windows. This being sunny San Diego, there were plenty of those. Too many.
But what she'd also need was an opportunity to not commit a crime on camera. If Sophia walked north on Barrett, Jimmy had confirmed, she'd be well out of the webcam's range.
“I came alone,” Sophia said. “I'm here. You can obviously see me and I'm not going anywhere else. Because I know that your threat to kill Dave is just a threat. If he's dead, you have nothing—you'll get nothing from me.” She spoke quickly, not allowing him time to interrupt as she zipped into a parking space almost directly beneath the webcam. “I also know that he's desperately ill, so here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to sit here, in this park, right under this camera. And I'm going to wait for a phone call— from Dave, telling me that he's been dropped off at a hospital emergency room. At which point I will walk north on Barrett.”
She didn't wait for a reply and, flashing both hot and cold, praying that they wouldn't realize she was lying, knowing that Decker was going to be furious, she got out of her car and hurried toward the fountain plaza.
The street address for Gavin Michaelson was at the very end of a new development that had obviously fallen victim to the financial disasters sweeping the country. Construction had been halted, with very few out of nearly a dozen McMansions completed. Two of the four that had roofs had foreclosure signs in front of them, the other two had for-sale signs. But most pathetic of all were the foreclosure signs on framed shells or stark foundations that were already starting to be overgrown by weeds.
Tracy watched over the van's video monitor as Lopez used a minicam to do a quick surveillance of the area. The house in question was garish and ugly, with a driveway of brick pavers that didn't quite match the Southern plantation–style architecture. A single car sat in front of the house, and Lopez gave them a close-up of the plates.
Radio communication was open between the van and the SUV.
“Are we in the right place?” Sam sounded incredulous. “There's no security. No cameras—”
“There looks like an alarm system,” Alyssa pointed out.
“A bush-league civilian one,” Sam scoffed. “What the hell? Are we going to kick down this door and find some family eating breakfast?”
Jo Heissman spoke up. “We don't know much about Michaelson, but the lack of security fits Stafford's profile. He sees himself as so much smarter than the rest of the world. He would have absolutely no expectations that he'd ever be found.”
Tess was on the phone with Jimmy. “There's an MLS real estate listing for this address. Jimmy found a floor plan. He's sending the images now.”
“He can do that?” Tracy asked. Could he do that with the webcam images from the park, too? She was chewing her fingernails off, waiting for word from Sophia or Deck.
“Got it,” Sam said. “Everyone take a good look. We'll go in both back and front doors. Front team sweeps upstairs, back sweeps down.”
Jules's voice came over the speakers. “Car is registered to Russell Stafford,” he reported. “I am getting a warrant as we speak. Sam's team, get ready to go inside.”
“Koehl—front door with Lopez and Jenkins; Bailey, you're at the back with me,” Sam said. “Lock and load. I want everyone else watching windows and doors for squirters. Let's do this—let's go!”
As Decker watched, Sophia parked and got out of her car.
“What the hell?” he said aloud, but of course, she didn't answer him, because she was too busy getting out of her fucking car.
Decker took out his phone. He knew it wasn't worth it to dial Sophia's number. She wasn't going to pick up—she was clearly still on her phone with the people who wanted to grab her and torture her in front of Dave, to convince him to talk.
Instead he dialed Nash.
Who answered mid-ring. “What the hell is she doing?” Nash was incredulous. “She's fucking with them—I can see her clearly—she didn't park on Barrett, the way they said.”
And with a flash of clarity and understanding, Decker knew. “They're here,” he told Nash. “She knows they're in the area—they're not just watching her on the camera. She's trying to draw them out so we can catch them and find Dave.”
“She's going to get grabbed,” Nash warned. “Someone Sophia's size— it'll happen in a heartbeat.”
Decker was well aware of that. And although the idea of apprehending one of the kidnappers was a good one, she was seriously underestimating their adversaries.
“I need your eyes,” Decker told his friend as he looked around at all the people—the joggers, the dog walkers, the nannies with children—as he tried to move quickly toward Sophia, without drawing attention to himself. “My vantage point is limited. Help me find them, Jim. They're going to try for her.”
“Okay,” Nash said, as he watched through the webcam. “Okay. I got something. Two men came into the camera's frame. One's wearing a sweatshirt—a dark color: maroon—with the hood up, the other's got a baseball cap pulled low. Dark pants, dark shoes. Both are being careful not to let me see their faces and—fuck me! The fountain just went off! Deck, I got nothing but water!”
Dave was hallucinating, big-time. He recognized that. He was lying in a puddle on the basement floor—although he was pretty certain that was real—as Anise Turiano—definitely a hallucination—came down the stairs.
“Look what you've done,” she said, because he'd failed to hide the fact that he'd untied himself fro
m the tether. “And look what you've found. What on earth were you planning to do with that? Did you really think you were going to be able to hurt somebody?”
She used her foot to push the two-by-four away from him, and when her back was turned, Dave used his leg—his beautiful, strong, reinforced-by-the-other-two-by-four leg—to kick her legs out from underneath her.
She shouted as she fell onto the concrete—shouted and morphed into the ugly man who'd laughed as he'd pulled Dave's fingernails out with a pair of pliers.
The son of a bitch.
Dave brought his leg down hard on the man's head and pain ripped through him as he felt something give in his knee as the two-by-four he'd hidden up the pants leg of his jeans did damage to himself, too.
But not as much damage as it did to the man—who stopped shouting.
The pain was a good thing, sending shock waves through Dave with each blow he struck. He was alive, he was alive, he was alive. …
But enough—it was enough. Ugly man had stopped moving, and Dave rolled him over to search through the man's jacket as he heard more footsteps on the stairs.
Come on, Dave. Come on …
Tess was with Sam, positioned at the back door, when she heard first one gunshot, and then another—definitely from inside the house, from what sounded like the basement.
“Go,” Sam said into his radio, even though the official word on the warrant hadn't yet come down from Jules. There were exceptions to the rule within the letter of the law—and shots being fired were up at the top of that list.
Sam had already jimmied the lock on the door, and Tess followed him in, weapon up and ready to fire. And the world went, as it often did in this type of situation, into crystal-clear slow motion.
Clear, Tess signaled as she swept both a laundry area and a bathroom that was off the kitchen.
Clear, Sam confirmed that the kitchen and a dining room were also empty.
The house was quiet. She could hear Koehl and Lindsey already moving stealthily up the stairs. Lopez, however, joined them in the kitchen, pointing downward. He, too, believed the gunshots had come from the basement, and Sam nodded his agreement.
A door that hung open was right where it should have been—according to the floor plan—and a quick look confirmed that, yes, it led down to the house's lower level. Tess reached to open it, but Sam caught her arm. Typical SEAL—always wanting to go first.
Although the look on his face was not one of eagerness. And he didn't say it aloud, but she knew what he was thinking.
This could be bad.
Ready? he signaled.
Tess nodded.
Sophia saw them coming. Two men—both careful to keep their faces covered. Heading straight for her.
She ran for her car, but glancing back at them she saw a glint of sunlight as the one with the sweatshirt pulled out a gun.
It was meant to stop her, but she didn't slow down. She'd had sufficient weapons training to know that it was hard enough to aim and hit someone with a handgun, let alone to do it while running. You had to stand and plant and shoot—unless, of course, you were the Sundance Kid.
The crowd scattered at the sight of that gun, which was a good thing, because it gave Sophia plenty of room to maneuver.
She scrambled into her car, fumbled with the key in the lock—please God, come on— and started the engine with a roar.
“Hey!” Decker shouted, as everyone around him ran for cover at the sight of his weapon, and the man in the sweatshirt turned.
And hesitated.
It was all that Deck needed as he squeezed the trigger, and the man dropped. But then, shit, Deck's weapon jammed and the other man, the one in the baseball cap, spun and fired.
As Deck felt the bullet hit him and knock him down, he could see Sophia clearly through the windshield of her car. “Go,” he shouted at her. “Go!”
Jimmy couldn't believe what he was seeing.
The fountain had subsided, and Decker—like some kind of federal marshal from a western like High Noon— calmly blew the man in the sweatshirt away.
Jimmy couldn't find where Sophia had gone. The other guy, the one with the Lakers baseball cap—which seemed wrong—took aim at Decker, who, for some stupid-ass reason, didn't blow him away, too.
Decker fell, and Jimmy watched as he slammed his weapon with his other hand, and he knew with a sick certainty that, as he sat here in Safety Central, as he called it, he was going to watch his friend die.
But then Sophia's car moved, lurching forward, up over the curb and onto the park's lawn. And the Lakers man stopped shooting and dove out of the way as Sophia drove her car right where the man had been standing, providing the shield Deck needed.
There was a dead man slumped near the bottom of the stairs.
Tess couldn't see him clearly enough to know whether or not it was Dave, but she could smell the blood and the death.
She could feel her heart pounding as she quietly followed Sam down into the basement. They moved soundlessly until one of them—it might've been her, it might've been Lopez—stepped on a stair that squeaked.
“Freeze! Hands in the air where I can see them!” The voice giving the order was little more than a whisper, but they all froze.
Sam was giving her a signal to move back, but she didn't. Instead, she said, “Dave?”
There was silence from the shadowy darkness of the basement, and then, “Tess?”
“Yeah,” Tess said. “It's me. And Sam and Lopez. Are you alone down here?”
“I'm not sure,” Dave replied. There was a clatter as if he'd dropped a piece of wood on the concrete floor, and Sam's weapon was back to up-and-ready as the SEAL squinted into the dimness. “I think I… I think …”
“Dr. Malkoff, is it okay if I turn on the light?” Lopez asked. Tess looked up and saw a switch at the top of the stairs.
“Please,” Dave said, and the light went on.
As usual, Sam said it best: “Holy fuck.”
Dave was sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty room, holding a sidearm despite the handcuffs that bound his wrists. He was bloody and beaten, his clothes wet and torn, his pallor a deathly shade of green-gray.
And in addition to the body at the bottom of the stairs, another man was beside Dave—and what was left of his head was in a growing pool of blood.
Sam spoke into his radio headset as Lopez pushed past them both, ever the hospital corpsman. “Lys, we got him. Repeat, we have got Dave. Cassidy, we're going to need that ambulance, stat!”
Dave looked from Lopez, who gently took the gun from his hands, to Sam, to Tess. “Sophia,” he said. “Is Sophia all right?”
“Get in!” Sophia shouted as she leaned across the car to open the door for Deck. “Can you get in?”
She had no idea how badly injured he was, but he was able to scramble into her car as she jammed it into gear.
The man with the ballcap had rolled back to his feet and, taking a potshot that spiderwebbed her windshield with cracks, had started running north through the park, away from them.
The man in the sweatshirt was dead, his exposed face staring sightlessly up toward the webcam. And although identifying him was going to help, he wasn't going to tell them where Dave was being held.
Decker was healthy enough to kick out the windshield and shout, “Go!” as he dug for a backup weapon.
So Sophia hit the gas, and followed the man in the ballcap, because she wanted Dave back.
But then Deck grabbed his leg, so she shouted, “How badly are you hurt?” as the man in the cap launched himself into a waiting SUV, which peeled off, north on Barrett Boulevard.
She followed, laying down a rival strip of rubber as she went after him, the wind in their faces. The man in the cap knew where Dave was, and she was going to catch him and make him tell her. Because she wanted. Dave. Back.
“I'm fine,” Decker said, which was such a Decker thing to say, only maybe it was true, because like her, he was wearing body armor and he d idn't s
eem to be bleeding, and the grabbing-the-leg thing was because his phone was ringing and …
His phone was ringing and he answered it and then said the words she'd been praying she'd hear, words that made her pull to the side of the road and let the SUV roar away.
“They got him. They found him,” Deck told her. “Dave. He's alive, Sophia. He's safe.”
It was over.
The ambulance had arrived, accompanied by what looked like the entire volunteer fire department and half of the local police.
They were getting ready to move Dave up and out of the house as Tracy paced, waiting for her phone to ring.
Rumors were flying.
Sophia and Decker were going to meet them at the hospital.
Lindsey had spoken to Tess, who had spoken to Nash, who thought that it was possible that Decker had been shot. Again. No one knew how badly, but when Tracy finally caved to temptation and called Decker's phone, she got bumped right to voice mail.
“Hey, just making sure you're okay,” she said, which was totally lame, but less so than not leaving any message at all and registering on his phone as a missed call. She hung up, and as long as she was being pathetic, she dialed Jimmy Nash's number.
He answered on the first ring. “Tracy?”
“Yeah,” she said, moving farther away from the van because the reception was so crappy. “Hi. I just wanted to squelch a rumor that's going around that Deck was shot. You know how worried people get. I wanted to get the facts straight.”
Nash laughed. “People?” he said. “You seriously expect me to buy that? You're calling because people are worried? And speaking of rumors, I've heard a doozy about—”
“Please,” she said. “I'm worried, okay? Is he all right?”
“I saw him go down,” Nash told her. “Tess told me he was wearing a vest, but… You're going to see him before I do. This'll give you a good excuse to undress him.”
“Don't,” Tracy said. “Please. You know that kind of teasing would make him really uncomfortable.”
“Wow,” Nash said. “You're serious.”
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