As he released his arms limply from around her, she was amazed as with his last remaining strength he clutched her hand in his again.
"Jack. I love you. I love you so much. I'm so sorry Jack. I should have made you stay here. I didn't know they'd have a gun. I never should have let you go." There 12
was helpless frustration in the voice of the man behind her.
The boy on the bed didn't answer, his eyes were fixed, staring over her shoulder, vacantly staring, at nothing.
His labored breathing had finally ceased.
Randy leaned over and shook him. "Jack? Jack!" He was sobbing now, pulling him up. He hugged the boy's limp body.
Mayree forgot for a moment how she had even gotten here. All she felt was pain, and she felt the loss of a boy she'd known for only a few fleeting minutes as intensely as if she had known him forever. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Randy glanced over at her as he held his little brother. The pain in his eyes was palpable.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered.
The man behind her, Quinn, walked out, and from somewhere outside of the room she could hear him slamming the wall as he cursed and cried.
Mayree pulled her hand from the boy's, thinking now of her own safety. She wondered if they were going to put her in the trunk and take her back. She didn't want to be in that trunk again. Worse yet, they weren't going to take her back at all since the boy was dead. They had no further use for her. She thought about running, both men were consumed with their grief, and it seemed like the perfect time.
She looked back over her shoulder at the doorway, half expecting the other man to be blocking it, but it was empty. Her leg muscles tensed, and she bolted from the bed to the door, scrambled down the hall, back toward the kitchen.
She had just made it to the end of the hall when she heard someone right behind her. The large man grabbed her, and she fought him savagely.
13
He was strong, too strong. She knew her resistance was futile, but she struggled anyway. He pushed her down, crushing her against the hard wooden floor with his body weight. His hands grasped her wrists and held them on either side of her head, his legs holding hers still.
He looked down at her, his face inches away from hers.
Quinn's long, dark hair shrouded her face, blocking out everything else in the world except him. "That was a stupid fucking move, bitch," he snarled. "You aren't going anywhere."
She hadn't really seen his face before, and now she could tell that the boy who had died was his brother too.
He was older than the others. His face was rough and unshaven.
Everything about him seemed hard, and threatening, and yet he was somehow even more beautiful than the boy she had just seen die.
His eyes were full of tears, and he seemed to look right through her. She could feel the heat of his breath against her face, his heart pounding against her chest.
The hollow sadness in his eyes was haunting. Despite the frightening situation she was in, she almost wanted to put her arms around him and hold him. No one should have to feel pain like the heartbreaking agony she saw in his beautiful eyes.
"I'm so sorry about your brother. Please, let me go,"
she pleaded.
"You're not going anywhere. My brother wouldn't go to the hospital because he didn't want me or Randy to go to jail. He fucking died for that! I'll be damned if some little cunt is going to put us there."
His voice seemed menacing, but he was still crying. A tear slid down the bridge of his nose and dripped onto her face.
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"Just take me back, please. I won't say anything," she said. How many times had she heard that dumb line used in movies, and it never worked. Please let it work now. Just this one time, let it work.
"I've never met a woman who could keep her mouth shut about anything," he said.
She was terrified. If he wasn't taking her back then what was he going to do? She was afraid she already knew the answer to that. She looked in his eyes, saw they were glazed with grief from the loss of his brother. She couldn't read anything in them beyond that.
Suddenly the thought of being in the trunk didn't seem like a bad option.
"Just put me in the trunk and take me back? I don't know where I am, I won't be able to tell anyone anything.
I won't tell anyone anything! Please?"
"You saw the car! You saw what we look like. My brother even told you our last name. I'm not taking you back. I can't."
She squirmed beneath his weight, renewing her attempts to free herself. He was much bigger, much heavier, and far too strong to get away from.
"What are you going to do with me?" She felt her chest tightening in fear, it hurt to breathe. The combination of her fear and his heavy weight on top of her was lung crushing.
"I don't know!" he said, his voice was full of frustration.
His grief seemed to overwhelm him for several moments, and he sobbed. His large body trembled above hers shaking like a leaf in the wind.
Finally he moved off her, still holding one of her wrists so tightly her hand felt numb. He stood, pulling her up with him. He dragged her back into the kitchen to a door, which he flung open. He snapped a switch on the wall and a dim light illuminated a set of dusty wooden 15
stairs. A stale musty smell rose from the cellar below, he gave her a shove.
"Get down there."
She backed up against him. His body was steely hard against her back.
"No. Please, no," she pleaded.
"You either walk down, or I throw you down," he said coldly. "Either way you are going down there."
Moving forward, shakily down the steps, she could see a dirt floor at the bottom, and the air was damp and cold.
She could hardly breathe, and was almost certain he was taking her down there to kill her. He followed her to the bottom of the steps, and pointed to a door.
"That's where you are going."
The door had had a rusty hasp on it, but there was no lock. He opened it, quickly shoved her into the dark room, and slammed the door shut behind her. She heard a grinding sound then silence.
Mayree pushed on the door, but it wouldn't open. She pushed harder, then rammed against it with her shoulder.
It was pitch black in the room. She stumbled around trying to feel if there was anything in the room to use to get the door open. Something brushed across her face, she thought it was cobwebs at first, then realized it was a string. She pulled it and a single bare light bulb in a dirty white ceramic fixture came on above her head.
The room seemed to be an old storage pantry. There were dusty canning jars on shelves lining the wall, but there was nothing anywhere that would be useful in getting the door open. She went to the door again, and pushed against it, relentlessly, over and over, kicking it, ramming it with her shoulder until she ached.
Sitting down on the dirt floor, tears crept into her eyes.
She was so tired, but her heart was pounding in her ears.
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She stared at the thick cobwebs covering the lower shelves, thinking what a cold miserable place this was.
She didn't want to die in this room. The chill of the dirt floor was getting to her. The thin cotton scrubs she wore did little to keep her warm.
She lived alone, and had no close relatives or close friends. The only hope she had of somebody noticing she was missing was by not showing up for work, or her car abandoned in the parking lot, unless the repo man found it first.
She wasn't due back at work for two days, and since she was so new they would probably decide to fire her for not coming in instead of worrying where she was. She could be cold and dead in this room and no one would even care. No one was even going to notice she was gone.
Even if she had never before realized what a worthless, unimportant person she was, it was impossible to ignore now. No one would miss her. No one.
She shivered, and curled into a ball, the tears unstoppable now. No one. It was a brutally bitter ending to a life that never ha
d been sweet. Her eyes fixed blankly on a spider crawling onto her leg. Normally, she was terrified of spiders, but it seemed trivial now.
Unmoving, she watched it, until the spider crawled off, and ran beneath the dusty shelves.
Mayree slumped back against the wall, both physically and emotionally exhausted.
Grandma used to talk about heaven, how beautiful it was, how you were reunited with all your lost loved ones there. Mayree closed her eyes. Maybe she would see her grandparents again soon. Maybe she would see the boy, Jack, again in heaven. He was such a beautiful young man, maybe in heaven she would finally be beautiful too.
Sometime later she was awakened by the sound of the door creaking open. It was the man who didn't have a 17
gun, Randy. He held a pillow and some blankets in his arms. He tossed them on the floor next to her. His eyes were teary and sad. For a moment she considered trying to run past him, but she was so cold, stiff, and sore that it hardly seemed worth it. She wasn't going to be able to outrun him anyway.
He started to close the door.
"Wait! Please?" she pleaded, trying to look up at him.
The light from the dirty bare bulb above hurt her tired eyes.
He opened the door back up, just far enough to see her.
"Please let me go?" she said, meeting his eyes.
Pleading both aloud and wordlessly, she stared at him, tears again blurring her vision.
"I can't," his voice was sad, but gentle. He had a softer expression than Quinn, maybe he would help her.
"Please. What are you going to do to me?"
He looked at her sadly. "I wasn't the one who brought you here. You're Quinn's problem. It's up to him what he does with you. I'm sorry."
She searched the man's face. "Is he going to kill me?"
she asked, afraid to know the answer.
Randy looked at the floor, confirming her worst fears by his silence.
"Please help me. Please? Please let me go, Randy?"
She hoped adding his name would soften him more.
I can't let you go," he said, anger creeping into his voice.
"Why not?" Mayree choked through her tears
"My fucking brother is the one you need to ask to let you go. You're his fucking problem! I brought you blankets. Go back to sleep," he said, and he closed the door.
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She huddled in the blankets shivering, waiting in terror for what was going to happen next. She tried to sleep, but couldn't. She listened, waiting for the door to open again, waiting for the big man with the gun to come.
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CHAPTER 2
Quinn sat on the back steps, watching the rain. He'd slept a few fitful hours, but was plagued by the image of Jack's face, twisted with agony. It was his fault, he could have said no, he'd have been the one shot then, but his youngest brother would still be alive. It had been Quinn's idea to rob the store. Randy was going to drive.
Quinn was supposed to be the one who went in, not Jack. Jack, who so wanted to be like him, Quinn could never understand why. Quinn had spent more of his adult life in prison than he had as a free man. Jack had been excited, he'd never robbed anything. Hell the boy had never been in trouble his whole life.
Quinn looked out at the pond, in the back field. The wild geese were honking. Jack had loved the geese.
Even now as Quinn sat mourning him, they were gathering at the pond by the barn. Soon they'd fly out, all at once, to begin their journey to wherever it was they spent their winter. Jack knew everything about geese.
Quinn had always hated them, they were noisy and shit everywhere. Last fall when they began gathering at the pond he went outside and fired off a shot. The blast of the shotgun had made all the geese rise up in a huge cloud.
Jack came running out of the house, enraged with him. Jack had even taken a swing at Quinn, a first for the boy who idolized his big brother. Quinn remembered Jack screaming at him that Canadian geese mated for life. He'd never known that. Jack spent hours talking about the geese, and how they mourn the loss of their mates. Quinn had lost Donna, but he didn't mourn. All he felt was anger, there was no grief.
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The cold rain mixed with the tears on his face. Jack was gone. Dead ... like Quinn's heart, his whole world.
Jack had been the only good thing left in his life. Quinn wished it was him who was dead, not Jack. Jack didn't deserve to die. Quinn had nothing to live for. If he was smart he'd put a bullet in his head right now to end the travesty that was his "life." Quinn knew he was a loser.
He either belonged in the ground, or belonged in prison.
He sure as hell wasn't supposed to be alive and burying Jack.
But, he was going to have to bury him. Maybe near the pond, he'd loved that pond so much, or beside the house, where he'd forever be close to home. He walked along the path beside the house. The pain of losing Jack was so intense his chest physically ached.
Randy's car was still where Quinn had left it last night.
The trunk was open and he went over to shut it, when something caught his eye on the ground. It was a plastic hospital ID badge, a pretty, blue-eyed, dark-haired girl's picture smiled above the name "Mayree Jacobs, housekeeping". He'd completely forgotten about her, concentrating on Jack.
He looked at the picture again. It was as if he'd never seen her before. He'd had his face inches from hers and yet he'd had no recollection of what she looked like. All he could see was Jack dying.
The girl's face was pretty, really pretty. Mayree ... such a pretty name for such a pretty girl. It was a shame he'd fucked up and brought pretty Mayree here. He weighed the option of letting her go, but knew he couldn't. If he was implicated in an attempted armed robbery or worse yet ... kidnapping ... he was going to be looking at a lot of time. That wasn't his first robbery. It wasn't Randy's first either.
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He was going to have to kill her. Just the thought of it made him queasy. He was a liar and a thief, but he wasn't a killer. He'd never killed anyone and he didn't want to. Things he had done in the past haunted him.
Small things, that compared to murder, were nothing.
He'd known last night when Randy told him she was his problem that it was going to be up to him to decide what to do with the girl. The rain was coming down much harder as he went to the house.
Randy was at the kitchen table, drinking a mug of coffee and looking blank. "Think it'll rain all day?" Randy said, in a drained voice.
"I don't know, it looks like it," Quinn replied as he poured himself a cup of coffee, noticing then his hands were shaking.
The house was really cold, he rarely bothered building a fire in the wood burner until winter really set in, hell, it was barely October. He thought about the girl, downstairs, in the cellar. She was probably freezing.
"I took her down some blankets last night," Randy said, as if he had read his mind.
Quinn tossed the girl's ID badge onto the table and sat down heavily, his fingers tracing over the stain on his jeans where she had dumped her coffee on his leg last night.
Randy picked up the badge and looked at her picture.
"What are you going to do with her, Quinn?"
Quinn couldn't look at him. "I have to kill her."
He heard Randy exhale sharply. "She asked me last night if you were going to kill her."
"What did you tell her?" He hated the thought of anyone freezing all night in a cellar, knowing they were waiting to die in the morning. Everything about this situation was wrong.
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"I didn't answer. I didn't know what you were going to do with her."
"What else can I do? You want to go back to jail?"
"No," Randy said quickly, "but isn't there something else? This is so fucked up, I just know no matter what, this girl is going to get us in fucking trouble. Fuck, there must be something you can do besides killing her. She was begging me to let her go."
"It's either kill her, or let her go. You don't think I haven't thoug
ht this over? It was an attempted armed robbery for Christ sake! Then I fucking kidnapped that girl! I'm not going back to jail!"
Quinn could feel Randy staring at him. "Jack would hate you for doing this."
"Fuck you, Randy! Jack probably hates me now anyway. I'm the reason he got shot. I'm the reason he's dead! You know goddamn well I don't want to kill anybody."
"She was so nice to Jack. He died holding her hand.
He thought she was a fucking angel! He even asked you to take care of her. Now you're going to kill her?" Randy said, his eyes getting watery. "You are such a cold hearted son of a bitch, Quinn. Let her go! She's scared enough, she won't tell anyone!"
Quinn slammed his hand on the table, as the frustration and anger boiled in him. "Stop it, Randy.
Just fucking stop it! It's that girl or us. I don't have any other choice! I'm not going back to jail!" He picked up his pistol from the table and went to the cellar door, intending on ending this, here and now.
Randy said something else, but he couldn't hear him as he rushed down the steps. He jerked the screwdriver out of the hasp and flung open the door to the root cellar.
The girl was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. She was wrapped in blankets, with a tear stained 23
face. She looked up at him slowly, her eyes filled with fear.
He raised the gun and pointed it at her, thinking of the picture on her ID badge, smiling Mayree Jacobs. She sure as hell wasn't smiling now.
"Please, don't," she cried, holding her hands out defensively as if they could somehow save her from a bullet.
"Cry a fucking river, bitch! That shit don't work on me," Quinn lied, trying to force himself not to care that she hadn't done anything to deserve this. He needed to be cold, callous.
She leaned back against the wall, her eyes squeezed shut tightly. "You know I would have done something for Jack if I could have helped him. I'm sorry, please don't do this!" her voice trembled.
Stolen Property: The Abduction of Mayree Jacobs Page 2
