* * *
Two minuteslater I entered the parking lot of the abandoned motel. My eyes caught on a shiny black Audi parked under a tree behind a dumpster. “What the hell?”
I parked my bike and walked over there. It looked like the R8 that I’d seen at Paige’s place when I dropped her off the other night. Sure enough, the license plate said DrAntn. Why would Paige’s dad be here, and why was his car behind the dumpster? Was he looking for Bailey?
I decided to go explore the motel. The lower level was all boarded up, but the upper level wasn’t. Maybe the girls were in one of the rooms.
As I walked through an opening toward the back stairs, passing a broken out vending machine, I could hear voices. Actually, it was just one guy and he was talking in Spanish. Despite having lived in La Playa all this time, I didn’t know Spanish. But the closer I got, the more I realized I knew who was talking. El Diablo. He was standing next to that guy Chanclas and he was on the phone.
My fists clenched and I wanted to run out and kick the shit out of him. But I couldn’t do that because then he’d just move the girls. If they were even here, that is.
Instead, I tiptoed around to the side of the building, making sure to stay in the shadows so I wouldn’t be seen.
I took the side stairs up to the second level and slowly made my way up to each window. I peeked in as best I could to see if anyone was in them. The first three rooms were clearly empty. But the one in the middle—I wasn’t so sure. I thought I could hear muffled voices coming from inside.
Pressing my face up against the window I tried to make out what was inside. Yes, there were definitely people in there. I closed my eyes so I could hear better and pressed my ear up. Then, I heard it. Lily! Lily was in there and she was probably talking to Bailey. My heart soared! She was alive!
Now I just had to figure out what to do. With El Diablo and Chanclas right below me, I couldn’t make too much noise. I needed to find a way to get in the room, get the girls out, and take them to a safe place.
I crouched down below the railing so that El Diablo wouldn’t see me. That also meant that I couldn’t see them. I just needed to think. I could break the window but that wouldn’t help. Maybe if I got their attention somehow they could open the door. No, they were probably tied up or else they’d just open the door themselves.
There was only one door and one window in. My time was running out, because I heard El Diablo and Chanclas walking toward me.
“Just as I thought, the Garcia brothers don’t want the old one. You can have her. Do what you want and then dump her in the desert. Just make sure she can’t identify us. Got it?”
“Oh yeah, brother. I got it.” His voice sounded gleeful. “I’m gonna have me some blonde pussy tonight!”
He was disgusting. Who was he talking about, the old one? Could it be Paige’s mother? No. She wouldn’t be here. Then, suddenly it hit me. The car. Paige probably borrowed her dad’s car and came down. The old one was Paige!
Goddamn it. Instinctively I stood up to look in the window again. It wasn’t my smartest move, because as soon as I stood up, my head exploded in pain and the world closed into darkness.
Forty
Paige
As soon as we heard someone at the window, we all froze. We’d been talking softly about how to escape, but then heard someone outside the door.
“Shh,” I whispered. If it were that Diablo guy, he’d have just come inside. Lord only knows who else would be there. If it were a friend, yelling for help would work. But if it were a foe, we might make things worse.
Before I had a chance to do anything, there was a thud, and then the sounds of someone being dragged. This was not good. We needed to get out of here immediately. From what I could tell by the angle of the sun coming through the curtain, it was late evening, and the sun would soon be going down. Whatever they planned to do, my guess was they planned to do it at night.
As soon as the sounds of dragging went away, I twisted myself into a sitting position. “Maybe if we sit back to back, Bailey, we can untie each other’s hands. Like that game Mom did at your 13th birthday party?”
“Okay.”
I scooted over to where she was and managed to get up on the bed, and we sat back to back. I started fumbling with the rope but couldn’t feel where the knots would untie.
“I know,” Lily said. “I can look at what you’re doing and give verbal directions. She scooted over to where we were and started talking.
“Okay, Paige, just to the left of your thumb is the main loop of the knot on Bailey’s wrist. If you take two fingers and loosen it. No, put your finger right between those…yeah. Like that.”
My arms were absolutely killing me and I vowed that if I got out of this I would spend whatever money I needed to get a nice massage. But with Lily’s instructions, we were getting each other’s ropes loosened. It was working!
It took almost an hour, but finally my rope was loosened enough to slip my hands out. The skin was bloodied and torn, but my hands were free! It wasn’t as easy to untie my feet as they make it look in the movies, and I still had to spend another twenty minutes getting the girls untied too. Eventually, though, we got it.
“Okay, now what do we do?” Bailey asked. “We can’t exactly walk out the front door.”
I went into the bathroom and noticed that the window in there was one of the older ones that would be big enough to crawl through. Thank god it wasn’t one of those tiny shower ones with vented glass.
