Maybe she should email her sister to say good-bye.
That way, Mandi could call their parents so at least they’d know something had happened to Dree, plus Mandi would know not to wait for Dree to get her any more money for her son Victor’s expensive autism therapies.
Victor’s sweet face, terrified by the world around him that he couldn’t comprehend, rose in Dree’s thoughts.
Dammit.
Plus, Maxence was out there somewhere, and he’d obviously known he was being kidnapped. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have shoved his phone in her hand with it already calling someone so she could tell them what had happened.Somethinghad caused Max to have that sudden change of heart. One minute, he’d been insisting Dree go with them so she would be safe, and a few seconds later, something had made him shove her into the crowd, shouting at her to run.
He was in danger, too.
And she needed to find him. When Maxence’s motorcycle had broken down in Nepal, she’d promised she wouldalwayscome find him.
So, she had to get away.
It was that simple. She justhadto.
Dree waited, standing motionless for a few more minutes, while Kir Sokolov and his driver got into an argument in some harsh language she assumed was Russian.
Their shouting intensified. Their hand gestures widened.
Their voices bounced around the bare steel support beams and aluminum siding.
It was getting pretty chilly in the warehouse with the wind blowing in the open garage door back by the van.
Open.
Garage.
Door.
Dree tugged her white and silver cape more closely around herself, thinking hard.
A lot of joke websites had popped up during the last political election in the States, and Dree wracked her brain, trying to remember their website addresses until she finally came up with one.
She clicked the URL bar, typed in the address, and then said, “That’s weird,” just as the screen flashed red and black and a siren started blaring. She exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh! What’s it doing?”
Kir Sokolov jumped toward the computer and shoved her out of the way. “What did you do to it?”
“Nothing! The bank website must have been hacked. I was just sitting there trying some different passwords that Francis used, and all of a sudden, it wigged out!”
“You went to a porn website!” Kir Sokolov accused her.
Dree gasped, laying her hand at the base of her neck like she was clutching her pearls. “I didnot!Just becauseyougot a computer virus whenyouwere watching porn doesn’t mean that’s the only way to get one!”
The computer screen stopped flashing and turned to a truly obscene animated graphic of a man wearing a plaid shirt and sporting a chode the size of a fireplace log, abusing a cartoon pig.
The computer blared,“Hey everybody! I’m watching porn!”
Sokolov began stabbing the keyboard frantically with his fingers. “No, no, no.Not this computer!”
These two buffoons had allowed a prisoner access to a vital computer? Oh, they deserved everything they were going to get.
Kir Sokolov and the driver kept shoving each other out of the way, trying to rescue the computer, and were thoroughly occupied with their technical problem.
Dree began backing away.
The computer screen changed to a different animated graphic of another man grabbing his butthole and yanking it until it appeared to be a foot wide. The computer yelled again for everybody to notice it was showing porn.
