Her smile is beatific.
Sophia scrambles across to the other seat, and I half clamber over her to pull the seatbelt into place. I’m not sure at what age kids graduate from child seats to adult ones, but judging from the loose loops of the belt, not yet.
“Okay.” I sit upright and Sophia grabs my hand, squeezing tightly. Not the easiest way to drive, but it’s an improvement from her imitation of a necklace, so I start the car, pulling free only long enough to get us moving.
Once we’re on State Highway 73, I relax. It’s a straight run along here until we hit… well, whatever it’s called where Sophia lives. Nowhere special according to my app. Section after section of nothing much at all.
But when we travel past a service station, she sits upright, kicking her legs against the seat.
“Are we close?”
She nods, her tight grip loosening as she pays more attention to our surrounds than to me. “Here,” she announces as we near an intersection. “Left here.”
Okay. The kid’s a navigator after all. I follow her directions until we’re on a long gravel road that leads straight into a patch of forest. After five minutes, we pull up to a tall metal gate.
“And this leads to your house?” I ask in a voice pitched a good half octave above my usual. A quick comb through my memory doesn’t reveal any occasion on which I’ve used a private driveway or been stopped at a private forest gate on my way to a private house.
Or estate. Surely, that’s the word. A massive bloody private estate.
“How do we…?” I wave at the imposing structure blocking us.
“There’s a code.”
“Which you know?” Sophia nods and I unbuckle us both, still one-handed since the girl clearly isn’t about to let me go. “Do you want to help me enter it?”
She resumes the position of large neck accessory as I force open the door with my right shoulder, wrenching it out of the new shape the collision bent it into. I limp over to the largest post, staring at the keypad and wondering how to get past the locked cover.
Smash it?
Seems likely that whoever put a monstrous gate in the middle of nowhere might have had the foresight to reinforce the glass covering.
“Don’t suppose you have a key on you?” I ask Sophia.
I don’t get an answer. Instead, her eyes widen, movement snags the corner of my eye, and I’m dragged backwards, the girl torn from my grasp. A hand slams into the centre of my back, pounding me into the ground. A foot pins me there.
When I glance to the side, a rifle points into my face.
Today has not been a good day.
And that sucks because right now it looks like it’s my last.
CHAPTERTHREE
BAXTER
I drag a chair across the rough concrete flooring of the subterranean garage. Its wooden legs make a racket, even louder down here where not even the slightest breath of the outside world makes it through the soundproofing.
Luckily, given the noise Antonio has made over the last hour, the reverse is also true.
Once in front of the bound man—blood leaking from his swollen eyes, pulverised mouth, the cuts inflicted over his arms and back—I stop and take my seat. Ducking to his level, I stare into the mass of puffy flesh that houses his eyes. Just because I can barely see them through his injuries, doesn’t mean they aren’t staring back at me.
“You’re dead either way,” I say in a melodic tone. Given how my vocal cords have pulled tight with anxiety, just making a sound is a feat in control. “Tell us your contact, direct us up the chain, and at least your family won’t join you in your grave.”
That makes him jerk at his bonds, something he was too wounded and exhausted to try for the last round of beatings. Opening the folder in my hands, I take out a photograph, filmed using a high-definition lens that makes the image vibrant.
“Your wife will be first,” I tell him, holding it so close that even with his damaged eyes, he can recognise the subject. “Then your son.”
The boy is around ten or eleven. It’s hard to be sure with his sickly pallor. His medical records put him in and out of hospital half a dozen times a year, dealing with an array of allergies that would make a man think the world had declared war on his tiny frame.
