Good point. Not that she’d concede to the douche, but it was a good point. “Because it won’t end anything other than potentially a few lives,” she said. Weeks cocked his head. “The man you’re looking for, the one you want to kill, isn’t in that group. So my brother-in-law and his buddies show up, there’s a gunfight, maybe you die, maybe you don’t. Maybe one of them is hurt, maybe not. But if you escape, you still have to go after your target. Nothing changes.”
“You don’t have a lot of faith in your Spec-Ops buddies,” Beeks said.
“I have a ton of faith in them, but you’ll catch them by surprise. You’ll have the upper hand. It might not be for long, but it will be long enough to do some damage. Especially with that pistol. Besides, if they come and I’m not here, they’ll find me. And when they do, they’ll be prepared for you. Really, it’s in my best interest to let you take me. Yours, too. You may not be able to see my neighbors,” she said, gesturing to the area around them. “But that’s just the way the houses are positioned. You fire that gun and someone will hear. The cops know what happened yesterday, and that I’m staying here. You can be sure they’ll arrive in minutes. Not to mention, they’re local and more familiar with the land than you. Even with a few minutes’ head start, they’ll be able to track you. Why are you after him, anyway? Did someone hire you?”
“It’s not personal,” Weeks said.
“Murder seems kind of personal, but I’m guessing that means someone hired you.”
“Enough,” Beeks said. “Inside now.”
“No,” she said, bracing herself.
“No?” he asked, seeming genuinely surprised.
“Have you not been listening?” she snapped back, taking a few steps toward them, stopping at the top of the stairs, away from her phone. “You can shoot me here, in which case, the copswill be here faster than you can make it back to wherever you came from and you will have lost your leverage. Or you can take me with you. Those are your options, gentlemen.”
The two men shared a look.
“You walked here, through the forest. You can’t be far,” she said, hoping the recorder was picking everything up. Laugo Aliens weren’t common pistols; that bit of information might help Ava find some sort of connection between the men and whoever hired them. And knowing they walked might help HICC narrow down a search area. Not that she was going to wait around for a rescue.
“Unless you have a snowmobile,” she said, testing the waters. Beeks’s eyes flickered up. “Ah, I see you do. Well, that will make it harder for someone to find me.” They could get a lot farther a lot faster, and the tracks would be covered in snow in the next two hours.
“Then again, if you rode most of the way here, you can’t be more than thirty miles away. You couldn’t make it that far and back again on one tank of gas in this kind of weather and across the ungroomed terrain,” she said. And even then, that distance wasn’t likely. Traveling thirty miles without being seen by neighbors, something the two men probably wanted to avoid, was impossible in the immediate area.
“Which means you probably parked a truck nearby. Maybe the state park five miles south of here?” she posited, hoping to leave as many clues as possible.
“Enough!” Weeks said. “You know a lot of weird shit, but you need to shut up now.”
The two men advanced. Her gaze skittered to the right, to the second set of steps leading off the porch toward the woodshed.
“No need to run, sugar,” Beeks said. “You’re going to get what you want.” She barely had enough time to register the small black device in his hand before a shock of microcoulombshit her. Pain twisted and curled through her body, her limbs reacting of their own accord, independent of one another. She cried out, or thought she did, as her legs buckled and she crashed to the ground, her cheek hitting the edge of the handrail on her way down. She landed on the first step, then rolled down the remaining four, her body battered and bruised with each turn. Coming to a stop on her back in the snow, she forced her eyes open. Beeks and Weeks stood over her. Dimly, in some distant recess of her mind, she noted the zip ties Weeks held in his hand. Then her eyes fluttered closed, and she drifted into oblivion.
She came back to consciousness in stages. The rumble of tires on a sanded road vibrating through her body. The lurch of a car hitting a pothole. An ache pulsing through her body as if she’d been pressed by a medieval torture device. Then the feel of air moving in and out of her lungs, the cut of something sharp at her wrists, and the smell of wet dog.
Dog?
That bizarre, meaningless thought pulled her from semi-awake to awake. Panic shot through her system as all her senses sharpened. Her heart leaped, then started galloping in her chest. A wild sort of frenzy threatened to take over her mind, and she fought not to let the fear consume her.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The quote popped into her head, a taunt or a salve, she didn’t know. The question distracted her enough, though, that she managed to pull in first one, then a second deep breath.
Car. She was in a car, lying on her side, her hat gone. It didn’t feel like a trunk, though. Not stuffy or stifling enough despite stinking of wet dog. But it didn’t feel like the back seat of a truck, either. Hadn’t Weeks and Beeks all but confessed to having a truck? Fuck she hoped she hadn’t gotten that wrong. When Callie found her phone and listened to the recording, they’d be looking for a snowmobile and a truck.
Opening her eyes, her lashes caught, like a butterfly kiss, on a towel. Red and muddy, it sprawled across the space, bunched in some places, smooth in others. Discarded, not carefully placed. She inhaled again. Definitely wet dog. Did Beeks and Weeks have a dog? She doubted that. Did that mean they’d stolen yet another vehicle? Far more likely.
The car hit another pothole and she bounced against the bottom of…of what? She twisted her head, breathing through the pain, and looked beyond the towel. Windows and open space came into view above her. A hatchback, or more likely a station wagon. She’d been trussed and tossed in the back of a station wagon. Well, double-fuck. If it had a full tank of gas, they’d have a range of a hell of a lot more than thirty miles.
The back wheels of the car slid sideways enough to unnerve her, but caught again before another wave of fear could gain momentum. Gas might not be a limiting factor for them, but the weather sure as hell would be.
The car dipped, as if passing through an intersection, then started climbing a gentle slope. Lifting her head, she fixed her attention out the windows. She had an exceptional sense of direction; if she could figure out roughly where she was, when she escaped, she had a good chance of finding her way to some sort of civilization.
And with the killers safely away from Callie, Daphne could focus on herself and getting out of this mess. At least they zipped-tied her hands in front of her and hadn’t blindfolded her.
The car turned and started up a steeper hill. The rear window was covered with snow and mud, and though she caught glimpses of house lights, she couldn’t make out any street signs. Taking the risk of alerting Weeks and Beeks to her wakeful state, she lifted her head another few inches, wincing as pain sliced through her body.
Mud and snow, that’s all she saw.
Refusing to give up, she shifted slowly onto her back. Rear windows tended to take the brunt of winter slush and…yes! As she’d hoped, the side window, though not pristine, was clear enough to see through.
