She drew in a deep breath and set out once more for shore. For what she hoped was shore, a big black mass rising out of the dark sea, cold and unforgiving. She tried to speed up her strokes, but it took all her strength merely to resist the increasingly strong tide.
Another wave crashed over her head, driving her under, and she crested the surface just as her breath gave out, gasping and treading water, looking around her in a panic.
It was all black, all dark now. Which way was shore, and safety? It was impossible to tell. She struck out again, hoping it was the right direction, her strokes uneven. She fought down the waves of panic, the deadliest enemy at sea, as she fought the strength of the waves that wanted to carry her out, away, toward the vastness of the open sea.
Exhausted, she gulped in air, only to find it was salt water instead. Her limbs were flailing now, she was so cold it was hard to coordinate her movements. She treaded water, turning in a full circle, fighting panic.
Darkness, everywhere. No lights, no sounds from shore to orient her. No ships on the horizon, nothing.
Staying still like this, she rode the waves as they grew taller, trying to time it so she wouldn’t dissipate her strength. Rising, rising, a faint ripple of light as the wave crested in foam, then the drop to the trough, over and over again. Up, cresting, plunging down…another wave crested fast over her. She hadn’t expected it, she had no air in her lungs.
Oh God! It was pitch-black beneath the waves! The swirling water had tumbled her into a somersault and now she didn’t know which was was up and which was down. She tilted her head back, but there was nothing to see, not even reflected starlight on the surface.
She started kicking, arrowing as fast as she could…up? Please God, let her be kicking upward. In a last spurt of strength, she scissored her legs harder and faster, lungs burning, aching to pull in the breath that would fill her lungs with air. She had a second left, maybe two…
She was going to die here, all alone, in the cold, dark ocean, everything so silent except for her beating heart. It thumped against her rib cage, hard, as she kept her hands outstretched, hoping to break the surface, but all her hands encountered was cold water.
She was dying, panic ringing in her mind like a bell, ringing, ringing…
Nicole sat up in bed with a gasp, sweating and shivering, completely disoriented in the dark. With a shaking hand, she groped until she found a lamp and turned it on, blinking blankly at the room.
The ringing continued, on and on. Her cell phone!
Nicole dove for her purse, lying on the floor, scrambling for the phone. Maybe it was Sam. He wasn’t here. The house had an unmistakeable empty feeling. And, she now saw, there was a note on the dresser from him.
She glanced down at the little window. Not Sam, her father. Was something wrong? Had he taken a turn for the worse?
“Dad?” she said breathlessly. “Are you okay?”
“Not your father, bitch.” A low, deep, man’s voice. Slightly raspy, somehow familiar…
“Who is—” And suddenly she knew. That low, raspy voice had spoken vicious things in her ear only hours ago. The intruder.
“Look at your screen.”
Nicole turned the phone so she could see the screen and gasped. It showed her father, pale as ice, tied to a chair. He was trembling badly. Not fear, those were muscle spasms unchecked by the medication he’d clearly not had a chance to take. While Nicole watched in horror, a large man’s hand off-screen took a knife and traced a long line down her father’s face, from temple to chin.
At first she thought he’d brought the wrong edge of the blade to her father’s face, as an admonishment.Look what we could do to him if we wanted to.
But then a small red line appeared, growing larger and larger, gaping open, blood starting to drip off her father’s jaw onto his pale gray pyjamas. Looking more closely, Nicole could see that the knife had cut deep into the flesh, possibly to the bone.
“Stop it!” she screamed into the cell phone. “Don’t you dare hurt my father!”
The hand reappeared, this time holding a gun. A big black gun that looked enormous next to her father’s frail figure. Deadly black metal against her father’s pale, wrinkled skin. The gun angled downward until the muzzle pressed into her father’s knee. It was driven so hard into her father’s flesh she could see the material of the pajama pants ruching around the muzzle.
Then the screen went dark.
“Oh, we’ll do more than just hurt him,” the deep, vicious voice came back on. “You saw that gun.”
Nicole listened, heart pounding.
“I said—you saw that gun!” the voice roared.
Nicole tried to get her voice to work but her mouth and throat were too dry. No sound would come out. She coughed, managed to croak, “Yes. Yes, I saw the gun.”
“Good. Remember that gun. Now listen carefully. This is what I want you to do.” The voice was back to cool and calm. Giving instructions as if indicating which way to Balboa Park. “Call a car, tell him to take you to Fleetridge, to the Westwood shopping mall parking lot there. Keep this line open and the video function on so I can hear and see what you’re doing, otherwise your father will pay the consequences. If you don’t come alone, your father’s dead meat. He’s dead meat, anyway, anyone can see that, but I’ll make him suffer before he goes. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll disappear with him and you’ll never see him again, but you’ll know that every second of what’s left of his life I’ll be hurting him. Is that clear?”
The temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Nicole was shivering with terror and cold. “C-clear,” she whispered.
