CHAPTER
50
Rebecca should have trusted her gut instinct.
Even before she got into Dixon's car she knew something wasn't quite right. He didn't turn to look at her directly, and instead, kept the left side of his face out of her sight. Yet if she had seen his black eye she still would have gotten into the car. She would have been concerned and would've wanted to hear what had happened.
No, it wasn't that he wouldn't look her in the eyes. It was something else. A tension, a fear so palpable she had felt it.
However, her gut instinct could never have predicted a gunman crouched in the backseat. Nor would she have predicted that the woman from the van, the one who had called her Becky and offered her a ride, would be slamming her face down into the snow and binding her wrists with plastic ties.
Now all alone in what felt like a dark, cold hole with the smell of gasoline all around her, Rebecca's mind raced. Who were these people? Why were they doing this? Had Dixon been involved in the mall bombing? Was Patrick? What did they want with her? She didn't know anything. She hadn't seen anything.
Her eyes started to adjust to the darkness. It was a cellar or a crawl space. Wood rafters for a ceiling that wasn't even four feet from the floor. Not really a floor, just cold, hard concrete. The walls were concrete blocks. No windows. One small three-foot-by-three-foot door above. A trapdoor with no stairs. It didn't fit tight or in the rush, was left askew. Light from above seeped in around the left side. They had flung her down and with her wrists tied together she landed hard on her wounded arm. She felt a trickle of blood and knew some of the sutures had ripped. The pain was secondary. Nothing could override her fear.
Up until now she had been with Dixon. They left his car in the long-term parking lot at the airport. It had still been snowing. Rebecca searched for signs of life, security vehicles, a shuttle bus, other motorists, passengers returning to their vehicles. There was no one. Even if she dared to scream no one would hear her.
The woman in the van had followed close behind. It was there, in between the vehicles of the parking lot, that the woman pulled Rebecca from the car and pushed her down into the snow, binding her wrists so tight Rebecca felt the plastic bite into her skin. They shoved Dixon and Rebecca into the back of the van. The gunman crawled up beside them.
Dixon wouldn't meet her eyes. He looked awful. His lip was split on the same side as the black eye. His hair stuck up in places where it had been yanked. In the headlights of passing traffic she saw that his coat had been ripped and his jeans stained at the knees.
She wanted to ask him what was going on. She wanted to make him look at her and tell her whether he had anything to do with the bombing. But the panic had closed off her throat. It took all her effort to breathe, to keep from hyperventilating. Her arm throbbed.
They had parked in a long narrow alley, some place downtown. Again, there was no one to see them hustled from the van through the back entrance of a building, a brick building four?maybe five?stories high with long, dark corridors, institutional linoleum, blank sterile white walls. Rebecca tried to notice everything. Isn't that what they did in the movies? Even blindfolded and gagged they'd remember how many railroad tracks the car had bumped over or the sound of water under a bridge. Noting and recording her surroundings made her concentrate on something other than the pounding of her heart.
Now she tried to do the same thing here, alone in the dark. It simmered her panic.
She could hear muffled voices. Thumping footsteps overhead. Not just footsteps. It sounded like they were moving furniture. In the room above, she remembered metal desks and rolling chairs, file cabinets and a shelf with electronic boxes. There were several computers left on, their screen savers the only illumination in the room when they first entered. Everything had looked new, the walls a freshly painted white, plain and sterile like the corridors. Oddly there had been nothing personal in the room. No coffee mugs, no jacket over a chair, no container with pens, no plaques or pictures. It looked almost as if someone had quickly put together a makeshift office that was meant to be temporary.
Her eyes stared at the trapdoor, first waiting for someone to reappear. As time passed she still watched, wondering if the door wasn't closed properly and was out of line to cause that sliver of light, then maybe it wasn't locked. Could she shove it open? A bit of hope fluttered until she realized that with her hands tied behind her back she'd never be able to push it open or climb out.
She started looking around the musty area for something sharp to rub the plastic tie against. There had to be something here. That's when she noticed why the smell of gasoline was so strong. There were pools of it on the hard, cold concrete floor. She must have fallen in it because now she could smell the damp spots on her jeans and coat. Two cans marked gasoline sat on a shelf with their caps off. But they were set upright, not tipped over.
Rebecca realized this crawl space hadn't been splattered with gasoline by accident. Someone intentionally poured it out all over the floor.