“Do you want me to come over?” Ally asked.
“I’m not allowed to open the door to anyone but Lee, Mace or Vance,” I told her.
“Says who?”
“Says Vance.”
“Since when do you do what you’re told?”
“Since the words ‘escalated’ and ‘hostilities’ entered my vocabulary and I finally told your brother I love him and he’s living with me and I might be pregnant with his child and I haven’t seen his cabin in Grand Lake yet and his office is not safe anymore and –”
“All right, all right, I get it,” Ally cut me off. “Call me when you know something.”
“Gotcha.”
I hung up and stood in my living room and stared at the weapons on my dining room table.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
This was all my fault.
Well, maybe not all my fault, it was mostly Rosie’s fault but if something went wrong, I’d feel responsible. This wasn’t the kind of something that could go wrong like jumping in a car with ten dollars in your pocket and a half a tank of gas and driving to Colorado Springs in hopes of going to a bar, not getting carded, and meeting hot, soon-to-be-fighter-pilot cadets from the Air Force Academy, an endeavor doomed to fail (and I would know as I was the voice of experience on that kind of thing, how do you think I got my t-shirt?). This kind of something meant guns and bullets and Brody in the surveillance room where, outside the door, grunts of pain could be heard.
I wasn’t really good at doing nothing, I was kind of an action girl and sitting around waiting was not my style.
Nevertheless, I pulled my cop’s daughter shroud around me, not impenetrable but it would do the trick in a pinch. I sat on my couch, pulled my heels up on the seat, rested my cheek on my knees and waited.
*
Looking back, it was kind of an idiotic thing to do.
Not that I should blame myself too much, it wasn’t like cars exploded in front of my house every day. Not to mention, I was a little wired, what, with the love of my life who I’d finally hooked up with, done the deed with and started living with, out there escalating hostilities.
In my defense, Vance didn’t say anything about not going outside if there was an explosion that shook your house, made your windows buckle and was so loud, it made you think your ears were bleeding.
I wasn’t totally stupid. I did look outside first. There was a car on fire in the middle of the street, burning debris everywhere. The car didn’t explode, it exploded and bits of it were all over the road, the sidewalk, even in my front yard, wrecking Stevie’s beautifully tended legacy. There were people shouting and running around. And anyway, what kind of neighbor would I be if I hid in the house if someone was out there, hurt, burned, whatever.
Not to mention, that someone could be Lee.
I thought, with all those people, I’d be safe.
I was wrong.
I nabbed the stun gun (my premier choice in weaponry), unlocked the door, unlocked the security door, did a scanning sweep of my porch and stepped outside.
I got to the edge of my porch, which was where they took me down.
*
This kidnapping was entirely different from the one before and the one before that.
I came to in the backseat of a car, legs bound at the ankles, wrists bound behind my back with the added dimension this time of being gagged.
With hindsight, and a lot of time to lie in the back of the car thinking, the explosion was not a very ingenious tactic of getting me to expose myself. In fact, it was kind of crude.
I’d fallen for it though so what did that say about me?
We drove for a long time, I couldn’t see much and I didn’t try. Cherry had been nearly exploded the day before so the minute a call came into dispatch about a car going up in flames in front of my house, the Denver Police Department, and Lee and his boys, would be all over it like flies on doo doo.
I couldn’t imagine someone hadn’t seen me being carted away, seemingly unconscious.
I couldn’t imagine they’d be far behind.
I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t rescue me.
You live, you learn, unfortunately, all my life, I’d always learned the hard way.
*
It seemed like we were driving forever, maybe it was half an hour, maybe longer, when we finally started to do some turns, obviously coming off the highway. The car slowed, there were streetlights then there were none. Then, we hit a gravel road, drove for a few minutes and we stopped.
I was yanked out of the backseat by my ankles and thrown over a shoulder in a fireman’s hold. I didn’t see much, it was late, dark and we were well out of the city so dark meant dark. I could tell we were in the mountains though.
Shit.
I was carted into a cabin and thrown on the couch, then arranged in a seated position.