Threat warning

CHAPTER FOUR

Ryan’s mind raced. They should be fighting back, shouldn’t they? Instead, they were just doing what this bitch with the gun told them to do, driving long into the night-over two hours now-without a word being spoken by anyone.

This Colleen chick was an odd piece of work. Even as she threatened their lives, she managed to sound friendly. Now that the threat was made-and Ryan didn’t doubt that she was capable of killing again-she’d stopped talking, except to give Mom occasional driving directions. She spent the quiet time softly humming church songs. Ryan recognized “Amazing Grace”-who didn’t know that one?-and several others sounded familiar enough that he could have hummed along if he’d wanted. Ryan didn’t consider himself anyone’s expert on religion, but he was pretty sure that Heaven was out of reach for murderers and kidnappers. When one person did both, the odds had to be pretty awful.

Colleen had actually spoken Ryan’s thoughts when she warned against tumbling out of the car and going for help. That was exactly what he’d been considering. Now, with the dire threat to kill Mom still standing, the moment for action was lost. But maybe only for a little while.

Ryan’s dad had told him a thousand times that eighty percent of so-called “victims” of violent crime were in fact willing participants who talked themselves into victimhood as a means of rationalizing their fears. They didn’t consider life-saving action because it added new risk.

In the abstract, it’s easy to think of people who feel fear as cowards, but in real time, when you’re the one who’s likely to die if the nut job pulls the trigger, fear feels more like a survival skill than cowardice.

Interstate 66 led to Interstate 81, which in turn led to Route 262. After that, he lost track of the route numbers. They drove west, endlessly into the night.

They drove into a future that Ryan imagined held little comfort for the Nasbe family. Their next opportunity to make a difference would arrive when they made their first stop-whether it was at their final destination or at someplace along the way for gas or maybe even a pee break. A dozen ideas churned in Ryan’s brain, from the simple to the heroic. Somewhere in the mix of all those options, there had to be one that would work. The trick lay in choosing the right one at the right time.

The trick also lay in Mom’s willingness to take a risk. Weapons notwithstanding, two against one presented real advantage; but if one of the two hesitated, none of the rest would matter.

He tried repeatedly to capture his mother’s eyes to communicate that he had a plan, but she seemed to be intentionally avoiding his glance.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Ryan announced.

The noise seemed to startle the girl with the gun. Then she shrugged. “So go.”

Ryan recoiled. “What, on the floor?”

Colleen leaned forward and lifted an empty Evian bottle from the rear center console. “Or here.”

He was horrified. “I’m not going to go in a bottle. In front of everybody.”

Colleen put the bottle down. “Suit yourself.”

“Can’t we stop somewhere?”

Colleen laughed. “Could you be more obvious?” She tapped Christyne’s headrest with the barrel of her pistol. “How much gas do we have, Mom?”

Christyne cleared her throat, then said, “A little more than half a tank.”

Colleen leaned closer to peer over her shoulder. “Looks more like three quarters to me,” she said. “A minivan like this, that’s got to be fifteen, sixteen gallons. At twenty miles to the gallon and sixty miles an hour, what’s that, three gallons an hour? We stop in five hours.”

“Five hours?” Christyne exclaimed. “Where are we going?”

Colleen said, “Second star to the right, straight on till morning.”

Ryan recognized the directions to Peter Pan’s Neverland, and had started to look out the windshield again when quick movement from Colleen made him jump. Before he had a chance to react, Ryan was staring down the barrel of the pistol. It looked huge, even in the dark. In his mind, he could almost see the bullet launching into his face.

“Don’t ever lie to me again,” Colleen warned. “Don’t try to trick me, don’t try to piss me off. This isn’t a game. Do you understand me?”

Ryan nodded. For the first time, the true gravity of what was happening registered in his mind. He was genuinely terrified.

“I need the bottle after all,” he said.

Ryan lost track of the turns and the route numbers-and also the time-as the roads became progressively narrower and the night darker. But for the clock on the dash that told him it was one-thirty-three, he would have sworn that it was even later. For the last half hour or more, they hadn’t passed a single car. Good thing, too, because Ryan didn’t think there would have been room for two vehicles abreast.

The terrain out the window was mountain-steep, and when the headlights weren’t splashing over rocks, all he could see were trees. Sometimes-rarely-he caught glimpses of lights shining from buildings way off in the distance, for all he knew maybe miles away, mostly in the valleys far below.

He’d never seen his mom so stressed behind the wheel. The last few miles were all short-radius switchbacks, a far cry from the suburban roads in Mount Vernon, and as the van’s transmission screamed for relief, she gripped the steering wheel as if it were a climbing rope. Ryan had considered offering to drive for her, but decided that that would be a bad idea.

Finally, the bitch with the gun told them to turn onto yet another road-paved, but just barely-and then sent them for miles down a lot of nothing, the darkness interrupted only one time by a large house on a hill. At last, they stopped at a heavy-duty gate made of chain link.

“What now?” Mom asked.

“Just wait a second,” the kidnapper said.

Two men seemed to condense out of the black night. They wore black clothing and each carried a rifle that looked like the ones soldiers wore in battle on the news. Flanking the van on both sides, they kept the muzzles pointing to the ground as they approached the car, but their fingers stayed precariously near their triggers. The one on the left used his non-trigger hand to make a whirling motion in the air to tell Mom to roll down the window.

As she did, the nut job in the backseat leaned forward to be seen.

The man in the window smiled. “Sister Colleen,” he said. “Welcome back. I understand you did some excellent work tonight. We’re all very proud.” Turning away from the window, he pulled a flashlight from his belt and flashed it twice at the gate.

Within seconds, another black-clad man with a rifle appeared in the wash of the headlights, approaching from the far side. He removed a padlock from a heavy-duty chain and pulled the gates apart. He and the man at the window both stepped out of the way.

“Go ahead,” Colleen said, using her pistol to point through the fence opening.

As the minivan eased through, Ryan noted through the side-view mirror that their back bumper had barely cleared the fence before the guards were pulling it closed again.

Outside the wash of the headlights, the darkness that surrounded them was near absolute. This part of the roadway wove through trees, but he sensed that the area was more field than forest. In the dim starlight, he thought he could make out the outlines of buildings, but even that was hard to tell. Some distant windows emitted yellow light, but in each case, the light seemed dim.

By the clock on the dash, it took six minutes to cover the distance from the gate to the sturdy block-and-timber building where so-called Sister Colleen told them to stop. This was one of the buildings with lights on, and now that they were close enough, Ryan could tell from the flickering that they were looking at candlelight. Candlelight and a gun-wielding bitch who thought she was a nun. Oh, this was bound to get interesting.

He shot a glance at his Mom. “No electricity?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Maybe it was just that obvious.

“Turn off the lights and the car,” said Sister Colleen.

Their world went blacker still.

The front door to the house opened, spilling a parallelogram of light across the porch and onto the ground. Two shadows filled the space almost immediately. Both were maybe six feet tall and athletic looking, though Ryan categorized the one on the right as football-athletic, and the one on the left as soccer-athletic. Neither appeared older than twenty. They each carried an old-fashioned oil lamp, the kind with a hurricane globe around the wick and handle on the top-Ryan associated them with movies about old-time railroads-and pistols in holsters on their belts. As they approached, Colleen opened the sliding door, introducing a blast of frigid air.

“Everybody out,” she said. “And please don’t give us reason to hurt you.”

Ryan did as he was told, pausing to grab his coat from the floor and put it on.

“Good idea,” Colleen said. “You’ll want to have your coats with you. It can get chilly at night.”

The one who looked like a football player looked even bigger up close.

“The mission went perfectly,” Colleen announced. “This is the Nasbe family.”

Football held his lamp high and peered through its shadow for better view. He looked each of them in the eye, and smiled. He exchanged nods with the other lamp bearer. “Perfect indeed,” he said. “I am Brother Stephen. This is Brother Zebediah, and you have already met Sister Colleen. Gather closer together.” He made a gathering motion with his hands, sort of like a stiff-armed clap, but without actually clapping.

Ryan sidestepped closer to his mom’s right.

“I have always believed that honesty is the best policy,” Brother Stephen said. He continued to hold the lantern high, and as he spoke, clouds of condensed breath occasionally obscured his face. “You should know that you are prisoners, and that Brother Zebediah and Sister Colleen and I are your jailers.”

Christyne’s hand gripped Ryan’s arm.

“If you behave and do as you are told, your life will be tolerable. If you cause trouble, your life will be hellish, and perhaps unnecessarily short.” He paused for effect. “I know you have questions-you’d be foolish not to-but I won’t be answering any of them. Consider yourselves fortunate that on a night when so many others died in their cars, you are still alive. Follow me inside now.”

Christyne hesitated. Ryan saw tears on her cheeks.

That seemed to please Brother Stephen. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

“C-Christyne.”

“Do I scare you, C-Christyne?” he reproduced her stammer perfectly.

She nodded.

He gave a little smile and cocked his head. “Good,” he said. “It’s good to be scared of me. The idea of hurting a pretty lady like you actually turns me on, know what I mean?” He rubbed his crotch.

“That’s enough, Brother Stephen,” Sister Colleen snapped.

He ignored the rebuke and maintained his eye contact with Christyne. “Be very, very afraid of me.” He stood, and turned his attention to Ryan. “I’ll even let you watch.”

Ryan lunged without thinking, and Brother Stephen stopped him with a punch to the center of his chest. Just like that, his breath was driven from his lungs, and he found himself struggling to get it back.

“You a tough guy, little man?” Brother Stephen asked with a grin.

Christyne moved instantly to intervene, pulling Ryan behind her to shelter him with her body. “He didn’t mean anything,” she said. “We’re just both very tired. We’re not thinking straight.”

“Got your mommy to hide behind, eh, little man?” Brother Stephen mocked.

Ryan had never felt this way. He didn’t know what to do. Anger, humiliation, and terror together drove his heart rate to something beyond anything he ever felt on an athletic field.

“Don’t say a word, Ryan,” Mom said.

“Smartest advice you’ll ever hear,” said Brother Stephen. “You just do what she says, do what I say, and I won’t have to cripple you.”

“For crying out loud,” Sister Colleen said.

Brother Stephen leaned in closer to the boy, silently emphasizing the five inches in height and eighty pounds in weight that separated them. “But any time you want to go a round with me, you just let me know.”

Ryan struggled to find words to say, something cool that might help him resurrect some measure of honor. But he was simply too terrified to make his voice work.

“Inside now,” Brother Stephen instructed. “Both of you.”

Sister Colleen led the way. The front door opened into the middle of the house, in the center of what appeared in the dim light to be one big room constructed of hewn timbers-like a log cabin, but without the mud crap between the logs. The inside dimensions were smaller than the outside dimensions, though, leading Ryan to believe that there must be additional wings on the sides, accessible, he supposed, through doors that hid in the shadows beyond the lamp light.

An army-style cot, made up with a sleeping bag and pillows, sat along the back wall of the main room, just barely visible along the edge of the flickering light. Ryan thought he saw a sink of sorts, positioned under an old-style hand pump. The remnants of a fire glowed in the bottom of a stone fireplace, just behind and to the right of the cot.

In a flash of understanding, Ryan realized that he’d just reentered the nineteenth century. No electricity, no running water, no heat to speak of. The lack of running water, in fact, explained the vague smell of shit that hung in the air. He wondered if maybe they were in Pennsylvania Dutch country-the Amish, he remembered, from some Harrison Ford movie that his mom had made him watch-but then he remembered that the Amish were all about peace. Whatever these creeps were about, it definitely was not peace.

The center of the room was unremarkable, especially in this light, except for a dark rectangle that at first looked like a shadow cast onto the floor, but revealed itself to be an open hatch leading to a stairway to a lower level. Brother Stephen gestured to the stairs with an open hand. Brother Zebediah led the way with his lantern held high. Ryan started to follow, but Brother Stephen’s heavy hand around his biceps pulled him to a stop. “You stay back with me, little man.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” Christyne said.

“I’m okay, Mom.” Ryan refused to flinch as Brother Stephen’s fingers dug deeply into his arm muscle. He watched as his mother disappeared into the space below. Then, when it was his turn, Ryan half expected Brother Stephen to heave him down like a human bowling ball.

The stairway ended at what felt like a concrete floor covered with slime-green carpeting. A worn sofa dominated the back wall, upholstered in a fabric that resembled a moldy chocolate chip cookie. To the left of the sofa, a rectangle of mismatched brick marked the spot where Ryan figured there had once been a door.

“Keep going,” Brother Stephen barked.

“To where?” Christyne asked. There in fact seemed to be no place to go.

Brother Zebediah said, “Just follow me.”

He led the way across the room to the far wall, the one perpendicular to the back wall, where he stopped and lifted a heavy padlock on its hasp and inserted a key in the bottom. He removed the lock and pulled on the hasp to reveal a doorway that would have been all but invisible to anyone who was not looking for it. Handing his lantern to Christyne, Brother Zebediah said, “You first.”

Brother Stephen’s grip closed even tighter around Ryan’s arm. “You’re last,” he said.

As Christyne stepped across the threshold, the yellow light of her lantern revealed a squatty room with a ceiling that maybe rose six feet. From outside, Ryan could see furniture, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

“There are candles and another lamp in the room,” Brother Zebediah said. “But be judicious in their use. They’re the only ones you have. When they’re gone, the nights will get especially dark for you.”

Ryan’s stomach flipped. He’d never been a big fan of enclosed spaces.

“Don’t be scared,” Christyne said, her voice trembling a little. “It’s not so bad. There are beds and a sofa. They even have books to read.”

“Your turn,” Brother Stephen said to Ryan. He gave him a last shove as he crossed the threshold. The door slammed shut immediately. The lock slid into place with a heavy thock, and then the Nasbes were alone. It was cold in here-beyond cold, actually-and the stink of an old toilet bloomed strong in the air.

“What the hell is happening, Mom?”

“Watch your language,” Christyne said.

Ryan gave her an empty stare. “That was a reflex, right?” he said.

She smiled in spite of herself. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she confessed. She spread her arms for a hug. “At least we’re not hurt.”

Ryan allowed himself to be embraced, and decided not to tell her just how hideously he expected all of this to turn out.

In the process, he willed himself not to cry.

The hug was an attempt to soothe his fears, but Ryan broke it off as soon as he could. He snatched the lantern out of her hand and turned a slow circle to reveal the details of their new home. In total, the space appeared to be about twelve feet square, and it was crammed with furniture. Immediately to the right of the door, four sagging twin beds had been shoved into the far corner, at what Christyne figured to be the front of the house, each separated from the adjacent bed by a gap of only a couple of inches. A carpet remnant of indeterminate color covered most of the concrete floor. The beds each had two pillows and a bedspread, and appeared to be fitted with sheets underneath.

“Four beds,” Ryan said. “Do you think they’re expecting more?”

She didn’t offer an answer because she knew he really wasn’t expecting one.

The rest of the space was crammed with miscellaneous furniture. Moving around among the clutter was a challenge, but Ryan managed okay as he explored their prison.

“Why is it so cold in here?” he mused aloud, zipping up his coat. He paused. “Oh, crap,” he said. “This is disgusting.” He turned back to face her. “I found our toilet.”

Actually, it wasn’t a toilet at all. It was a chair with a hole cut in the seat and what looked to be a porcelain pot suspended underneath. “I think that’s called a chamber pot,” Christyne said. “It’s what they used in the days before indoor plumbing when you couldn’t make it to the outhouse, or just didn’t want to go outside.”

“So the poop and pee just sit there?” Ryan asked. This, apparently, was far more horrifying to him than their overall predicament.

“Somebody has to empty it,” Christyne explained.

“Nose game,” Ryan said, and he quickly touched the tip of his nose with his forefinger. In Nasbe family parlance, the last person to touch their nose in the nose game was “it” and therefore had to perform whatever task was in play.

Christyne let it go.

This time when Ryan looked at her, his expression glowed with anger. “I told you not to pick her up,” he said.

While Gail tended the pasta, Jonathan manned the bar. He made Gail’s cosmo first, pouring equal parts Grey Goose L’Orange, Cointreau, orange juice, and cranberry juice into a shaker and giving it a vigorous ride. He strained the pink concoction into her favorite martini glass and delivered it over her shoulder.

“Your sissy drink,” he said. He kissed the nape of her neck and elicited the shiver he’d hoped for.

Gail scrunched her shoulders and took the drink with both hands. “Sneak up on a girl, will you? That’s a good way to get shot.”

“I don’t scare easy, Sheriff,” he said. He walked back to the bar to make a real martini for himself: two or three glugs of Beefeater and a drizzle of vermouth, definitely shaken (not stirred) with ice, then strained into whatever martini glass happened to be closest. Two olives later, he was done.

He took a sip and became self-actualized. “God, I’m good,” he said. He rejoined Gail at the stove and lifted the lid on the marinara. “Smells great.”

She hip-nudged him. “You’re in my way. Where do you keep your bay leaves?”

“Um. In the bay?”

She sighed. “Unbelievable. How can you have a kitchen this grand and not have bay leaves? How do you make marinara when I’m not here?”

“I pretty much open a jar and call it spaghetti sauce.”

Jonathan’s home, one block up from the water, started life as a firehouse. He’d bought it a few years ago after the town decided to relocate the fire trucks to newer digs out on the highway. Now he lived on the first two floors, and his company, Security Solutions, was on the third floor, accessible by a separate entrance. Thanks to money passed on to him from his father, who would never again see the outside of a supermax prison, Jonathan could afford the best of everything, from firepower to cooktops. He was even a pretty decent cook. Still, why work to improve a product that was damn near perfect out of the jar?

But this was Gail’s treat to him, and he took his role as sous-chef seriously. He even hand-shredded the salad and hand-opened the bottle of Italian dressing. He also lit candles and dimmed the lights in the dining room where they gathered at one end of the table, close enough that their knees touched. Cocktails finished, he opened a favorite Lodali Barbera D’Alba.

Jonathan and Gail’s relationship was a complicated one. That’s what happens when your first encounter includes a gunfight. She worked for him now as one of his best investigators. Once a member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, she could thread a needle at fifty yards with just about any firearm, and if she was afraid of anything, he hadn’t yet seen her confronted by it. That was the good part.

Unfortunately, her law degree had somehow melded the Constitution to her DNA, reducing her color spectrum for right and wrong to only black and white: either something was legal or it wasn’t. By contrast, Jonathan’s color palette for justice was kaleidoscopic. If the ends were justified, the means for achieving them were limited only to the breadth of his imagination and the laws of physics of chemistry. It never occurred to him to question whether a strategy for rescuing a good guy from a batch of bad guys might violate a law or two.

It was a rift that occasionally grew to a chasm.

To give their relationship a chance to flourish, they’d banned work discussions during their off-hours together, adding strategy and tactics to religion and politics on the list of topics that were forbidden in polite company. It made sense in theory, but in practice, their brokered peace occasionally left them with long moments of silence. Tonight was an example.

“So, how terrible was it?” Gail finally asked. “On the bridge, I mean.”

Jonathan arched his eyebrows. “I was too caught up in the moment to notice details. A lot of shots fired, a lot of people killed.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt.”

The gin was just beginning to find his bloodstream. He felt a little flushed as he tasted the wine. “I kept my head down,” he said. “The shooter’s the one who should be counting her blessings. She owes that fed a thank-you card.”

“As you owe Wolverine,” Gail said. “In fact, you owe her a mention in your will.”

Jonathan chuckled. The director of the FBI-Wolverine to Jonathan, thanks to some work he’d done for a Bureau a number of years ago-had covered his tracks on more than a few occasions. “I’m doing better than that,” he said. “I’m buying her breakfast tomorrow.”

Gail took a sip of her wine. “This is good. Are you going to tell her everything?”

“Lodali’s a small vineyard in Tuscany. Everything they touch is great.” Saying the words inspired him to take another taste. “I don’t see a reason to hold back. There’s nothing covert about my presence.”

“In a perfect world, it would be nice not to have your name tied to a terrorist attack.”

Jonathan recoiled. “Is that nervousness I hear?”

“Of course it is. You tried to kill somebody who’d killed Lord knows how many people. I don’t think Fisherman’s Cove needs terrorists flooding in to settle the score.”

He dismissed the point with a wave-not because it wasn’t valid, but because there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Wolverine’s always been able to keep me out of the news. No reason to think she’s lost her touch.”

They fell quiet again.

“You know what sort of baffles me about this evening?” Jonathan said to break the silence. “During the time that I was in custody, no one ever once asked me what I had seen out there on the bridge. They were so intent on me being the shooter that it apparently never occurred to them that I might have important details.”

“Do you?” Gail asked.

“Probably not. But you’d think they would have asked.”

“Would you have answered?”

Jonathan started to answer, then laughed. “Probably not. I was kinda pissed.” Another silence as they finished their pasta.

As he refilled the wineglasses, he looked around. “Where’s JoeDog?” Normally, the energetic black lab was making her presence well known at this point in a meal.

“I saw her heading off to Kramer’s earlier in the day,” Gail said. “Must be his turn.”

Officially, JoeDog was a stray. She’d appeared at Jonathan’s door a few years ago, and while he was her nominal master, she wandered the town on her own, blessed with special dispensation from the leash laws. When she tired of the lazy life of the firehouse, she wandered to the police chief’s house-Doug Kramer’s house-to mooch off him for a while.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Jonathan said, rising from his chair and holding out his hand for Gail to join him.

She stood and waited to be enlightened.

Jonathan pulled her close and laced his fingers at the small of her back. “It means that we have the bed all to ourselves tonight.”