Courtney narrowed her eyes and used the gun to gesture at me. “Tie her hands next, I want to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.” A pause. “And get it good and tight. She’s smart and I don’t trust her.”
I felt myself twirled around and did what I could to flex my hands, to make them bulgy and muscle-y, but I was pretty sure my efforts didn’t make any difference.
“Oh, hey, look at this,” Luke said as I felt my cell phone sliding out of my shorts pocket. “Forgot to look in their pockets.” He tossed the expensive rectangle on the ground and, with one heel, smashed it to tiny bits. “Check the kid.”
Courtney eyed Kate’s pockets. “She doesn’t have room in there for half a sheet of Kleenex.”
I didn’t know where Kate’s phone was, but having them look for it wouldn’t be good. “She doesn’t have one,” I said. “I took it away from her last week when she didn’t make curfew.”
Courtney snorted. “Curfew? I moved out of my mom’s house because she made me come home by midnight.”
“Now what?” Luke asked. “Tie them to a tree?”
“We’re going to use the shed,” Courtney said.
“But you said—”
“Yeah, I know what I said. We can take care of that, though. I’ll show you.”
The two of them walked over to the shed. Kate looked at me with wide eyes and a white face. “Aunt Minnie—”
“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. She’s not the only one with ideas.” This was true. I had lots of ideas. None of them useful at this particular point in time, but Kate didn’t need to know that.
“Let’s go.” Courtney returned and prodded me in the back. “Into the shed.”
“You realize,” I said conversationally, “that I’m friends with the entire sheriff’s department, including the sheriff. They won’t stop looking until they find me.”
“Much good it’ll do them.” Luke laughed.
“Shh,” Courtney hissed. “Don’t engage, okay? Inside,” she said, and gave me a shove.
I stumbled forward, losing my balance in the process and tumbling toward the dirt floor. As I fell, I managed to rotate and hit the ground hip-first. This was surprisingly painful and I oofed a grunt of pain as I landed.
“Aunt Minnie, are you okay?” Kate awkwardly knelt next to me.
Luke kicked my legs to the side. “Shut up and lie down. No, you here and you here. Oh, for crying out loud . . .”
He dragged me to one side. Dragged Kate’s feet around. Rolled me over. Rolled Kate around.
The entire thing was an exercise in frustration and humiliation, and I could tell that my face was aflame with fury. At the end of it, Kate and I wound up tied together with more twine, my nose touching her knees and her nose up against my ankles.
“Done,” Courtney said, dusting her hands again, a mannerism I was finding very annoying. “This has taken way too long. We’re going to be late.”
Luke stepped over the top of the Minnie-Kate assemblage and, from the sounds of it, started grabbing pill bottles. “They’ve reopened that county highway already, so we don’t have to take the detour. We’ll be fine.”
Bottles went into whispery plastic bags. They crossed the shed and slammed the door, causing motes of dust to drift down through the small slats of sunlight. We heard the click of the padlock, and just before their footsteps faded away, we heard Luke ask, “When do you think we should come back to finish the job?”
“Good question,” Courtney said. “How about later on today?”
“Let’s do it after dark.”
“Ooo, romantic.” She laughed. “I like the way you think.”
And then they were gone.
Chapter 21
They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” Kate asked.
I tried to moisten my dry lips. Didn’t accomplish the goal. “They want to. But it’s not going to happen.”
“No?”
The hope in her voice made me want to weep and comfort her at the same time.
She sighed. “Really? And how, exactly, are you going to keep that from happening?”
I found myself, of all things, smiling. This was the obstreperous Kate I knew and loved. “First, let’s work on your use of pronouns.”
“What are you talking about?”
She sounded annoyed. On a normal day, I would have become annoyed in return, which would have been obvious, and her annoyance would have increased, and the escalation would have gone on until one of us (Kate) stomped away in a sulk. Today, however, things were different. The fact that she had the gumption to be alert and critical when a pair of stone-cold killers were intent on ending our lives was a sure indication she’d have the courage to take action when needed.
“I’m saying the two of us need to come up with a plan.”
“Me? What makes you think I can do anything?”
Well, almost sure.
I opened my mouth to give her words of wisdom, a message that would give her confidence, a nugget of gold to help her get through the next hours, but she wasn’t done talking.
“You didn’t want me to say anything to that Luke. You didn’t want me to run. You didn’t want me to do a thing back then when our hands were untied and we were standing up, but here we are stuck and about to get shot to death, and now is when you want to do something? Now?”
And back to being sure. “Kate, my dear sweet niece. I wanted you to keep quiet and not do anything because right then it wasn’t going to help.”
“I could have—”
“No,” I interrupted, “you couldn’t. Neither one of us could have.”
“But they say getting away from kidnappers before you’re moved to another location is important. That running away is your best defense. If you’d run in the opposite direction I did, we would have split them up and I bet one of us would have gotten away, called nine-one-one, and by this time Those Two”—she made the phrase a capitalized one—“would have been in handcuffs. Why didn’t you run?”
Because that would have meant leaving her behind, and there was no way I would have done that. “You’re missing one pertinent point,” I said. “Luke was holding a gun. I doubt either one of us is fast enough to outrun a bullet.”
“It’s not like on TV,” she argued. “Unless he was an awesome shot, which kind of seems unlikely, he wouldn’t have been able to hit us once we got running.”
“Unlikely, yes. Because . . .” I stopped, not wanting to say the words out loud.
“Because what?”
I shut my eyes briefly, saw how the situation could have spun out, then shook my head against the images and opened my eyes. Looking at packed earth was far more soothing than what I’d just pictured. “Because,” I said, “Luke Cagan is a man, and a fit young one at that.” Kate started to say something, but I talked over the top of her.
“Those TV shows and movies with heroines kicking butt and taking the names of men half again their size are fantasy,” I said. “The only real exception is a highly trained female against an out-of-shape couch potato. Men are bigger and stronger and faster and no indignant proclamations of equality are going to change that.”
“So what are you suggesting? That we lie here like sitting ducks and wait to be murdered?”
I rolled my eyes. “What, you think direct attacks and quiet acceptance are the only two choices?”
“At least I tried something,” she said sulkily. “I don’t hear you coming up with any ideas. All those college degrees and you’re lying here next to a kid who doesn’t even have a high school diploma. Guess you’re not really any smarter than I am, are you?”
Oh, for crying out loud. “What makes you think—” I forced myself to stop. This was not the time to deal with Kate’s misinterpretation of everything I’d ever said to her.
“We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “What we need to do now is untie ourselves.”