Powering up the system, she selected a Nina Simone LP, removed it from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and activated the tone arm.
The chicken-and-egg battle over what would come first, the bathrobe or the wine, was over before it started. Wine first. Ryan walked into her kitchen and took down a bottle of OneHope petite syrah.
As Nina Simone began singing “Blue Prelude,” she opened the drawer where she kept her favorite souvenir from France, a waiter’s-style Laguiole snakewood-handled corkscrew. Its box was there, but the corkscrew was missing.
She opened the other drawers in the kitchen thinking maybe, after a few too many glasses of wine last time, she might have put it back in the wrong place. That wasn’t like her, though. She always put it back where it belonged, but having been out of town for so long, it was hard to remember what she had done last time.
After a cursory glance through all the drawers, she gave up, and grabbed a Leatherman multi-tool from her bug-out bag.
Once the wine was opened, she fished out some cheese and crackers, and then carried everything to the coffee table. After pouring a large glass of wine, she took it with her as she went to get changed.
She came back with Nelson DeMille’s latest thriller, turned off her cell phone, and made herself comfortable on the couch.
Two glasses and nine chapters later, her eyelids started getting heavy. She laid the book on the table and intended to close her eyes for just a second, but before the final notes of “Solitaire” had been played she was asleep.
• • •
Bang, bang, bang! It sounded like gunshots; close gunshots. The earsplitting cracks nearly caused her to leap off the couch. What the hell was going on?
Ryan tried to shake the cobwebs from her head as the banging came again. Someone was pounding on the door. “I’m coming,” she said loudly, hoping to quiet down whoever was outside before they woke her entire complex. Who the hell could this be?
Tightening the belt of her robe, she approached the door and looked out the peephole. A young blond girl in her early twenties stood glassy-eyed and swaying. She raised her fist to pound again, but Ryan unlocked the door and pulled it open before she could make contact.
“I don’t know who you’re looking for,” Ryan stated, “but you’ve got the wrong apartment.”
The girl stood dazed for a moment, as if unsure what to say, but then collected herself and asked, “Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?”
“Oh crap. What happened?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” the girl said, quickly adding, “And it wasn’t my boyfriend’s fault. Someone cut us off.”
“Cut you off? What are you talking about? Better yet, who the hell are you and what happened to my car?”
“I’m Chrissie,” she replied with an inebriated smile and a look of misplaced expectation as if the mere mention of her name should be cause for fireworks or a parade. “I live in the building next door.”
She extended her hand, but Ryan ignored it. Clutching the lapels of her robe, she looked out into the hall and then said to Chrissie, “What happened to my car?”
“Like I said. It wasn’t our fault.”
“I got that part, Chrissie. Did you and your boyfriend hit my car? Is it damaged?”
Chrissie tried to raise her thumb and forefinger to indicate that there might be a little damage, but suddenly had trouble raising her arm while keeping her balance. The woman was smashed, and so too, Ryan worried, was her car.
She grabbed her keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter, slipped on a pair of flip-flops kept near the door, and said, “Why don’t you and I go take a look.”
“Sure,” slurred Chrissie as if she had just been invited shopping. “Do you want me to show you where it is?”
“No,” replied Ryan. “I think I can remember where I parked my car.”
As they started toward the stairs, Chrissie said, “Remember, you promised you wouldn’t be mad.”
She had promised no such thing, but there was no reason to argue. The girl was so wasted it probably wouldn’t even get through.
They walked down to the parking lot and over to Ryan’s Nissan. The right rear quarter panel was crushed. Idling perpendicular was a piece-of-shit white panel van with a dinged up push-bumper that must have belonged to Chrissie’s boyfriend. Ryan needed this kind of trouble like she needed a hole in the head.
As she walked over to inspect the damage, the boyfriend got out of the van. “Is that your car?” he asked. He sounded a lot more sober than his girlfriend. Ryan should have taken that as a warning, but her concern over what had happened to her car, coupled with her anger over the repeated problems with so many of the young residents in the complex, caused her to let her guard down.
His headlights perfectly illuminated the damage. This was going to cost at least a thousand dollars to repair, and judging by the looks of these two, they didn’t even have a hundred dollars between them. They probably didn’t have insurance, either. Ryan was growing angrier by the second.
“How did this happen?” she asked, vaguely aware of the young man’s approach on her left side as she bent down to examine the damage. “Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost to fix this? I want to see your license and insurance card right now.”
The man’s right hand was in his jacket pocket and it didn’t come out until he had reached Ryan’s car and he was close enough to touch her.
It wasn’t until that moment that she processed the unmistakable shape of the Taser in his hand. The cartridge had been removed, which meant he didn’t want to leave a shower of micro-stamped aphids behind as evidence. It also meant he wasn’t afraid to get up close, press the device against her, and deliver its jolt of electricity via a technique known as a “stun drive.”
Either this guy was really good when it came to hand-to-hand, or he had no idea whom he was dealing with. Ryan didn’t wait to find out.
Pivoting on the ball of her left foot, she bladed herself to her attacker and snapped her left arm out in a wide arc. She crashed her forearm into the man’s wrist, knocking the Taser from his hand. She followed with a blow to his sternum, which knocked him backward two steps.
Before he could regain his balance, she charged, throwing a rapid combination of punches and elbows. It was happening so fast that all the man could do was cover up as Ryan rained down the pain.
The jabs, the crosses, all of it had been drilled into her through years of training. All of it came naturally. There was only one thing she neglected to do—sweep the area around her with her eyes.
Had she done that, she might have seen Chrissie coming up from behind. She might have been able to whip her head back and catch Chrissie on the bridge of her nose. Maybe she could have knocked her unconscious. Maybe she could have connected hard enough to render her temporarily dazed. At the very least, she might have been able to buy herself a couple of extra seconds to prevent Chrissie from getting close enough to her, placing another Taser against the side of her neck, and activating the trigger.
CHAPTER 23
Before the effects of the Taser had worn off, Ryan was tossed inside the back of the van, where her hands, feet, and mouth were duct-taped and a black hood was yanked down over her head. As soon as the vehicle started moving, she had her wits about her enough to try to interpret their speed and direction. Every piece of information was vital. Even the smallest data point could mean the difference between life and death.
How could she have been so stupid? She wanted to blame the wine or her jet lag, but she knew that she was ultimately responsible for her predicament right now. She should have never let her guard down.
The only silver lining she could find was that she wasn’t dead, yet. If they had wanted to kill her, they could have put a gun to the base of her skull and pulled the trigger rather than using a Taser on her. But while she saw breathing as a silver lining, she knew that at some point tonight she could end up wishing they had killed her in the parking lot.