Probably he wouldn't have to use the gun tonight. There were other ways of handling this situation. Above all, he had to be smart. He knew he wasn't the sharpest tack on the bulletin board. He'd never been a straight-A student, or even straight-B. He'd barely made it through community college, and he knew he wouldn't ever rise higher in the ranks.
But he'd learned a thing or two about self-preservation. Survivalthat was what it was all about. On the streets you learned about survival, or you didn't last long.
During his wait outside Parker Center, he had decided something. Whatever happened, he was going to survive this mess. He would do whatever was necessary. He was not going down.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Meg wished she smoked.
If she did, maybe she'd have a lighter, some way to penetrate the total blackness around her. She should have taken up smoking and stayed away from Gabe. She'd made a poor choice of vices. Of course, she hadn't thought of Gabe as a vice. She'd thought of him as the love of her life, who would never betray her. Now it was as if she'd awakened from a dreama stupid, irrational dream.
When he'd called her an immature kid, he'd been right. Only an immature kid could have made the mistakes she'd made.
People always said you learned from your mistakes. But you couldn't learn much if your mistakes got you killed.
She had to stop thinking that way, stay positive.
Positive. Right. She was handcuffed to a metal railing in a lightless basement, waiting for a man she'd thought she loved to come back and murder her.
Okay, he hadn't specifically said he was going to murder her. But it seemed like a really safe bet.
Though she might not know his real name, she knew him. She knew his face. His amp; body. She knew he had been at the awards dinner for Robin. She knew he was a cop. She knew too much.
Yesterday she'd wondered what it had been like for Justin Gray's victims, waiting in the back of his van, knowing they would die but not knowing when. Well, now she knew.
Uselessly she rattled the handcuffs against the railing. Around her, in the dark, she heard rustling sounds. Small creatures, disturbed by the noise.
"Bunny rabbits," she whispered, forcing a smile.
She guessed there was some kind of justice to the way things had worked out. She'd broken every ethical rule her mom had drummed into her. She'd lied and gone sneaking around and had sex with a guy who was more than twice her age. And she'd thought she was so damn smart, so grown up, and that her mom, for all her brains and education, just didn't get it because she was too old to understand true love.
But it turned out that what Gabe felt for her wasn't love at all, but some kind of pathological sickness, which her mom would have understood completely because she worked with crazies every day. She would have pegged Gabe as a psycho right from the start. She would have seen the insanity in him, which Meg had entirely missed.
"So she's smart and I'm dumb," Meg whispered. "She's right and I'm wrong. Great. How does that help me get out of here?"
It didn't, of course. Nothing would. She was trapped, and she couldn't get free, and her life was over at the age of fifteen_
Footsteps.
Upstairs.
He was back.
A wave of trembling shot through her like ice water. She tugged at the handcuffs, rattling the short chain again, chafing her wrist. A noise halfway between a moan and a wail started rising in her throat. She bit it back and waited.
The footsteps came closer.
She didn't want to think about what would come next, but she couldn't stop herself. Images ran through her head like movie clips. How many dramatized murders had she witnessed in the course of her life? A thousand? Ten thousand? It seemed as if every one of them was replaying itself in her memoryevery shooting and stabbing, every death by fire or water or torture, every gangland hit and serial-killer slaying, all the ways there were to die. Which would be her way?
The footsteps stopped outside the cellar door.
Looking up, she saw a dim seam of light limning the door frame.
A flashlight. It must be dark outside by now. He needed a flashlight to find his way.
The flood of images coursed faster. She saw herself strangled, smothered, beaten to death. She flinched from blows that hadn't yet come. She was crying again, new tears joining the tracks of dried salt on her cheeks.
The door opened. The flashlight's glow was blinding after her long darkness. She had to look away.
"Megan?" A man's voice. Not Gabe's. This was someone else.
She was too startled to speak. The beam of the flashlight skittered around the room, illuminating the corners she'd never seen, the cinder-block walls and concrete floor, the stale rodent droppings and skeletons of mice and elaborate cobwebs and dust, before finding her at the bottom of the stairs.
"It's okay, Meg." A gentle voice. "Everything's okay. I'm a police officer."
She lifted her head into the glare. "Police?" she whispered.
He set the flashlight on the landing, its beam dimly lighting the room. He came down the stairs, a big man in a business suit, moving slowly, as if wary of scaring her. "That's right. I'm Detective Tomlinson."
"Detective Tomlinson?" She was repeating the man's words like an idiot.
"Right." He was nearly at the bottom of the staircase. "LAPD. Robbery-Homicide."
"How'd you find me?"
"Someone reported a suspicious car in the alley behind this factory. The vehicle matched one seen leaving your neighborhood at the time of your abduction. I checked it out."
"Alone?"
"We're a little shorthanded at the moment. There are a lot of people looking for youand for Gray."
"Gray?"
"Justin Gray. The serial killer."
"He escaped?"
Tomlinson had reached her now. The glow of the flashlight on the landing outlined one side of his face as he smiled down from his greater height. "This afternoon."
That explained her mom's phone call, but it only made everything else more bewildering. Was it coincidence that Gabe had kidnapped her so soon after Justin Gray's escape? If it wasn't coincidence, then what was going on?
"None of this makes sense," she whispered.
"Don't try to sort it all out. You've been through a lot." He reached into the side pocket of his jacket. "Let me get those cuffs off, and we'll be out of here."
He produced something from his pocket. A key. It must be a handcuff key. In the feeble light of the flash on the landing, she couldn't be sure.
He reached for her. "I'll have that cuff unlocked in no time."
Under any other circumstances she would have let him do it. But one thought stopped her.
Gabe was a cop too.
She took a step back. "Let me see it."
"What?"
"The handcuff key."
He frowned, bewildered by her suspicion. "Sure, Meg. It's right here."
He raised his hand slowlythen in a sudden motion thrust it forward, aiming at the bare skin of her right arm. She jerked away from him, and he missed her, his fist brushing her skin. She retreated as far as the handcuff chain would allow.
She had seen the thing in his hand. Not a key.
A syringe.
"Gabe sent you"her voice was thick and raw"didn't he?"
Tomlinson dropped the act. All at once he was a different man, his gentleness gone. "Gabe?" He chuckled. "Is that what he's calling himself?"
"What's his real name? Who is he?"
He ignored the question.
"That son of a bitch," he said, "is going to get himself in trouble one of these days, tomcatting around. Then again"his gaze moved over her"for a sweet piece of ass like you, a man might be willing to risk some consequences."