He was not dying as the result of a human’s bullet.
THREE
I-87, A.K.A. THE NORTHWAY
Oh, that new-car smell.
A combination of too-fresh carpeting, still-viscous hinge oil, and glue that was only surface dry.
Sola Morte loved a fresh start in the automotive department, which was why she always leased her Audi A4s. Every three years she got a new one—sometimes more often if there was a program that let her jump ship a month or two early.
So, yeah, this was familiar territory … except for the fact that she was getting a whiff of heaven from the trunk of whatever sedan she had been shut into.
Not the way she’d planned on ending her night, but sometimes free will was out on break when you needed it.
The question now was, how to survive the kidnapping and get back home.
Given her line of work as a burglar, she was used to improvising in dangerous situations. She wasn’t exactly MacGyver-capable; it wasn’t like she could build a nine-millimeter autoloader out of duct tape, a tube of toothpaste, twelve cents, and a Bic lighter. But she was smart enough to feel around, looking for a tire iron, a tool kit … a forgotten soda can. Anything she could use as a weapon.
When she’d been abducted from her house, she’d had nothing but the parka on her back and a desperate hope that whoever it was got her out before her grandmother made it down the stairs and was dragged into all this. The latter happened. The former? Bad news, because she didn’t even have a cell phone.
And so far, her palm expeditions around the trunk had yielded a big fat nada.
She also had no clue where she was being taken. Going by the purr from the undercarriage and the lack of potholes? They must be on the highway—and had been for a while.
Man, her head hurt.
What the hell had they hit it with? A hammer?
Straining her spine upward, she patted under the small of her back, thinking she might be lying on the compartment that held the spare tire—and tools. She didn’t feel any seams in the carpeting, though. Maybe you had to lift the whole thing up? Shit.
Reaching over her head, she rechecked the side walls, feeling the soft scratch of the carpeting and the undulation of the wheel wells … then the netting that might have held groceries in place … a folded sheet of paper that could have been a map, a receipt for some kind of purchase, a “Top Ten Ways to Torture a Captive” list …
Drawing her knees into her chest, she turned herself around in the tight space, shoving with her hands and her feet, cramping her head into an angle it really didn’t appreciate.
“Jeeeesus…” she groaned as she paused to catch her breath. “Cirque du Soleil is so out for a second career.”
Resuming the stretching and twisting, she finally got her prize—the ability to check out the opposite—
“Well, hello…”
Digging her fingertips into a break in the carpeting, she followed the square cutout until she found latches on either end. Disengaging a compartment cover, she popped the panel free and found …
Toolbox? First aid?
A lottery win manifesting itself in a fully loaded Smith & Wesson?
As she navigated by touch alone, trying to decipher the shape and feel of what was inside, she was reminded of how much she appreciated her vision.
“Gotcha,” she hissed, digging her nails into the box and fighting with the hold to get the thing free.
When it popped out, she realized there was a handle on the lid. Dumb-ass.
Its latch was simple to pop free, and inside …
The cylinder was about eight inches long and an inch and a half wide. On one end there was a cap with a rough patch on its top, and inside? Party time.
This flare was her only shot.
Tightening her hand on the thing, she refocused on trying to figure out where she was going to end up—other than a morgue, of course. The problem was, she had no idea how long they’d been en route—but if they were taking her to Benloise’s house? Then they had to be closing in on their destination. West Point wasn’t that far from Caldie.
And this was Benloise’s doing.
Payback by the narcotics wholesaler for her little home invasion and redecorating gig. Which in turn had been her way of telling him to F-off over a payment issue.
That had involved Assail.
Closing her eyes—even though she couldn’t see a damn thing—she imagined that man, everything from his glossy black hair to his deep-set eyes to that body that should have belonged to an athlete … as opposed to a drug dealer who was probably going to take over the entire eastern seaboard as his territory.
For a split second of insanity, she entertained a fantasy that he would come after her and help get her out of this mess. And yup, that was awkward on so many levels—one, she had never relied on anyone before, and two, the whole save-me-big-man bullcrap was enough to make her want to hurl on principle.
But her pride was taking a backseat on this one: She knew waaaay too much about Benloise. It was going to take a miracle to get her free, and Assail was the closest thing to one of those she’d met. Too bad he wasn’t going to miss her anytime soon. They knew each other only because she’d been paid—partially—by Benloise to spy on him. Assail hadn’t appreciated that and had turned the tables on her.
Which had led to … other things.
Shaking her head until the pain made things spin, she reminisced on all that had been so important before she’d gotten ambushed in her own kitchen: the cat and mouse between the pair of them, the seductive threat he threw off, the erotic charge she got just by being in his presence.
All of that had been so fucking important.
The current roll of the dice had wiped that slate clean, however. Now she was in survival mode—and if that didn’t pan out, she just hoped her grandmother had something left to bury.
Because she wasn’t fooling herself. Benloise wasn’t going to cut her any slack just because she had been, for a time, almost like a daughter to him in some ways. She shouldn’t have pushed him. Temper, temper, temper; her anger had been her undoing.
God, her grandmother.
Tears threatened, stinging her eyes, making her crack her lids and blink to keep them from falling.
Too much loss in her vovó’s life. Too many hard things. And this was probably going to be the worst of it all.
Unless Sola got herself out.
As feelings too big and complicated to hold in threatened to short out her brain, she struggled to contain them … and the eventual solution for that was a surprise. She went with the impulse, however—in the same way she intended to use what she had found in the trunk wall.
Putting her only weapon down by her hip, she clasped her hands over her heart and bowed her head in prayer, chin to chest.
Opening her mouth, she waited for the rote passages of her Catholic childhood to resurface in her brain and tell her tongue what to do.
And they did. “Hail Mary, full of grace…”
The words formed a cadence, a beat like that of her heart, the rhythm uniting her with a whole host of Sundays in her distant past.
When she was finished, she waited for some relief or strength or … whatever you were supposed to get from this age-old ritual.
Nope. “Damn it.”
Words—it was all just words.
Frustration made her kick her head back, slamming it into the compartment—in just the wrong place. “Fuck!”
Time to get real, she told herself as she tried to reach around and rub the sore spot.
Bottom line? No one was coming to save her. As usual, she had only herself to fall back on, and if that wasn’t enough to get her out of this? Then she was going to die in a truly horrible way—and her grandmother was going to suffer. Again.
Talk about your prayers? Sola would have given anything just to go back and rewind the evening, hitting pause at that moment when she had come home and missed the strange sedan parked across the street. In her perfect, redo world, she would have gotten her gun out and put a silencer on it before setting a foot past the front door. She would have killed them both, and then gone upstairs and told her grandmother she was going to move the furniture around just as her vovó had asked the week before.