Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
To Do:
- Survive
It was pitch black in the trunk, and Claire’s hands were still bound behind her back. Country music wailed from the front seat. She rolled her eyes. There was no way Conway Twitty was going to be the background music of her untimely death.
Oh, a left turn. So far that made two rights and a left. The drive was smoother now. They had to be on a highway. She was running out of time. There was no knowing what was at the end of this road. ESA made people disappear. Would she be tortured? Raped? No one knew where she was. No one even knew to look for her. If she somehow managed to survive, Luke would undoubtedly kill her.
Okay, this was Los Angeles. There were cars and people everywhere. All she needed was to kick the taillights out and wave at the cars behind them. Abduction 101. The drivers call the police, creepy dude gets pulled over, boom. Home in time for dinner. She could do this.
But there was a snag in her plan. Her hands were bound tightly behind her back. How was she supposed to yank up the corner of the carpet covering the taillights with no hands? She rolled onto her side and braced herself. The plastic bit into her wrists as she strained against the zip tie. It didn’t budge. She tried again, harder this time, but didn’t gain a centimeter. She was trapped.
She went limp even as her breath went ragged, coming in hitches.
Death had been in the back of her mind since the Barney incident. Prior to her first abduction, she had assumed that, like most people, she would live a long and plentiful life and die of old age surrounded by a crowd of loving grandchildren. If she died young, surely it would have been from doing something heroic, like saving dogs from a burning building or jumping in front of a bullet. She had never imagined that death would almost come in a dimly lit parking garage at the hands of a knife-wielding serial killer. Nothing could have prepared for her to face death again less than a year later.
Was this the end? Claire Hartley, dead at twenty-seven. Murdered by misogynists. She would never get married. Rosie and Winston would be orphans. She would never meet Nicole’s baby. She would never again hug Luke so tight that he almost threw up.
Against her will, a tear slid down her cheek.
“No.” She bit down hard on her bottom lip. She would not give this idiot the satisfaction of making her cry. “Focus, Claire,” she scolded herself. Dr. Goulding’s instructions came back to her. “Count to ten.”
She counted, breathing deeply to slow her rapid heartbeat. She should have just agreed to take the stupid anxiety medication. Now was not the time for a panic attack. Slowly, painfully, the trembling subsided. Her heart eased to a slightly more normal pace, and the all-encompassing feeling of doom inched away.
She was not helpless. If she could bring her hands to her front, she would have options—punch out the taillight, break into the back seat, punch this asshole in his stupid, greasy face. She had done more complicated poses in yoga class.
The car hit a bump, and her head smacked off the carpet. At least when Barney had kidnapped her, she had been unconscious for her trunk ride. The smell of stale fast food wafted in from the back seat. Her stomach clenched.
She planted her feet and thrust her hips toward the lid of the trunk. Shit. This was never going to work. There wasn’t enough room to maneuver.
The panic crept back in. Think, Claire. Think. There was always a solution. She wiggled and scooched until her elbow banged something metallic. She reached one hand out and felt the curved, metallic tip of a shovel. A dozen feelings hit her at the same time. Surely she could use this shovel to escape her bonds. But a shovel meant her captor meant to do some digging—probably six feet of digging, if she had to guess.
Her captor was now singing along, painfully out of tune. This idiot was not going to take her life. She flipped over and backed up until her bound hands reached the tip of the shovel. Plastic sawed against metal as she worked her wrists back and forth over and over again. Her arms burned. Her face ground against the scratchy carpet.
There was a light snap, and her wrists sprung apart. They smarted like they had been burned. Claire flipped and wriggled toward the tail light. Her head brushed against something—a latch! Of course. Most trunks these days had a latch to open the back seat. Her fingers curled into a tight fist, and she pulled. The smallest click was barely audible over the country music droning from the driver’s seat. The seat nearest her collapsed. The music grew louder, but her captor didn’t notice over the drone of the radio.
Now what? Did she hit him with the shovel and try to incapacitate him? If he lost control of the car, she could hurt someone else. A tractor trailer rolled by the left window. The car bumped smoothly down the road. They were definitely on a highway. She stuck her head an inch into the back seat.
Aha! Flopped unceremoniously next to a greasy bag of Burger King was her purse. The tip of her mint-colored cell phone case stood out. She snatched the phone and retreated back into the trunk, pulling the back seat half closed behind her.
Her hands shook as she dialed 911.
“911, what is your emergency?” a calm female voice asked.
“I was abducted from Twilight Ranch approximately twenty minutes ago and placed in the trunk of a car. We were going south when we left the ranch, but now I’m not sure which direction we’re going,” Claire whispered into the phone.
“Okay, ma’am. Do you know your abductor?”
“Not him specifically, but it’s kind of a complicated situation. I put away a serial killer in Pennsylvania and I’m here on business and some of his friends are mad at me and?—”
“Okay, okay. We are working on tracking your location now. Is the car moving?”
“Yes.”
“Can you safely exit the vehicle?” The operator’s voice was careful now, more measured.
Claire glanced out the window. Telephone poles flashed by. “Not at this speed.”
“Ma’am, we have your location. I am dispatching officers to you right away. Does he know you have your phone?”
Claire peeped through the hole into the back seat. Her attacker was slapping his hand on the steering wheel in time to the music. “No.”
“Just hang tight, honey. Officers should be there in just a few minutes. Now I want you to stay on the line with me and tell me if anything changes. What’s your name?”
As Claire rattled off her name and Luke’s home address, her mind spiraled. Would he stop for officers? Would he simply kill her before they could pull him over? Would he hurt the cops too? If he was anything like Barney, he was capable of unimaginable horrors.
A click came from the front seat, and the rhythmic ticking of a turn signal sounded. Shit . They were turning off the highway. That must mean they were approaching whatever horrible, twisted place they were headed to.
“We’re turning,” Claire hissed into the phone. “I have to do something.”
“Ma’am, I must advise you to stay calm and do nothing unless you are in imminent danger. The police will be arriving soon.”
Imminent danger? Did being zip-tied and tossed in a trunk not count as imminent danger? Bullshit. The last time Claire had involved the police, a team of frat boys had nearly murdered her archnemesis. There wasn’t any time to waste. She snaked one arm into the backseat and shoved her hand into her purse. Her fingers closed around the cool metal of a can of mace.
The car shifted. Her head popped up. Bridge struts flashed past the window. She raised her head just high enough to get a visual. They were in the exit lane—and who knew what lay beyond. Armed with the mace in one hand, she slithered into the back seat.
“Ma’am?” The operator called faintly from her phone. Claire tossed the phone into her purse. She leaned forward. For an abductor, this man was incredibly unobservant.
“Are we there yet?” She whispered in his ear before unloading the entire can of mace.
Shit. That was a mistake. The cloud of pepper spray engulfed her, burning her eyes and lungs.
Her captor swore and jerked the wheel. The car smashed into something and tilted into the air like the Titanic before it sank. Suddenly, there was a feeling of weightlessness. The nose of the car tipped down. Through her streaming eyes, a graffitied support structure was barely visible sticking out of some water. Was that a cartoon penis? Seriously, universe?
Oh, god. They were going to crash. Would the water be deep enough for her to survive? She would still die, but at least not at the hands of a bunch of sociopath frat boys. Luke was going to be so angry.
Splash . The car hit the river with ten times the force of the log flume rides Claire had loved in her youth. Untethered, she slammed into the back of the front seat, still coughing and sputtering from the cloud of pepper spray.
“Oh my god, I’m going to die.” Her idiot captor cried in exaggerated, short gasps, like someone being chainsawed in a horror movie. He fought with his seatbelt, eyes streaming and red. He coughed violently as he pulled on the door handle. Good.
The car bobbled in the river. Water poured in from the door cracks and hood. They were sinking. Great.
Okay, what were the rules of escaping a sinking car? She had definitely watched a MythBusters episode on this. She closed her eyes, gasping through the burn of the pepper in her lungs.
“Wait until the car sinks, then open the door,” she whispered to herself. Could that really be right? Something about equalizing pressure. If she was wrong, she was going to drown in the Los Angeles river. It wasn’t even a real river, with lush banks full of wildflowers and ducks. Solid slabs of concrete funneled the river downstream.
The water line was halfway up the windows now. The shoreline shrank behind a wall of muddy water. Apprehension grew. Would she really survive this? Even if she made it out of the car, could she swim to the shore?
Water poured into the vehicle. Her feet and ankles were soaked. The smell of mud and vegetation instantly transported her back to the Jet Ski proposal she had coordinated in a river back home. But there would be no tuxedo-wetsuit-wearing groom coming to her rescue today.
The man ripped furiously at his seatbelt.
“Ma’am?” The voice from her purse was louder now. The operator must have been practically shouting.
“Sorry, sorry,” Claire choked out over the burn in her esophagus. “I pepper sprayed him and the car crashed into the river.”
There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. She faintly heard the operator requesting the fire department and water rescue.
“Claire, what I need you to do is?—”
“This is your fault!” The man lashed out with his right hand. It clipped Claire across the face, and her phone tumbled into the murky water.
She searched frantically through the water, which was now up to her waist. By the time her waterlogged phone emerged from the depths, it was dead. Her only link to the outside world was gone. She was trapped in a fast-sinking car with a homicidal maniac.
“My fault?” She coughed as the water reached her elbows. “You’re the one who kidnapped me!”
“You deserve much worse than a watery grave,” the man hissed. He blinked almost constantly in the rearview mirror, but there was no mistaking the malice in his eyes.
“Oh, fuck you.” She slung her soggy purse across her shoulder and tossed her dead phone inside. Nothing a bowl of rice couldn’t fix. Assuming she lived.
Her captor wrenched his seatbelt back and forth, vinyl scraping against plastic, but it didn’t budge. For once, karma was delivering justice.
Where was it? She dug around in her now-muddy purse. Tablet. Breath mints. Sticky notes. Dog treats. Aha! The combination flashlight/seatbelt cutter/window breaker Alice had given her four years ago. Her entire life now rested in the hands of a product she had never intended to review on Amazon, much less use in an emergency.
The water brushed her chin and goosebumps scattered up and down her arms. Sunlight dappled on the water as the muddy river crept ever higher up the windshield. She turned the flashlight on and clipped it to her purse. Her chin tipped to the ceiling, and she took slow, measured breaths. Her limbs trembled. Adrenaline surged in her veins. At least the burn was subsiding from her eyes.
Her captor was now openly hyperventilating and crying in his seat. The crash must have damaged his buckle.
Claire paused, hand on her emergency tool. Could she let him die? Would she watch another human being drown in front of her? If anyone deserved to die, it was this idiot. Wouldn’t one less murderer in the world be a good thing?
The last of the daylight slipped out of view as the car sank below water level. This was it. The water crept up the man’s chin, covered his mouth. His eyes opened wide, pleading with her in the rearview mirror.
She clutched the tool, frozen to the spot. The plastic pressed into her hand. She had seconds to make this decision.
Did he have a family? Would a cop knock on his mother’s door to tell her that her son was dead? And someone could have saved him but chose not to?
“Fuck.” Claire floated between the front seats. The water was almost to the ceiling. She took a deep breath and plunged beneath the flood, feeling around blindly until she located his lap belt. Everything was muffled.
She aimed the blade and sawed. Seconds passed. Was it working? She opened her eyes, but all she could see was muddy water and the faint glow of her flashlight.
She had waited too long. Now she was going to drown right alongside this idiot. She sawed again, harder and faster. Seconds crept by. Something gave. The man thrashed and flung the severed belt aside. Claire swam to the back seat and felt around until she located the handle. Her captor was on his own now.
She yanked on the latch until the door opened, drifting on its hinges. She kicked off the sideboard and surged into the river. Her lungs screamed for air.
Something caught her ankle, and she gasped. Bubbles of the breath that burned in her lungs drifted in front of her, rushing to the surface. Particles of mud swirled around rays of sun. She kicked. Her heel connected with something, and the weight around her ankle left. She kicked violently, surging toward the surface.
Her head broke through, and she gasped, sucking down the smog-polluted air like it was a glass of chilled rosé on a sultry summer evening. The river current dragged at her as she took breath after breath, dizzy with relief. Oxygen rushed into her lungs, invigorating her. She bobbled in the water, floating like an overdressed cork. Time to reassess.
Sirens wailed above her. The traffic on the bridge had stopped. The guard rail above was warped as if it had melted in the sun. A beady-eyed blue heron lurked beneath the bridge.
She wasn’t a great swimmer. Never had been. But she sure as hell wasn’t about to drown in a dirty concrete river in Los Angeles. Not after everything she had faced. Stubbornly driving one arm into the water and then the other, she swam to the bank.
Her waterlogged sneakers squelched as she climbed to her feet. There was a one hundred percent chance that she looked like a drowned sewer rat. Her phone and tablet were surely fried. But by some miracle, she was alive.
Where was he? The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. Cops and firefighters swarmed down the sides of the bridge. She whirled around. It was difficult to make out at this distance, but she could swear a pair of wet footprints went up the opposite bank and disappeared. Son of a bitch.