24. Hell is empty
HELL IS EMPTY
Walking through the Mission, I took a shortcut down an alley off Folsom.
Supposedly there was a really good grocery store nearby, and I wanted to surprise Rafael with dinner.
We needed something nice. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I’d been watching videos on how to make pide, and I was determined to get the dough right.
Unfortunately, I also wasn’t much of a navigator and missed a turn somewhere. Everything looked different walking instead of driving. That was what I got for trying to be healthy and get in some cardio.
I examined the map on my phone. An arm wrapped around me from behind, hand clapping over my mouth.
I shrieked. “Rafael, goddammit, you were supposed to warn me!” Muffled as it was by the hand over my mouth, my meaning was still clear.
The assailant slapped my phone to the ground. He dragged me sideways.
Wait. Rafael wouldn’t ruin my phone… Oh fuck, these arms aren’t big enough. The proportions are all wrong. It’s not him1!
“Help! Call 911!” I screamed at the top of my lungs; kicking, biting, clawing, scrabbling for my phone. “Fire! Fire!” Someone had once told me that would get more attention. What a time to test it. I stomped ineffectually at the feet of the person holding me.
A masculine grunt told me I’d connected. Two more hands grabbed me. Two men? One of shoved a cloth gag into my mouth. Another pulled a bag over my head.
They wrestled me down the street. Fuck, why had I walked down an alley by myself? I screeched like a banshee around the gag, and was summarily lifted off my feet and thrown over a shoulder, knocking the breath out of my lungs. I writhed and flailed, but couldn’t break free of the kidnapper’s grip.
Why me? I wasn’t some heiress. Didn’t even look like one. Of all the ways I’d imagined my death over the years, kidnapping had never remotely factored in. Traffickers didn’t grab middle-aged women off the street. Cold sweat seeped through my clothes. For all I fought, my body rapidly chilled.
When I heard a car door open, I redoubled my efforts. Tears soaked the bag covering my face, and drool ran down my chin from my screams around the gag. Fuck, was I going to be held for ransom? Or would they go straight to murder?
“Please, please, my boyfriend is wealthy!” The gag muffled me, but I yelled anyway. “His name is Rafael Nazim. He’ll pay whatever you want. Please, I’ll give you his phone number! Just let me go. I won’t press charges!”
The men—I assumed they were men because who else did that kind of shit?—tied my wrists behind my back and my ankles together and threw me into a trunk. I landed hard on my little backpack purse. Why hadn’t they taken that?
The trunk slammed shut. I kicked out with both feet, but there wasn’t enough space to do much. The engine started. Trying not to hyperventilate, I curled into a little ball.
I was going to die. I was going to die and Rafael wouldn’t even know where I was when it happened.
I wouldn’t get to tell him goodbye. Or Dee.
Or Annie or Ross or my coworkers or even my parents.
I’d never get to write that sequel. I’d never get to kiss Rafael again or tell him I loved him.
God, I hoped nobody blamed him for this, but he’d naturally be the first suspect.
It wasn’t fucking fair. I wept pitiful tears.
We drove for what felt like hours. I had no sense of where we were going, only that hills were involved.
Hopefully, that meant we were still in the city.
Some possibility that I’d be found—even if it was just my dead body.
My face hurt from crying. My shoulders and knees screamed from being stuck in one position, and my back ached from having my purse jammed into it.
With a brake squeal, the car swerved and stopped. I tensed; was this the part where I was murdered, or worse?
The trunk opened. I kicked out, throwing my whole body into it. They just hoisted me out of the trunk and tossed me on the concrete.
“Dollface sends her regards,” one of them snarled.
I barely had time to register the pain of impact as car doors slammed and tires peeled. Wriggling on the pavement like a worm, I tried to work my hands forward under my feet, but I wasn’t limber enough. Damn my aversion to yoga!
“Help! Somebody help me, please!”
People talked in the distance. Cars moved in and out of what had to be a parking lot. No one reacted to my gagged screams for help. My voice grew hoarse. I decided to save it for when I heard someone get close. No amount of writhing on the pavement helped me pull the bag off my head.
Time crawled as I lay there shivering. My shoulder throbbed where I’d landed on it, and I was lucky I hadn’t hit my head.
At least the ground wasn’t wet. But why had they taken me only to dump me in a random spot?
No ransom demands. No robbery. No human trafficking.
I’d never even heard them talk to each other. It made no sense.
Rafael wasn’t expecting me back for a while, but surely someone had called the cops when I was snatched off the street in broad daylight. Surely someone would find me and take pity on the woman trussed up like a thanksgiving turkey on the street. Or alley. Or wherever I was.
Hopefully, whoever found me didn’t turn out to be worse than the men who’d abducted me. So long as people didn’t leave stuff visible in their cars, the city was pretty safe overall. But it was still a city; with all a city’s problems.
Feet pounded on the sidewalk. A runner! I cried out for help with what little strength I had left. The gag turned it into a warble.
“Elaine?”
Rafael’s voice!
“Here!” I yelled. “Over here!” or rather, “Mmm! Mmph Mmm!”
The pounding picked up the tempo, getting louder. He skidded to a stop beside me.
“Elaine! Oh fuck, Elaine.” Rafael ripped the bag off my head and the gag out of my mouth. “Are you hurt? Who did this?” His eyes were red-rimmed, and his voice shook as he cut away the ties on my wrists and ankles with a pocket knife. “Fuck, I thought I had lost you.”
All I could do was shiver. He pelted my face with kisses and gathered me into his arms. His body heat was so comforting I completely fell apart, wailing out my sobs as the inevitable meltdown railroaded me. My heart pounded so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest.
“Oh, canim, I am so sorry. What did they do to you?” He wept into my hair, rocking me against him, muttering in Turkish. I picked out ‘seni seviyorum’—I love you—several times. His arms locked around me, and the bass thrumming in my bones calmed me down.
I finally croaked out, “I’m ok.”
“Are you sure?” He brushed my sweaty hair from my face, peering deeply into my eyes as though searching for some horrible truth. “You can tell me, askim. My darling, my love. Please, let me help you.”
“S’true. Jus’ scared.” Why was my speech so slurred? My vision fuzzed around the edges too.
Rafael kissed my forehead. “I never should have let you go out by yourself after what happened at Telve. This is my fault.” His eyes lit with fury. “I will kill the motherfuckers who laid a hand on you.”
Bathed, fed, watered, coffee’d, and summarily burrito’d, I watched Rafael pace from inside my blanket mound on the sofa. He’d wanted to take me to the ER, but I wasn’t hurt, just terrified. It took me about an hour to stop shaking, even with a Xanax.
I’d been dumped only a few blocks from the abduction site.
Rafael had found my phone—now with a cracked screen courtesy of those assholes—because my watch had pinged his phone to report a hard fall.
It had also dialed 911. I hadn’t even known I had that setting.
Naturally, someone had stolen the watch in the interim.
It was a small SF miracle that my phone was still there.
Cops finally showed up to take my statement almost an hour after Rafael found me. I didn’t remember much of note, and they didn’t seem particularly interested.
One asshole pig had said, “Probably just some jealous ex-boyfriend trying to scare you.”
Rafael immediately bowed up, making the cops nervous. I’d begged him to take me home. The last thing I needed was for him to catch a charge for assaulting a police officer and land in jail after all that. Thank god his worry over me distracted him away from his anger.
That didn’t last. On the drive home, he got the chief of police on the phone and cussed the poor lady out for the officers’ incompetence. I barely registered his blistering words, only the bass growl. He’d been on edge ever since.
“How did you find me before the cops did?” I freed one arm to reach my coffee mug.
Rafael paused, an unreadable expression flitting across his face. “I put an AirTag in your wallet.”
I frowned. “Why?” The last thing I needed was more surprises.
He raised supplicating hands. “You kept misplacing it. Sorry, I should have told you. Now I look like a stalker.”
My heart rate slowed. “Oh. Ok, that’s fair. I do lose it a lot.” The implications loomed, but I didn’t have the energy to pick them apart. A neat little compartmentalization for you. “I don’t understand why they didn’t take it too.”
“No point if they were not trying to rob you. That stuff is too traceable. I would not have known anything was amiss until much later if not for this.” His eyes darkened like a hurricane on the horizon, jaw muscles twitching.
Rafael pulled out his phone and thrust it at me, a ferocious scowl distorting his face.
“I looked for the AirTag the second I saw this.”
The text was from a blocked number.
See what happens when you fuck with me? I won’t be so sweet to your little punching bag next time.
xx Dollface
“They said ‘Dollface’, too.” My stomach dropped into my ass for the second time that day. “I’m guessing that’s—”
“Molly Fucking Lively.” Rafael snarled her name like a curse. He typed something angrily into his phone. “Started calling herself ‘Dollface’ when I refused to.”
I sat up. “Please don’t retaliate.”