Chapter 19 #2
Dekker opened fire on the police officers. Not one of them hesitated to shoot back, their only thought to disable the threat.
Tonka wanted to scream at them to stop. Jasna could be inside that cabin! They could hit her!
By the time the officer in charge yelled “cease fire!” above the sound of the firefight, Dekker was lying in a bloodied heap in the doorway to the cabin…which looked even more eerie with hundreds of bullet holes in the walls.
Tonka was moving before he even thought about what he was doing.
He didn’t get far. Brick and Tiny grabbed his arms and held him back.
“Let go of me! I need to get to Jas!” Tonka shouted as he struggled.
“You run into the middle of that clusterfuck, they’ll shoot your ass too!” Spike told him. “Calm down and let them do their job. If Jas is there, they’ll get her out and you can go to her.”
Tonka knew his friend was right, but he still fought. It went against everything in him to stand there and do nothing—yet again.
He watched as one officer checked Dekker for a pulse and others walked over and around him to enter the house. His friends now had him in a tight lock. He held his breath, waiting for confirmation that Jasna was inside and still alive.
Ten seconds went by. Twenty.
Tonka’s heart was beating a thousand miles an hour. His adrenaline was sky high. He was jittery and desperate to see Jas. To make sure she was all right. For himself, for Henley.
To his confusion and horror, the police officers began to file back out of the house, holstering their weapons as they went.
“What’s happening?” Tonka whispered. As eager as he’d been to rush into the house a moment ago, now his feet felt as if they were encased in lead. He couldn’t move. Were the officers coming out because she was wasn’t there? Because she was dead?
No. Neither option was acceptable.
Brick and Tiny remained right by his side, both with a hand on his arm but neither holding him back anymore. They were holding him up.
“Don’t panic,” Tiny ordered. “I’ll be right back.”
He jogged over to the nearest officer and spoke to him briefly before walking back to where Tonka was waiting.
He could read by the look on his friend’s face that whatever was happening, it wasn’t good. Feeling faint, Tonka locked his knees.
“She’s not inside,” Tiny said, not dragging out the news.
A part of Tonka was relieved, had expected that answer after what Dekker had said, but another part was even more horrified. If she wasn’t in that cabin, where the hell was she?
“Fuck,” Brick swore. “Where is she?”
Hearing his own thoughts echoed by his friend was both painful and a relief.
Tonka’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and as much as he dreaded having to tell Henley again that they hadn’t had any luck finding Jasna, he refused to ignore her messages.
He reached for his cell, and his friends let go of him reluctantly. Tonka could feel three pairs of eyes on him, but he ignored them as he looked down at the screen on his phone.
Instead of seeing Henley’s name, there was a text from an unknown number.
He unlocked his phone and clicked on the text that had just arrived.
Unknown: Jasna is in cabin 103. She’s unhurt.
Tonka read the text again.
Then a third time.
He turned without a word and starting running back to Brick’s vehicle. Thank God they’d been the last car to turn down the dirt driveway. They’d be able to get out quickly.
“Tonka? Who was that? Henley? What’s wrong?” Brick asked as he ran to catch up to him.
In response, Tonka handed the phone to his friend but didn’t slow his pace.
“What the fuck?” Brick exclaimed as he handed the phone to Tiny, who read the message to Spike.
Tonka had so many questions, but at the moment, all he cared about was getting to Jas.
“Who’s this from? And how the fuck do they know about the bunkers?” Spike growled as they reached Brick’s Jeep.
“I just tried to respond to the text,” Tiny said. “Came back as undeliverable.”
“You think Pipe, Owl, or Stone somehow found her and stashed her there?” Spike asked with a frown, clearly grasping at straws as Brick started the car.
“No,” Tiny said with a shake of his head. “There’s no way they would’ve done that without calling Tonka. And they’d take her to the lodge, or to the hospital if necessary. They certainly wouldn’t stash her in a bunker.”
“103 is the closest to a road on that end of the property,” Brick mused as he backed up quickly, nearly clipping a police car. Then he pulled forward, almost taking out a tree, before backing up again and heading for Route 4, which led to The Refuge.
“Why wouldn’t they just pull down our drive and bring her to her mom? Even if they didn’t know Henley was at the lodge, they had to know someone would be there,” Tiny asked.
“Even better, why didn’t they go to the police station? If they found her wandering along the road or in the woods, they had to have seen the Amber Alert on their phone,” Spike added.
Tonka didn’t say a word. He couldn’t. If he opened his mouth, he’d scream with the amount of tension bottled up inside.
He had all the same questions as his friends, but at the moment, all he cared about was getting to the bunker and seeing if Jasna was truly inside.
If she wasn’t…if someone was fucking with them… he didn’t know what he’d do.
For the second time since he’d heard that Jasna was missing, he thought about Pablo Garcia. Could this be him?
No. As far as he knew, the man was still in prison.
He would’ve been contacted if he’d been released.
And it would be many, many years before that happened.
Dekker had obviously been the one behind Jasna’s disappearance, but how the hell did she get out of that cabin and into one of their bunkers?
Their secret bunkers that literally only eight people in the world should know about?
“Could Alaska have let something slip about the bunkers?” Spike asked, as if he could read Tonka’s mind.
“No,” Brick said resolutely.
“She could’ve said something in passing, to someone she thought she could trust, not thinking. Or maybe someone overheard her?” Tiny suggested.
“I said no,” Brick repeated brusquely. “She knows how important it is to keep those bunkers on the down-low. She would never tell anyone anything without asking me if it was okay first. I trust her one hundred percent. It wasn’t her.”
“Okay, then how the hell did some anonymous person know about them?” Spike asked.
No one had an answer.
“Tonka? How’re you holding up?” Brick asked as he sped down the road.
Tonka appreciated him driving like a bat out of hell. “Not good,” he said between clenched teeth.
He was glad when no one tried to reassure him.
There was no telling what they’d find when they got to bunker 103.
It was at the three o’clock position relative to the lodge.
There were seven bunkers in total, deep in the woods of their property at the nine, ten, eleven, twelve, one, two and three o’clock positions.
Brick stashed Alaska in bunker 111 when he went to hunt down the psychopath that was after her.
103 was about five miles from the one he’d used to stash Alaska.
And as Brick had already mentioned, it was the closest bunker to a main road. There were no cameras on the road, so if someone had stopped alongside Route 4 to take Jasna to the bunker, they’d had the privacy to do so unseen.
“I’m fucking setting up cameras,” Brick mumbled, yet again reading Tonka’s mind as he executed a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulled over.
All four men climbed out and immediately set off through the woods with Tonka in the lead.
None of them needed a GPS to tell them where to go.
They’d all memorized the locations of the bunkers in case of an emergency.
When they’d first arrived at The Refuge, they’d all still been a little messed up in the head because of the traumas they’d gone through.
Having the bunkers felt like a necessary fail-safe.
Places where they could go if the shit ever hit the fan, or if they just needed to hide themselves away for a mental break.
They informally referred to them as “cabins,” but they definitely weren’t.
They were underground boxes of varying sizes.
They hadn’t been used in years, until Brick used one to hide Alaska, but they’d always been kept stocked, just in case.
Tonka felt as if he was going to throw up as they approached the area where the bunker was hidden. Stopping, he looked around, searching for something, anything that would indicate someone had been there. But all he saw were trees, grass, and rocks. As usual.
“Let me,” Tiny suggested as he started to push past Tonka.
His arm whipped out and he blocked his friend. “No.”
He didn’t need to say any more. Tiny nodded and stepped back.
Tonka took a deep breath as he headed for the entrance.
It was well hidden. No one simply walking by would even notice the circular ring buried in the debris on the forest floor.
Tonka unerringly took hold of the ring and pulled upward.
It didn’t take a lot of strength; they’d built the doors so they could be lifted with minimal effort, just in case one of them was wounded when in need of a bunker.
Looking through the round opening, Tonka couldn’t see anything.
It was pitch black, and his stomach clenched in fear.
This particular bunker was longer than it was tall, so he sat on the edge and jumped down easily.
He got down on one knee and used his hand to brace himself as he stared into the darkness of the bunker, praying harder than he’d ever prayed before. Even on that awful day on the ocean.
“Here,” Spike said, holding his phone down toward Tonka.
He’d turned on the flashlight function already, and even though the light wasn’t terribly bright, nothing like the flashlights they carried on their belts when they went out into the forest with guests, it would be enough.
Tonka hadn’t even thought about using his own phone’s light.
He was grateful his friend had been ready.
With shaking hands, he lifted the phone and pointed it toward the opposite end of the bunker, every muscle in his body tensed.
“Is she there?” Brick asked urgently.
“I…I think so,” Tonka croaked. “Hang on.”
He shuffled forward on his knees toward the dark lump at the end of the bunker. As he got closer, he could see wisps of dark blonde hair spread across the narrow cot. There was a warm blanket over the lump, and Tonka held his breath as he reached out to pull it back.
He let out his first shaky breath as he gazed down at Jasna. But his fear hadn’t abated.
His hand trembling so hard he wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell if she had a pulse or not, Tonka placed his fingers on her carotid artery. For a fleeting moment, he panicked. But then he felt it. The reassuring thump, thump, thump of her blood coursing through her body.
She was also warm to the touch, another indicator she was alive.
“She’s…she’s here. And she seems to be okay,” Tonka said. He meant to call out the news, but his voice was no louder than a whisper.
“You need help getting her out?” Tiny asked through the hole.
Taking a moment to look her over and make sure she wasn’t visibly hurt, Tonka almost cried when he didn’t see any sign of blood or an injury.
“No. I got her,” he said, answering Tiny’s question. He pocketed Spike’s phone, not needing the light anymore, now that he knew Jas was all right. He picked her up and shuffled backward on his knees. He barely felt her weight, his mind nearly blank, he was so thankful they’d found her.
When he got to the hole, he carefully stood, letting Tiny take her from him so he could jump out, then immediately taking Jas back in his arms as they headed for Brick’s Jeep.
“You want me to text Henley?” Brick asked.
Tonka shook his head. “I’ll call her from the car on the way to the hospital.”
The others nodded.
“I’ll tell Pipe to drive her and Alaska there,” Tiny said.
It worried Tonka that Jasna hadn’t stirred at all—but just as he had that very thought, she shifted in his grip, slowly winding her arm around his neck. “Finn…?”
His knees almost buckled with relief. “Yeah, baby girl. It’s me.”
She buried her nose into the side of his neck and said, “You smell good.”
Tonka almost laughed—until she went limp once more.
She shouldn’t be this out of it if Dekker had just knocked her over the head or something.
He immediately suspected she’d been drugged.
Despite that scary thought, even her brief moment of lucidity made him feel a little better.
The sooner he got her to a doctor and they did a full blood workup and made sure she was all right, the better.