Chapter 19 #2
Spike felt a little better knowing she’d left him a note, but it didn’t help them now. And if he’d found the note, it was possible he would’ve talked himself out of heading out to look for her immediately. And they’d be even more behind the eight ball than they were already.
Thinking about not finding out she’d been kidnapped for another two hours made a shudder rack his frame. It was bad enough they were an hour and a half behind her…four hours would’ve felt insurmountable.
“Now what?” Stone asked. “Where were they going? What did those men want?”
“I don’t know. Without their phones, Tex can’t track them. He’s working on the traffic cameras in Santa Fe and down in Albuquerque, but he admitted that with a car as common as Reese’s, and with as many cameras as there are, it might take a while,” Brick said.
“She doesn’t have time,” Spike seethed. “If they dump her somewhere in the wilderness, we’ll never find her.”
“We’re going to find her,” Tonka said.
“How?” Spike couldn’t help but ask. He felt helpless. Worse than helpless. The woman he loved more than he ever thought he could love another human being needed him, and he couldn’t do anything to help her because they had no clue where she’d been taken.
The men all stared at each other. No one spoke. No one had any ideas. Whoever her abductors were, they had a huge head start. And once they hit Albuquerque, they could go east, west, or even south toward Mexico.
Then something occurred to Spike. “We have Angelo’s phone, right? Can we see if Tex can hack it? Find out if there are any texts or messages on it that will help us?”
“That’d be a great idea,” Tonka said, “if it wasn’t smashed to pieces. Apparently, someone didn’t want us doing exactly that.”
“Shit!” Spike swore.
“I can call Owl,” Stone said after a long moment. “See if he can get his hands on a chopper. He can search from the air.”
“Owl hasn’t flown since the mission where you both ended up POWs,” Brick said quietly.
“I know, neither have I, but we’ve both kept our licenses current, and I have no doubt he’d do whatever he had to in order to find Reese.”
Spike closed his eyes. This was a nightmare, and he didn’t know how to snap out of it.
The thought of never seeing Reese again, never hearing her laugh, never touching her, was so abhorrent it made him double over in pain.
Leaning over with his hands on his thighs, Spike’s mouth watered with nausea.
He spit onto the ground at his feet and tried not to lose his breakfast right then and there.
A notification on Pipe’s phone sounded loud in the silence surrounding the men.
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed.
Spike straightened. “What?”
“I just got a text. Four words and a map with a red dot, moving south,” Pipe said, the confusion easy to hear in his tone.
“From Tex?” Brick asked.
“No, an unknown number.”
“It’s him,” Tonka said.
“Him who?” Stone asked in confusion.
“The guy who found Jasna. Who put her in that bunker.”
“We don’t know that,” Brick started, but Spike ignored him and snatched Pipe’s phone out of his hand.
Unknown
I’m tracking her tile.
That was all the text said. It wouldn’t have made sense to most people, but Spike had seen Reese’s keyring enough to know what it meant.
She’d told him that she was constantly misplacing her keys, so she’d bought one of those tile things, that connected to an app on her phone that tracked her keyring.
“Holy fuck. It’s Reese,” he said, watching as the red dot made its way south out of Albuquerque on Interstate 25.
He heard Brick speaking to someone on his phone, and heard him say Tex’s name, but all his attention was on that red dot.
“I’m calling Owl,” Stone said firmly.
Spike was all for his friends using their helicopter piloting skills to find Reese, but in the meantime, he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for them to find a chopper, get the authorization to take it up, then find her. He had to get to her now.
“Get in,” Pipe said, reading his mind. “We’re going after her.”
Spike nodded and turned to go to his friend’s hotrod.
“Wait!” Tonka said.
Spike turned to tell him that he wasn’t waiting another second, but Tonka was already heading for Brick’s Jeep. He returned seconds later with a backpack. “We can’t go unarmed,” he said grimly.
“Tex’s trying to tap into that same feed,” Brick called out.
At the moment, Spike didn’t care. He also didn’t care who was responsible for the text.
All he cared about was that they had a way to track Reese.
Her kidnappers had done their best to get rid of anything that might leave a trail, but they hadn’t even considered the keychain. Hell, neither had Spike.
Whoever had discovered they could track Reese by the innocent gadget attached to her keys was a fucking genius.
Within moments, with Pipe behind the wheel, Tonka in the backseat making sure the weapons he had were loaded and ready to go, and Spike watching the screen of the phone, they peeled out and were racing south.
As it turned out, Reese didn’t have a chance to do a damn thing when they stopped for gas.
The men next to her didn’t budge when they stopped.
Even when she pleaded with them, telling them she was going to pee all over the seats if they didn’t let her out to use the bathroom, they barely glanced her way.
Worse, the gas station they’d stopped at was literally in the middle of nowhere. Once beyond the outskirts of Albuquerque, the towns and houses were few and far between. Tumbleweeds blew across the road and even if she’d been able to run, there wasn’t anywhere to go.
They were the only people at the gas pumps and the driver didn’t waste any time filling up the tank before getting back into the SUV and getting back on the road.
At one point, she heard the men talking about El Paso and assumed that was their destination.
It was around a four-hour trip to El Paso from Albuquerque, and Reese dreaded what would happen once they arrived in the city.
Her anxiety was through the roof and she felt light-headed with dread as each mile passed.
As the city approached, the men began to talk amongst themselves a bit more, and it sounded like they were arguing.
If they were fighting about something, Reese thought maybe she could use that to her advantage.
Not to mention, a city meant people. And if even one person heard her scream and got concerned and called the police, she could be saved.
But once again, she was disappointed when they didn’t stop and instead switched interstates and started heading east on I-10.
Reese’s ass hurt from sitting for so long and her muscles ached with tension.
She wanted to get out and walk around, stretch, but the likelihood of that happening was slim to none.
Her captors had a destination in mind, and she had a feeling they weren’t stopping until they reached it.
They’d been driving for most of the day at this point, and another gas stop was just as disappointing as the first. The men had allowed her to use the bathroom, but the experience was humiliating.
The man who’d grabbed her the first time had gone with her to the unisex bathroom and watched as she’d peed.
She wasn’t even allowed to wash her hands before he was hauling her back to her car.
It was stupid to be upset about not having clean hands when she was in the middle of a kidnapping, but Reese wasn’t thinking straight anymore.
Terror, hunger, and the nonstop adrenaline rush had made it hard to keep her wits about her.
All she could do was envision one awful scenario after another waiting for her at the end of their journey.
When the vehicle turned off the interstate and headed south, passing a sign for the tiny town of Marfa, she almost laughed, thinking about the famous “Marfa lights.” She actually hoped an alien was watching them, ready to suck up her car and save her from whatever was going to happen when they stopped.
And Reese knew something was coming. The men around her were getting antsy, as if they knew something was imminent. She prayed that they weren’t excited about finally having their shot with her after the long drive.
Determination welled once more inside Reese.
They wouldn’t touch her. She didn’t want her last moments, her last thoughts, to be of strange men violating her.
She wanted to remember only Gus inside her.
Only Gus’s touch. She longed to be back at The Refuge.
In their bed. Laughing as he tickled her when he ran his hands over her body.
She saw a sign for the Big Bend National Park, and shortly after they pulled off onto a dirt road. It was dark now, the only light for miles coming from the headlights of her car.
The men had started talking again, in low tones, as if the darkness had spooked them somehow.
Once again, she braced for whatever was coming.
She was almost looking forward to any change at this point.
She needed out of this car. Needed to fight—and she couldn’t do that while surrounded by the three men.
No. Four. Reese had long since included Angelo amongst her kidnappers. At no time in the last several hours had he made any attempt to help her or even look at her. It hurt. A lot. She’d done her best to befriend him, and this was how he repaid her?
Well, fuck him. Fuck all of them. She’d get away, hide out until they left, then somehow make her way back home. To Gus.
Angelo stared straight ahead. He was scared. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. When he’d gotten to the Western Union place, he’d been surprised when the lady said she didn’t have any money under his name. He’d left in disgust—and then Pablo had shown up.
“We’ve come to take you home,” the man said.