‘No. Use mine.’ He forced his body to stand, ignoring the stiffness in his knees and back. And in his groin. Because this was neither the time nor the place to make all those fantasies reality. That would have to happen later. But not too much later.
He offered her a hand, gripping hers harder than he needed to as he tugged her to her feet. Releasing her was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He gave her his phone. ‘Tell him to check out the unmarked car at the top of the hill. The cop inside was too quiet.’
Understanding filled her eyes. ‘Shit,’ she murmured as she dialed. ‘We’re okay. We’re in the house,’ she said without preamble, then proceeded to tell Deacon what had happened.
Marcus blocked out her conversation with Deacon, instead listening intently for the sound of anyone approaching. The shooter had almost gotten them – three times. The guy wasn’t likely to give up so easily.
His ears pricked at a faint noise. But it hadn’t come from outside. It had come from the basement, to his right. He caught Scarlett’s eye and tilted his head in the direction of the sound.
‘Gotta go,’ she murmured. ‘Hurry, Deacon.’ She handed Marcus his phone and took a small penlight from the pocket of her vest. ‘Where?’ she asked, almost soundlessly.
Marcus activated the flashlight app on his phone and pointed it toward the sound. ‘There.’ He drew the Glock from his pocket holster and crept forward, his head cocked, listening.
There. There it was again. So soft he nearly missed it.
It was a moan. He glanced at Scarlett, saw she’d heard it too.
‘Hello?’ he called softly. ‘We won’t hurt you. Please come out.’
Another moan, even fainter than the last one, seconds before all hell broke loose upstairs.
The front door banged twice before he heard it slam open, followed by the thunder of running feet and shouts of ‘Police! Hands where we can see them!’
Marcus stopped short when his foot landed on something hard. Aiming his light at his feet, he realized he’d stepped on a cell phone. The phone lay on a carpet, about eight inches from the edge of a twin bed, positioned with its headboard up against the wall. He went down on one knee to examine it.
‘Holy shit!’ he yelped when bony fingers came into view, appearing disembodied at first glance. Then he realized the hand was connected to an arm, which was attached to a body lying on the floor under the bed.
‘Oh God,’ he murmured. The phone he’d stepped on was unharmed. But the frail, bony hand that reached for it was not. Bruised, with open wounds, it was covered in dried caked blood.
The hand reached and strained, trying to get the phone. Marcus met Scarlett’s eyes, saw that she was as horrified as he was.
‘Deacon!’ Scarlett shouted into a pocket of quiet. ‘We found someone down here. She’s hurt but still alive.’
Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday 4 August, 1.25 P.M.
Furious, Ken leaned into Stephanie’s face, grabbing the back of her head when she would have pulled away. ‘Who took the goddamn baby?’ he hissed. He didn’t give a damn about the baby, but by God, she’d tell him who else had been there when his men had arrived. He left no witnesses. Ever. ‘I am tired of your games, Stephanie. Who else was in your house?’
She met his eyes squarely. ‘Ask him. She’s his too.’
‘Shut up, bitch!’ Chip snarled. ‘You don’t know anything. Just shut up.’
Ken spared him a cold glance. ‘She seems to know enough, Chip.’ Keeping one hand on the back of her head, Ken gripped her chin with the other, digging his fingers into her cheeks so hard he’d definitely leave bruises. Stephanie’s eyes flared wide, flickered with shock.
He smiled at her, tightening the grip on her hair. ‘You thought you were safe, didn’t you?’ he asked softly, pleased when she began to tremble again. ‘You thought because you’re so pretty and I planned to sell you, that I wouldn’t hurt you.’ He squeezed her face harder, her eyes now shining with tears. ‘You thought wrong, dear. Bruises heal in time and I’ve already shown you that I can hurt you without leaving a mark. But I’m getting too angry for that. You’d better answer me now or I’ll get so mad that I won’t worry about putting marks on your pretty skin. It won’t matter anymore because I will have killed you putting them there.’ He kept his voice soft, his smile friendly. He’d learned long ago that the combination scared people far more than a shout.
Stephanie’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. No longer was she being coy or feisty. She was truly petrified. Excellent.
But then his cell phone picked that moment to ring. Cursing the interruption, he was tempted to ignore it until he realized it was the ringtone he’d set for Demetrius. Keeping his fingers clenched in Stephanie’s hair, he released her face to answer the phone. ‘Is it done?’
‘Not exactly.’ A sigh. ‘No.’
Maintaining his smile so that his frustration wouldn’t show, Ken released Stephanie’s hair and patted her cheek. ‘You’ve earned a momentary reprieve, sweetheart. I’ll be right back.’ Telling Demetrius to hold on, he grabbed the two strips of cloth that had been used to gag Stephanie and her father. He wadded the cloth and shoved one gag into each of their mouths, then went up the stairs to the kitchen, where he could watch his captives on the security monitor.
‘All right,’ he said calmly to Demetrius. ‘What happened? You were supposed to shoot him. That’s all.’
‘I did shoot him,’ Demetrius said, disgruntled. ‘I may have missed.’
‘You may have missed?’ Ken hissed. New rage barreled through him, and he put his speaker phone on mute, letting his furious breath shudder out. Breathe until you can speak without raising your voice. He couldn’t let his captives hear him losing it. It would give them hope, and he didn’t have time to strip new-found hope away. He needed to know who’d witnessed the Anderses’ abduction.
‘Ken?’ Demetrius asked through the speaker a minute later. ‘You still there, man?’
Ken unmuted the phone. ‘I am here,’ he said, calm now that he’d vented off some of the rage. ‘What do you mean, you missed?’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, man,’ Demetrius said, his own anger rising. ‘And if you’re thinking about saying if you want something done right, do it yourself, then I’m out of here.’
It wasn’t the first time Demetrius had threatened to close up shop, so Ken let the statement slide. ‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ he said, even though he’d thought it. ‘But how could you miss him? We agreed that you’d take a head shot close enough that you’d be able to get the bullet out of him before the cops found it.’
‘Things changed,’ Demetrius said coldly. ‘I followed him and that homicide detective to Anders’s house. She got out and went to stand with the white-haired guy. The one in the FBI.’
‘Agent Novak,’ Ken said. He’d never met the man personally, but he’d read plenty about him, as the agent was a media darling. ‘And then?’
‘And then O’Bannion got out of the car and slunk around to the back of the house. I doubled back to the main road, which has a view of the back door. Bishop came around to yell at him. I had them both in my sights.’
‘And then you shot them.’
‘I took care of the plain-clothes cop on watch first.’
Ken groaned. ‘You killed a cop?’
‘I think he was a Fed.’
‘Aw, fuck, Demetrius.’
‘I don’t know if he’s dead. I just didn’t want him coming after me when I did O’Bannion and Bishop. They were ready to go into the house. Burton said he and Decker and the guys got fired on by Anders, so I figured there was evidence of a gunfight in the house. If O’Bannion got in and saw that, the cops wouldn’t need a warrant. They’d just storm the place. I had a silencer. Nobody was supposed to know they’d been shot.’
‘Except you missed.’
‘I may have missed,’ Demetrius said through his teeth. ‘The bastard’s fast. He moved at the last second. My bullet hit the door exactly where his head had been.’