“Why do you say that?”
“A feeling I have. If he couldn’t come to meet me, he would have called. You didn’t read his messages. This was really important to him, Jake. He wouldn’t just blow me off like that.”
For the first time, Jake felt annoyed with Laura. Who was she to act so parental? It felt like a dismissal of all Jake’s hard work. He alone had raised Andy while she went gallivanting about the country in search of-who knew what? She hadn’t earned the right to assert herself in this way.
“Laura, I’m glad you and Andy are talking. You’re taking steps, and that’s good. I want you to have a relationship with your son. It’s important for him. But this isn’t your responsibility. It’s mine. I’ve been looking out for Andy on my own for a lot of years now, and I think I have a good handle on when to worry and when not to worry. The fact that I’m not seeing any of his friends suggests to me they’re all together somewhere. And this isn’t a time to be panicked.”
Laura bit at her lower lip. The mannerism was so familiar to Jake. “I don’t know what to say. I just have a feeling.”
Jake’s eyes flared. “So you’re telling me you have mother’s intuition now? You haven’t been in our lives for the last twelve years, you show up out of the blue, and suddenly you’ve got a feeling about my son? Come on, Laura. Let’s get real here.”
“He’s our son,” Laura said defensively.
“You get my point.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it,” Laura said. “Maybe the intuition never really went away. Maybe it went dormant or something until I got close again. Now it’s here, and I can’t deny how I’m feeling. He would have called me. It was important to him. It was important.”
“Maybe,” Jake said, softening his stance, “but you might be overstating that importance. Look, Laura, you may be Andy’s mother, but you’re essentially a stranger to him. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he’s pissed at you. Maybe he’s just being a normal teenage boy and not doing what you expected him to do. Or maybe, just maybe, he’s leaving you hanging the way you left him.”
Jake regretted the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. They were hurtful and unnecessary.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Laura didn’t answer, but nodded, and Jake knew she accepted his apology. What she didn’t seem ready to accept, however, were any of the possibilities he had listed.
CHAPTER 20
The darkness was total. Whoever had blindfolded Andy had done a fine job of it. He couldn’t move his arms or his legs except to wiggle them back and forth a little. He still had circulation in his limbs, but those were starting to throb. The fear became something Andy could actually taste: sour, acidic, all-consuming.
Where he was, Andy couldn’t say. He was seated on a hard-plastic chair somewhere in the school. Even if he’d had the forethought to count his steps, Andy didn’t know which direction they had walked, or the precise distance between the Terry Science Center and any of the surrounding buildings.
The speed at which everything had happened bent Andy’s mind. Space and time seemed to fold in on each other. One moment, Andy and Ryan were squared off, ready to go at it, and the next he was tied to a chair.
He called out for help, but a gag in his mouth silenced those cries. The blindfold covered his ears, and Andy could hear his own muted grunts as if they were coming from inside a seashell.
Andy thought back to the moments before his abduction.
When the man wearing protective chemical gear appeared in the abandoned second-floor hallway, Andy figured the fight with Ryan was over. He lowered his arms. Ryan, with his back to the stairs, kept a fighting stance. The man tapped Ryan several times on the back and pointed to the stairs. Maybe he couldn’t be heard through the protective hood covering.
Get out, his gestures conveyed. Get out now.
Ryan hesitated, but the man pointed at the stairs with added urgency. Ryan held his ground. He wanted to be left alone to finish what he had started. The man stepped into the hallway, spun Ryan around, and shoved him hard from behind. Ryan stumbled toward the stairs. The man took a few threatening steps toward Ryan, who turned-no hesitation now-and bolted down the stairs as though the hallway were on fire.
What got Ryan so spooked? Andy wondered.
Andy went to join Ryan, but the man in the suit reached out and seized him by the shoulder as he passed. He held Andy in place, watching the stairs. Waiting. What was he looking for? No one was there. They were alone in the hallway. Andy tried to pull away, but the man held on.
Without provocation, the man unleashed several quick jabs into Andy’s gut. Andy’s mouth opened wide. His face writhed in pain, but the screeching alarm swallowed every bit of his scream.
The attacker shoved Andy down the hall in the opposite direction of the stairwell. Andy regained his balance and whirled around, thinking only of escape. He juked left and went right, but the man wasn’t fooled. Inside a breath, he clinched Andy in a crushing embrace. Instinctively, Andy pushed his hips back to try and create some space from his attacker. The key, he knew, was not to panic, but Andy was caught by surprise and reeling from those punches to his gut. He executed the move properly, giving a little bend at the legs before he unleashed a powerful strike to the face. The blow struck hard against the man’s face shield and caused no damage. Panic had got to Andy after all. He had done exactly as his dad taught him, but failed to account for all of the variables. A fight with Ryan Coventry was one thing, but a real life and death struggle proved to be something else entirely. A second later, the man had his hand wrapped around Andy’s throat.
The pressure on Andy’s windpipe was excruciating. He kicked his legs frantically, but had no leverage. The man pushed him back into a wall.
“No te muevas o mueres.”
Andy wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. He’d studied Latin in school, and while it helped with translation, the gun pressed under Andy’s chin made the order terrifyingly clear. The weapon seemed to have materialized out of the ether. With quick, fluid motions, the man wrenched Andy’s cell phone from his back pocket and shoved him into a nearby classroom. The man slammed the door shut.
Andy went to the windows. From there he could see students piling into waiting buses. Andy was about to open a window to scream for help when the man returned.
“Aléjate de la ventana,” the man said.
The man spoke Spanish. Who was this man? Where had he come from? What did he want? The hood made it hard to hear his attacker’s voice, but Andy understood the man’s gestures just fine. He moved away from the window.
The attacker removed Andy’s backpack; then he wrapped rope around Andy’s wrists. How could he say “too tight” in Spanish? Instead, Andy said it in English. No adjustments were made. The man knotted a blindfold over Andy’s eyes and slipped a gag into his mouth. Pressure on Andy’s shoulders settled him to the floor where he waited perhaps thirty minutes, maybe more. He didn’t dare try to escape. He couldn’t tell if the man was still in the room or not. He was helpless to do anything but wait. Then he was on the move. Escorted down a flight of stairs.
He felt cool air against his skin and figured they had gone outside. He had never heard the campus so quiet. Even weekends had some commotion, but now it was just birdsong and distant sirens.
Soon he was inside again. He was led down a hallway and into a room, up a short flight of stairs, where a chair was waiting for him.