Page 41 of Dancing With Doubt

She went inside long enough to grab her pink hoodie and walked back out to the deck. The phone was ringing, and she ran for it, jerking it up off the table.

“Hello?” She said into the phone, her hands shaking.

“Ah, Roxie. My favorite whore.” Nathan’s obnoxious words filtered into her ear and Roxie shuddered.

“Fuck you, Nathan, what do you want?” She looked around as if expecting him to pop up out of the darkness.

“Ten million dollars, baby. Ten million or the rich boy you’ve been whoring for is dead.” He gloated, but the high-pitched girlish giggle that accompanied his threat blunted the desired result.

“You have Lincoln?” Roxie asked, suddenly calm now that she knew who had him.

Nathan having him was a million times better than the gangsters she’d run from for over ten years. Who knew what those assholes were capable of? Nathan was so strung out he probably didn’t even have Lincoln tied up.

“I do, Princess Whores-a-lot.” He giggled again.

“Could you be any more childish, Nathan?”

“Well, I can shoot your new boyfriend, if that helps?” He offered, drying up her fountain of sarcasm instantly.

“No, don’t do that. What do you want me to do? I don’t have ten million dollars.” She was stalling for time as it finally occurred to her that Kai should be in on this phone call.

She ran into the house to find him and put Nathan on speakerphone when she found Kai in the living room. She gesticulated at Kai and he sat up, paying attention as Nathan began to speak.

“I want you to meet me with the money down at the marina. I’ll give you a few hours, I know it’ll take a little while to get that kind of money together. Of course, you know you can’t call the police or anyone else right? Bring the cash and you can have your boyfriend back.”

The line went quiet for a long moment, but then Roxie could hear him faintly giggling again. Fucking high, he was fucking high! She bit down on her lip to keep from shouting at him.

“Oh, and Roxie?” He added, as if he’d just remembered he was on the phone with her. “If I don’t have the money by tomorrow at noon, I’m going to start cutting off parts of your man. Starting with the one part you’re most familiar with in your line of work.”

“Don’t do that, Nathan. Don’t hurt him.” Roxie said it more for his own good than hers. Lincoln would kill him a million different ways if he did that. And he’d get the better of Nathan eventually, Roxie had no doubt of that. Nathan was too high to be any threat.

“I’ll do what I please, whore. I’m the one in charge now. Not you and not that rich boy you’ve been fucking. Bye bitch.” He hung up then, before Roxie could say anything else.

“Right. Let’s take that in.” Kai said, sitting back on the couch. “He wants you to meet him at a marina, but he didn’t say which one.”

“Yeah, I noticed that too,” Roxie said, sitting down. “He’s high.”

“I kind of noticed,” Kai responded bluntly but without judgment.

“Maybe he’ll call back?” Roxie could only hope he would.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” Kai said, his eyes on his phone as he typed into it.

“I’m going back outside.”

“Cool,” Kai called out, making Roxie frown.

Kai was so weird sometimes.

Should she call the police, she wondered as she stared at her phone. Kai had told her this morning not to do that. His team would handle it. As far as Roxie could tell, they weren’t doing much of anything. Frustration sent her back to pacing.

This really, really sucked. She knew who had Lincoln now, which was kind of a relief, but she felt as if she’d had a carrot dangled in front of her, only to have it pulled away. Lincoln wasn’t far away, but where would Nathan have taken him?

She went back into the house and pulled out a laptop that sat around for anybody to use. She pulled up a map of the area and started scrolling around it. She couldn’t figure out which marina Nathan might be talking about. They’d never gone to one together, and he’d never talked about one. She looked through a list of marinas nearby, but none rang a bell in connection with Nathan.

“Where would he keep Lincoln?” Roxie asked Kai when he came near on his way through the kitchen.

“Somewhere where there’s no people, probably with no windows, or, if he’s always that high, it could be anywhere. He might have him staked out on the beach for all we know.” Kai shrugged, but then spoke again. “What we need is proof of life. And I’m not talking about a severed finger or any of that garbage. We need to see him and hear what’s going on around him. Maybe we could figure it out from that.”