Page 61 of Up in Smoke
Connor.
His name whispered through her mind like fog.
The maelstrom of noise eased a little…receding like a wave. She pressed her open mouth against the back of her hand and sobbed. He’d told her he was proud of her, but he wouldn’t be proud if he could see her now. Curled up like a weeping baby, lamenting the past. Maybe she had never been that girl he was proud of. Maybe she’d only been pretending.
No.No. Fuck that.
She wouldn’t give up, and neither would he. If she didn’t believe in him, then she’d been lying all along, and that trust she’d claimed to have had never existed. But not just in him. In herself. She would fight and bargain and scrape her way out of this and back to him. She loved him too much to give up.
The van stopped and she forced her breathing to even out.In, out. In, out.Her stepfather knew what small spaces did to her, hence the cage. Hence his ploy that long-ago afternoon in the prison to send her to solitary. He wouldn’t expect her to be lucid, let alone ready to rumble.
Think.
With renewed determination, she reached out and examined the lock with her fingertips, unable to see in the nonexistent light. No go. She fumbled through her pocket until she found her ever-present matches, striking one and breathing deeply as it flared like a beacon in the dark.Focus.Okay, standard lock. Not a padlock and nothing fancy enough to keep her from picking it, if she only had something to use. Normally, she kept a bobby pin handy for occasions like this, but with her newfound confidence in herself, she’d grown complacent.Dammit.She tried to remember what she’d seen upon entering the van, but nothing came to mind except for the cage.
No…there had been rack against the wall. Had there been tools? Something. There had to be something. Erin crammed herself as far as she could into the corner of the small cage and rammed her body against the other side, hoping to scoot it toward the rack. It didn’t budge.
So she did it again.
And again.
“Come on, come on.”
Connor’s stomach lurched violently as Derek took a sharp turn off of Lake Shore Drive toward the water.Diversey Harbor, the sign said. Police personnel fanned the expressway about a mile behind them, but he and Derek were closing in on the van. An off-duty cop had spotted the van seconds after the BOLO had gone out and followed. The cop’s voice buzzed though the radio on Derek’s dashboard, steadily updating them on the van’s progress toward the harbor.
A throbbing had started behind his eyes, matching his wild pulse. If he let himself picture the scenario in which Erin’s stepfather required a body of water, he wouldn’t hold it together, so he closed his eyes and tried like hell to breathe. Told himself that as soon as this car stopped, he would find her and hold her. Tell her how sorry he was for letting this happen. He had to believe he’d be given that chance.
The chill of metal against Connor’s arm had his eyes opening. In the driver’s seat, Derek held out a gun to him without comment and he took it gratefully, holstering it beneath his jacket. At the end of the expressway off-ramp, Derek took a hairpin turn and slammed on the brakes just beneath the overpass.
Connor looked upon his worst nightmare.
The white van was parked at the very edge of the water, doors flung open. A man Connor assumed to be the off-duty cop had his gun aimed at Luther. Luther, pointing a gun back at the officer, had his foot propped on the side of a cage, as if he were in the process of shoving it into the water. Erin was inside that cage. Alive, thankChrist. But in a fuckingcage.
Rage leached his body of reason. Flashes of light compromised his vision as he threw himself from the van and raised his gun.Don’t look at her.He couldn’t look at her or he would lose it. Her fear would rip him wide open.
The only thing that kept Connor from firing his weapon at that moment was her stepfather’s obvious panic and Erin’s proximity to the water. One wrong move and she would be sinking to the bottom in a tiny prison. Surrounded by pitch black. That image socked him in the gut and it took him a moment to inhale through the denial of such an outcome. The off-duty cop demanded Luther drop his weapon, but had no luck. His foot inched the cage closer to the water.
“Don’t do it. You’ll be dead before she hits the water,” Connor rasped, slowly moving closer, once again fighting the need to reassure Erin. “Or you give us Erin and we give you what you want in return. Seems like a pretty easy choice to me.”
“You must think I’m an idiot, trying to talk me down like an average perp,” Luther sneered. “Don’t insult my intelligence. I’ll never see that money now, so I might as well give her what she has coming.”
Terror turned his blood to ice.Don’t talk about what she deserves, he wanted to shout, but forced himself to keep a level head. “You willing to die for that?”
Beginning to look indecisive, Luther glanced down at the cage and Connor couldn’t help it any longer. He made eye contact with Erin and almost fell to his knees. She was…serene. Like she’d already accepted what was going to happen. There were tears in her eyes, but love crowded them out. Love for him.
When he spoke again, his voice wavered slightly. “The one who wronged you is dead. You’re taking it out on the wrong person. But you can make it right if you just give her back to me now. Get in your car and drive away.”
Everything happened so fast. Too fast. Erin’s stepfather’s foot slipped off the cage, edging it closer to the water. Connor, Derek, and the off-duty cop raised their guns, causing Luther to jerk his weapon back up defensively and fire off a round. Connor didn’t wait for any more encouragement, but unloaded his weapon at the same time as Derek.
Just as the cage…and Erin…went flying backward into the water.
“Noooo!”
Ah, fuck.
Erin’s head slammed into the bottom of the cage. Or was it the top? She’d anticipated the bastard trying to send her to a watery grave, but being upside-down and not knowing which direction the surface was hadn’t entered the equation. Her head connecting with the cage had disoriented her, making it twice as bad. Even now, she could hear Connor’s bellow echoing in her skull. Could see his anguished face. She’d tried to calm him, telling him she had everything under control, but he hadn’t been in a very interpretive mood. She didn’t blame him. If someone put him in a cage, she would unleash unholy wrath on whoever had made such a mistake.
After an effort that had left her sweating and the beginnings of quite a few bruises, she’d found a bent nail in the van’s storage rack. It had only taken her seconds to pick the lock, but the van had stopped, her stepfather throwing open the back doors before she could climb out of the cage. Her plan had been to wait for an opportune moment to take him by surprise. Jam the nail into his foot and bust free of the cage while he howled in pain. Then the cop had shown up and forced Luther to draw his gun. No way could she make her move when he held a weapon. When Connor had shown up, it became an even bigger impossibility. She wouldn’t place him in the line of fire for anything in the world.
