Cindy Dees - Night Rescuer

The bandit’s head jerked in what looked like equal parts offense and surprise. He studied her more closely. “Where’s your soldier boy? He should have been able to bring you right to me.”

She shrugged. “I got rid of him after the last village. He didn’t want to hike in here on foot. Told me it was too dangerous. So I told him to get lost.”

Huayar’s intelligent gaze drilled into her, measuring the truth of her words. She crossed her arms and assumed a waiting stance. John had warned her not to be rude or belligerent with the guy, and she schooled her face not to show her thoughts. He strolled over to the bloody man lying on the ground and kicked him viciously in the kidneys. The guy didn’t flinch. Unconscious. “Take this sack of garbage out in the woods and shoot him. Nobody steals from me.”

Two of Huayar’s men ran forward and grabbed the bound man by his armpits. Every fiber in her being screamed for her to beg for the man’s life, to do something to save the guy. But there was nothing she could do. Huayar held all the cards. All she had going for her were her wits and the desperate hope that John could figure out some way to help her and her family against these overwhelming odds.

Where are you, John? She prayed silently that he was safe and well away from this fiasco. But somehow, she didn’t think that was the case.

She started as Huayar’s voice cut across her thoughts harshly. “So, you are here now. You will show my men how to make this new drug you have invented.”

“Look. I’ve tried to tell you people over and over that the formula is not perfected. It’s not anywhere near refined enough for human consumption. It will take months of lab work to finalize the recipe.”

“You will tell me the formula now. My people will do any necessary refining.”

Yeah, she’d bet. They would randomly screw around with the mixture until they found one that didn’t immediately kill the victims they tried it on and would call it good. How many people would die before they stumbled on the right mix of ingredients? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand, maybe?

“That’s not the deal we made. My family goes free. They walk out of here and I receive confirmation that they are back home safe and sound before I tell you a thing.”

Huayar’s hand flashed out. He slapped her viciously across the face almost before she saw it coming. Her cheek exploded in fiery pain and her neck ached from the unexpected snap of her head to the side. Ohgod, ohgod. Show no fear .

She straightened, checking her teeth on that side with her tongue to see if any were loose. She tasted blood. “Slapping me around does nothing to endear me to you, Geraldo. If we’re going to be colleagues, we’re going to have to establish some ground rules, here.”

“Coll-” Huayar broke off, obviously startled. He glared at her as if he wanted to rip her skin back and peer directly into her brain.

She did her damnedest not to give away a thing beneath the intensity of his scrutiny. “That’s right. Colleagues.” Time to drop a whopper on the guy and shake him up a little. “You don’t seriously think you’re the only person who’s approached me with some sort of business proposition, do you? I studied the market and analyzed you and your competitors long before you resorted to a sophomoric stunt like kidnapping my family.”

Jaws dropped all around the fire. Huayar looked skeptical, but rattled. Definitely rattled.

“I had narrowed it down to you and one other…corporate entity…already.”

“Who was the other?”

She gave him the name of one of Colombia’s most notorious drug lords. The only reason she knew the man’s name at all was because she’d heard it dropped at a security meeting within her pharmaceutical firm as someone who would kill to get the formula she was developing. Too bad the same security meeting hadn’t included implementation of protective measures for her family. If it had, none of them would be in this pickle now.

Huayar’s eyes narrowed in hatred. He must know the drug lord she’d named.

“I will have the formula from you. Now.”

She answered evenly. “You will have the formula when my family is out of here. And it’s not like you can’t continue to use them for collateral against my continued cooperation. Your people can kill them just as easily in Mexico City as they can here.”

Huayar actually seemed to consider that. He paced back and forth on the far side of the fire for several minutes.

A gunshot rang out in the woods. She jumped about a foot in the air, then said a silent prayer for the soul of the nameless man. At least he wasn’t in any more pain. Perhaps death wasn’t the worst fate out here.

Thank goodness she’d talked John out of handing himself over to Huayar to be tortured to death. The thought of having to endure John being mutilated, to hear him screaming in pain like that…nope. She wouldn’t have been able to do it. She cared for him far too much for that.

“I need a show of good faith. Give me the list of ingredients for this new drug you have designed.”

Her attention swung back to Huayar. Score two points for the guy. He was capable of being reasonable. She weighed how far she dared push him. “Do you have a chemist here?”

“You said the ingredients were readily available. Over the counter.”

“They are. But several of them, if handled improperly, could blow this place into last week.”

He frowned. But if the guy manufactured methamphetamine, and from the smell of the place he did, then he had a rich appreciation for the dangers of exothermic chemical reactions. Finally, Huayar bellowed, “Get Vito. Bring him here.”

She waited tensely while the resident chemist was fetched. Vito turned out to look as Italian as his name sounded, with thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, and a burly frame. He nodded cautiously at Huayar and glanced over at her incuriously. Was that the future awaiting her? Serving at the whim of a madman and doing her best imitation of a robot so as not to draw his random and cruel wrath?

“Tell him,” Huayar ordered.

“Do you have some paper? I’ll have to write it down. It’s a rather lengthy list.”

A grimy notebook and a pen were duly passed to her. She scribbled hastily, leaving out several key ingredients. Unlike methamphetamine, which was a relatively simple formula, the one she’d devised involved nearly a dozen steps and twice that many chemicals. But the premise of her work was to only use readily available ingredients, and most of the obvious ones for concocting a drug had already been controlled, to some degree, by governments and industry.

She tore the page out and held it out to Huayar. He gestured at the chemist and she passed the page to Vito. He read down the list carefully. After maybe a minute, he looked up at Huayar. “Not the list. These chemicals cannot form what we seek.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but before she could utter a word, Huayar’s fist coldcocked her squarely in the jaw. She went down like a rock. The blow didn’t knock her out, but the pain was so excruciating that her legs buckled right out from underneath her.

White spots danced in front of her blurry gaze, and she definitely had a couple loose teeth now. Whether she willed it or not, terror exploded inside her. Her ploy hadn’t worked. Huayar was going to torture her and kill her family. She’d failed them all.

“You stupid bitch,” a voice snarled above her. A foot slammed into her gut. Already half curled into a fetal position, the kick tightened her into a little ball, just like a roly-poly bug. Except in infinitely more pain, of course. She coughed violently, surprised she hadn’t thrown up, too.

In the face of her pain and terror, something odd happened. It was like a switch flipped on in her head. An odd purity of thought came over her, a suspension of time wherein her mind worked at double or triple normal speed, and the events around her seemed to be unfolding in super-slow motion. She watched in detached interest as Huayar drew back to kick her again.