Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

She looked at him, ears a little flattened, lips slightly drawn back, teeth gleaming in the morning sun. She did not look friendly.

“Well, for sure no one’s going to steal that Subaru,” he said.

“Hello, darling,” he said to Oliver’s receptionist, affecting the slow drawl he had used earlier on the phone. “Which way is that old boy’s office?”

The receptionist fluttered her eyelashes and said, “I’m afraid Mr. Muravieff has someone with him just now-oh, no, I believe he’s just leaving,” and she turned to smile as her boss came through the door behind her desk.

Oliver Muravieff’s client barely registered on Jim’s peripheral vision. “Ollie!” he said in his biggest, boomiest voice. “How the hell are you!” And he steamed forward, hand extended.

Oliver’s hand came up either in greeting or in self-defense. “I’m sorry?” he said, his brow creasing, “I’m not sure I-”

Jim pushed him back into his office before he could finish the sentence. He stumbled a little over his cane, and when he got his balance back, he looked at Jim with the beginnings of a scowl. “Who the hell are you?”

“All right, you little motherfucker, where is Kate Shugak?” Jim said.

“Who?” Oliver said. But he took just a little too long to say it.

Jim kicked the cane out of Oliver’s hand. “Where is Kate Shugak?”

Oliver fell awkwardly, and Jim heard a sound that might have been the crack of a bone. Oliver yelled.

The door started to open, but Jim slammed it shut and raised his voice. “Ollie, old buddy, you’re just as clumsy catching that ball as you were in college. Ifs okay, honey. He’s just taken himself a tumble, but we’re fine!”

Oliver stared up at him in pain and disbelief. “Who the hell do you think you are,” he said, “barging into my office, assaulting me verbally, assaulting me physically? Do you know what a felony is?”

Jim took a step forward. “If I commit one, I’ll hire you to get me off. Just like you got Paul Cassanovas off. It’s what you do.”

“Paul Cassanovas? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“He’s a client of yours.”

“So? I’ve got a lot of clients.”

“This client hangs out with a guy name of Ralph Patton.”

Oliver was recovering a little of his sangfroid. He looked at his cane as if to pick it up. Jim took another step forward, and Oliver abandoned the idea for the moment. “Again,” he said, “what does any of this have to do with you barging in here and assaulting me?”

“Paul Cassanovas just had his van stolen.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Look, Mr.-whoever you are-I-”

“Yesterday,” Jim said, “about eight hours before somebody coldcocked Kate Shugak and tossed her into the back of it.”

There was a moment of silence. Oliver appeared to be thinking deeply. “There’s no way you can know that.”

“There were two eyewitnesses. How do you think I traced the van?”

“I knew nothing of this,” Oliver said. His face had paled and he was breathing a little faster.

“Yeah,” Jim said, “you did, and you’re going to take me to her.”

“Is that so?” a voice said, and Jim looked around to see Fred Gamble of the Federal Bureau of Investigation step into the room.

She woke to a dull, throbbing ache that seemed to take up the whole left side of her head. She couldn’t see and she could barely breathe through the covering over her face. For a moment, she panicked, and then she forced herself into deep, shallow respiration, one breath at a time. She tried to move her hands, her feet, couldn’t. She could barely feel them.

There was a narrow concave surface beneath her. She tried to roll and hit an edge. She rolled back to the center. A cot perhaps. She could smell wood smoke, or the residue of it. She was in a cabin, maybe?

She was also hearing voices.

Was there pain in heaven? Certainly there were voices. Joan of Arc had heard them; it stood to reason Kate Shugak would hear them, too. Of course, Joan had been given directions. Maybe the Woman Who Keeps the Tides or Calm Waters’ Daughter would give Kate a sign.

She moved again and her head fell off. She couldn’t stop a low, agonized groan.

Maybe it was hell. Definitely pain in hell, according to the preachers, lots and lots, and Kate had sinned, big-time. She wished she was sinning right now, back at the town house, upstairs in that king-size bed with Jack.

That wasn’t right. Jim, that was it, Jim in that enormous bed and her having her way with him.

Was he one of the voices?

“I only hit her once,” someone said.

“You shouldn’t have hit her at all,” another voice said coldly and clearly.

Nope. Not Jim, neither one of them. But the voice did sound familiar.

She went away for a little while, hiding from the pain, and when she woke up again, the stifling cover had been removed from her face. She sucked in lungfuls of clean, cool air. They hadn’t gagged her, hallelujah, but of course that only meant there was no one within shouting distance. Still, she had to try.

She gathered everything she had, took as deep a breath as she could, and produced a small croak. She waited a moment and tried again. “Help,” she said, gaining volume. “Can anybody hear me? Help! Help! HELP!”

No one replied. She heard the rustle of wind in the trees, a flock of chickadees talking among themselves, and what might have been the heavy footstep of a moose. Nothing else.

She looked around her, her restraints permitting her limited movement. The wood smoke had been a clue. She was in a cabin, a small one-room affair, studiedly rustic, filled with Adirondack furniture Kate recognized from a catalog she’d read once when she’d been stuck on a long flight with no books. There was a little woodstove and a counter with a Coleman stove and a pink plastic dish tub and a matching pink plastic dish drainer on it. There was a shelf beneath holding a variety of canned goods and a cardboard box with the top cut away to form a tray, holding bottles of water.

Kate had a sudden raging thirst. She rolled toward the edge of the cot and discovered that, along with tying her hands and feet, they had tied her to the cot. She looked down and saw that she was still wearing Jim’s T-shirt, which had rucked up to her waist, and she was so enraged and so thirsty that she cursed at the top of her voice for a full minute.

When she was done, she felt much better. Her head still hurt and her right eye was swollen almost shut. Her vision in that eye might even be a little foggy, but she could still see fine out of the other. She looked the room over again. She twisted around on the cot and saw that it had folding legs. She considered the possibilities.

The ropes around her hands and feet were tight, tight enough to cause her hands and feet to swell. The rope around her body, the one tying her to the cot, was a little looser. One end of it was connected to her hands, the other tied off to itself in a slipknot.

She smiled, showing all her teeth and displaying a distinct and unnerving resemblance to Mutt, had anyone been there to see it. She began rocking back and forth in the cot, back and forth, back and forth, until the cot began to rock up on its legs, an inch, two inches, three, six, twelve. It was a heavy sea and Kate was wallowing in the troughs, way up and way down, the rope cutting into her now-bare stomach as she flung her body weight at it, until finally, the cot nipped over at last and Kate splatted face first against the floor.

It didn’t do the injury to her face any good, and she groaned again.

It was a wood floor, poorly finished and dirty. In the end, that was what got her moving again. She pulled her knees to her chest and, using her shoulders and her head, began to inch her way toward the counter, the rope attaching her to the cot really cutting into her now, and the cot on her back weighing a lot more than it looked.