Lisa Gardner - Gone

His fist caught her in the ribs. She gasped. He seemed to realize the advantage and used two fingers to dig into her kidney. A new pain shot up her lower back, accompanied by a warmth between her legs. She’d wet herself. He’d reduced her to the state of an animal, pissing on its legs in its terror to get away.

Fuck it. She let go of his wrist and clamped down hard on his forearm with her teeth.

“Aaaaaaagh!” her captor said. She shook her head from side to side, picturing every feral dog she’d ever seen. She wanted to bite bone, wanted to taste blood. She chewed on his forearm, ground her teeth.

“Son of a-” He still couldn’t use the knife in his right hand and couldn’t hit her hard enough to dislodge her bite with his left. She was winning, she thought, and in her delirious state, she saw herself chewing off his arm, spitting out his hand. When asked how she managed to get away from her armed captor while being bound and blindfolded, she would reply, “I just pictured him as a nice juicy steak.”

He jabbed her kidney again, trying to hit her spleen. Now he had his legs wrapped around hers, was coming up and over, trying to pin her into the muck. She used her hands to fend him off, to keep her precious stance, half on top of his body, her teeth sunk into his forearm.

She fought and she hated and she raged. Her captor, on the other hand, finally got smart.

He pinched her nose shut, and that quickly, it was over. Continue biting and be asphyxiated. Stop biting and be stabbed.

Funny, right up until this moment, Rainie herself had not realized how much she wanted to live.

She thought of Aurora Johnson again. She thought of all the little girls who never had a chance. And she thought, for the first time in a long time, of Quincy’s daughter Mandy.

I am sorry, Rainie thought, except she wasn’t apologizing to the victims anymore, she was apologizing to Quincy. Because he had already lost so much, she would’ve liked to have spared him this pain.

She released him. Her captor’s arm ripped away. He screeched, half relief and half curse. Then he socked her in the eye.

The force of the blow rocked her back. She tumbled off him, rolling into the mud. Her eye socket exploded. Behind the blindfold, there was a miraculous display of white, shiny lights.

Then she heard him, rising in the rain, pulling himself out of the muck. He stomped toward her. She had the mental image of a large, hulking beast, maybe the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I love you, Quincy, she thought.

Then her captor raised the knife and smashed the handle across her head.

Now, Rainie forced herself to uncurl from the damp floor and got up. Her bruised muscles spasmed in protest. She could not stand straight; it brought too much pain to her ribs. She huddled over, moving like an old woman as she shuffled with her bound feet across the space.

Her fingers touched the wall, recoiled. Cold, slimy, definitely wet cement. She picked a different direction and used little shuffling steps to map out her domain. Once she hit a hard wooden structure, pain rocketing up her shins. Further inspection revealed a workbench, now devoid of tools. Then she tangled in one spider web, only to recoil into a second. Something big and hairy brushed her cheek; she did her best not to scream.

On the other side of the room, she found wooden stairs. With her hands, she counted over ten steps before they rose up out of her reach. They probably led to a door. She didn’t trust herself to climb them in her current state, however, and didn’t doubt for a minute that the lone exit would be locked and barred. She returned to the bench. The dusty, wooden surface felt warm compared to the floor. She swung her feet up, curled up in a ball, and told herself she was at Club Med.

Her throat hurt. She coughed and that made her ribs ache. She wondered what Quincy was doing now. Probably driving the case detective crazy, she decided, which at least made her smile.

Her hands moved on the bench. With one finger, she traced the only words he needed to know: I love you, too.

Then a sound came from overhead. Door opening. Footsteps on the stairs.

She stiffened, tried to swing herself off the bench, tried to prepare herself to defend.

There was a soft thud, followed by an immediate moan.

“Brought you something,” the man said, then his footsteps retreated back up the stairs. The door slammed shut, she heard a lock click shut. Then, silence.

“Hello?” Rainie tried.

Slowly she crossed to the stairs, her hands groping out in front of her, her fingers feeling in the dark. She found the body at the bottom, curled up against the floor as she had been not that long ago. Smaller frame than she expected, encased in wet jeans and an even wetter sweatshirt.

Her fingers moved, determining the welt at the back of the head, then discovering the face.

“Oh no. Oh no.”

She rocked the boy up onto her lap. She cradled his still form against her, stroking his chilled cheek and willing some heat from her own cold frame into his body.

“It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” she murmured over and over again. But she didn’t know who she was trying to convince anymore, herself or Dougie Jones.

Tuesday, 8:20 p.m. PST

QUINCY SAT ALONE IN A CORNER of the command center. He had a blanket on his lap, a mug of black coffee in his hands. In front of him, officers buzzed around the conference table with the brisk steps of people who had serious work to do and not nearly enough time to do it. Kincaid and Sheriff Atkins were in the middle of a heated debate, both looking tired and strained. Mac was talking on his cell phone, glancing from time to time in Quincy’s direction like the diligent baby-sitter he’d promised to be. Kimberly had been sent out on an errand at Quincy’s personal request; his daughter had departed only after wringing a blood oath from Mac that he wouldn’t let Quincy out of his sight.

When Mac glanced over for the third time, Quincy couldn’t resist raising a hand in acknowledgment. Haven’t managed to croak yet. Please, carry on.

So this, he thought, was how it was going to feel one day when his workaholic daughter stuck him in an old folks’ home. He took another long sip of coffee and pretended his hand didn’t shake.

In contrast to his daughter’s opinion, he did not think he was going to drop dead just yet. No tightening of the chest, no tingling in the extremities, no cramping in his stomach. He was just tired. Bone-deep weary, hitting the stage that was officially beyond stress.

He didn’t only miss Rainie anymore. He didn’t just worry and wonder and ache. He could feel himself slowly but surely letting her go. Shutting down the small details-the flannel-gray color of her eyes, the quick, lithe way she crossed the room, a woman who made no effort at all to be sexy and thus captivated the attention of every male around.

First time he’d met Rainie, it had been professional. She’d been a deputy in Bakersville, serving as the primary officer on her first big case-a shooting at Bakersville’s K-8. The number one suspect was the sheriff’s son, which put the whole department, of course, under enormous pressure.

Quincy had come waltzing in-federal agent, expert on mass murderers, doing a special research project on school shootings-expecting to be welcomed with open arms. It was possible that he’d had an ego, even been quite full of himself.

Rainie had mocked his title, derided his credentials, and then said some pretty uncomplimentary things about his tie. And that had been it for SupSpAg Quincy. Other people fell in love over candlelight dinners or walks on the beach. Quincy fell in love sitting across the desk from a small-town deputy who liked to splinter number two pencils when feeling enraged.