Lisa Gardner - Gone

It would be a matter of wits then, not brute strength.

She crossed to Dougie, moving as quietly as she could. The boy remained unconscious but was no longer shivering so hard. She didn’t know if that was a good sign or bad.

She got an awkward grip on his cocooned body. Staggered over to the closet. Deposited him inside.

Just in time to hear a cry of rage from the laundry room.

Not much time left.

Rainie closed the closet door and crossed immediately to the window. Please let her be lucky. Please, just this once, let God give her a break.

She found the old metal latch. She flipped it open. She grabbed the top of the wooden-framed window, and with all her might, she pushed up.

Nothing.

She tried again.

More splashing. Furious footsteps running through the kitchen.

“Come on,” she begged in the darkened room. “Come on!”

But the old window wouldn’t budge. After all these years, it was either swollen or painted shut.

Footsteps in the hall.

Rainie ducked behind the door. Got a grip on the knife.

Time was up.

Wednesday, 1:27 p.m. PST

MAC THREW THE VAN into gear and they went charging down the access road before either of them had their seat belts on. Mitchell had the radio and was furiously trying to raise Kincaid.

“We got a location. GPS has stabilized on a single set of coordinates. We’re running them through the program now and should have an address in a matter of minutes.”

Kincaid squawked on the other end in delight and surprise. He wanted the address the moment they got it. He was calling for SWAT, he was calling for backup, by God…

Then there was a short interruption as he took a call from his cell phone. Quincy. He had Rainie on the line. She was trapped in a house and the kidnapper had just returned home. Quincy would swear to God the man’s voice had sounded just like Danicic’s.

“We got an address,” Mitchell yelled.

“Danicic’s house?” Kincaid pressed.

No, it was Stanley’s fishing cabin in Garibaldi.

“We’re ten minutes away,” Mac reported, and hit the gas.

“I’m already there,” Quincy said as he went tearing back onto the dirt road and Candi grabbed the dash.

Wednesday, 1:29 p.m. PST

“COME OUT, COME OUT, wherever you are,” the man called softly down the hall. “Whoo-hooo. Come on, Dougie. Say hi to your old friend.”

Rainie held her breath, remaining in position with her back pressed against the wall. She could see a small sliver of hallway through the crack in the spine of the door. A foot came into view.

“I know you’re still in here. The doors are locked from the outside, the windows screwed shut. It pays to be prepared when kidnapping a law enforcement officer and her little felonious friend.”

Another step. She had a view of black jogging pants, now splotched with water.

“You’re not getting out of this house, Rainie. Dougie and I have a deal. If you escape, I will have no choice but to fulfill my end of the bargain and burn Peggy Ann alive. You don’t want Peggy Ann to suffer, do you, Dougie? You wouldn’t want to kill her the way you killed your own mom?”

The man’s whole profile appeared. Rainie inched back, feeling his eyes go to the gap between the back of the door and the wall.

“Come on, Dougie,” he said impatiently. “Enough of this foolishness. Step forward, confess what you’ve done, and I’ll forgive you. It’s Rainie who’s hurt you, remember? She lied to you. Pretended to be your friend.” And then, as a new thought struck him, “Hey, Rainie, let’s make this real simple: You come forward, and I’ll pour you a drink.”

The man stepped into the doorway, and Rainie slammed the door on his face. She heard a crack, followed by a sharp cry. “My nose, my nose, my nose! You bitch, you broke my nose! Do you know how that’ll look on TV?”

Rainie fumbled with the knob, tried to find some sort of lock. Nothing. She dug her heels in, pressing her weight against the door as her eyes searched the room. She needed a chair to jam beneath the knob. Or a heavy piece of equipment.

She spied the bureau, but it was too cumbersome and distant. Then her whole body thudded as the man threw himself against the door, howling in outrage.

“You are not getting out of this house. Do you hear me? You are dead.”

He slammed against the door a second time, and Rainie rocked back on her heels. She got her weight forward just in time for the third blow. Then, slowly but surely, he went to work, twisting the slippery knob beneath her hand.

She tried to get a better grip. Fumbled with the knife so that she could use two hands.

He was too strong. He’d eaten and slept and not spent two days trapped down in a frigid basement. He had more muscle. Less fatigue. He was going to win.

She started the countdown in her mind. When she got to ten, she sprang away from the door.

The man burst in, stumbling forward and promptly falling onto the bed.

And Rainie bolted out the door.

She was aware of many things at once. The weight of water, now nearly at her ankles, as she splashed down the hall. The sight of the front door, looming nearly fifty feet away as she struggled through the kitchen, into the living room, reaching, reaching, reaching.

The sound, maybe in her mind, of car doors slamming shut. The voice, maybe in her head, of Quincy saying I love you.

Then the louder, closer scream of outrage as the man came barreling after her.

She turned at the last minute. She saw a large black figure bearing down on her. Lucas Bensen appearing on the deck when she was only sixteen. Richard Mann waiting for her with a shotgun a decade after that. All the nightmares she had ever had, careening down the hall, racing toward her.

Rainie planted her feet. She brought up her knife. She prepared for her last stand.

The front door burst open. “Stop, police! Put down your weapon.”

Rainie dropped to the floor.

Danicic lunged forward.

Quincy and Candi Rodriguez opened fire.

Aftermath

IN THE HOURS THAT FOLLOWED, things moved slower, evened out, tried to make sense.

Medics arrived. Pronounced Danicic dead. Found Dougie still alive, slowly warming back to consciousness within his cotton cocoon. They took the boy to the hospital. Tried to take Rainie, too. She refused to go. Just sat in the back of Quincy’s car. She had his coat around her shoulders, four blankets on her lap, and a steaming cup of coffee in her hands.

She wanted to feel the warmth seeping back into her bones. She wanted to inhale the scent of Quincy’s cologne in the collar of his coat. She wanted to realize herself, inch by inch, as she ventured back to the land of the living.

Quincy sat in the car with her as more investigators arrived and started to work the scene. The house, Rainie learned, belonged to Stanley Carpenter, his grandfather’s old home that he kept for periodic rental income. He had been pleasantly surprised to receive an inquiry in August to rent the property for the entire winter. The renter claimed to be a writer from out of town, looking for someplace quiet to work on his next novel. Stanley had received a cashier’s check for the entire winter’s rent up front and hadn’t thought about the house much since.

The house sat on a heavily wooded property, just a mile from the ocean. The nearest neighbor was five miles away to the west. Rainie and Dougie could’ve run all night and still never found a single person to help them.

A Sergeant Detective Kincaid appeared. He stared at Rainie so hard and so somberly, Rainie didn’t know what to say. Then he nodded once to Quincy and walked away.

Next came a gorgeous Hispanic officer named Candi. She had been one of the first officers at the scene, arriving with Quincy. Now she took a seat on the gravel drive beside the open door on Rainie’s side of the car and, with a surprising gentleness, drew out Rainie’s account of the past few days. How Rainie had pulled her car over in the middle of the night. Been surprised by a blinding white light. Woken later to discover herself drugged and bound in the back of a vehicle. She’d done the best she could, working hard to protect herself and Dougie.