Lisa Gardner - Touch & Go

“Justin, the funds have been delivered. Can you please advise us as to your location? We have officers standing by for the safe recovery of your family.”

“Mom!” Ashlyn cried, clutching my arm, bouncing even higher at the news. We were safe, funds received, we were safe, the police would be on their way.

Justin, sounding abruptly tired, as if the good news had taken more out of him than our impending deaths: “We are currently at the new state prison. Located—”

Boom!

I turned toward the control room door, breath already catching. Expecting to spot Z, striding through the smoke and rubble like the Terminator, ready to mow down all the officers in the police station, or, in our case, a helpless family stuck in a control room.

The locked door was intact, the bank of barred windows intact. No Z. No smoking rubble.

“Mom!” My daughter, yanking on my arm as she screamed hysterically.

I turned back just in time to see Mick come barreling out of the door I’d assumed was a supply closet. He was grinning madly and, true to Z’s words, was armed to the teeth.

“Miss me?” he called out.

Then he leveled his semiauto, and while we stood there, the proverbial fish in a barrel, he opened fire.

WHILE WYATT DROVE, Tessa worked the phone. She got Chris Lopez on the line, demanding to know anything and everything he could tell them about the state prison Denbe Construction had built in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Surrounded by six hundred acres of mountains, marshes and deep wilderness. Closest town twenty miles away. Nearest PD even slightly beyond that. A facility so remote it was set up to house its own security team, except given that the prison was never funded, those barracks remained empty.

Help wasn’t anywhere close. Looking at fifteen to twenty minutes ETA for first responders.

While the police radio crackled to life with fresh reports. Sound of shots fired coming over Justin Denbe’s cell phone. Sound of female screaming. Call now dropped, unable to reconnect with the Denbe family.

“Drive faster,” Tessa ordered Wyatt.

“Now see, this is why you should hang out with sheriffs. We not only know how to drive faster, but we can also drive smarter.”

Abruptly, Wyatt swung the vehicle left. They careened onto a dirt path Tessa would’ve sworn was a deer trail. She grabbed the oh shit handle just as he hit the gas.

The cruiser launched, then settled into a bone-crunching gallop.

“In the state of New Hampshire, the shortest distance between two points is rarely paved. But if you know where to look, you can almost find a dirt road. Ten minutes,” he announced. “Ten more minutes, then we’ll have the prison in our sight.”

“THE DOOR,” Justin was yelling. “The door, the door, the door!”

At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Justin had gone down, the first shot from Mick’s gun dropping him like a rock, red blooming across his shoulder. Ashlyn had screamed, then instinctively dove behind me, leaving me standing alone, on one side of the vast control desk, Mick, still grinning madly, on the other.

He turned his gun toward me. I ducked, then heard a grunt and watched him rock to the side; Justin, down but not out, had kicked him in the side of the kneecap.

“Door!” my husband yelled again.

Then I got it. We were trapped. In a space this small, Mick would mow us down in a matter of seconds. Escape back into the prison, where we could get out or at least spread out, was our only chance at survival.

I bobbed up, ducking my head as I frantically stabbed at the touch screen, willing myself to stumble upon the door controls. We’d been in the security menu. I’d seen a door lock override. Where, where, where…

Another shot. Two, three, four. My shoulders hunched reflexively and I practically felt the whistle of the last bullet as it whizzed by my ear.

Then my daughter was suddenly standing, her eyes wild, her long hair a tangled mass as she heaved up a rolling desk chair and threw it at Mick with all her strength.

“I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I fucking hate you.”

A second desk chair went flying and now Mick was ducking for cover, swearing as he tangled briefly in one set of rolling chair legs, went down, tried to recover, got nailed by Justin again in the kneecaps and landed hard.

There! Override. I jabbed at the bright red button. “Are you sure?” a dialogue box squawked at me. Override releases all inner and outer doors…

Override, override, override! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Ashlyn had found the walkie-talkies. A dozen had sat in a neat row of charging stations around the outer perimeter. Now she turned them into missiles, humming them one after another at the top of Mick’s head. He cursed again, pinned behind the control desk by her relentless assault.

The control room door swung open just as Ashlyn hurled the last walkie-talkie. I couldn’t see Justin, but I heard his voice, commanding clearly:

“Run, goddammit. Get her out of here!”

I didn’t need to be told twice. We had our deal, parent to parent. Either one of us was expendable. It was Ashlyn who mattered.

I grabbed my daughter’s hand and pulled her from the control room.

While behind us, Mick once again opened fire.

WYATT HIT THE CREST OF THE HILL HARD. Briefly, the cruiser was airborne, and in that moment, Tessa spotted it. A vast compound at least ten miles away, perched up on a knoll, dominated by a large, obviously institutional building, and surrounded by miles and miles of razor-wire fencing.

The cruiser landed. They both grunted on impact. Then Wyatt was fishtailing back down the dirt road, hurtling them out of the woods, onto pavement. A hard right, and they were headed north, flying up a newly paved road as trees blurred into a long green tunnel around them.

“That’s huge!” Tessa exclaimed. “How will we find them?”

“Follow the sound of gunshots. You wearing a vest?”

“Yes.”

The whole team had donned them at two thirty. Expecting that the call might lead to action, and while you hoped for the best, a good cop always planned for the worst.

Tessa couldn’t help but think of Sophie, her daughter, who’d already lost a parent. And then, her daughter’s own prophecy, Look for them in a cold, dark place. What could be colder and darker than a mothballed prison?

As Sophie had said, Ashlyn needed her. The whole family needed her.

“I want the shotgun,” Tessa said.

Wyatt flattened the accelerator to the floor, and once again, they shot forward.

WE CLEARED THE CONTROL ROOM into the main corridor.

“Dad,” Ashlyn gasped, her hand still clasped in mine.

“Out, out, we need out.”

“Dad!” My daughter actually dug in her heels, tried to halt our progress.

I whirled on her, my expression so fierce, or maybe just so insane, my daughter gasped. “You forget him, Ashlyn Denbe. You forget me, too, if it comes to that. You get out of here. This is your last order, the one instruction I want you to remember. You survive. Your parents demand it of you.”

“Mom—”

“Shut up, child. He’s coming. Now run !”

She did, straight down the hall toward the outer doors. I’d like to say Ashlyn was motivated by my speech, but far more likely, she was spooked by Mick’s inhuman roar as he finally cleared the control room, staggered into the hallway and turned toward us.

I had a brief image. A huge pumped-up bear of a man with blood streaming down one half of his face where some of Ashlyn’s missiles had found their mark. He was clad all in black, covered in some kind of vest that virtually sprouted guns and ammo. And a knife. Strapped to his outer thigh. A huge, gleaming hunting knife that I could already tell he’d love nothing better than to use to gut me.