No Escape (32 page)

Reno, Nevada

Thursday evening, March 18

“H
ey, Stoner,” Luke greeted his employee with his customary nickname. “Any problems with the rental?”

“Nope. We’re gassed up and good to go. I even managed to stock it with a first-aid kit, some snacks, and a couple of warm blankets. Figured the kid might need ’em when we get her to the car.”

Luke nodded his approval. He and MacBeth were just coming out of a lodge belonging to the hunting guide who had been helping them become familiar with the land surrounding Ricky’s cabin. They had bought topographical maps of the area from the guide, as well as snowshoes and pack gear suitable for the frigid, snowy night.

They had also arranged to borrow several rifles, automatic pistols, and a flare gun from the guide, who had been told only that they were going in to end a case of custodial interference of a minor girl by a man who wished to abuse her sexually.

The great thing about Nevada, Luke thought, is that people weren’t inclined to wring their hands and wait for the police
to help out in such a situation. Once the guide had heard that a teenage girl and sexual abuse were involved, he had been only too eager to lend Luke and his team the firepower they would need to carry out the mission tonight. He hadn’t even waited to receive the fax from Novak International with details regarding the licenses and permits necessary for Luke and his team to carry concealed weapons.

He’d just handed over his “varmint guns” and asked Luke what else he could do to help.

They’d agreed that the guide would spend some time in the forest near the far edge of Ricky’s property line that night, playing cards with his brother and waiting on-call to see if additional assistance would be required by Luke and his team. The guide’s commercial Hummer would be hauling a trailer with several snowmobiles, which could be brought in like the cavalry if it all went from sugar to shit.

Luke sincerely hoped it wouldn’t, because he hated to rely on unknown elements and outsiders for help if his team got in trouble. But it never hurt to have a backup plan.

“Good deal on the rig, Stoner. Let’s pack it tight and go back to the hotel. I want to pick up Tessa and get some chicken-fried steak in our systems before we head out.”

“Pop the locks, would you?” MacBeth asked. “I’ll throw our gear in the back.”

The three men arranged the gear in the cargo area of the Chevy Suburban to their satisfaction. Luke paused as his cell phone gave a long beep followed by two short chimes, a code that indicated he’d received a text message.

“It’s probably Tessa,” Luke said. “No one else ever uses the paging feature to get in touch with me.”

“She’s probably sending you a dirty message—ooh, baby, do it again,” Stone said, mimicking the voice of a woman in passion with surprising skill.

“Can I help it if my woman can’t get enough of me?” Luke asked with a smug grin. “Just cut the jokes around her, will ya? She’s kind of sensitive about—”

“What is it?” MacBeth asked, all joking gone as he watched the humor drain out of Luke’s face.

“Something’s wrong. You can only send about thirty characters per message. I’ve got ten of them, starting with
TROUBLE
.” Luke scrolled down to piece together the abbreviated characters in the rest of the messages.

“Call the hotel,” MacBeth ordered Stone. “Page Tessa in her room.”

“Shit, shit,
shit.
” Luke slammed the back doors to the Suburban. “Forget it, she’s not there. Change of plans, guys. We go in now.”

Tessa sat in the back of the truck as it bounced over the rough and icy road. She was shivering convulsively, though the ride was a bit more bearable now that they’d left the freeway and the truck wasn’t able to travel at high speed. Still, she was being jostled and banged about every time they hit a pothole, and the cold metal of the truck bed was leaching the heat right out of her body.

She’d already snagged the jacket one of the men had stored in the back with her. But she wanted to be able to return it quickly to its previous location once they stopped, so she was afraid to sit on it. Instead, she spread it over herself, but that still left her with the cold metal beneath her bruised butt.

At first, she’d tried to distract herself by punching out messages to Luke on her cell phone, one character at a time. Concentrating in the dark made her nauseous, but she didn’t know what else to do to let him know what had happened to her. Unfortunately, coverage was spotty where they were, and she wasn’t even sure if her messages were going through.

But she’d continued to send them, willing him to receive her pages and understand that she’d really screwed up. She only hoped that she hadn’t done permanent damage to the
operation, but that was milk spilled all over the place at this point.

Right now she had to focus on getting out of the mess she’d made. She scrolled through the log of sent messages to make sure she’d given Luke the best and most complete information possible. Hopefully he’d understand the code she’d used.

She wasn’t sure if the messages would make sense, but hadn’t wanted to waste time hunting for vowels using the number pad on her cell phone. She also didn’t want to run down the battery scrolling through everything again and again. So she decided to send one more message to Luke, then quit.

Sorry
.

She’d splurged on a vowel for that one.

Tessa waited for several minutes, but no replies came. She then set the phone aside and felt around in the dark, figuring it was time to come up with a plan for when the truck stopped. If nothing else, maybe she’d find a weapon to defend herself. But after a brief search, it seemed like the cell phone was her only piece of luck for the evening.

She turned around and felt along the boundaries of the pickup bed. It felt like there was a plastic bin or something attached to the front of the bed, which ran the length of the space behind the cab. The plastic didn’t come all the way down to metal, leaving a fair-sized gap. As she reached into the void, she realized she would probably be able to squeeze her body in there.

That way, she could hide when Ricky and his companion
finally came to a stop. If she stayed where she was, they would discover her when they unloaded the truck.

She knew that when Ricky traveled to his Tahoe-area cabin, he left his street vehicles parked at the edge of the property line, where he had built an oversized garage. Inside it were several snowmobiles and ATVs, which he used to complete the one-and-a-half-mile trip to the cabin. Apparently the roads were too rough and narrow for even a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get through.

So she decided to wait, wedged into the little crevice she’d found, until Ricky and his friend left for the cabin. Then, she’d do something that seemed pretty foolish, but in actuality was her only option.

She’d follow them. Or at least she’d follow their tracks in the snow.

She’d been over the plans for tonight’s extraction enough times that she’d memorized a lot of the details of the land surrounding Ricky’s cabin. And while she knew the location of the clearing where she had been told to wait in the Suburban for the team to return, she only knew how to get to that location from Ricky’s cabin. She had no idea of how to reach the area from the garage where the snowmobiles were parked.

So she’d have to follow the fresh tracks left by Ricky and his friend, and use them to get close to the cabin. From there, she would skirt around the building until she found the path Luke and the others were planning to take back to the Suburban once they retrieved Kelly. She’d use the trail to find their escape vehicle and wait for them there.

It made perfect sense. And if she
happened
to see Kelly, she’d grab the girl on her way by.

After a final reconnoitering of the area around her, Tessa decided that the hastily conceived plan was her best way out of the situation—unless, of course, Ricky left the keys to the truck inside the vehicle, and she managed to drive back
to Reno. But they’d have to leave the keys behind for that to work, because her hot-wiring skills were, quite frankly, nonexistent.

Tessa felt a change in speed once again, then the vehicle hit a particularly deep pothole. Gritting her teeth against the pain of being briefly airborne, then hitting metal as she landed, she managed to wedge herself into the space underneath the plastic storage bin. She held her breath when the cast on her left forearm clanged into metal, but hoped the men in the cab wouldn’t hear the noise over the road sounds.

Once she was in place, she grabbed her cell phone to adjust the ringer. After squinting at the lighted display, she realized that they must have crossed over the border into California, because she apparently was in CalCell territory once again. Cheered by the news that she would be able to call Luke once she was left alone in the truck, she went through menus to turn the ringer off on her phone.

A brief review told her the relevant ringer options were
silent
and
meeting
, so she chose the meeting mode. That ought to disengage the ringer, which would hopefully keeping her from being revealed by an untimely phone call. But her cell would buzz soundlessly if Luke managed to receive her frantic series of pages and sent her a message with instructions in return.

Once the ringer had been set to meeting mode, Tessa took the time to type out one last text message to Luke. She wouldn’t send it yet, but instead would keep her finger on the button, ready to do so at a second’s notice. That way, if the men did happen to find her, she could immediately hit
SEND
and let Luke know what had happened.

For whatever that was worth.

Hell, she’d probably better start coming up with a backup plan to cover that contingency, too.

The vehicle began to slow down, then threw her to one side as it made a wide turn and came to a stop. She waited
with breath held as both doors opened and closed. She heard muted conversation and clenched her teeth against both the numbing cold and the tension building inside her.

A minute, maybe two, and they’ll be gone. Hang in there.
She concentrated on keeping her breathing shallow but even, telling herself that even though every noise felt magnified a thousand times to her, the men could not really hear her breathing. They had no reason to suspect that there was a stowaway aboard.

No reason, that is, until one of them slammed shut the plastic bin she’d hidden beneath. She hadn’t even realized they had opened it until the whole thing reverberated half an inch from her nose.

The bin’s momentary sound and motion were enough to cause her to jump visibly. That in turn jostled her cell phone off her belly, causing it to fall onto the metal truck bed with a clatter.

“What was that?” A male voice demanded.

Of course
, Tessa thought bitterly.
Of course I couldn’t drop the freaking thing onto my padded body. No, I had to drop it on god damned metal
.

“Shhhhhh,” the other voice hissed.

Oh, God. I’m toast.

At that moment, her cell phone received a text message. It lay against the metal of the truck bed and vibrated like a crazed hornet. Two short buzzes, then a long one. Under her horrified gaze, it actually moved several inches in the dim light, propelled by its vibrating battery away from her body. She snatched it up, hoping that no one had heard it.

But of course they had.

Ricky Hedges threw back the black tarp covering the pickup’s bed and shined a flashlight inside. Tessa flinched away from the brightness and knew she’d been caught.

“Well look right here, Bobby. She don’t look much like her picture, but I think we’ve got ourselves a deputy district attorney hiding out in the truck.”

Near Lake Tahoe, California

Thursday night, March 18

T
essa eased her finger over her traitorous cell phone and hit the
SEND
button. Since she was apparently in CalCell territory, she prayed that Luke would quickly receive her emergency message and understand things had just gone from bad to worse. She sat blinded by Ricky’s flashlight and decided that it would probably be a good time to come up with a new backup plan.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like the earth was going to open up and swallow her anytime soon—so much for that idea. She’d have to come up with something else, and soon.

Using the pretext of turning away from the light, Tessa managed to curl away from the men. She took a second to slide her brand-new, wafer-thin cell phone between the plaster of her cast and her wrist. Hopefully, they wouldn’t think to look for it there.

“Come out of there, Miss Jacobi.”

Gritting her teeth, she managed to slide out from under the storage bin and make her way across the truck bed. She made a big deal out of favoring her broken wrist, hoping that
the sign of weakness would put Ricky and his colleague off guard.

“What am I going to do with you?” Ricky asked. “You wearing a wire or something?”

“No,” she shook her head. “My boss doesn’t know I’m here. I came for Kelly.”

“What if I told you that Kelly was dead?” Ricky asked.

“Then I’d say you’re a liar,” Tessa shot back.

Ricky cocked his head. “The tracks around the cabin—you make those?”

She didn’t say anything, just tried to look chagrined and defiant at the same time. Maybe if he believed that she was an overzealous prosecutor out here on her own, he would be taken by surprise when Luke and his men raided the cabin after midnight.

That is, if Luke stuck to the plan. She had no idea what he would do now that she had been taken as well. She’d have to think about that—surely there was something in the careful plans they’d been working on that she could use to help in the current situation.

“Put her in front of you on the ride to the cabin, Bobby.” Ricky turned away and headed toward the garage. “If she gives you any trouble, kill her.”

Luke sat in the front passenger seat of their vehicle as MacBeth drove over the icy, rutted road. Stone had just taken a GPS reading, and they were less than ten minutes away from the clearing where they would park the truck and head toward Ricky’s cabin on foot.

They were going to have to mix things up a bit, leaving Stone behind in the truck to wait for Tessa, even help her if needed. Luke and MacBeth would continue toward the cabin as planned, and if there was no sign of Tessa, they would hike down to the garage where Ricky usually parked his vehicles and pick her up there.

If she was all right. If something hadn’t happened to her first, like hypothermia.

Luke kept going over one of the jerky messages in his mind, the one where Tessa had indicated that she was hiding in the back of a truck. And she was cold.

His cell phone, which was being charged on the console, gave a series of beeps to indicate another message. Luke snatched it up and pressed the button to read Tessa’s latest page. This one was in regular English, as if she’d taken time to write it.

But the contents were urgent, and his gut clenched in fear as he read.

They found me. Escape. Love you.

“Kick it into high gear, MacBeth. Ricky’s got Tessa,” Luke said. “We’ll have to move to our contingency plan.”