The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

But the next thing she knew, she was down, and it hadn’t been hard concrete. It had been a softer landing. Then she realized that she was now on a blanket inside the black minivan, its sliding side door still locked in the open position.

There was no middle or backseat in the van, only open carpeted floor.

She tried to scream or yell, but the wind knocked out of her left her gasping for air.

She heard the driver, a male, yelling: “Phone! Get the fucking phone!”

The driver had been yelling at the man who’d tackled her, because with a grunt he pushed off her. He ran back to the sidewalk and retrieved the phone.

She tried to sit up and make a try for the open door. But then she painfully felt a hand grab her hair at the back of her head. It pulled her back down.

She heard some woman’s voice on the sidewalk yell, “Stop them! Someone call the police! Stop!”

Then the man who’d tackled her jumped back into the minivan and onto her. The hand let go of her hair. And the minivan roared away from the hospital, wind rushing in through the open sliding door.

Some three or four blocks later, the minivan stopped. The man in back slammed shut the sliding door. There was the sound of tape being ripped from a roll. Despite her desperate attempts, Amanda Law very shortly found her wrists bound with duct tape, then her ankles. Then a strip of the tape was placed over her mouth, and finally a pillowcase pulled over her head and held there with a wrap of tape around her neck.

Amanda Law, her head still covered by the pillowcase, knew that she was in some sort of house not too far from the hospital. She had tried to track the direction and distance the van had driven her since she’d been abducted, but had become pretty disoriented after the first four or five turns. On two of the turns, the driver had taken them so fast that she’d rolled around on the open back floor, and that had really thrown off her sense of direction.

The distance had been easier to track only because it had not taken long at all to reach the house. It had been maybe eight, ten minutes at most before the driver had stood heavily on the brakes, then bumped up over a curb.

Someone-it must have been the skinny dark-skinned one in the T-shirt-had gotten out the front passenger door, and there had been the sound of a chain being pulled from around a metal pole, then of a metal gate dragging across what sounded like rock. The van had eased forward, its tires crunching on the gravel. And the gate was closed and locked.

One of the men had then picked he

r out of the back of the van, thrown her over his right shoulder, and carried her into the house. There, in what smelled like the kitchen, she had been put into what felt like an old wooden armchair. There came a tugging at her duct-taped wrists, and she realized after a moment, when the pressure of the wrap began easing, that her hands were being released.

But only for a moment. As she flexed her fingers and wrists to get the feeling back in them, someone grabbed her left wrist, and there came the sound of more duct tape being torn from a roll. Her left wrist was then taped to the left armrest of the wooden chair, and it was repeated on the right. Then her ankles were taped to the bottom of the chair’s front legs.

She could hear the sound of someone walking across the room, the door of a refrigerator opening, the clanking of what sounded like beer bottles being removed. Then the door closed and bottles were opened with a pffft sound.

And then the clanking of glass bottles again.

They just toasted the success of my kidnapping! Amanda Law thought.

What the hell is going on?

What do they want with me?

Is this… is this it? “So, Dr. Amanda Law,” a male Hispanic voice said.

He knows me?

How the hell does he know who I am?

That’s the same voice as the driver, who shouted about getting the phone…

There was the sound of a newspaper being opened.

The voice then said, “ ‘ The cowards who carried out these killings are despicable’-”

Despite the tape covering her mouth, she suddenly gasped.

He’s reading that from the front page of the paper!

The voice went on: “ ‘ Shooting a helpless patient as he lay unconscious in his hospital bed is a vile act… I would personally like to stare these evil people in the eye and see that they suffer real justice.’ ”

There was a long silence. It ended with the sound of a glass bottle being put heavily on a table.