50

GRETCHEN LINDEL LAY curled up on her filthy mattress, scratching her head, staring at the plywood walls that imprisoned her, and wondering if her torture would ever end.

Coated in grime, her nightgown in tatters, Gretchen reeked, and her feet were cut and swollen. Her hair was tangled with burrs, leaves, and twigs. She couldn’t pick them out, no matter how hard she tried, and she hadn’t tried in days, at least since the last time they’d come for her.

How long had that been? Five days ago? Six?

She couldn’t tell, and in the end it didn’t matter.

I’m here until I’m not, Gretchen thought. It’s like I’m not even me already.

How bad can the last step be?

The big man in black, the one wearing the tinted paintball visor and carrying the knife, had come for her four times since her kidnapping. Each time it had been dusk when he’d untied her blindfold and she’d found herself in the woods.

There were two or three others there, all dressed similarly, all laughing at her when the big one said, “Run, now. Give yourself a chance, and give the boys a show.”

Gretchen played competitive volleyball, and she ran hard the first time, took off, not caring about the stones and sticks that jabbed her bare feet. She’d gotten ahead of them and thought she’d lost them.

Before it turned dark.

Then they were all suddenly around her, yelling in the woods, taunting and calling, “Where are you, blondie? Where are you, uptown girl?”

They had to have been wearing night-vision goggles or something like that, because they’d caught her every time, and every time they’d taken her right to the point where she believed with every cell that they were going to kill her, slit her throat and watch her bleed out, all on-camera, all to their delight.

The first three times they’d hunted her, Gretchen had survived by focusing on her friends and her parents and on how desperately she wanted to see them all again, especially her dad. She shared a special relationship with him, a real friendship as well as respect and love.

It would kill him, she’d thought when she’d wanted to give up and ask them to end it. It would kill him, and I can’t do that to him. To either of them.

The fourth time they’d hunted Gretchen, the last time they’d hunted her, had been different. They’d barely let her run before catching her. They’d dragged her to a building in the woods. The big one had torn off her panties while the others held her down. They’d—

She’d gone to a far-off place in her mind then, where there was no hurt, no feelings at all, as if she’d already found death. That feeling of passing, of being already gone from her body, had stayed with her even after they were done, even after they’d thrown her back in her plywood box, even after days without eating.

Someone threw the door’s dead bolts.

Gretchen cringed and tried to keep staring at the plywood wall.

“You don’t eat, you don’t deserve to play the game,” the strange electronic voice said. “You don’t eat, drink, keep your strength up, you don’t deserve to live.”

“I don’t want to live like this.”

“We kind of thought that.”

She looked at the big guy in black wearing the GoPro camera and the paintball visor and saw something that cut through her feelings of nothingness, made her retreat.

He wasn’t carrying that knife he’d brought the first four times they’d played the game.

This time he carried a coil of rope tied at one end into a hangman’s noose.

CHAPTER

51

JUDGE LARCH GAVELED the court to order at precisely eight a.m. She took care of several administrative issues before reminding Norman Nixon he was still under oath when he returned to the witness stand.

“Ms. Marley,” Larch said. “Your cross-examination, please.”

Anita patted me on the thigh, got up, and said, “Mr. Nixon, of the nine fatal shooting incidents you looked at involving my client, how many were judged wrongful police conduct?”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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