One-Two Punch (21 page)

The trapdoor was heavy but adrenaline helped her slam it shut and shoot the metal bolt home, trapping Ed in the cell he had prepared for her.

Ky hammered the heavy bag with his fists. The gym was closed, empty except for him, the dim security lights providing the only illumination. He didn’t know how long he had been attacking the bag. All he knew was that it was long enough to make his arms quiver and turn his knees to water, but it wasn’t long enough to quiet his brain.

His glove slid off the bag on his final right hook and he toppled sideways, barely catching himself with a couple of staggering, sideways steps. Bent over, arms braced against his shaking thighs, he gasped for air.

“Where the fuck are you, Barbie?”

When Ky finally made it back up the stairs to the loft, he saw Harry hunched over on the couch with some kind of notebook in his hands. Ky moved to stand next to Harry, close enough to see what he was looking at.

It was Beth’s sketchbook, the one she always kept in her purse so she could draw during quiet moments—on the bus, in line at the DMV, on one of her rest days at the gym as she waited for him or Harry to finish working out. Harry was staring at a sketch of him and Ky. Beth had caught them in an unguarded moment when they were messing around after a sparring session. Harry had Ky in a playful headlock, grinning in his happy Harry way, and Ky was smiling up at him.

To Ky, his adoration of Harry blazed from the page and he had to glance away from the picture, embarrassed. He looked at Harry instead, and his gut clenched at Harry’s expression—so afraid, so lost. Ky was used to Harry being the strong one, the Cap’n, always prepared and always laughing, not scared of anything.

“This is how she sees us, Pokey,” Harry said, his voice raw from worry and lack of sleep. Ky couldn’t say anything—no reassurances, no hope, just no words at all. All he could do was flip the pages of the sketchbook over to another picture, this one of a stranger, a drawing that didn’t show love in every pencil stroke. Ky cupped his hand around the back of Harry’s skull and pulled the other man’s head against his sweat-soaked stomach in a rough embrace. Locking his arms around Ky’s waist, Harry burrowed his face against the hard abs.

Ky tightened his fingers behind Harry’s head and closed his eyes at the pain in his heart.

Once out of the ugly little cabin, Beth ran to the van. Grabbing the driver’s door handle, she threw her weight backward, nearly pulling her shoulder out of its socket when the door refused to open. Staring at the handle in utter disbelief, she gave it another jerk.
Who locks a car in the middle of nowhere?
She took a single step back toward the cabin and then turned and ran in the opposite direction. The keys might be somewhere in the cabin and Ed might still be locked safely beneath the floor, but Beth just couldn’t force herself to go back into the hulking structure.

The road was barely two tire tracks, disguised by the darkness. She stumbled and fell several times when her toe caught on the uneven footing or a rock shifted beneath her. She lost the flashlight on her second fall, spent precious seconds searching for it but then fear caught her and she had to run again.

Each time she fell, she ignored the pain in her knees and palms, pushed herself up and took off into the darkness. A small part of her brain told her that it was stupid to 114

blindly tear around the mountain—she had gone off the road in her panicked flight—

but she couldn’t help it. She had to get away from Ed as fast as she could.

When she finally stopped, sucking in painful breaths of the thin air, she realized that she was very, very lost. Dawn was turning the blackness around her a light gray but everything still looked the same, no matter which direction she turned. The trace of a road had completely disappeared. Sweat evaporated almost instantly from her skin, leaving her shivering in her thin tank. It was freaking cold in the mountains.

Although she had lived in Colorado all her life, she had never been an outdoorsy kind of person. Camping was not something she considered fun—the beds were hard and she always felt dirty. An occasional hike was fine, as long as it was on a groomed trail, lasted no more than a few hours and was followed by a shower and lunch at a restaurant. She had never been in Girl Scouts, had never wanted to learn how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together and, even if a compass had magically appeared, she wouldn’t really know what to do with it.

In Denver, she always knew which direction she was going because the mountains were to the west. Here, to her disgust, the mountains were on all sides. She turned in a full circle and the pink edge of sunlight creeping over one of the peaks caught her eye.

The mountains might be all around me
, she thought with a small, triumphant smile,
but
the sun only comes up in the east
. East was good—that was the direction of civilization.

A full-body shudder overtook her. Walking would help keep her warm, she decided, and headed toward the rising sun.

By dawn, Harry had pulled himself together. Losing it wasn’t going to help Beth, he told his red-eyed, stubbly jawed reflection. He turned away from the mirror to see Ky in the bathroom doorway, watching him warily.

“What’d your dad say?” Harry asked, his heart sinking when Ky shrugged and shook his head.

“He had nothing.”

Pulling his shoulders back, Harry pushed aside the disappointment. “Okay. You take the neighborhood, spiraling out from here, and I’ll take the park.”

Even before the words were out of his mouth, Ky had given a short nod and left.

“Okay, Beth,” Harry said to the empty bathroom. “Time to get you home.”

No one had seen her. Harry had crisscrossed the park over and over, asking every person walking a dog, biking, running or sitting under one of the big trees drinking out of a paper-bag-wrapped bottle if they had seen her.

He had brought a picture, one of his favorites of her, taken one day when Beth had just finished working out. When Harry had called her name, she had glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him, giving him just enough time to take the picture before she noticed the camera and ducked, laughing, out of range, giving him hell for taking her photo when she was, in her words, “a total mess”. He thought she looked beautiful.

He was losing his voice from asking over and over, “Did you see this woman here yesterday?” and losing heart at every “no” or head shake.

“Are you sure you didn’t see her?”

The woman pushing a stroller shook her head and hurried away, giving Harry a quick, uneasy look over her shoulder. He blew out a frustrated breath and ran a hand over his face, feeling the rough stubble.
Great
, he thought. Now he was scaring people.

It was probably an entirely different crowd at the park on a Monday morning than had been there on Sunday afternoon, he knew. The odds of talking to anyone who had seen her were slim.

Depression and dark fears threatened to overwhelm him but he shoved them back, striding over to a man pushing his toddler on a swing. The man flinched as Harry approached. Harry tried to lighten his grim expression but didn’t think he was very successful, judging by the man’s wary look.

“Did you see her yesterday?” Harry asked the same question he’d been asking all morning, thrusting the photo in front of the man’s startled face.

The man glanced down automatically and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember her—pretty girl.”

Harry blinked at him for a second, so accustomed to “no” that a “yes” took several moments to register. “Really? You did? Where? Was someone with her? Which way was she headed? Was someone following her?”

“Um.” The man took a half step back at the barrage of questions. “What?”

Taking a deep breath, Harry restrained the urge to beat the answers out of the man.

“Where did you see her?” he asked, speaking slowly with a great effort.

“Right over there.” He waved toward a path parallel to the playground.

“Was she alone?”

The man nodded.

“Was anyone following her? Was anyone who looked suspicious lurking around?”

Harry sucked back the next question when the man started looking panicked again.

“Is she okay?” he asked, lifting his fractious child from the swing. “Did something happen to her?”

“She’s missing,” Harry told him impatiently. “Was someone there?”

“Not that I noticed,” the man said slowly, squinting a little as if trying to remember.

“I wasn’t really paying attention though—if I look away from Tyler for a second, he’s gone.” He gestured toward his little boy, who was already running off toward a slide.

His dad hurried to catch up as Harry followed close behind.

“Which way was she going?” he asked.

“Toward the lake—or pond or whatever. The one next to the pavilion.”

Harry gave a short nod. “Did she look worried, anxious—anything like that?”

The man grinned. “Nope. She looked pretty content, like she was just out for a stroll.” His smile dropped away. “Sorry. I forgot that she’s missing. I hope you find her.”

“So do I,” Harry told him, wincing at the massive understatement. He dug in his pocket and pulled out one of his cards for the gym. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

The man studied the card. “Sure.”

“Thanks,” Harry tossed over his shoulder as he hurried toward the pavilion, digging his cell phone out of his pocket.

“Someone saw her,” he said when Ky answered. Talking to someone who actually remembered her had left his heart pounding so hard he could barely hear Ky’s response.

“Give me ten minutes—I’ll meet you,” Ky was saying. “Where?”

“The pavilion by the pond.”

Harry waited through a second of silence and then glanced at his phone. Ky had already hung up.

No one else had seen her. Harry didn’t know what he had expected—a trail of breadcrumbs? A neon sign with an arrow? The surge of excitement Harry had felt after talking with the man on the playground was quickly deflating.

“Hammer’s on his way,” Ky said.

Harry’s head whipped around. “You called him?”

He shrugged. “He’s a PI. Thought he could help.”

“Good idea.” Rubbing a hand across his head, Harry turned in a slow circle, taking in the pavilion, the pond, the trees scattered across the green expanse. “Where did she go?” he asked, half to himself.

“It wasn’t that way,” Ky pointed back toward the playground. When Harry raised a questioning eyebrow at him, Ky explained, “That guy who saw her—he noticed her.

Thought she was cute?”

Harry clenched his teeth together and gave a short nod.

“He was watching for her then—would have known if she passed him again.”

“Good point.” Harry looked out over the park, thinking. “There aren’t any roads in that direction.”

It was Ky’s turn to lift an inquiring brow.

“If someone,” Harry swallowed hard, “took her, they would need a car close by. It’s hard to get a fighting, screaming woman a few feet, much less across a park. Someone would notice.”

Ky looked across the pond, his face and voice tight as he asked, “Could she still be here?”

The idea hit Harry in his stomach like a punch. “No,” he snapped immediately.

And then repeated more slowly, “No. People are crawling all over this park. It’s been almost sixteen hours. Someone would have…found her.” He could feel his hands shaking and shoved them into his pockets.

Ky gave him a quick glance and then nodded. “Okay. So, perimeter?”

“I’ll take that,” Harry said quickly, grateful that Ky had let it go. There were some things that he just couldn’t think about without falling apart. “You check out the interior roads through the park. Keep an eye out for tire tracks through the grass too.”

Giving him a sideways look, Ky clarified, “Tracks that aren’t ours, you mean.”

“Yeah. Someone else had to have seen her, right? People don’t just disappear.”

Ky didn’t answer. He just gave Harry a rough squeeze on the arm and headed off across the park.

“Stupid mountains.”

Beth was hot. The sun was high in the sky and her bone-deep shivers during the night seemed impossible. How could she have been so cold when she was burning up just a few hours later? She was also thirsty. Incredibly thirsty. Each breath of dry, thin air felt as though it sucked the last drops of moisture from her.

Although she was trying to walk in a straight line, boulders and steep drop-offs blocked her way, forcing her to make frequent detours. Even when her path was clear, Beth wasn’t quite sure she was still headed east. It was easy when the sun was coming up and she could just keep walking toward it. Now, with the sun up above her, it would be all too easy to wander in the wrong direction.

A scrubby evergreen cast a pitifully small shadow and Beth sat down in the measly bit of shade to rest for a moment, shifting around as she tried to find a comfortable seat on the stony ground. After a few moments, she gave up and attempted to ignore the hard press of a rock in her rear.

She eyed a small cactus that squatted close to the ground. Living in Denver, surrounded by sprinkler-fed lawns, she often forgot that the lush, green grass wasn’t natural for Colorado. Still, it was strange to see a cactus.

Beth looked around, half expecting to see Ed approaching. Despite her paranoia, the panicked rush of fear that had kept her moving through the night had dulled and now she just felt thirsty. Thirsty and bone-tired. Her feet were bruised from the rocky ground, even with the cushion of her athletic shoes.

With a soundless sigh, Beth wrapped her arms around her updrawn legs and rested a cheek on her scraped knee. She could still see the cactus, although it looked sideways now from the tilt of her head. She had a vague memory of watching something on TV

about how cacti stored water. The thought of moisture made her try to swallow but her throat was so dry that she gagged. The cactus was starting to look better and better, and she imagined breaking off the top and watching water shoot into the air, as if the cactus was an open fire hydrant. The only problem was that she couldn’t remember if her sketchy knowledge of the cactus’s water-holding ability came from a
Nature
special or if she had seen it on a cartoon. She shrugged—either way, it was worth a try.