Kristen Ashley - Rock Chick

“Out,” Vance replied and that was all I was going to get and the way he said it made me decide not to go for more.

I stood and as I did, Vance got tense, his body turned so he was facing the closed door as well as standing in front of me and his hand went to a gun holstered at his belt.

We heard a violent thud on the wall outside the door and a muted exclamation of pain.

My mouth dropped open and I stared at the door.

Ally came up beside me and she stared at the door.

Vance listened (also staring at the door).

After awhile, there was silence, Vance relaxed and nodded to us.

He left the room.

We followed.

The place was darkened, but not dark, the light on Dawn’s desk was burning and the overhead lights were on but muted. The office seemed, somehow, sinister. There was not a good vibe in the air.

We ran into Brody in the parking garage.

“Hey!” he yelled, trotting up to us, all excited and happy and definitely not feeling the sinister vibe. “Guess what? Monty called and he’s letting me do the surveillance room.” Brody lifted a plastic bag filled with cheese puffs and energy drinks. “All night. I’m, like, one of the guys!”

“Righteous, Brody,” Ally said quietly, definitely attuned to the sinister vibe.

“You guys want to do the shift with me? It’ll be cool. We’ll order pizza.”

“No,” Vance said and Brody’s eyes swung to him.

“No?” Brody asked.

“No. No pizza and no visitors. The office is no longer safe,” Vance replied.

Brody got pale.

Ally took in breath.

I forgot to breathe.

What on earth did that mean?

Vance kept speaking. “You lock down the surveillance room once you enter it, watch the screens, field the calls and that’s it. You don’t open the door unless you get the code.”

Brody was beginning to look a little panicked but he hung in there. “Oh shit, another code, what’s this one again?”

“Same as always,” Vance said.

Brody looked blank.

Vance looked unhappy. “Three two two.”

“Got it. Yeah. Right. Okay.” Brody didn’t say good-bye and walked away, whispering to himself.

I allowed myself a moment to hope Brody was going to be all right before we all climbed into a black Ford Explorer.

Vance took Ally home first, asking her address. She got out, quiet and looking worried and she promised to call me.

Vance waited until the door closed behind her and her inside lights went on, then he took me home and didn’t ask my address. He walked me to the door, took my key from my hand, opened it and made me stand just inside the closed door while he checked the house. He came back downstairs, went out to the Explorer, came back carrying a small duffle and walked immediately to my dining room table.

He opened the duffle and started to put stuff on my dining room table, announcing each one as he set it down. “Gun, Glock, loaded. Extra clip. Taser. Stun gun.”

I stared at the weapons on my table and then back to Vance.

“Lee says you know how to use them,” he said.

I realized his statement was a question and I nodded.

“Lock all doors and windows after I leave. You don’t open the door to anyone unless it’s Lee, Mace or me. Even if you know them. Got me?” Vance asked.

I nodded, then he nodded.

“Where’s Lee? What’s happening?”

“This will all be over soon,” he said instead of answering. He went to the door, stopped and turned to me. “Close your blinds.”

“Hang on a second.” I went after him and grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t go. “What the fuck is happening?”

He looked at me a beat, likely trying to guess my reaction to whatever dire news he was about to impart.

Then he decided that he could share.

“Lee’s escalated hostilities, Wilcox has done the same.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Again, he looked at me a beat.

Then a slow, arrogant, unbelievably handsome, shit-eating grin spread across his face.

“That means, tonight we’re gonna have fun.”

With that, he left.

I stood staring at the door thinking it didn’t sound fun at all.

After I’d locked my doors and windows, closed my blinds and stopped myself from hyperventilating, my phone rang.

I ran to it hoping it was Lee, falling on the phone like a crazed woman who’d been on the Atkins Diet one day too long and just entered a bakery.

It was Ally.

“Do you know what’s going on?” she asked.

“Escalated hostilities, on both sides,” I answered, wanting to talk to Lee, see Lee, hear from someone that Lee was okay even if it was a disembodied communication from a higher deity.

“What does that mean?” Ally went on.

“Hell if I know.”

And I didn’t want to know. I was deep in my Denial Fortress, way deep.

“Do you want me to come over?” Ally asked.

“I’m not allowed to open the door to anyone but Lee, Mace or Vance,” I told her.

“Says who?”

“Says Vance.”

“Since when do you do what you’re told?”

“Since the words ‘escalated’ and ‘hostilities’ entered my vocabulary and I finally told your brother I love him and he’s living with me and I might be pregnant with his child and I haven’t seen his cabin in Grand Lake yet and his office is not safe anymore and –”

“All right, all right, I get it,” Ally cut me off. “Call me when you know something.”

“Gotcha.”

I hung up and stood in my living room and stared at the weapons on my dining room table.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

This was all my fault.

Well, maybe not all my fault, it was mostly Rosie’s fault but if something went wrong, I’d feel responsible. This wasn’t the kind of something that could go wrong like jumping in a car with ten dollars in your pocket and a half a tank of gas and driving to Colorado Springs in hopes of going to a bar, not getting carded, and meeting hot, soon-to-be-fighter-pilot cadets from the Air Force Academy, an endeavor doomed to fail (and I would know as I was the voice of experience on that kind of thing, how do you think I got my t-shirt?). This kind of something meant guns and bullets and Brody in the surveillance room where, outside the door, grunts of pain could be heard.

I wasn’t really good at doing nothing, I was kind of an action girl and sitting around waiting was not my style.

Nevertheless, I pulled my cop’s daughter shroud around me, not impenetrable but it would do the trick in a pinch. I sat on my couch, pulled my heels up on the seat, rested my cheek on my knees and waited.

* * *

Looking back, it was kind of an idiotic thing to do.

Not that I should blame myself too much, it wasn’t like cars exploded in front of my house every day. Not to mention, I was a little wired, what, with the love of my life who I’d finally hooked up with, done the deed with and started living with, out there escalating hostilities.

In my defense, Vance didn’t say anything about not going outside if there was an explosion that shook your house, made your windows buckle and was so loud, it made you think your ears were bleeding.

I wasn’t totally stupid. I did look outside first. There was a car on fire in the middle of the street, burning debris everywhere. The car didn’t explode, it exploded and bits of it were all over the road, the sidewalk, even in my front yard, wrecking Stevie’s beautifully tended legacy. There were people shouting and running around. And anyway, what kind of neighbor would I be if I hid in the house if someone was out there, hurt, burned, whatever.

Not to mention, that someone could be Lee.

I thought, with all those people, I’d be safe.

I was wrong.

I nabbed the stun gun (my premier choice in weaponry), unlocked the door, unlocked the security door, did a scanning sweep of my porch and stepped outside.

I got to the edge of my porch, which was where they took me down.

* * *

This kidnapping was entirely different from the one before and the one before that.

I came to in the backseat of a car, legs bound at the ankles, wrists bound behind my back with the added dimension this time of being gagged.

With hindsight, and a lot of time to lie in the back of the car thinking, the explosion was not a very ingenious tactic of getting me to expose myself. In fact, it was kind of crude.

I’d fallen for it though so what did that say about me?

We drove for a long time, I couldn’t see much and I didn’t try. Cherry had been nearly exploded the day before so the minute a call came into dispatch about a car going up in flames in front of my house, the Denver Police Department, and Lee and his boys, would be all over it like flies on doo doo.

I couldn’t imagine someone hadn’t seen me being carted away, seemingly unconscious.

I couldn’t imagine they’d be far behind.

I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t rescue me.

You live, you learn, unfortunately, all my life, I’d always learned the hard way.

* * *

It seemed like we were driving forever, maybe it was half an hour, maybe longer, when we finally started to do some turns, obviously coming off the highway. The car slowed, there were streetlights then there were none. Then, we hit a gravel road, drove for a few minutes and we stopped.

I was yanked out of the backseat by my ankles and thrown over a shoulder in a fireman’s hold. I didn’t see much, it was late, dark and we were well out of the city so dark meant dark. I could tell we were in the mountains though.