I felt the vibration against my thigh. Drying my hands, I pulled the cell phone from my jeans pocket and flipped it open.
Another text.
My heart raced and my mouth went dry.
I thumbed it open.
Cry, cry, cry you naughty kitten
Tears built up behind my eyeballs. I never bothered with checking the Caller ID. I knew who the caller was. I simply closed the phone and slipped it back into my jeans pocket. Breathing in and out, I turned off the water.
Then a loud bang, like someone closing a kitchen drawer. It registered through the bathroom door. It gave my heart a start. Following that, a slight commotion, muffled voices, my bedroom door slamming shut.
Michael.
I wanted to call out his name, but I couldn’t. My hand trembled as I opened the bathroom door and went out into the hall. It took forever to reach the bedroom. But when I did, a loud burst of thunder rattled my bones.
When I opened the bedroom door, I knew immediately that we would not be going to New York City.
Chapter 44
The reality of the situation didn’t immediately register.
It just looked like Michael was lying on the bed as if he was simply taking a quick lie-down before we hit the road for the 140 mile drive south to New York. But a fraction of a second later the fog lifted and the real scene came to light. It was only then that I could see how his shirt was ripped off, how his mouth was gagged with duct tape, how his hands had been hastily duct taped together at the wrists, his legs bound together at the ankles.
He was unconscious, eyes wide shut, body lying fetal on the bed.
I stood there paralyzed. Stood there staring at Michael, one side of his face was pressed into the pillow. The exposed half was lit from the light that leaked in through the open window.
The bedroom was as still as an empty church. My copy of Mockingbird had been tossed onto the floor by the bed. I stood petrified, my feet planted in concrete. I gazed up and down at Michael’s naked chest with a kind of frightened curiosity. There was a small cut that had been made just below his right nipple. A thin line of blood trickled from it, ran down along his ribcage. The dark hair on his head was mussed up. A thin streak of blood ran down the center of his forehead. I knew then he’d been hit over the head with a blunt object.
I knew I could not be alone; that there was someone else inside the apartment besides Michael and me. The ashtray smell. It was a familiar smell. I knew that smell as well as I knew myself.
I had no idea how long I’d been standing inside that open door, just staring at the bound image of my ex- husband. A half-second maybe. Or a full minute. Fear warped time, bent it the same way it crippled my insides.
For me, the present moment no longer contained any logic or proportion. I knew I had to do something. What I wanted to do was lift my feet, put one foot in front of the other. I wanted to unbind Michael, rescue him.
But I just stood there doing nothing.
My hesitation must have been exactly what Whalen was counting on when he opened my closet door and stepped out into the bedroom.
Chapter 45
My awakening was as painful as it was sudden.
Michael was gone. Disappeared.
Aside from the sting in my head, his absence was the first thing that caught my attention.
There remained only my cell which had been removed from my jeans pocket, set on the wood floor directly before my eyes. There was a throbbing pain in my head and an egg-sized lump protruding from my forehead directly above my right eye. I touched the lump with the fingers on my right hand only to pull them back quick from the sting.
For the moment, I didn’t quite know where I was. Rather, I knew where I was, but I couldn’t be sure if I had entered into one of my vivid dreams. Had my dreaming progressed from hearing his voice to actually hearing the man; seeing him; smelling him; feeling him? I breathed, tried my hardest to calm myself; tried to focus on ending the dream, going back to sleep.
I wanted it to be morning.
I wanted to wake up to sunshine, to my routine. But every time I closed my eyes, I opened them again to the reality of the moment. All objects inside my periphery were blurry, distorted, depth-of-field spinning, pulsing like an out of control video camera.
Pushing myself up off an exposed hardwood floor, I sat up and felt a great weight inside my head. The throw rug that had covered the floor was gone. I saw the empty place that Michael had occupied in the bed. All that remained now were the crumpled bed sheets, the discarded shirt tossed to the floor.
I pulled the bedroom door open, ran out into the hall. That’s when the cell phone exploded in loud, bursting pulses. Whalen must have adjusted the ringer setting.
Running back into the bedroom, I picked the phone up from off the floor and put it to my ear. But there was no sound coming through the earpiece. In the place of a voice came a notice for a new text.
I thumbed OK on the keypad.
The text appeared on the radiant face of the phone.
Do not run little kitten. Do not call the police. Do not speak. Break the rules and Michael dies. Cry, cry, cry.
I pressed the phone back up against my head.
“Where’s Michael?” I screamed.
Heart pulsing inside my throat, I waited for an answer. A voice. But then I remembered to pull the phone away from my ear, stare down at the screen. The answer revealed itself in the form of another text.
Little kitten broke the rules. Cry. Cry. Cry.
Chapter 46
I felt on the verge of fainting. My breathing became rapid and forced.
I made my way back into the bathroom, yanked up the shade and stared out the window onto the parking lot. Blue and black clouds filled the sky. The occasional flicker of distant lightning lit them up. The usual cars were parked in the lot, including Michael’s truck. From where I stood it was impossible for me to see my Cabriolet.
Turning, I held the phone back up to my face, staring down at the display panel. I thumbed the command that would reveal Whalen’s number. The caller ID came back, “Restricted Number.” With trembling fingers I began to dial 9-1-1.
But before I fingered the second number in the sequence, I stopped myself cold.
I stared out into the thickening darkness and the silence of the apartment. What if the police come to my home? Whalen must be watching me. He must have been watching me now for weeks; months. What will he do when he sees the police car? What kind of revenge will he take out on Michael?
All strength seeped out of me. My hand and the phone it gripped fell to the side. I had no idea which way to turn for help. Not without getting Michael killed in the process.
I sensed someone behind me.
I knew he was there before I actually saw him. Something inside my brain went click. My eyes rolled back
