“Pink, okay to move.” I raised an eyebrow at Ana. “A ball gag?”
“I thought it was yours.”
“Mine?”
“I found it in the trunk of the Porsche. I wasn’t going to say anything, but…”
“No, it’s not fucking mine.”
“Then whose…?”
Did my husband have a whole other dark side I was previously unaware of? No. No way. What about Carmen? Nate borrowed Black’s car sometimes. Hmm… I couldn’t see it. Dan wouldn’t dare to take the Porsche for a spin, not after she’d managed to write off Black’s Humvee a few years back. Who else? Ah… Sofia. She’d used it to drive to Virginia Beach with her boyfriend last month, and she did have a dark side.
“Fia,” I mouthed, and Ana snorted.
Carmen appeared with Race in tow, and we arranged the three amigos face down on the platform. A whole roll of duct tape later, we had them trussed up like mummies, and I turned to face the people on the train. Apart from the occasional gasp and some sobs, they’d followed orders and stayed silent.
“Sorry about this interruption to your day, folks. We’ll be leaving in a minute. Does anybody need medical attention?”
A few people mumbled “no,” and the rest shook their heads.
“Great. We’ll call the cops on our way out, and they’ll be along shortly. All you have to do is tell them what happened.”
Dan had been fumbling round in the control booth, and with a bit of guidance from Mack, she managed to release Trick’s and Vine’s restraints.
“Ready, guys?”
They didn’t move. Why not?
One of the other riders came to life. “You can’t do this!”
“You won’t be here for long, and it’s for your own safety.”
“Let them go!” a girl yelled.
Huh? Let them go? Not us?
“She’s gonna die,” somebody else shouted.
The protests kept coming.
“Don’t be so mean.”
“Leave them alone.”
“Go away.”
Something hit me in the shoulder. I looked down and saw a hair clip. Then a coin landed next to me, and a moment later, we were being pelted with everything from souvenir dinosaurs to cigarettes those kids should not have been smoking. Even a girl who’d obviously been crying threw a roll of Life Savers at me, and she looked pissed.
What the actual hell?
“Enough!” I bellowed. The throwing of projectiles ceased, probably because I was holding a gun. I pointed at Trick. “Explain. These men were threatening you, yes?”
“Yeah, but just before you showed up, the guy said he was only doing it so he could save his daughter. Like, he apologised.”
He apologised? Gee, that was fine then.
“How does holding you hostage save his daughter? The first guy we caught said they wanted drugs.”
One of the other kids spoke up. “Yeah, idiot. For his daughter.”
The insult barely registered because suddenly I understood. Sacker. Bio-D. Ah, fuck. Had these fools kidnapped the two Sacker girls to force Pharma Daddy to hand over drugs his company made—probably for pennies—and sold at some exorbitant price? Big pharmaceutical companies could charge whatever they wanted, and people had no choice but to pay it.
I rolled Jeffrey over. “Is this true? You need drugs to save your sick daughter?”
He nodded, and I resisted the urge to facepalm. Instead, I unbuckled the ball gag.
“For the love of all that’s holy, do you people not understand how ransom demands work? If you ask for a particular drug, then all the cops have to do is phone around the hospitals until they find whoever needed it, and then they’ll track back and arrest you.”
Jeffrey stared at me, unblinking. “I don’t care. I’ll go to jail if it saves my daughter. This is her last chance. The doctors said she’ll die unless she gets treated in the next week. A cycle of Cytoblin costs five hundred thousand dollars, and she’ll need two cycles at least.”
“What does Cytoblin treat?”
“Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.”
“Hey, I saw something about that in my research,” Mack told me. “A course of Cytoblin used to cost fifty thousand bucks, but Bio-D bought the patent and hiked the price tenfold.”
Flaming Nora. What a bloody mess.
“You still can’t go around…” I was about to say “waving guns at people,” but then I realised I still had my Walther in my hand. Shit. I shoved it back into its holster. “Sick child or not, you can’t just terrorise members of the public.”
“I wouldn’t have hurt anyone.”
“He wouldn’t,” a kid called out. “He promised.”
“My sister had cancer,” a girl said. “It’s horrible.”
“What if he asked for money instead of the drugs?” another teenager suggested. “Then the cops couldn’t find him.”
I felt a headache coming on. “Hello? He held Sacker’s daughters hostage.”
“We won’t tell anyone it was him,” Isolde said. “Our dad’s an asshole.”
“We’ll all say they weren’t here,” a boy with floppy hair offered. “Won’t we?”
A chorus of yeses echoed back.
“They posted their whereabouts on fuckin’ Instagram,” Dan pointed out. “The whole damn world knows they’re here.”
Ana started laughing. Sometimes, she had a really warped sense of humour.
“It’s not bloody funny.”
“Da, eto tak. It’s hilarious.”
“It is kind of funny,” Carmen said. “You said today would be boring, and now the bad guys are the good guys, and the victim is practically a criminal, and there are monkeys everywhere.”
Welcome to my life. MC Escher meets Hieronymus Bosch.
“What if I just give these people the money myself?” I suggested. “Then we can go back to the bar.”
“Throw cash at the problem? Where’s the fun in that?” Ana asked.
I leaned against a railing with my head in my hands. How could a straightforward rescue have gone so wrong? Much as I hated to admit it, the others had valid points, and I really couldn’t stand David Sacker and his ilk. I was nobody’s little fucking lady.
“Does anyone have family waiting for them outside?” I asked the teenagers. “People who’ll start looking for you?”
One kid raised his hand. Guess the other parents all took the sensible option and stayed at
