HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) Read online

  “Hunter, I’m begging you to trust me,” said Ash nearly in a whisper. His whole body was tense.

  “Hunter,” said Twitch in a low tone, as the cop stepped passed his window.

  Quickly, she slipped the gun back into her purse, but kept the opening flap loose and her hand nearby. If he indicated at all that they were suspects in the Brooklyn murders, if he so much as asked them to step out of the vehicle, Hunter would not hesitate to kill. Images of her nightmare came to mind, swirling and overlapping chaotically. She tried to shake them, focusing on what she knew about Grizzly. He was manipulative, that much was certain, but he kept his word. He had said they had until Sunday, that Blair would remain unharmed until then, and she had to trust he was being honest. She had to trust him at his word. How insane was that? To trust a monster was such an impossible proposition, and yet deep down she knew she could. She sensed Blair was fine, scared but fine. So long as Hunter got there in time, the real threat would fall on Hunter and her alone. She had to get there, to put herself in harm’s way, switching Blair out from the chopping block. That was the only thing that mattered. This cop was not going to stand in Hunter’s way.

  Just as the police officer raised his arm preparing to tap on Ash’s window, Ash rolled it down.

  “License and registration,” said the officer with zero intonation in his voice. The reflective aviator sunglasses made it impossible to see the cop’s eyes. Ash had no way of gauging if this was a casual pullover or a serious attempt to apprehend two killers. At least the cop was moving slowly. It was also favorable that he was alone, no partner waited for him in the passenger’s seat of the squad car. Hunter’s gun crossed Ash’s mind. He wasn’t about to kill a cop and seal his fate to spend the rest of his life in prison, but it would get them out of this if things went south. He couldn’t let Hunter do it, though. If anyone took on the risk, it would have to be Ash.

  Ash extracted his license from his wallet after fumbling through its myriad folds, buying time. He had no idea where the car’s registration was, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that even if he located it and handed it over, it would clearly state the name of the vehicle’s owner, and Ash would have a lot of explaining to do.

  “May I ask why you pulled us over, Officer?” he asked, again attempting to buy time.

  As Ash eagerly anticipated the cop’s response, hoping to engage him into any degree of conversation that would help humanize Ash and possibly gain the cop’s sympathy, Hunter searched through a mess of papers in the glove compartment. It was mostly receipts, trash, and the like. She kept at it in search of the car’s registration.

  “I’ll need the vehicle’s registration,” said the officer repeating himself, but this time in an aggravated tone.

  “Yes, Sir,” responded Ash quickly. “We’re getting it now.”

  The officer leaned down, observing Hunter on the other side of the car as she searched in a frantic manner. He then began eyeing Twitch in the back seat.

  Twitch knew cops generally did not like him. It was as though they would look at the gradient mohawk, beaten up denim jacket with its arsenal of punk band patches, and his plethora of piercings and tattoos, and instantly pegged him as trouble. It was an instinctive, knee-jerk type reaction. No one needed that kind of problem right now, so Twitch made a concerted effort to glance away, avoiding eye contact, as the cop stared.

  Hunter came across a faded piece of paper that was most definitely the car’s registration. In clear black ink, she read: Lorne Mann after the words “registered to.”

  Hunter nearly stopped breathing. Her heart sank into her stomach, and bile and dread crept up her throat, clipping her words, choking them in.

  She looked at Ash. Her eyes conveyed her panic. It was no longer just a question, a sense of doubt. Hunter had no idea how they would ever get out of this.

  Ash wanted to remind her to breathe. He wanted to tell her that the officer had no right to collect her I.D., or Twitch’s for that matter. The officer didn’t have to find out who she was. Ash would take the fall for all of it and wouldn’t give her up. But he couldn’t say any of that. Not with the police officer leaning on his windowsill, growing less and less patient.

  Ash took the registration from Hunter and at long last handed it along with his license to the police officer.

  “Wait here,” said the officer before heading back to his squad car.

  When he was beyond earshot, and Ash saw him open the driver’s side door and climb in, Ash turned to Hunter. “If he asks for your I.D. don’t give it to him. Say you lost it. You aren’t Hunter Mann.”

  “Okay,” said Hunter. “Did you see the registration? This is my dad’s car. What should we do?”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said Ash.

  “Yes, there is,” said Hunter. “I can shoot him.”

  “You aren’t going to do that,” he said, locking eyes with her. “Let me determine if that needs to happen and if it does, I’ll be the one to do it. Remember, you aren’t Hunter Mann.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  They sat in silence for a long moment. The seconds passed so painfully slow that they felt like minutes. The minutes felt like hours. From Hunter’s vantage point, it looked as though the cop was speaking, perhaps into some kind of radio, but she couldn’t be certain.

  “God, what is taking so long?” she whispered.

  “Stay calm,” said Ash, who was also watching the police officer like a hawk through the rearview mirror.

  But she couldn’t stay calm. Her heart was racing, beating so hard she could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. She wanted to jump out of the car and open fire until the cop was dead. She wanted to run across the fields, into the woods, the mountains and disappear forever. She wanted to drive off, losing the cop, and get on with her dark plans. She wanted to do anything but sit here, waiting, with no control, no knowledge of what was taking place in the squad car behind them.

  Ash straighten up, stiffening in his seat, at the first sign the officer was getting out of the squad car. Ash’s stomach churned, a tight ball of nerves. He realized he had been gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had turned white. He lowered his hands to his lap and focused on relaxing his jaw. The tension was unbearable, but he had to try to look calm, at ease, casual.

  “Everything okay, Officer?” he asked when the cop appeared at his window.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the vehicle. All of you.”

  * * *

  The barn was dark, the air heavy with the sharp scent of bleach intermingling with the dull tang of iron, blood. Grizzly’s steel tipped boots clapped against the wooden slats, which made up the floor of the barn, as he spread fistfuls of hay across the ground, covering a large dark stain. He would need to replace those slats of wood eventually, but for now they would do. He could make them last until Sunday.

  He paused for a moment, having laid enough hay across the floor to mask the intense bleach smell. Hay had a dry, dusty scent he had always liked. He would have to consider a way of making the wooden table a hay bed. There had to be a way to do it. The hay would absorb blood nicely, making the cleanup efforts afterwards less involved. Ideally, the men were supposed to effectively wash away all evidence, DNA, all traces of the girl who had performed here immediately after the event, but that goal had gone unrealized. Often there wasn’t enough time, enough cleaning supplies, enough determination to rid the barn of such traces. It seemed a futile effort anyhow. No matter how well they cleaned today, there would always be another performance tomorrow. Cleaning up after had become a Sisyphean task in that sense. No one wanted to be Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a mountain over and over again to no end, to no award, to no rest.

  So the hay would have to do.

  He looked up, squinting against the rays of sunlight that streaked through the barn. The sun had a way of piercing through the long cracks in the barn’s side where the wooden slat failed to meet flush against one another. Hangi
ng from the wooden beams that supported the four walls of the barn were thick rustic chains. Large meat hooks were attached to the lowest rungs of the chains. It was gruesome he knew, but no more gruesome than what farmers did to cows. The trick, the secret, the rule, and the reason he had never been caught in all these years, especially the last few after so many girls had escaped, was because of the gruesomeness. It had to be gruesome, horrific, grotesque or else the girls would remember. A child’s mind was designed to block out and forget the horrors survived. Therefore things had to be horrific. It was the only way, and Grizzly had seen firsthand that it worked.

  He batted a hook and watched it swing this way and that.

  In just two days he would orchestrate the performance of a lifetime. No one was better equipped to put on a show than his daughter. The event would go down in history as the most disturbing and inhumane assault ever conducted on a person, he would make sure of it.

  Grizzly couldn’t wait.

  Without warning the barn door, broad and rickety, rolled back, and one of his men, Garry, stepped in.

  “You got a phone call,” said Garry in an apologetic tone. “You need me to finish anything up in here?”

  Grizzly eyed him up and down. Garry was soft. Grizzly missed the good old days when his men were stone cold without a shred of compassion for the girls. He missed the days when he had created those kinds of men. Men like Dale, Travis, and Thomas. Garry was too gentle. He lacked camaraderie with the other men, and tended towards visiting the girls alone, tenderly, deluding himself into believing they liked it, liked him, would like all of it if only they were handled gently. It was infuriating. Garry should’ve died in Brooklyn that day, not Dale, not Travis, not Thomas.

  Hunter deserved to be punished for all she’d done.

  Patience.

  “Do what you can to disinfect these hooks,” he said to Garry. “I might want to take my daughter off the hook and let her struggle for life for a few days. I don’t want an infection to kill her. Killing her will be by my hand, and my hand only.”

  Garry swallowed hard, looking up at the hooks.

  “Alcohol is on the table with the bleach,” said Grizzly before stepping through the barn door and out into the sunny late afternoon.

  As he made his way across the field to the farmhouse not fifty yards away, Grizzly considered at what stage of panic Hunter was grappling. He knew that his anonymous tips to the police had likely gone heavily scrutinized and yet he trusted that the detective had received word and followed up.

  He found it extremely interesting that Detective Sarah Voss had been assigned to this case. Grizzly had done his fair share of research tracking Sarah Voss, keeping tabs on her career, her progress in cases, even her personal life. Though he couldn’t know for sure, Grizzly was confident that Voss would make it here as well, hot on Hunter’s trail, and that his plan would be complete. He hoped to see her.

  Inside the farmhouse den, Grizzly picked up the receiver, placing it gingerly to his ear.

  “This is Lorne Mann,” he said, making his tone intentionally pleasant sounding.

  “This is the Belknap County police department,” said a woman’s voice on the other end of the phone. “We’re calling about your vehicle, the brown Ford sedan.”

  “What about it?” he asked when the woman paused for longer than usual.

  “The vehicle was discovered after the local police pulled it over for speeding. This is a courtesy call because the driver was not Lorne Mann,” she said.

  “Who’s driving my car?” he asked frankly.

  “Asher Kane, Sir,” she answered.

  “I see,” said Grizzly. “Has the vehicle been associated with any other mishaps?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that, Sir,” she said.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Would you like the officer to apprehend the driver? Would you like to come and collect your vehicle?” he asked.

  “No,” he answered flatly. “That won’t be necessary. I permitted Asher Kane to drive my car.”

  “Very well, Sir,” she said.

  “Tell me,” said Grizzly. “Where is the car now?”

  “In Sanbornton, on one of the back roads, nearly in Franklin, Sir.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” he said.

  “You have a good afternoon.”

  Grizzly hung up the phone.

  Hunter was going to be early.

  And she hadn’t killed Ash.

  This would be harder than he expected, but not impossible, just interesting.

  Grizzly liked when things got interesting.

  * * *

  Hunter, Ash, and Twitch stood outside of the dark sedan, waiting for the cop to do whatever it was he was doing inside his squad car.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ash into Hunter’s ear, as he took hold of her hand.

  “What do you mean, ‘don’t worry’? I’m panicking,” she said, as she stole her hand away, tucking it under her folded arms. “He had my I.D. He knows who we all are, Ash.”

  “But he doesn’t know how we connect to what happened in New York because this isn’t Dale’s car. It’s your dad’s. And until they connect Dale to your dad…”

  “Which they will,” she interrupted, her voice shrill with anxiety. “They will, Ash. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “How do you know that?” he challenged. “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m being realistic,” she said before sarcastically adding, “You should give it a try sometime.”

  All of a sudden, Hunter noticed a gray sedan on the horizon. It was heading towards them, hopefully just a mere passing vehicle of no importance. But as it approached, slowing down, the anxiety in Hunter’s stomach bubbled up into a form of dread so gripping it took her breath away.

  “That car looks familiar,” said Twitch, who watched it with an unwavering, nervous gaze, as the car pulled off to the shoulder just ahead of them.

  Hunter had noted two people in the gray car, a woman driver and a portly old man in the passenger’s seat.

  “Who the fuck are they?” she asked Ash.

  But it was Twitch who answered. “I think it’s the cop that showed up at your place,” he said.

  “We’re not going to make it out of this,” she said to Ash.

  He wanted to say she was wrong, but whatever optimism he had been hanging on to had eroded significantly. His hope dangled by a thread.

  “Kill or be killed,” whispered Hunter, gaining an immediate response from Ash.

  “It doesn’t work like that, not with this crowd. You know that. If we kill three cops, forget it. We’ll get the death penalty, and this in New Hampshire. They still hang people from the trees,” he said.

  Suddenly he realized his hand was on his back, reaching for his gun. He shouldn’t have this on him. At least the weapons in the trunk of the car could be argued, written off as Lorne Mann’s, since the vehicle belonged to him and everyone knew that. But having a weapon on his person would not bode well in his favor if they all got patted-down.

  “We have to ditch our weapons,” said Ash.

  “Forget it,” said Hunter, gripping at her purse that was hanging heavy from the gun stowed within it.

  “If they get us for something petty -” he began, but Hunter interrupted him.

  “I said forget it,” she said. “I’m telling you right now, if this doesn’t turn around in our favor immediately, if any of these cops tell us to turn around, I’m ending them.”

  Ash pressed his mouth into a hard line. He believed her. And he knew he couldn’t stop her.

  “Here they come,” said Twitch, nodding towards the gray car ahead of them.

  Sarah Voss stepped out of her car, but keep her gaze forward, hesitating to not to look back at the girl, Hunter Mann.

  Hunter looked so small, standing there next to her male accomplice, and another kid, a scrawny male punk-type.

  It was beginning to hit Sarah, the magnitude of her hopes, the d
epths of her fears. Hunter Mann was a lost soul, a survivor, Sarah could tell. She sensed it even though she had to admit she didn’t know everything about Hunter there was to know. For some reason, a reason only Sarah knew, a reason Sarah guarded close to her vest, she felt an immense sense of pride when she saw Hunter standing there.

  She took a deep breath, readying herself to approach Hunter, but Linden stopped her.

  “Can I speak with her alone?” asked Sarah, meeting her partner’s gaze. “This isn’t the time for good cop, bad cop.”

  Linden glared at her, annoyed.

  “We’re not supposed to be here. The Lieutenant doesn’t know we left the borough. Even if we grilled her and got everything we needed, we wouldn’t be able to use it,” Sarah shut her mouth. She was making too many arguments. It was coming across as needy or desperate or just plain sad.

  “You don’t get it, Voss,” he said. “She’s a stupid kid. If we put it to her the right way she’ll probably let us give her a ride back to Brooklyn for a full confession.”

  “The fact that you assume she’s guilty is reason enough that I should talk to her alone.”

  Linden rolled his eyes.

  “We don’t need a confession. We need information. That’s how we need to look at this.”

  “No, Voss, we need to look at this from the standpoint that I’m retiring soon and my last case could bring on a world of glory. Think about it. It’s time to be a team player. We’re cracking open a serial murderer, and she has an accomplice. This is worthy of national news. Let’s get these motherfuckers.”

  “It’s my call,” said Sarah. “Wait here.”

  Linden sighed a deep exhale, shaking his head.

  “I got Ringdings in the glove box,” said Sarah. “Have a snack.”

  “You’re an asshole, Voss,” he said, reluctant to back down.

  Sarah watched her partner gaze back and study Hunter for a long moment, narrowing his eyes, acting as though he could smell her guilt. But eventually he acquiesced and lowered himself back down into the passenger’s seat.

  Sarah turned away. The squad car caught her eye. The police officer was still behind the steering wheel, dealing with some kind of phone call. Good, she had time.