The man squeezing her cheeks shook her face. “Come on. Smile. It’s showtime.”
He had a stocking mask over his head, with holes cut out for the eyes and his mouth. He leaned down and put his face close in front of hers. “Feel free to scream for the camera. After all, you’re the star, and the star always screams.”
Kate was momentarily confused as to whether or not she was awake or asleep in some kind of bizarre dream.
And then he twisted her left nipple until she did scream, an involuntary, helpless cry of pain that felt like it was shrieking up from her soul. The more she screamed, the more he twisted.
The shock of pain brought her wide awake and brought tears to the scream. The sharp agony of it radiated through her entire chest as he kept at it until she was sure he intended to rip it off her breast.
The man finally let go and stepped away from her. Kate shivered, panting under the agony of lingering pain, wanting nothing so much as to be able to put a comforting hand over it.
As her wits came back into focus, she realized that she was in trouble, but she was having a hard time making sense of how she came to be in the dark room.
There was a camera on a tripod not far off in front of her. The red light was blinking. She was being recorded.
Beyond the camera was a dark metal table with a collection of items on it, but she couldn’t tell what any of them were. She looked around and could see little more than a few glimpses of dark walls. There was a closed metal door she could just see over her left shoulder.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded strange, hoarse and dry. “Where am I?”
The man turned back. He grinned. His two middle teeth on the bottom were missing. The rest were a dark yellow. He looked like nothing so much as a homeless derelict.
Something told her he was something else entirely.
“I’m Victor,” he said in a cheerful tone, as if happy to make her acquaintance.
Kate vaguely remembered someone saying that name in their hotel room. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t in the hotel. She could only remember being there.
“Where’s Jack? I need to see him. What have you done with him?”
“Me? Nothing. He is for someone else. You are for me.”
Kate spit blood to the side. It still didn’t seem real. With the way her mind was swimming it felt like some kind of drug-induced hallucination.
“What are you talking about?”
He cocked his head as if she were dense. “Jack Raines is meant for someone else. You, Miss Bishop, are here to entertain me and my audience.”
A wave of dread washed through her when he gestured at the camera.
“Where’s Jack!” Kate screamed at him.
He looked amused. “The founder of our little website has taken him somewhere for a private conversation.”
Website. She realized who Victor was. He was the one who provided date-rape drugs for Sid. It all came rushing in. He was the one who had tortured and killed Rita.
“What are they doing with him?”
She knew it was foolish to ask the question, but she couldn’t help herself, as if it would somehow slow events from their headlong rush.
“Probably pulling his intestines out a foot at a time,” Victor said with a wicked grin, “wrapping them around a stick.” He shrugged again and cocked his head. “Maybe something else just as fun. That’s not up to me. You are the one up to me. You belong to me, now.”
“Why are you doing this to us?”
He shook a finger at her face. “Jack Raines is a dangerous man. You’re nobody. You’re only here to entertain me and my fans. But Jack Raines has outlived his usefulness.”
“What usefulness?” she asked as Victor started toward the camera.
He turned back and smiled. “He thinks he’s so smart. But he has been finding those like you for us without even knowing it.” He cocked his head to the side. “He finds them, just like he found you and your brother, and those before. He finds them, we snatch them.”
Kate suddenly understood. It all came into sharp resolution as all the connections registered.
Now that she was more awake, she tried again to move, but she was helplessly restrained. Kate remembered AJ’s stories of killers and what they had done to their captives. She remembered AJ lying there on the floor with duct tape wrapped around her head, blinding her. Kate’s frantic sense of panic at being so helpless, at what was to come, began to build.
As Victor turned back toward the camera, she remembered what the sifu had said to her that day. If you are attacked, it is because they have the advantage. For you, they will always be bigger, stronger. No one is going to help you, so don’t expect any. You must do everything you can with the bad intention of hurting your enemy.
She didn’t see how she could do that. It seemed like meaningless words.
She knew, though, that if she wanted to live, if she was going to help Jack, then her only chance was to think. No one was going to come to help her.
She looked around again, trying to take everything in, trying to find something helpful. Her vision was still a bit blurred, but starting to clear. It felt like someone was pushing on her eyeballs.
She knew that her arms were tightly bound behind her. By the way her skin pulled, they were probably wrapped with duct tape. It felt like that tape must be wound around the back of the chair. When she had been drugged and limp, Victor had an easy time of restraining her just the way he wanted.
Victor suddenly returned with a pair of pliers. He put a grimy hand on her head and tilted it back.
She tried to twist her face away from him. “What are you doing? Stop it!”
“I’m going to have to take out your teeth.”
Take out her teeth? It sounded insane. Kate twisted her head from side to side.
“No! Stop it!” she yelled.
He slapped her hard and shook the pliers at her face. “I had a girl bite me once when I was in her mouth enjoying myself. That was a bad experience. So now, I always take their teeth out first.” He grinned. “Feels better for me without the teeth. You know? You’ll see how much I enjoy it.”
He came back from the table with a small metal bucket, rattling something in it. He tipped it toward her so she could see inside. It was half full of bloody and broken teeth.
It dawned on her what he was talking about.
After putting the bucket back, he grabbed her hair to hold her head still. He pushed a filthy thumb in her mouth, feeling all of her teeth as if taking inventory. The hand with the thumb in her mouth was holding the pliers. She knew that if she didn’t think, if she didn’t do something, he was going to use that pliers to rip out her teeth. The thought terrified her.
Kate bit down as hard as she could.
Victor cried out in pain. “Let go!”
When she didn’t, he pressed a knuckle of his other hand against the rear of her jawbone. The pain was blinding. She tried to keep biting down on his thumb, knowing that if she let go he would go to work on her teeth with the pliers, but the intense pressure against the back of her jaw was more than she could endure, and it finally forced her mouth open.
“You will pay for that,” he growled, comforting his thumb.
He went to the camera, checking the settings.
While he did, Kate frantically looked around for something, anything, to help her. There was nothing, and besides, she wouldn’t be able to grab it if there was. There could have been a gun in her lap and she wouldn’t be able to use it.
She realized that her left leg ached something fierce. She looked down and saw that she still had her panties on but her legs were bare. There was a tourniquet wrapped tightly around her left leg at midthigh. Below the tourniquet her skin was going purple.
Her arms were duct-taped behind her, but her legs were free. She realized why. With a sickening sense of dread, she remembered Jack describing what had happened to Rita. Kate remembered that it was Victor who had done it, and that he had v
ideoed it for the Scavenger Hunt site.
Kate saw her jeans thrown off to the side. Her knives were in her jeans. They couldn’t do her any good.
Victor tipped the light above her to the side. “See? This is my collection of pretty ladies, like you. They all brought me great satisfaction. Like you will.”
She could just make out half a dozen bags of some kind hanging against the wall. As she squinted, she realized that they were the naked, bloody torsos of women tightly wrapped in plastic. Dismembered limbs were laid against the bodies under the tight plastic wrapping.
Victor let go of the light, letting it swing over her. “After I finish my time with you, you will join my collection. But that’s still days away. We will have plenty of time together. My fans enjoy my shows so much. I want it to last.”
At the thought of what was in store for her, she couldn’t stop her trembling.
Kate could see the red light on the camera blinking. Victor went to the table and threw the pliers down.
He picked up a handsaw.
He returned and knelt down beside her. She could see his murderous eyes through the holes cut in the stocking cap.
“Since you are going to be difficult, I’ll wait to pull your teeth until later, once you’re more cooperative and don’t thrash around as much. Your mouth will be more useful, then.”
His grin was as evil as anything she had ever seen.
Victor gripped her knee in a powerful hand. Try as she might to pull away, he held it still enough for what he wanted. He brought the handsaw up and laid the teeth down against her flesh between her knee and the tourniquet.
He looked up at her with those murderous eyes.
“Drug cartels and the like use a chainsaw for this, but I think that’s silly. That way it’s over so quickly. What fun is that? Better when it goes slow. Better for you to feel every saw cut, one cut at a time. One scream for each.”
Kate could tell by his voice how excited he was getting.
She remembered Jack telling her how Victor had sawed off Rita’s legs just above the knee as she had screamed.
Kate started crying in helpless panic.
“No. Please, no.”
He paused to look up at her. “But I have to.”
“No,” Kate wept, “you don’t have to. Please.”
“Yes, I do,” he said as he turned a grin toward the camera. “Having sex with you will be so much better once your legs are off, and I pull your teeth.”
He laid the teeth of the saw back on her leg and cocked his arm back.
Kate screamed.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN
Kate panted so hard as she screamed in panic that she was choking on her own spit.
Through her panic, some part of her that wanted to live forced her to think. Begging a killer was what all victims did. They always begged. Always. It never helped. Killers wanted their victims to beg, to scream, to cry in terror.
If there was something she could do that might save her, it wasn’t going to be begging. If she didn’t do something, she and Jack were both going to die.
As hard as it was, she forced herself to stop begging.
“Your camera just went off,” she said.
Victor paused before taking the first saw cut and frowned up at her. “What?”
“Your camera just shut off,” Kate said through gasping tears. “The battery must be dead. Your audience is going to miss this.”
Victor shielded his eyes from the overhead light as he tried to see the camera. Kate could just make out the red light flickering, but for some reason he couldn’t see it, or maybe her suggestion was enough to make him fear she was right.
He rose up and walked across the room to the camera.
Kate’s arms were taped tightly behind her back, taped to the old wooden chair, but her bare legs were free. He wanted them free so he could saw them off. He wanted her to struggle and kick while he cut them off. He liked his victim to struggle.
As Victor fiddled with the camera, cursing to himself, trying to check if it was working, Kate swung her legs, rocking the chair onto its front two legs. She took one more big rock and rolled forward until she was standing on her feet. She was bent over at the waist, with the chair taped to her back, but she was standing. All the sharp grit was painful under her bare feet.
She remembered what Jack had done.
Without a moment’s hesitation, and with every ounce of her strength, she raced across the room toward the camera. At the last instant she sprang up, throwing her right leg around Victor’s head as she violently spun her body around.
The momentum yanked his head around. The collision and her weight drove him to the ground as she twisted herself in a circle with her leg still locked around his head. She felt his neck snap just before they crashed to the floor.
Kate lay on her side a moment catching her breath, right leg locked around his neck, triumphant.
Not wanting to waste any time, she extricated herself and struggled to her feet again, then raced backwards, smashing the chair into the wall. The wood splintered. She hit the wall twice again until the chair broke. The bottom of the chair came off, but her arms were still taped together to the remainder of the chair back.
Kate ran across the room, dropped to her knees, and slid to a stop by the saw next to Victor. After three tries with her fingertips, she managed to tip the saw so that the teeth faced up. She held the end of the saw tight between her bare knees, straddling the saw blade, and raked the duct tape around her wrists against the teeth, tearing it apart. Once she had enough of it cut through, she was able to wrench her arms in a way that tore the tape. In a few minutes more she had the tape off her arms.
Kate removed the tourniquet, pulled on her jeans and socks, and quickly put on her shoes. She didn’t waste a second to congratulate herself. Instead, she opened the door on the side of the camera and pulled out the SD card. She put it in her pocket. As she crossed the room she pulled the little flashlight Jack had given her out of her back pocket.
Opening the door just a crack, she carefully peeked out. She didn’t see anyone, so she slipped through. There were no lights on, leaving the mysterious place in the dark. By the looks of everything revealed by the flashlight, she was in a basement. As she came upon rolling steel doors, she pulled them aside. She pushed chain-link gates open as she frantically moved through the basement, searching all the grimy rooms and storage areas, looking for Jack, all the while her sense of dread rising by the moment.
Even as she ran through the empty basement, she began to realize that he wasn’t in the same building. This was Victor’s slaughterhouse. Jack would have been taken somewhere else.
The place was an immense, filthy, confusing maze. Plastic sectioned off portions, making it more confusing. She couldn’t find a stairway up or a way out.
Kate eventually found a window covered in bars up high. Outside she could see only a dark alley and the corner of a Dumpster. The window was too high to reach. She cast about, looking for something she could drag closer, but there wasn’t anything she could use to stand on.
She didn’t know what to do. She was growing more frantic by the moment. She put her back against a wall and slid down, putting her head in her hands as she started to cry in fright for Jack. How was she going to find him? How was she going to help him?
Stricken with a sudden idea, she pulled out the burner phone Jack had given her. She stared at it a moment, crying, trying to think. She pushed the first speed-dial number. She wiped her tears with the back of her other wrist as she listened to the phone ring once, twice. Then someone answered.
“Yes?” a voice asked.
“Please! I need help! I need to talk to, to, Dvora! I need to talk to Dvora! It’s an emergency!”
“Code in.”
Kate made a fist as she screamed. “I don’t know the code! I don’t know it! Jack Raines is in trouble! They’re going to kill him! I need help!”
“Code in.”
“I
don’t know any code! I only heard Jack say the name Dvora Art-something!”
“Who is this?”
“Kate Bishop! I’m Kate Bishop! I’m the one who saw the guy with the bomb at O’Hare Airport! He called this number to get help! Please, they’re going to kill him. I need help. Please help me … please …”
“Hold.”
As Kate held the phone to her ear, she gave in to weeping as she waited, not knowing if they were going to help her or not, not knowing if they could.
“This is Dvora Artzi,” a woman abruptly said.
Kate jumped to her feet. “I’m Kate Bishop! Help me! They’re going to kill Jack! I need help! Please!”
“Jack?”
“Jack Raines!”
“You are the one who said that you saw someone with a bomb at O’Hare Airport?”
“Yes! A man went on an Air France plane. I’m the one who saw him and told Jack. He called you.”
“What kind of bomb did he have?”
Kate grabbed a fistful of hair, hardly able to control her rage. “It was surgically implanted in him. The bomb was inside his abdomen. When you were on the phone with Jack I described the bomber and told you he had a bomb inside him.”
“I remember you, Kate. What’s wrong? Tell me.”
Kate momentarily gave in to a cry of relief. She wiped her nose on her hand as she composed herself in order to talk.
“Jack and I came to New York City. We went to the hotel. We were drugged. I woke up in a basement duct-taped to a chair with a killer who was going to saw off my legs.”
“How did you get away?”
“I broke the bastard’s neck. I managed to get free but I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where they’re holding Jack. The guy who had me said that they were going to kill him.”
“Who is ‘they’? Do you know?”
“I think it’s a woman named Shannon Blare. She’s the editor for his book. We came here to see her about his new book.”
There was a brief pause. “All right, I want you to listen carefully to me, Kate. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” Kate sucked back a sob. “Just please help me find him before they kill him. Please.”