as a ghost.”
“I’m going to duct tape your mouth until you start taking this seriously.”
“Fine, but it will be hard for me to answer your questions if my mouth is duct taped. I could probably mumble through it, but it wouldn’t be coherent. Once, when I was a kid, I started playing with my dad’s handcuffs and cuffed my ankle to the water meter outside. It was raining, freezing cold, and there I was, unable to move. It took three hours before someone came to unlock me. I thought I was going to die of hypothermia and exposure.”
“Your father is a cop?”
“No, he was a detective, until he died. He took a shotgun blast to the chest while in a gas station. He went in to buy a lottery ticket. Some junkie walked in to rob the place. When he saw my father’s gun he just started shooting. Ironically, the ticket was a winner. My mom collected the life insurance, the winning lottery money, and his pension. What makes it even more ironic is that my mom was just about to leave him because he was a real jerk. Instead of a divorce, she got eighty-four million dollars. I thought it was a nice consolation prize for putting up with him all those years. She bought a new house, a new car, and retired. She’s still living quite well off the proceeds of that. She even used part of it to put me through college. Some people are just lucky. Mom has always been that way.”
“You’re babbling again.”
My eyelids finally loosened and opened. Not far, just far enough to see some light and shadows. Definitely an improvement over my previous state. Slowly, they adjusted to the light. I could see the man who had been talking. He stood about six feet from me, looking indecisive.
“Sorry, I just like to talk. My friends all complain that I either talk too much or not enough. I’m shy in big groups of people. I tend to sit like a fly on the wall, just listening. But one on one, I can hold up my end of any conversation and the other persons. I’ve….”
“Not another monologue.”
“Oh, monologue, that’s a big word. That’s the other thing they complain about. No one actually talks like that. Well, no one but me. I’m always using big words that others have to look…”
“I am supposed to do the talking.”
“That’s another lame line,” I muttered. “Fine with me. What would you like to talk about?” There was a method to my madness. A tracking device was hidden in my shoe. If I distracted him long enough, I wouldn’t be tortured, and I really didn’t want to be tortured. Plus, a person did have trouble torturing you, if they thought you were human.
He skulked over to me and pushed my head down. I stared at my knees and his shoes. My knees were kind of bloody, and I wondered if it was mine. I didn’t feel hurt, but I was also pretty high on adrenaline.
“Your shoes aren’t laced the same.” I commented. Better to stare at his shoes than the blood.
“What?” The exasperation came through in his voice.
“Your shoes, they are laced different. It looks funny.”
“Why does it matter how I lace my shoes?”
“Well, if you laced your shoes the exact same way it would show that you cared about your shoes. See, my shoes are laced exactly the same, left lace over right all the way up. They have the same length sti…”
“I’m beginning to think you’re insane.”
“That’s technically a legal definition, not a mental health definition. I might have a personality disorder or two, but I am clearly not stark raving mad. I’m…”
“Shut up!” He hit me on the side of my head. For a few seconds, pretty lights exploded in my skull and it throbbed, then everything cleared again. “Jesus Christ, how did I get stuck with you?”
“Hey, you picked.”
“It was rhetorical!” He sighed. “I want some information. Will you please give it to me without a fight?”
“I don’t know, I keep trying to talk, but you keep interrupting me. How do you know I won’t say something important if you never let me finish talking? I mean I don’t know what information you want. How do you even know I have the info?”
“Shut up.”
“How am I supposed to answer your questions if you keep telling me to shut up or you interrupt me? Is this the first time you’ve interrogated someone? If not, I think you’re in the wrong line of business. I mean, if I was going to interrogate someone, this is not the way I’d go about it. Maybe you should go rehearse what you want ask. You don’t seem to have your thoughts organized enough to do a proper interrogation.” He hit me again. It hurt, but then so did being tackled by six Great Danes and I survived that every day, a couple of punches to the face was easy.
“All right, Ms. Daniels, I’m going to ask you some questions. I want you to answer in short, brief statements, and you aren’t going to deviate. If you deviate, I’m going to continue to hurt you. If I think you’re lying, I’m going to hurt you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but I make no promises to stay on topic. You seem to have a good vocabulary, which will help, because I won’t have to stop and explain certain words. However, feel free to ask if I use one that you don’t know. I don’t want there to be a miscommunication because I overestimated your language skills.”
“Do you know a woman named Amanda Reed?”
“Yes.” I responded flatly. The cavalry was pretty slow today; I hoped they showed up soon.
“Did you help her disappear?”
“Yes.” Yes, seemed to be a pretty good answer, he didn’t hit me. Everyone liked hearing the word yes.
“Where did you send her?”
For a second, the wheels in my head turned, trying to find a city.
“Bogotá, Colombia.” It popped out before I could stop it. Why I would relocate someone to the cocaine capital of the world was beyond even my imagination. It was obviously beyond my captor’s too, he frowned at me. His eyebrows drawing together, his forehead wrinkling. He stared, puzzled for a moment.
“You sent her to Bogotá?”
“Yep.” Might as well go with it now. Had I seen a movie or TV show about Bogotá recently? I couldn’t remember, though it seemed unlikely since my TV was broken.
“Why Bogotá?”
“Would anyone ever think to look for her there?” Of course not, I wouldn’t think to send anyone there either. “Kidnappings, drug lords, corrupt government officials, it’s a writhing cesspool of crime. Why would someone look for a relocationee in Colombia? It probably has a higher crime rate than Miami and Detroit put together. And let me tell you.” Pain exploded in my arm as he hit it with something. It didn’t feel like a fist. “Hey, I’m answering your questions, you can stop doing that. Excuse me if sometimes I get a little side tracked; I have a lot of useless information floating around creating disorganized thoughts.”
“Ms. Daniels, do you think this is some kind of joke?”
“Not really. I imagine you’re pretty serious about your desire to find Amanda and kill me as necessary. That doesn’t mean we have to be uncivilized about it. I’m telling you what I know, and you’re just being an asshole. It makes me want to be less cooperative, especially since you’ve already told me I’m going to die.”
“Fine, Ms. Daniels,” he said through clenched teeth. “Why Bogotá?”
“I’ve already told you. Because no one would think to look for her there.” I shook my head.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why would I lie?” I met his gaze. He had very pretty brown eyes; it was too bad he was obviously a couple cards short of a full deck.
“All women lie, why do they do that?”
“I think it’s too get more presents. See, if you lie...” Pain exploded in my thigh, this time I had seen the glint of metal. “Excuse me, are you stabbing me?”
“What?” The question seemed to take him off guard. I looked at the new spot of pain. Sure enough, it was starting to turn my blue jeans darker in that area.
“Did you just stab
me? Well, imagine that. You aren’t just an asshole, you’re a bastard too. I’m wearing one of my favorite pairs of jeans and you are poking holes in them. I had considered being buried in them, but that’s not going to happen now. Oh no, because you had to get knife happy. The blood can be cleaned up, but the holes cannot be repaired in time for my funeral. That just irritates the hell out of me.”
“You’re going to die anyway, why are you complaining?” He spat the words at me, forcing me to look up at him. Gazing at his face, I remembered it from a photo Alex had taken. The man ruining my clothes was Amanda Reed’s husband.
“Because you could have at least left my favorite pair of jeans alone. I’m not walking around, stabbing holes in your favorite clothes, now am I? So I helped your wife hide. She probably ran away because you started making holes in her favorite clothes too. I have never.” This time he didn’t stab me, he just hit the area already wounded. It should have hurt like hell, but it was only a minor annoyance. I was running on pure adrenaline now; the pain would come when it stopped flowing, but not before then.
“Oh yeah, that’s obviously working.” I rolled my eyes, making sure he noticed.
“What are you mouthing about now?”
“Doesn’t matter. I think you are the one who is clearly insane. I mean let’s just take a moment to think about this. You’ve now stabbed me twice and punched me a couple of more times. All I’m really doing is bleeding onto the floor. It doesn’t seem to be eliciting any