And that didn’t even have to apply to being kidnapped. Say you’re a single girl who doesn’t have anyone at home to help you get out of overly restrictive clothing. Say it’s been a really hard day and you’ve maybe even had one or two glasses of wine. You’re trying to get ready for bed, you’re so tired you can hardly see straight, and bam, you can’t get out of your skirt because the zipper’s stuck and there’s no one there to help you.
See what I mean? Menaces.
No, that last example didn’t have anything to do with the current situation. But it was still a valid point.
I huffed my way back up into the passenger seat, my gaze intent on the world around us. We were on the freeway now, I saw, and that meant that we were probably going somewhere relatively far from here. Not San Jose, at least I didn’t think so. If we’d be staying in town, why the van? Why all the drama? Why not just have the clients—whoever they were—come and meet him at what he claimed was his apartment?
Then I saw that we were on the 130, heading east. There was nothing east of San Jose. A bunch of smaller towns. Wine country. Lots of horse ranches.
I didn’t exactly have any experience with being kidnapped, but I couldn’t imagine a syndicate that specialized in something like kidnapping running its operation out of a vineyard. Seemed like an awfully weird combination, if you asked me. And being out in the middle of the country would surely hamper their ability to find new victims.
It would also mean they were isolated—which, theoretically, would make them easier to find. If I were a kidnapper—or a syndicate that dealt with things like kidnapping—I’d want to do business in a city. Someplace where the kidnapper could get lost in the crowd. Someplace where a group of people could meet for an exchange of a victim without drawing too many curious glances.
Of course, what did I know? I wasn’t a kidnapper. Or a kidnapping syndicate.
So I stored our direction away to mull on later and started asking questions. Because if I was going to figure out how to get out of this, I needed to start doing it sooner rather than later. Yeah, I had left a shoe in the parking lot of his apartment. But that was going to take an awfully long time to pay any dividends—if it did at all. Far more likely I was out one very expensive shoe for no reason.
But that didn’t change the fact that wherever we were going, I had no intention of getting there. I wanted out while we were still in the Bay Area.
“Why me?” I asked, leading off with the most direct question I could think of.
I saw Jack’s gaze slide toward me, but his face remained expressionless. “I’m not the one who makes the decisions for the syndicate. I just do what they tell me to. Grab who they want me to grab.”
“Doesn’t seem like a very rewarding way to live your life,” I noted, pushing on something I’d noticed about him. Because I didn’t think he actually was that guy. I’d spent much of my career learning how to judge people, and getting pretty freaking good at it.
And I would have bet good money on Jack being a much softer person than he pretended to be. After all, he was the one who’d thought to bring me sweats and flip-flops for the drive. And I didn’t think his crime bosses had told him to do that.
Judging by the color he’d bought—plain gray—and the size—definitely too large, which he should have been able to tell from whatever bio I assumed they gave him about me—he also didn’t shop for female kidnapping victims often.
He shifted uncomfortably. “Pays the bills,” he responded gruffly.
“Hm. A lot of other things do, too,” I noted quietly. “How’s the money in kidnapping, anyhow? Better than your standard nine-to-five?”
“Don’t try to head-shrink me, Alice,” he said, a note of warning in his voice. “Because I promise it won’t work.”
“Why would you think I was doing that? I was just asking a question. Doing research.” I widened my eyes in innocence—despite the fact that he was very intentionally not looking at me and wouldn’t see it. I had a theory that men knew instinctively when women made that particular face. And that they instinctively responded to it.
Hey, I was a woman in power. I’d had to figure out how to use all the tools in my particular tool chest. And fake naïve/innocent/damsel was one of the best tools I’d found. Particularly when it was so opposite to who I really was—which meant they never saw the real me coming.
Turned out that it worked on Jack just as well as it had worked on many of the other men I’d run across, because the corner of his mouth twitched.
“You thinking of ditching the software game and turning into a kidnapper or something?” he asked.
I settled back into my seat and looked ahead, watching for signs that would tell me where we were heading. “Depends on how good the pay is.”
He laughed outright at that, and I smiled as well—partially because I was winning, and partially because this particular outburst surprised me. He had a deep, chesty laugh. One of those big, booming ones.
I wondered how often he got to use it. Because I didn’t think kidnapping and laughing probably went hand in hand too often. It seemed to me that a life of crime most likely called for one to be serious at all times. Serious and deadly.
Which brought me right back around to how he’d gotten into it. Because ‘deadly’ didn’t exactly go with ‘I bought you clothes and guessed at your size.’
“Why did you buy me clothes?” I asked softly.
There was a long pause—during which, I assumed, he was fighting with himself about how much to tell me. Because if buying clothes for your kidnapping victim was against the rules, then telling them why you did it must definitely be frowned upon. When he answered, though, it seemed that he’d decided on the truth.
“Because I knew you’d be coming from your office, and that meant you’d be in business attire. I knew that you might be willing to go on a date in that, but that you wouldn’t be comfortable in a drive across the des— Ah. A long drive.” There was another brief pause, and then: “And I didn’t want to hear you complaining the entire time.”
The last part was added in a harsher, rougher voice—one that I was starting to recognize as fake. His kidnapper’s mask. The one he put on when he was worried that he was getting too soft.
Which meant that he’d made a mistake. One that he was trying to make up for. And it didn’t take me long to go back through what he’d said and find it.
He’d told me where we were taking our little drive. And that last sentence, the one with the threat, was meant to cover it up.
Because he’d started to say ‘desert.’ Which meant we were probably going into Nevada. Las Vegas, then. Or Reno. I didn’t know anyone in either town, but now that I had a destination, my brain started to work on how I could use it.
Chapter 11
Jack
We’d been driving for about half an hour—just through the various smaller cities and communities that lay before the stretch of desert and nothingness—when I realized that I was starving. We’d had a lot to drink at that bar—or at least, Alice had—and hadn’t ordered any food, despite our promise to do so, and I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.