I want to thank everyone for the awesome reviews. Shout out to my wonderful reviewers Mila, ReaderGirl0401, j, May 8th Guest, May 10th Guest, and GJFH. I also want to thank my followers and/or favoritors (for lack of a better word) I've gained since last chapter: beachgirlsrule, Wendylouwho10, lizzi3879, ReaderGirl0401, Nancy Drew24, and Soccerfan2014. You really are an inspiration! I had a lot of fun with the subtext this chapter so I hope you enjoy it too!
Disclaimer: It apparently doesn't matter how fast I update, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew still won't be mine. Quinn's an awesome O.C. though, right?
INT. WAREHOUSE – KANSAS CITY – THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
Six days until the trial.
Joe jerked awake drenched and blind.
The last thing he remembered was the gun pressed against his throat and then being ripped away when his big brother rammed the guy and the two had flown out the back of the moving truck. Then everything went black.
Now, he felt the soaked cold heavy fabric pressed and formed to his face. His wrists were handcuffed behind him, arms wrapped around a chair. Feet tied to individual legs. He breathed heavily, his heart raced. Joe closed his eyes and listened.
He heard footsteps on concrete floor. He heard a lighter being flicked. He heard a girl's angry muffled voice. And then he heard the sound of a camera flash.
Then suddenly his chair was being pushed from behind; it squeaked harshly against the concrete. He felt a sudden blast of heat like a bug, the sun, and a kid with a magnifying glass.
Someone grabbed his cuffs and pulled his arms back, Joe jerked his upper body towards his knees to compensate. He felt the handcuffs click and open and his hands were free. Joe moved on instinct. Instantaneously, he ripped off the stocking and tried to stand.
This time Joe was blinded by the spotlight pointed down at him. Two hands grabbed his shoulders and slammed him back down into the chair. He cried out and a handkerchief was swung around his face and used as a gag. Joe struggled against the hold and the handcuffs were reinstated. His eyes started to adjust just in time to see a hand coming straight towards his face.
Splash! Another bucket of cold water brought Joe back to his senses. His eyes slowly adjusted to the room. No windows. The room was a rectangle, one long and one short wall were concrete blocks, and the remaining walls were bars. The bars on the long wall side faced a hall. They started bolted to the ground rose about twelve feet made a sharp 90 degree turn and stretched until they touched the concrete wall on the opposite side. He was in a cage.
He continued to absorb his surroundings. The two NFL punks were standing on either side of him. He saw a goon smoking just outside the cage, one foot rested on top of an ice chest. Another was fiddling with a Polaroid camera. One other captive tied to a chair. No Frank. Joe's eyes locked onto Quinn. She gave a muffled warning. Joe followed her gaze.
The gunman approached him with a wicked grin, a newspaper, and a stapler. One of fullbacks grabbed a handful of Joe's hair keeping his head locked in position as the gunman placed the newspaper against his chest and stapled it. Joe hissed around his gag and the three men around him quickly stepped away from him. The cameraman got into position and snapped Joe's picture. The newspaper was then ripped off, crumbled, and discarded.
After that everything happened methodically. The lighting equipment, the cameraman, and the fullbacks cleared out. The gunman whipped Joe's and Quinn's chairs around so they were facing back to back in the middle of the cage.
The gags came off.
"When my father finds out what you've done to me, he's going to have your head!" Quinn shrieked.
"What I've done?" The gunman laughed. "Stopped his unloyal, pathetic excuse for a daughter from testifying against him? Ruining him? Ruining all of us! I don't think so."
"I didn't have a choice." She didn't meet his gaze now.
The gunman slapped her. A startled sound escaped her.
"Hey!" Joe snapped, but the gunman didn't even acknowledge him.
"You could have ran back home at any time, but you didn't. Your dad sent me to watch you, and when I reported to him that you kicked me in the face, held his own men at gun point," He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. "He laughed. The old man was actually proud of you."
The gunman pulled her face closer to his. She could feel his hot breath against her lips. "So, now, I've had to take a little insurance of my own. We'll see how much your father really loves you."
"Leave her alone," Joe growled.
"And you," The gunman finally turned his gaze onto Joe, like he had forgotten the Hardy boy. He released his grip on Quinn's chin and shoved her chair over.
Joe inwardly flinched at the sound of skull connecting with concrete as the gunman circled around to face him.
"If it wasn't for your brother, you wouldn't even be here right now."
"Where is that jerk anyway?" Joe asked.
"He's dead, Kid." The gunman spoke quietly now. "After he selflessly sacrificed himself to stop you from getting shot, we shot him instead and then we blew him up into little pieces."
Joe felt himself start to go cold, but he remembered that time he, his brother, Nancy, and her friends had faced Tanga in Hawaii. That man had told him his brother had drowned in a boating accident. This was no different.
"No," Joe spoke his thoughts confidently. "My brother escaped, didn't he? You're just trying to cover it up. Where's the proof?"
"I was hoping you'd say that. Oh no, don't look so surprised." The gunman turned to the silent man still smoking outside the cage. "Mac?"
Mac nodded, dropping the butt of the cigarette on the ground and squashing it. He picked up the chest he had been resting a foot on.
As Mac fiddled with the cage door, the gunman gave Joe some of Mac's working history. "Mac is our disposer. He makes sure the people we kill are never found. I asked that he save a little piece just for you."
Mac gave him a toothless grin. Then, he opened the ice chest. On the ice rested a severed and extremely burnt hand and part of the forearm. Wrapped around the wrist was a blue ribbon bracelet Nancy had given Frank.
Joe paled. He normally had a pretty strong stomach, but now he felt like he was going to heave. Joe closed his eyes.
Mac shut the ice chest.
"Frank got away." Joe repeated, but his heart wasn't in it.
"Sure he did," The gunman said easily, he had gotten what he was after.
The gunman and Mac left and when they returned with a sedative, Joe didn't struggle against the needle.
He almost welcomed the numbness.
INT. LOS TULES – KANSAS CITY – EVENING
Nancy Drew fidgeted in her booth at Los Tules. With a quick note to Hannah, Nancy had taken the first flight to Kansas City the next morning and had walked into the restaurant around 10:00. Now it was past seven p.m. and still no sign of Frank.
She had lost track of how many coffee's and tortilla chips she had eaten. She actually had to start paying the manager to let her stay. He had to show up.
Her waiter, Maude, showed up with her dinner. She set the enchiladas on the table then sat down across from her.
"Girl, if I were you, I would left here hours ago," Maude's chocolate eyes were full of pity.
Nancy gave her a half smile. "He'll show up. He has too."
Maude shook her head dark curls bouncing. "He's gotta be quite the boy for you to still be here."
"That I am," A voice behind Nancy said.
Maude gasped as Nancy jerked around.
"Frank Hardy!" She jumped up and he pulled her into a hug.
Frank winced, "Hi, Nan." Then he pulled back and winked at her, "Surprised, I made it in one piece?"
"Could have fooled me," Nancy said seriously. He was dirty and disheveled. Scrapes and burns covered his arms. He looked like a car crash victim, or even car-in-a-tornado survivor.
Maude scooted out of the booth and gave Nancy a little smile. "Looks like he's got quite the tale to tell you."
Nancy looked up at Frank and put all the joking aside. "Yes, you do."
Frank slid into the spot where Maude had been. He grabbed one of Nancy's enchiladas and just before he took a bite of it looked over at her. "You mind?"
She shook her head feeling her face flush suddenly.
He scarfed it down. "Sorry, I haven't eaten at all today. Honestly, I would have been here a lot faster, but I was hiding in an alley and I… I fell asleep. About an hour ago a uniformed homeless man woke me up to inform me that I was in his spot. I raced here as fast as I could. After our phone conversation you must have been worried sick."
"About that conversation," Nancy started, "You said, you said that.." She couldn't even say it out loud.
Frank and Nancy held each other's gaze for a moment. Silent, questioning.
"I shouldn't have said it; it was stupid. There was a gun pointed at me and I.." Frank swallowed as he heard the words opposite of what he wanted to say come out.
Nancy glared at him. "You know what? It was stupid. You shouldn't say things you don't mean. Especially.."
"That's not what I meant," Frank backpedaled. "I meant that-"
This time Nancy cut him off. "Just tell me what's going on Frank. You obviously have a lot on your mind."
Frank let out an exasperated sigh. Sometimes sorry wasn't enough. Sometimes words weren't enough.
"I lost the bracelet you gave me," He looked up at her face. Was she stunned? "I hadn't taken the thing off, but I needed it yesterday. We've, Joe and I, we've been watching this girl. She's a witness to this gun trafficking case. And she's a handful. I'm pretty sure she's a little crazy."
Frank realized he was rambling, but Nancy didn't interrupt. "But she's only the tip of the iceberg. There's these goons that are after her. And they caught us."
He took a drink of her coffee. "One minute we're talking in Mr. O'Dell's room and the next minute, I wake up cuffed in the back of this truck. And there's this guy saying that he didn't need both of us. I start using your lock pick to get out of the cuffs and they're sitting my brother up against the wall."
Frank paused to steal her second enchilada. He took a bite and chewed carefully.
"I guess the guy decided to kill Joe, cause my brother knocked him out with a dumpster last week. Talk about grudges. The gunman's partner is holding a gun to Joe's head and he's starting to wake up. As soon as my cuffs were off I didn't think. I just dropped everything and rammed the guy as hard as I could. That's when I dropped the bracelet."
"Oh, Frank," Nancy breathed.
"Yeah. We flew out the back of the truck onto street and somehow I managed to take the fall for him. We rolled and started to fight. To be fair we both got some good hits in," Frank said as the scene of him getting pummeled replayed in his head.
"But I managed to get away. And that's when I made it to the phone booth and called you."
"What happened?" She was dying to know.
"The guy found me. He shot and missed. That's when I dropped the phone. When he fired again, the gun misfired and exploded. The guy caught on fire!"
Frank remembered running towards the man who was trying to kill him and Frank trying to help him put the fire out. The man had grabbed him. He was only a little bigger than Frank so it wasn't a hard struggle to get free, but instead of letting Frank help, the man had tried to hold Frank so he would burn along with him.
Frank shuddered. "I tried to help, but then the truck was coming back and I thought I heard sirens so I ran as hard as I could until I ended up in that alley and sat down to rest."
"Where you fell asleep," Nancy finished for him.
"Exactly. Now, there's only six days left before the trial. I have to find Joe and Quinn before then."
"We will," Nancy promised. "But first we need to treat your wounds. You don't want that getting infected." She pointed at the burns.
Practical Nancy, Frank mused as he nodded reluctantly. What would she have said if he would have told her he meant every word?
But instead all he said was, "I hope Joe's not too pissed at me for leaving him."