Chapter Nine
Maura's eyes hadn't moved from Jane in over twenty minutes, and they strained with the effort of focusing on the faint pulse at her neck. She willed the detective to wake up, already concerned with the length of time she had been unconscious, but Jane's only movement came with the jostle of the car as it forged potholes along the old two-lane that they had been traversing for almost an hour. The radio had edged into complete static, only the occasional sound of a scratchy human voice permeating the car. Maura's throat was dry and she eyed the bottle of water that sat in her cup holder, unable to remember when she had left it there. She took in the blue material of Jane's shirt, noting that it was missing a third button. Her thoughts had swung from the horrific to the mundane, a pendulum of nerves that was slowly dismantling the thin veil of bravery she had constructed.
Her head dipped back along the seat and she glanced anxiously at Brad, who was now intent on monitoring his phone and the little blue darts that indicated perusing police cars. Maura's phone had fallen between them, and she could only hope its tracking system had been initiated during her captor's explorations of it. If she could find out where they were headed and possibly get her hands on it, she could try sending another SOS. She watched the large, foreboding body next to her, noting the way his head bent forward, his teeth clenched in a hardened concentration. Moving her bound hands slightly, she let her fingers graze the hard plastic case of her phone.
"Why are you working for Moore?" she asked, directing her question to the open air. Her voice was strained and hoarse, mimicking the sound of the intermittent radio voices.
"We don't work for him," Brad corrected, his gun flitting casually towards her temple, causing her to move her hands back to her lap. "The company is equally owned; we're all shareholders."
Ted snickered from the front seat, tiredly shaking his head, as if he'd heard such an explanation one too many times. "I don't think you're an equal shareholder, Brad," he snorted, glancing at the younger man through the mirror. "As a math whiz, you ought to be able to figure that one out." His eyes met Maura's. "Tell her the real reason you're on board."
Brad's lips suckled into an unattractive pouch. "It's a lucrative opportunity," he answered vaguely, staring hard into the front seat. Maura sensed the tension between the two men, which had tilted from their captives onto themselves. She hoped it left her with an opportunity to exert some sort of a heroic effort, despite the fact that such a thing usually fell to Jane.
"Brad here is Rob's brother," Ted continued. "A math whiz, straight out of MIT, and one of the best engineers you'll ever meet, but he's missing the business sense that his big brother has."
"Is that why you're here?" Maura asked him, finally hitting on a subject that could keep them talking. "Robert has the infrastructure connections, Brad has the knowledge, and you have the business acumen?"
"You've pinned the pegs in the wheel," Ted replied, giving her a winning, if feigned, smile and revealing a row of low, straight teeth. "Too bad you and your girlfriend here were trying to drain the grease that makes it turn."
"We weren't the only ones," Maura pointed out.
"You're the only ones still alive," Ted retorted, his grin fading and his lips sliding back into a straight line.
Maura squinted out of the window to her right, taking note of a faded street sign as they passed by it. They were thirty miles outside of Pittsfield. That wasn't incredibly far from where she and Jane had ventured a couple of days earlier, and the quivers that ran through her stomach hardened into a hard knot of apprehension. This side of Massachusetts hadn't been kind to them in the past. "Are you taking us to the reservoir?" she asked. "In an attempt at some monomythical demonstration of our failed heroism?"
Ted gave her a mistrusting glance. "Don't give me that ivy tower bullshit."
"Hey, Ted, cut through the side street over here, we got a squad car about three miles ahead," Brad cut in, his shoulders still bent towards his radar screen.
Maura glanced down at his phone before studying him, hoping to distract him from spotting the next police car along their path. "Why are you doing this?" she asked. "Is it because Robert is your brother?"
"It's a lucrative opportunity," he repeated, not lifting his head.
"What's that worth when you're rotting in jail?"
He laughed, the forced sound prickling the hairs on her arms. "What if I told you I'm just a science geek?" he asked lightly. "I like the engineering part of it."
"Then you would know that the horizontal fracking method is one of the most destructive to the rock bed around it," Maura replied evenly, the science momentarily ousting the fear from her voice. "Aside from the earthquakes and the sinkholes, there's the pollution to local water, the satiation of toxic chemicals..."
"Oh, you want to debate the merits of fracking?" Brad asked, finally looking up at her with a pair of disillusioned gray eyes. "I'm all for it."
A movement from the front passenger's seat caught Maura's eye, her heart skipping as Jane spoke, her voice thick. "That is a bad move, pal," she muttered, putting a hand tentatively to her head. "You do not want to debate science with that one." She turned her head back as much as she could and gave Maura what she hoped was a confident, if drowsy smile. Her vision blurred as she turned back to the front, squinting against the afternoon sunlight and unable to focus on a road sign as it passed them by; she had absolutely no idea where they were.
"Jane," Maura sighed, leaning forward, but not far enough to attract the harsh hand of the man next to her; her scalp was still tingling from his earlier grip in her hair. "What's the capitol of Serbia?"
"I don't know," Jane mumbled, her pulse pounding on the left side of her head. Her jaw ached with the slight movement of speech, and she lay her head back briefly against the headrest, darting a look at the driver's seat. She was met with the hollow cylinder of Ted's gun.
"What's the circumference of the earth?" Maura asked again, seemingly unaware that her questions were not instinctually answerable by anyone with even an above-average IQ.
"I don't know," Jane repeated, frustrated. "These aren't exactly questions I knew before I got smacked in the face, either, Maura. I'm fine."
"For now," Brad humphed from the back seat, prompting Maura to pin him with a dirty look. She morphed it into a quick, beleaguered smile as he raised his hand menacingly toward her.
"Well, look who's awake," Ted remarked. He jerked a thumb towards Maura. "Your girlfriend's been wondering when you'd wake up. Maybe you can keep her quiet. Brad hasn't been doing that great a job of it."
Jane snuck a glance back at Maura, giving her a nervous smile, but mostly taking inventory of her body, making sure she hadn't been hurt. "You okay?" she asked, wanting some verbal confirmation.
"Yes," Maura nodded.
Jane noticed the small veins that rippled across her forehead, a physical imprint of Maura's concentrated distress, and she felt failure wash through her, filling her lungs. It was a look she had seen before, as if the blonde's wiring had been maxed to its breaking point, and she wished she had some way of wiping it away and replacing it with a relieved smile.
"You know, the two of you caused Robert a ton of trouble," Ted said, prompting her to turn and face him. "We had everything tied up neatly until you environmentalists came along."
Jane held up her cuffed hands, correcting him with a pointed finger. "We're not environmentalists - "
"Yes, we are," Maura piped from the backseat, giving Jane a corrective glance.
Jane rolled her eyes, an automatic gesture, but kept her gaze on Ted's gun. He noticed, grinning over at her. "You want me to give you another black eye to match the one you already got?"
"Why take us all the way out into the middle of nowhere?" she asked, skipping over the question and hoping her answer was implied. "For a bunch of bottom-dollar frackers, you guys don't seem to pride too much on efficiency."
Maura's voice sounded from behind them once again. "I would like to point out that at times the criminal mind differs slightly from the logical, rational processes of the quote-unquote normal mind. Reason can be skewed, due a slight mutation in the neurons of the amygdala."
Jane suppressed a smile, almost taking pleasure in the fact that both men had probably been subjected to such academic eruptions over the course of their drive. Maura may not have realized it, but it was her own way of wearing people down, and Jane just hoped it had worked its magic.
"Bodies are easier to dispose of out here," Ted answered pointedly, with a glance at the back seat.
Maura swallowed, but shook her head. "Actually, the reservoir toxicity concentration wasn't high enough to do acute damage to tissue. It would take days for it to fully decompose a body due to the dilution of the runoff."
"She ought to know," Jane said. "This one here is the 'Queen of the Dead'."
Ted eyed Maura, his lip twitching in twisted pleasure. "Well, in less than a couple of hours, you really will be 'Queen of the Dead'. And Yosemite Sam over here – " he jerked his thumb at Jane – "can be your King. But we're not headed to the reservoir, sweetheart."
"What a pity," Jane murmured. "Maura and I have been dying to go back."
Maura couldn't quite summon the strength to smile, her zygomatic muscles having been paralyzed from fear, but the sound of Jane's confident, level voice did give her some comfort. Maura may have had the ability to analyze physiological cues, but Jane could sense perpetrators' moves as if she shared some symbiotic connection with them. It had gotten her out of plenty of scrapes before, and Maura hoped it would come in handy again before their drive came to an end.
"Hey, stay on this road, Ted, we got another road block forming about six miles up the road," Brad called, his brow arching as he cocked his head toward his phone.
Maura stiffened next to him, and felt Jane's eyes dart back at her before resting on the iPhone that sat abandoned on the seat. She said nothing, but Maura saw the quick flicker of calculation, then the widening of her pupils that came with implicit understanding: that phone was their lifeline. Jane quickly diverted her gaze back to the front, keeping her face expressionless, but was afraid the uptick in her pulse could be heard over the low static of the radio. She couldn't remember the last time she had been so grateful for one of Maura's geekier predilections.
Maura felt Brad's eyes on her, as if he sensed some tacit information passing between his two captives. She spoke up in an attempt to break his concentration, peeling his eyes away from his radar. "Where are you storing the natural gas?" she asked. "Is it near the disposal wells?"
She didn't get an answer, but she did manage to get Jane's attention, and the brunette snuck a look at them, her eyes narrowing as Brad plucked the iPhone up, pondering it. "She'll just keep asking," Jane replied, her voice carrying louder than it should, as she hoped to continue their game of distraction. "She takes silence as a sign of stupidity."
Brad was unresponsive, his lip curling as he flicked through Maura's phone, pulling up icons she didn't even realize she had. His thumb paused over one, and he turned his studied gaze to Maura. She forced her forehead to relax as she met his eyes, hoping he didn't ask her a direct question, although hives didn't seem like such a bad thing in comparison to dying. Without a word, he rolled down his window, and Maura knew viscerally that he had discovered their secret. "No!" she blurted, attempting to catch his arm. He shrugged her off, hurling the phone out into the passing green blanket of grass, and with it, any semblance of hope Maura had left.
She panicked, her bound hands lunging over him at the open window. Brad moved surprisingly fast, clamping a hand around her throat and pushing her against the opposite side of the car with a low growl. The gun flashed towards her, stopping at the corner of her mouth, and she let out a strangled, startled cry.
"What other tricks do you have up your sleeve?" he demanded, leering over her and ruffling a frenzied hand underneath her blazer. Her breaths came in ragged, painful jabs as she tried to keep still, the gun grating threateningly against her chin.
The violence in the backseat exploded quickly, but Jane whipped fully around, ignoring the gun that Ted raised at her and reaching her bound hands around her seat. "Don't you touch her!" she yelled. The car jerked as Ted pulled abruptly off the road, pushing Jane back in her seat, but she fought her way forward, needing to get Brad's hands off of Maura.
"You try anything like that again, this goes straight into your mouth, you got it?" Brad spat, the barrel of his gun inching toward Maura's lips. She let out a gargled cry of frustration, stray tears of resignation and pent up fear leaking from her eyes. She shook her head, hoping to appease him in some way, but her voice failed her.
"Let go of her," Jane pleaded, attempting to use her legs to fight her way toward the back seat. The chilling, bone-hurtling crack of a gunshot stopped her cold, her insides searing with terror as she registered the hollow, smoking muzzle of Ted's gun in front of her. She waited for the pain, or the sensation of flowing blood, but it didn't come, and she turned slowly to the passenger window, where a small bullet hole had penetrated through it. She twisted back to him slowly, her hands in front of her. "Okay," she breathed, her desperation snagging the roof of her mouth as she forced herself to speak. "Don't hurt her."
"Everyone, calm the fuck down," Ted instructed calmly, ignoring her, but keeping his gun still trained neatly on her. He glanced toward the back seat. "Brad, reign in your goddamn temper and focus on the fucking radar. I don't want any more disruptions, is everyone clear on that?"
Brad glanced over his shoulder, grimacing, but pulled back, settling into his seat. "Fucking Big Brother companies," he murmured, directing his attention back his original task. "Making money off taking other people's privacy."
Maura's breath returned to her body in a shaky gust that rattled her lungs, but she stayed pressed against the window, too afraid to move. Jane peeked around the seat, her own eyes still wide with concern. "You okay?" she asked, but before Maura could respond, Ted jerked her back impatiently into her seat.
"You turn around, or even look at her again, we ride the rest of the way with one less body, you got it?"
Jane nodded slowly, biting her lip in unexpressed rage. She thought about her odds of grabbing the wheel, but one more bullet and she was a goner. And that left Maura alone, which was not a risk she was willing to take. She needed to be patient.
Maura's breaths were still coming in ragged heaves from the back seat and as Jane glanced in her side mirror, she could see the strained rivulets of nerves pinching above the smaller woman's eyes. That unbridled expression of hopelessness frightened her more than any promise of physical pain, and she spoke up, hoping to ease it. "Maura," she said softly, keeping her eyes obediently forward.
She got no response, and tried again, her tone still gentle, but firm. "Maur."
She heard a sharp inhale. "Yes," Maura replied shakily.
"We're okay," Jane continued, trying to catch her eye in the mirror, needing to establish some contact with her. "You're okay."
Maura closed her eyes, attempting to silo Jane's voice from the rumble of the car, the static of the radio, and the burning sensation the gun had left against her chin. "Yes," she said again.
Jane's tone was still even, if huskier and slightly hoarse. "If you hyperventilate on me, Maur, we'll never make it to Chateau du Blah, okay?"
Maura felt a smile inside of her, even if she couldn't make her lips do anything more than tremble a quivering response. "Yes."
"We're okay," Jane said again, her words almost meditative as Maura nodded into them, letting them float over her.
Her pulse steadied, only slightly, but enough for her to open her eyes, confronting their reality once again. "We're okay," she confirmed, her eyes finally finding Jane's in the side mirror, the two of them taking comfort in sharing whatever connection they could, even if it was only a reflective glance.
"Jesus," Ted muttered, flicking the radio louder and searching for a station. "I can handle NPR better than this load of estrogen."
"It's not estrogen," Jane countered, but her voice was still soft, directed solely at Maura. "It's a much more complicated, dynamic chemical than that. It's a 'miracle of the human brain'," she finished, reciting the words that had looped pleasurably in her mind ever since Maura uttered them to her in the guest house. "Right Maur?"
Maura nodded, recalling the shared memory, and felt an unsolicited tear slide down her cheek. Raising her cuffed hands, she wiped it quickly away, as if by doing so she could erase the fear that had settled almost permanently into her chest. Jane's confident voice didn't give away her fear, but Maura had seen the uncertain look in her eyes. And she was fully aware of the promise that Jane hadn't been able to make: We will get out of this.
Frankie had followed the roving dot on Jane's phone for over half an hour, and was beginning to suspect that the sporadic turns of Maura's Prius had more to do with the road blocks he had organized than with their intended route.
"Why haven't we caught up with them?" Angela asked, her fingers dancing nervously over the tops of her knees. She hadn't stopped moving since she'd gotten into the squad car, her body a tight ball of electric nerves.
"They keep changing routes," Frankie replied, knitting his brow. "They must have police radar or something." He kept his speed up, using his siren intermittently, but he had little reason to do so considering how few cars they had come across along the ruddy two-lane highway. But it was something to occupy his fidgeting hands, which had tapped a nervous rhythm over his steering wheel.
"This is my worst nightmare," Angela murmured, her eyes pinned out the front windshield, as if at any given moment she would spot Maura and Jane hiding among the trees. "This is every mother's worst nightmare."
Frankie stole a glance at her, for once understanding his mother's plight. Growing up, and even going through the academy, his goal had been to be more like Jane. She may have been a girl, but she was always his biggest idol, and he wanted to carry himself with the same confidence and ease as she had. In the same vein, he wanted to be as good a cop as she was. Jane wasn't afraid to put herself at risk to do some good in the world, and as he had gotten to see her know Maura, he saw that same will put towards their relationship. She had been in danger before, but this felt entirely too visceral. For the first time he understood what his mother must feel every day that they went into that precinct.
"Ma, we'll get to them," he assured her.
"I want to get to them in time," she clarified, her voice catching in her throat. "God, how can a mother let her children go through this?"
He raised his eyebrows at her, surprised by the sudden guilt trip. "Ma, what are you talking about? This isn't your fault."
"I can't believe I let the two of you become cops," she said with a bitter shake of her head. "I should have put my foot down and made you both go to college. Then each of you would be settled down with a nice... girl."
"Jane and I would've become cops with or without your permission," he reminded her. "You know that."
"It was all that 'cops and robbers' when you were kids," she lamented, still stuck on her own fabricated mistakes. "I should have put a stop to it. I bet you mothers these days don't let their kids play those types of violent games."
"Ma, you're talking crazy here. Not that it's any different than you normally talk."
"Of course I'm talking crazy!" Angela exclaimed, her voice straining. "Both of my girls are in danger."
Frankie knew all too well the danger they were in, and could offer no more words of comfort to her. Instead, he simply reached over and rubbed her shoulder, dropping the phone in the middle console. Angela picked it up, studying the blue dot that they had spent forty minutes attempting to track. "Is it supposed to be moving?" she asked.
"What? Yeah, of course." Frankie reached for it, studying the stagnant blue target, even as his foot pressed harder on the gas. "It's stopped," he said. "They've stopped." He reached for his phone, dialing Korsak, his voice edgy as the detective answered on the first ring.
"I got a location," he stated, wasting no time. "They're right outside Northampton, along Appalachian Ridge Highway. I'm headed there now with one squad car as backup. I'll radio the location to the locals, and have them get there as soon as they can."
Korsak's voice sounded relieved, but he managed to keep his praise professionally minimal. "Good work, Frankie."
"Uh huh," Frankie responded, less than eloquently, but that was all he could manage at the moment. He tossed the phone back in the center console, his fingers resuming their nervous beat along the steering wheel. The hard part was over. Now he just had to make sure Jane and Maura were still alive. And keep them that way.
"Pittsfield," Jane read, managing to catch the name from a faded green sign as they zoomed past it. "What is that, the arm pit of Massachusetts?" She waited for Maura to quip something informative, or relay the population and staple crops of the town, but there was only silence from the backseat, which worried her. Maura had at least kept up the semblance of their banter in the beginning, more than likely as a way to deal with her own fear, but now that terror seemed to be catching up with her. Jane hadn't heard her utter a word in more than twenty minutes.
Ted scoffed at her. "More like the toilet of Western Mass. Used to be an old waste water treatment plant out here. It was the biggest in Massachusetts, back in the eighties."
Maura's voice sounded from the back seat, and Jane smiled briefly as she recognized that brief flicker of earnest curiosity that she had been missing. "Waste water treatment?"
Jane chanced a glance at her as Maura leaned forward slightly in her seat. "Dr. Isles has a thing for waste water," she teased, repeating her own phrase from earlier that day. Now they struck a bitter chord in her, plucking at the strings of worry that seemed to be attached directly to her heart.
"Are you processing chemical runoff there?" Maura pressed.
Ted glanced at her, pushing her back slightly with the muzzle of his gun. "Why are you people always so interested in things like this?" he asked. "Do you really expect to survive to tell a jury, or are you really just that curious?"
"Curious," Maura and Jane replied in unison.
"We don't just process runoff there," Brad contributed, seemingly bored with the few dots that littered his radar now that they were no longer being tracked. "We store production there. It's closer to the border."
Maura looked over at him, his sudden burst of anger from before still causing her to tread carefully. "When is the last time that plant was inspected? It can't be up to code regulations, especially not when storing something as implosive as natural gas."
"Where do you think I come in?" Brad replied with a pointed gaze at Ted. "This is why I am an equal shareholder."
Ted rolled his eyes. "Just keep any more transformers from going underwater, then we can talk equal shares," he said.
"That issue was handled," Brad spat defensively. "If you guys hadn't hired a bunch of lugs with no capacity for simple high-pressure chemical reprocessing methods, we'd be fine."
"What can I say," Ted responded irritably. "Good help is hard to find. You can't even get a good murder-for-hire these days. Got to do everything yourself."
Frankie glanced down at Jane's phone, eyeing the taunting blue dot that they were now on top of, and searched the area ahead of him. He hadn't seen a car for six miles, and there was no way a Prius was hiding in the deep thicketed trees that sidled the road. He pulled over with a frustrated shake of his head, a dreadful realization drudging through his brain: he wasn't finding the car because it wasn't there. The phone was there, abandoned, discarded after its discovery, but the car was long gone. He felt his failure as a vertiginous pressure behind his eyes, and he walked around to the back of the car so as to keep his face hidden from his mother.
He plucked his own phone from his holster, dialing Maura's number. Sure enough, he heard the familiar sound of the Transformers blare into the silence, a ringtone specifically for him that Jane had programmed into her own phone as well. It had been their favorite cartoon on Saturday mornings, Jane, him, and Tommy piling onto the couch to watch, each fighting over whose milk had turned the most disgusting color from their sugary cereal. Frankie walked towards the sound and caught the glint of the screen, ending the call and effectively silencing the music and the memory. "Shit," he muttered, his voice catching eerily in his throat as his theory was confirmed. "SHIT!" he yelled into the thickness of the trees, hurling his frustration and anger into them.
He heard the car door slam, his mother's footsteps grinding the gravel underneath her Keds. "What's going on?" she asked. "Is that Maura's phone?"
"Yeah," Frankie muttered, nodding as he turned back to her, once again putting on a game face that was slowly exhausting him. "They must have found the tracking app and gotten rid of it."
"No," Angela said, grabbing the phone from him and stabbing her fingers desperately against the carefully ordered icons. "It has to tell us something else, like where they're going. They would have left us a clue."
"Ma, just get back in the car," he coaxed, taking the phone from her as he spotted the second squad car approaching them from the distance. As far as he knew, there had been no texts or notes on the phone. I there had been, he wouldn't have felt so deflated. "I need to reroute these guys," said flatly.
Angela didn't follow his instructions and instead walked towards the trees and placing her hands on her knees, physically letting her worry drag her toward the rocky ground. Nausea unsettled her, and she was grateful she hadn't had the time to eat lunch.
Frankie dialed Frost this time, letting a pause hang in the air after the detective answered. "The phone was tossed," he finally confided. "I got nothing here. They're gone."
"Shit." He heard Korsak grunt in the background, then the sound of something jostling in the car before Frost spoke again. "What the hell is on that side of Massachusetts?"
Frankie squinted his eyes shut, and suddenly the image of Moore's companies scrolled through his mind. "A treatment plant," he muttered, the words kindling a spark of hope inside him.
"A what?"
"Frost, hang on a second." Frankie motioned for one of the local uniforms, placing a hand on his shoulder as his eyes bored into him. "You know of any waste water treatment plants around here?" he asked urgently, shifting anxiously on the balls of his feet.
The man thought for a moment, his eyes rolling briefly up into his head toward the gallon hat he wore. Frankie hadn't even thought they existed outside of the old cop shows he and Jane used to watch. "Yeah, sure is, but it's been shut down for about fifteen years."
"Where is it?"
"About twenty miles west of here, along Trenton Trail. That where you think they're headed?"
Frankie looked up at him, narrowing an eye. "I don't know. But I'm running on instinct now. Let's get over there." He directed his attention back to his phone. "Frost, you get all that?"
"Got it. We're heading your way as fast as we can."
"We're en route." Frankie hung up, looking for his mother, finding her still in the same position, her head hanging almost to her knees. "Ma, I may have something," he said, jogging over to her. "Listen, you want to head back with this nice policeman and go to the local precinct? I'll let you know as soon as I find something."
Angela straightened, her eyes shiny and hard, like plastic. "Do I look like the type of mother who wants to sit around with Barney Phife while her girls are in trouble? You know me better than that, Frankie Rizzoli."
"Ma - "
She held up a hand, her eyes moist with emotion that she had so far managed to keep at bay. "If something bad should happen, I don't want to be told by some stranger while I'm sitting at a police precinct twiddling my thumbs. I'm coming with you." She headed towards the car, brushing his back with her hand. "This isn't over yet. Let's go get our girls."
Maura leaned closer toward the window as they turned down a narrow road, which had at one point been paved, but was now so dilapidated that her car traversed it as if it were a gravel path. Four large, cylindrical structures loomed ominously ahead of them, abandoned in a large clearing. A warehouse of sorts sat alongside them, indiscrete, with nothing so much as creeping water stains along its sides to identify it. As far as passerby was concerned, this was still an abandoned waste water treatment site.
Jane peered out of the front windshield, her mouth parting. "This does not look fun."
"Maybe not," Ted said. "But for us, it will be plenty satisfying." He opened his car door, but before Jane could take advantage of the small, transitive moment, she heard Maura yelp from behind her. Brad had already pulled her towards him, the gun against her head, and he eyed Jane, daring her to make a move.
The passenger door was yanked open, and Ted waved his gun down at her. "Get out," he directed.
Maura shook her head, straining against the arm across her chest. Neither knew what awaited them outside of the car, but she didn't want Jane finding out alone.
As if reading her thoughts, Jane refused. "Not without her," she said, pointing to the backseat.
"I don't know what makes you think you're in the position to negotiate," he said harshly. "But I think I've got the upper hand." He waved his gun. "She stays. Now get out."
"No," Maura protested, squirming. The gun inched closer to her head, pressing against her temple.
Ted peeked into the car, glancing over Jane's shoulder. "We could switch it up," he offered. "You can flip a coin for all I care. But someone's going to die first." He paused for a moment, looking at each of them in turn. "No takers?" he asked coyly before yanking Jane's arm, pulling her roughly out of the car. "Looks like it's gonna be you, Detective."
I really have enjoyed the late nights writing this, but it would make it even better to hear from you all as to whether you're enjoying the ride as well (horrible allusion to this chapter, but you get my drift).
Thanks for reading :)
Cat, Ren, thanks for the pre-read!
