The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(75)

Trent tossed the key onto the table and took a position directly in front of Ballard. He leaned down and put his balled fists on his thighs.

“Isn’t that all noble of you to try to save her like that? But what happens if, like the surfer girl, the wife just disappears without a trace?”

“Same thing, Trent. They come right here.”

“I don’t think so. Not when the wife is a sadomasochistic porno queen. You know what I think? I think they’ll say, ‘Good riddance to her.’”

“Trent, don’t do this. She has nothing—”

She didn’t get to finish. Trent reached forward and with both hands roughly pulled the gag up and back into place across her mouth. He then reached back to a rear pocket and produced a black eyeglass case. He opened it to reveal a syringe and small amber vial with a label on it. Ballard knew it was ketamine and he was going to drug her again.

“Just need to put you out for a little while,” Trent said. “And when I come back, we’ll have a party with my beautiful bride.”

Ballard struggled against her bindings, but it was a lost cause. She tried to talk against the gag but couldn’t form words. He stuck the syringe through the rubber top of the vial and drew a quantity of clear liquid.

“They use this stuff on cats and dogs,” he said. “It works pretty good on humans too.”

He put the vial and eyeglass case on the table and went through the process of holding the needle up and flicking it with his finger.

“Don’t want any bubbles now, do we?”

Ballard felt tears forming in her eyes. All she could do was watch him. He then leaned down, putting one hand on the chair post again. He harshly stabbed the needle into her left thigh. Ballard jerked, but that was all she could do. Trent slowly pushed down the plunger with his thumb and she felt the needle’s contents course into her body.

“Hits pretty fast,” Trent said. “Two minutes tops.”

He stepped back and started putting the syringe and vial back into the case.

“Might need this with the bitch,” he said. “She knows how to put up a fight.”

Ballard watched him from a distance, as if through a tunnel. She could already feel the ketamine moving into her system, doing its job. She tried to flex her muscles against her bindings and couldn’t do even that. She was helpless. Trent noticed and looked over at her after snapping the eyeglass case closed. He smiled.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

Ballard stared at him as she felt herself slipping away. Soon the tunnel collapsed and became a pinhole of light. And then even that was gone.





27

Ballard tasted blood. She opened her eyes but was disoriented. Then it all came back. The upside-down house. The chair. The bindings. Trent. The gag had torn both corners of her mouth when he had pulled it back into place. Her neck felt stiff and hard to move. Once again, her vision wobbled as she brought her chin up.

The room was dark. Trent had turned the light off when he left. She could see only the dim outline of light around the curtains across the room. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious or how long it would be before Trent came back.

She looked around and saw a dark image of herself in the mirror, still bound. She tensed her body and found the bindings as strong and unyielding as before. She tried to calm her thinking and lower the sense of panic she felt.

She started with Beatrice. Trent had gone to get her. She knew where the upside-down house was and where Beatrice lived and worked. It was a minimum twenty-five-minute drive each way in routine traffic. If it was the middle of the night, he would be much faster. If it was the middle of the day, much longer. Trent would also have to find a way to abduct and control Beatrice. If she was alone at the warehouse, that would be one thing. If she was in the midst of video production, there would be people around, and that would complicate matters considerably and cost Trent time.

There were too many variables and none mattered, because Ballard did not have the starting point of knowing how long she had been unconscious. The one thing she did know gave her an adrenaline shot of hope. She was now alone and Trent had made a mistake. Earlier, when she had looked at herself in the mirror, she had seen that her wrists and ankles were bound to the chair posts with black plastic zip ties. They looked like the kind bought at a hardware store. Thin and designed to bundle cables or for other industrial and household needs, not the kind carried by police and used for binding human beings.

Regardless of their purpose or strength, Ballard knew that all zip ties had one thing in common; they were totally susceptible to the laws of physics.

In law enforcement, zip ties, or flex cuffs, were officially considered temporary restraining devices. They were not in the same league as handcuffs for the simple reason that one was made of plastic and the other was made of steel. There were plenty of stories and warnings passed in official memoranda, roll-call rooms, and the back hallway chatter of station houses. The message was simple: always keep your eye on an arrestee in flex cuffs. It didn’t matter how strong they were. Plastic is subject to the laws of physics. Friction creates heat. Heat expands plastic.

Ballard tried to move her wrists, this time not pushing against the restraints but rather moving her hands up and down along the vertical chair posts. The bindings were so tight that she could not move them more than a half inch either way. But one half inch up and one half inch down was enough. She started moving her arms like pistons, up and down, up and down, as quickly as she could, creating friction between the plastic and the wood. The hard plastic straps almost immediately started cutting painfully into her skin. But soon she could also feel the heat she was creating, and that pressed her to move her arms faster and harder.