Hellfire Drop (Brimstone Cycle Book 2)(9)
I know that the latter option is little more than wishful thinking. People who are too lazy to take care of even simple maintenance will eventually be lazy when it comes to the task of guarding me. Thing is, mercenaries, like most soldiers, do not last long if they fall into the bad habit of ignoring their kit. These people aren’t the reason this van is such a sty. They’re just borrowing it for the moment - to be discarded later. Like me.
For a moment, I can feel an anxious panic pressing on my chest again. I’d known that surrendering to my kidnappers would put me in a bad situation. Knowing in my head, however, is a far cry from feeling it in my bones as the sour smell of the van surrounds me. I’m ashamed of it, but I just wallowed in that feeling, that gaping well of hopelessness, for a moment before another thought comes to me.
I’m not the first person that mercenaries have abducted this way. When Tom’s people took Mary, I’d found my home shattered, and the walls scarred with gunfire. Mary had endured just as much, if not more, than me in the time it took me to track her down and try a rescue. She’d been strong when I’d found her. She’d kept her shit together, for me. But it wasn’t enough.
I can’t save Mary anymore, but I can stay solid long enough to get her revenge.
I put my mind to something useful - namely listening to the people and things nearby.
After a minute of eavesdropping, I start to form a mental picture of where things are in the van. The youngest mercenary, the one from inside of the diner, is crouched or sitting somewhere near the double doors at the end of the van behind me. The woman is up front next to the older mercenary who serves as the trio’s apparent leader and driver. IDing him as the brains, or at least chief, of this kidnapping isn’t hard. His voice carries the hard tones of a man used to being obeyed, and the others always quiet down when he has something to say.
The woman is harder to figure out. The tattoo I’d seen earlier marks her as another Marine, but something about the cold, blank way she speaks makes me think of the spooks I’d bumped into while plying my old trade. My guess is that she’d been loaned from the Marines to at least one three letter agency. The kind that leave people hollow and numb once the work comes to an end.
That thought makes me shudder under the hood. I’d done my fair share of business with spy agencies, but always tried to make each of those deals a one time thing. Complex is too kind of a word for the webs those people weave. Whenever I get around to making my escape, I may need to take the unusual, for me at least, step of putting her down before I leave. She doesn’t sound like the kind of loose thread that I’d like to have training after me.
The trio wait until we’ve made it a few dozen miles down the road before one of them, the first mercenary that I now call Diner Boy in my head, scoots over and starts the process of attaching new restraints to my legs. They feel like the zip-ties already holding my wrists together, and are attached at my ankles, calves, and just above my knees. It feels like overkill to me, but then again, these guys hadn’t been surprised when I’d landed from my drop behind them at the diner. I guess overkill is just enough when dealing with special cases who take meals with demons.
When I think on it a bit longer, I can see the sense of their actions. They’d made a whole lot of noise at that diner. If they’d stopped to fully tie me right there in the parking lot, there’s a chance that some rescue in the form of a highway patrolman could have shown up and complicated their day.
Once again, that tells me something. These guys are apparently used to improvising, maybe as used to it as me, but also seem to have no trouble in switching back to a plan once the complications of real life had been taken care of on the fly. All in all, that makes them a dangerous bunch, even without their guns. I’ll have to be careful once it comes time to make an escape. Anything less will just be a fast route to bleeding out at their feet.
The woman says something to the driver in a smooth contralto that barely rises over a whisper. Her murmurs are almost swallowed by the wheezing sound of the van’s ill maintained engine, but I can still catch a hint of satisfaction in it. The driver responds to her in a similar tone. Moments later, I hear the clear sound of him dialing numbers into a cell.
The phone rings for a moment before a voice answers on the other side.
“Status?” says the voice. Another woman’s, sounding tired.
“We’ve got her.” the driver replies. “No unforeseen costs paid on the way.”
The man’s voice is surprisingly warm when he speaks. Familiar, but lacking that extra edge of flirtation I often hear from people in his line of work when talking to the opposite sex.
I hear a noncommittal grunt on the other side of the line. The sound is casual, unselfconscious. Whoever these two are, I’m not their first rodeo. They’re comfortable with each other, even with a kidnapped woman in the back of their van.
“Don’t pat yourselves on the back until she’s delivered.” The woman on the phone says. She pauses, then after a moment returns. “Tom and the others are depending on you. We’ve got no other way to find our people without her.”
The line clicks dead from the other end, and for the first time, I’m almost grateful for the hood covering my face. If it hadn’t been there, the whole van would have seen that my eyes had gone wide.
This whole time, I’d assumed that the devil wearing Tom was the one who’d hired these guys; that his opportune appearance the moment I woke up was a part of this. It made at least some kind of sense given the body he was wearing, and the rules which protected devil dogs like me from others like him and Ole Beeze. From the sound of the phone call that I’d just overheard, though, this wasn’t business. This was personal.