Second Shot

“What kind of vehicle?” I expanded as he strode away towards the parking area at the side of the hotel. I had to hurry to keep up, shivering inside my jacket. The wind had picked up a little and it knifed straight through to my bones the moment we stepped out of the door.

“Oh, the vehicle?” he said, suddenly sounding vague. “Well, it’s right over there, so you can see for yourself.”

He pointed and, like a fool, I let my gaze drift in the direction he indicated. When I looked back, he’d taken his hand out of his right pocket and, this time, there was a gun in it. A black semiautomatic, maybe a Colt, but in this light it was hard to tell. The Beretta was in my own pocket, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance of getting to it in time. I let my breath out slowly and forced myself to relax.

“Nicely done,” I murmured.

The mustachioed man gave a tight little smile in acknowledgment of the praise and jerked his head to the side.

“Keep walking,” he said.

“What’s the point?” I said, eyes tracking his every movement for sign of a way in. The barrel of the gun was disappointingly steady in that regard. “If you’re going to drop me, then drop me here. Why do I need to die tired?”

“I ain’t gonna drop you unless I have to,” the man said. “Someone wants to talk to you, is all. But you give me any trouble, ma’am, and you better believe I’ll do what I got to.”

“And if I don’t feel like talking?”

The man smiled again, almost. “All you really got to do is listen,” he said. “And trust me, you’ll do it a whole lot better if you ain’t in pain. So, we gonna do this the hard way, or the easy way?”

I paused, considering for a moment. As I did so I heard the long scrape of the side door of a van opening, away to our left. Any hopes I had of the noise causing a distraction were instantly dashed, however. Mustache never even flinched. I glanced sideways myself and found out why.

Another man had emerged from a dark-colored van. He was medium height, neither small nor bulky, and his close-cropped hair gleamed slightly red in the lights from the hotel. He was also carrying a semiautomatic. My chances of escape had just halved.

“Quit messing with her and get her in the van,” he said easily to Mustache.

Mustache still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Both of them had the look of pros, relaxed, confident and unlikely to make any slips I could take immediate advantage of. I cursed under my breath for walking so lamblike to the slaughter and shrugged my compliance, allowing the red-haired man to pat me down with rough efficiency. He took my mobile phone, then quickly found and confiscated the Beretta.

“Tsk, Charlie,” Mustache said, and I couldn’t suppress a twinge of unease at his use of my first name. “Now I’m betting you ain’t got a license for that.”

“Why?” I said. “Do you?”

He didn’t answer, just giving me a shove in the small of my back towards the still-open sliding door. I climbed in, aware of a sense of deep foreboding. After I’d left the army I’d made a living for a while teaching self-defense classes to women. One of the most important points I’d stressed was not to allow yours elf to be taken to a place of your assailant’s choosing. Yet, as I waited for an opportunity to grab for the gun that never quite arose, here I was, breaking all my own rules.

Mustache climbed in after me, threw his clipboard into the back, and slammed the door shut. The red-haired man got into the driver’s seat, reversed out of the parking space and stuck the gearshift into drive. The whole thing had taken no more than a couple of minutes from us walking out of the hotel lobby. There had been no witnesses.

As we began to move forwards I caught a glimpse of the hotel’s lights glittering through the darkened back windows of the van, and wondered what the hell I’d just got myself into.

The two men drove me down into North Conway and almost all the way through the town until we finally pulled off next to a little seafood restaurant called Jonathon’s. They stopped the van and the red-haired man twisted to face me, laying his arm along the back of the seat. He was wearing an ornate ring on the little finger of his right hand. The light was behind his head and I couldn’t see his face clearly

“Now, you been a good girl so far,” he said. “Are you going to behave, or do we need to go through the whole threat business again?”

“That depends,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “on what happens next.”

The redhead smiled enough for me to see his teeth in the gloom. “Someone inside wants to speak to you,” he said. “We go in, you talk, you come out, we give you a ride back to the hotel.”

“O-K,” I said slowly “And the threat business?”

“Oh, we don’t need to go into that, but just let me say that sure is a cute kid you’re looking after.”

I felt my face freeze over. “I think I’ve been pretty patient so far in allowing you two to drag me down here, but that, my friend,” I said softly, “was a big mistake.”