Page 140 of Never Flinch

“I’ll send you a picture of Ms. Anderson so you know she’s all right. So far. You will come to the Holman Hockey Rink, in Dingley Park. By the time you arrive, there will be people coming into the park from Buckeye Avenue and Dingley Plaza to attend a charity softball game to be played there tonight, but the Holman Rink is on the other side of the park, abandoned and condemned. Take Service Road A. Your GPS will show it to you.”

She chances an interruption. “Sir… Mr. Stewart… there are tons of people in front of the hotel who know what I look like.”

“That’s your problem, Ms. McKay. Solve it. Use the brain God gave you. I want you at the rink between five-fifteen and five-thirty. That fifteen-minute window is the key to Ms. Anderson’s survival. Get there earlier or later, and she dies. Tell anyone,anyone at all, and she dies. If you come, and come alone, you both will live.”

“Are you—”

“Shut up. If you ask me even one more question, I won’t bother with putting a bullet in her knee, I’ll kill her right now. Do you understand that?”

“Y-Yes.”

When was the last time she stuttered? College? High school?

“Let me recap. Holman Rink, between five-fifteen and five-thirty, which is approximately seventy-five minutes from now. If you don’t show up, she dies. If you tell anyone and I find out—I have my ways—she dies. Show up accompanied by someone else, she dies. Understood?”

“Yes.” She’s awake now, all the interior lights on and turned up to bright.Isthis Stewart? She can’t understand why it would be anyone else, but he sounds older than the man looks in Holly’s photographs.

It must be him.

“Show up according to my instructions, and you both walk away unharmed.”

Sure, Kate thinks,and we won in Vietnam.

The phone goes dead, but six seconds later it vibrates as a text comes in. She opens it and sees Corrie duct-taped, almost mummified, to a steel post coated with peeling yellow paint. Her eyes are wide and full of tears. Her mouth has been sealed with duct tape wound around the back of her head and Kate thinks—funny how random thoughtsintrude—that the tape will pull out chunks of her hair when it comes free. That will hurt… but only if she’s alive to feel it.

Now she begins to feel anger. She thinks of Holly, then rejects the idea, and not just because her callerhas his ways. Holly is good at her job—the speed with which she kicked the folding chair in front of that rampaging bull of a man confirmed that—but this particular monstrosity would be beyond her. She looks like a strong gust of wind would blow her away, she’s rather timid, and—face it—she’s getting on in years.

Besides, Kate wants to handle it herself.

She wishes shehadbought guns for her and Corrie; this might not have happened if she had insisted that Corrie carry a piece, but in the onrush of events she never even tried. What shedoeshave is the Sabre Red Pepper Spray Holly supplied her with.

She looks long and hard at the picture Christopher Stewart has sent her (because it must be him, who else). Corrie taped to a steel pole like an insect caught in flypaper. A breathing-hole punched in the tape over her mouth. Corrie, who has already had bleach thrown in her face and could have inhaled a deadly poison, except for her own quick wits. Corrie looking like a horror movie actress about to be sacrificed to a horror movie killer—not the Final Girl but the Second-to-Final Girl, the one who gets fourth billing in the credits.

She writes a brief note to Holly and sticks it on the suite’s bedroom door with one of the Dr. Scholl’s callus pads she keeps in her purse. Then she picks up the hotel phone, identifies herself, and asks for the hotel manager. When he’s on the line, she says: “How can I get out of here without being seen?”

Chapter 22

1

4 PM.

Trig’s office is on the second floor of the Mingo Auditorium. The dressing rooms are on the third. Talking to Kate McKay on the phone was all well and good, but with Sista Bessie, facetime would be better. He needs to think about it, and very carefully.

He decides a little shock therapy might be in order.

2

4:05 PM.

Holly has called Jerome and asked him if cleaning up elephant poop at ten AM means anything to him. Jerome said it didn’t. She tried Barbara to ask the same question and her call went straight to voicemail. Holly guessed she was either in the shower or practicing her dance moves as an honorary Dixie Crystal.

She decides to take advantage of a no–press conference day by lying down and having her own power nap, but she’s too wired to even doze. She missed something that should be too big and obvious to miss… and yet sheismissing it.

An idea comes to her, maybe brilliant. She sits up, grabs her phone, and calls a person who probably knows as much about Buckeye City as anyone: her recently retired partner, Pete Huntley.

3

4:10 PM.

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