Page 19 of Stunts and Sparks

“No worries,” he said, and she answered her phone.

“Hello?” she said. “Hey, Mom. What’s going on?” She stood and gave Cole a quick peck on the cheek. “I’ll be right back,” she said to him. “Enjoy the sunset, but don’t eat all the appetizers.” She winked and smiled and made her way into the restaurant to presumably take the call out front.

Cole supposed it was the most polite thing she could do under the circumstances, but something in him was uneasy about her being out of sight. He was always a bit jumpy when it came to certain situations, so he told himself to stop overreacting. It was funny, really. He was so confident in his ability to protect his partner doing the most dangerous version of every stunt, but if she stepped out of his view on a date, he started to panic.

He forced himself to sit and wait. He finished his drink. He checked his watch. It had been five minutes, and to Cole, that seemed way too long. His gut was telling him to check, and while he could try to fight it for a minute or two, he knew better than to fight it completely. Listening to his gut had gotten him out ofmore than one deadly situation in the past. He was not about to ignore it now.

He rose from his seat and made his way through the bar, dodging waiters and patrons alike. The closer he got to the front entrance, the more he knew something wasn’t right. When he stepped outside, for a moment, he was relieved. Heather stood on the edge of the curb, happily chatting into her phone. Cole wondered whether she was talking about the date with her mother and hoped she had good things to say about him.

In an instant, though, a dark van drove up to her, a man in a mask leapt out and pushed her from behind, while four arms from within the van pulled her toward them. Cole shot forward, desperate to reach them, but he was too far, and they were too fast.

He didn’t have time to make a plan. He relied, instead, on his instincts. The kidnappers started to drive away before the door was even closed. Cole shouted for the people around the van to notice, to do something, but everyone nearby was more confused than anything. He couldn’t even have been sure they had seen and understood what just happened in front of them. They probably thought it was just some elaborate prank. Heather had been so taken aback that she hadn’t even had a moment to scream.

Cole ran toward his car, his eyes constantly darting back toward the van to see which direction it was driving in. He doubted they had noticed his presence. If anything, Heather had probably looked like a woman who was alone, waiting for a ride, an easy target. They probably weren’t driving evasively, which meant the direction they exited the bar parking lot from would say something about which highway they were heading toward.

There wasn’t a moment to spare. He hopped into his car, taking his eyes off the van for only a second. When he looked back again, it had disappeared, but Cole had been smart enough to mark the direction it was heading. There was a specific route they appeared to be taking that led to a highway. That would be the most likely route to take for a number of destinations.

Once again, Cole followed his gut. He peeled out of the parking lot in the same direction as the van and headed straight for the highway. There was no time to second-guess, no time for questions or doubts. He briefly thought of the fact that he’d just dined and dashed at his favorite bar, but he was certain Mike would understand. He would pay his bill later. Right now, all the mattered was getting Heather back.

Cole had no way of knowing what these people wanted with her. All he could do was hope that whatever it was, it would require them to keep her alive and deliver her unharmed to whatever location they were heading toward.

He entered the highway and held down the gas pedal until he was going well over the speed limit. If anyone started chasing him with sirens, all the better. More attention couldn’t possibly be a bad thing. Like an idiot, he had left his phone at the bar, so calling the police wasn’t an option right now.

Just when he began to lose hope, he spotted it up ahead — the van. It had slowed down to the speed limit. They clearly were not interested in attracting the kind of attention Cole would have welcomed right now.

As soon as he was tailing them, Cole slowed down. The last thing he wanted to do was start a high-speed chase. As long as the people in the van, the men who had Heather, didn’t realize they were being followed, they would head straight to wherever theywere planning on keeping her. And Cole, for better or worse, had every intention of joining them there. He had just begun to realize that he might have finally met someone he wanted to try a long-term relationship with. That was something he would have told anyone was impossible two weeks ago. Now that he had found her, he wasn’t willing to let her go, not for all the world.

CHAPTER 10

HEATHER

The abduction happened so fast that Heather was in the van before she fully understood what was happening to her. Her eyes hadn’t even adjusted to the darkness of the van before she was plunged into even more darkness by a black bag being put over her head. She heard herself ask, “What’s happening?” several times without getting any kind of answer. She was shoved unceremoniously into the back wall of the van by one of the men, and she could hear the others sit down around her as the engine roared.

Several thoughts popped into her head before she really worked out the danger she was in. She was in shock, and all she could think about was what Cole would assume. Would he think she had taken off without him, ditched their date? Would he even realize she was gone? How long would it take before he did?

Then her kidnappers started talking amongst themselves. “That was easier than I thought,” one said.

“Don’t get comfortable,” a low voice responded. It sounded like it was coming from the driver’s seat. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

“Peeled for what?” the first man said.

A third voice chimed in. “Cops, duh.”

“Look for any suspicious vehicles,” said the voice Heather thought belonged to the driver. “Not all cops are advertising themselves.”

“They’ll advertise themselves if they want to go faster, won’t they?” said the third voice. He sounded young and full of himself. Heather decided to call him the hothead, just to keep them all straight. The one who was driving sounded older, like he knew what he was doing, like he had done this sort of thing before. Heather decided to call him the leader.

“Please,” she said, trying to appeal to their humanity. “I don’t know what you want. At least tell me why you’re doing this.”

“Don’t talk to the goods,” the leader said to everyone who wasn’t Heather.

Heather wasn’t about to give up. “Can you at least tell me if you’re planning to kill me?” Her heart was beating a mile a minute, but she didn’t let it show. She needed to project a calm demeanor above all else. Somehow, she knew that was going to be the key to her survival.

Someone whose voice she hadn’t heard yet laughed at her question. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said. And then he called her something nasty, and she glared from behind her blindfold. This voice, more than all the others, sounded like trouble. There was a coldness to him, an emptiness she’d only ever seen in interviews with serial killers. He seemed to be reveling in her fear. So she decided to call him the psycho in her head.

“Can’t you just tell me where you’re taking me at least?” she asked, not because she thought she would get an answer, but because she wanted to keep them talking to her. The more they said, the more information she got about them. And she intended to memorize every second of this trip just in case she got away. Also, it kept her from thinking too hard about what her ultimate fate was going to be. To think, just a few days ago, her biggest worry was that she might have fractured a bone in a nasty fall. Now, she had to ask herself whether she was even going to get out of this alive, and she didn’t like the answers she came up with when she actually thought about it. So that was that. Thinking was off the table.Just talk and memorize, she advised herself. “Please?” she begged the men in the van. “I promise I can’t do anything about it.”

Someone finally answered her question, and by his voice, she could tell it was the hothead. “Obviously, we can’t tell you where we’re going,” he said with a scoff. “That’s kind of the whole point of the hood.” He laughed at her, but she still preferred him to the psycho. She decided to keep speaking to him.

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