Page 14 of Playing Hardball
“I guess,” she says in answer to my question.
“Come on,” I say pulling her up. “I’m starting to get worried. You haven’t said more than three sentences since we woke up. It’s unlike you.”
She wrinkles her nose.
“That’s your way of saying I’m talkative, right?” she asks and I shrug.
“Your words not mine.”
She hits my arm before giving me a smile. I’m relieved to see her smile.
“I just have this feeling that something bad is about to happen,” she says sadly.
“Hey,” I say, nudging her chin upward so she can look at me.
“I would never let you get hurt,” I promise.
“I know, Ben,” she says kissing my cheek. Then she heads into the bedroom to change.
Soon, we’re on the road. She’s still on edge. I try to get her to talk but she barely responds. I have no idea what to do. It’s silent in the car for a while until her phone rings.
“Who’s that?” I ask with an easy smile.
“New number,” she whispers, giving me a long look before picking up the call.
She raises the phone to her ear and I see her eyes open wide.
“Sloan?” she whispers.
I’m about to speak when something slams into her side of the car. The collision is powerful and sends our car drifting off the dirt road into the thicket beside the road. I’d slammed my forehead on the wheel, and I’m still groaning from the pain when I hear the screech of another car stopping beside ours.
“Kim,” I whisper, and try to raise my head when something slams me right in the face.
I can’t tell how many minutes I’m out for, but when I open my eyes, my head feels like it’s being split open. Gasping, I raise my head and turn to look at my side. The door is open. Kimberly is missing.
How did they find us?
I spend several seconds wrestling with my seatbelt before it slips out of its lock. I open the door and fall out of the car. I can still see their car, racing down the road and kicking up a storm of dust behind it.
I can save her. I can still save her. I have to save her.
I crawl back in the car, and endure excruciating pain as I turn my car around and start off in the direction they’d gone. Immediately I put a call through to the guys.
“Hey,” Thomas says.
“Thomas, I need the tracker in Kim’s phone switched on now. They have her and they’re getting away.”
“Who has her?” Thomas asks.
“Thomas, we’ll deal with that later. Track her and send me her live report,” I scream.
“Okay, okay, on it.”
We had programmed a tracker into Kim’s phone before we left for Fairfield. We didn’t put it on though, but it only takes them a few seconds to put it on and send the link to me so I can follow her live on the map.
“I’m close. She’s hardly two kilometers away,” I whisper to myself, and push down on the accelerator.
I keep following for several minutes until the blinking red dot stops. Figuring that they don’t know I’m following, I slow down and finally stop when I can see their car parked by the fence of a huge maize farm. The road is deserted and one of the three men is holding her wrist and attempting to lead her into a barn by the road.
