Colton 911: Desperate Ransom
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Cindy Dees
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Chapter 1
“Honey! Are you ready?” Myles Colton’s voice floated up the stairs.
Faith Colton yelled back, “Coming!”
Any time her husband tore himself away from the law firm and made time for a date night with her, she was going all out. She’d dropped off their four-year-old son, Jackson, at her mother’s house and spent the rest of the afternoon picking out the perfect little black dress, debating the sexy-as-hell but torture-to-walk-in heels versus a lower, more practical shoe that wouldn’t give her blisters—she went for sexy—and doing her hair, makeup and accessories.
She wanted tonight to be really special because she had something to talk about with Myles. Since Jack would be old enough to start pre-K next year, she wanted to go back to teaching full time. Myles had been against her going back to work, given that the outrageous cost of day care would have eaten up her whole paycheck, but that argument would be moot once Jack started school.
She was ready. Her one nonmommy purse in hand, a sleek black clutch with crystal trim with no sign of a Cheerio inside it, she marched downstairs. Or more accurately, she hobbled downstairs, already regretting her choice of shoes. But they made her legs look fantastic, and why work out for all those hours to get back her prebaby body if she wasn’t going to show off her legs a little?
Myles was waiting impatiently at the bottom of the stairs, looking at his cell phone. Probably scrolling through work emails. The man never stopped working.
She’d known intellectually that junior lawyers worked long hours, but she’d had no idea just how many early mornings, nights and weekends he would spend at the firm, doing whatever lawyers did. Myles rarely talked about his work at home, and truth be told, she knew very little about his clients or cases. He claimed that when he was off work he didn’t want to think about any of it, but she knew better.
After the incident with gang members putting him in the hospital for convicting one of their leaders, and her freaking out over it, he’d stopped talking with her about his cases. Not that she regretted for one second insisting that he leave the district attorney’s office and go into private practice.
She knew he didn’t like practicing liability law anywhere near as much as he’d liked being a criminal prosecutor. But she’d been very pregnant and very scared when he’d been attacked, and she darned well didn’t want to lose the father of her child to some pissed off defendant or his buddies out for revenge.
Myles looked up as she approached the bottom of the staircase, and those light green eyes of his that she’d been in love with since the sixth grade lit with pleasure. A flashback of coming downstairs for prom in high school washed over her. He’d been impossibly handsome then, too, tall and lean and athletic.
He was still tall and athletic, although he’d filled out from that teen into the mature man smiling up at her. He still maintained a year-round tan from running, and it still set off his light brown hair and light green eyes like nobody’s business.
“You look fantastic, sweetheart,” he murmured.
She laughed a little. “The depth of the surprise on your face makes me wonder how bad I look the rest of the time.”
He snorted. “You always were the prettiest girl in school. Why do you think I snatched you up so young and never let you go? I’m no dummy.”
She smiled doubtfully as he gallantly held out an arm to her. She looped her hand around his muscular forearm and tottered out to the garage beside him, trying not to fall off her high heels.
She was tempted to ask him to wait for her to run back inside and get her mommy flats, but as she opened her mouth to speak, he commented, “We need to get a move on. Manchero doesn’t seat patrons if they’re more than ten minutes late for their dinner reservation. We’ll be cutting it close.”
“Your car or mine?” she asked. His was a sporty little number that was quick in traffic but low to the ground and horrible to get in and out of in a tight dress, stockings and heels.
“Yours,” he replied. “The roads are wet and the mommy-mobile is safer on wet pavement.”
She’d researched every car review she could find before she chose the vehicle she would drive her child around in. It had cost more than they could afford when they bought it, but it was the safest car on the market. Chicago’s highways could be terrifying, particularly near the downtown area, and especially at rush hour. Out here in Evanston, the roads were saner, but a soccer mom late to pick up her kid from practice could be a menace, too.
Even though it was a weeknight, traffic was bad heading into the city. She didn’t talk or ask Myles about his day as he navigated the congested roads back toward downtown and the posh restaurant at which he’d managed to finagle a reservation.
He’d said this morning when he called to invite her out on a date that he had something he wanted to talk with her about. To pass the time, she’d tried to guess what it was. Her money was on him finally getting promoted to partner at work. Goodness knew, he’d been working his tail off for it the past four years.
He’d promised her when he took the job with this firm that once he made partner he could cut back on his work hours, make a lot more money, and afford to enroll Jack in the outstanding private school she’d dreamed of getting their children into ever since they moved back to Evanston. She couldn’t wait. She was ready to have her husband back. More than ready.
As Lakeshore Drive approached downtown, the traffic blessedly thinned, and Myles accelerated aggressively. He was obviously worried about missing their reservation. It made her nervous when he drove fast, but she got why he was doing it and said nothing.
The lights from the towering high-rises of downtown on their right sparkled off the pavement, still wet from the rain. The streetlights made pools of brightness in the dark, and even the traffic lights took on a festive air. It felt good to get out of the house, and as much as she loved Jack, a bright, high-energy four-year-old could be exhausting. She was looking forward to engaging in some actual adult conversation.
They turned onto Ontario Street to head for the trendy West Loop district, and with a glance at the dashboard clock, Myles stomped on the gas.
The light was green and the intersection clear when two things happened simultaneously. Her car beeped a cross-traffic alert, and out of nowhere on her right, a vehicle loomed in her side window. The vehicle was big, dark and had no headlights. It was coming fast. Way too fast.
She had a bare millisecond to register what was about to happen and for a single word to erupt in her mind. No!
A huge impact slammed her whole body to the left, blacking her out for a moment. But the painful rigidity of the seat belt yanked her back upright. She grunted as the front airbag smashed her face and the side airbag caught her body as it ricocheted back toward the ruin of her door.
It was all chaos, then. Spinning car. Musical crash of glass shattering. Tires squealing. Lights going round and round outside.
Then, stillness.
Pain.
Her chest felt cracked in half.
Can’t breathe.
Can’t breathe.
Panic hit her then, and she flailed against the terribly tight restraint of her seat belt, batting to one side the airbag now deflating away from her body.
Oh, Lord. Myles.
She tried to turn her head to the left, but her whole body protested. She spied Myles out of the corner of her eye, gripping the steering wheel with a trickle of blood running down his face. He was staring back at her, very much alive.
Thank God.
“Are you hurt, Faith?”
“Don’t think so,” she rasped.
He sagged in his seat for a moment, as if the relief of knowing she wasn’t dead was too much to absorb. But then his shoulders straightened. Fury entered his gaze.
She watched, as if from a great distance, as he shoved open his door in slow motion and staggered out of the car. He stumbled around in front of the minivan to stare at something off to her right. She couldn’t see anything through the hanging side airbag and crushed side door, but she heard Myles swear angrily.
And then time resumed its normal course. People ran over from their cars to poke their heads through her missing window and ask if she was okay. Phones came out, 911 calls were made. Someone told her not to try to move. Which was rich. She could barely breathe, let alone marshal the strength to drag herself across the mangled center console to crawl out Myles’s door.
She felt disconnected from her body and emotions as this strange catastrophe unfolded around her.
All at once, the ability to draw breath normally returned. She gasped, a thousand knives of agony stabbed her chest, and then she exhaled carefully as her entire rib cage rebelled against motion of any kind. She panted in short, shallow breaths that were all her abused body would tolerate at the moment.
Myles was back, leaning across the driver’s seat. “Faith. Baby. Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” she managed to croak.
“Are you bleeding?”
“Don’t know—”
“Don’t move, honey. An ambulance is on the way. Just stay still and stay with me.”
She frowned. Where was she going to go? She was pinned in her seat—
Oh. He meant not to pass out. Or die.
“Is anything broken?” he demanded.
“How would I know?”
“Does anything feel broken?”
“Yeah. My whole chest. Breathing hurts.”
She became aware of being leaned to the left with the whole passenger side of the vehicle plastered up against her right side. She thought that might be part of the armrest jabbing into her right hip. Whatever it was, it hurt.
“Are you seeing stars? How many fingers am I holding up?”
She didn’t feel like fainting. She just felt as if she was floating slightly above and outside of her body. “Neck hurts. Don’t wanna turn my head to count your fingers,” she mumbled.
“Don’t you faint on me,” he said forcefully.
The sirens, when they came, were deafening and made her pounding head throb even worse. She squinted against the glare of spotlights suddenly pointed at her.
And then a fireman was right in front of her, his friendly, concerned face no more than a foot away. He spoke loudly and clearly. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’re gonna use the Jaws of Life and pull this car off of you, okay? I’m gonna put this blanket over you to protect you from sparks. It won’t take long.”
A heavy, suffocating blanket went over her head, torso and lap, shutting out his face and all the light. It felt as if she couldn’t breathe through it. Suffocating. She was suffocating! She panicked, gasping frantically for breath.
A screamingly loud sound of metal screeching in protest made her go still. Good grief. They were ripping her car apart with her still in it.
The painful thing jabbing her hip went away all of a sudden, and then the fireman was back, peeling the blanket away from her face.
“Before we move you, ma’am, I’m just gonna give you a quick once-over for injuries. Tell me if you can feel me pinching.”
He proceeded to rather painfully pinch her arms, legs and feet, and she yelped each time, on cue. He slipped his hand incredibly gently behind her neck and felt around under her hair. He announced over his shoulder, “Neck doesn’t feel broken, but I want to immobilize her, anyway.”
A stiff, plastic collar with not enough padding at the edges went around her neck and dug into her chin. Two firemen turned her carefully and lifted her out of the wreck of her car. As they swiveled her feet to the right, she caught a glimpse of the back seat. Jack’s car seat was mangled.
As in, a twisted lump barely recognizable for what it was supposed to be.
And that was when she broke. Had he been in the car, he would’ve died for sure. Sweet, innocent, precious Jackson. Oh, God.
She began to sob, which did nothing to help her already rough breathing. She thought she might have hyperventilated, for when they laid her on a gurney and pushed her toward an ambulance, one of the firemen put a paper bag over her mouth instead of an oxygen mask.
It helped. By the time she was strapped into the ambulance and Myles had climbed in beside the medic, she could sort of breathe again, and the worst of the panic attack had passed.
The next two hours were a blur of bright overhead lights, X-ray rooms, and nurses poking and prodding her in pretty much every way they seemed able to think of. But at the end of it, a doctor with kind eyes came in to tell her she was a very lucky young woman and seemed to have avoided any serious injury.
“Good thing you and your husband were driving such a sturdy vehicle, Mrs. Colton,” the doctor added casually. “Most people T-boned that hard wouldn’t have survived.”
Aaand...the panic attack was back.
She gasped ineffectively for air, any air at all. Myles lurched forward, obviously worried, but with no idea what to do. It was the duty nurse, a small, feisty, middle-aged woman named Mrs. O’Dingle who explained, “She’s having a panic attack. Hug your wife until she calms down. But gently. Gently, man. She’s going to be mighty sore for a couple of days.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and carefully wrapped his arms around her, holding her as if she was made of blown glass and the slightest squeeze would crush her. For all she knew, it might. They’d given her a shot a while back, a painkiller that had dulled everything to a distant ache. For now. But an ominous hint of pain to come hovered just over the horizon.
She was alive, though. They both were. And Jack was safe at home with her mother. Thank goodness.
It was taking forever to get her discharge paperwork compiled, and while she and Myles waited, a police officer stepped into the tiny room. “Mr. and Mrs. Colton? I need to take a statement from you regarding your accident earlier. Is now a good time?”
Now was most certainly not a good time, but the officer didn’t sound as if he was giving them any choice in the matter.
Myles took the lead. He described driving west on Ontario Street, having a green light, and entering the intersection, a vehicle coming out of nowhere, moving south at high speed and slamming into the side of their car. He described her car giving a cross-traffic warning, then added, “But there was no time to swerve, no time to hit the brakes, nothing to do. It just slammed into us. Pushed us sideways all the way across the intersection.”
“We didn’t spin around?” she asked, frowning. “I remember lights spinning all around us.”
“You were knocked half-silly. I expect you were dizzy and that made the lights seem to spin,” Myles said gently.
“Oh.”
The police officer spoke up. “Did you see the vehicle, Mr. Colton?”
“It was big and dark colored.”
She gathered herself to offer, “It was a pickup truck. Black. No headlights. It had one of those winch things mounted on the front.”
“No headlights, you say?” the cop said quickly.
“Correct.”
Both men were frowning at her as if she’d grown a second head.
“It’s a very dark night out. No moon, full cloud cover,” the police officer said.
“I know,” she replied tartly. “And the truck had no lights on. I may have imagined the lights spinning after the crash, but I know what I saw before it.”
Both men were silent, their skepticism thick in the air. She knew what she’d seen, darn it.
“Did you hear brakes squealing before the truck hit you?”
She thought back. “No. Not at all.”
The cop and Myles frowned heavily, and it hit her belatedly what that meant. Oh, my.
The cop cut across the sudden tension, asking, “Did either of you see a license plate, or maybe the driver?”
Now why would he ask that?
Myles answered, “As soon as I got my wits about me and saw that my wife was alive, I jumped out of my car to run around to see if I could catch a license plate number. But he was already too far away for me to see it. He backed up a hundred yards or so at high speed, did a Y-turn, and then peeled off in the other direction.”
The other vehicle had fled the scene? Ahh. That must be why Myles had stood in front of their car swearing.
“Was an airbag visible in the truck?” the policeman asked.
Myles thought for a moment. “If it would have been white, then no. The cab of the truck was all dark.”
“Hmm. Old vehicle or he must’ve disabled it.”
“Looked like a late-model truck to me,” Myles commented.
The cop stated, “That’s what the witnesses said, too.”
“Did any of them catch the license plate?” Myles responded quickly.
“Unfortunately, no witnesses could give us any detail that would identify the truck or driver,” the officer said. “The department will try to track down some security camera footage or closed-circuit TV images of your hit-and-run vehicle. But don’t hold your breath. We don’t have much to go on.”
“Did someone at least see if the driver was male or female? Maybe a hair color? Basic description like beard or no beard?”
The officer shot her a wary look and muttered, “Witnesses thought the driver was wearing something over his head.”
“Like a mask?” Myles blurted.
“Possibly. Like I said, we’ll search for video to tell us more.”
The policeman left quickly after that, and she turned to Myles to ask him more about the other vehicle fleeing the accident and what it could mean. But as she started to speak, he frowned and followed the policeman out.
She shamelessly tried to eavesdrop on their conversation, but they were speaking too quietly for her to hear anything more than a low rumble of sound. How frustrating!
The cop left, and Myles must have pulled out his cell phone, for he started to speak again. This time, she heard him well enough describing the accident to whoever was on the other end of the call, but then he lowered his voice again, and she missed the rest of the conversation. Darn it.
He stepped back in. “Who was that you called?” she asked.
“My boss.”
“Why did he need to know about the accident right away? Shouldn’t we call my mom first?”
“I’ll call her next.”
“What else did you say to your boss?”
“Nothing.”
He was lying. But Myles never lied to her. Why was he doing so, now? What wasn’t he telling her? With the powerful painkillers coursing through her system, her brain felt cloudy, her thoughts all blurry, and she couldn’t summon a single sharp argument to confront Myles with.
He stepped into the hall again, this time to let her mother know they’d been in an accident but were both fine. That was another lie, but at least she saw the reason for this one. No need to panic her mom when there was nothing she could do to help them, right now.
Myles left the hallway altogether then, after muttering something about calling their insurance company and arranging a rental car for them.
She stared at the ceiling, hurting and scared. What wasn’t he telling her about the accident? Had it been an accident at all or intentional? That was certainly how he was acting. But who on earth would try to hurt—or kill—them like that? And why?
Even worse than when she’d seen that truck barreling straight at her, terror tore through her now, along with a single thought replaying itself in her head over and over.
She’d almost died tonight.
