“You’ll pick him up and escort him to Hobby Airport, fly him back to L.A. and turn him over to your pet mad scientist, and that will be the beginning of things for us, not the end. As to the grandniece, we’ll just let her go. She’s so doped up she’ll never be able to tell anyone who snatched her or why. And since she hasn’t been harmed,” Somerset shrugged, “I’m sure that her family will want to forget about the whole business as quickly as possible.
“As far as the FBI and the local cops are concerned, that’ll be the end of the case. There’s no injured party, there are no leads, the parents will be satisfied just to have their daughter back, and everything will be filed and forgotten. Then, if Navis can learn how the old man does it, we’ll be heading for heights that’ll make the presidency of CCM look like a consolation prize for the losers at a Phi Delta sorority party.”
“No, ‘if’ about it,” Huddy said. Already he felt better. Somerset never failed to make him feel better. “We’ll get what we need out of him. I’m taking all restrictions off Navis.” He turned to face her, finally relaxed enough to think about something besides Jake Pickett.
“I always did like that gown.”
“What part do you like the most?” She sat back on her haunches and smiled at him.
“The parts that aren’t there.” He reached for the orange ribbon.
Endless, the dream seemed. On and on it went, liquid and black, with her as the nexus afloat in a sea of nothingness. A dark ocean buoyed her from beneath. Stars pressed close, sometimes too close. It was warm and soft and somehow still not very relaxing.
Occasionally the stars shifted, and once the dream was gently shattered by the intrusion of huge, distorted planetary bodies that assumed the form of human faces. These globular shapes seemed capable of conversing with one another in some profound planetary tone. Their words were unintelligible.
Fortunately they didn’t stay long, letting her slip back into the depths of the fuzzy, uneasy dreaming, to drift alone on the supportive back of the emptiness.
Unexpectedly the stars started to fade from the dream sky, the black ocean to evaporate. Dark waves no longer moved gently beneath her, though her support remained soft and comforting. The waves went away altogether and she grew afraid the empty sky might swallow her up. Then it too began to move, falling away from her eyes, retreating into focus. The sky lightened, became a ceiling, and she knew that the stars had lived only on the backside of her retinas.
She turned over very slowly, moving almost as ponderously as the deep voices which had pontificated above her. The bed she was lying on was not her bed, the ceiling overhead not the ceiling of her bedroom. Where the window that looked out over Lavaca Bay belonged gleamed instead the great ignorant eye of a television set.
She tried to prop herself up on her elbows. That turned out to be far more difficult than rolling over, so she contented herself with lifting her head for a moment to inspect the rest of her surroundings. That made the sky start to swim again, but eventually it resumed its identity as a ceiling. She tried to orient herself. It wasn’t easy because she felt that at any moment the room around her might melt and flow together, returning her to that falsely secure homogenous dream world she’d only just escaped.
The bed she lay on seemed enormous. Partly that was the result of her drugged condition and distorted perceptions, but it was surely at least a king-size. Near its footboard stood an expensive-looking dressing table, a couple of ornate chairs, and above them a light fixture weeping crystal. The only window in the room looked out onto the sky. She could see the stars through it, but they weren’t the same stars she’d been watching in her dream. These were distant and real.
The light in the room came from a single nightlight set into one wall socket. Everything was dim and ghostly. The only bright light came from a crack under the door next to the dressing table. Memories came racing back to her.
The people in her bedroom, her real bedroom: no dream, that, but all too real. A cloth over her nose and mouth, a sack over her head. Something pricking her arm and then … the beginnings of the dream, creeping over her, stealing reality. Herself on someone’s shoulder, moving rapidly. Then moving faster still, but far more smoothly. How? In a plane, in a boat, a car?
Where was she, and why?
Mom and dad, they must be worried sick about her. Taps on the telephone, bugs in the lamp, and suddenly she knew, she knew. These people who’d been after her poor Uncle Jake, they’d finally decided to stop playing around, like a fencer who’d traded in his foil in favor of a broadsword. No more finesse now. Brute strength.
She seemed to be in a fancy hotel room. Certainly there was nothing so elaborate in Port Lavaca. Houston, perhaps? It was hard to tell because she had no idea how long she’d been dreaming.
Now she could sit up, could see a little more clearly. There was another door to the right of the bed, leading to … where? Rolling over, she dropped her hands to the floor and pushed against the base of the bed. Her body oozed snakelike out from beneath the sheets and her legs made little noise as they fell against the thick carpet. A faint murmuring came from beneath the door, entering the dark room along with the light. Voices, freezing her there on the floor for a desperate moment. They faded, coming no closer, and she breathed again.
The effort of escaping the bed had exhausted her. She waited until the room stopped swimming, then started for the door next to the bed. Using her arms she pulled and pushed herself across the carpet until she was facing the opening. Bathroom; an extremely large curved tub, a separate shower stall farther off, dressing table, john and bidet. A very fancy hotel, she decided.
A telephone beckoned from the nightstand close to the bed. She’d ignored it because she doubted her captors would be so foolish as to leave her an open line to the outside world. It was harder to push herself across the tiled floor of the bathroom, but she managed, heading for the bathtub. Above it was a low window, and through it she could see the moon.
The side of the tub presented only a temporary problem. It was slippery, but her arms were considerably more powerful than those of the average sixteen-year-old. She put both hands on the side of the tub and pushed down, raising her whole body and turning at the last instant so that her hips swung sideways. The ceramic was cold through her thin nightgown as she sat and caught her breath. As she rested she stared out the window.
Plants rose like thin shadows from a planter on the far side of the tub, but they didn’t block all of the view. She was able to see open sky, and the moon. The same moon that shone through the window of her bedroom, how far away she couldn’t guess.
Using her hands she swung her dead legs into the tub. Using the handholds provided for older guests, she managed to edge her way around to the far side of the tub. A push and she was sitting on the planter, ignoring the plants crushed beneath her. Her face was flat against the window and she could look down as well as out.
She saw a second moon, an echo of the first, rippling on unknown waters. Lavaca Bay? The same Lavaca Bay she saw from her window at home? Or had she been moved much farther up the coast, or down toward Corpus Christi? There were no landmarks beyond a distant narrow, sandy spit of land running north and south. That could be the Matagorda Peninsula, she thought, or Matagorda Island, or Padre Island, or any of several other gulf barrier formations. But at least she was still on the coast. She was sure she hadn’t been unconscious long enough to travel cross-country.
The moon in the sky gleamed off scrub cypress, live oak and mesquite. To the left of her prison she could make out two long docks extending out into the water. A small cargo vessel was tied up at one of them. Pressing tight against the glass, she tried to see straight down and was rewarded with visions of huge pipes and conduits, pavement and a rats nest of smaller pipes and cables. They filled her field of view and sent out metal tentacles toward the docks and into the water.
Beyond a paved walkway lay a narrow beach barely a couple of yards wide. To her right was a single thin, small dock, a stick alongside its larger commerical brothers. Several pleasure boats nuzzled up against it.
As she stared, a long barge led its mothering tug from south to north. She watched until it vanished. A glance at the clear late summer sky showed familiar stars in their expected positions.
Barge traffic implied a protected channel. She was looking out at a portion of the Texas intercoastal waterway, the same liquid highway that ran through Lavaca Bay. It only confirmed her suspicions as to her location. With her family she’d traveled up and down this coast several times. The building she was in was a good three or four stories tall. Only in Galveston or Corpus Christi were there hotels this high on the waterfront.
Unless her first guess was wrong and her prison wasn’t a hotel. What other structures were likely to boast a fancy room like this several stories above the water’s edge? From Galveston to the Mexican border there were only isolated, large industrial plants. Corpus Christi lay on a curving bay, and she couldn’t see anything to north or south. Galveston’s shorefront would be full of night-time strollers, and there were none of these. It seemed likely she’d been brought to a far more isolated location.
It didn’t matter. There was one person who would be able to find her anyway. She hesitated, considered carefully before contacting him. He was an old, tired man with a bad heart. But she didn’t know what else to do. She was scared, and it wasn’t like he was helpless. Not anymore.
She closed her eyes and did as she’d done for all of her conscious life, reached out with as much strength as she could muster.
“UNCLE JAKE!”
The half scream, half cry brought Pickett awake as if he’d been shocked. Instinctively he started to scramble clear of the bed, then calmed himself and set his mind to listen.
“Is that you, Mandy?”
“It’s me, Unkle Jake. Are you alright? Where are you?”
“I’m fine, Mandy. I’m at your mom and dad’s. Everyone thinks you’ve been kidnapped by a bunch of angry would-be car thieves. They think you’ve been taken for revenge by the people your dad beat up.”
“I’ve been kidnapped, but not by them. By—”
“I know who,” he said wordlessly, interrupting the thought. “I knew right away. Are you sure you’re okay? You sound funny.”
“They drugged me, Uncle Jake. Took me away and drugged me. I’ve only just come out of it and I don’t know how long I’ll have before they come in and drug me again.” She was watching the bathroom doorway now, not the view out the window. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been sleeping.
“They took you last night, princess. I just got here today myself.”
“So I’ve only been out one day. Then I’m sure I’m not far from home!”
“Where are you, Mandy? Just tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you. I’ll bring every policeman I can find between here and wherever you are.”
“No, Uncle Jake. I’m … I’m afraid what might happen if these people think they’ve lost their last chance to manipulate you. If they see a bunch of police cars driving up, they might move me or … they might do something else. You have to come get me by yourself, Uncle Jake. You have to try. I think you can do it. I don’t know what else to do.”
“If that’s what you think’s best, Mandy, then that’s what I’ll do. Now tell me how to get to you.”
“I can’t tell you for sure, Uncle Jake. I’m on the coast somewhere, in a bathroom three or four stories off the ground. My room faces the intercoastal waterway; you know, the ship canal? It’s a fancy room, but I don’t think it’s a hotel. I can see the water and the moon and ships moving around. There are lots of big pipes and things all over the place, and big docks with one cargo ship. It’s got to be a plant of some kind. You don’t feel very far away, Uncle Jake.”
“Neither do you, princess. Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of there. Then we’ll send the police in for these evil people, after you’re safe and away from them.”
“Be very careful, Uncle Jake.”
“I will, Mandy. They won’t be expecting me. I’ll bet they plan on contacting me in the morning, to tell me they have you and to warn me I’d better cooperate. I have to come get you now, before they find out I’m not here anymore. I’m sure they know I’m here.” He was dressing silently, pulling on worn socks, tying his shoes.
“That’s right, I almost forgot. They have the house bugged, Uncle Jake, so I’m sure they have somebody watching it, too.”
