Page 29 of The Chain

The apartment is in an old mill that has been converted into condos. It’s only a flop to crash in and get mail.

He parks the car and goes inside.

He grabs a Sam Adams from the fridge and plugs the iPhone into the charger. When it comes back to life, he looks at a second text from Rachel.

They said it was OK for me to bring you in. Call me, please!it says.

He dials her number and she answers immediately. “Pete?” she asks.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Are you home?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

“I’ll call you right back,” she says.

The phone rings. It saysUnknown Caller. “Rachel?”

“I’m calling you from a burner phone. Oh, Pete, I need to talk to somebody. I tried to talk to Marty but he’s in Georgia. Oh God,” she begins and dissolves into sobs.

“Have you been in an accident? What’s happening?” he asks.

“It’s Kylie. They’ve taken Kylie. They’ve kidnapped her.”

“What? Are you sure she’s not just—”

“They’ve taken her, Pete!”

“Have you called the police?”

“I can’t call the cops, Pete. I can’t call anybody.”

“Call the police, Rachel. Call them now!”

“I can’t, Pete, it’s complicated. It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”

20

Thursday, 6:00 p.m.

Pete has the same recurring thought as Rachel does: If they harm one hair on Kylie’s head, he will scorch their world and stamp on the smoldering ashes. He will spend the rest of his life hunting them down and killing them all.

No one is going to harm Kylie, and they are going to get her back.

Pete drives the Dodge Ram hard to the front gate of the self-storage yard on Route 9. He parks outside locker 33. It’s the biggest locker you can get, the size of a couple of garages. He had graduated from the small locker to the medium one and now to their “deluxe storage facility.” He opens the padlock, rolls up the metal door, finds the light switch, and pulls the door closed behind him.

When his mom sold the house and moved to that place near Scottsdale, Pete had just taken all his stuff and dumped it in here, adding to it over the years. Until he bought the apartment he’s in now, he had never really had a civilian house. He’d lived in the married quarters at Camp Lejeune and a succession of billets in Iraq, Qatar, Okinawa, and Afghanistan. This anonymous self-storage place between the road and the old ruined freight railway is the closest thing he’s got to a permanent home.

He can spend hours here going through his old crap but today he ignores the nostalgia boxes and goes straight to the gun cabinet on the wall at the back. Rachel was confused and unclear on the phone. Kylie had been kidnapped and at this stage Rachel didn’t want to go to the police. She wanted to cooperate with the kidnappers and do what they asked. If he can’t persuade her to bring in the FBI, the two of them will need to be well armed. He unlocks the gun cabinet and takes out both of his handguns—his grandfather’s navy-issue .45 ACP and his own Glock 19—and finally his Winchester twelve-gauge. His rifle is in the cab already.

He takes spare ammo for all the weapons and grabs a couple of flash-bang stun grenades he’d smuggled home. If this becomes a rescue mission, what else will he need? He gets his B-and-E equipment—lock-pick kit, sledgehammer, EM-alarm jammer, latex gloves, flashlight—and the bugging and anti-bugging gear he’d acquired for his post Corps corporate work.

He loads everything into the Dodge Ram and wonders,What else?

He takes the zip-lock bag containing his stash of heroin out of the glove compartment.

This would be the time to go cold turkey. To end it. Leave it here and drive away without it.

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