Page 91 of Threat of Danger
Derek jumped into his own truck and unlocked the glove compartment, withdrew his SIG, and shoved the handgun into the back of his waistband. Next he reached behind his seat, pulled out a sturdy metal flashlight, and clipped it on his belt. Then off he went, back to the sugar shack, to Zak.
“I can’t find Kaylee and Jess anywhere. I think they might have gone into the sugar bush. Do you still have those squatch-cams up? How does that work?”
Zak was the vice president of the Versquatchers, Chuck’s second.
“Over a hundred cameras. Every new member has to donate a camera to the club as an entry requirement. Each member is responsible for checking his or her camera once a week. Then if someone has something, they report at the monthly meeting. But usually sooner. We just post the footage in our private Facebook group.”
“Motion sensor? Night-vision cams?”
“Sure. The sasquatch move at dusk and dawn for the most.”
“Call in the Versquatchers.”
Zak was on his phone already. “They’ll do anything for Kaylee,” he said while he waited for the other end to pick up. “On account of Chuck. Kaylee is like family. She was even offered to be the Sasquatch Princess in the spring club parade.”
He made one call, then another, explaining everything twice, then hung up. “Now they’ll call the others. We have a call tree. We can have every member alerted under eight minutes. We run timed drills bimonthly.”
“Do they all have radios?” Cell reception was spotty out in the middle of the sugar bush.
Zak scoffed. “Do sasquatch shit in the woods?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
THE ONLY THINGanyone needed to know about walking through the Vermont woods in March in their underwear was:Don’t do it.
Jess shivered as she stumbled forward in front of the masked man on the narrow ATV trail. As soon as she’d stepped into the woods, he’d had a gun pointed at her and commanded her to strip. She’d been freezing her ass off since.
She didn’t care about the cold, though. All she cared about was finding Kaylee.
The man followed her at a smart distance, around twenty feet or so. Too far for her to turn and lunge at him, but not so far that she could dart into the trees and get away from him before he could squeeze off a shot.
“It’s nice to see you again,” he said, his black ski mask distorting his voice, the mouth hole sewn shut as before.
“Can’t say the same,” Jess told him. “I have no weapon. I wasn’t hiding anything. You could have let me keep my clothes on.”
“You know I prefer you naked.”
Creepy.
The key was to thinkcreepy, notfrightening. She needed to think that she wasweirded out, notpanicked. On the job, she never allowed herself to be afraid of a stunt. Instead of thinking,That’s too scary, she’d trained herself to think,That looks difficult, but I can do it, and it’ll be fun because Ilovea challenge.
Restate and reframe.She plodded forward.This is difficult, but I can do it.
At least the ...Loserhad let her put her boots back on after she’d undressed, if only so she wouldn’t slow him down, stumbling over frozen roots barefooted.Loser.She was determined to stop thinking of him as thekidnapperor thekiller, or eventhe masked man. She wouldn’t give him power.
“Where is Kaylee?” she asked, not for the first time.
This time, he responded. “You’ll see her soon.”
“You need to let her go when we get there. Having to pay attention to both of us just complicates things.” Had he not learned that the last time?
She didn’t bring up how she and Derek had escaped before. She didn’t want to anger the guy. She didn’t want to bring things to a head until Kaylee was free.
Since part of the reason the man wanted her naked was to humiliate her, to destroy her spirit by making her remember the three days of torture at his hands, she simply refused to give him that. She pretended that she was on a movie set. She’d spent the last decade in Hollywood. If the man behind her thought showing her skin would shake her up, he’d better think again.
“Kaylee is a sweet girl,” he said.
You’re a sweet girl.
