never out of touch, either. Her friends expected they could reach her whenever they wanted, and vice versa. Not replying when a friend texted was just rude. At least a K or a busy hit you l8r.
Her parents, too. They might not expect her to text in two seconds. But if they called she’d better pick up or they’d freak pretty soon. Not just Becks. Her friends’ parents, too. They’d all bought into the same fantasy, grown-ups and kids, We’re safe as long as we’re in touch.
She’d learned better tonight. The phone wasn’t safety. It was the illusion of safety.
“Five minutes,” Jacques said to Kira.
To what? She saw the mystery was part of the game for him, another way to play with her, wind her up.
* * *
Ahead, an exit. They pulled off down a short ramp that ended at a stop sign: ALTO. Turned left, beneath the overpass that supported the highway. A tall white van waited, pulled over, hazard lights blinking. The cargo compartment windowless.
A man stood beside it, his cigarette flaring in the dark. He flung it away, pulled open the back doors.
NFW. Not a van with no windows. They might as well make her wear a sign that said I AM GOING TO BE MURDERED.
The pistol. She leaned forward, tried to see how far down Jacques might have put it, how she could reach it. Jacques was big, his legs were in the way. But he’d have to get out before she did.
“Sit up.” Jacques pushed her against the seat.
Distract him, say something, anything.
“The cuffs. They’re hurting.”
Lilly handed Jacques a black bag, thick mesh.
Jacques eyed Kira as he opened the bag. His face was eager. He wanted her to reach up with her cuffed hands and grab for it. He wanted her desperation.
A terrible thought came to her. What if Jacques had no plans to ransom her? What if he was just playing with her? What if he’d taken her for himself and would use her until there was nothing left?
“Don’t scream.”
Then she could think of nothing else but her voice tearing through the night—
But she said nothing, nothing at all.
And then the bag came down and the darkness with it.
8
Barcelona
Three forty-nine a.m. Rebecca’s mood was as dark as the Gothic Quarter’s grimy streets.
The Barri Gòtic, as locals call it, is a rectangle-shaped district that angles northeast from Barcelona’s waterfront. The famous pedestrian street La Rambla divides it from the seedy but gentrifying neighborhood of El Raval to the west. Together the Quarter and El Raval are only about a half-mile wide, a mile long, but they hold hundreds of places to eat and drink.
After she and Brian split, Rebecca worked her way south to the waterfront. Then she doubled back to the Plaça Reial, an open square just off La Rambla. The plaza was the center of Barcelona’s tourist nightlife, a block from The Mansion. The walking sobered her up. She noted every stop she’d made on her phone.
In two hours she showed Kira’s picture to forty-three people, mostly bartenders. Bouncers were a better bet. They were paid to stop trouble before it started, so they had to keep their eyes open. But many bars in the Quarter were too small to have bouncers.
In any case, Rebecca came up empty forty-two-and-a-half times. At a bar called Ginger, on the eastern edge of the Quarter, a bouncer said maybe he’d seen Kira walk by. Maybe. With someone? Two people, a man and a woman. Two? Yes, two.
Didn’t totally make sense but he seemed sincere. Rebecca offered him twenty euros. He waved the money off, a fact that made her think he was telling the truth, he wasn’t in it for the money. He took her number and promised to call her if he remembered more.
Of course, many of the people she’d tried to ask had simply ignored her. No doubt they saw her as an overprotective American chasing a teenager who hadn’t even been missing a whole night.
After a while Rebecca hated them all. Had she ever been this besotted with herself, immune to everything but her own pleasure? The answer had to be yes, but that didn’t make seeing these golden children any easier. The streets blurred, and Rebecca began to wonder whether she was in purgatory, condemned to chase her missing daughter endlessly.
Though that wouldn’t be purgatory, would it?
After three, slightly earlier than she’d expected, the streets calmed. Smaller bars shut their doors. The partiers still out split into two main categories.