Page 100 of Take Your Breath Away

Tyler was only half a dozen houses away. He stopped pedaling and allowed himself to coast for a few seconds. He was going to need a moment to catch his breath before he could say a single word to this lady.

He wheeled into the driveway and hopped off the bike while it was still in motion. It skittered across the asphalt on its side and the forward momentum carried Tyler a few steps on his feet. He put out his hands to brace himself, and they slapped into the Volvo’s tailgate window at the moment the woman was getting out of the car.

Her eyes went wide. “Oh my!” she said.

Now Tyler was bending over, hands on his knees, struggling to catch his breath. The woman’s brief expression of panic turned to something closer to wonder when she realized who it was.

“Oh my!” she said again. “You’re from Whistler’s! Did I forget something?”

Tyler was still panting. He couldn’t get the words out.

“Did you really chase me all that way?” she asked, taking a step in his direction. She was smiling now, almost laughing. “Did I drop my wallet or something?”

Tyler, still winded, shook his head. “Not … wallet.”

“What, then?” She glanced over at his bicycle. “I hope you haven’t wrecked your bike.” She went over to it, grabbed it by the handlebars, and stood it up on its two wheels. “Looks okay.” She studied the underside of the bike, as though looking for something. “I guess bikes don’t have kickstands anymore.” So she gently set the bike back on the ground on its side.

She gave Tyler another smile and came around to the back of the car and swung open the tailgate. She scanned her groceries and said, “Everything seems to be here.”

Tyler said, finally, “Who are you?” And then thought, that was going to be his second question.

The woman froze for half a second, then slowly turned around. “Excuse me?”

“Are you her? Are you Brie? Are you Brie Mason?”

Forty-One

Andrew

During the time that I was on the ground and incapacitated from the Taser—and I didn’t have to be a weaponry expert to figure out that was what I’d been shot with—Matt rolled me onto my stomach, pulled my arms around behind me, and cinched a set of plastic handcuffs around my wrists.

The Taser shot had paralyzed me for several seconds, maybe as long as a minute, and while my mind was telling my body to fight him off, my limbs were not getting the message. While I lay there, wrists bound, Matt went back to his truck, opened the driver’s door, rummaged around for something, and quickly returned.

This time, in his right hand was a real gun, not a Taser. A Glock, it looked like, although guns were not my area of expertise. Whatever it was, it scared the shit out of me. In his other hand, a roll of duct tape.

He kicked me over onto my back. My bound hands dug into me, but Matt didn’t appear to be concerned about my comfort. He tucked the gun into his belt and stood over me, one leg on either side of my chest. If I’d had control over my limbs I’d have tried to kick him in the balls, but it was not to be.

He ripped off a length of duct tape, then bent over long enough to slap it over my mouth, and stepped away.

“I want you to understand something from the get-go,” he said. “Give me a moment’s trouble and you’re dead. You get that?”

I managed a nod as I shifted to my right side to take the weight off my wrists.

Matt said, “The tape’s temporary. I’m gonna explain some things and I don’t want you interrupting. And don’t think of shouting when it comes off.”

I nodded again.

“Okay,” he said, taking a step back. “Don’t go away.”

As he walked back toward his Suburban, I tried moving my various parts. He hadn’t bound my legs, and when I tried to move them, I was successful, if you can call being able to drag them across the ground like they were logs a success. And I was now able to wiggle my fingers, although for how long was anyone’s guess, given how the plastic cuffs were cutting off the blood flow.

Matt came walking back. He was holding a shovel. He pointed the blade into the ground, rested one foot on it, cupped his hands over the end of the handle, and turned it into a resting place for his chin.

“You’re gonna dig a hole.”

I listened. He stepped around me, leaving the shovel, deep enough in the dirt that it remained standing, and looked at my bound hands.

“You’re clearly a workingman. You got the hands. There’s a lot of digging, and I don’t need you whining about blisters.”