Page 114 of The Lie Maker

Before Dad could say another word, I was bringing up Lana’s number on my phone.

Waiting.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

“Shit!”

Four times.

Then:

“Hello?”

“Lana?”

“Hi, Jack. I’m afraid Lana can’t come to the phone right now. It’s Gwen. We should talk.”

Sixty-One

Lana had one motherfucker of a headache.

Even before she opened her eyes, she could feel the throbbing inside her skull. In the moments before fully waking, she tried to remember what had happened to her. She recalled meeting the man in the hotel bar, walking outside with him.

There was someone, he said, who wanted to speak to her, to “have a word,” as he put it. As they walked out of the Marriott, he pointed to a black van.

“This way,” he’d said.

“Who are we meeting?” Lana had asked.

“She really wants to talk to you but doesn’t want to be seen. She could get in a lot of trouble for telling you what she knows, what she suspects.”

What was Lana going to do? Walk away now? Just when she might get a lead on a very important story?

They were almost to the vehicle when Lana felt something go into her neck. Something pointy and sharp in the man’s hand. A needle. Within seconds she felt her legs give out beneath her, but the man caught her before she hit the pavement and shoveled her into the van.

She heard someone shout her name. And in the seconds before everything went black, a popping sound. A firecracker? A car backfiring?

Now, waking up, she went to open her eyes and realized things still were shrouded in darkness. For a second she thought she was in a room with the lights off, but then felt her eyelashes brush up against fabric.

A blindfold.

All she could hear was tickety tickety tickety tickety tickety. Like some kind of cheap fan.

As alertness grew, she understood she was sitting in a hard, straight-backed chair, and that she was secured to it, her arms tied behind her back. And if all that weren’t bad enough, she felt a tickle in her nose, like she was going to start sneezing.

“She’s waking up,” a man said. She recognized the voice. It was the man who had met her in the bar, tricked her into going out to the van.

“About time,” a woman said. “You gave her too much.” A couple of footsteps, and when she spoke again she was much closer. Right in front of her, Lana sensed.

“How are we feeling?”

“Who are you?” Lana asked. The words came out soft around the edges, as if she’d had too much to drink. “What do you want?”

“Take her blindfold off,” the woman said.

“You sure?” the man asked.

“I don’t think we’re going to have any problem with Ms.Wilshire here. She’s going to want to cooperate, and then we’ll be able to move past this. Don’t you think so, Ms.Wilshire?”