No dream. No nightmare. She was wide awake.

Tears came then, and fear. Where the hell was she?

The memory came back in strobelike flashes. Night. Walking. Choking on her fear. Begging for her life. A gunshot.

A gunshot. She’d been shot. She looked down at herself. Her T-shirt was soaked with blood, a hole burned through the upper left shoulder. She didn’t know if the bullet was still in her body or if it had passed through her. Whatever it had done, it hadn’t killed her. Hours had to have passed and she hadn’t died from loss of blood.

That was one good sign.

Slowly she took stock of her body. She had feeling in her left arm, but it seemed to be useless. Her right arm worked. She moved her left foot, bent her left knee. No damage there. Her right leg was a different story.

The attempt to move her right foot was excruciating. She struggled up onto her right elbow and looked down, panic knifing through her. The foot was turned inward almost perpendicular to the leg bone, as if it had been snapped off at the ankle.

“Help!” Gina called out. “Help! Somebody help me!”

She called out until her throat was raw. She was in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to hear her.

The space she was in was maybe five feet wide. It was a long way to the light. She was a poor judge of distance, but it had to be more than twenty feet. She remembered now the doors, like cellar doors. The doors—cracked and dilapidated—were the ceiling of her prison.

She reached out with her right hand to touch the wall, rough and hard. Concrete. Filthy. Beneath her was garbage—old boards, collapsed cardboard boxes; stinking plastic garbage bags that had been ripped and torn, their contents spilling out: eggshells and coffee grounds and putrid food and milk cartons. And beneath it all was the smell of stagnant water.

She was in an abandoned well, and she wasn’t alone.

Slowly she became aware of the feeling of being watched. Her heart pounding, Gina turned her head left inch by inch and came face-to-face with the biggest rat she had ever seen in her life.

Chapter 43

43

“No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No signs that she packed anything in a hurry—or at all,” Mendez told Dixon.

They had gathered in the sheriff’s office to share the news. Dixon sat back against the edge of his desk with his arms crossed tight across his chest. As always, his uniform was pressed crisp and impeccable. The only wrinkles were the creases Vince could see deepening across the sheriff’s forehead and around his mouth.