Threat Warning Read Online Free PDF Page B

work. The trick lay in choosing the right one at the right time.
    The trick also lay in Mom’s willingness to take a risk. Weapons notwithstanding, two against one presented real advantage; but if one of the two hesitated, none of the rest would matter.
    He tried repeatedly to capture his mother’s eyes to communicate that he had a plan, but she seemed to be intentionally avoiding his glance.
    “I need to go to the bathroom,” Ryan announced.
    The noise seemed to startle the girl with the gun. Then she shrugged. “So go.”
    Ryan recoiled. “What, on the floor?”
    Colleen leaned forward and lifted an empty Evian bottle from the rear center console. “Or here.”
    He was horrified. “I’m not going to go in a bottle. In front of everybody.”
    Colleen put the bottle down. “Suit yourself.”
    “Can’t we stop somewhere?”
    Colleen laughed. “Could you be more obvious?” She tapped Christyne’s headrest with the barrel of her pistol. “How much gas do we have, Mom?”
    Christyne cleared her throat, then said, “A little more than half a tank.”
    Colleen leaned closer to peer over her shoulder. “Looks more like three quarters to me,” she said. “A minivan like this, that’s got to be fifteen, sixteen gallons. At twenty miles to the gallon and sixty miles an hour, what’s that, three gallons an hour? We stop in five hours.”
    “Five hours ?” Christyne exclaimed. “Where are we going?”
    Colleen said, “Second star to the right, straight on till morning.”
    Ryan recognized the directions to Peter Pan’s Neverland, and had started to look out the windshield again when quick movement from Colleen made him jump. Before he had a chance to react, Ryan was staring down the barrel of the pistol. It looked huge, even in the dark. In his mind, he could almost see the bullet launching into his face.
    “Don’t ever lie to me again,” Colleen warned. “Don’t try to trick me, don’t try to piss me off. This isn’t a game. Do you understand me?”
    Ryan nodded. For the first time, the true gravity of what was happening registered in his mind. He was genuinely terrified.
    “I need the bottle after all,” he said.
     
     
    Ryan lost track of the turns and the route numbers—and also the time—as the roads became progressively narrower and the night darker. But for the clock on the dash that told him it was one-thirty-three, he would have sworn that it was even later. For the last half hour or more, they hadn’t passed a single car. Good thing, too, because Ryan didn’t think there would have been room for two vehicles abreast.
    The terrain out the window was mountain-steep, and when the headlights weren’t splashing over rocks, all he could see were trees. Sometimes—rarely—he caught glimpses of lights shining from buildings way off in the distance, for all he knew maybe miles away, mostly in the valleys far below.
    He’d never seen his mom so stressed behind the wheel. The last few miles were all short-radius switchbacks, a far cry from the suburban roads in Mount Vernon, and as the van’s transmission screamed for relief, she gripped the steering wheel as if it were a climbing rope. Ryan had considered offering to drive for her, but decided that that would be a bad idea.
    Finally, the bitch with the gun told them to turn onto yet another road—paved, but just barely—and then sent them for miles down a lot of nothing, the darkness interrupted only one time by a large house on a hill. At last, they stopped at a heavy-duty gate made of chain link.
    “What now?” Mom asked.
    “Just wait a second,” the kidnapper said.
    Two men seemed to condense out of the black night. They wore black clothing and each carried a rifle that looked like the ones soldiers wore in battle on the news. Flanking the van on both sides, they kept the muzzles pointing to the ground as they approached the car, but their fingers stayed precariously near their triggers. The one on the left used his non-trigger hand