Free Hostage by Emlyn Rees Page B

photo ID, showing Danny’s face, someone else’s name, and giving his profession as a lawyer with a firm in Washington DC.
    Danny’s body temperature was plummeting. He’d checked online before he’d left the hotel. Ice storms were forecast. The kind of weather that could kill a man. A buck-naked man even quicker.
    He felt like a jerk. No doubt looked like one too. He hadn’t even met the kidnappers yet, but already they were infuriating him.
    They’d snatched Mary Watts three days ago from the parking lot outside her mother’s nursing home in Atlanta, Georgia. No leads. No witnesses. The first indication that she’d gone missing had been when a letter listing the kidnappers’ demands had been delivered by an anonymous courier to Ricky Watts’s Washington office.
    Ricky Watts had made the cover of Fortune magazine two years running. A real estate mogul. He’d been happily married to Mary for eight years. Didn’t want to get rid of her. Or cash in on her. Danny knew. He’d checked.
    The kidnappers had sent Ricky a photo of Mary stripped to her underwear, tied to a toilet with a gag in her mouth.
    Every move they’d made had been efficient and ruthless. And Ricky Watts’s response to their demands had been the same. He’d followed their instructions to the letter. He’d not involved the police or FBI. He’d agreed to pay ten million dollars in untraceable Venezuelan bearers’ bonds. Not even the CIA could track those.
    Smartest of all, he’d taken the advice of an ex-military buddy of his and had contacted Danny’s new boss, Crane, who’d in turn contacted Danny and asked him to fetch Ricky Watts’s wife back alive.
    The money Watts was paying Danny for his services would be well spent. Danny’s guiding instinct was to protect the bullied, the oppressed and the abused. He wasn’t in it for the money. Never had been. Danny was here to make things right, to try and make it up to his wife and his son. He was trying to save other innocent people, because he had failed to save them.
    Another cold blast of wind scoured his body. He chewed down harder on his wad of gum. He wished again that he’d eaten before coming here.
    Chocolate. If he could have had anything right now, that’s what he’d have chosen. He had a weakness for it. The sugar he’d once got from alcohol, he got from candy now. He’d had to stop drinking two years ago. If he’d carried on, he’d have been dead by now.
    After Sally and Jonathan’s deaths, once Danny had got out of hospital, after the police had failed to catch the Paper Stone Scissors Killer, Danny’s whole life had fallen apart.
    What had happened in the woods that day … he’d found no way to deal with it. A darkness had fallen on him and paralysed him. He’d been unable to shake it. It had seeped into him, had become a part of him. Time and time again, he’d wished himself dead.
    His only glimmer of hope had been Lexie. Like a survivor from a shipwreck, he’d clung to his nine-year-old daughter as if she’d been a raft. As if she’d been the only thing he had left and the only thing that could keep him afloat.
    He’d moved with her to California. He’d meant it to be a fresh start. But his drinking and the pills he’d got hooked on had gone with him. Then one day his mother-in-law had arrived from England and told him he was sick. She’d said she wanted to take Lexie back home with her, so that she could take care of her properly there.
    And Danny had let her. The one thing he’d cared for, he’d let it be taken from him too. Because even in his boozed-up, drugged-up state, a part of him had known that his dead wife’s mother was right. A part of him had known that if he’d kept clinging on to Lexie, then he’d have taken her down with him too.
    Here in the cemetery parking lot, Danny flexed his toes.