The Doll 12（文稿）

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 12 IRVING, TEXAS
Veers Transport was first on Bradford’s hit list for finding Logan because it had everything he looked for: Trucks. Office. Warehouse. Seclusion. Red flags.
On the surface, the company was legitimate and profitable, and if not for the information found in the Doll Maker files, there would have been nothing about the business to have drawn the war room’s attention.
Even Katherine Breeden’s name was no longer connected to the company, although it had once been.
Only by following Breeden’s trail, as the dead man had, and working backward, could the connection have been made.
Veers Transport owned a fleet of fifteen trucks, most of them class-six commercial vehicles with a couple of eighteen-wheelers thrown in for good measure.
State filings were up-to-date; there was no pending litigation; the company properly paid income, sales, and unemployment taxes;
it provided health-care benefits to full-time employees, of which it had eighteen;
and none of the directors or officers of the closely held corporation were connected to the names on the Doll Maker’s roster.
It had taken digging into the personal lives and histories of the primaries to sniff out the hole in the facade,
because there was just no explaining how those who owned the company didn’t also own or rent property, own or drive vehicles,
or how as recently as last month one of the men had listed a homeless shelter as his permanent address.
Bradford drove by for a visual first pass.
They were off Loop 12 in a commercial area dotted with importers and wholesalers spread among parking lots and wide single-story office complexes.
The depot was directly off the road, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a separate prefabricated building near the front and a two-bay warehouse toward the rear.
There were six trucks in the lot, and if the entire fleet ever came home to roost at the same time, it would be a tight squeeze.
To the casual observer, security was lax if not nonexistent, but to well-trained eyes, the cameras and motion detectors were easy to spot.
Walker said, “You’d think in an area like this they’d flaunt the security.”
“Maybe the low-key approach is for the benefit of law enforcement.”
“Perhaps,” she said,
and Bradford continued down the strip, far past the depot, to a smaller street and from there to the first right,
which was an alley along the other side of the ten-foot wall that separated the residential area from the commercial complexes.
Here, streetlights dotted the alley and backyards stretched from clapboard siding to chain-link fence,
and faded and cracked plastic toys littered patchy lawns, occasionally joined or replaced by a car up on blocks.
Satellite images had pointed to this route as the least intrusive form of access to the transport company,
and Bradford kept the vehicle creeping along the narrow pitted road until the roof of the warehouse settled into position ahead.
He stopped in what shadow existed and allowed the length of an office complex to separate the Explorer from their target.
Walker snapped a magazine into an MP5, and they stepped into the night.
ZAGREB, CROATIA
Flat on her back, arms to her sides, Neeva stared at the ceiling.
The metal door was open and had been ever since she’d woken: open and wide like a tormenting bully who offered something just to take a swing if you accepted.
Chained to the wall, ankle trapped inside the rubber-coated metal ring, the tease of escape was far worse than being locked away in darkness.
She yanked the chain in frustration, felt the solid tug, and deflated. She’d no energy left to scream and fight.
The guard who usually sat outside her door was gone and the language recordings had stopped.
She didn’t know if this was bad or good, because in this place change meant something worse was coming.
She’d been bathed or showered since the water attack, because she was clean and the track suit smelled freshly laundered, and her hair was really weird. Shirley Temple weird.
A shadow filled the doorway. Neeva jerked upright and backed up against the wall.
There hadn’t been any footsteps to announce the person, not even in the silence.
She fingered the chain, which had enough slack in it to use as a weapon if the shadow got close enough.
The person ducked to enter and then moved out of the doorway so the light wasn’t directly behind, and Neeva could see the face—
definitely the mystery person from yesterday, although the hair was different and the person now wasn’t so much an it as a he.
“May I come in?” the person said, and Neeva stared, blinking,
not because of the polite nature of the request but because this was the first real-life English she’d heard in so long she’d lost track,
and it was real American English, not all accented and stilted as if one of these animals had learned it in school.
“You’re already in,” Neeva said, and he smiled, kind of sad. “Michael,” he said, and stuck out a hand.
Neeva didn’t move and after a while the hand withdrew. “You speak English,” Neeva said finally.
“Apparently, so do you,” the Michael person said. “Very colorfully.”
Neeva snorted, and Michael stepped closer.
About halfway into the cell, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and tipped his head toward the ceiling.
Neeva waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Didn’t even look at her, which was more out of character for this place than anything else so far.
“What do you want?” Neeva asked.
His face shifted toward her. “To talk with you, if you don’t mind.”
Neeva let out a bark of laughter. Chained to the wall, she wasn’t exactly going anywhere, and until now what she did or didn’t want had meant nothing.
“Sure, talk,” she said. “But don’t you need to drop your pants and whack off first? That seems to be the order of things— that is, if you skip talking altogether.”
Almost as if to himself, he said, “You’re lucky.” The words were like a smack in the face.
“Yeah, for sure,” Neeva said, “I’m so lucky. That’s exactly what those pervs are thinking when they honor me with their presence.”
“They’re trying to degrade you,” he said. “That’s the best they could do without touching you.
“If you were anyone else, they would have beat and raped you. To humiliate you. Break you.”
The honesty of the explanation left Neeva without a retort, without any sense of up or down, and all the questions that had no answers came back again until Michael spoke once more.
“I’m being forced to do a job that I don’t want to do,” he said. He turned to look directly at her. “I just want you to know, no matter what happens, this isn’t what I want.”
“I don’t see you in chains,” Neeva said. “So don’t talk to me about want.”
“I’m a prisoner here just as much as you are, wearing chains, even if you can’t see them.”
“Excuse me if I’m all out of sympathy.”
“I wanted to say it before the insanity starts,” Michael said, then stood and turned for the door.
Neeva fought for a reason to keep him there. He was American. He was English conversation. Possibly he had answers to the big why and what.
“You’re the person in the cell down the hall?” she said.
Michael nodded.
Neeva pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Can you answer the questions that nobody else will?”
Michael stopped and turned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can try.”
“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do they want with me? Is it for ransom?”
He studied her as if plotting things in his head, maybe weighing answers or trying to find words, then said, “This is a holding place, a waiting area.
“Someone put a purchase price on you and the people who control this building, the ones who kidnapped you, they’ve made it my responsibility to get you to the person who bought you.”
The words brought clarity. Neeva drew in a sharp inhale and said, “Knowing this, you’re going to just hand me over?”
Michael moved toward the door, looked back, and paused. “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I know who you are, and if I could find a way to save us all, I would, but I can’t.
“I have a gun to my head, and the more you fight me, the harder I will have to fight you back to save my own life. You understand?”
Neeva refused to justify the pitiful excuse with a reply. Instead she crossed her arms and glared.
Michael nodded. “I’m truly sorry.” From down the hall came the sick thud of boots against the concrete.
Michael’s head tipped up and then, as if Neeva ceased to exist, he straightened and walked out.
She tugged on the chain. Wiped away tears she didn’t even know she’d cried.
In a fit of futile desperation she yanked harder and more frantically on metal that refused to give, while the anger and fear and frustration;
the urge to destroy that had been building and building through the passing days;
the want, the desperate want to hurt and maim and kill and exact revenge on anyone who’d had anything to do with this state of helplessness, came out in a curdling scream.