THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

spun to his left. A pale Trish emerged from the bathroom, tears streaming down her face.
    She ran to him. Zane clutched her shaking frame. Thank God she was safe.
    Trish sobbed against his chest, oblivious to his wet clothes.
    “Are you okay, honey? Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice strained.
    “I’m okay.”  She hiccupped between sobs. “It’s Angel.”
    “What happened?”  He hadn’t meant to snap, but worry for Angel now took front and center.
    “I’m so sorry,” Trish wailed. “I couldn’t help her. I tried, but I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there until she told me to run.”  Another sob escaped.
    He clenched his teeth to keep from shouting. The more anxious Trish became the less coherent she’d be, and he needed all the information he could get right now.
    Zane coaxed her, “It’s okay. Just calm down and tell me what happened.”
    She sniffled and cleared her throat. “We were in the kitchen and the power went out so Angel went into the living room to get candles, but she didn’t come back. So I went out there and some guy was in the apartment. Could have wrestled on TV. He’d knocked her down. I screamed ... he turned around and I froze.” Her eyes welled up with tears again. “I’m so sorry.”
    Zane’s nerves were being dragged through a field of razor blades each second he waited on Trish to tell him everything. Did Angel lie hurt in a hospital somewhere? He took a deep breath to keep from shouting and pushed his sister for more.
    “Okay, take it easy, but tell me what happened to her.” 
    Trish raised pained eyes to him. “He came after me, but Angel jumped on his back and screamed at me to run.”  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “So I did. I ran way down to the end of the complex, scared out of my mind. I hid behind some bushes by one of the buildings. I was crying, trying to figure out what to do.” 
    “What else?”  Zane silently pleaded for Trish to get it all out.
    She sniffled. “I wanted to come back here and check on Angel and I thought maybe I could get his tag number.”
    Patience was paying off, but at the cost of his sanity. Chinese water torture would be easier than waiting for Trish to tell him where the hell Angel had gone. “So you got a tag number?”
    Trish shook her head. “I came back to help Angel and found Heidi.”  Tears poured out of her swollen eyes. “Angel’s gone and I can’t tell you where.”
    He wanted to say it was okay, that he would get her back because he had a tracking device in Angel’s sneaker.
    But finding the chip didn’t mean Angel would be alive when he got to it.
     
    Chapter 40
     
    Pain drove nails through Angel’s head. That jerked her from a dark fog. Her first tick of consciousness brought with it a chill that shook the length of her body.
    Where was she?
    She blinked to clear the cobwebs from her brain. A dank, oily odor overpowered her. With another blink, her vision began to clear.
    Way up, maybe twenty feet from where she was lying on her back, flashes of light backlit a row of dingy windows near the top of a rusting metal wall. Cold seeped through her bones. Wet clothes clung to her clammy skin.
    When she slid her elbows to push her head and shoulders up, the room spun. A sharp pain stabbed her side. She swallowed hard to settle her roiling stomach. Barefoot pygmies had tromped through her mouth leaving a nasty taste and a dusty trail.
    Very slowly, to control the dizziness, Angel shifted her head around, surveying the room. A tall overhead garage door stood on one end of the fifty-foot-long room. Wires hung loose from a panel next to the door as if someone had ripped the control box from the wall. Her eyes trailed down to a silver padlock the size of her palm that had been threaded through a shiny new hasp at the bottom of the door.
    No exit there.
    She scanned the next wall, opposite the windows. This one was a short interior wall, but still close to fifteen feet. It must separate the room she was in from another area. A pigeon landed on the top ledge of the wall and cooed. Several holes large enough to drop a chair through yawned across the ragged metal roof. Water pooled on the floor from past rain showers. At least it wasn’t raining now.
    Dreading the dizziness, Angel forced herself to turn further to check out the last barrier of her prison.
    An oil-stained floor spanned the distance between her and a standard office door. The building appeared to have been a commercial truck