"And just how am I supposed to do that? Tap one of them on the shoulder? Yell at him?"

"What? Distract who?" Grant asked.

"Nothing. Go haunt a computer. Not you, Grant." Maybe the boy was under so much stress, he wouldn't remember the strange things she was saying.

"So all I'm good for now is making computers go wonky? No respect for the dead." Charley left through the nearest wall.

Dawson groaned. He was alive.

The first knot in Grant's ties finally came loose and Amanda wanted to shout with joy at the small victory. She didn't, of course. They were far from being out of there.

Even though her fingers were slick with sweat in addition to trembling, the other knots were easy after the first couple.

As soon as she freed the last one, Grant flung the ropes off and shot up from the chair to go to his brother's side. He knelt next to him and started tugging on his ropes.

"Let me do that," Amanda said. "I have experience. See if you can wake him up."

Dawson groaned again.

"Dawson, it's Grant. Can you hear me?"

Amanda squatted behind him and began twisting the knots. She'd done it before. It should be easier this time.

It wasn't. Her shaky, sweaty fingers slipped on the rope which refused to budge. How long could Charley entertain the killers with his computer tricks?

Her breathing sounded loud and harsh to her own ears, so loud she was sure Brendan and his buddies could hear her even if they were still in the house.

Grant held his brother's face between his hands. "Dawson, you need to wake up. We're in trouble, and you need to wake up now." Despite the nightmare situation, his voice was steady. He was bound to be terrified, but he was successfully fighting the panic.

Grant was, as Dawson had said, a brave little boy. He deserved to live to be a brave man. She ordered her fingers to relax, to be methodical about getting the knots undone.

Charley burst into the cellar. "Amanda, get out! Now! They're coming!"

Amanda thought her heart rate had peaked already, but she was wrong. "Grant, you need to leave." She tried to speak calmly, but even to her own ears her words were squeaky and tense. "Those people are coming. Get out before it's too late."

In contrast to her breathing, her fingers seemed to move in slow motion as she twisted ineffectually at the knots.

"I'm not leaving without my brother," Grant said.

Dawson moaned and mumbled. He was coming around, but it might be too late.

The first knot came loose. Amanda almost cried with relief. "We'll be right behind you. Go for help. Run. Now."

The next knot was almost free. All they needed was a few more seconds. A few more seconds and they could escape, run through the weeds, get back to the highway, call Jake and Sunny and her father and even her mother, drink a cold c.o.ke, eat a hot pizza- "What the h.e.l.l?"

Amanda's heart sank to the bottom of her feet at the sound of Brendan's voice.

Chapter Seventeen.

"Noooooo!" Grant's small form hurtled toward the three people silhouetted in the doorway. He flung himself at the bald man standing on the bottom step next to Brendan who was barely recognizable without his tinfoil and gla.s.ses.

The bald man grabbed Grant's arms, but the boy struggled, twisting and kicking, trying to get free, trying against all odds to subdue the older, larger man.

Grant was brave, but Amanda wasn't sure how smart he was. Attacking their captors probably guaranteed they were all going to die right there in that musty old cellar. Amanda found herself suddenly strangely calm. Her hands were no longer trembling. Her heart continued to race but she felt no panic, only anger at the people who'd taken this boy, drugged her friend, tied them up and stuffed them in this dark dungeon.

Though she knew the sheer idiocy of her actions, she couldn't let Grant take the defense alone. With a sigh of resignation, she gathered her energy, charged across the packed dirt floor and launched herself at Brendan.

"Amanda!" Charley shouted. "Stop that! Are you crazy?"

To her surprise Brendan fell to the floor from the force and suddenness of her attack. She had him down.

Now what?

Her father had taught her to shoot but not to fight.

Never again would she leave her gun at home, not even if she was just going to the library.

Brendan shoved her off, pushed her to the floor and started to rise. She aimed a motorcycle-booted foot at his groin. His shriek of pain told her she'd aimed true.

A gunshot echoed loudly in the small confines of the cellar and one of the jars on the back wall exploded. The sound bounced around the small s.p.a.ce, ringing through Amanda's head, and the broken jar released a noxious odor that overpowered the smell of gunpowder.

She rolled away from Brendan while he grasped his crotch and called her rude names. She lifted her head to see if Grant had been shot. The boy still squirmed in the grasp of the bald headed man, the man she'd seen the day before in the ominous beige van.

"Stop, both of you!" The mousy woman from the van stood on the second step waving a Glock as if it were a club, her finger resting on the trigger.

Jake and Ross were right. The woman didn't know much about shooting, which meant she was more dangerous with that gun than if she knew what she was doing.

"Grant!" Amanda pushed to her feet and started toward the boy but Brendan grabbed her arm. His grip wasn't strong, and she suspected he was still experiencing some pain in his groin. She certainly hoped so. "Get your hands off me, you filthy traitor, or I'll kick you again. You need to get out of the gene pool anyway." She tried to shrug him off, but he wrapped his other arm around her neck.

Charley appeared in front of her, shaking his head. "d.a.m.n it, Amanda, you never did know when to give up!"

"Give up?" She tried to push Brendan's arm away from her throat. "Are you seriously saying I should give up?"

Brendan tightened his hold on her neck. "Giving up would be a very good idea."

"He's right," Charley said. "You're in a position of weakness. That means you've got to be smart, and the first step is to lull them into believing you're defeated. Kicking the man in the b.a.l.l.s and calling him a traitor isn't a good way to do that."

Leave it to Charley to know the proper way to work a con. Of course, that was his field of expertise.

She made a monumental effort to cease struggling for her freedom. It went against every fiber of her being, but Charley was right. The odds were against them. They had to pretend to acquiesce, bide their time and figure out how to get away.

She groped at her side and was able to touch Grant's small arm. "Stop," she said quietly. She wanted to explain the way Charley had explained it to her, to rea.s.sure the boy they weren't giving up, just making a tactical retreat. "It'll be all right." That was the only thing she dared say. It would probably defeat the purpose of being sneaky if she made a public announcement about their strategy.

As if he sensed her thoughts, Grant stilled. The man holding him shoved him across the room. "Get back in the chair."

Grant turned a frightened gaze toward Amanda. She nodded and tried to look confident instead of panic-stricken. He moved to the chair and quietly resumed his seat beside Dawson who had ceased groaning and sat eerily still and silent. That revved up her panic several levels.

No. Dawson was all right. He had to be. She couldn't panic, couldn't think about any other possibility. She had to remain calm if she was going to get the three of them out of there alive.

"I told you we should have eliminated those two redheads on the motorcycles," the bald guy said. "Where's your friend, that other woman?"

Amanda glared at the creepy guy. "That woman is my mother, and she's looking for me. She and my two friends on the police force will be here any minute. They're tracking the GPS device in my cell phone." Amanda was fairly certain the GPS device wouldn't work when she had no service, but it was worth a shot to try the bluff. Poker 101. Another skill her dad had taught her while her mother was away at social functions.

Brendan shoved her forward. "You get over there and sit down, too."

Amanda stumbled, regained her balance and turned to face the villains. "I'll be happy to sit if you'll fetch me another chair."

Grant rose. "You can sit here."

The woman stepped down between the two men and waved the gun again. "She can sit on the floor!"

The packed dirt floor was covered in leaves, dead bugs, mouse droppings and no telling what else. "Have you got a broom or a rug?"

The woman fired a shot just over her head. Again the sound exploded and magnified in the small s.p.a.ce, bouncing around the room and setting Amanda's ear drums to ringing. A lot different than shooting at the range while wearing ear protection.

"Since you put it that way-" She sank to the floor, cringing as she felt a crunch. A twig or a dead roach skeleton, and that was probably a best case scenario. She smiled rea.s.suringly at Grant. "I sit on the floor at home all the time." Of course, her floors at home didn't crunch when she sat. Or if they did, it was only from a misplaced tortilla chip.

Brendan shook his head. "What a mess."

Amanda was pretty sure he wasn't talking about the floor.

The bald man stepped closer and extended a hand toward her. "Give me your cell phone."

Amanda considered refusing but the sight of the woman waving the gun around made her decision. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled it out. As soon as they saw it had no service, they'd know she'd been bluffing about the people tracking her.

She drew back her arm and threw the phone as hard as she could against the rock wall of the cellar, flinching at the shattering sound her poor phone made. Everyone including her stared at the ruins. She'd only had that phone a week, just time enough to get her contacts updated and her favorite songs downloaded, plus it was the only place she'd stored Jake's cell number.

Her hatred of those people surged to even greater heights. The loss of her phone was one more thing to add to her list of wrongs she was going to get revenge for.

She lifted her chin and stared directly into baldy's eyes. "You do not get to read my private texts or see my s.e.xting messages to my boyfriend."

"What?" Charley shouted. "Boyfriend? s.e.xting? I knew you had something going with that Jake!" He paused and looked confused. "But when did you do it? I never saw any s.e.xting messages."

That meant Charley had been snooping on her phone! She made a note to get back to that conversation later when her life wasn't in danger.

The bald man lunged toward her. "Roger!" Brendan shouted. "Forget about the phone. It's not important."

"Scott's right," the woman said. "Get out of the way and let me shoot her."

Scott. That was the name Grant had mentioned. Brendan was Scott? She'd think about that later too. At the moment it took second place to the woman's desire to shoot her.

"Killing me would not be a good idea." She licked her lips and tried to come up with some reason why it wouldn't be a good idea other than the fact that she still had motorcycles to ride and c.o.kes to drink. "That boyfriend I sent those s.e.xting messages to, he's one of the cops I mentioned."

Brendan/Scott frowned. "Neither one of those police officers acted like your boyfriend."

"You knew they were cops?"

"Of course I knew. We've had Dawson bugged for the last three days. What did you think I was doing with all that electronic equipment in Brendan's apartment? Searching the skies for aliens?"

Brendan's apartment, not my apartment. That didn't sound good.

"Well, Jake and I didn't make a public announcement, but he's my boyfriend all right. He spent last night at my place."

"No, he didn't!" Charley protested, then suddenly smiled. "Oh, I see. You're bluffing again. Good job, Amanda! You're getting to be a top notch con artist."

Amanda just hoped she was going to make it out of there as a live con artist.

"We need to shoot all three of them and get out of here," the woman said. "There's no reason to keep them alive now."

Amanda ducked as the woman carelessly waved the gun in her general direction.

"Alice is right," the bald man-Roger-said. "We can't stay here. The police could be on their way already if Red's telling the truth. Scott, you established that neither one of those boys knows where that program is, so they're worthless to us. We have the computers and we need to get rid of these loose ends."

Brendan was definitely Scott. But Brendan was a real person who'd lived in Dawson's building for nine years, long before Dawson's parents were killed. Jake had verified all that, and Scott had referred to the place he'd been staying as Brendan's apartment.

A horrible possibility reared its ugly head.

"Scott." She said the name aloud, and the man she knew as Brendan looked at her. "Where's the real Brendan?"

Scott snorted. "The real Brendan? Are you referring to that wimp who tried to contact aliens and allowed his phobias to trap him in that awful apartment? The only thing he was good for was helping us find these two and lending us his computer equipment."

"He helped you find them?" Jake had mentioned Brendan's Internet posts about Dawson being an alien.

"These boys aren't smart enough to hide. Dawson acted so suspicious, Brendan got paranoid and tried to track down his neighbors. When he figured out their ident.i.ties were false, he decided they were aliens and posted it all over the Internet. If he hadn't done that, we might never have found them." He shrugged. "I needed to use his place to keep an eye on things and his Internet connection to send the messages. He didn't like that idea, so he's in a plastic bag in the back of our van."

Grant gasped but said nothing.

In a plastic bag in the back of their van? Amanda had never met the real Brendan, but that image clenched her gut and added to her anger. She leaned forward. "You killed a human being and stuffed him in a trash bag? You kidnapped a kid? And all for some stupid computer program? You're monsters!"

"Shut up!" Roger stepped forward and slapped Amanda so hard lights flashed before her eyes.

"Are you okay, Amanda?" Charley and Grant both asked at the same time. Charley hovered close, pa.s.sing through Roger and causing the man to shiver then step back.

Amanda drew a hand over the side of her face. She didn't feel any blood but she wouldn't be surprised to end up with a bruise, maybe even her first black eye. However, she wasn't about to admit it hurt. "I'm fine. He hits like a girl."

Roger grabbed her arm and yanked her up to face him.

"Back off, Roger," Scott said quietly. "Amanda, it's not a good idea to insult somebody who has the power to hurt you."

He and Charley were on the same page with that one.

Roger released her and she fell back to the floor with another crunch. The first thing she was going to do when she got out of there was take a shower. She'd probably have to throw away the jeans.