Whatever It Takes: A Joe Beck Thriller Read online

  It wasn't good.

  Beck eased his foot off the gas and turned off the music. He slowed the Camaro to a halt by the side of the road, stopping maybe twenty feet from where she lay, and sat still for a moment, watching out the window.

  She had long red, fiery hair, as far as he could tell through the bushes, and pale white skin. Her legs looked cut and sore. They were lined with bloodied bright red welts, each long and thin. It looked like lash marks, except her skin had been sliced through to the pink dermis layer. Blood had oozed from the slashes and crusted in dark crimson slicks around the outside of the wounds. She was shaking, frantically. Likely, in shock. But, crucially, she was still alive.

  No sign of anybody else around, he opened the door and got out of the car.

  "Ma'am?" he called through the extreme afternoon heat.

  She made no response. She just lay there, trembling on the dirt.

  He stepped closer. "Ma'am, are you...are you OK?"

  Again, no response.

  He stepped closer toward her and leaned in toward the bushes for a better look. "Ma'am?"

  She looked to be about forty, as far as he could tell from the thin wrinkles in her skin around the edges of her eyes. But she was in a hell of a state. Her face was mangled. It was a beaten, bloodied mess. Dark bruised circles ringed her eyes and her right cheek had been cut in a grisly fashion. It hung down over her jaw like a flap of flesh, exposing a row of broken, bloodied teeth and pink swollen gums. Somebody had cut the side of her face from the corner of her mouth all the way up to a fleshy cauterized wound where her ear should’ve been. It was a grisly mess. Shredded and torn. It looked as if it had all been done with a serrated object, a steak knife perhaps, and slowly, in an agonizing, sawing motion.

  "Jesus," Beck said and jumped back. He glanced around. There were no signs of anything or anyone. No tire markings on the road and no tracks on the dirt. There were no footprints, either. All he could see were the birds of prey drawing near on the horizon, circling with the carnivorous scent of flesh in their olfactory glands.

  He wondered what had happened and whether she had any other injuries, internal or external. Seeing the state of her face, he wouldn't have been surprised if she also had a couple of broken bones or punctured lungs. Instinctively, he wanted to help.

  "Help," she sobbed.

  Beck pulled out his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. The call rang out, his phone without any signal. Fuck, he thought and stepped back toward her. "What's your name? Who did this to you?"

  She said nothing. She just shook and shivered.

  He pressed his lips together and grimaced and leaned down and gently turned her over, careful in case anything was wounded or broken.

  She groaned as she rolled onto her back. It was a deep, painful moan. The sound a person makes when a broken bone is prodded.

  The right of her face was the same as the left. Battered and bruised, eye purple and cut and swollen, her cheek hanging down over her chin, and her ear also gone. But the sinister slashing wasn't the worst thing somebody had done to her.

  As she rolled over, the gray blanket slipped off her shoulders and fell aside, exposing her red and sore, naked lashed chest and abdomen, and her left and right arms. Her left hand was missing all of its digits. All five of her fingers were gone. It was just a pale lump of flesh with five bony, bloodied stumps. The cuts looked different from those on her face. These ones were straight and clean. It was as if they had been made with some sort of sharp instrument. But not scissors. Something more heavy-duty. Something powerful enough to slice through flesh and bone with one, savage snip.

  "Jesus Christ," Beck said and stepped back again.

  That was when he caught a glimpse of her right arm. It had been severed at the elbow. Her forearm and hand were gone, with nothing but a torn fleshy stump remaining. A fleshy stump that looked like it had been caused by the unforgiving-ferocious teeth of an industrial shredder or the ripping force of a crocodile's death roll.

  The sight hit Beck like a freight train. He dived back and caught his breath and threw up a little in his mouth. Nothing came out, though. He was too careful for that. Instead, he swallowed it back down and stared at the poor woman, a sadness in his eyes, pondering the unimaginable extent of the horrors she had been put through.

  He glanced around the area where she lay, scanning the ground with bated breath in case he found anything else. He flicked his eyes along the dry, scorched landscape, looking for her severed appendages, but he saw no signs of them. He also never saw any blood or other signs to indicate that any of the torment had been inflicted here. Which meant, whoever had done this had done it elsewhere and brought her here and left her to die.

  The woman sucked a light breath of the dry, seething desert air in through her nose and slowly opened her eyes, locking them on his. Her gaze was piercing. It was like looking into a vast abyss the shade of ocean blue.

  Beck saw the pain in her soul. It looked agonizing, as though it was howling through her body and she was helpless to fight against it.

  "Who did this to you?" he asked, speaking softly, a merciful look on his face.

  She didn't answer him. She just swallowed and said, "Help." Her voice was weak and fragile and the words came out more like a light breath than anything else.

  He grimaced. He wanted to help her, but he couldn't. Her condition was too severe. Even calling an ambulance wouldn't work. There was no cell signal and, even if there was, they wouldn't make it on time. There was nothing he could do, and he knew it. A lump filled his throat.

  "I can't," he said and, painstakingly, shook his head. "I'm sorry. I can't."

  "Save her," the woman whispered, speaking in an ebbing, barely-audible voice.

  "What?”

  “Save her.”

  “Who? Save who?" Beck asked.

  She didn't answer. She sucked in another difficult breath and just said, "Please."

  "Save who?" Beck asked again.

  The woman paused and sucked another difficult breath and, still staring into his eyes, said, "Save her. Please. Whatever it takes."

  "Save who?" Beck asked for the third time.

  A tear slipped down the left of the woman's face and she appeared to shake her head. It was only a subtle movement, but it was definitely a shake, that's for sure. Still looking into his eyes, she gasped suddenly and her shivering stopped. Then, she relaxed and her body went limp. Her head shook briefly, moving side to side, and her eyes rolled to the back of her skull.

  She died right there on the dirt, her broken battered skin burning under the white-hot sun, lying virtually naked by the side of the empty desert road.

  Beck took a deep breath and brought his left palm up against his forehead while staring down at her lifeless body for a long moment. He felt the sweat on his clammy skin and took a deep breath as a whole bunch of questions ran through his mind.

  Who the hell is she? What the hell happened? Who did this to her? What the fuck was she talking about? Who needs saving? Why? From what? From who? What the hell’s going on?

  He glanced around, desperately looking for anything that would shed some light on the situation, looking for anything that would even hint at any of the answers. But he saw nothing at all. That was when another troubling thought crept into his mind.

  Whoever she's talking about, whoever needs saving, what if nobody else knows she needs help? What if she's alone and in danger and nobody is trying to help?

  He shook his head and looked up at the sky, lowered his clammy palm, and sighed. His plan for the rest of the day had faded off into the distance, and he knew it. He also knew there was really only one thing to do. And that was to go in search of the answers to the questions. But he had nothing to go on. He had no clue as to who the woman lying at his feet was or how she got there. He needed a start.

  Nothing else to go on, he drew his cell phone from his pants, opened his camera app, and took her picture. Then, he quickly turne
d around and got back into his car and took off along the road before anybody rolled up and caught him at the scene, standing over a dead body, only to mistake him for the killer.

  THREE

  Unfortunately, Joe Beck was right.

  Approximately one-hundred and thirty-six miles away, she was alone and unsuspecting and about to fall into an incomprehensible amount of danger. And, worst of all, she never even saw or heard it coming.

  She was home alone in her parents' house, her mom off to work, having left early after her new boss had called her in, and her dad having gone off on what he said was his latest out-of-town assignment. These days, it seemed like he was always away. She didn’t mind. She was old enough and mature enough to be on her own. And she liked the peace and quiet.

  She was in her bedroom, sitting on her bed looking at her cell phone. The room was as expected for an eighteen-year-old girl. Stylish and sophisticated - white walls with one of them painted purple as a feature, a matching purple carpet, a white wooden double bed with a white bedcover and plump white pillows, a purple silky fur throw along the bottom.

  She was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a pair of black sweat pants, and there were earphones in her ears. Her music was blaring, a track from the Spotify Billboard Hot 100 playlist playing. An open sketchbook sat by her side on the duvet, next to an almost-empty glass that once held soda and a red bag of Lay's Flamin' Hot potato chips. The glass was tilted against the pillow and the bag of potato chips was propped up against it.

  She had been busy killing time sketching a few pictures of the New York skyline, dreaming of what the city would be like ahead of her trip to join her boyfriend in Albany for college at the end of summer. She had been sending him messages on Whatsapp, showing him pictures of her art, asking what New York was really like, planning where he could take her, anticipating what he could show her, wondering what life would be like around the Big Apple together.

  Her boyfriend was a fella named Jon. He was a sweet guy, someone she had known for years. He had moved northeast with his family a while back and reconnected with her online since, seeing her a few times as their romance would blossom. He was a guy who treated her the way she deserved, whether he was there in person or thousands of miles away, the flowers on her bedside cabinet, a beautiful glass vase filled with purple tulips that were freshly delivered that very morning, a testament to their relationship.

  They say that love is blind, but in her case, it’s also deaf because between the volume of her music and her focusing on her messages with Jon, she never heard the car's tires crunching to a halt over the shale in the driveway or the glass of the window being smashed into the conservatory. She also never heard the guy enter the house, going room to room in search of any signs of life. She never heard his footsteps on the stairs, the floorboards creaking under the thud of his boots, as he climbed them slowly, coming to get her.

  She never heard the dodgy floorboard outside her bedroom door squeak under his weight as he stood on it for a brief moment, the one she had long been complaining to her dad about, the one he had been too busy or too distracted to fix.

  She also never heard the bedroom door's lock squeak, either, as he turned the knob from the outside. Another DIY job her Dad had brushed off as extraneous toil only fit for a retired handyman who was looking for odd jobs to fill his days.

  She may not have heard him coming, but one thing's for sure, she definitely noticed when he arrived.

  Her bedroom door swung open and slammed against the wall, hitting it with such force that the silver spring door stop popped off the white wooden skirting as the handle punctured a hole through the plasterboard.

  Bang.

  For a brief second, he stood, seething, in the doorway with the menacing presence of a bull about to enter a China shop. Big and strong, ox-like, and fearsome. He was almost seven feet tall, and muscular. Built like a bodybuilder. He had legs like tree trunks and arms as thick as lampposts, and the great big puffed up chest of a champion. He was absolutely huge and every bit as fearsome.

  He was dressed in black, wearing boots, jeans, and a round-neck t-shirt underneath a black jacket. A pair of black gloves covered his hands and a black woolen ski mask covered his face. Only his eyes and mouth were showing. He was also holding a Ruger SR9, a black 9mm semi-automatic pistol, in his left hand. It had an overly-long-looking barrel for a pistol, having been fitted with a screw-on silencer.

  Seeing the gun-wielding behemoth of a man standing ominously in her bedroom doorway, her heart skipped a beat and her eyes just about exploded from her head. She gasped and tossed her cell phone down on the bed and dived up onto her feet, her earphones whipping from her ears mid-lyric, the loud musical bliss abruptly cut to a chillingly-silent and dangerous reality.

  The guy sucked a breath and stepped in, covering the gap between the door and her bed in just two big strides. He was on her before she knew it, before she really had any time to react. He made a loud grunting sound and whipped the right side of her face with a hard backhanded slap, knocking her to the carpet.

  She yelped in pain and flopped sideward, her cheek stinging and pain rushing up her face. She knocked the flowers and vase from the white oak cabinet and banged the side of her head on its hard wooden edge. Everything went blurry on impact, then quickly faded to black as she fell unconscious, and that was the last thing she remembered.

  four

  Who the hell was she? What the hell happened? Who the hell did that to her? What the hell was she talking about? Who the hell does she think needs saved? From what? From who? Why?

  The questions shot through Beck's mind as he drove all the way to Kingman. He arrived in just under a half-hour, having gunned the Camaro's engine, pushing the accelerator pedal to the floor.

  Whoever the woman was, she had obviously pissed off the wrong people. And whoever she felt needed saving could've been in real trouble if they were in the same wicked hands. She could've even been running against the clock, battling to survive an ungodly amount of pain with every passing moment. That was what he thought, what he figured he knew, but before he could save anybody, he first had to figure out who it was that needed saving.

  He lifted his cell phone from the center console and glanced at the screen. It was low on battery, down to just four percent. Fuck, he thought and sat it back down and kept on driving. He pulled into the empty parking lot of an internet cafe about a mile into town, not particularly far from Kingman Airport. It was a place called iCafe and occupied a small unit tucked in off the right-hand side of the road, beside a UPS and a Dollar General. He parked the Camaro in a spot by the door, killed the engine then jumped out and went inside to start his search.

  A soothing blast of chilled air welcomed him from the air conditioning units overhead on the other side of the door. It felt like applying some aloe gel to red sunburn, quenching his skin from the searing rays of the hot morning sun.

  The cafe was small and cozy. It had a mahogany wooden floor and caramel-colored walls lined with canvass paintings of coffee beans, coffee cups, and caricatures of people sitting at tables and smiling and looking like they were having fun. A strong aroma of coffee wafted through the air and there was jazz music playing at low volume in the background. A few dark brown leather sofas sat opposite each other with wooden coffee tables in between on the left. A few silver-haired souls, old retirees, sat on them in pairs of two or trios of three, huddled together, chatting and cradling white porcelain coffee mugs in their hands.

  There was a barista bar on the right. A couple of young male baristas were moving around behind it, turning back and forth, grabbing plates and mugs, pouring foamed milk from stainless steel jugs, and emptying used grounds from the portafilter of the big expensive stainless-steel machines. The baristas were both young with dark curly hair and thin, bony faces. Kids in their first jobs, perhaps, trying to earn a couple of extra bucks.

  Up ahead, Beck saw a couple of computers by the back wall. There were tw
o of them. They were sitting on a wooden countertop beside the condiments bar. The computers were black, flat LCD screens resting on top of matching black base units with black wired mice sitting on white pads on their right.

  He walked past the counter toward them, ignoring one of the baristas smile a hello. He pulled out the brown cushioned leather chair and sat down at the computer on the left. There were a couple of tangled black phone charging cables plugged into its USB slots. He immediately untangled them and plugged in his cell phone to juice it up, then turned around and saw the seat meant he had his back to the door. He winced. He hated being blind to a building’s breach points.

  A young brunette waitress wearing a black apron and black ball cap with the café's logo stitched on the front in silver, a white coffee cup with an ‘i’ in the middle and a ring of Saturn around it, saw him and walked over carrying a small black notepad and pen.

  Beck clicked on the orange and blue Firefox icon and opened the browser. It popped up with a gateway screen that presented him with a range of access options and prompted him to enter the code from his purchase receipt to gain access.

  "Excuse me, Sir,” the waitress said. “Only customers can use the internet. You need to order first."

  Jesus Christ. In this day and age, he thought and looked around at her.

  She saw the scar on the left side of his neck and gulped. "Uhm, can I get you something to drink? A coffee? An iced tea, maybe, since it’s hot out?"

  "Yeah," he said and flicked his eyes over her shoulder at the white acrylic menu board above the counter. "Coffee. Filter. With cream."

  "Regular or large?" she asked, still looking at his scar.

  He glanced at the board again. There were no quoted prices, just a list of drinks and sizing options. Bigger was often better, he figured.

  "Large," he answered and nodded toward the computer screen. "And throw in a half-hour's access to the net."