Lethal Ransom. Laurie Alice Eakes

Slow and steady. Water flooded over the road. She could hydroplane and cause a pileup if she slammed on the brakes and lost control. If she didn’t stop fast enough, she would plow into the aged Buick ahead of her.

      She was losing momentum too quickly. The back of the Camry fishtailed. The SUV blasted its horn, and Kristen jumped.

      “Just past the Harlem exit,” Mom was saying into her phone.

      “Put the phone down.” Kristen barked out the order. “If we crash, it could break your face.”

      If they crashed? When they crashed.

      Or something crashed into them.

      The thud came from the left, a tap against the bumper. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the SUV looming dark and menacing in her side mirror. Roaring up closer, crowding her to the right where she could go over no farther. Threatening the back of the pickup.

      Bang.

      The SUV hit the left-hand back door. Kristen’s foot slammed on the brake in a convulsive effort to maintain control. Water blasted against the undercarriage.

      And control was only a dream.

      The Camry spun perpendicular to the lane, missed the pickup by a hair, then smashed its front bumper into the side of the SUV.

      The air bags exploded, slamming Kristen against her seat, driving wind from her lungs. Mom emitted a soft gasp, then began to cough from the dust.

      Kristen couldn’t breathe at all. Her vision blurred. Her chest tightened, squeezing, squeezing...

      Between the air bag and seat belt, she couldn’t move. Cocooned. Strangled. The air bag was already deflating. A click and the seat belt would be off. This was mere seconds.

      It felt like a lifetime.

      A scream reverberated through her head, couldn’t reach her lips, choked her.

      “No panic attacks now.” Mom never raised her voice, but it was sharp nonetheless. “No weakness.”

      Weakness. Mom considered panic attacks weakness. Must not show weakness.

      Nausea clawed at Kristen’s middle. She swallowed, reached for the seat belt lock with one hand and the door handle with the other.

      The door popped open without her aid. It should have been locked, but a man stood in the opening on her side and another on Mom’s side.

      “Get out,” the man on the right commanded.

      “Stupid move there, lady,” the man on Kristen’s side said. “Who taught you to drive?”

      “I will wait for the police here in the vehicle.” Mom made the declaration and folded her hands against her waist.

      “You’re going to get out now.” The man on her side grabbed her arm and reached across to release her seat belt.

      Mom moved her hands to the dashboard. “I do not wish to go into the rain.”

      “Even if your car explodes?” The man on Kristen’s side grabbed her arm and began to haul her from the car.

      She slammed her fist against his wrist. The move failed on a full-grown man. He continued to hold. She grabbed for the steering wheel, curled her fingers around the grip.

      With a squeeze of the man’s hand on her wrist, her fingers opened against her will, freeing her hold on the wheel. And then he was dragging her into the rain, icy for June, painful for rain. Hail. Tiny hammer blows against her face. She ducked her head, saw her feet in their sensible pumps scraping along the pavement as though they belonged to someone else.

      They may as well belong to someone else. She possessed no power to stop herself from being forced from her car.

      Carjacking was all too common. People stole cars to commit a crime, but they didn’t usually hurt the vehicle owners. They left them beside the road. It was unpleasant but not life threatening if they didn’t fight back.

      But these men were taking her and her mother, not the car. They had deliberately wrecked her.

      She yanked one arm free and struck out for the man’s face. Missed. She kicked one kitten heel into the man’s shin. Connected. He grunted, then picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Tires, a barely dented bumper on the SUV, wet pavement, Mom’s designer heels spun past in a nauseating blur. In another moment, she was going to be sick.

      The man tossed her into the back of the SUV. Her head hit the side. Stars exploded before her eyes. Dazed, she lay still for a fatal moment—a moment in which her mother landed beside her.

      “Tie her up,” one man commanded.

      He leaned into the back of the SUV and grabbed Mom’s hands.

      Kristen surged up and bashed her head into his face at the same time Mom shoved both stilettos into his middle. He staggered back, fell against his companion, sending him reeling, but still held Mom’s hands.

      “Kristen, run!” her mom cried.

      Kristen ran, kicking off her pumps and speeding along the shoulder of the Eisenhower. Above the roar of traffic, she heard the slam of the SUV’s hatch—with her mother behind its tinted windows.

      * * *

      Traffic slowed to a crawl and Nick Sandoval knew he had found what he’d been looking for, what he’d feared he would find since receiving the phone call from his boss.

      “Judge Lang contacted us to say she fears they’re about to be carjacked.” Callahan’s voice was as calm as usual, but Nick knew the US marshal for the northern district of Illinois well enough to catch the tension beneath. “I’ve called the local law enforcement and am sending men out from here, but you’re on your way in that direction, aren’t you?”

      “I am.”

      Despite all his responsibilities, Nick’s boss remembered this was Monday night, the night Nick ate dinner with his eldest sister’s family. Unlike Wednesday night when he joined his younger brother and sister-in-law, and Friday nights, when the entire clan gathered at their parents’ house for Mom’s great cooking and terrible attempts to get her last unmarried child to commit to someone—again—no matter how many times Nick told her he wasn’t ready to put his fiancée’s death behind him.

      “She’s in her daughter’s car,” Callahan continued with his deliberately slow explanation. “It’s a silver Camry.”

      “That should be easy to spot. There must only be a hundred within a mile.”

      Despite his sardonic response, Nick’s instincts for trouble tingled up his spine as his eyes fell on the slowed traffic ahead.

      “Got to go, sir. Something up ahead.” Still hearing his boss’s voice squawking from the speaker, Nick tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He needed both hands on the wheel, and his vintage Mustang didn’t possess anything as fancy as a Bluetooth connection to the car speakers.

      Sirens wailed in the distance, audible above the rain drumming on the Mustang’s roof and roar of surrounding traffic. Cops were on their way, but Nick wanted to get to the scene first if it involved the judge. Protecting federal judges was his primary duty.

      An accident involving the judge would be worse than a carjacking. Oddly enough, the latter were usually peaceful with drivers forced off the road, removed from their vehicles, left stranded while the crooks took off in the vehicle to commit a crime, such as a robbery or drive-by shooting, and then abandon the car, usually wrecked, somewhere else. In that scenario, the car might be a loss, but the judge and her daughter would be safe. Wet. Cold. Probably frightened, but unharmed.

      His gaze swept the traffic and his mind touched on the idea that if this was a carjacking, it wasn’t like those that went down in the city so often they rarely made the news anymore.

      Maybe the traffic jam had nothing to do with Her Honor. Nick couldn’t