Miss No One - Mark Ayre (top 10 most read books in the world txt) 📗

bed: comfort, Abbie attempted to imagine a worse ending to her interview with Ndidi.

It wasn't easy. Abbie had been doing this a while. Had turned up in over fifty new places to warn a stranger they were in danger and to save them. That conversation was tough when the person you were trying to save was an adult. Near impossible when you were speaking with a parent whose child was in trouble.

Twice before, Abbie's dreams had sent her to save the life of a pre-adolescent. Both times, Abbie had struggled against parents who did not want to believe their son or daughter was in danger. The second time, a young boy's father had grown so agitated he had tried to attack Abbie. Acting on instinct, Abbie had dodged his blow, tripped him, and watched as the father smashed his head on a kitchen counter. He might have died. Luckily, they were dealing with only a slight concussion. Nothing a trip to the hospital couldn't fix.

But it had made Abbie's job 50x harder. Possibly 100x.

Abbie had come close to failing that particular mission. The little boy was four, the youngest she had ever tried to save, and Abbie had been five seconds from failing him when it ended.

Walking away from that incident, Abbie had been shaking, had been violently ill on the road. She had won but could not stop herself thinking about what might have been. How she might have failed that sweet, innocent boy.

That night, lying in bed, unable to sleep. She told herself it was okay to feel that way and that she should look on the bright side. That had been tough, but could it ever be so difficult again?

Probably not.

Then came Isabella.

Abbie had warned Ndidi his daughter was in danger. What followed was not the father's near braining on a hard surface, but something worse. The news that someone had kidnapped Isabella. Abbie was still locked up, and now, not only was she on the hook for assaulting a police officer, but she had put herself in the frame for orchestrating the kidnapping of that same officer's daughter.

The questions were inescapable.

You attack a police officer, and then, the next morning, his daughter goes missing. What are we supposed to think?

Right. What were they supposed to think?

And wait until they found the dead bodies at the dealership. Killings which happened shortly before Abbie had allegedly attacked Gary and Ndidi, only a mile away, and hours before Isabella was kidnapped.

Yep. Things were about to get interesting.

The question was: could they get any worse?

"Call for you. Get up."

If Ndidi had been armed, Abbie was musing when the cell door opened, he might have withdrawn his gun and shot Abbie in the head. That would have been a worse way to end the interview.

"Come on. I've not got all day."

This was not a selfish thought. Abbie wasn't implying that interview ending would be worse because it included her demise. Far from it. She thought of Bobby, who would feel let down, betrayed, when Abbie didn't return home safely to him, as he had requested. And she was thinking of Isabella. She was not so arrogant as to believe she alone could save the young girl. Still, the child's chances definitely improved so long as Abbie was around, trying to save her, rather than in a morgue, a bullet between her eyes.

The police officer knocked his knuckles against the metal door.

"Yeah, yeah," said Abbie. "I'm coming, I'm coming."

Of course, as it stood, Abbie wasn't around trying to find and save Isabella. A little after eight am on day one of two, Abbie was still behind bars, twiddling her thumbs and wasting time on pointless hypotheticals.

And time was running out.

The officer escorted Abbie to a room with a phone. He watched her sit down and pick up the phone, then stepped outside.

"I'll be right out here. Don't take too long."

Abbie waved a hand and put the phone to her ear. She was not surprised to hear the old, crisp voice of her employer's representative.

She called him Ben.

"Oh, dear. You've got yourself in a spot of bother, then?"

Now was not the time for pleasantries. Abbie laid out her position without hyperbole. She told Ben she had come upon Detective Ndidi attacking a man named Gary and had interceded on the hapless Gary's behalf, leading to her arrest for assaulting a police officer. Told him about Hammond and how the station was supposedly driven to see Abbie convicted as a kind of surrogate justice (Abbie did not attribute this phrase to Ndidi; perhaps she would feel guilty about that later), as Hammond's killer was in the wind. She told him about the falsified statements and brought him up to date by describing how she had mentioned concern for Isabella moments before Ndidi learned of the kidnapping.

"I dreamed about the child," Abbie said at the end.

There were no cameras in the room. Abbie was supposedly on a call with her legal representation the police were not allowed to listen in. Regardless, she feared her friend on the other side of the door might break the rules by pressing his ear to the wood. Ben would know what Abbie meant about the dream. It was safer not to go into detail. For this same reason, she had mentioned walking past the dealership on her way to the park where she had found Ndidi assaulting Gary. This point added nothing to the story, so Ben would know something had transpired at the car lot and act accordingly.

Abbie finished her story and waited for Ben to tell her what would happen next. What he was going to do to extricate her from this situation. While she waited, she twirled the phone's cable around her fingers and wondered when she had last seen a cabled phone. Landlines were rare enough but an actual cable, tethering you to one spot...

Budget cuts.

At last, Ben said, "Well, maybe spot of bother doesn't quite cover it.”

"You think?"

Ben was the only member