by Linda Howard
She hadn’t taken two steps before she noticed the black car slowly moving through the parking lot, two men, and they seemed to be checking the cars because each one was looking to the side, the driver toward the left, the passenger toward the right. She skidded to a stop, watching, the back of her neck prickling. Maybe it was her imagination, but when they reached her car the driver seemed to hit the brake for a moment, as if they were taking a harder look.
Assess the threat.
Oh shit, oh shit, not a headache, not now!
She forced herself to just look at the men, concentrate on them.
She did, and the pain faded to a bearable level—still there, but she could function. And, damn it, she’d assess the threat if she wanted to, she thought angrily.
Assessing took only an instant. The passenger now had his head down. Both men were wearing hoodies, the hoods up and forward as if they were hiding their faces. The hoodies were wrong for the hot weather, very wrong.
She wasn’t the only customer who’d noticed the car, the way it was crawling through the parking lot, and the two occupants who weren’t acting like people looking for a quick sandwich or plate lunch. A few people were on their way to their cars and one man stopped in his tracks, his body language shouting wariness as he watched the car crawling past, one aisle over. The D.C. area was notorious for drive-by shootings, almost always gang related, but collateral damage was still damage.
The driver looked around, and his gaze seemed to stop on her. Maybe he’d said something to the passenger, because the other man’s head came up and he, too, seemed to look right at her.
Then he leaned out the window, and she saw the weapon in his hand.
She dropped her lunch and dove to the side, automatically reaching for the weapon she didn’t have. The first shot went high, hitting the plate-glass window behind her; glass shattered, shards went flying. Screams punctured the air. The man who had stopped to watch the two men in the car threw himself to the ground.
Lizette rolled, then crouched behind a heavy newspaper machine. It wouldn’t stop a bullet, but there were cars between the shooter and her, so maybe he couldn’t see where she was. Her heart pounded, banging away in her chest, the roar of blood as it rushed through her veins so loud she could barely hear the screams that were erupting all around her.
Most people either flattened to the concrete or ran for whatever cover they could find, but one man stood frozen in front of the newspaper machine, a middle-aged man who looked around, wild-eyed, still holding the big bag with his to-go lunches in it. “Get down!” Lizette screamed at him.
Another shot. The man screamed, the to-go bag dropping as he wheeled around, clutching his shoulder. He stumbled, went down.
Lizette swiftly darted her head around the newspaper machine, a lightning-fast peek—and saw the shooter taking aim at her.
She threw herself to the side. The third shot killed the newspaper machine.
She’d seen his face—some of it, anyway. Caucasian male, mid-thirties, at least two hundred pounds. He wasn’t firing without purpose; he’d looked directly at her. Drive-by, my ass.
She rolled, and another bullet hit the concrete behind her. She rolled in the opposite direction, and the newspaper machine took another one. She threw herself back in the other direction; the next shot went right over her head and hit the brick wall of the restaurant. Shards of brick cut her arms, stinging but not wounding.
Shit! She was pinned down, had no weapon, and all the shooter had to do was keep her pinned down until he had a clear shot.
The car was slowly moving forward, the shooter getting a better angle on her with every second. What kind of weapon did he have? He’d shot six times. Did he have a revolver, an automatic, how many in the clip?
The analysis was flying through her thoughts, somehow coolly divorced from the adrenaline searing her veins. This was not going to be good. She had nowhere to go.
The potbellied, bearded man who’d winked at her came out of the front door with a shotgun braced against his shoulder. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He pulled the trigger, the boom deafening at such close quarters.
“You goddamn bastards!” he yelled, his face red, swiftly pumping another shell into place and bringing the shotgun back to his shoulder with one smooth move.
The shooter yelled and ducked, and the driver hit the gas. The car fishtailed in the parking lot, the rear bumper catching a customer’s car.
The shotgun boomed again, right over Lizette’s head. A steady stream of inventive cursing was turning the air blue. You go, buddy! Blast their asses!
Her ears were ringing from the gunfire. No, wait—sirens, maybe. She couldn’t really tell.
The black car peeled out of the parking lot into the street, nearly taking out a couple of oncoming cars. Tires screamed as hapless drivers swerved, caught up in the unfolding drama and unable to do a damn thing about it.
Not her problem.
Lizette jumped up and grabbed her purse, which had come off her shoulder when she was rolling around trying not to get shot, and bolted for her car. Everyone would be expected to stick around to give statements to the investigators, but she wasn’t about to. She hoped the shotgun guy didn’t get in trouble because she’d chosen his place to get a barbecue sandwich.
Not her problem.
She had to get out of here.
She was almost to her car, keys in hand, when she froze in mid-step. The car—she’d have to leave it behind. She couldn’t take the risk of staying with it. They’d found her, not once, but … how many times? The grocery store, that same car she kept seeing in her rearview mirror before dismissing it to her imagination, those times she just felt as if she were being watched. They knew what she drove, what her tag number was—hell, maybe even had a tracker on it. She needed another car.
She spotted a new customer pulling in, not knowing what was going on, other than that he’d just missed being in an accident when the traffic in front of him had almost creamed a car leaving the parking lot. She raced toward him as he opened his car door and stepped out, then hesitated, finally noticing the chaos in front of the restaurant.
“What’s going on?” he called to her, his tone anxious. He didn’t feel threatened by her; most men didn’t feel threatened by a woman.
“There was a shooting,” she said as she got closer. She made her voice breathless, panting. She assessed his car. A Chrysler, silver-gray like hers, probably a V-6.
“What? Was someone killed?” He stepped back, looking as if he might get back in his car.
“I don’t think so.” She slowed, looked back over her shoulder. There was a crowd around the wounded man. The shotgun-toting man—manager, owner, whatever he was—was staring down the street as if waiting for the black car to return.
“You’re not leaving before the cops get here, are you?” he said, frowning at her. “Everyone should stay. I didn’t see anything, but … hey, are you all right?”
There was no time to do this easy, no way to talk her way into that car.
“Sorry,” she said sincerely, and punched him in the throat—not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to send him to his knees, keys dropping, hands going to his throat as he gasped for breath. She grabbed the keys from the pavement and rolled him to the side, then slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine, all in one smooth motion.
She did take care not to run him over as she backed up into the aisle, thinking in one part of her brain that it didn’t do her a damn bit of good to park poised for a quick getaway if she ended up leaving her car behind and stealing one that wasn’t properly situated.
“Sorry,” she said again, glancing in the rearview mirror to watch the man struggle to his feet. He’d be fine. She could have kicked him in the balls, but he hadn’t done anything wrong so she’d chosen the only other option she’d been sure would work. How she knew that … how she’d known to precisely pull the punch so the man would go down without a fight but not suffer permanent damage … not
a clue.
She couldn’t keep this car for very long. The police were already on their way, would be here in minutes, if not seconds, and now they had not only a supposed drive-by shooting but a car theft to investigate. She had to assume the police would enter the parking lot from the main road, so she circled around the building and took a back exit, searching her mind for the best route.
Best for what? Escape. Freedom. Survival.
And then she saw them, the shooters in the black car, circling back as if they intended to have a second chance at her before the cops got there.
And they saw her.
Lizette hit the gas and took the first side street she reached. Coming straight at her, she could see flashing blue lights. Great. She was driving her stolen car right toward the police.
She had the fleeting thought that maybe if she flagged down the cops—no, that might save her for a little while, but she’d end up in the pokey for at least a while, because she’d just punched a guy and stolen his car. She wouldn’t be safe there; she’d be trapped.
At least the cops weren’t actively looking for her yet.
Maybe. Cell phones and radios were faster than any car.
From that second on, Lizzy stopped thinking and acted on instinct. There was a moment of terror as she gunned the engine and bulled into traffic, much the way the black car had earlier. Tires squealed, horns blared at her. A white pickup truck came within a hair of T-boning her. A woman in the car right beside the truck took her hands off the steering wheel and covered her eyes, which wasn’t the most helpful thing she could have done. Thank goodness she also hit the brake.
Anxiously, Lizzy glanced in the rearview mirror. Damn it, it was set for the much taller owner. She reached up, adjusted it, then moved the seat closer to the steering wheel because she could barely reach the gas pedal. Was the black car following? At the moment she couldn’t spot it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that it could be blocked by vehicles between them. Would they risk it, with the cops so close? Maybe, maybe not. How bad did they want her dead? How pissed were they that she wasn’t in a car they could conveniently track even if she did get lucky enough to shake them for a little while?
Lucky, hell. At least she could drive. She’d realized that the day she’d evaded the man from the grocery store parking lot, and again last night, when she’d found joy in speeding along the interstate. If she shook them now, they’d have no way of finding her.
Then what?
She was running for her life; one wrong turn, one miscalculation, and she was dead. At this speed she’d probably take someone with her, maybe several someones. She didn’t want that, didn’t want to hurt anyone, but she had to escape.
There it was, the black car, weaving in and out of traffic the same way she was, though more recklessly. One car they met ran off the road, dust flying.
This wasn’t going to last. By now the cops had a description of the car she was driving, and they could call ahead. They had resources: spikes, a roadblock, helicopters. She hadn’t just carjacked the guy, she was involved in a shooting, and they’d be looking hard for her as well as for the guys in the black car. Once they had overhead eyes on her she was sunk.
Traffic began to clear, making way for her and for the black car.
“So much for making it look random,” she muttered. “Chase me through the outskirts of the city and run me off the road or shoot me after this … no way everyone won’t know you executed me. No way.” Execution? Yes, that’s what this was meant to be. She didn’t know who she was talking to, but whoever it was, she was definitely pissed at them.
She took the next ramp that would dump her on the interstate, two wheels all but leaving the pavement as she made the sharp turn. She was heading into Virginia again. Only a few minutes had passed since she’d peeled out of the parking lot in a stolen car, and she didn’t have much time. No helicopters, please, not yet.
The black car followed her onto the interstate. Their engine was more powerful than hers—which was definitely a V-6, damn its puny little cylinders—and they had no trouble gaining on her. Her foot was pressed to the floor, and they were still gaining. She watched the rearview, gripping the wheel, judging the moment. Closer, closer. The car was coming up beside her, on her left. They were flying down the interstate at over a hundred miles an hour, side by side, the V-6 steady but not giving her a lot of extra power. The man in the passenger seat, hood pushed back down, aimed a black handgun out the open window at her.
She slammed on the brakes, yanked the steering wheel sharply to the side, and spun so she was facing the wrong way on four lanes of interstate. Oh, shit! Nice move. Where the hell had she learned to do that? The black car was stopping, too, but now flashing lights in the distance signaled that cops were on the way.
“Fuck!” she said violently, her vision blurring at all the traffic coming toward her, and she hit the gas. A hundred miles an hour on the interstate was scary. Any speed going the wrong way on the interstate was enough to give even the most hardcore adrenaline junkie a high.
She left the roadway much faster than she wanted to be going, but she had to get off the road or have a head-on with a semi. She sailed off the shoulder, the car taking to the air for a moment before landing on the gently sloping grassy hill and heading for a stand of trees. Shit! Tree, car—the tree always won. She’d really hate to get away from the bad guys and basically kill herself by driving into a fucking tree.
She’d said “fuck.”
For one little frozen-in-time moment, that struck her as the most unlikely thing she’d done in the past terror-filled fifteen minutes.
She spun the steering wheel, eased off the gas, and slid the car to a hard, jarring stop that rattled her teeth. The passenger side crumpled against a tree.
Then she bailed. She grabbed her purse and ran, sprinting away from the interstate. The sirens were still at a distance, but it wasn’t as if she could hide the car. Her tracks were plain in the grass, not to mention the traffic was horribly snarled directly behind her, and, oh yeah, here was a wrecked car.
Would they have a good description of her, what she looked like, what she was wearing? Most eyewitnesses gave god-awful accounts, completely missing hair color, miscalculating how tall someone was, how old, but the guy with the shotgun had struck her as a man with a good head on his shoulders and sharp eyes in that head. There was no way to know, and no time to worry about it. She needed to put distance between her and this whole situation.
As she raced across the ankle-high grass, she remembered that she hadn’t taken the time to wipe her prints from the car. But—what difference did that make? Whoever was trying to kill her knew damn well who she was, and if her prints were on file somewhere … well, who was she kidding? Of course her prints were on file somewhere. The big question was whether or not they were in the AFIS files that cops accessed, or some other kind of file.
Given the locale and general topography, she couldn’t expect to remain undetected for very long. The trees thinned, giving way to asphalt and a playground that had seen better days and a street lined with apartment buildings. There were a number of people out and about, in the park and nearby. They probably saw joggers all the time, but how often did they see a jogger wearing office attire and carrying a purse? In the distance, even over her own heavy breathing, she could hear the whap-whap of a helicopter, probably a news crew but possibly a police helicopter. Other people heard the same thing, shading their eyes against the hot sun as they looked up. A plane could drone overhead without anyone so much as glancing up, but helicopters always got people’s attention.
Whoever was in the helicopter, reporter or cops, would be looking for someone who was running, so that someone couldn’t be her. She stopped, clutched her purse tight, and looked up, shading her eyes with one hand as she mirrored what other people were doing. There were several women in the park, many of them with children. If she just didn’t run, she’d look like everyone else.
Hide in
plain sight.
Lizzy stood in place and looked up. She wondered if anyone on the street would mark her as a stranger, if they would notice she’d been running when she arrived, that she was breathing hard and that her cheeks were red. But there were a lot of apartments on this street, and there was no way anyone would notice someone who didn’t belong, the way Madison—the much-too-savvy child who’d helped Lizzy deface her own car—had noticed in that little complex. God, that seemed so long ago, and it had just been … three days?
The helicopter was flying low, banking over the interstate where, Lizzy knew, the traffic was a snarled nightmare. From here, though, no one could see the highway or how backed up the traffic was.
One man asked, his question directed to no one in particular, “What’s going on?”
No one seemed to know. The helicopter turned, heading back the way it had come. Lizette looked at the woman next to her, shrugged, and walked away as if she knew exactly where she was going.
Hah. The truth was, she had no idea beyond her next step.
Chapter Seventeen
Xavier grabbed some much-needed sleep in the safe room in “J. P. Halston’s” condo, tilted back in his chair, his booted feet propped on the desk. He could have slept in his own bed, but being where people could find him—and by that he meant not his own people—struck him as a little risky right now.
An instant message had alerted him about the confrontation Lizzy had had with the surveillance dumb shit. God, that was such typical Lizzy, slick and ballsy.
But none of the others knew Lizzy the way he did. The way she was playing it, there were still reasonable explanations for everything. She was keeping them guessing, and his people were watching and would let him know if anything unusual happened. He already knew Felice had met with Al again very early that morning, and he also knew that, after Lizzy’s confrontation with her surveillance, whoever Felice had hired to do the job had been pulled off.