He didn’t answer me. I could feel him breathing, could hear his heart pounding in his chest. I watched my fingers dance over his lower belly, wondering what the hell I was doing. Had I fallen for his charms? Should I have? Who was this man? Why was I here with him?
“Who were those men in that van?”
“The bad guys.”
“I think I need a little more information than that.”
He touched me, lifting my hair off my neck, his fingers brushing the skin there. “You’ll know everything soon enough. Right now, I’d rather just leave things the way they are.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s complicated, Valerie. And I don’t have all the information. Wouldn’t you prefer to know everything all at once?”
“I want to know why I’m lying here in bed with a man who snatched me off the damn street and locked me up in a trailer!” I sat up, pulling away from his touch, wrapping my arms around my breasts to hide them from his view. “Everything I’ve seen in the last forty-eight hours tells me that you’re the bad guy! Why should I think any different?”
His eyes narrowed, that dark Oliver coming out despite my reluctance to meet him again. He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed, looking around for his clothes, clearly forgetting that he’d taken them off in the bathroom.
“Who are you, Oliver James?”
“I’m not the bad guy.” He stood up and went to the bathroom, disappearing for a long moment, then returning with his jeans on, his T-shirt balled up in his hands. He snatched up his boots from the floor and sat on a chair across the room to lace them up. “I’m not the reason you’re in this mess!”
“Then why are you the one locking me up in a trailer? Why did you come after me?”
“Do you really want to go out there and take your chances with those men in that van?” he demanded.
I blushed, remembering what it felt like when those bullets slammed into the sides of the car. I’d seen my fair share of car-accident victims, more than my share of gunshot victims. I didn’t want to add myself to that list.
“Unless you want things to go from bad to really shitty like this,” he said, snapping his fingers as he approached me, “you need to trust me.” He leaned close and kissed me in the center of my forehead. “I’m going to go get you some clothes. Can I trust you to be here when I return?”
“As far as I can trust you.”
He studied my face for a long second, then kissed me again before walking out. I noted almost immediately that he’d taken the room key. If I were to get brave enough to step out of this room, I wouldn’t be able to get back in.
I threw myself back against the pillows, crying out in frustration. I was a doctor. I was scientifically minded. I liked math because I could solve the problems and know they were solved properly. I liked science because it made sense of the world around me. I liked medicine because I could use it to heal people, sometimes to bring hope to people who hadn’t had any in a very long time. My thoughts moved logically from point A to point B, never veering off to point Z without good reason. But that was exactly what I was doing here.
I was in complete control of my life forty-eight hours ago. I knew who I was, knew what I was doing with my life. I was on the phone, arguing with my father over those exact points. But then, less than twelve hours later, some stranger had changed everything, dragging me off that porch after the chloroform had done its job. And then chaos took over.
Why did I remember getting on a motorcycle with some guy? Why did I have flashes of a van, the tactile memory of someone touching me while I was unconscious? Why did I have a puncture wound on my neck? Why was Oliver there when I woke? Why did he put that stupid cast on my leg? Why did he lock me up in that trailer?
And why were those men trying to run us off the road today?
None of it made sense. Oliver was keeping me hostage, but he’d never done anything to hurt me—if I forgot about that puncture mark—never did anything that would lead to permanent damage. Those men had. They fired at the car. Oliver or I, or both, could be dead, lying on the side of the road, bleeding out from gunshot wounds.
Oliver didn’t even have a gun, as far as I knew.
I kept coming back to that moment on the porch. I’d been talking to Scott, and then he was gone and someone else suddenly arrived, holding me with an arm around my shoulders. I remembered leaning back into him, trying to get leverage to elbow him, trying to stop him from hurting me. I knew from that that he was tall. My head had come to just below his shoulder. I knew that because that’s what it felt like when I leaned back against TJ or Scott, both of whom were nearly a full foot taller than me.
It was what it felt like to lean back against Oliver.
But Oliver wasn’t wearing a white shirt that day.
There was a white sleeve on the arm that held me. And it was familiar, something about that shirt so familiar, but wrong all at the same time. I sat up and dragged my fingers through the knots in my hair, tugging at the strands like it might help me remember. A white sleeve. Not a long sleeve, not really. A three-quarter sleeve, like on a woman’s blouse. But it was a man. There was no doubt in my mind about that.
It’d had very thin, dark stripes through it. Like a western shirt, or the kind of shirt my dad might wear with a suit. But thin, like it had been designed for summer wear.
And that’s when it hit me, where I’d seen the shirt before. It wasn’t a shirt. It was a bathing-suit wrap, the kind a woman wears to the beach. And I knew where I’d seen it before.
My stomach turned, and I barely made it to the bathroom before what little I’d eaten that day came up for an encore. The dry heaves hit immediately, forcing me to hug the porcelain far longer than I might have wanted to. When it finally passed, the muscles in my abdomen were sore, burning like I’d run a marathon or something. I sat there on the floor for a moment longer, realizing that if I was right about the person who’d used the chloroform on me, then I was in bigger trouble than I’d initially realized. But I wasn’t the only one.
“Daddy…”
Chapter 18
Oliver
I dialed the number while I was still on the stairs, rushing out of the hotel so that I could get back as soon as possible. I was halfway down the block when the call was answered, my eyes searching every vehicle that passed on the road, every face that passed me on the sidewalk. It was getting late, but this was the city; people tended to find plenty to do after dark.
“This is Caballo,” a pleasant voice said when the call was finally picked up.
“Connect me to 8661,” I said, slightly annoyed at the breathless sound of my voice. I was three blocks from the hotel and there was no sign of a clothing store, but no sign of our previous pursuant, either.
A moment later, Akker’s voice, a little clearer over the cheap burner phone, filled my ear.
“Status?”
“We’ve been compromised. Requesting extraction.”
I spotted a clothing store three blocks further down and ducked inside just as the woman was coming to lock the door. I grabbed a pair of jeans, a blouse, underwear, and made a guess on shoe size before rushing up to the register. They wanted to sell me hair accessories, too, so I ended up walking out of there with a couple of scrunchies that were handmade by the woman’s granddaughter, or so she said. But what was I supposed to do with damn hair ties?
Back on the street, I crossed to a little taco stand and bought a couple of the Americanized concoctions, tossing cash at the guy rather than waiting for him to announce the cost. Then I was taking another route back to the hotel, eyes peeled for trouble. I didn’t like the crowded street. It was too disordered, too crowded. Too much like trouble in prison. A part of me kept expecting some big guard to come up behind me and yank my collar, using his knight stick to take me down a peg or two, as they’d claimed they were doing over and over again during my stint at Huntsville.
“You have to stay out of their way, man,” Alejandro had told
me. “And never look them in the eye. They’re like predators. They can’t stand when one of their prey shows even the tiniest bit of courage.”
It wasn’t in my nature to be timid, but I could see the value in it. The beatings became a little less frequent when I learned to keep my head down. But then there were the other inmates to deal with.
“You need an affiliation,” was Alejandro’s advice for that.
If not for my cellmate, I never would have survived prison.
Alejandro Ramirez. He was in for selling coke to the wrong guy, an undercover cop who got him on resisting arrest and possession with intent to sell. He’d already been there for more than five years by the time I arrived and knew every trick, every game that could make prison almost survivable. And he taught them all to me.
The tattoos, that was Alejandro, too.
And Valerie. I owed her to him, too.
I spotted the white van as I came around a corner, saw it parked on the side of the street near a private residence. I moved behind a low wall and watched as the driver got out and went inside. He was gone about five minutes before he came out again, a short, fat man gracefully rushing after him.
How the hell did they know we were here? Had someone given them information they weren’t supposed to have? Had they done something to Valerie that I wasn’t aware of?
The moment they drove off in the opposite direction, I ran toward the alley, entering the hotel through a back entrance. I was breathing heavily when I got to the room, slamming the door open with my foot since my hands were full. The bed was empty.
“Valerie!”
I had images of her locked in the back of that van again, violated and drugged, going off to a place she would never come back from. I dropped my packages on the bed and ran around the other side, dipping low to look underneath before throwing open the bathroom door. She was there, standing under the weak stream of the showerhead, so distracted that she hadn’t even heard the door bang against the wall.
“Hey,” I said, tugging the curtain open, “we need to go.”
She opened her eyes and I could see they were haunted by something new. I worried that it had something to do with the conversation we’d had before I left. I cupped the back of her head and drew her close to me, kissing her thoroughly as she melted against me, getting the front of my shirt wet with her soaked body.
“Everything okay?”
She nodded. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe.”
She didn’t push the question, didn’t ask anything else. She gestured to the towel sitting high on a little shelf above the toilet. She dried herself quickly, dressing in the clothing I’d purchased without comment or criticism, even though it was all slightly too big. She even used the damn scrunchies, pulling her hair into a high ponytail.
We left the tacos leaking on the bed and rushed down the stairs, pausing for a second before stepping out the back door into the alley. I wanted to stay in the alleys as much as we could, keeping off the streets until we had no other choice. We ran nearly twelve blocks before we were finally forced to slow down.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked between gasps for breath.
“Friends are going to meet us.”
“Friends? What kind of friends?”
“The kind with access to a safe house not far from here.”
“Are they back?”
I glanced at her. “Who?”
“The guys in the white van. They’re the ones who took me—right?”
My eyebrows rose. I wondered for a second if she was beginning to remember. But then it occurred to me that she might actually be beginning to trust me. It was an odd feeling because very few people trusted me these days.
Alejandro did. He’d called me out of the blue a week or two ago, wanted me to come see him in prison despite the fact that the day I got released he told me he never wanted to see my ugly mug again. When I sat at the table in the visitors’ room and a familiar guard brought him out, the sight of them both gave birth to a whole host of conflicting emotions inside of me.
“Didn’t think we’d see your face again, Winn,” the guard said.
“Neither did I.”
Alejandro took a seat across from me and waited until the guard walked off before leaning across the table to speak confidentially to me.
“I told you about my old crew down in Mexico, didn’t I?”
“Pedro and Antonio?”
“Yeah, man. Those two are the biggest idiots you will ever meet, but they’ve gotten themselves in with this other guy, Juan Carlos. And he’s been getting them to pull some big scores, mostly kidnappings.”
“Yeah?”
“You ever hear of Jacob Cole?”
Alejandro sat back, watching me as he waited for my answer. “I’ve heard of him,” I said, wondering what the hell this was all about.
“I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Pedro and Antonio have been hired to snatch up the guy’s pretty daughter. Some sort of doctor who’s planning to spend her summer break down in my old stomping ground.” Alejandro glanced over my shoulder at the guards, then leaned forward again, speaking in the quick Spanish that he’d taught me over several weeks of intensive lessons.“Los idiotas no sabenen lo queseestánmetiendo. ¡Este tipoquelos ha contratado es un tonto!”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Hay muchodineroenjuego.¡Es hora de que pasealgobueno por nosotros, hermano!”
He trusted me. He knew I would do what he asked of me no matter what was going on in my life. I owed him that life and he knew it.
“I don’t know how they found us,” I said to Valerie. “But they clearly have friends here in the city.”
“You did see them.”
“I did. And we need to get out of here before they see us.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her up toward the street through another of those narrow gaps between buildings. I hesitated a second before stepping out into the open, watching for that damn van. I didn’t see it, but that didn’t mean there weren’t eyes around, watching for us.
We walked calmly but briskly down the crowded sidewalk. It seemed we were closer to the part of town where all the nightspots were located, adding to the congestion on the street. Cars honked and people laughed, screamed, and yelled. Someone tried to walk between Valerie and me, but I held fast to her hand, refusing to let her go. The man hissed a dirty curse under his breath before moving around us, rushing ahead to meet some woman waiting for him under a storefront awning.
“We’re almost there,” I assured Valerie.
She didn’t respond, just quickened her pace to keep up with me.
We were going to make it. I could see the building where the rendezvous was supposed to take place towering up over the other buildings, just four or five blocks ahead. We were going to make it, and then this thing would done, this fight would be over. It would be time for the next stage of the operation.
Four more blocks.
“Oliver!”
My eyes were so hard on the target that I almost couldn’t move them, didn’t want to adjust my focus. When I did, it was just in time to see that fat, short man wrap his hand in Valerie’s ponytail and jerk her back, a gun pressed into her ribs.
They’d found us.
Chapter 19
Valerie
I’d seen guns. I’d handled guns. I grew up in Texas, for crying out loud! I knew my way around a gun. But I’d never had a gun pressed into my ribs.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
My head was jerked back at an odd angle, but I could still see Oliver and all the people marching past us like it was every day that some man held a gun to a woman’s ribs.
“Turn and walk,” the man said to Oliver in heavily accented English.
“Let her go.”
The man jerked on my hair, forcing my head back even further. “You go!”
“Please!” I moaned, my head beginning to pound from the pressure on my hair. �
�Please, don’t do this!”
“You let her go, and I won’t hurt you. How about that?” Oliver said, his voice low, almost conversational.
“She’s worth mucho dinero, hermano!”
“I’m aware. But she’s no longer on the market.”
The fat man shook his head, his greasy cheek hitting mine with every toss of his skull. “Mine,” he announced, jerking me backward as he attempted to move into the protection of the open door of the club behind us.
“I warned you, amigo,” Oliver announced as he continued to just stand there and watch us. But then he made a quick move forward, grabbing my arm painfully as he swung his knee up into the fat man’s crotch. The man hadn’t thought to keep me in front of him where he wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack. Oliver took advantage of that, getting him a second time in his impressive belly as the man fell forward, finally smashing his knee into the man’s nose, causing it to explode blood all over the already dirty concrete.
Oliver grabbed the man’s gun, then took my arm, pulling me back down the street. We ran, no longer bothering to try to remain inconspicuous. I was breathing hard, my head pounding from the suddenness of all this, the danger and the adrenaline rushing through my veins. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of that gun against my ribs, couldn’t stop expecting to be grabbed again. My skin crawled; I was so convinced I would be snatched again. I held hard to Oliver’s hand, fear making my heart pound crazily in my chest.
We’d gone about a block and a half when we heard screeching tires behind us. I glanced back, caught sight of the white van rushing toward us through the crowded street. He was just pushing through cars and people, not bothering to slow down, not stopping to care about the wreckage he was leaving behind him. And as I watched, two men jumped out of the van and came running in our direction, at least one of them with a gun in his hand.
I don’t know how I was still on my feet. Everything inside of me was screaming Hide! I wanted to duck into a corner, run under a car, go somewhere where they couldn’t possibly find me. I wanted off that street where I was nothing more than a duck in a shooting gallery.
Caballo Security Box Set Page 12