Hide From Evil

by Jami Alden

  Up the spiral staircase Krista could just make out in the darkness a master bedroom suite.

  “A secret lair worthy of a James Bond villain,” Talia had said wryly.

  From the little that Krista could see, it looked a lot like any number of warehouses that had been converted into luxury work/living spaces, although those spaces were all clumped together in newly gentrified neighborhoods, not supposedly abandoned spaces next to a trucking lot.

  “There should be a panel along the wall,” Ibarra said. “Can you see it?”

  They carefully sidestepped a low couch and Sean flashed his light along the wall. No panel, but there were two massive abstract acrylic canvases on the wall above the couch. Sean handed Krista the flashlight and took first one and then the other canvas down off the wall and propped them on the back of the couch. “Bingo.”

  Ibarra repeated the information Talia had provided, and Sean had the motion sensors deactivated in a matter of seconds.

  Sean carefully rehung the paintings and said, “According to Talia, the office is in the back right corner of the warehouse.”

  They walked more quickly now that they didn’t have to worry about the motion sensors. Krista still held onto Sean’s shoulder, not so much because she was worried of losing him in the dark, but because that slight contact took the edge off the anxiety pumping through her, the awful feeling that something was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong.

  They came to a closed door. As Sean’s hand reached slowly for the knob, Krista’s heart leaped to her throat, and as Sean turned the knob she fully expected alarms and sirens to sound and for a trap door to open and send them hurtling down to a deep dark cave.

  Instead, the door opened without issue. There wasn’t even a simple button lock to keep a person out.

  Sean closed the door and switched on the light. Even if someone happened to walk by the warehouse, no light would leak from the windowless room. The room was dominated by a huge mahogany desk topped by piles of paper and a large computer monitor, and the wall behind the desk was lined with custom cabinets built from the same material as the desks.

  Krista flipped on the computer as Sean went to work on the cabinet locks. As the machine hummed to life, Talia’s words rang in her head.

  He used to brag that he had secrets there beyond what anyone could imagine, secrets that could take down the entire state from the top down.

  If that was true, those secrets were in this room, hidden in those locked cabinets or stored on his hard drive. Krista crossed her fingers and prayed for the dozenth time that Talia hadn’t steered them wrong.

  A few minutes passed, and Ibarra whispered, “Okay, I’m in.” By simply turning on the computer and ensuring it was connected to the network, Krista had opened a back door for Ibarra to hack his way in, just as he had Kowalski’s computer and the police department’s intranet. Krista didn’t understand the methods or the technicalities, but she promised herself that when this was over, she was never leaving her sensitive information on a networked computer.

  “He’s got a lot of data on here,” Ibarra said, almost to himself. “It will take me a few minutes to copy this.”

  There was a loud thud behind her. Krista jumped, gasped, and then gave a little laugh when she realized that Sean had just dropped the heavy flashlight. “You scared the—” Her voice stuck in her throat when she saw Sean.

  He was standing at the end of the cabinets, his hands braced on the narrow counter jutting out from the wall. Krista could hear the breath soughing in and out of his chest, see the sweat bead on his forehead.

  “Sean?”

  He straightened abruptly, his eyes frantic as they bounced from her to the closed door behind her to the thick, windowless walls.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, approaching him slowly, as she might a nervous animal. “We’re going to be out of here in just a few minutes.”

  He nodded jerkily. She didn’t know what else to do, so she put her hand on his back, half expecting him to jerk away from her touch as he had before. She winced at the tremble of muscles under the damp fabric of his shirt. To her shock, instead of turning away, he turned toward her. She instinctively wrapped her arms around him, lifted one hand to his neck to pull it into her shoulder, and held him as tightly as she could.

  His breath whistled heavily in her ear—in, out. Maybe it was her imagination, but he seemed to calm a degree. No, he was settling down, his breath slowing as his arms held her in an almost desperate grip.

  Krista whispered reassurances and molded herself against Sean as though she could pull the anxiety from his body to hers.

  “We’re almost finished. Shit!” The alarm in Ibarra’s tone snapped them both back to attention.

  “What?” Krista whispered.

  “I’ve got two cars headed in your direction, heading down Marginal from the north.”

  “How do you know they’re coming here?” Sean asked, his voice steady but tight as a bowstring.

  “I don’t,” Ibarra snapped. “But they’ve passed the Boeing complex, and there’s not much else around here to interest anyone at this time of night.”

  “How much time do we have?” Sean asked.

  “About forty-five seconds.”

  “How much longer to finish copying the files?” Krista asked.

  “About thirty seconds.”

  “That doesn’t give us enough time to re-arm the alarm system and lock up,” Sean said grimly. “They’ll know we were here.”

  Krista shook her head. “We can’t tip him off. Not until we know exactly what we have. But if we go now—”

  “If you stop the transfer process now, some of the files will be corrupted on his end,” Ibarra said grimly.

  Krista blew out a frustrated curse. “We’ll have to come back—”

  But before she could finish Sean had opened the office door. “Make sure the transfer finishes clean.” He headed for the door.

  “Sean wait—”

  “I’m going to reset the alarms.”

  “You can’t do that, we’ll be…trapped,” she barely breathed the last word, because Sean was already halfway across the warehouse.

  Sweat beaded on her own brow as she went back to the computer. “Come on, come on,” she muttered as the status bar seemed to pause interminably at ninety-eight percent complete. She looked toward the door, but the meager glow of the computer cast just a small halo of light. Only the beam of Sean’s flashlight glowed in the inky darkness beyond.

  Sean finished resetting the alarms, and Krista felt her stomach drop to the floor as he hurried through the dark warehouse. “What about the motion detectors?” she hissed.

  “I re-armed it but left the motion detectors off,” Sean hissed back through the darkness. “Unless he tries to set them off himself, he shouldn’t notice.”

  “I no longer have a visual on the vehicles,” Ibarra said. At that moment, Krista heard the sound of car tires crunching in the gravel outside. A few seconds later, the doors slammed.

  “They just parked,” she whispered into her collar.

  “You need to kill the light, Sean.”

  Her heart thudded in her throat as Sean’s flashlight went dark and she looked frantically at the glowing computer monitor. She could turn off the screen, but if they came into the office, they would notice it had been turned off with the tower unit still on.

  “Copy is complete. Kill the computer. Be sure to use the proper shut down procedures,” he cautioned.

  Krista quickly powered down the machine, feeling the sweat bead under her shirt as it seemed to take an eternity for the screen to go black.

  She waited by the door and thought her heart was going to crash through her chest as she heard muffled voices outside and then the beep of the door alarm being disarmed. A metallic scrape, and the door was opening…

  A large hand caught Krista in the chest and pushed her back into the office. She barely stifled her squeal of alarm as Sean quietly shut the door behind them.


  Light showed in the crack under the door, and footsteps sounded. The voices got louder.

  “I don’t know why you insisted on this meeting,” she heard a male voice say.

  A nudge on her arm pulled her attention back to Sean. He aimed his light at the ceiling, clicked it on and off twice, pointed at himself, her, then up at the ceiling, and then handed her the flashlight.

  Was that supposed to be some kind of signal, she wondered frantically.

  Sean moved quietly as a cat on top of the desk. “Light.” His whisper cut through the stillness. “Up,” he snapped, squinting angrily as the beam hit him full in the face.

  Realization dawned as he reached up and carefully, quietly popped a ceiling panel from the frame and shifted it to the side. He beckoned her up onto the desk.

  “Careful,” he whispered and she nodded, gently shifting her foot away from the jar of pens stacked in the middle of the desk top.

  She raised her hands up but was barely able to curl her fingers around the edges of the panel. Strong hands gripped her hips and lifted her. She smothered a grunt as she got her elbows up over the edge and used them to help pull herself up. Sean’s hands moved to her butt and finished boosting her through the hole.

  She rolled to the side and heard a thunk as Sean put the flashlight up through the opening. In the pitch black, every sound was magnified. As Sean reached to pull himself up after her, Krista swore the sound of plaster shifting echoed like a bullet in the room below. She held her breath, expecting the door to burst open at any second.

  But so far, so good, and Sean reached for the light and shined it on the opening long enough to make sure he placed it back squarely and securely. “Let’s hope they don’t notice the plaster dust on the desk,” he whispered. The panel slid into place, and Krista thought of the wall of cabinets whose contents they hadn’t had time to search.

  They had the contents of Maxwell’s hard drive, she consoled herself. It had to be enough.

  For what? a doubtful inner voice taunted her. You broke into his private property and stole the information. No matter what he’s up to, you’ll never be able to use it against him in court.

  It didn’t matter, she reminded herself. She had started this quest in the name of truth, and if that was all she got, that had to be enough.

  But will it be enough to put an end to all of this? Will it be enough to save you and Sean?

  She didn’t have time to contemplate the question as Sean’s hand found hers in the darkness. “Let’s move.”

  Chapter 17

  Sean focused on keeping his breathing steady as he inched along the crawl space on his belly. The crawl space spanned the area of the office and the bedroom suite below it, but it was only about twenty-four inches high.

  And completely enclosed.

  He positioned the flashlight in front of him and did a quick three-sixty scan of the space. The good news was that there was room for them at all, that the ventilation and plumbing for the master bath required the space between the two floors for all the tubing and piping.

  Bad news was there was no easy way out, not into the bedroom anyway. While the ceiling of the office below them was done in modular paneling, the floor of the master suite above them was solid, either hardwood or carpet on solid flooring. In any case, no easy way to pop up out of the crawl space like they had out of the office.

  A bead of sweat trickled down and dripped off the tip of his nose. He wrapped his gloved fingers tighter around Krista’s, cautioning himself not to hurt her in his desperation to drown the panic that was trying to burst free.

  On one end, about fifteen feet away, was a roughly two-foot-long-by-one-foot-high opening covered by a slatted vent. The overlapping slats were closed, but if the panic hadn’t totally fucked up his orientation, if he popped it off, it would open out to the south side of the building.

  He focused on that opening to the outside and started inching toward it.

  There was a low rumble of voices in a foreign language—Russian—drifting in from the other side of the space.

  “Stop,” Krista breathed and dug her fingers into his arm to emphasize her point.

  “I call this meeting because I think you are about to try to—how you say—squelch on this deal?”

  “Welsh,” an angry male voice replied. “And it’s welsh on a bet. And I haven’t given you any reason to think the delivery won’t go down on Tuesday as expected.”

  The vent opened out over the main room and a faint glow of light came in from fixtures mounted on the high ceiling. In the faint glow, Sean could see Krista’s hand pointing at that opening. Away from freedom.

  She hitched up on her elbows and started to combat crawl for it. Every instinct in Sean screamed to go the other way, toward freedom, but one last rational cell in his brain knew they needed to stay on top of David Maxwell and whoever was working with him so they could find out exactly what the fuck they were up to.

  He fought to keep his breathing quiet as he followed, though he was sure they’d be able to hear his heart thudding on the panels below him.

  From their vantage, he could see seven in total. A tall broad-shouldered man with slicked-back hair, cold gray eyes, and flat, Slavic features and three men who were variations on the same template. They all wore expensive-looking tailored suits over silk shirts. No ties.

  “Who are the suits?”

  “Karev, and three of his men,” Krista breathed in his ear, and though he knew he was picking one poison in favor of another, he focused on the way her lips felt moving against the sensitive skin of his ear, remembered how good they had tasted earlier at Ibarra’s house.

  To his surprise, it actually worked, and the surge of raw lust took the edge off the panic. Who knew that two primal, irrational forces would serve to cancel each other out? Already close in the cramped space, he inched close enough to feel the vibration of her pounding heartbeat as it rattled through her.

  He wasn’t the only one struggling with his fear.

  He could see three other men, including Maxwell, whom Sean recognized from his pictures in magazines and newspapers. In contrast to his gangster companions, he was dressed in khaki pants, loafers, a V-neck sweater pulled over a collared shirt, and a beige trench thrown over his arm.

  Like he’d been pulled away from another night at the yacht club.

  Next to him was a dark-haired, wiry man, similarly dressed and younger than Maxwell by quite a bit. It wasn’t until the man turned more fully that Sean saw the scar that bisected the man’s face. It was Carl Grayson, Maxwell’s stepson and publicly acknowledged heir apparent to Maxwell’s business empire.

  Evidently, Grayson was involved in all of dear old stepdad’s business ventures.

  Next to Grayson was a tall man with a crew cut and a goatee, his jacket shoulders straining the seams of his black trench. Obviously Maxwell’s muscle, with his at-the-ready stance and his hands hanging loose beside him, poised to grab a weapon at a second’s notice.

  It was a sign of how much the anxiety scrambled his brain that Krista recognized the thug before he did.

  “Holy crap,” she breathed. “I think that’s one of the guys who shot the deputy and tried to kill us.”

  Now that she said it, Sean saw it. Sure enough, that was the motherfucker who had shot him in the leg.

  All of the people in the room below were responsible for trying to have him killed. Worse, they’d tried to hurt Krista, the thought of which sent a tsunami of primal rage roaring through him, startling him with its intensity.

  And Sean could do nothing but wait here like a fucking rat, helpless for the moment to do anything to hurt the men who would have killed Krista without a second thought.

  The anger tipped his agitation into overdrive. He took another breath, the air starting to taste stale and close in his lungs. Despite the feel of Krista next to him, he felt suddenly like a thousand ants were crawling on his skin, like a rhino had just taken up residence on his chest.

  A female
voice rang through the room. “We have to suspend all shipments until we know Slater and Flynn have been taken care of.”

  “Guess that answers our question about the wife knowing what’s going on.” Krista’s breath warmed his neck.

  And holy shit, there she was, complete with the blond helmet of hair and a gray knit pantsuit that probably cost more than his truck. An icon of Seattle old money, a grand dame of local society so renowned that even Sean, a jock who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Kirkland, knew her name.

  Standing here in a warehouse with armed guards, arguing with Russian gangsters. It was so jarring, it pulled him back from the edge.

  Maxwell hit her with a dark look. “Goddamn it, Margaret, this isn’t your decision to make.” He turned on his stepson. “I told you she shouldn’t have come.”

  “Fuck you, David,” Margaret snapped. “We’re just getting momentum in my campaign. I will not let you risk it because you’ve crawled into the sewer with these lowlifes—”

  Like a striking snake, Karev’s hand lashed out and caught the queen of Seattle society’s cheek in a vicious backhand.

  Margaret staggered back with a cry and would have fallen if the bodyguard hadn’t caught her.

  “What the hell was that?” Maxwell asked Karev.

  The Russian shrugged, the flat, reptilian expression never wavering. “You don’t handle your woman, I do.” He nodded at his thugs, who stepped forward and seized Margaret from the bodyguard’s arms. Too busy trying to hang onto Margaret, he couldn’t get to his weapon before Karev’s three had their semiautomatics out of their waistbands and trained on the woman.

  “Now, let me make this clear like crystal, yes?” Karev said. “We do shipment Tuesday as planned, and next one after that, and next one and you get the idea, no? You use this power you say you have to take care of attorney and keep cops out of my business. If no, I pump her full of lead and leave her on front lawn for world to see.”