One Wrong Step (Borderline Book 2)

by Laura Griffin

  “Forget your rifle. This thing’s about to escalate. I need you near the bridge.”

  “Got it.”

  But he knew Stevenski couldn’t get there in time. Rowe was on his own. He forced his shoulders to relax, tried to feel connected to his weapon. Just like in training, he and the rifle were one unit; it was an extension of his body, his mind. Rowe tuned everything else out and focused on the people in the middle of the bridge. Cecelia and the boy were separated from the subject by at least three feet. It was a forty-yard shot, a cakewalk. And if the subject made one wrong move, Rowe intended to take it.

  Kate watched from behind the base of a lamppost, for once in her life feeling grateful for her petite stature. She was on the north end of the bridge, which could be accessed by a curving bike ramp or a flight of concrete stairs. From her hiding spot at the top of the ramp, she had a perfect view of Cecelia Wells as she passed a bag to the tall, skinny guy in black. Kate didn’t think she’d ever seen him before.

  Then the intensity kicked up. They were arguing. Cecelia began stepping backward, corralling the boy behind her as she moved across the bridge and closer to Kate.

  Some movement on the stairs caught Kate’s attention. A man was crouched there in the shadows. He wore a dark skullcap and had a black goatee, and Kate could almost swear he was one of the guys in the Avalanche, the ones she’d watched in the surveillance video. He held a handgun poised on his knee and looked tense, as if his legs were spring-loaded.

  Suddenly he jumped up and aimed the gun.

  “No!”

  The piercing scream was followed by a pop, and Celie’s head whipped around. She first thought of firecrackers, but in a nanosecond her brain identified the sound.

  “Get down!” she screamed, shoving Enrique to the ground.

  Another pop, then a shriek. The shots were coming from the far side of the bridge. Celie tried to shield Enrique, pinning him facedown against the pavement. The man in black had disappeared.

  Another shot, this one from the opposite direction. Bullets were flying on both ends of the bridge. They were trapped in between.

  Celie rolled off Enrique and grabbed his hand, making sure to keep low. “We have to get out of here. Do you know how to swim?”

  “Yeah.”

  She clasped his fingers. “On the count of three, we go up and over. Don’t let go of me, okay?”

  Enrique nodded. She saw fear in his eyes, but also trust. He trusted her. After everything he’d been through, he still thought she could keep him safe.

  “You ready?” She tightened her grip on his hand. “One, two, three !”

  John sprinted onto the bridge.

  “Celie!” Where the hell had she gone?

  One second, they’d been in plain view. Then gunfire had erupted, and she’d dropped out of sight. John had taken a quick potshot at the man in black, but he’d sprinted into the trees.

  John raced across the bridge now, eyes scanning for any sign of Celie or Enrique. He passed lampposts, planters, benches, knowing at any moment he might trip over their torn up bodies.

  And then he saw her.

  Kate’s arm was on fire. The burning started just above her wrist and radiated up, taking over her shoulder and her neck. She sat up and clamped her left hand down over the wound, pressing her right elbow into her side and trying to stop the bleeding.

  “Omigod, omigod, omigod…” She bit her lip and pressed harder, but the pain was spreading. The blood, too. It poured down her arm, her wrist, her hand. The warmth of it seeped through her jeans.

  More sirens approached, and she cast a frantic look around. She got up and stumbled the short distance to the top of the stairs, then felt dizzy and sank back down onto the concrete.

  “Hey!” Kate yelled. “I need help up here!” She leaned against the railing and waited for a paramedic.

  A young cop mounted the steps, gun drawn. His eyes bugged out when he spotted her.

  “He shot me,” Kate said through clenched teeth. For some reason just saying the words made her eyes fill with tears. “I need—”

  “Where’s the shooter? Where’d he go?”

  Kate nodded toward downtown. “Took off that way. Black Avalanche.” Goddamn it hurt !

  “Medic’s on his way.” The cop darted a worried look at her arm. “Don’t move, ma’am. You have any weapons on you?”

  Kate choked out a laugh. “Yeah, right.”

  He reached out with his free hand, like he was going to frisk her.

  “I’m not armed, I’m wounded ! Where’s the ambulance?”

  “They’re coming, ma’am.”

  She watched her blood seeping between her fingers. It looked purple in the lamplight.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” This couldn’t be happening. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus on something besides the burn.

  “Kate?”

  Her head jerked up. Nick Stevenski towered over her, hands on his hips, panting like he’d just run a marathon. “What happened back there?” He quickly unzipped his windbreaker and turned it inside out.

  “I was hiding behind a lamppost,” she told him. “Just over there.”

  “You need to elevate this. You’re losing blood.” Nick crouched down and gently pulled her arm away from her body. It was bent at a strange angle, and Kate had to look away so she wouldn’t think about what he was doing.

  “I saw the guy,” she said. “From the surveillance video. And he had this…this gun…. And he was watching Cecelia Wells. And that little boy, too.” She felt Nick wrapping the windbreaker around the top of her arm. God, was she even making sense? The events felt blurry now.

  “He stood up and raised the gun. Like…like he was going to shoot them? And I screamed and ran at him—”

  Nick pressed too hard, and she shrieked.

  “Sorry.”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. God, where was her phone? She needed to call her dad.

  “I…I tackled him,” she stammered, “and the gun went off. And we were on the ground. And it went off again. ”

  Nick gave her a reproachful look. His eyelashes were damp and his face was so close, she could smell the rain on him. She suddenly had this insane wish that he’d put his arms around her.

  “You shouldn’t have jumped in the middle like that,” he said. “You could have been killed.”

  “He was about to shoot a kid ! What would you have done?”

  God, her arm hurt, like she’d been touched with a branding iron. She started to feel nauseated.

  She looked at Nick. “They’re okay, right?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Nick?” Her voice hitched. Had one of them been hit ?

  “We don’t know,” he said grimly. “They’re not on the bridge.”

  The impact smacked the breath out of her. Celie kicked and groped for the surface, all the while clenching Enrique’s hand in a tight fist.

  Suddenly, sky. And trees and lights and a glimpse of the bridge. She gasped for air and sputtered Enrique’s name.

  He didn’t answer.

  She yanked him up, flailing and thrashing in a frantic bid to keep her head above water. God, why was she sinking ?

  “Enrique, breathe !”

  She needed a better hold, but she was terrified that if she let go his fingers, she’d lose him. Using her free hand, she grabbed a fistful of his T-shirt and pulled him up. Now his mouth was above water, but he was gurgling.

  She maneuvered behind him and tried to push his shoulders up. He needed air. “Enrique, come on! Cough it out!”

  He made a wet, strangled sound. The fall must have knocked the wind out of him, too. God, what if he’d hit his head on the way down?

  The lake was pulling at her, sucking her under. She kept sinking. She choked and spit and tried to keep her head above the surface, but her body felt leaden.

  Rowe’s vest. Panic hit, and she gasped, instantly filling her lungs with water. Enrique’s hand jerked away, and then she w
as alone, sinking. She pulled at her shirt, trying to yank it off so she could get rid of the vest.

  “Enrique!”

  Suddenly something wrapped around her throat. She kicked and punched. A powerful arm snaked around her waist and grabbed her, trying to pull her under. She screamed and clawed at it.

  “Celie, stop !”

  McAllister.

  “Get this off!”

  The shirt ripped free. She felt the Velcro pull and tug as he yanked off the vest, and cool water surrounded her. Then she was weightless, bobbing up like a cork.

  McAllister hooked his arm across her chest and pulled her across the surface. The chilly water swished around her as his legs scissor-kicked and scissor-kicked, propelling them forward.

  Where was Enrique? She struggled to locate him, but sky and trees and wet hair filled her field of vision. Then the world around her darkened. Her feet touched bottom. They were near the shore, shadowed by trees. McAllister grabbed hold of a low-dangling limb and heaved them both out of the water. Her butt plunked against something hard and solid. She slid down the slope of it, saw that it was a rock, and then grasped the tree branch and caught herself before she could slide back into the lake.

  McAllister stood up. His jeans and T-shirt clung like a wetsuit. He’d managed to keep his boots somehow. Water slurped as he trudged through some mud to a nearby outcropping of rock.

  Where Enrique sat, breathing hard, his knees tucked up against his chest.

  Relief swept over her.

  Enrique looked up with wide eyes as McAllister braced a hand on his shoulder and said something. Even from a distance, Celie could see the boy shaking. But he looked okay, otherwise. Wet and frightened, but breathing.

  She flopped back against the rock, wincing when her head connected. For a minute, she just lay there, shivering and wheezing and trying to figure out what had just happened.

  Then a shadow fell across her, obscuring even the dim purplish light reflected down from the city’s cloud cover.

  McAllister loomed over her, chest heaving. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” She coughed up some more water and pushed herself up into a sitting position.

  The distant wail of police sirens filled the air. Celie glanced around, but she didn’t see any cars or lights. Just the bridge and the churning, rain-swollen lake and the trees lining the shore.

  McAllister stripped off his T-shirt and handed it to her. “Put this on.”

  She looked down at the ball of dripping white fabric in her hands. It was smeared with muck, but at least it would cover her transparent beige bra. “Thanks.”

  She wrestled the shirt over her head, noticing the scrapes and cuts on her arms for the first time. She was pretty sure they’d come from the pavement when she dove for cover from the bullets. By the time she’d managed to pull on the sodden shirt, the sirens had become shrill and insistent.

  McAllister planted his hands on his hips and looked up at the bridge. She couldn’t believe she’d jumped from such a height. She glanced at Enrique, who was standing on the steep hillside now, soaked and shivering and waiting for guidance.

  “You ready?” McAllister looked down at her and held out his hand. She nodded, and he pulled her to her bare feet. Her sandals were probably at the bottom of the lake by now. Mud oozed between Celie’s toes as she picked her way over to Enrique.

  “Are you all right?” She enfolded his skinny body into a hug. He’d somehow managed to swim to shore, even weighted down by his clunky basketball shoes. His skin felt cold.

  “Enrique?”

  She pulled back and stared down into his face. He nodded.

  Together, they started hiking up the hill. It sounded like a convention of emergency vehicles up there, and she hoped one of them was an ambulance. “Let’s get you checked out just to be sure.”

  As operations went, this one was a clusterfuck.

  Two missing suspects, three missing civilians. Plus a gunshot victim on the other side of the bridge—some innocent bystander, according to the Austin police.

  The one scrap of success Rowe had to show for the night was the man in black, whom he’d just finished Mirandizing. Rowe had chased him down the slippery, shadowy jogging path that paralleled the lake, finally overtaking him near the canoe docks. They’d wrestled in the mud, the guy grunting and throwing bony elbows as Rowe disarmed him and got the cuffs on. He’d been carrying a small but lethal Chiefs Special.

  The perp hadn’t said anything so far. Rowe wasn’t even sure if he spoke English.

  But he looked American. Rowe eyed him as he sat in the back of the Buick, his hands cuffed behind him. He no longer wore a cap, and Rowe saw now that his hair was light brown, his skin pale. Not likely a relative of the Barriolo brothers. Rowe would bet money he worked for Saledo and was here to intercept the cash. If so, Rowe had to wonder, how in the world had he found out about this meeting?

  He wasn’t just some flunkie—that was clear. As soon as he’d stepped off the bridge, the guy had had the brains to transfer the money to a bag he’d brought with him. This maneuver would have backfired if the duffel had had an exploding dye pack in it. But because it merely had a tracking device sewn into the lining, the move had effectively derailed Rowe’s plan to sit back and follow the cash.

  Now Rowe stripped off his slimy windbreaker and tossed it in the front of the Buick, right on top of the gray zipper bag he’d seized with the perp. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked the display. Still no callback from Stevenski. He’d tried him twice now, with no response. Rowe looked across the bridge and saw the telltale white antennae of a television news crew jutting up into the sky. The media had wasted no time making the scene. At this very moment, Kate Kepler was probably phoning her story in to her news editor before the night’s final pressrun.

  Rowe turned toward Abrams. He and another agent had shown up ten minutes ago to help supervise the fiasco. “You got this guy?” Rowe asked him, nodding toward the Buick.

  “Yeah, I got him,” Abrams answered. “Hey, and I just heard from one of the uniforms. Someone spotted your missing civilians on the other side of the lake.”

  “Really?” Why hadn’t Stevenski called?

  Abrams smiled. “Yeah, sounds like they decided to take a swim.”

  John hiked up the hillside, scanning the faces of emergency workers and trying to locate Rowe or Stevenski. His gaze landed on a pair of paramedics loading a woman into an ambulance.

  “Hey, wait!” John sprinted over to the rig. “Kate? Kate! ”

  She lifted her head up from the gurney.

  “What the hell happened?” Jesus, her arms were covered with blood.

  She tried to say something, but an oxygen mask blocked her mouth. She reached up with a bloody hand and tugged it down. “One of those guys shot me.” She nodded toward a white bandage on her right arm.

  “Holy shit, Kate!”

  One of the medics glared at John. “Save it for later. We’ve got to get her to the hospital.”

  The paramedics continued to situate Kate in the back of the rig while she spoke. “It hurts like hell.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “Can you call my dad? Tell him to meet me at—Where are you taking me?”

  “Brackenridge,” said the medic closest to Kate.

  “Okay, but…” John raked his fingers through his hair. “What’s your dad’s name? What’s his phone number?” He grabbed hold of the door and levered himself onto the ambulance bumper. Blood saturated Kate’s clothes, but she was lucid and alert.

  “Here.” She twisted and turned on the gurney until she dug a cell phone out of her back pocket with her left hand. She tossed it to John. “He’s on my speed dial. Wozniak, too. Call in this story, will you?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Hey, you mind if we get moving here?” The paramedic shoved John out of the way and pulled one of the doors closed.

  “I’m totally serious,” Kate answered. John couldn’t see her face anymore, but her
voice was loud and clear. “I gave him the lowdown on the way over here, and he’s delayed pressrun until we get this story in.”

  The second paramedic hopped down and slammed shut the other door.

  John looked at the cell phone in his hand and cursed as the chartreuse rig rolled away.

  CHAPTER

  17

  McAllister stood just outside the ambulance bay at Brackenridge Hospital. The waiting room staff had insisted he go outdoors if he needed to make a cellular call, so he was stuck in the drizzle, juggling Kate’s phone as well as his own as he enviously watched hospital workers file outside to suck down nicotine during their breaks.

  Life was full of surprises. Tonight, for instance, he’d learned that Kate Kepler was the only daughter of James Kepler, who, besides being a computer geek, was one of the richest men in Austin, if not in the entire state. He was notorious, too, for some sort of shady business dealings he’d been involved with about ten years back. John couldn’t remember the details, but it wouldn’t take him long to turn up something on the Internet.

  Another surprise was that the man didn’t look like a geek at all. A few minutes ago, he’d arrived at the hospital in a silver Tesla Roadster with plates that said placom, an allusion to PlayComp, the software company he’d founded. After whipping into a handicapped space, he’d leapt out of his car and charged through the emergency room doors like some sort of angry bantamweight fighter. He’d been wearing athletic shorts and a RunTex T-shirt and an intense look on his face that said he wanted answers about his little girl, now.

  The gum-smacking receptionist just inside—who wore pink scrubs tonight and told everyone who approached her she wasn’t at liberty to discuss the status of any patients, and could you please take a seat in the waiting area?—was toast.

  John punched at his keypad and once again connected with the night editor’s desk at the Austin Herald. The guy was a friend, but tonight John was pushing the boundaries of that friendship by blowing his deadline completely out of the water.

  “Hey, Pete, I’ve got that info for you.”