by Simone Sinna
The other two men worried her more. They didn’t appear to be together but they were of a type. Heavyset thug type. More muscle than Corey, one as broad-shouldered as a bear. The other, shorter one, was like a football player whose shoulder muscles filled in where the pads should have been, leaving him with little neck. Neither of them had luggage either. Unlike the businessman who hadn’t noticed her, they had both checked her out independently, trying to pretend they weren’t. Savannah reassured herself that men often checked her out, and it didn’t mean anything. She was only carrying a light bag no bigger than a hand bag, so maybe it wasn’t so strange not to have luggage, even coming from an airport.
Savannah tried to enjoy the scenery, tried to feel excited about coming to a city that had been a definite “must do one day.” But she kept checking the men out, unable to relax. No one was getting off. Others joined them as they came closer to the city center. She checked the maps on the walls and got off to transfer to the subway line that would take her to Grand Central. The bear and the footballer were right behind her. She didn’t waste time looking, ducked between people and made for her platform. At the top of a set of stairs she could see them heading her direction. Her stomach clenched. Could she find a cop? What would she say? It wasn’t like they had done anything. She found her platform and tried to get lost among the hundred or more people waiting. She got on and couldn’t see them, but propping herself in a doorway and taking time to look into the next carriage, sure enough, there they were.
At Grand Central the mass of people swarming around left her at least reassured that she was unlikely to be abducted anywhere this busy. Unless they had a gun and told her to be quiet. Savannah remembered being told by Dan that the best thing to do in that circumstance was to throw your wallet one direction and run the other, that most people couldn’t hit a running target and that hand guns needed to be up close to hit anything. Trouble was in Australia people didn’t have guns in general. Her understanding was in the USA they were a whole lot more likely to, and worse, have a range of sizes. She had no idea what constituted the description of hand gun. Had Dan been talking about something very small, or did he mean anything that wasn’t a shotgun? In any case, if these guys were after her, they wanted her, not her wallet. She remembered Ben’s phone call. Maybe they wanted the photo? Could she throw that and run in the opposite direction? Right now it was in her money belt and that’s where she intended to leave it.
She went to the counter to get her ticket to New Haven, checking the monitor. There was one in an hour. Perfect. Handing over the cash she looked around, but there were too many people.
“This may sound weird,” she told the woman on the counter, “but if anyone asks where my ticket is for, can you do me a favor and say…” She consulted the board. “…Poughkeepsie?”
The woman didn’t react. She had probably seen everything working here.
Savannah now had an hour to lose them, get a coat and anything else that might be useful.
There was no shortage of coat shops. Savannah found just the one she wanted. Reasonably priced and with two entrances. She went in one and walked out the other in a hat and dark coat, ducked around the corner, did a loop and with ten minutes to spare started to slow, pretending to browse in the shop windows as she edged towards one of the station entrances.
She saw them maybe twenty yards behind. They must have been following her all the way yet they had taken care not to be seen. Right now they were heading directly towards her. There were people walking past her in both directions. The traffic on Forty-Second Street was steady, cabs and cars slowing to drop off and pick up people. The door of a dark blue car opened, and she had the fleeting impression of a “thug type” at the wheel. In that instant she knew that they were going to bundle her in there and drive off. With the bear and footballer still ten yards away and closing quickly she reacted without thinking. She pointed at them and screamed.
“Rape! Oh my God they’re the men that raped me. It’s them!” Another piercing scream, she waved her arms and backed up. She didn’t have to fake looking terrified.
At first nothing seemed to happen. The bear and the footballer stopped dead, and, lucky for her, hesitated. The people around her, rather than coming to her aid, looked at her like she was crazy and backed off, stopping, assessing. She couldn’t blame them. She screamed some more, still backing towards the station entrance. The men looked at each and then back to her, faces grim, and she could see they were going to grab her anyway. Fifty yards away two cops had started heading her way. Not too worried, just some mad woman.
The bear lunged then stopped, staring. To Savannah’s right she saw a gun. Maybe technically a handgun, because it was certainly in a hand. But this one looked huge, black, and no matter what Dan had said, not the sort that she had any inclination on talking a chance with. Not that there was a choice. The third man’s other hand gripped her arm like a vise.
Things got really messy. The two cops were now running, guns drawn. A shot rang out from the car, people screamed and were diving for cover. Savannah had the impression that the bear and the football player jumped for the blue sedan. She heard another shot, loud and close. As he fired his gun, the man holding her loosened his grip. As soon as Savannah felt the ease of pressure, she kicked him hard, and turned and ran as fast as she could. She didn’t think. Fear had injected her with a surge of adrenaline that left her with one thought only. Escape. The clock said one minute to her train departure. She kept running and didn’t stop until she jumped on it, and a second later the doors closed and it pulled out of the station. As she closed her eyes, she realized the third man, the one with the gun, was the businessman who had also been on the air-train from the airport.
* * * *
Zachary Bateman was not a happy man. He had made as much a fuck-up as his stepbrother had. Fuck-ups didn’t happen to him, they happened to other people, and he got to tell them they’d got it wrong. He’d been too long dusting desks, was out of practice.
On the positive side no one had been injured. Bad enough he had discharged his firearm and missed the tires. He wouldn’t have minded hitting one of the thugs, though the paperwork would have been painful. Not that it wasn’t going to be anyway. But the worst thing was that after following Savannah from the airport he had lost her. The police were on him, yelling for him to drop his gun. He’d have risked getting shot if he had followed her. Precious minutes were lost while he did as requested and showed the NYPD his FBI identification. They were good cops, cautious, but by the time he got to the platform she was nowhere to be seen. Fuck.
He sat down on the stairs into Grand Central station and called his office, wanting an ID on the photos he’d taken in the train. These had to be Hezekiah’s boys. Ben had thought maybe they didn’t want the girl, just the pack with whatever was in that box Savannah’s mother had left her. This made it clear that either what they thought was going to be in the pack wasn’t, or else it had been her they were after all along.
Now he would have to wait until his agent picked her up in Poughkeepsie, though why in the hell she was going there was a mystery. All of this was a mystery, and it wasn’t getting any clearer. His phone rang and he checked the ID.
“Where are you?”
“Grand Central.”
“You got her?”
“Sorry kid, I’m beginning to think she just might not be as sweet and innocent as she looks.”
“Jesus, don’t tell me she hoodwinked the FBI?”
Zac heard Ben chuckle, but it wasn’t with much mirth.
“Well now we can work together.”
“I thought we were?”
“I mean physically together,” said Ben. “My plane just landed and is cruising the tarmac. Decided I have stake in this. I don’t like being jerked around.”
“We’ll get her. She’s on a train to Poughkeepsie.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
“End of the line.” As soon as he said, Zac looked up at the board
. All the trains at Grand Central were listed by the end stop. “Call you back.” He hit the off, strode down to the ticket counter, pushed in front of the queue and showed his badge.
“Remember me?”
The woman looked startled, eye on the FBI identification he’d slammed on the counter. He hadn’t done that first time, and she’d just answered the question. He’d been in a hurry, hadn’t thought to question it, but fact was she probably wouldn’t have answered without it. Unless she had been asked to.
“She looked legit to me,” said the woman nervously.
“So where is she really going?”
“New Haven. She checked that was the stop for Yale.”
* * * *
As soon as Savannah’s heart rate was back to normal, her first thought was she was now running from the law. How big a thing was it to run from the scene of a shooting if you were the victim? At least they would have caught the businessman. Had he been with the thugs or was he with someone else? Her head was spinning. What on earth was she in the middle of?
She tried to make sense of what she did know.
A thug called Corey had tried to abduct her. An ex-cop tells Corey where she is, all the while buttering her up and trying to get information. Could he have not known, and the person on the phone was also pulling Corey’s strings? Maybe. But she wanted that to be true too much to trust it as an idea. Right now she was running short of friends. One would have been good. Truth was, she was scared, lonely, and feeling out of her depth.
She had escaped, flown five hours across the country and was then nearly abducted by someone else. Someone was being paid by the same boss as Corey. She played through the Grand Central Station episode in her head but still couldn’t work it out. One or two lots of people were trying to abduct her, which meant that they knew she had been on that plane, which in turn meant these weren’t amateurs. They had money and resources to be dangerous. Maybe enough to bribe cops, certainly enough to risk shoot-outs in the center of New York, and who knew what else.
It was already getting dark when the train drew into New Haven. There were only a few people left on the train, none likely to have followed her. The station was a half mile from town and the walk deserted and bleak, wind whistling around her as she put her hands in her pockets and strode into the main street. From the outskirts it had looked like any other town, but once in the heart the university dominated. Like her hometown university at least in part, this one looked more English than anything else. Grand old buildings were surrounded by lawns, bare trees and squirrels rummaging around in thick piles of leaves. But unlike Sydney, this university was in the heart of town, commerce weaving itself around the buildings which seemed to extend forever.
Cold and hungry, Savannah set herself up in an internet café and started reading about Yale. They had a great website where you could search for other alumni. Trouble was that to register, you had to be an alumni yourself. It had a great library system, but, of course, you had to be one of their students. She didn’t have time to enroll and somehow didn’t think a certificate in bartending and food preparation would cut it as entrance criteria. Over eleven thousand students at any one time. And she was looking for one from thirty or more years ago. How many Todd Wilsons would there be? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? She figured in the photo he had to be at least twenty-five, and at the oldest, thirty-five. Which meant he would have been born somewhere between 1950 and 1960. So he would have gone to Yale somewhere between 1968 and 1978. Maybe a little later because she was pretty sure they did postgrad degrees here, so maybe she would need to look all the way up to 1985. Seventeen years of records. Even if she could access them, and taking into account that students stayed on for three or four years, it would be over 100,000 names. Better odds, she supposed, than the fifty-four million results on Google for the name.
It was close to eight, dark outside, when she decided to find somewhere to crash for the night. But as she paid up the door to the café opened. She looked up and there were Ben and the businessman.
Chapter Seven
Zac saw her eyes widen in fear as she took a step backwards, eyes darting and ready to run. Ben looked like he was about to go and hug her and risk being hit over the head with a chair. Zac put one arm out to stop Ben and with the other fished out his FBI badge.
“What?” Savannah looked at it in disbelief. Unfortunately, serious disbelief. Zac couldn’t blame her. If she was on the level that was, and if she wasn’t, he had to agree with Ben, she was the best actress he’d ever seen.
“I’m FBI,” Zac repeated. “Ben is my stepbrother. He got my help to find out where you’d gone and I met you at the airport and saw you had other company. I followed you and them to work out who they are.”
The woman at the counter was looking at them oddly. All the customers had stopped talking and were openly gaping.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Ben.
They adjourned to the corner of a quiet bar a few doors down, Zac keeping a hand on her arm until she was seated and Ben following her every move with puppy-dog eyes. Ben had it bad. Zac could understand it. Savannah’s cool look sent shivers up and down his spine. He pictured her in over-the-knee boots with a whip and nothing else. It had been a while since he’d frequented his favorite BDSM club, and this close to Savannah, her body tense but eyes flashing, he wished he was there right now, with her.
“I saw the white van too, when I went to get coffee,” said Ben in a rush. “Couldn’t make any sense of it. I was meant to be following Corey, but he led me to you. Then the reverse happened. Turns out the guy who hired me was not who he said he was. Probably same guy who Corey works for, his uncle.”
“Does the name Hezekiah Tanner mean anything to you?” Zac was watching her closely but he made sure that in the shadows she couldn’t see his face.
Savannah shook her head. “It’s the sort of name I’d remember, but I’ve never heard of him.”
“Then why are you here?”
Savannah frowned. “Because Rachel, the dancer friend of my mother’s, remembered some extra things when I rang her back. A University club my father took them to. But not his own, you know, mutual rights or something. She thought he either had a bulldog or donkey mascot. Couldn’t find a donkey.”
“You think your father went to Yale?”
Savannah nodded.
Zac leant forward. “Okay, so now it’s getting interesting. Because I can place Hezekiah near San Francisco in 1985 and 1986, and he also attended Yale.”
* * * *
Corey was getting sick of driving. Since Hezekiah had ordered him into position he and his two friends had been on the road, stopping only briefly at gas stations. The last burger was the worst Corey had ever had. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing his uncle. He had some very particular rules that Corey didn’t care for, particularly related to what women he was allowed to have. The old man was always on at him, never thought he could get anything right. Like who could? Corey wasn’t much of a reader and Hezekiah kept sprouting Bible quotes that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Not that Corey cared. What did make sense was keeping America free. That Corey understood just fine. It could put up with his uncle’s rules because at the end of the day they were a hell of a lot better than what the fucking government with its bleeding heart bullshit advocated.
This particular problem hadn’t been Corey’s fault. If his uncle had trusted him to take her in the first place it all would have been much simpler. It was the other guy who complicated things, and Corey had the impression his uncle had been using him to keep an eye on his nephew. Why there had been a change of heart Corey had no idea and didn’t really care. Seemed he hadn’t been the only person to mess up so at least Hezekiah’s ire was currently directed elsewhere.
* * * *
They talked for an hour about the possibilities, but agreed they would wait until morning to hit the alumni website. Ben’s concentration was shot even if the other two seemed engrossed. This close to Savannah it was amazin
g he could think of anything except her. She seemed to have forgiven him. Her smile and eyes had been warm, her hand squeezed his briefly. But there was something else he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Like she was shying away from him. They had, after all, only slept together once. Perhaps he was coming on too strong. Flying across the country to find her had probably made her wary, though truth was it was because he was pissed at himself for allowing Manny, or rather Hezekiah, to fool him.
They finished their drinks, knowing Zac would be able to access the Yale website. He could have used his FBI status but that would have taken time, and he wouldn’t have to. He’d done his law degree there. His ties were sufficiently recent that he had also been able to access them accommodation.
“Not brilliant,” he acknowledged, “but convenient.” Zac looked at Ben, then Savannah. “I could only organize two rooms.”
“You boys are sharing then I guess.”
Ben had been expecting this, but to hide his disappointment got up and went to the counter to pay the drinks bill.
* * * *
“You’re going to hurt him.”
“Not intentionally. Why I thought it was better to stop before we got in any deeper.” Savannah held Zac’s gaze defiantly.
“You’re not the stay-around type?”
Savannah thought for a moment. “I’d like to be. Just I fall for the Bens of this world, stable and solid, and then get restless.”
“Ever thought of alternatives?”
Savannah drained the last of her cocktail. Something that had tasted deceptively mild and had a kick like a mule. “Such as?”
“A threesome.”
Savannah looked away in order to ensure her expression gave away nothing, grateful he no longer had his hand on her arm because he would have been sure to notice the acceleration in her pulse rate. “We talking sex or lifestyle?”