Moral of the story for bad guys: when in doubt, dispose of the problem.
Reed was as sure as it was possible to be that after thinking things through for themselves, whoever was holding Ant would come to that same conclusion. Ant would be safe for precisely as long as his captors thought they had more to gain by keeping him alive.
With Ant dead, if Holly started to talk before they could capture and silence him, they could paint Holly as a street thug, a gang member, a drug user with a rap sheet just trying to make trouble for the cops. Nobody would believe Holly. Hell, if Reed hadn’t known Holly, and the situation, he wouldn’t believe the kid, either.
Then there was Reed himself. Looking at it objectively, he knew talking to the media wasn’t going to work any better for him. There was an excellent chance that whoever was calling the shots on this—right now, his money was on Superintendent Wallace, but he was open to other possibilities—would be able to spin it so that Reed, who had admittedly committed an impressive number of felonies in the last six or so hours, came out looking like a criminal, a nut job, a dirty cop with an axe to grind. They might claim he had Photoshopped the pictures. They might claim—hell, they might claim anything.
He might find himself arrested, tried, convicted, and thrown in jail for the rest of his life.
He might find himself shot on sight, or later, out of sight.
Holly had already been arrested for possessing crack cocaine. Reed knew that was a lie. How many others would believe it was a lie, though? Would a TV reporter believe it? Would a judge and jury believe it?
Reed rated the odds that anyone would believe Holly was telling the truth as at best fifty-fifty.
Not great odds when you’re gambling with your life.
So, going to the media as a solution was probably out.
What did that leave?
Not much.
His department? In the wake of the superintendent’s betrayal, everyone was suspect. Even his partner, Terry—Reed couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of anyone anymore, or anything. Besides, they were all hunting for him now. Not just the NOPD, but all the cops from the surrounding parishes, too. After tonight, even the cops who were innocent of any involvement in the events in the cemetery would, best-case scenario, arrest him, worst-case scenario, shoot him.
Brows knit, glancing thoughtfully past the golden arches without really registering them, Reed could see the expressway, see the concrete cloverleaf curving up toward it. An eighteen-wheeler chugging up the entrance ramp caught his eye. Impossible to make out any identifying marks at this distance, but Reed was almost positive that it was the one Holly was in. He watched it gain the top of the entrance ramp, pull out into sparse traffic, and accelerate away, keeping his eyes on it until he couldn’t see it any longer. Then he blew out a long, slow breath of relief. Go with God, kid. With Holly now almost certainly speeding out of harm’s way, the situation became slightly less dire. One rescued, two (including himself) to go. By tomorrow night, the kid should be safely out of the reach of the not-quite-long-enough arm of the New Orleans law. Reed felt some of the tension that had been keeping his muscles as tight as wound springs start to ease.
For now, the broad outline of the plan was to get his hands on Ant, get himself and Ant away from New Orleans, and at some point try to figure out exactly what the hell they’d all gotten mixed up in.
Whatever this was, it was too big for him to tackle alone. He was going to need help. The problem was where to find it.
Two days ago, when he’d gone rushing out of headquarters after his fight with the superintendent, when he’d known he had trouble on his hands but had not yet realized just how extreme it was going to get, he’d thought of hightailing it straight to the FBI with what he knew.
The problem with that had struck him almost immediately: the local feds were tight with a lot of the NOPD guys.
A little too tight for him to chance it, he decided.
But if not the media, or the feds, then who? Who was left? Who could he turn to?
What it boils down to is, who can I trust?
It was like a game show. Catch was, get it wrong and you and people you care about die.
He’d already gambled on DeBlassis, e-mailing his former partner copies of the pictures Holly had taken, along with a brief summary of the facts as he knew them, asking him to get the pictures enlarged and clarified and then just sit tight: he would be in touch. For caution’s sake, he’d used his neighbor’s computer and e-mail account, because he’d known that one of the first things anybody looking for him would do was check his e-mail and phone records.
Possible issues with what he had done abounded: DeBlassis wouldn’t recognize the sender’s name, and might not open the message for a while; not being one to keep in touch, he hadn’t sent an e-mail to DeBlassis since the guy had moved to Boston, which meant he had no idea if DeBlassis might have changed to another e-mail address; and since it was Christmas, he couldn’t be sure that DeBlassis was even home or checking his e-mail.
And those were just the problems he could think of off the top of his head.
Reed was sifting through a mental list of other people he might possibly be able to turn to for help when he saw what looked like a dozen squad cars streaking into view up on the expressway, racing west from the direction of the city. The stroboscopic bursts of red light hit his eyes a split second before he heard the first faint shrieks of the approaching sirens. Horror pumped a fresh jolt of adrenaline through his veins.
The cars were speeding down I-10 in the same direction in which the truck carrying Holly was traveling.
Were we spotted? Did Elsa sell us out? Did the driver sell us out? Jesus, are they going after Holly?
Or maybe the cop cars were heading for the truck stop, coming after him.
If so, he didn’t have much time.
Breaking into a dead run as the volume of the sirens escalated into a full scream, he dodged around the enormous pile of dirt that came complete with a backhoe parked on the edge of it that stood between the car and the truck stop—he’d parked behind the dirt pile as an extra precaution, both in case Caroline should somehow manage to swivel around enough so she could look out the rear window, and in case random headlights from a vehicle pulling into or out of the truck stop should pierce the darkness of the field and illuminate the Mazda—and was almost upon the hazy patch of denser darkness that was the Mazda before he was really able to see it.
For a second, as he peered at the car, he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing.
Then as he sprinted closer he realized that the front passenger door was open, and the slender pale things emerging from it were a pair of long bare legs.
Caroline’s long bare legs.
She was escaping, just as two shrieking cop cars separated themselves from the pack on the interstate, peeled rubber down the cloverleaf, and, bubbletops revolving wildly, raced toward the truck stop.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CAROLINE WAS SO MAD she could spit.
Her hands were cuffed behind her back. As he’d clapped the bracelets on her, Reed had explained—not particularly apologetically—that he was fresh out of zip ties.
The cuffs were actually more comfortable than a zip tie, which she was going to remember for future reference in case she ever had a choice of restraints when arresting someone. At least this time her hands hadn’t gone numb.
Didn’t matter. She was still pissed.
If Reed thought she was going to take being held as his captive in stride, he was wrong.
He’d dragged her around to the rear passenger door, given her a chance to shed her flak vest and windbreaker, which for comfort’s sake she had done, then cuffed her hands behind her back, sat her down, and belted her in. Then he had driven for several more minutes, cut the lights, pulled into a pitch-dark field, and after bumping across it for a couple of hundred yards, parked. He was being careful, even unscrewing the interior lightbulb so opening the door wouldn’t creat
e a flash. After he and Holly had gotten out, he’d shed the SWAT jacket he had been wearing and turned it inside out, hiding the bright white lettering. Then he put it on again, so it looked like a plain black jacket. She guessed he needed the jacket to conceal his shoulder holster, which she glimpsed bisecting the gleaming white of his shirt. That done, he had reached inside the car and yanked on her seat belt so it tightened into rigidity, pinning her against the seat. Then he’d told her to sit tight, he’d be right back.
And she’d told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Which had made him smile—right before he’d plastered a strip of duct tape over her mouth.
Which had made her madder than she already was. Call it mad times ten.
She really, really hated having duct tape over her mouth. More than she hated being handcuffed. More than she hated being clamped by a locked seat belt into immobility. More than she hated being kidnapped.
Duct tape tasted like plastic and glue. It made her lips dry. It made her skin burn. It made her anxious. It hampered her breathing (or at least, it could potentially hamper her breathing, so that was pretty much the same thing). Having her mouth sealed shut made her think of all the things that could go wrong while she only had one orifice through which to take in air: What happened if she choked? What happened if she had an allergy attack? The possibilities for something to go wrong struck her as endless.
So when the opportunity to escape had presented itself, she had seized it. That had happened after she had tried wriggling in an effort to give herself more room, which had only made the seat belt cinch even tighter. Furious, frustrated, and now actively uncomfortable, she’d had a to-hell-with-this moment and vowed to free herself from the damned thing or die trying. Scooting sideways an inch at a time, she’d strained to reach the seat belt latch and finally succeeded. After that, she’d only had to stretch her fingers out over the plastic casing and push down—
Hah!
Once the seat belt released its stranglehold on her, the rest should have been easy, right? Not so much. Caroline tried opening the back doors with no luck. It had taken her a moment to realize that Reed must have engaged the childproof locks.
Which left the front doors.
Turns out, climbing into the front seat was surprisingly awkward without the use of her hands.
She managed it.
By this time, she was hell-bent on getting out of the damned car.
Besides giving Reed a figurative one-fingered salute, the object was to persuade him that he could trust her. She was going to wait for him, sitting on the car’s hood.
Message: I could have escaped if I’d wanted to. Instead, I stayed. That means you can trust me. So tell me what’s going on and let me try to help you, you dolt.
For however long she had before something terrible happened, she was going to work to persuade him to give himself up.
Mad as she was at him, she didn’t want him to die.
She was horribly afraid that was how this was going to end.
Her reasons for staying weren’t just personal, either. Bottom line was, she was a cop. She wasn’t entirely certain what Reed and Holly and Ant had gotten themselves mixed up in, but she was as sure as it was possible to be that a grave injustice was going down. She didn’t believe Reed was a dirty cop or that he’d taken a bribe, and she didn’t believe that he would have done something as spectacularly criminal (and boneheaded) as take a good number of the city’s VIPs hostage without an extremely compelling reason. If she walked away and left Reed to his own devices, it was unlikely that justice would ever be served because the truth would die with Reed.
She could not just stand by and allow him—and Holly and his brother—to be killed.
Not if it was in her power to prevent it. From where she was standing, it was looking like she was the only chance they had.
She’d sworn an oath to serve and protect, and for what it was worth she’d meant it.
So she was going to stay and get to the bottom of whatever the hell this was.
The first step, obviously, was to persuade Reed to confide in her. Which she was hoping her non-escape would facilitate.
Once she was safely in the front passenger seat, Caroline became aware of the distant wail of police sirens. The sound caught her attention, perked her up, made her heartbeat quicken, because as much as she reminded herself that she wasn’t on Reed’s side, her body didn’t seem to get it. It reacted with an instant jolt of adrenaline to the specter of pursuit. She knew that as the victim, she was being searched for, but it felt like she was being hunted. Breathless from the exertions involved in actually getting from the back to the front seat, she curled her legs beneath her for height and squirmed around until she could grasp the door handle. With a real sense of triumph she finally got the door open. Without the cushioning effect of the car around her to block the sound, the scream of sirens split the air. A shiver ran down her spine as she registered how close the police cruisers had to be. They sounded like they were no more than a block away and flying directly toward her . . .
Staring fruitlessly in the direction from which the sounds were coming—tall, backlit black shapes including a hill of dirt approximately ten feet high and an abandoned backhoe blocked her view—she swung her legs out of the car.
Maybe Reed and Holly had been spotted. Maybe they had been captured. The prospect was electrifying, and not in a good way.
No shots had been fired. Or at least, if they had been she hadn’t heard them.
She was willing to bet money that no way was Reed going down without a fight.
In a screwed-up way, realizing that was almost calming: if he’d been captured or killed, she would have heard gunfire.
Standing up, nostrils flaring as she sucked in the night air that felt still and almost heavy now, as if rain were on the way, Caroline craned her neck toward the onrushing wall of sound that was the sirens as she tried to guess what was happening. Her brow furrowed in reaction as the wailing screamed closer and closer—then stopped abruptly. She blinked in surprise. Somebody had cut them off. Why? That was the question that made her stomach tense. It was followed almost instantly by another, even more urgent one: Where are Reed and Holly? Were they running? captured? hiding? None of the above? Of course from where she was she couldn’t see anything that might give her a clue. Pushing the door shut with a hip, she turned to squint in the direction in which Reed and Holly had disappeared. She was frowning toward the pale glow of the lights of the businesses that were blocked from her view by the dirt hill when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a blur of movement as someone—something—came racing toward her through the dark from only a few yards away.
Her heart jumped. Her eyes went wide. Skittering backward, she would have screamed if she could have. Instead she turned to run, only to have hard arms grab her around the waist and shoulders and yank her back against a strong male body.
Reed! She knew him the instant he touched her, had known his identity almost from the instant she’d seen the blur of movement, really, she realized. Her first surge of fright at the charging unknown figure had been instinctive, and now it gave way to surprise and anger—and, yes, more than a little relief.
At least he hadn’t been captured. Or worse.
“Mmmm.” Her expression of outraged protest at being grabbed was muted by the tape.
“Don’t make another sound,” he growled in her ear, dragging her farther back into the darkness behind the dirt hill. From squirming impotently in his hold, Caroline went perfectly still as his urgency transmitted itself to her. The sirens added up to cops nearby. Holly—she couldn’t see Holly. Where was he? Had the kid been arrested? Had Reed gotten him safely away? The duct tape made it impossible to ask, so all she could do was speculate wildly, and worry.
Whatever Reed might have done, Holly was innocent of the crimes that had precipitated this.
“Squad car,” Reed muttered, hauling her with him into the shadow of the backhoe left b
eside the dirt hill. A plastic bag filled with hard items hung over his arm. The bag crackled faintly as whatever was inside knocked against her hip: cans, she thought. With Reed’s arms wrapped tight around her, she was pressed so closely against him that she could feel the heat of his body—and the too-rapid rise and fall of his chest. She could feel his tension in the rock hardness of the muscles imprisoning her. The unmistakable outline of his gun dug into her left shoulder blade. The backs of her thighs were wedged against the powerful length of his; his tuxedo pants felt cool and smooth against her skin. Knee-high weeds brushed her bare calves. The insect chorus was loud; the smell of damp earth was strong. Less pervasive but still detectable was the scent of fabric softener—must be his shirt—and man.
Even before she saw the twin beams of light pierce the field, she knew danger was at hand.
Of course, the danger wasn’t to her. But still her heart pounded.
Reed continued, whispering, “Two of them came off the expressway and started cruising through the parking lots of the businesses out front. Looks like one of them is checking out the field.”
The twin beams were headlights. One of the squad cars had obviously parked facing the field. The sound of a car door being opened and closed was followed almost instantly by another. Caroline pictured it: two uniforms, out of their patrol cars. When two more, smaller lights started playing over the field, she mentally put flashlights in their hands.
Her stomach dropped toward her toes.
As a kidnap victim, what she should have done, of course, was throw a kick back into Reed’s kneecap, tear herself out of his arms, and run headlong toward rescue.
What she did was go quiet as a mouse in his arms, waiting, praying that they—they—would not be found.
Her being a cop was not going to matter under these conditions.
Cuffed, with duct tape over her mouth, she would have no chance of intervening in the first few crucial minutes of a showdown. Whatever was going to happen would occur without her being able to do a thing, or say a word, to stop it.
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