Lewis Security

by Glenna Sinclair

  I was still holding my phone. All I had to do was call somebody.

  “Why are you following me?” he asked, tilting his head to the side.

  I struggled to find my voice. “What? Who says I’m following you?” I wished I sounded more confident. I was talking to the Devil himself. Who would feel confident at a time like that? We were all alone in an alley, right in the center—where he’d drawn me, I realized. Just like he’d drawn Ricardo. Only I was the one he could take out without anybody noticing this time around.

  “The fact that we’re standing here together,” he pointed out. Funny how the insane could sound perfectly reasonable when they wanted to. “Why are you following me?”

  Why lie? “Because I know who you are.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Stop wasting my time.”

  “Stop wasting her time.” I couldn’t hold back the shiver that ran down my spine at his words, and the way his voice changed yet again when he spoke them. He was sharp, nasty, and his message stung like a whip.

  “Where is she, Jonathon?”

  “I’ll take you to her, Christa.” I willed myself not to react when he spoke my name. I should’ve known he’d know who I was. He’d probably done his homework, learned who we all were, all the agents working under Pax. “Oh, surprised that I know who you are? Please. Like I wouldn’t know all about Pax’s new squeeze.” His eyes darted over my face. “You look a lot like the old one.”

  The buzzing of my phone, still in my hand, made me jump. Damned if the monster didn’t know how to put a person under his spell. We both looked down to find Pax calling.

  “I’ll take that.” He pried it from my fingers before I could react, but instead of answering like he’d done with Lizzie’s phone, he dropped mine on the ground and smashed it with the heel of one heavy-soled boot. My heart sank. There went any hope of contacting any of them. And Pax. Oh, Pax. I love you. I’m sorry it had to be this way.

  “Now. If you’ll come with me, Miss Christa, we’ll get this party started. We’ve already wasted too much time.”

  “Come with you? What party?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask so many questions, pretty lady.” He took a step toward me, but I immediately raised my fists to strike. “And if you think you’re going to use those fists on me, remember: only I know where the little girl is. You hurt me, you hurt her. Got it?”

  I got it. My fists slowly sank to my sides. Her life hung in the balance. Forget mine.

  His smile was satisfied, maybe even triumphant. “I knew you’d see things my way. Now move.”

  Chapter Sixteen – Pax

  I heard the footsteps outside the office, heard voices overlapping each other. It was enough to draw me out of my cave. I opened the door and stuck my head out. One of Ricardo’s detectives was walking past. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Christa called earlier and told us she was trailing him.”

  “Him? Smythe?” Suddenly, I was on alert. Every nerve in my body stood at attention, and I had never felt more clear-headed in my life. “What, is she crazy?”

  “Yeah, well, she lost him. And we lost her.” He hurried on, leaving me standing there with the feeling that somebody had just poured cold water over me. I couldn’t breathe for a second. I thought I was going to die, even. But just for a second, no longer than it took to blink an eye. When I could move again, I ran for Ricardo’s office. He wasn’t in there.

  “Where is he?” I shouted to no one in particular. Nobody seemed to know, or else they just weren’t answering me because they didn’t know what I was talking about. They were all useless to me just then. I went back to my little office, pulled on a coat and ran for the front doors. The cold, damp air was a shock to my senses, but it was enough to sharpen me even more at the same time. I welcomed it.

  Ricardo was just coming up the stairs, looking tired. “Did you find him? Or her?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know where the hell she is now. She’s not answering her phone. I had her on the line, she lost him, and I was a little sharp with her. Do you think she would sulk now?”

  I shook my head. “No—she knows how to put things aside when she needs to.”

  “Yeah. I thought so. She wouldn’t ignore me when she knows how important it is.”

  “Where was she last? Do you know?”

  “Around the corner, one block down, between a shoe and cell store.” He pointed. “That was where she described, anyway. That’s where she lost him.”

  I got a sick feeling. “And there’s nobody there now?”

  “I have one of my guys walking around the area.” His radio squawked, and I watched as he touched his fingers to the small speaker attached to his coat lapel. “Yeah?” he asked.

  “Detective, we found something in that alley you were talking about.”

  My feet were moving before Ricardo had the chance to reply. I took off at a dead sprint with my heart racing almost as fast as my thoughts. Christa. Christa. Christa. Her name was all that played in my head. He wouldn’t take her from me. He couldn’t. God couldn’t. I didn’t even really believe in God—I hadn’t for years, since I was a kid, even—but if He was up there, He couldn’t be that cruel. He couldn’t take away everything that had ever mattered to me.

  I knew without looking that Ricardo was just behind me as I turned into the alley. It suddenly became dark, and even colder and damper then it was out on the street. I saw a guy standing maybe halfway between the two streets, in the center of the alley. He looked concerned as he pointed down to the ground. When I reached him, I saw what had gotten his attention.

  “Oh, my God.” I closed my eyes for the briefest of seconds and again saw her in front of me. Laughing, arms reaching for me, standing in the middle of a clear sea.

  “Her phone?” Ricardo asked, standing just next to me.

  “Yeah. Her phone.”

  “Do you think he has her?”

  “I think she would’ve gone with him,” I said. “He probably told her he’d take her to Lizzie. She would go with him if it meant keeping her safe.”

  “Son of a bitch.” He recovered quickly and started barking orders to anybody in earshot. “They couldn’t have gotten far! I want a team patrolling every inch of this five-block radius! Now!” Feet took off at a run. I, on the other hand, stood rooted to the spot. Christa, too. What would he do with her?

  “Wherever they are, they can’t be far from here,” Ricardo muttered.

  “You don’t know that. They could’ve gotten in a cab. I bet she would’ve gone anywhere with him as long as it meant going to Lizzie. And if she hurt him, we would never find out were Lizzie is. I mean, I would do the same thing.” Who was speaking? It couldn’t be me. My brain wasn’t working the way it needed to work for me to sound rational like that. Was it possible for me to be raving, screaming, losing my grip on reality inside my head but still sound rational?

  He got on the radio. “I want you to talk to the owners of the stores on either side of this alley and ask to see their security footage from the past twenty minutes. Look for Christa Michaelson or Jonathon Smythe and come back to me the instant you see anything.” Then, he turned to me. “This could be the break we need.”

  “Yeah. At what cost?” I leaned against a dumpster when my knees started to give way. Was this the coup de grace? Was he waiting to pull this last trick on me? Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse.

  “You think he knew who she was already?” he asked, but of course we both knew the truth. He must’ve been following me around or something. Maybe he’d watched outside headquarters just like I’d watched him. Like a spider, spinning his web, waiting to draw me in. He would’ve wanted to know who was important to me before putting the plan in motion.

  She needed me. They both needed me. That thought managed to cut through the rest of the noise in my head and got me back on my feet.
I couldn’t afford to sink into self-pity or to recriminate myself for the way I had spoken to her. Why hadn’t I been kinder? Why couldn’t I have told her how sorry I was before she left? Had she even listened to my message, or had it already been too late? She might have been with Smythe while I was leaving that voicemail. I’d have that on my conscience for the rest of my life. Just one more thing.

  I jumped when the radio static cut through the silence between us. “Detective, we have something at the shoe store.” I turned and ran for it. I had already run more that day than I had in years, just when I thought I was totally run down. Incredible what a person could do when they thought they had nothing left in them.

  There was a small crowd huddled around a video monitor behind the counter in the back corner of the tiny store. I pushed my way through. “Where are they?” Ricardo asked from over my shoulder. One of the plain clothes cops pointed at the screen.

  “Here. Right here. The timestamp says it was twelve minutes ago.” Only twelve minutes. They had stood right there, right in front of the store, and he’d hailed a cab.

  “Damn it,” Ricardo growled. “We just missed them. How the fuck did we miss them?” Everyone around him except me recoiled a little.

  “We have a cab number,” I pointed out. It was clear in the feed, too. Great quality. “We can call up the company and find out where they went. The driver will probably know—hell, he might still be in the car with them.”

  “This is tricky,” he replied. “We don’t want the dispatcher getting on the horn with him while Smythe’s listening. He can’t know we know he’s in that car.” He pulled out his phone and dialed up the number on the side of the cab into which the two of them had disappeared. I stared at the monitor like a man in a trance, memorizing every bit of my enemy. His clothes, his glasses, the way he combed his hair—parted on the side, slicked down. He looked like any normal person out on a Friday afternoon. No big deal. I wouldn’t have given him a second thought if I passed him on the street—and if I didn’t see those empty, soulless eyes of his. If I had seen them, I probably would’ve crossed the street just to avoid him.

  “The man in that cab is extremely dangerous. He’s wanted in a double homicide and the kidnapping of an eleven-year-old girl. We believe the woman with him is also being kidnapped. It’s imperative that you don’t tip your hand,” Ricardo was instructing, and he looked over at me while he was speaking. His eyes were hard, shining, like an animal in the middle of a hunt. This was what he did best. I knew him well enough to know he would rather it be anybody else in the world than Christa he was tracking.

  His hand covered the speaker. “They’re reaching out to the cab now, just to see if they’re free for a fare.” I stood closer to him, hoping to hear what the dispatcher said when they came back. It seemed to take forever, a painfully long time when we were both frantic to hear that Christa was okay. If we could find out where Jonathon was holding my little girl, so much the better. This might be the break we were looking for all along.

  Please, please, be stupid enough to make this mistake. He couldn’t have known Christa would trail him the way she did. He couldn’t possibly have planned to pick her up exactly when and where he had. He must’ve been thinking on the fly when he got into that cab with her, which would mean he didn’t plan out how to go about taking her back to his lair. I couldn’t think of it as anything other than a lair, somewhere an animal would call home. If he wasn’t thinking, there was room for error.

  “You can’t?” Our eyes met, and he shook his head. Damn it. “Is there any sort of tracking device on your cars? What about the cabbies and their cell phones? Do they keep them on? There’s got to be a way we can pinpoint their location.” I knew enough about cab drivers to know that in the modern age, they liked talking on their phones while they drove. How they managed to negotiate city traffic while listening to a voice in their ear, I had no idea. They were dangerous enough back in the days before cell technology, for Christ’s sake.

  Ricardo nodded as the dispatcher spoke. “Fine. Keep trying to get them. I’ll have one of my guys call back in a few minutes.” He hung up with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know, Pax. I have a bad feeling about that cab driver.”

  “Shit.” I shook my head. “They didn’t know who they were picking up.”

  “Exactly. But something tells me it didn’t take long for them to find out.” He checked his watch. “It’s only been sixteen minutes since they got into that cab. They can’t have gotten far, not with traffic the way it is. Unless he ordered the driver not to pick up the radio when dispatch called through, the car is probably somewhere fairly nearby.”

  “So what are we thinking? He has the driver take them to his hideout and kills him?”

  “Would you put it past him?” he snarled.

  “So they can’t be far.”

  “Wouldn’t that be just like him? Hiding out near the station?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. That would be just like him.” And it could mean that my baby was somewhere close by, too. “What’s the plan?”

  He looked like a man on the brink of insanity, sort of how I felt. I could almost see the wheels spinning behind his eyes. “We keep trying to locate the driver. We try to pinpoint his GPS location using his phone—the dispatcher can give it to whoever calls back and we can try to trace it.” He got on the radio to alert all patrol cars to be on the lookout for the cab in question while I wondered if it wasn’t already too little, too late.

  My eyes wandered over to the monitor again, and I watched as Christa climbed into the back of the cab. She was a good actress. Nobody would ever guess she was in mortal danger.

  Would that be the last time I ever saw her alive again?

  Chapter Seventeen – Christa

  “Please. I got a family. Don’t do this.” The cab driver, an older man who looked like he might be driving as a way to pass his retirement, blubbered almost incoherently as he drove.

  “Shut the fuck up or I blow your brains out right now. Do not touch that radio,” Smythe warned. “I swear to God, I’ll do it right now while we’re still moving.”

  I bet he wished he hadn’t picked us up. Poor guy. He thought he was going to make a few bucks.

  Somewhere deep in my subconscious was the awareness that I was starting to slip into shock. I was thinking too clearly, like I had stepped outside myself and my situation to watch from somewhere far away, high above the cab which traveled through congested city streets. We were only a few miles from the station, but it might as well have been the other side of the world. The further we traveled, the less hope I would ever see Pax again.

  “Make a right. Go three blocks.” We were almost at the river by then, where a bunch of new construction was going up to replace rows of abandoned piers. Was that where we were going? To one of the old buildings there? It made sense—I knew Pax had been going through real estate records, and I could’ve told him Smythe never would’ve made it that easy. He wouldn’t have purchased a space even under an assumed name. Just like before, he had chosen a dirty, rat-infested little hole.

  Sure enough, he had the driver come to a stop between two tall buildings without a single unbroken window between the two of them. Just beyond them was the Hudson river, and only a half-mile away was a string of beautiful new condos. Amazing how little separated the haves from the have-nots. What the hell was I thinking? My mind was trying to compensate for the sheer terror I felt. I had never been so terrified, not ever. It was why I was always a sure bet to take on even the most dangerous missions, missions even some of the men in my unit were hesitant on. I had never hesitated. Hesitation could make the difference between life and death for me and the unit. But again, I had nothing to lose back then but my life.

  What would Mom do if I died? I guessed somebody would take care of her, and I hoped nobody ever told her what happened to me. She couldn’t take it, not in her mental state. My idiot aunts and uncles, however, would probably be stupid enough to give her the details. Morons. They d
idn’t have a single brain among all of them put together.

  And what about him? I couldn’t even think his name just then. It was too painful. Did he know what happened by then? Was he trying to find me? Or was he still buried in real estate records? What would he do when he found out I was missing?

  “Okay,” Smythe barked, ripping me out of my thoughts. “Out of the car. Both of you.” He got out, gun in hand, and hurried around to the driver’s side. He opened both doors. I wished the driver had tried to get away in the short window of time when Smythe wasn’t in the car, but terror did that to a person. He froze like an animal in a snare. Wasn’t that what he was, really? What we both were?

  “Please, mister. I got a family,” he pleaded again. “I didn’t see nothin’. Just let me go. You can have the cab, I don’t care, just let me go.”

  “No.” A moment later, the old man dropped to the ground. I flinched at the sound of the gun—there was a silencer, but that didn’t help the way it always did in movies and on TV shows. It wasn’t totally silent, just not quite as loud. A bunch of birds flew away at the cracking noise.

  “Help me get him into the river,” Smythe ordered. I couldn’t believe he’d ask me to do something like that. Making me complicit, almost. He needed an accomplice, didn’t he? He wanted me to blame myself, too. Even though there was nothing I could’ve done to help the poor man once he’d stopped and picked us up.

  I took his feet while Smythe took his hands and together, we carried him to the water. I barely managed to hold back my tears. What was the point of any of this? Would he take me to Lizzie if I did as he asked? I didn’t dare ask about her, for fear that he’d kill me—not that I was afraid for my life, but I was afraid for hers. If I was with her, I would do anything in my power to keep him away from her. I would give up my own life if that was what it took, but not until I saw her and knew my life wouldn’t be spent in vain.