Nowhere to Run

by Suzanne Brockmann

  The old white Volkswagen they’d “borrowed” from the Sea Circus parking lot was halfway down the block. Felipe moved quickly toward it, trying to shield Caroline with his body, praying his sixth sense that told him trouble was coming was wrong.

  Caroline had thrown him for a loop back in Rafe’s apartment. Her admission that she still didn’t trust him had hurt even more than he’d let on. She needed time, he reminded himself. In time, she would learn he truly was everything he said he was.

  Please, God, give him that time.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Felipe saw a shadow move, and instantly, everything kicked into slow motion around him.

  He turned his head and looked directly into the cold steel of Tommy Walsh’s pale blue eyes.

  Tommy had his gun out, hidden under a jacket he was carrying over his arm. It was pointed directly at Caroline.

  If Tommy intended to kill them right here in the street, in front of all these people, they’d already be lying there dead. Still, Felipe knew if pushed too hard, Tommy would shoot. The time to move was now, while he was expecting Felipe to hesitate.

  But Felipe wasn’t going to hesitate. Not with Caroline’s life hanging in the balance. No way was he going to let Tommy kill her. No way.

  He pushed Caroline behind him and reached for the gun that rested against the small of his back. He drew smoothly, watching Tommy’s finger tighten on the trigger at his sudden movement. But Tommy moved in slow motion and Felipe was faster. He aimed and fired.

  The noise was incredible, as was the look of total shock on Tommy Walsh’s face as the big man fell to the ground, a neat little bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

  Stay detached, Felipe ordered himself. That wasn’t a man he’d just killed, it was a monster. There’d be enough time later to suffer over the fact that Tommy Walsh might have a mother, maybe even a wife and children, who would mourn him. There’d be enough time—if Felipe could stay cool and concentrate on getting himself and Caroline out of there.

  Somebody screamed—maybe it was Caroline—and suddenly the world moved again at its regular speed.

  He stepped over Tommy’s body and the blood that was pooling on the sidewalk. Stay cool. Don’t look at the blood. Don’t think. Just get Caroline away.

  He wrenched open the door of the Volkswagen and pushed Caroline inside. Vaulting over the hood, he had the key in the ignition and the car in gear and halfway down the street before he even got the driver’s-side door closed.

  “MY GOD,” CARRIE GASPED. “My God! You killed him!”

  “Fasten your seat belt,” Felipe said calmly, as if he hadn’t just fired a bullet into another man’s head.

  He’d killed a man.

  An unarmed man.

  With sickening clarity, Carrie remembered her surprise when Felipe had suddenly grabbed her arm. She could still see that awful, almost inhuman look in his eyes as he drew his gun. They had been filled with a cold, unearthly, unfamiliar savagery that was echoed on his face. His lips had been pulled back from his mouth in a wolfish snarl as he’d violently taken another human’s life.

  Who was this man, this Felipe Salazar?

  Did she really know him at all? Lord knows she had never seen this side of him before—never.

  Carrie felt sick to her stomach. How could Felipe kill someone and then just…keep going? He’d stepped over the body as if it had been nothing more than a spilled bag of garbage, an inconvenience.

  Unless killing was something he’d done before, something he took lightly….

  My God, was it possible he’d killed those two men in the sandlot after all?

  The police had all that hard evidence against Felipe—a ballistics report that proved his gun was the murder weapon and a videotape of Felipe holding the two victims at gunpoint. Felipe claimed the tape had been made months ago and that the ballistics report was doctored. But ballistics reports were done scientifically. It wouldn’t be easy to falsify information….

  All her doubts, all her uncertainty came rushing back, hitting her full force in the stomach.

  Maybe it was possible that Felipe had killed those men. Maybe he had been the one who’d shot them in the back of the head execution-style. That savage man she’d had a glimpse of, that man with the deadly flat eyes, had certainly looked capable of such an awful deed.

  She took a deep breath, trying to steady her shaking hands, trying to stop the flood of tears that was streaming down her face. She’d been following her heart for the past several days, refusing to allow the cold hard facts to interfere with her feelings for Felipe.

  But now those cold hard facts included one very dead man, and she couldn’t ignore them any longer.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, still in that same quiet, almost unnaturally calm voice.

  “No,” she said. “I want to get out of the car.”

  “We will in a minute,” Felipe said. He looked into the rearview mirror. “I just want to be sure that none of Tommy’s men are following us. But then we should ditch this car. The police will be looking for it.”

  In the distance, Carrie could hear the sound of police sirens moving toward them, getting louder. A patrol car passed them going sixty miles an hour.

  Felipe turned down a side street.

  “No,” Carrie said again. “You don’t understand. I want to get out of the car—now.”

  “Caroline, we can’t—”

  “Not ‘we.’ Me. I want you to pull over and let me get out.”

  Carrie felt him turn and look at her, really look at her. She stared down at her feet, unable to meet his gaze.

  “I can’t do that,” he said quietly.

  She did look up at him then. “Can’t…or won’t?”

  The muscles in the side of his jaw were working hard again. This time it was Felipe who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “What difference does it make?” he returned.

  “Am I your hostage?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “Have I been all along?”

  He made a sound that might’ve been a laugh. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t know. Had he been manipulating her right from the start? Were his words of love really empty promises, designed to make her trust him, keep her from running away? And what about her feelings for him? Was this really love she felt, or was it some kind of warped attachment of a hostage for a captor?

  “Please,” she said softly. “If you care anything for me at all, please let me go.”

  Felipe was silent as he took a left turn onto McCallister Street. “So,” he said, just as quietly, “you’ve decided not to trust me, huh? That’s too bad.”

  “Please,” she said again. “Prove I’m not your hostage, Felipe. Let me go.”

  “As much as I’d like to prove that to you,” he said, “I’d rather you remained alive. As long as there’s a threat from Lawrence Richter, you’re staying with me.”

  Carrie gazed out of the window, unable to speak.

  “And now you’re thinking, ‘Ah, I am his hostage.’” Felipe’s velvet voice surrounded her. “I have to tell you one more time, Caroline, that everything I’ve ever said to you is God’s own truth.”

  Carrie closed her eyes. “I don’t know what the truth is anymore.” She only knew the facts. She’d seen him kill a man without a second thought. A ballistics report tied him to the murder weapon. A videotape showed that he was with the two men before they died.

  As they stopped for a red light, Felipe reached over and picked up her hand, the hand with the green plastic ring he had given her.

  “This is the truth,” he said. “Open your eyes and look. Look at me!”

  She opened her eyes and looked directly into the eyes of this man that she thought she knew so well, but perhaps didn’t know at all. His face was so familiar—high cheekbones, lean, smooth cheeks, long, elegant nose, full lips, dark, mesmerizing eyes. She’d thought she’d seen him in every possible way. She’d seen him relaxed and la
ughing, tense and worried, cool and calm, thoughtful, angry, unhappy, joyful. But not murderous. At least, not until this afternoon.

  Felipe took her hand, the same hand with the ring, and placed it on his chest, over his heart.

  “This is the truth, Caroline,” he whispered. “But if you don’t want that truth any longer…”

  As she watched, his eyes started to fill with tears, but he blinked them back, forced them away. He returned her hand to her lap.

  “It’s almost all over,” Felipe said, putting the car into gear as the traffic light turned green. “A little bit longer, and then I won’t stop you. You’ll be free to go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  FELIPE was getting the job done.

  He’d ditched the white Volkswagen near the parking lot of the Fourth Precinct. He’d found Jim Keegan’s car in the lot. The key was hidden on top of the right front wheel, exactly where Jim had said it would be.

  Now he sat outside police headquarters in Jim’s gray Taurus, waiting for Chief Earley to leave for his meeting with crime lord, Lawrence Richter.

  Yes, he was getting the job done.

  He was trying very hard not to think about anything besides the pictures he was going to take of Earley and Richter’s meeting. He was trying hard not to think about that small, permanent hole he’d put in Tommy Walsh’s head or the nausea he felt as a result. And he was trying desperately not to think about Caroline Brooks.

  That wasn’t so easy to do, because she was sitting right next to him, and because, while he was busy getting the job done, he was having to take care that she didn’t try to run away.

  They had come full circle. Apparently, her doubts and suspicions had come out the victor in an emotional wrestling match. And, apparently, her love for him hadn’t stood up to the test.

  That hurt more than he would have believed possible.

  So okay. He tried to harden his heart, tried to think about this practically, tried not to care. So he wouldn’t leave the vice squad. He’d merely leave St. Simone. So what if it was his home? He hadn’t lived here all his life. His parents had come here to make a new start. So now he’d go somewhere else to make his own new start. There were a lot of cities out there where his face wasn’t known. Maybe he’d go up to Diego’s New York, become a New York City cop. Now, there would be a job that was on the edge, that was filled with high risks and danger. He’d fit right in.

  Man, he should be feeling lucky. Here was Caroline, ready to walk away from him, exactly the way he’d wanted their affair to end a few days ago. He wasn’t going to have to worry about her safety. He wasn’t going to have to deal with the restrictions that a permanent relationship would bring. Man, he was getting off easy. He’d had his fun. He’d had a series of intense sexual experiences with a beautiful, vibrant, passionate woman. He had the added satisfaction of knowing that he’d saved her life. He should be more than ready and willing to let Caroline Brooks simply fade into a fond memory as he continued on with his life as he knew it.

  He should, but he couldn’t.

  Something had happened these past few days. Something had opened his eyes to the fact that his life wasn’t winning any awards or prizes for Most Fulfilling. Yes, he was making a difference out on the streets. Yes, he was good at what he did. And yes, sometimes he even liked it. But he didn’t like it all the time—and lately, he didn’t like it at all.

  The sorry truth was that the something that had opened his eyes had been Caroline Brooks. Caroline had shown him firsthand everything he’d been missing. She’d gone and made him fall in love with her and opened his eyes to a future that was impossibly joyful.

  Impossibly indeed.

  She stirred in her seat, and he couldn’t keep himself from glancing at her.

  She didn’t trust him.

  He was angry and hurt and even insulted by her mistrust, but the ultimate insult was that these emotions didn’t make him stop loving her. He wanted to fall on his knees and beg her to believe him. But pride kept him in his seat.

  He wanted to see her smile, hear her husky, sexy laughter. He wanted to know, just from looking in her eyes, that she’d be in his arms again tonight, surrounding him with her warmth and love. But there was not a chance in hell for that.

  He wanted to weep for all he’d lost—for the love he’d probably never really had in the first place.

  Because how could she have truly loved him without trust?

  She was quiet and her face looked pale. She hadn’t spoken a word to him since they’d taken Jim’s car from the parking lot.

  But now she looked up, actually meeting his gaze. The mistrust and trepidation he could see in her eyes burned like acid in his soul. But he didn’t look away. He couldn’t.

  Maybe seeing her looking at him that way would make him love her less. But probably not.

  “How many people have you killed?” she asked.

  Her question caught him off guard. Of all the things he’d expected her to say to him or ask him, that wasn’t one of them.

  But he answered honestly. “Five,” he said. “Tommy Walsh was the fifth.”

  “How do you sleep afterward?” she asked. “How do you do it? How do you live your life knowing that you took someone else’s?”

  Felipe was quiet for a moment, wondering how to answer. But there was really only one way to answer—with the truth.

  “You don’t sleep,” he finally told her. He watched the entrance to the police station as he spoke. “Not at first. You lie in bed going over it and over it in your head. You try to figure out where you went wrong, where you made the mistake, what you could’ve done instead to make it turn out differently. And then, after about a week of not sleeping, when you feel like hell and you can’t handle it anymore, you go visit the counselor—the precinct shrink. And then you start to work through it until you accept the choices that you made—the choices that led you to pull that trigger and take that life.

  “You talk to people who were there, who witnessed the shooting,” he continued. “You hang out with the person whose life you maybe saved by firing your gun and killing the perpetrator. Or you come face-to-face with the fact that it came down to the guy you killed or yourself. You look at yourself in a mirror and you remind yourself that he was the bad guy, not you. If he had been a little faster or a little smarter or a little luckier with his own gun, then it might very well have been your family holding that funeral service instead of his.”

  “And if he didn’t have a gun?” Carrie whispered.

  Felipe shook his head. “They all had guns. Starting with Benny Hammett. He was eighteen years old, just a kid, freaked out on crack. He had his father’s handgun and was taking potshots at the children in the playground next to his house. One kid was dead—four years old—and two others were badly wounded. The medical teams couldn’t get in to help them. The SWAT team was on its way when Hammett hit a fourth kid who’d been hiding behind some bushes. I was one of the cops who climbed down to his window from the roof and took him down. My bullet killed him.

  “Then there was Thomas Freeman, age forty-seven. Took his hunting rifle and went back to where he’d been laid off, killed his boss’s secretary and threatened to wipe out the entire office. I went in as a deliveryman, took him out before he killed the mail-room clerk.

  “Hans Thorne, thirty-eight, escaped convict, tried to hold up a convenience store that Diego and I happened to be in. I stopped him from blowing Diego’s head off.

  “T. J. Cerrone, twenty-three years old. I believe you had the honor of meeting him at Sea Circus. When we busted him on drug charges, he and his friends decided they’d skip jail and go right to hell. Unfortunately, they took a few of my friends on the force with them. T.J. had access to an Uzi submachine gun when I ended his life with my .45.”

  Felipe kept his eyes on the entrance to the police station, but he could feel Caroline watching him.

  “And Tommy Walsh?” she probed. “Where was his gun?”

  Felipe turned to l
ook at her. “It was aimed at you,” he said. He could see the doubt in her eyes. Madre de Dios, was it possible she didn’t know Tommy had been armed? “You didn’t see his gun?”

  “No.”

  “You think I would kill an unarmed man?” His voice rose in disbelief. What kind of monster did Caroline think he was anyway?

  “That’s what I saw.”

  Felipe’s heart broke into a thousand tiny pieces. “Maybe you saw what you expected to see,” he said quietly. “You’ve already decided I’m guilty, that I’m a killer. But you’re wrong, and I’m going to prove that, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Numbly, Felipe stared at the door to the police station. He’d lost Caroline. He’d totally lost her trust—if he’d ever even had it in the first place.

  Everything around him, his entire life, seemed to be circling the drain.

  Everything, everything—his freedom, his reputation, his life—was riding on his conviction that Chief Earley was Lawrence Richter’s partner. Everything now depended on his being right about that.

  God help him if he was wrong.

  TEN MINUTES AFTER THREE, and Earley still hadn’t left for his alleged three-thirty meeting with Lawrence Richter.

  Carrie risked a look at Felipe. He was getting more and more tense by the minute. He muttered something in Spanish, then glanced at Carrie, but didn’t bother to translate.

  “What if you’re wrong?” she asked quietly. “What if Earley’s not involved?”

  “I drive you to Montana,” he said, “then come back and start over again. If Earley’s not this Captain Rat, then someone else is. Sooner or later, I’ll find him.”

  He stared across the parking lot at the entrance to police headquarters. His mouth was set in grim determination and his face was lined with fatigue. His dark eyes were even more unreadable and mysterious than ever.

  Where was his gun? she’d asked.

  It was aimed at you, he’d said.

  Was he lying?