While the phone call connected, Allie snuck another glance up at the chopper. It was still up there. As if the damn thing was ever going anywhere. It paced her like a silver metallic hawk waiting to pounce.
Finally, after three rings, someone picked up the phone on the other end, the voice coming through the speaker loud and clear. “How’s the vacation going?”
“Not good,” Allie said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m in trouble, Lucy.”
“Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good,” the teenager said.
Now that’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.
“What’s going on?” Lucy asked.
Allie peeked at the navigation. The highway was closing in on her fast.
“I’m going to be arrested in a few minutes,” Allie said.
“Oh, shit,” Lucy said, her voice rising noticeably even through the speakers. “Why? What did you do this time?”
Allie smiled. She would have taken offense at that question if she didn’t share the kind of history she did with the kid. The truth was, it was a perfectly logical response, considering all the other messes she’d been caught up in the last few years.
“Never mind that,” Allie said. “Where are you now?”
“School.”
“Still?”
“Allie, it’s ten in the morning. Where else would I be?”
“Playing hooky.”
She imagined Lucy grinning when the girl said, “Not today. So what do you need me to do?”
“Get in touch with Randall.”
“Randall?”
“Yes, Randall.”
“I don’t like that guy. He always hits on me. I don’t think he knows I’m still in high school.”
Oh, he knows, Allie thought.
Then: I’ll definitely have to talk to him about that, but not today.
She said, “You don’t have to like him, you just have to get in touch with him for me.”
“What do you need him to do?”
“I need Aubrey White wiped from the system.”
“Which system?”
“All of them.”
“Oh, shit. You really are in trouble.”
“Yes, Lucy, I really am in trouble.”
“How can I help?”
“Call Randall.”
“Besides that.”
“You can’t.”
“There must be something I can do…”
“Not this time. The best way you can help me is to do what I asked. ASAP.”
“I’m leaving class now,” Lucy said. In the background Allie thought she heard a man’s voice calling Lucy’s name, then a door slamming shut.
“I’ll be in touch,” Allie said.
“Make sure you do,” Lucy said.
“I will. Be good.”
“Yeah, you too. And be careful.”
Too late, Allie thought but said, “Now hang up and call Randall. Let him know how urgent this is. Then pay him from the same fund.”
“Okay, bye,” Lucy said, and the phone went dead.
Allie picked the cell up from her lap, then flicked her way to the phone’s system with her free thumb before scrolling down the list of options. This was a little more difficult with the road getting a little bumpier—
“There they are,” Allie said to herself.
She knew they would be there, but Allie was still disappointed to see them: At least a half dozen police vehicles—the ones she could see, anyway—parked across the road that linked the dirt trail to the state highway. She hadn’t been able to make out their lights because of the daytime, but there was no missing them now. She still couldn’t hear sirens, probably because they had them turned off.
And the chopper, still shadowing her from above.
Allie slowed down so she could focus on the phone in her hand. She found the right menu option, then pressed it.
A prompt on the phone asked her if she was sure about erasing its contents.
She pressed Yes, then tossed the mobile onto the front passenger seat.
Allie slowed down further as she neared the barricade, but didn’t stop completely until she was about a hundred yards from the armed deputies up ahead. She put the car in park at about the same time she finally heard sirens coming from behind her. The ones from the cabin, finally catching up, even though she couldn’t see them in her mirrors yet.
In the sky, the chopper had gone on ahead when she stopped. It was now making a U-turn, the uniform cop hanging out the side hatch pointing his rifle down at her. She didn’t think he was going to shoot but was probably just getting a better look through his scope. Or, at least, she hoped that’s what he was doing, because she had turned off her car’s engine.
Allie held the keys out of the window for the sniper to see. When the man didn’t fire, she dropped the fob, then repeated the process with Trent’s Glock, followed by the SIG she’d been carrying behind her back this entire time.
Not that Allie expected the army of cops out there—and that was what they sounded and looked like, an army ready for battle—to go easier on her because she’d made a show of disarming herself. They couldn’t be sure if she didn’t have more guns on her, and frankly she didn’t blame them.
Allie took out the tissue paper that Sarah Marshall had written her note on. She stared at it for a moment. It was still mostly intact but torn at more places now, and the red ink had smeared so much that if Allie didn’t already have the words burned into her brain, she wouldn’t have been able to decipher most of it without a lot of study.
She tore the note up into smaller pieces before putting them into her mouth, then forcing them down with the help of a water bottle in her door’s cup holder. The note wasn’t going to help her now. If anything, it tied her to the Marshalls and was just one more thing that could be used against her.
The note…
Sarah’s flight from the house…
Tom’s death…
The revolver…
She was clearly being set up, and she couldn’t trust anything anymore. Nothing Sarah had said and certainly nothing the woman had left for her to find last night at the Don’t Stop In. For all Allie knew, Sarah was the mastermind behind all of this, using Allie as a patsy for her husband’s murder. That would explain her disappearance and the revolver mysteriously appearing in Allie’s cabin.
Allie sat back and waited.
She glanced over at the phone just to make sure it was still erasing. It had stopped working because it was done, and the screen was welcoming her to a reset phone. That was one complication out of the way.
Now for the rest…
The police cars—every one of them featuring Wells City PD paint jobs—had reached her parked vehicle. They stopped about fifty yards behind her, and men and women in tan uniforms flooded out to take positions behind their open doors. At the same time, dark-suited commandos in urban assault vests, goggles, and Kevlar helmets were moving up the dirt road toward her from the highway, matted black shields leading their way.
It was a lot of firepower. Too much. But maybe the identity of the victim had a little something to do with that.
A little something? Or everything?
She sighed, watching sunlight glinting off shiny bulletproof helmets as they bobbed their way toward her car. Slow but steady.
Slow but steady…
Seventeen
All things considered, the day could have gone worse. Not that this was something she was going to write home about, or think back on with a smile, but Allie had been in worse situations that ended in much worse ways.
A lot worse.
So when she thought about this in terms of all those other moments, it really wasn’t so bad. It was manageable, which was a good thing. At the very least, she was under no risk of being shot to death. Unless, of course, the Marshall clan’s power really was as vast and all-encompassing as people kept telling her, and the head man decided she was guilty and deserved to die, a trial be da
mned.
But Allie didn’t think so. Even a place like Wells City, insulated from the rest of the Pacific Northwest as it was, had to obey the rules of the 21st century. Maybe a hundred years ago a family like the Marshalls could order someone’s murder in the name of instant justice, but those days were long gone.
At least, Allie hoped they were.
The SWAT commandos hadn’t taken any chances when they grabbed her and dragged her out of her vehicle, then threw her down on the ground to handcuff her. Allie thought she could still feel the hard bone of a kneepad-wearing knee as it ground against the small of her back, pinning her to the dirt road while another man slapped manacles around her wrists and ankles. They hadn’t been very gentle at all.
The ride back to Wells City was less traumatic. Apparently no one had tipped off the local media that she was coming, and Allie was whisked to the WCPD station in the center of town and entered through the back. Inside, she was fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken. When they asked her name, she told them “Aubrey White,” because they already had her fake ID.
They typed everything into a computer and later, a female deputy gave her a thorough body search in a small room that provided some privacy. Afterward, Allie was given a bundle of surprisingly fresh-smelling jail clothes. Loud orange, with no belts or anything that could be used to hurt herself. They also took her old clothes for evidence gathering, along with all her personal items, including wallet.
“You’ve done this before,” the female deputy who searched her said when they were done.
“What makes you say that?” Allie asked.
“Oh, come on.”
Allie smiled back but didn’t confirm or deny the other woman’s suspicions. She wished she could say it was the first time she’d had to go through the ordeal, but that would have been a lie.
They cited her for evading a police helicopter but said nothing about the murder of Tom Marshall or his wife’s disappearance. Allie had a feeling there was more coming. The citation was just to put her in detention until they could come up with more charges.
After that humiliation, she was led away by three officers, including the same female deputy who had inspected her in private earlier, and two big men with a foot and about fifty pounds of muscle on both Allie and her female guard combined. They took her into the back, where the holding cells were, and she was led to her own private room at the end. Unfortunately, this meant being paraded past general holding cells, where drunks from the previous night got to watch her walk by.
A couple of those curious eyeballs belonged to a trio of Devil’s Crew MC bikers, but none of them were Mitch or his companion from the Don’t Stop In. Just remembering that encounter reminded Allie of how fast everything had happened. She had gone from trying to get a little buzz to being arrested in less than twenty-four hours. She’d had more whirlwind single days before, but not by very much.
Her guards put her in the last cell, the female deputy locking it once she was inside, then asking, “Any requests?”
“Yeah, let me go,” Allie said.
The woman—she was in her thirties, wearing blonde hair in a ponytail—chuckled. “You’re talking to the wrong person. I just work here.” Then, with a wry smirk, “You really stole a cop’s gun and took him hostage, while his partner was standing there?”
Allie looked past the deputy and at the surveillance camera on the wall across from them, the lens pointed directly into her cell. Was the other woman trying to get her to confess to something?
No, Allie thought when she saw the amused look on the deputy’s face.
“Is that what they said I did?” Allie asked.
“That’s one of the things they’re going to charge you with, from what I hear,” the deputy said. “And oh, something about damaging police property.”
“That’s all?”
“You mean there’s more?”
“You tell me.”
The woman shrugged. “I just work here. Someone will be along shortly to give you all the answers you need.”
I doubt that very much, Allie thought.
“You sure you don’t need anything?” the deputy asked. “Last chance.”
“If you can’t leave the door open for me, I guess there’s nothing I need right now,” Allie said.
“Well, holler if you change your mind.”
Allie nodded, before noting the deputy’s name tag for the first time: Parker.
“Thanks, Parker,” Allie said.
“You betcha,” Parker said.
Parker left with the other two, leaving Allie alone in her cell. It was much smaller than the others and provided her some privacy, not that that stopped a couple of her fellow jail detainees from trying to talk to her through the brick wall between them anyway.
Allie ignored them and found a seat on a bench in the back.
No one had said a word about Tom Marshall’s death or asked her about his wife and child’s whereabouts while she was being led through the police station. No one came to talk to her at her cell after Parker left. There were also no mentions of Sarah’s Audi or the blood on the upholstery the woman had left behind last night.
So what happened to the car? Did someone take it after she left with Sarah? Maybe Sarah’s accomplice—if she was a part of this—had secured the vehicle before it could be discovered. Was that the same man who had broken into the cabin?
There were so many possibilities, and any one of them could be reality. That was the problem. She was swimming in the deep end of a dark, black ocean and couldn’t make out how far down the bottom was. It was disconcerting and annoying, and she hated the lack of control. Her life was about being prepared for anything, always knowing what she was getting herself into.
This wasn’t one of those times. Someone had brought her into this. Who? Why?
Too many questions. There were just too many questions in front of her.
Allie wasn’t worried about having her real identity exposed. Besides, the “Allie Krycek” that once existed no longer did. These days, she was a ghost that had disappeared off the face of the earth one day and never resurfaced. That was also one reason why she was so sure this wasn’t personal.
No, there had to be another reason behind this setup. What, though?
What?
One of the jailbirds on the other side of her wall was trying to talk to her. A man with a slightly hoarse voice, leaning against his bars and sticking one skinny hand out and waving, not that he could see her at the very back of her own cell.
“Hey, how’re you doing?” the man asked.
Allie ignored him.
“What did you do?” the man asked.
Allie continued to ignore him.
“Must have been something big. You shoot some cops or something? That’s wild. Whole building’s abuzz.” Then, when Allie still didn’t say anything, “Come on, you can tell me. We’re all friends here.”
“Speak for yourself,” another voice piped up in the adjoining cell.
“Shhh,” the first man said. “I’m trying to get her to talk.”
“Give it up, she’s not talking,” a third voice said.
“Not if you two don’t keep your traps shut.”
“Give it up, man,” the second voice said. “Sit back down. You’re annoying everyone in here.”
“You don’t wanna to know? Don’t bullshit me. You know you wanna know. We all wanna know.”
“No. I don’t wanna know. I don’t care.”
“Liar.”
“Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up,” a fourth voice, much harder edged than the previous two, snapped.
That shut Curious George up and made Allie wonder who the fourth speaker had been. One of the Devil’s Crew MC bikers, maybe. Someone like that, flanked by two of his mates, could make for an imposing threat to a drunk.
She closed her eyes, thankful for the silence.
Around two in the afternoon, Parker returned, once again flanked by the two large deputies that walke
d at her sides like protective big brothers making sure no one messed with their sweet and innocent little sister. Allie got up and walked over as Parker opened the door, keeping both eyes on Allie the entire time.
“Where we going?” Allie asked. She already knew the answer, of course. She’d done this dance before.
“Some of the detectives want to talk to you,” Parker said.
It’s about time, Allie thought, stepping outside.
She followed Parker up the same hallway, passing the same curious groups of eyes from the general population cells. They hadn’t cuffed her for the trip, not that Allie had any illusions she could escape from them. Parker by herself, yes, but forget about all three, even if she could manage to steal one of their police batons. And even if she somehow got free from the trio, there were all the other cops in the building to deal with.
No, fighting her way out of here wasn’t going to work. Not now, anyway.
A man with greasy long hair that ended in a mullet ran over to the cell bars and stared out at her as Allie walked past. “Hey, what’s happening? What did you do?”
Allie recognized the voice. It was Curious George from before.
Like the last time the man tried to talk to her, she ignored him.
“Hey, Jonas, what’d she do?” Curious George asked, this time directing his question at one of the big male guards walking alongside Allie.
Like her, the guard ignored the man.
They turned a corner, when Parker said, “You’re famous.”
“Am I?” Allie said.
“Oh yeah. Bill’s still trying to live down what you did to him.”
“Bill?” Allie thought, before remembering.
Bill Trent. The deputy I assaulted, took his gun, then put him in the trunk of my car. Good luck living that down, Bill.
“You also haven’t asked for a lawyer yet,” Parker was saying.
“Do I need one?” Allie said.
“That’s up to you. But usually that’s the first thing people do. Ask for a lawyer. Too many episodes of Law & Order on the brain.”
“I don’t need a lawyer.”
The female deputy looked over at Allie with an expression that Allie read as, Are you sure about that?
Allie Krycek (Book 4): Savior/Corruptor Page 13