Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

Even as she gasped and refocused to see what was happening, he was cramming her inside an open car door. As her butt landed on a cracked vinyl seat, she realized that Mark had just stuffed her in a taxi that was being vacated by someone else.

  “Scoot,” he barked, but she didn’t need to be told. She scooted like a dog with its tail on fire, and he jumped in beside her, slammed the door, and said, “Union Station, fast” to the cabbie, who sped off.

  Jess’s mouth was still hanging open as she glanced back. The black-suited man ran through the crowd, pushing people out of the way as he came after them, his hand still hidden beneath his jacket. She grabbed Mark’s arm and tried to stutter out a warning, but nothing coherent emerged. Then the cab turned a corner and he was lost to view.

  Jess thought she was going to melt into a little puddle of reaction right there on the seat.

  “Friend of yours?” she asked. Her eyes rolled around to Mark, who gave her a warning look. Clearly this was something that was not to be discussed within earshot of the cabbie. Oh, yeah, she got why. Probably because the idea that murderous goons were chasing his cab with the idea of riddling his passengers with bullets might not go over so well. In fact, if his thought processes were anything like hers, the cabbie might well slam on the brakes and order them out on the spot. Good for him. Bad for them.

  Thanks to near gridlocked Friday-afternoon locals-get-out-of-town traffic, progress seemed glacially slow. But no Dark Car appeared behind them, or beside them, or anywhere else. All vehicles moved in bumper-to-bumper unison.

  As the Beaux Arts-style building that was Union Station came into view, Mark was already handing over a ten from their dwindling kitty. Jess spared no more than a passing thought for the money as the taxi stopped in front of the statue of Columbus and she scrambled out.

  Some things were worth paying for. Like living.

  Mark was right behind her. He grabbed her hand and towed her after him like a barge after a tugboat. Her legs and back had been bothering her earlier. Now, with the knowledge that a death squad was right behind them, the aches and pains were reduced to minor twinges that barely slowed her down.

  “Did you recognize him?” she gasped out.

  “No.”

  Hundreds of people were in and around the building. Jess barely registered the ornamental facade festooned with eagles, or the replica of the Liberty Bell. Instead, she concentrated on getting off the street and out of the sight of any arriving cars, and when they burst through the doors to join the teeming crowds inside the vast open space, she felt an overwhelming wave of relief.

  “Unless they followed us”—she might be being overly optimistic here, but she was pretty sure the bad guys hadn’t been able to get close enough to the cab to see where it went—“there ’s no way they can know where we are, right?”

  Given the fact that Mark was still dragging her through the Main Hall, which seemed as long as a football field and boasted a 96-foot-high barrel-vaulted ceiling, she wasn’t too surprised by the wry twist of his mouth, which told her that her optimism was sadly misplaced.

  “Simple enough to find out where the taxi that just picked up passengers in front of the main library let them out. What we’ve got here is a few minutes’ start.” His eyes darted around, roaming over everything from the tourists munching pizza at the food court to the escalator that led to the movie theaters, with an occasional glance over Jess’s head to survey the terrain behind her. As Jess had been casting frequent looks back herself, she knew what he saw: There were so many people that picking out black-suited goons with murderous intent would be impossible until the goons were practically upon them.

  “This way,” he said. Her pulse was now thundering so loud in her ears that she wouldn’t have heard the words if she hadn’t been looking right at him when he spoke. Pulling her with him onto an escalator, he looked like he wanted to push his way through the impassable lineup of people clogging the slow-moving thing. Instead, he stopped, seething with barely concealed impatience as the escalator leisurely chugged its way down.

  Jess would have said something, but she was too busy catching her breath. After their life-or-death race from the library, she was sweating, she was exhausted, she was terrified, and her body ached like a losing prize fighter’s. She ’d swallowed a couple of pain pills along with her tacos earlier, but they were no match for the kind of day she was having.

  Their destination, she discovered as they left the escalator and Mark dragged her through another set of doors, was the metro.

  “Be right back.” As soon as they were on the platform, he dropped her hand and strode away. Swallowed up in the milling crowd, she cast scared looks all around. Before she could totally succumb to panic he was back, thrusting a fare card into her hand. A moment after that, they were boarding a train.

  Jess flopped down into one of the seats with relief. Taking a couple of deep breaths and straightening her glasses, which had gotten knocked crooked in their rush through the terminal, she cast a jaundiced eye at Mark, who dropped down beside her. She was glad to see that it wasn’t just her—he was breathless and sweaty, too. He ’d lost the baseball cap, and as she put a hand to her head in reaction she discovered she had lost hers, too. The bright sunlight streaming in through the windows showed up how bloodshot his eyes were, as well as the puffiness beneath them. More than a day’s worth of stubble now darkened his cheeks and chin. His shirt was limp and had lost a couple of buttons, and he looked kind of like a bum. A sexy bum, which was the annoying thing, because she was fairly certain that sexy was one of the last words that anyone would use to describe her appearance at the moment. Questions about his calls to Davenport loomed large in her mind, but this was neither the time nor the place to confront him. Best not to upset the status quo with your protector until you were someplace safe.

  “We can’t just keep running,” she pointed out between gulps of air as the train jolted out of the station. The car was almost full, so her voice was just loud enough to reach his ears. “We need a plan.”

  “We’ve got one.”

  She seemed to remember hearing that before. “Oh, yeah? Do tell.”

  “Trust me.”

  Her expression must have been something to see, because he laughed, picked up her hand that was lying curled on her lap, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it.

  The sight of his handsome head bent over her hand, the feel of his warm lips on her skin, would have been enough to stun her into dazzled compliance at any other time. Even under the circumstances, for a moment there her heart did a little tap dance, and she teetered on the brink.

  Then she got a grip, snatched her hand back, folded her arms over her chest, and scowled at him. “No.”

  “Guess you’ll just have to wait and see, then.”

  He was still smiling a little. Mindful of their fellow passengers, Jess restrained herself. They sat in silence through two stops. By the time the train chugged into a third, she was breathing normally and her heartbeat had resumed its usual constant, steady rhythm. Then Mark stood up, pulling her up beside him, and her heart gave an automatic uneasy thump.

  “Our stop,” he said, and Jess almost groaned. She was worn-out, bone-tired, in pain, scared to death, and sick of it, filled with uneasiness and lack of trust toward her partner in flight, and in general ready for this to end.

  Not that she said any of that. What was the point? Embracing her inner stiff upper lip, she left the station with Mark without saying anything at all. At least, she thought, as they hot-footed it across the street hand in hand, he was no longer walking as fast as he could, which seemed to argue that he felt they were relatively safe for the time being. Or maybe he was just being considerate of her still-much-less-than-optimum physical state. They were in Dupont Circle, the eclectic, primarily residential area with accommodations ranging from Civil War-era mansions, many of which had been turned into apartments or condos, to boxy new office buildings. There were numerous restaurants and quite a few art galleries and museums,
and lots of people. Unfortunately, Jess was in no mood to appreciate the little bistros and boutiques that lined the streets. The people, however, she appreciated. Just in case the bad guys were using eye-in-the-sky technology to search for them right now, she wanted as many people around her as she could get.

  She occasionally liked to try to solve the Waldo books when she babysat her nephews. Now, she realized, she and Mark were Waldo, and the game had become Where’re Mark and Jess?

  Trying to keep her breathing from going haywire at the thought, she looked at Mark. “Now what?”

  They had turned onto a quieter residential street with far fewer fellow pedestrians to get lost among, and then he pulled her into a narrow, grassy alley that ran between two identical four-story brick rectangles with colonial-looking white pedimented doorways and green shutters out front. There were no people at all in the alley. Glancing up, Jess saw a bright blue strip of sky above them and shuddered.

  “Congressmen fly home on the weekends to make nice with constituents and see their families. They’re required to maintain homes in their districts. Most of them—the honest ones—don’t make squat. Therefore, they rent relatively cheap apartments to live in during the week when they have to be in Washington.”

  They reached the end of the alley, which opened out into a larger one with a lot more blue sky above it. A strip of blacktopped pavement ran down the middle and Dumpsters and trash cans lined either side. The slanting sunlight of late afternoon beamed down, but thanks to the buildings they were in deep shadow. She wrinkled her nose at the faint smell of garbage as she cast another worried glance up at the sky. Across the street, a calico cat watched them from inside a window two stories up. Other than that, there was no one around.

  “Which means . . . ?” So far what she was hearing did not add up to anything helpful.

  He pulled her around a brick retaining wall and let go of her hand. “We ’re going to borrow one for the night.”

  “What?” Jess’s head snapped around. All thought of searching for bad guys was forgotten for the moment as her gaze riveted on Mark. He was standing on the stoop of the brownstone building beside the brick ones, punching numbers into a lock that hung from the back doorknob. He turned the knob and the door opened.

  “The woman I was seeing is a realtor. She rents out apartments in these buildings all the time. I know her code.” He pulled her into a gloomy, hardwood-floored central hall as he spoke, and she realized that the lock he ’d punched numbers into had been a realtor’s lock.

  Glancing around as he closed the door behind them, Jess practically swallowed her tongue. A long row of flat brass mailboxes set into the wall lined the hall. She recognized some of the names as he pulled her past them and hit the elevator button: Sahlinger, Cristofoli, Urton, Guenther. Congressional representatives all.

  “So we’re going to let ourselves into an empty apartment?” Jess asked with a flicker of misgiving as they stepped into the elevator, the door closed, and it started its creaky ascent.

  “I thought about that, but here’s the thing: We ’ve got to assume these guys know everything about us. So using an apartment she has access to is out. Sooner or later, when they can’t find us, they’ll probably think of that.”

  The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. Four doors, two on either side of the hall, bore the respective numbers 13, 14, 15, and 16. Beneath the numbers were affixed small brass plates with typewritten names inserted into the open centers.

  “So . . . ?” Her voice trailed off as he stepped up to the door of apartment 14, knocked, and waited. Nothing.

  “So we borrow one from Congressman Cristofoli.”

  Then he pulled a small Leatherman tool out of his pocket and applied one of the attachments to the lock.

  Jess was still casting petrified glances all around in case somebody should come out of one of the other apartments and see what he was doing when he pushed open the door and grabbed her hand.

  “Hurry up, I’ve got to turn off the alarm.”

  Still processing extreme dismay at the knowledge that they were breaking into a congressman’s apartment as she scuttled in behind him, Jess felt her unease ratchet up to another level as she heard the warning beep leading to the earsplitting screech of a violated security alarm.

  “This is so illegal. If we get caught, we could go to jail. I could lose my law license . . .”

  “Baby, if we get caught that ’ll be the least of our problems.”

  Pushing the door shut behind her, Mark dropped her hand and disappeared into another room.

  Facing the truth of what he’d said, Jess clasped her hands together and called after him in a wobbly voice, “Please tell me you know some way to shut off that damned alarm.”

  A moment later the ominous beeping ceased. Then Mark reappeared in the doorway between the two rooms and grinned at her.

  “What did you do?” Wrapping her arms around herself, she was barely able to keep her teeth from chattering. And not from cold, either. From reaction. And fear. And way too much physical exertion. And exhaustion. And—everything. Her whole absolutely gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket life.

  “Took care of the alarm.”

  “How?” She asked the question before she realized she probably didn’t want to know the answer.

  “What can I say? I’m good.” His gaze swept over her, and he frowned.

  “You look beat. Look, you can quit worrying for a while. I figure we’ve got a good twenty-four hours before we have to start thinking about moving on.”

  “Great.” Which meant that a very uneasy day from now, they’d be on the run again—unless he was wrong and they got killed first. Still, as the prospect of even a nerve-racking respite began to seep through her system, she very slowly exhaled. She hadn’t been aware of how tense she was until the worst of it started to ease.

  “Are you hungry? Looks like there’s food in the kitchen.” He headed into the other room.

  Jess was, indeed, hungry. She also realized that the solid core of trust she ’d thought she’d established with her partner in flight was suddenly not so solid after all. They were all alone now in a place that was totally out of the public eye. What if he’d actually tipped somebody off to meet them here? What if . . . ?

  She heard the sound of the refrigerator door opening and, as if in answer, her stomach growled. Firmly, she pushed all the terrifying what ifs out of her head.

  Unless something more concrete than suspicious phone numbers turned up, she wasn’t about to rush back out into eye-in-the-sky-ville alone. Which meant she was on board with Mark.

  She trailed after him through the small apartment. The front door they’d come in through opened directly into a living room, which connected to a single bedroom and a small kitchen in an open plan intended to make the place seem larger. The rooms were decorated in beiges and browns, and filled with furniture that she could only characterize as “early hotel.” Inexpensive-looking beige carpet extended through the living room and bedroom to the kitchen. There was apparently a big window in both the living room and bedroom, because the drapes in both rooms, which were drawn, covered the entire outside wall. The only bathroom—which was also the only room with an actual door—was located between the kitchen and bedroom. She made quick use of the facilities, washing her hands and face, and emerged minutes later feeling a little better.

  Mark was seated in one of the two bentwood chairs at the small glass-topped bistro-style kitchen table that sat in the middle of the tiny kitchen. A long, narrow window with its mini-blinds open ran the length of the far wall, making the kitchen, with its white cabinets, appliances, walls, and tile floor, the brightest room in the house. There was a paper plate in front of Mark, what looked like a heap of coleslaw on the paper plate, and a sandwich, which he had just taken a big bite out of, in his hands. A juice box sat beside the paper plate. Jess saw that another paper plate, complete with sandwich, coleslaw, juice box, and fork, waited across the table for her.

  Swallow
ing, he nodded at her plate. “Made you a sandwich.”

  Jess looked from the plate to him. He was already taking another huge bite. His blue eyes met hers guilelessly.

  “Thanks.” Crossing the kitchen, she pulled two paper towels from the roll by the sink—she saw no sign of any napkins—and offered him one as she sank down opposite him.

  The sandwich, she discovered as she bit into it, was ham. The coleslaw was spicy. And the juice was orange. Her stomach gave a little hiccup of delight.

  Waiting and wondering was not her style, Jess discovered as she responded to some enthusiastic comment of his about the amount of food the congressman had on hand. So she put down her sandwich, looked him in the eye, and came out with it.

  “Why did you call Mr. Davenport just a couple of hours before he tried to shoot me?”

  26

  Mark choked on his ham sandwich. She knew right then she wasn’t mistaken: Surprised guilt was there on his face, easy to read as a first-grade schoolbook.

  He swallowed and coughed a little and drank some juice.

  “What makes you think I did?” he asked at last.

  Good try. Not working. “Mark.”

  He took another big bite out of his sandwich—a stall tactic if she’d ever seen one—chewed, and swallowed. Then he washed it down with a slurp from the juice box. All of which clearly gave him time to think.

  She lifted her eyebrows at him, waiting.

  He sighed and gave up. “I was authorized to make you a cash-settlement offer. Since it wasn’t supposed to be known that it came through the Cooper family, we were funneling it through Davenport.”

  Jess’s eyes widened as she remembered Marian telling her she would be getting a settlement. She never had learned how much it was going to be, which was probably just as well. No point in tormenting herself about its loss.

  “We?”

  “Well, actually they. The Cooper family.”

  “Why would the Cooper family give me a settlement? They have no liability in the accident. The liability lies with the limousine company, its driver, and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Davenport and Davenport, Bascomb, and Kelly, because I was technically on the clock for them when the accident occurred.”