Great. Now what? He looked to Josie. Hopefully she had some ideas.
She smiled at the woman, obviously controlling any impatience more effectively than he was. “Might the concierge be able to tell us more?”
“She might have taken a shuttle.”
Reed snapped his attention back to the desk clerk. Now they might be getting somewhere. “Thank you. Do you remember what company?”
“I didn’t say she did take a shuttle. Just that she might have. A lot of our guests find them convenient.”
Reed tried to keep a cap on his impatience. “What company?”
“There’s only one that serves our hotel.”
“Thanks so much.” Josie shot Reed a glance and started for the lobby door. Beyond the glass, a family unloaded from a shuttle van.
Reed adjusted his grip on the baby carrier and moved to follow.
“Wait.”
The voice was so soft, Reed wasn’t sure he heard it at first.
“You must be careful.”
He turned to see a small woman with mousy blond hair. She was dressed in the white button-down shirt and black pants a hotel worker might wear, yet the clothing was wrinkled and one of the blouse’s sleeves was torn. “Excuse me?”
“You must be careful,” the woman repeated, some kind of Eastern European accent flavoring her words. “You must go away from here. You must hide him.”
There were crazies in every city, and San Francisco had its share. He smiled at the woman and shook his head.
“Miss Dawson, she gave yo—”
“You know Honey?”
She nodded and motioned him closer.
Reed glanced back for Josie.
She’d reached the hotel door and was trying to flag down the shuttle driver.
Reed turned back to the mousy woman. “A man with short, blond hair?”
A small tremor moved through the woman’s body. She straightened her spine and thrust out her chin. “He was here two times.”
“Looking for Honey?”
“The first time, I lied. To protect the baby. The second time, he did this.” She pulled the collar of her blouse a few inches to the side. An inflamed welt marred white skin.
A cigarette burn. Reed’s stomach turned. “He did that to you?”
“He was very angry that I lied. That I told Miss Dawson to go, to run.”
“You told her to run? Where?”
“I don’t know where. Just away from here.” She covered the wound, flinching as the cotton hit her skin. “You must hide the baby. You can’t let him see.”
“Who does he work for?”
She shook her head. “Go. If he sees you…”
“If he sees me, what? What does he want with the baby?”
Her gaze darted around the lobby as if she was sure the man who’d burned her was here, closing in.
All Reed saw were a few businessmen and a family of tourists. No blond hair. No gray coat. Nothing for this woman to be afraid of. Was she for real? “How do you know Honey Dawson?”
“I babysit.”
“You took care of her baby? This baby?”
She glanced down at the baby bucket where Troy had thrown back the blanket and was waving his arms in the air. “Not that baby.”
Now he was really confused. And beginning to think she was giving him some kind of runaround. Maybe trying to con him out of his money. How, he hadn’t figured out. “What baby did you care for?”
“The baby I stayed with was a girl.”
“A girl? That couldn’t have been Honey Dawson. You must be mistaken.”
“No mistake. I stayed with the girl. She took the boy with her.”
The girl? Could this be for real? He leaned forward, his palm slick on the baby carrier’s handle. “She had two babies?”
“Two babies, yes. This one and his twin sister.”
JOSIE STEPPED BACK into the hotel and out of the light drizzle that had begun to fall. When she’d raced out of the lobby to catch the shuttle driver, Reed had been right behind her. Or so she’d thought. She had no idea how she’d lost him. For crying out loud. Next time she’d have to hold his hand and pull him along with her.
She firmly pushed that idea from her mind and scanned the lobby for the man she was beginning to think of as Captain Mess With Josie’s Mind. She still didn’t know what to think of his promise to Missy. And the actual attempts he’d made so far toward taking care of the baby, even if they hadn’t gone much beyond holding him, had only made her more confused. It was sad. She was a grown woman with her own business, what there was of it, and she felt like a teen with a crush. Even when he acted like the commitment-phobic playboy she knew him to be, she couldn’t help being attracted to him.
Like now.
He stood near the corner of the lounge, talking to a woman with more interest than Josie ever remembered a man showing her.
She stepped around a man with cropped dark hair and made her way back across the marble floor. At least she would get the baby. If he needed a few more minutes to get a phone number, so be it. It was a good reminder of how bad he was for her.
He spotted her before she was halfway across the lobby. Stepping out from the corner where he and the woman were huddled, he waved Josie over, the move abrupt with urgency.
Maybe she’d judged the situation a little too quickly. She scampered to his side. “Did you find something?”
“She babysat for Honey.”
She glanced at the woman he’d been talking to, then back to Reed, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “She took care of Troy?”
“Not Troy.” He looked at Josie pointedly, as if preparing for some kind of punch line. “Troy’s twin sister.”
She couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d told her Troy was her very own child. “Twins?”
“Come here.” He turned around and froze in his tracks.
The woman he’d been talking to, the one Josie had just seen, was now gone.
Reed grabbed up the baby’s seat in one hand and caught Josie’s hand in the other. He strode toward the hotel’s far door, pulling her along. “I don’t know if something or someone spooked her or what, but I don’t think we want to take the chance.”
“What’s going on?”
“We’ll talk about it outside.”
She quickened her pace to keep up, while scrutinizing the handful of faces in the hotel lobby. Could he be right? Could Honey have had twins? And if she did, why leave only one in Reed’s boat? Where was the other?
Reed pushed through a revolving door and careened out into a covered circular drive. The place was empty other than a doorman and a couple of smokers tending to their addiction. No cabs. With the drizzle they were probably plenty busy and didn’t have to wait outside a hotel for fares.
“This way.”
She followed Reed past the smokers and out onto the street. The sidewalk glistened under the cloudy sky. People rushed past, heads bowed. A few carried umbrellas.
“Wait.” Josie reached down to the baby’s carrier and flipped the visor up to shield him from the elements. They continued, blending with the other pedestrians hurrying down the street.
Reed swerved into a pedestrian mall midblock. Halfway up, he ducked into the sheltered doorway of a restaurant. The tangy sweetness of curry swirled in the air around them.
After a quick check on the baby, Josie faced Reed. “Okay, what’s going on? Twins? What did she tell you?”
Reed didn’t meet her gaze. Instead he kept watch on the empty concrete mall through squinted eyes. “Honey hired her to babysit yesterday morning. She stayed with the girl while Honey took Troy with her.”
“To your boat?”
“It had to be. The timing is right. I arrived around dawn, and the baby was already there.”
“And then?” He’d said there was more. More than the fact that Honey had twins. And whatever that more was, she had the feeling it was behind their escape onto the rainy street.
“She sai
d a man showed up at the room looking for Honey.”
A man? The image of Missy’s attacker lodged in her mind. “What did he look like?”
“It was our guy. Short blond hair. Long coat.”
“Did he tell her what he wanted?”
“Just that he was looking for Honey. And he asked about the babies. Whether Honey had them with her or left them in the hotel room.”
“She didn’t tell him…?”
“No. She told him Honey had taken the babies with her. She told him there had been a plumbing problem, and she was cleaning the room. But he came back.”
Josie looked over her shoulder, half expecting a broad-shouldered man with short blond hair to be hulking behind her. “When?”
“After Honey had returned and gone. A little after sunrise.”
“Without Troy?” She’d asked the question, but she already knew the answer. Honey had left the little boy on Reed’s boat.
“She came back for the little girl. The maid told her our guy was there. That’s when Honey left for the airport.”
So that was it. They’d missed Honey. Unless the man who’d attacked Missy caught up to her, Honey had boarded a jet and flown who knew where. “Does she know where Honey went?”
“No. All she knew was that she took the shuttle to the air—”
She followed Reed’s stare down the open expanse of wet concrete. A man strode quickly down the edge, his shoulders slumped forward, his gray coat pulled tight, dark head bowed.
The man she’d noticed at the hotel. A man with short dark hair. “Reed?”
He snapped his eyes to her. “I think that’s him. I think that’s the man who attacked Missy.”
“You sure?”
“I think he dyed his hair.” Reed cursed under his breath.
Josie slipped her hand into the bag. She fitted the pistol’s grip into her palm.
The man stopped and pulled open a glass door. If Josie was judging the distance correctly, it had to be the back door leading into the hotel. The glass door closed behind him.
Once again gripping the baby’s carrier and Josie’s hand, Reed pushed out of the restaurant. “Go, go, go.”
Leaving the gun in her bag, Josie scampered to keep up. There was a chance she was wrong, that the man they’d just seen duck into the hotel wasn’t the same one at the boat yesterday. But she wasn’t going to wait around to find out, and she doubted Reed would want to, either.
They reached Market Street. Two cabs passed, filled with passengers. Josie glanced back over her shoulder. The wet sidewalks were clear, but that didn’t make her feel any better. “Chinatown.”
Reed glanced at her, then tried to hail another cab to no avail.
“Tons of shops, probably people, what better place to get lost? We can’t stay here. And it seems every cab in the city is taken.”
“Okay.” At the change of the light, Reed started across the street.
Josie hurried to keep up with his long stride. She hoped they were overreacting, that the man she’d spotted was no more than a businessman returning to the hotel to pick up something he’d forgotten. But as much as she wanted that to be true, she had a feeling it wasn’t.
They scurried the few blocks up Grant Street. The gateway to Chinatown loomed over them. A man stood in the rain snapping a picture of a woman posing in front of the landmark, the yellow umbrella over her head making her face appear sallow.
Craning her neck, Josie peered over her shoulder at the slope they’d just climbed.
A man in a gray coat strode up the hill, two blocks behind.
“Reed.” She ducked into a gift shop, Reed right behind her. Her bag swung heavily against her hip, the pistol inside. If worse came to worst, she could protect them. If he was unarmed, she could stop the man no matter how strapping his shoulders, no matter how muscular his arms.
But if he had a gun?
She pushed the image from her mind. They needed to lose him. She couldn’t let it come down to some kind of shoot-out in the middle of a populated street. They had to get away.
They threaded through narrow aisles crowded with displays of everything from silk kimonos to paper fans to small plastic toys. The scent of spicy perfume clogged in Josie’s throat. Rounding a glass case filled with pearls, she spotted a back exit. She grabbed Reed’s sleeve. He nodded, and they ran for the sign. Once they were outside, they’d be home free. There was no way the guy could guess where they’d gone. There was no way he’d catch up to them then.
“You not go there.” A sharp voice rang out from across the store.
They kept moving.
“Employees. Just employees. You can’t go.”
They reached the end of the glass cases and flanked a pile of tea pots shaped like dragons.
“Stop.”
Reed pushed through the silk curtain with one hand, holding the carrier behind him in the other. Josie followed him into a narrow hall that spilled into a room jumbled with boxes.
“Where’s the door?” The panicked note made her own voice unrecognizable, even to her.
“It’s got to be here somewhere.” Reed moved through the boxes, then turned back.
Josie scanned the shabby white walls. “There has to be a fire exit, doesn’t there?” But even though she asked, she knew there wasn’t one.
Their luck had just run out.
Chapter Seven
The curtain over the door flapped open. An older man stormed into the storeroom. Face red, he flailed his arms in the direction of the store’s front door. “Get out of here. Out!”
“Is there a back exit?” Josie asked. They couldn’t go back out on the street. The man would be closer by the time they reached the front entrance. Maybe even on the same block. He’d see them for sure.
“No, no exit.”
“What if there’s a fire?”
“No, no fire. Now go out. Go out. This for employees only.” He made a sweeping motion with his hands.
They moved back into the store. Josie watched the door. If Mr. Crewcut had made note of what store they’d gone into, they were in trouble.
“What kind of a place can get away with having no fire exit?” Reed squinted toward the front of the store. Josie was about to make a comment when he held a finger to his lips.
She followed his gaze to the open front door. A man with dark, short hair and broad shoulders stepped inside.
Her heart lurched against her ribs. So much for sneaking out the front door. With the man now inside the shop, they only had a moment before he’d see them. They had to find a place to hide, and they had to do it now.
She scanned the store, focusing on a circular rack jammed with embroidered silk robes. The kind of rack her niece and nephew loved to play in.
She grasped Reed’s arm and motioned to the rack. Over there. In the center. She mouthed the words, praying he’d understand.
Reed nodded.
Keeping low, Josie moved quickly toward the clothing. Splitting her way between the garments, she slipped into the vacant space inside. Reed passed the baby seat to her, then scrunched in behind her.
As cool as it had been outside in the rain, with their bodies so close and the silk all around them, the heat was tropical in here. Reed’s breath whispered against her cheek. Her pulse thrummed in her ears.
Footfalls vibrated along the floor beneath her feet. Whether the steps were advancing or fading, she couldn’t tell. A creaking sound filtered up from deep in the folds of silk.
The baby. He was awake.
Please little guy. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
She bent her index finger and offered him her knuckle. He clamped on, his tongue cupping around her finger. The hard edge of his emerging tooth pressed against her skin.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The footfalls were closer now. She could feel it. Not in the vibrations, but in the way the oxygen had gotten thin. The way pressure assaulted her chest, too tight to breathe.
Voices shuffled in the air outside their
cocoon. The store owner mumbled something under his heavy accent, too faint to hear.
A grunt came from somewhere else. “You sure?”
“They go.”
The vibrations on the floorboards started again. Going away? Josie thought so, but she couldn’t be sure, and she didn’t dare peek her head up to look.
Time passed; how long, she wasn’t sure. The baby sucked at her knuckle. She could feel the thump of Reed’s heart in her chest, indistinguishable from the beat of her own.
“You leave my store now.” The store owner’s voice spoke loudly from above them.
Josie looked up to see his bland face peering down at them. “Is he gone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Reed moved the silk aside and peered out of the clothing rack. “It’s clear.” He climbed out from between the clothing and reached back for the baby seat.
Josie pulled her finger from Troy’s mouth and handed the seat to Reed, then fought her way free of the silk. The baby squawked his protests.
Reed turned to the shop owner. “Call 911.”
The man waved his hands in the air. “No. No police.”
Josie wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t mean she was eager to step outside the shop without a police escort. “That man is dangerous. He might be waiting for us.”
“Your problem. No police. Asking questions. Stopping business. No police.” He glanced in the direction of the back room.
Josie dipped her hand into her bag and pulled out her cell phone. Maybe the shop owner didn’t want to call 911, but she would. She flipped open the phone.
The shop owner lunged for her. “No. Please. I will show you a way out.”
“There’s another way? Why didn’t you tell us that before?”
The man stared at her as if he had no idea what she’d just asked.
Reed grasped her shoulder. “It’s fine. It’s fine. We’ll call once we’re outside.”
She clapped the phone shut.
Reed turned back to the owner. “We are grateful for your help. Show us the other way.”
They followed the man in the direction of the front entrance. In a corner, just inside the outer door, a small hall jutted off to the side and led up a narrow staircase. The man led them up the steps, through the second-floor residence and down a fire escape into a side alley.
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