by Sam Sisavath
They sat quietly and watched a new group of cars pull into the parking lot and get in line at the drive-thru lanes for what might have been a few minutes. Or maybe it was just a few seconds. Time had gotten a little slippery, and Quinn couldn’t help but feel like a kid again.
God, get ahold of yourself. You’re not back in high school, and you’re not thirteen and waiting for your first kiss. You’re being hunted by the combined might of the FBI, remember?
Finally, Pete took his hand away and held up Clyde’s phone. “Anyways, I’ll take this in and see what we can find out. In the meantime, you need to stay off the grid.”
“Easier said than done. I have a few dollars left in my pocket, and that’s about it. I don’t even have a ride.”
“You’ll only need a ride if you’re going somewhere. Right now your best bet is to stay out of the open. It’s not just the FBI anymore, remember? It’s the locals, too.”
“If you got any ideas, I’m listening.”
“They’re looking for you at your apartment and places that’re associated with you, right?”
“Right. Standard operating procedure.”
“But they won’t be looking at my place. We’re not connected in any way except as coworkers, which pretty much includes everyone on our floor.”
She nodded and smiled at him. “Thank you, Pete. You don’t know how much this means to me,” she said, and meant it. Every single word of it. She had spent the entire day running around by herself, wondering if she had any friends left in the world other than Ben, and to find out that yes, she did, was like a great boulder being lifted off her chest.
Me, Ben, and Pete Ringo against the world.
I like my odds.
Chapter 8
Pete lived in a one-bedroom apartment in The Heights, a much more decent-looking area of Houston than the one she’d been able to wrangle with a junior agent’s salary. It was about a thirty-minute drive from the office and within view of the 610 freeway, which at the moment was dense with crisscrossing traffic.
Before he left, Pete handed her a spare key. “I’ll tell Ben what happened, then we’ll come up with something. I won’t be able to head back here before the end of the day, or even later than that if they have me running around doing something. Everyone’s doubling up on the workload because, well, you know. Until then, don’t do anything rash.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Run off by yourself?”
“It never occurred to me.”
He gave her an unconvinced smile. “Riiight.”
She smiled innocently—or as innocently as she could fake, anyway. “Honestly.”
“Just wait to hear from us first, okay? Three minds are better than one.”
She nodded. “Tell Ben I’m fine.”
“I will. Until then, sit tight. Watch some TV. Surf the Internet. Just…stay put.”
“Just get back to me as soon as you can.”
“As soon as I can,” he repeated.
She watched him leave, thankful there were at least two people in this world that she could still trust. Pete and Ben. The latter was a given, even if she wanted to push him as far away as possible to limit the blowback on him. But Pete, she had to admit, was the real surprise.
Tall, dark, and handsome, and good in a tight spot, too. What a combination.
She was glad he didn’t look back as he headed down the stairs, or he might have seen her grinning like an idiot after him.
She had hours to kill before Pete returned, and Quinn spent the first few minutes looking for and finding his computer. She booted it up and trolled the Internet, picking up where she had left off earlier at the café. Unlike most people, Pete didn’t have a password on his desktop, something Quinn found strangely appealing about the man. Leave it to Pete Ringo to give PC security the middle finger.
After an hour of scrolling and finding nothing new since this morning, she gave up and turned on the TV. She clicked through the channels, but it was just ten in the morning and the earliest local news wouldn’t be on for another hour. She hit up the cable news channels instead and was surprised when the first one she landed on didn’t have her FBI profile picture on the screen while someone, probably an ex-fed, talked about how dangerous she was.
And Porter. There still wasn’t a single mention of Porter anywhere.
Quinn hadn’t been an FBI special agent for very long—Ben, in particular, would look at her three-month stint in the field since Quantico and call it a blip in an average agent’s career—but it amazed her how successful the Bureau was at blacking out the hunt for Porter. There was an old saying about government agencies and leaks that she couldn’t quite remember, but the gist of it was you never told them anything you didn’t expect someone from the media to get their hands on a few hours later anyway.
And yet, there was nothing on Porter. Absolutely nothing.
How the hell was this even possible when everyone had a cell phone and a YouTube account and a blog?
Instead of talking about her or Porter, the cable channel was reporting on the latest smartphone release while featuring a blonde reporter standing next to a long line of people waiting outside a phone store. Quinn would never understand the need to wait in line for a phone that would be available to everyone as soon as it was released anyway. But then she was never much for standing in line, period.
She clicked away, landing on a report about the businessman preparing for a White House bid. He was a handsome man in an expensive suit, and he smiled at the cameras as the reporters threw questions at him. A man with a gleaming set of white pearls who was born to be in front of a TV screen, and possibly inside the Oval Office in a few years.
Only in America.
She moved on.
The third channel was also talking about the smartphone, except this time they had an interview with a man in a sweater. They were in a giant office with glass windows, but Quinn clicked away before she could hear the man answer a question about a new operating system…blah blah blah.
She only cared about one phone at the moment, and it was with Pete, on its way to the FBI cyber crimes lab where the eggheads hopefully would be able to find out where the calls from her guardian angel had come from last night. And from there, maybe she could find out who was trying to help her—if that was what they were doing. At the moment, Quinn couldn’t be certain of anything.
Except Pete and Ben. The three of us against the world.
She gave up on the TV after a few more pointless minutes and went looking for something to eat instead. Pete didn’t have a lot in the fridge, but she was able to make a sandwich for herself with some turkey slices and iceberg lettuce that may or may not have already gone bad. She fought the temptation to go into Pete’s bedroom and snoop. What kind of man was Pete Ringo, anyway?
Get a grip. This isn’t a date.
She settled for his bathroom in the hallway and looked through the medicine cabinet and drawers before finding nothing she hadn’t found in a dozen other guys’ bathrooms. She ended up back in the living room, and by noon was lying down on the ugly lime-green couch. The furniture was a real eyesore, and it made her question Pete’s taste. It was, she realized, the first chink in the armor that was Perfect Pete Ringo.
But it’s a minor defect I can live with.
As soon as she touched the armrest with her head she was asleep, a combination of the stress of the last few days and the lack of sleep in the previous twenty-four hours catching up with her in a flood of physical and emotional fatigue.
She woke up to gunshots.
No, not gunshots.
Just doors slamming down the hall outside the apartment.
Jumpy much?
Quinn pulled her hand away from the Glock and sat up on the couch. (God, it was such an ugly thing.) She had left the TV on with the sound muted, a live shot featuring a hunky young reporter interviewing people waiting in line outside a phone store. Again.
She picked up the remo
te and turned the TV off, then sat back down and took a breath. Sunlight poured in from the window across the room, and the clock on the wall ticked to one twenty. She hadn’t slept very long (did it even count as a nap?), which probably explained why her head was about to explode into a few hundred pieces.
The hallway was quiet again, but the prospect of going back to sleep seemed unlikely. She was apparently more wired than she thought, and that was overriding her need for sleep at the moment.
Quinn got up and went to the bathroom and washed her face, then considered the pros and cons of stripping down and taking a shower, but the image of her standing underneath a hot spray while federal agents stormed the room nixed that idea. She returned to the living room feeling a little better, even if she was hungry again.
Pete had left with Clyde’s phone and hadn’t given her a replacement in the meantime. Her fault for not realizing it until now, but she was so tired and was just glad to have someplace safe to rest.
Excuses, excuses.
There wasn’t a landline (who even had landlines anymore these days?), so she was stuck in a room with a TV that didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. There was the Internet, but it didn’t shed any light on her problem, either. Not that she had anyone to call even if she did have access to a phone. She still couldn’t—didn’t want to, really—call Pete; and the same was (even more) true for Ben. She was already putting both of them in danger just by accepting their help; calling them might be pushing all of their luck.
She had to be satisfied with watching daytime TV, and somewhere around two o’clock was shocked to find herself drifting off again.
The smell of food woke her up and she opened her eyes to Pete crouched in front of her, a bag of Chinese takeout resting on the table behind him. The intense smell of soy sauce and noodles made her stomach growl, but she was too hungry and way too tired to be embarrassed by it.
“Hungry?” Pete grinned.
“Famished.”
“Sorry about the fridge. I don’t usually stock for company.”
“You don’t get a lot of company?” she asked, sitting up on the couch.
“Not usually.” He took out a Styrofoam tray from the bag. “Got you some chow mein and broccoli beef.”
“I think I love you.”
Pete chuckled, then got up and went to the kitchen. “So that’s all it takes, huh?”
Quinn opened the cheap container and dug in. “Free food, a place to stay, that’s all it takes. I’m a very simple girl.”
“I find that very hard to believe.”
“You should have seen me before Ben found me. I was living out of a box.”
“For real?”
She nodded. “I don’t remember having my own bed until I was eleven.”
“Wow. Must have been some childhood.”
“Maybe.”
He took out two bottles of water and walked back over, handing her one before sitting down across from her again. “Maybe?”
She took the bottle. “I don’t remember most of it.”
“Sounds like you’ve had quite a life, Quinn.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
The TV was still turned on behind him, and the wall clock over his right shoulder ticked to just under six. The evening news was in full swing, but the sound was muted and there was nothing on the screen about the FBI manhunt for her or anything on Porter. She should have been glad that her face wasn’t plastered all over the news twenty-four seven, but a part of her was dreading the moment when she would see it, because she knew it was coming.
Pete saw where she was staring and glanced back. “You missed it.”
“What?” she said, before slurping up another forkful of noodles.
“They opened the broadcast with it.”
“The manhunt for me?”
He nodded. “Talked a good five minutes about it. That’s an eternity in local news time for one story.”
“I’m so honored.”
“There’s supposed to be an update soon.”
“Can’t wait.”
He took a box of fried rice out of the bag and began eating. He had taken off his blazer but Pete in a dangling, loosened tie was still a handsome sight, especially sitting less than two feet from her.
“What did you find out from Clyde’s phone?” she asked, and did her best to focus more on her noodles than on how close he was to her.
You’re being hunted by the FBI, remember? This isn’t a date.
Pete shook his head.
“That good, huh?” she asked.
“Eggheads couldn’t pull anything from it. Whoever called you, they were good. You said it was a woman?”
She nodded. “She might have had an English accent, but I’m fifty-fifty on that.”
“What else?”
Quinn thought about it between forkfuls of chow mein and chunks of beef. “Not much. She was cavalier.”
“Cavalier?”
“It didn’t seem like she was taking it very seriously. I guess she didn’t really have to, since it was my neck on the line. She was camped out somewhere across the street, watching me from a safe distance through a rifle scope.”
“She didn’t tell you why she was helping you?”
Quinn shook her head. “And she never called back after last night. I guess the phone’s a dead end.”
“Unfortunately.”
“What did Ben say? He didn’t want to come see me in person?”
“He couldn’t. Ben had to leave town an hour ago. I drove him to the airport myself before I came home. He won’t be back until tomorrow at the latest.”
“Where did he go?”
“DC. They’re not just shutting him out of the manhunt for you; they won’t tell us anything. Me, him, anyone associated with the unit. So Ben’s flying to the belly of the beast to ask some favors.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad for him…”
Pete picked at his rice. “The suits running the show know he’s the reason you got into the academy. He must have really pulled a lot of strings.”
“He did.”
“Point is, they know all about your history with him.”
She wasn’t so hungry anymore, and Quinn stopped eating and drank from her bottle of water instead. She stared past Pete at the TV and watched the two anchors on the screen fake-chat about something on mute.
“He’ll be fine,” Pete said. “If anyone can get through this, it’s Ben Foster. Guy’s the toughest agent I know, and he’s got lots of friends.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything. Ben did have a lot of friends, and the favors he’d asked to get her into the academy had been monumental. And yet Ben had done it, because when Ben Foster set his sights on something, he got it done. Which was why she wanted to keep him as far back from her problem as she could, because Ben was a pit bull.
Don’t throw your career away for me, Ben. Please. Don’t let my stupidity doom us both.
But she knew even if she could say exactly that to him in person, it wouldn’t have done any good. You didn’t stop Ben Foster from doing something he wanted; you only hoped to contain him.
That last thought brought a slight smile to her lips.
“Full?” Pete asked.
“I’ll finish it later.” She nodded at the TV. “I haven’t seen a single thing on Porter on the news all day.”
“Yeah, you’d think word would have leaked out by now…”
“Why haven’t they?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the agencies are smarter than we give them credit for.” When he saw the doubtful look on her face, Pete chuckled. “I’m just saying. Anything’s possible.”
“Maybe…”
“I did hear that one of the cable channels was sniffing around, but the Bureau somehow shut them down.”
“Shut them down how?”
“I don’t know, not my department. But one moment they’re asking questions about a second manhunt—one not involving you—and the next
, poof. They just stopped. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but they’re doing it. They’re keeping Porter out of the news.”
“Where do they think he is now?”
“Could be anywhere. The higher value targets are in DC, New York, the big cities. What’s in Houston that’s worth a guy like Porter’s time? There’s no reason for him to be sticking around. Can you think of any?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“He’s gotta be long gone by now, right?” Then, looking at her closely while licking a spoon clean of greasy oil, “Did you get any sleep at all?”
“A few hours. Why?”
“You look tired.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You know what I mean. You look like you could use a few more hours.”
“What’s that old saying? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Let’s hope that’s not for a very long time yet.” He reached over and put his hand on her knee and pursed his lips. “Hang in there, all right? We’ll get through this. Together.”
“Thank you, Pete. For everything. I know you’re risking a lot just by talking to me. You didn’t have to do any of this. Ben, I can understand. But you…thank you.”
Pete sat back and took his hand away. “You’re innocent. What kind of friend would I be if I stood by and let them railroad you?”
She didn’t know what to say. What did you say when someone you always admired proved to be everything you ever hoped they would be, and more?
The struggle must have shown on her face, because he gave her an awkward smile before standing up and clearing his throat. “Anyways. Until Ben gets back or we figure out what to do next, you take the bed and I’ll grab the couch. But since it’s my place, I call first dibs on the shower.”
“Is the bed at least comfortable?”
“It’ll be like sleeping on a cloud. Only softer.”
“Wow. Talk about selling it.”