Bending the Rules

by Susan Andersen

  “So you put yourself at risk because you’re bored?”

  “I’m lonely!”

  “I’m sorry, Cory, I’m sure that’s not easy. But Detective de Sanges is putting his career on the line for you and you can’t just—”

  “Of course you’d find his issues more important than my little problems. Hey, we don’t want to make things tough for Detective de S.!” She could feel herself losing it, but she was so damn lonely and she just couldn’t take it anymore. She’d thought Ms. C. would understand, because she was always so warm and smiley and had a way of making you feel so welcome.

  But Poppy wasn’t smiling now and Cory didn’t feel welcome. Ms. C.’s expression, in fact, had gone down right frigid and shuttered, and that shook Cory more than it probably should have. It was just too much on top of everything else, though, and hating the tears she felt rising to the surface, she embraced the injustice that surged in her chest—or at least the anger that was its end result. “I thought you’d understand, but you probably have all sorts of friends and stuff, and now that the project is done I guess I’m just a big pain in the butt to you.”

  “Honey, of course you aren’t.”

  “But you don’t want to be responsible for me—I get it, all right. Well, guess what?” Angrily she dashed the welling tears from her eyes. “I don’t want to be a rock around your neck, either, so why don’t we just forget I was even here.” She whirled around and reached for the lock on the door.

  “Cory, wait!”

  Ms. C.’s fingers brushed her arm, but she shook them off and got the lock undone. She couldn’t bear to see the pity or impatience or whatever on her teacher’s face. Wrenching open the door, she dashed out into the yard.

  “Sonova—Cory Capelli, get your butt back here!”

  Not freaking likely. Cory put on the extra burst of speed that carried her down the drive and out into the street.

  BRUNO’S HEAD came up when he heard someone call the Capelli kid’s name. Holy fuck. He couldn’t be that lucky, could he? But a second later the kid herself burst out of the drive and started sprinting in his direction. He ducked down behind the rear bumper of the Escalade nearest the sidewalk, unable to believe his good timing. He’d just returned from a quick recon of the mansion and the properties adjoining it.

  He heard the footsteps pounding up the street and when they reached the front of the vehicle he hit his keyless remote to disengage the alarm and open the SUV. He’d counted on the chirp startling her and knew he was right when her footsteps faltered. Springing out from the back of the car, he whipped his arm around her waist, lifted her off her feet and clipped her hard on the chin. She went limp in his arms and he stuffed her in the car.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he murmured as he buckled her in. “You’ve been causing me all kinds of problems, haven’t you?” He slammed the door shut and rounded the car to the driver’s side. “But that’s okay. Because I’m about to fix all that.”

  FOR THE SECOND TIME in as many minutes Poppy punched the code in the alarm. Then she bolted through the back door in pursuit of Cory, but the girl was incredibly fast and was already out of sight.

  Dammit, why hadn’t she handled that better? A bitter laugh escaped her. Because Cory had brought her personal relationship with Jason into it, that’s why. She’d heard the teen’s reference to a bond she no longer had with him and quit thinking like a rational adult faced with an emotional kid in desperate need of kid-glove treatment.

  And look what wonderful results that had brought.

  She was still beating herself up with all the possible ways that she could have, should have, controlled the situation when she reached the end of the drive. She looked frantically in both directions.

  And was just in time to see a man shutting the passenger door of a black SUV. The sun hitting the car’s tinted windshield showed a shadowy spiky-headed form within—a form that hung from the seat belt with a frightening lack of animation.

  “Shit!” Whirling on her heel, Poppy ran like she’d never run before back to the house. That had to be Arturo and she could not let him get away. Cory’s life was in the balance and it was her fault.

  Barreling through the door she’d left wide-open, she snatched up her tote, which she had dropped behind the counter in the newly renovated kitchen when she’d gotten here earlier, then ran back out, slamming the door behind her. She climbed in her car and started it up, hoping to hell the man hadn’t disappeared.

  The only thing in her favor was that he’d been parked facing this direction, so she craned forward to look to the right as she nosed the car up to the street. Then swore. He was nowhere in sight.

  She took a right anyway and raced up to the next corner. Slamming on the brakes, she looked in both directions and spotted him to the west, turning at the end of the block. “Thank you, thank you, God!”

  Creeping cautiously up to the corner where he’d turned, she rummaged with one hand through her tote. Where was her phone? Dammit, why the hell did she always have to carry such a freaking big bag?

  Her hand sweeping frantically among all the crap she’d accumulated in her tote, she paused at the corner. She watched the SUV take a right up the hill, then turned her own vehicle onto the block he had just vacated. She was scared to death the guy would see her and even more scared that she’d hang back so far she’d lose him.

  Her fingers brushed her cell phone just as she, too, turned onto the arterial and she yanked it from the tote. Flipping it open, she pressed in a speed-dial code she’d only used once before. “C’mon, c’mon,” she urged as the phone on the other end rang for what seemed like forever.

  Then it was picked up. “De Sanges,” came Jason’s cool, level voice.

  “Jase? Oh, thank God! He’s got her!”

  “Poppy? Who’s got who—” He cut himself off and his voice was sharp as a scalpel when he spoke again. “Arturo?”

  “Yes! He’s got Cory!”

  “How the hell did that happ—No, never mind, that’s not important right now. Where are you?”

  “I’m following him in my car. But, Jason, she’s not moving. I’m hanging back hoping to hell he won’t see me, and in truth I couldn’t see through the tinted windows on his car all that well when I was close enough, but I could see that she was slumped over and not moving!” She could hear the hysteria creeping into her voice and sucked in a deep breath. This was no time to fall apart.

  “Hohn! With me,” she heard Jason snap, then he spoke into the phone again. “I need you to stay calm.”

  “I know.” She inhaled another deep breath and let it out. “I’m okay, I’m good. It’s just…It’s my fault. He must have followed me to the mansion, then Cory showed up and I let the situation get away from me when she—” She cleared her throat. “Well, that doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that she ran out of here before I could stop her and—”

  “Tell me where you are,” he interrupted.

  “On Queen Anne Avenue.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not positive, but it looks like we’re headed for the underpass to the Aurora Bridge.”

  “Okay, hang in there with me. Hohn and I are heading in that direction. You just do your best to stay off his radar and keep me up-to-date on your whereabouts.”

  She did that. For ten minutes that dragged out into dog years, she followed the black Escalade and kept sane because she knew that Jason was not only on the other end of the line, but on his way to save Cory.

  Then Arturo, whom she’d let pull quite a way ahead of her when he’d turned onto a rutted street bordering a mixed-use portion of Lake Union, suddenly pulled into a lot next to a square building. Without traffic between them, she feared he’d spot her and she whipped into another business’s parking lot. “Oh,” she whispered into her phone as if the thug could somehow hear her. “He’s stopped.”

  “Are you still on East Northlake Way?”

  “Yes. West of the freeway. He’s in front of what looks like a warehouse or one of those ma
rine-type businesses that are all along here—I’m not close enough to tell which.” She sat tensely as Arturo climbed out of the car and came around to the passenger side. He stood looking out over the roof of the SUV for a moment, then opened the door and hauled Cory into his arms.

  She blew out a ragged breath. “He’s taking her out of the front seat, and she’s limp as a noodle, Jase. Oh, there, she moved her head! Thank God, she’s alive!” She’d been so frightened that maybe Cory wasn’t—that her efforts were too little, too late.

  Arturo disappeared with the teen down the side of the building. “I think he took her inside. I’m going to drive by and get the address.”

  “Good idea. Just don’t get too close.”

  “He’s got her in a windowless building out of sight, Jason. Her chances of staying alive just went down.”

  “And so will yours if he gets his hands on you.”

  She tapped the brakes in front of the building. It was a concrete warehouse and she read the address stenciled over the garage-type door into the phone.

  “Good,” Jason said. “We’re not far away.” Then he swore.

  “What?” she demanded anxiously.

  “Nothing. Just a little traffic snarl. We’ll get it straightened out and be there in five minutes, tops.”

  “Cory might not have five minutes!”

  “Look, Poppy, you’ve got to calm down and trust me,

  okay?”

  “Right. The way you trust me, Jason?” She regretted the words the instant they left her mouth.

  He went silent for a heartbeat, then said in his no-emotions cop voice, “Just stay away from the building until we get there.”

  “Uh-huh.” She parked her car one lot over from the warehouse. Shutting down the engine, she rummaged through her tote until she came up with the little canister of pepper spray her father had given her. She tucked it into her waistband, climbed from the car and closed the door. “We’ve got to stop him.”

  “Not we, Poppy,” he said and his voice wasn’t nearly as emotionless as it had been a moment ago. “Me. I’ll stop him. You just sit tight and do not—I repeat, do not—do anything impulsive.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Shit,” he said. “I know that tone. Listen to me. Sit tight. I know how fierce you are about your kids, but this is a matter for professionals. Do not interfere—you’ll just end up making things worse.”

  She approached a regular metal door on the side of the building. Listening for noises from within, she reached for its doorknob. “Get here soon, Jason.”

  “Dammit, Poppy, do you hear me? Sit tight! Stay on the line with me, you hear? Don’t hang up. Do not hang up!”

  Snapping the phone shut, she tried the knob.

  And took a deep breath when it turned silently beneath her hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  After what happened I sort of thought I’d be all cranked up and revving about a hundred miles an hour. Instead, I just feel numb.

  SWEARING WITH vicious inventiveness, Jase snapped his phone closed. “We’ve gotta get the hell out of here and over to that warehouse now,” he snarled. “I know she’s going in.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Hohn disagreed. “She couldn’t possibly be that stu—” Jase’s expression must have warned him not to go there, because he shut up mid-word. Instead, he hitched a shoulder. “You look like you could tear the head off a chicken with your bare hands,” he commented, scowling at the traffic stopped ahead of them. He flipped a switch to make the siren give a small whoop to direct people’s attention to the fact there were cops present. “Makes you the perfect candidate to clear me a path to drive through.”

  “Oh, trust me, it will be my pleasure,” Jase said savagely, climbing from the car. “But get Patrol out here to take care of the rest of it.” Hanging his badge from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, he started snapping orders at drivers, directing them to inch up a little here, pull a foot to the side there.

  Some idiot texting on his iPhone had rear-ended the car in front of him, causing a chain reaction that had culminated in a truck with its wheels already cranked to turn left getting bumped into oncoming traffic. The driver who found the truck suddenly face-on in his lane had performed some damn good defensive driving and avoided a collision. But the recreational trailer he’d been towing had jackknifed, snarling traffic in both directions.

  It took Jase seven minutes that felt like seven hours to clear a space large enough for Hohn to drive up onto the sidewalk. He loped back to the car, gave the roof a slap and dove in. “Sonovabitchin’ morons.”

  Hohn turned on the siren and hit the gas, rocking up over the curb.

  Jase leaned forward in his seat, his shoulders tense and his hands clenched between his spread knees as they left the congestion behind. It wasn’t until they were out of the district that he sucked in several deep breaths to get a handle on himself, then shot a glance at his friend. “You’ve been married a long time,” he said.

  “Seven years of wedded bliss, bro,” Hohn agreed.

  “How do you do it?”

  “Same way recovering addicts do, my friend—by taking it one day at a time.”

  Jase turned his head to stare at him. “Wow. A ringing endorsement like that almost makes a guy wanna go get hitched himself.”

  “Hey, it’s like the all-knowing one says, man—”

  “Do not quote Nietzsche at me,” he interrupted impatiently. Hohn had an unnatural attachment to everything the guy had ever written and usually Jase just shook his head. But he was in no mood for it today.

  “No, listen, I’m telling ya. This one is dead-on.” He took a deep, theatrical breath, took one hand off the steering wheel to place over his heart and said, “‘Ah women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.’”

  “Shit.” Thinking that this was what he got for broaching the subject of marriage—or hell, not even that, just relationships in general—from a smart-ass, Jase went back to staring out the windshield, silently willing his friend to get them to their destination.

  Now.

  POPPY CREPT on cautious feet a little deeper into the dim, cavernous warehouse. The place was still and silent and she was at a loss about what to do next. Pausing, she looked around her, trying to get a feel for the layout.

  That was more difficult than it should have been considering the space was basically a vast concrete cube. But while it might lack room-type walls, it was piled high with row after row of boxes that stacked nearly to the exposed steel girders overhead.

  But as she stood trying to figure out where to look first for Cory, she suddenly became aware of a murmur of sound. She realized it was either a man talking or a radio playing. It seemed to be coming from the lake end of the warehouse. Nervously palming her little canister of pepper spray, she slipped down a narrow passageway between two rows of boxes, trying to get closer to the murmuring voice without making any noise herself.

  Her heart was already pounding like a kettledrum and she didn’t know what she’d do if Arturo suddenly popped up at the end of her cardboard canyon. Nothing that ended well, she was sure. If heart failure didn’t get her, a hail of bullets was sure to do the trick.

  She froze for an instant before forcing herself to start moving again. But she could have done without that last thought. Of course Arturo would have a gun—he was a gangster, for cri’sake. She’d be a lot happier, however, without the Godfather-style imagery suddenly burrowing into her consciousness.

  Not that it mattered. It wasn’t as if she had the luxury of turning tail and leaving Cory to fend for herself. She was probably too stupid to live for coming in here instead of waiting for Jason, but living with herself if the girl was injured—or worse—and she hadn’t tried to help wasn’t exactly a workable option, either.

  And, hey, the good news was she’d reached the end of the row without incident. It was always nice to have one thing go right.

  Even if she was promptly faced with a new p
roblem.

  Breathing a little too fast, she stared in frustration at yet another towering wall of cardboard, this one at a right angle to the chute she’d just left. What was this place, a goddamn fun-house maze?

  Taking deep, calming breaths, she constructed a mental strongbox for her stress—fueled anger the way Aunt Sara had taught her a long, long time ago, back in their commune days.

  Apparently good tips never died, because the exercise was still effective. If she got out of this mess alive she’d have to be sure to thank the older woman. Barring that, she felt calmer, more in control, and tuning in on what had to be Arturo’s voice she allowed the sound to guide her as she inched forward.

  “…probably won’t believe this,” she heard him say clearly as she neared the end of yet another row, “but I’m not really thrilled with the idea of hurting a little girl.”

  Warily, Poppy craned her neck to take a peek around the end boxes. Heart pounding, she immediately whipped back behind the protection of her wall, images from the strobe light–quick glimpse seared with surprising detail on her retinas.

  Of a small cleared space in the surrounding forest of boxes.

  Of a stocky, well-dressed man standing with his back to her, casually scratching behind his ear with the barrel of a gun.

  Of Cory, all scared eyes, trembling lips and that damn stubborn chin raised just slightly despite the bruise starting to darken it, looking pale and frightened as she huddled on a sagging couch.

  Thank God she’s all right.

  “Uh-huh,” the teen said with a transparent show of bravado. “That must be why you’ve got that gun.”

  “What, this?”

  Poppy peered around again in time to see he’d lowered the weapon and had it aimed at the girl. Saw, too, that Cory had seen her. Poppy put a cautionary finger to her lips, then pulled back out of sight. And wondered what the hell to do next. God, I have got to get her out of here. Somehow, some way. She glanced around her for inspiration, but all she saw was boxes.