Elusive (On The Run Book #1)

by Sara Rosett

  “I didn’t run off on a whim. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with following an impulse,” Zoe said heatedly. “Just because you make a decision quickly doesn’t mean it’s wrong. You don’t always need a lot of time to make a good decision. Sure, I decided to come here on instinct, but I found you, didn’t I?”

  Zoe thought she heard him murmur something under his breath about lucky breaks, but she chose to ignore it. After a beat of silence, Jack said, “There appears to be no answer to that question which will further my argument, so I will wisely avoid it and ask instead, do you have a cell phone?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said as they drove by two skinny kids who were riding bikes in wide loops around the deserted parking lot of a boarded-up grocery store.

  “Let me see it,” Jack said. Zoe reluctantly handed it over. “You’re not going to throw it out the window are you?”

  “No,” Jack said with a small smile. As he drove, he flipped the casing open and removed the battery and SIM card, then handed everything back. “Just to make sure,” he said. He didn’t say what they were making sure of, and Zoe didn’t ask. She didn’t want it put into words. She dropped everything into her messenger bag as Jack pulled into the parking lot of the Oasis Apartment complex.

  The three-story units were pressed close together, and a few spindly palm trees strained for the open sky above the rooflines. Stucco flaking from the exterior of the buildings littered the cracked sidewalks as if the whole complex was a giant reptile sloughing off its old skin.

  “How did you find out about this place?” Zoe asked, stepping over a broken glass bottle near the stairs of building C. It wasn’t the kind of place that Zoe wanted to visit, but she wasn’t waiting in the car alone either. Jack cut her a look. “Right,” Zoe said. “That’s probably another thing I don’t want to know.”

  The apartment was situated in a breezeway under an open-air stairway, which smelled rank. She kept her hands in her pockets as she followed Jack into the alcove under the stairs. She noticed he didn’t hesitate. He headed unerringly in the right direction. “Been here before?”

  “Yesterday. Before that, I had no idea about his little hideaway, such as it is.” He bent over the door handle. Zoe said, “Great, you’re picking the lock. Well, I suppose we’re already in so much trouble, what’s a little breaking and entering?”

  He twisted the handle, pushed the door open. “No need to worry—no further black marks on our records,” he said. “I have a key,” he said, holding one up.

  “Another thing I probably don’t want to know about,” Zoe said.

  “Found it under the flower pot,” he said, nodding to a foot-tall prickly pear cactus in a medium-sized terracotta pot beside the door.

  “Yet, you’re wearing gloves,” she said, eyeing his pale blue hands.

  “You can never be too careful. Probably best to keep your hands in your pockets. After you,” he said with a wave of his gloved hand.

  Zoe stepped inside. The apartment was airless and dark. Jack closed the door and hit the light switch. “This is Connor’s apartment?” Zoe asked. The soles of her sandals made a sucking sound as they clung to some invisible sticky substance on the entryway tiles. She moved onto the spotted brown carpet of the living area where an orange tweed couch was positioned in front of a heavy dark wood coffee table littered with game controllers. A boxy twenty-five inch television perched on two cinderblocks. A high counter separated the living room from the kitchen on the far left side of the room, and Zoe could see stacks of take-out containers and pizza boxes tilting on the kitchen counter beside discarded cups from a variety of fast food chains.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, exchanging a glance with Jack. They’d both been to Connor’s empty house in Dallas with it’s leather couches, chandeliers, and stainless steel kitchen. Formica countertops and dirty commercial-grade carpet weren’t his style. This whole place wasn’t his style, except for the ancient computer. Despite his flashy car and latest digital appliances in his kitchen in Dallas, at his core, Connor was a Luddite. If he’d built that house in Dallas, Zoe was sure the sound system would connect to a boom box with a cassette player. Ever suspicious of new technology, Connor avoided upgrading, always insisting that the newest electronic gadget or computer or software wouldn’t be as good as what he had.

  “As strange as it seems, yes,” Jack said, heading for the area at one end of the kitchen that a realtor would have called a breakfast nook, except that there was a hulking computer on a cheap pressboard desk instead of a dining table. Jack moved to the computer and turned it on.

  “So you think you’ll find some answers on the computer?”

  “I should—now that I’ll be able to get into it.”

  The computer had been whirring and chugging, but a window popped up asking for a password.

  “How are you going to do that? Do you know his password?”

  “I don’t need it,” he said, plugging a small gray flash drive into one of the USB ports. “Password breaker,” he explained as he typed a few letters. The screen filled with numbers, which continued to scroll as Jack picked up a pencil and absently drew on a scrap of paper. The spray of the Bellagio fountains materialized on the paper. A window popped open on the screen, drawing his attention back to the monitor and he murmured, “Hello,” then pulled a memory drive from his pocket and plugged it into the computer.

  Zoe stared at Jack’s profile, working it out. “Eddie got that for you, didn’t she? You came here yesterday and couldn’t get in Connor’s computer, so you asked her to get that password breaker thing—I’m sure it’s another thing I don’t want to know the finer points on.”

  He ignored Zoe’s last comment and merely said, “It wouldn’t be wise for me to head out on a shopping trip. I am trying to keep a low profile. Besides, these things aren’t easy to find.”

  Zoe walked a few steps into the kitchen, her gaze focused high on the ceiling as she thought. “It had to be this afternoon at the fountain—that’s what you were doing there. Why else would Eddie walk all the way down there, then come back? And you did take her place, right after she moved away from the balustrade. It was a—what do they call it?—a drop!”

  Jack glanced up at her, then focused back on the computer.

  “Fine. Don’t respond. I can tell from your face—your deadpan, no expression face—that I’m right.”

  The silence continued, so Zoe said, “I’m looking around.”

  He didn’t look up. “Go for it. I sure as hell didn’t find anything around here. Not that I looked too hard.”

  “I can see why you wouldn’t,” Zoe said, pacing to the short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. The door to the bathroom was open. A quick glance inside was plenty for Zoe. For a second, she wondered why Connor would choose a shower curtain with black flowers—it seemed a little girly, but then she realized the flowers weren’t a pattern. It was actually mold.

  With a shiver, Zoe moved on to the bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor with a tangle of sheets and a thin blanket flung to the side. A cardboard box served as a nightstand with a small lamp and clock. Issues of Money and Entrepreneur and a few books were scattered around the floor. “This is so...not Connor,” Zoe called, looking down the short hallway that opened into the living area.

  Jack had his back to her as he worked on the computer. “Makes you wonder who he really was, doesn’t it?” he said without turning around.

  “Yeah, it does,” Zoe murmured, walking to the closet, which she edged open cautiously with her foot. A few thin shirts hung above several pairs of crumpled shorts on the floor. “It just doesn’t fit,” she said stepping back from the closet. “Connor wore Armani suits and Hugo Boss ties. And he was so fussy about his car. It was always spotless. He’d wash it right after it rained so he wouldn’t have any water spots on the windshield. He wouldn’t live in this place.”

  “And yet, he did,” Jack said, gesturing to a pile of envelopes on the counter. Zoe walked back into the living room
and studied the envelopes addressed to Connor Freeman. “Those were in the trash,” Jack said.

  “Strange,” Zoe said, shaking her head. “Give me one of those gloves.”

  “What?”

  “Your glove. You’re not doing anything except pointing and clicking. Give me your left-hand glove. I want to look at the books in the bedroom.”

  “I don’t think Connor’s reading material will hold a vital clue,” he said, but he stripped the glove off. Zoe ignored his tone. He didn’t think she could find anything, but she was willing to bet that Jack took a quick look around yesterday and when he couldn’t get into the computer, he’d headed out. Poking around the dirty apartment was not high on the list of things she wanted to do either, but if there was anything here that could help them, it was worth digging through the layers of dirt and grime. It couldn’t be worse than cleaning up after that renter who kept his motorcycle and pet iguana in the duplex office, she thought as she marched down the hall.

  She moved the lamp and clock off the box serving as the nightstand and opened the flaps. It was filled with smaller, white boxes with a winged lion imprint on the top of each one. She recognized the boxes. These were the paperweights GRS gave to clients. Jack had brought some home when they first ordered them. Moving awkwardly, she used her gloved hand to pull out a box and remove the lid. A heavy glass paperweight rested in a square of foam. Zoe replaced the lid and rubbed her gloved thumb over the smudged imprint, wondering why Connor would have a box of paperweights here. She replaced the white box and reassembled the makeshift nightstand.

  She went through all the pockets of the clothes, which took some time. The closet smelled of sweat, and the tiny room was hot. By the time she finished with the clothes, she was covered in a sheen of perspiration, and she had nothing more to show for it than two fast food receipts.

  She skipped over the magazines and considered the books. There was a battered copy of a Bathroom Reader, a few paperback political thrillers and, strangely, a cookbook. Zoe couldn’t picture Connor whipping up beef bourguignon, especially in this apartment, but then again, she couldn’t actually picture Connor in this apartment. She moved on to the last few books, which were oversized and heavy. Yearbooks, she realized, opening the glossy-pages. She found Connor Freeman’s photo. His white blond hair was cut shorter, and his face was thinner, but he had the same slyly superior grin that had irritated Zoe. She closed the book, then immediately felt guilty. No matter how annoying Connor was, he didn’t deserve to die the way he did. She put the yearbooks back as she’d found them, surveyed the room once more to make sure it looked as it had, then went back down the hall to the living room.

  The memory drive was blinking and Jack was stuffing a stack of papers in a garbage bag. “Papers that Connor didn’t get around to shredding,” Jack said, then glanced at the computer. He added the paper with his drawing of the fountain to the stack. “I’m copying everything I can. About ten more minutes and we’re out of here.”

  “Do you want any help with that?” Zoe asked. Jack actually looked a bit harried. His hair sagged over his forehead on one side, a sight Zoe recognized. He’d run his fingers through it, which was usually a sign of exasperation with her. It had occurred frequently when she’d have a perfectly wonderful idea like going out for ice cream on the spur of the moment and he’d point out that no one went out for ice cream at ten-forty-five at night.

  But it seemed he wasn’t exasperated with her. “No. The other glove would be helpful,” he said sharply as he glanced out the window. “Find anything?”

  Zoe worked the glove off and handed it to him. “Besides that he was a slob and had eccentric reading tastes? No, nothing.”

  Jack handed the bag to Zoe, then shot a quick glance at the sliding glass doors before he took a seat in front of the computer, his gloved fingers rapping out an impatient beat on the mouse.

  “Nervous?”

  “No, just ready to get out of here. We’ve been here long enough.”

  “I don’t think this is the type of neighborhood where people call the cops very often.”

  “I’m not worried about the police. The Dallas police don’t even know this place exists, and I doubt the Las Vegas police are aware that Connor had any connection to this city. Eventually, they’ll make the connection, but I don’t think they’ll be busting the door down any minute. It’s one of the few times bureaucratic sluggishness is actually a positive thing.”

  That could only mean he was worried about a visit from someone else—someone shady. “I see,” Zoe said.

  He grunted as he stared at the screen, his right heel tapping out a quick-time rhythm. Zoe was tempted to say, “A watched download bar never fills,” but she bit her tongue. Jack was antsy, and she doubted he would appreciate her humor. Instead of staring at the back of Jack’s head, she moved into the living room, but didn’t sit down on the couch. The cushions looked as if a layer of Doritos and Cheetos had been ground into the fabric. The center cushion had a permanent indent, and Zoe supposed that was where Connor had spent most of his time when he was here.

  How long had Connor lived here? Did he come back here “to visit?” He was out of town frequently, and Zoe had always assumed it was on business trips to visit clients, but maybe he came here instead? Zoe shook her head. Why would he come back here when he had a beautiful—all be it almost empty—home in Dallas? To pig out on fast food and play video games? Zoe just couldn’t imagine it. She glanced back at Jack. He hadn’t moved. Zoe sighed and leaned against the arm of the couch. The cushions shifted and she saw something shoved down between the sagging middle cushion and the next cushion. She used her knuckle to work it out.

  It was a small black moleskin journal. Now this looked more like something Connor would use, Zoe thought as she slipped the elastic band off the cover and opened the book. About half the lined pages were filled with notes: phone numbers, dates, and names. It was a gold mine of information.

  She turned the pages. She recognized some airport codes and dates near the end. There was an odd list, too, with random words. She looked up to tell Jack what she’d found. A man with a gun was moving swiftly across the living room toward Jack.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Las Vegas

  Friday, 5:22 p.m.

  ZOE didn’t know a lot about guns, but she knew that the long narrow extension attached to the barrel was a silencer. Jack was still seated at the computer with his back to the room. The man didn’t glance around. The sight of the man with the gun was so unexpected and he moved so silently that Zoe almost wondered if she was seeing things. It only took a second for the thought to register and for her to realize how absurd it was.

  She must have made some sound—an inward hiss of breath—or a sudden movement. She wasn’t sure what she did to draw the man’s attention, but he glanced her way, his dark eyes under wiry eyebrows registering her presence. It was the man who’d tried to run them down, then shot at her.

  Zoe jumped up from the couch and scrambled backward, dumping the journal. Jack heard her, too. As he stood, he spun toward the man, who was small with stubby legs, a round face, and a bit of a gut. If Zoe had seen him on the street, she wouldn’t have given him a second thought, but with the gun in his hand and the determined look on his face, she felt as if she were almost mesmerized and couldn’t look away.

  Her shoulder blades hit the wall, stopping her backward progress.

  The stubby man’s dark gaze flicked from her to Jack who stood, arms held out at his waist, palms down. The man waved the gun back and forth a few times almost as if he was reciting “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” He must have ended on Zoe because he pointed the gun at her, then motioned her over to Jack’s side of the room with two tiny flicks of his wrist.

  As Zoe inched away from the wall, there was a blur of movement as Jack heaved a kitchen chair at the man.

  “Run,” Jack shouted.

  Zoe swiveled on her heel and made for the door. The chair crashed into something—a wall or t
he floor. As she fumbled with the door lock, her fingers thick and clumsy, she glanced over her shoulder.

  The dining nook was empty. Jack must have ducked down behind the kitchen counter.

  The man kicked the chair away. It skidded into the leg of the flimsy desk, which collapsed, causing the desktop to tilt. The computer slid off the desk like a boat going over a waterfall. It slammed into the floor in a spray of plastic.

  The lock finally released and Zoe flung the door open. Zoe backed through the door, watching as the man rounded the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen, his gun pointed down at the floor.

  He’s going to shoot Jack. Right here in front of me, Zoe thought.

  Jack popped into sight and tossed the contents of a takeout container at the man’s head, then placed both hands on the counter and vaulted feet-first into the living room.

  The man swiped at his face with his free hand, wiping away some sort of goo. He was too heavy-set to follow Jack over the counter. He had to reverse course and go around the other way. His gun swung wildly back and forth as Jack zipped around the couch. He looked surprised to see her. “What are you doing? Run! Get out of here!”

  Zoe stepped outside, then remembered the black journal. She knew it was important. All those names and dates and numbers. They had to have it. She spotted it on the floor and ducked under Jack’s arm.

  “Zoe,” Jack yelled as she scooped up the journal and felt the man surge toward her. She didn’t look at him. She twisted around and sprinted for the door behind Jack, but she could swear she felt the short guy’s presence behind her. She expected to feel his hand yank at her hair or shirt any second.

  She shot through the open door and ran out from under the steps into the sunlight, feeling as if her legs were moving at Roadrunner cartoon-like speed, but her steps faltered as she scanned the parking lot.

  Where was Jack?