“Well, here we are—what the hell?”
Taylor leaned forward when Pam’s tone changed. Her social media trick had worked better than expected. There had to be at least a couple dozen people hanging out in the marina’s parking lot. When Pam turned the Mercedes into the marina parking lot, the people parted like a bad comb-over, then quickly closed in behind the car to be the first to get that car-exiting shot. It was then that she remembered the patched wound on her shoulder. The white bandage stood out like milk on a dark hardwood floor in the tank top she was wearing. This would be fodder for salacious stories for days if she couldn’t cover it up.
“This your doing?” Pam said. “Smart thinking. How’d you get them here?’
“Instagram.”
“Ah, I have an account just to follow my granddaughter. I’ll have to look you up!”
“I hate to ask, because you’ve been so kind, but do you have any sort of T-shirt or anything I could put on?”
“The bandage. Yeah, better not let these sharks see that. TMZ will be all over that.” Pam reached toward the passenger seat. “Here ya go, hon. Might be a little big on you, but it’ll cover you up.”
Pam handed back a purple athletic zip-up. It was perfect. “When you find me on Instagram, message me. Let me take you to lunch or something for your trouble.”
“I’d love that.”
Taylor turned her attention to Lexi as she pulled on Pam’s zip-up. “Don’t answer any of their questions if they start asking. Let me handle them. I get along with them well. Probably know most of them. I’ll just say you’re a friend of the family. Okay?”
“Okay. You think this will keep those men from getting us?”
“I think so.” Then to Pam, she said, “Thank you again, Pam. I owe you.”
Taylor slid out of the car to a wave of camera clicks. The reporters were shouting her name, asking her questions, everything from “how have you been?” to “when’s the next movie?” Lexi slid out behind her, but before Taylor could address the paparazzi, there was a commotion at the entrance to the parking lot. She shaded her eyes from the sun to see what she already knew it was: the black SUV. What surprised her was the blue light flashing in the front window. The police?
As the SUV pushed its way forward, the paparazzi moved out of its way. All of them shouting at the truck. Taylor’s first instinct was relief. Naturally you always think the police are there to help. But if that were the case, then why had they been chasing her on the beach and all the way to the health club?
The SUV’s front doors opened. Taylor grabbed Lexi’s hand and began to back away from the distracted media. There were about twenty people in between them and the SUV. Two men exited the back, and Taylor’s first instinct was quickly wearing off. She didn’t know if they were really police or not. They certainly weren’t in uniform. They were in casual clothes. Then she remembered something Cassie said. When Taylor was confessing about her connection to Victoria, Cassie had said something about Victoria having the FBI working for her. These had to be those guys. Every inch of Taylor’s gut was screaming at her to run.
“Police!” the driver said, now fully out of the vehicle.
Taylor tugged Lexi’s hand and began to backpedal. They were surrounded by boats, Taylor’s heels now close to the first slip. There really was nowhere to go but toward the water. The men had the exit through the parking lot blocked. She saw the first gun raise as the paparazzi cleared a path for the determined men.
“Taylor Lockhart, don’t move. You are under arrest!” the man shouted. “Get these people out of here!”
Taylor’s foot found the boat slip. The three other men began to herd the paparazzi back. She knew the men couldn’t hurt them as long as there were all these eyes. The problem was she couldn’t let them take her and Lexi either, because the minute they left here, away from the cameras, there was no telling what they might do to her. Taylor deserved whatever was coming her way, but not Lexi. She shouldn’t be here. This was Taylor’s mess. Taylor just needed to buy a couple minutes. Then Clint would be here. He would know what to do.
She hoped.
“Come on, Lexi!”
Taylor pulled Lexi onto the slip that ran the length of the marina. It was a couple hundred yards long; all the other slips jutted out into the water away from it.
“Stop right there!”
Taylor heard the man, but she and Lexi were already running away. If she could get down the slip far enough, she might be able to jump onto a boat and hide long enough until help arrived. It was all she had. And with a glance over her shoulder, seeing the two men running around the entrance to the slip, she knew it wasn’t much.
They were in serious trouble.
36
Cassie felt like she had been in the car forever following Clint. Not knowing if Taylor had managed to get Lexi safely to the SOBA Center was like waiting for the doctor to tell you if your cancer had come back. She wasn’t all that familiar with Malibu, but she knew they had a ways to go before they got there. That’s why she was surprised when a couple cars ahead of her she saw Clint turn his car into a marina. She slowed down, and when she made it to the parking lot, she crept in, shocked by what she saw. A lot more people were there than should have been, most of them with cameras around their necks.
Cassie parked and jumped out of the car. She grabbed the nearest man with a camera and turned him toward her.
“What’s going on? What’s the frenzy about?”
“Your lucky day if you’re with the press, lady. Taylor Lockhart is down there, running from the cops.”
“What?” Cassie couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah, like right now. A movie star running from the cops!”
So Victoria had Frank using officers from the police department to run down Taylor. What the hell was Cassie going to do now? She felt confident with all the paparazzi there that the officers couldn’t really hurt anyone. Then again, she couldn’t actually see Taylor and Lexi, and there was a man with a gun keeping anyone from getting on the boat slips. Cassie felt helpless.
Where the hell was Clint?
Cassie searched the crowd of people. She had lost Clint’s car once he turned into the marina; then with all the hysteria, she had forgotten about him entirely.
Gunshots rang out in the distance and froze Cassie. She was shocked to hear them, especially coming from the direction Taylor had gone running. The onlookers came running past Cassie toward the exit, knocking into her, terrified, but she did her best to move against the stream. Lexi was down there. If something happened to her, Cassie would be devastated. And Lawson, she would lose him forever too.
She passed a black SUV with a flashing blue light, and when she finally made it through everyone, she could see that the man who’d been keeping the paparazzi from entering the boat slips was lying facedown in a pool of blood. Up ahead on the ramp that ran the length of all the slips jutting out from it, she saw a man with a pistol extended in front of him moving past the rows of boats. Cassie stepped over the dead police officer, or FBI agent, whatever he was—he was in plain clothes so it was impossible to tell—and ran toward the shooter, pulling out the pistol Frank had left her.
She wished she knew more about what she was running toward. How many were after Taylor and Lexi, who they were, whom they worked for, what their intentions were. What the intentions of the man coming up behind Taylor and Lexi were. But she didn’t. She was just going to have to be ready to do whatever she could to get to Lexi and protect her. That was her only motive. She wished Lawson had been the one to go to Clint’s instead of her. Then he would be there running toward this chaos. She wasn’t bad in these situations, but no one she’d ever worked with or around was better in them than Lawson. He would have known exactly what to do.
The man with the pistol moved to his right onto a slip that reached out into the water. Dozens of boats, big and small, were lined all the way down the same slip. Cassie rushed forward, and just as she placed her feet onto the sl
ip, she heard more gunshots. A man—Maybe it’s Clint, she thought—was mowing down the plain-clothed officers. The last two officers standing began to return fire, and she was forced to jump to her right to take cover behind the bow of a boat. Her skin was on fire. All the action was about a hundred feet away at the end of the slip, and she swore she saw a woman, maybe two, ducking for cover on the slip next to the water.
Any one of the errant bullets could hit Lexi. But adding to the already out-of-control chaos by putting her own bullets in the mix couldn’t possibly do any good. Besides, who would she shoot at? Clint acted like he was going to help Taylor, but why would he go to this extreme? Killing cops, or worse, federal agents? What was happening? How had things become this bad?
Cassie poked her head out from behind the boat. Shots were still being fired, but she couldn’t see Clint. She could only see two men firing off to their right and, much to her horror, two people covering their heads on the ground beside them. And now she could hear them screaming. Cassie didn’t have another option: she moved forward, using the fact that the men beside Taylor and Lexi were distracted. She moved up, one boat at a time, running up then hiding behind each one. She came close enough to be able to take a shot. But she still didn’t know whom to shoot at. It was possible that both parties in the shoot-out were worthy of being lethally stopped.
Cassie stepped out from behind one boat and took a knee. She aimed her pistol down the ramp at the man closest to Lexi. She might not know who the real criminal was, but she figured she should shoot the man next to Lexi. If she took him out, at least the bullets would be directed farther from Lexi, and that was a good place to start. Her sights danced across the midsection of the silhouette, and just as she was about to squeeze the trigger, she felt a bolt of pain at the back of her head.
Everything went black.
When her eyes opened a moment later, she was lying facedown on the ground. She tried desperately to stand, but it was as if she weighed a thousand pounds. She could have been dreaming it, but she swore the two men beside Lexi had just fallen back into the water. She blinked her eyes and again tried to stand.
Nothing.
A mere two or three feet from her nose lay her gun. She tried to move her arm, but it was glued to the ground. Things began to fog. The outsides of her eyes began filling with darkness. She watched Taylor and Lexi get to their feet, and she thought she saw their hands above their heads. Cassie tried to scream, but like her failed attempts at movement, she failed to make a sound. Had she been shot in the head?
Then she heard muffled shots from what seemed to be behind her. But she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything in that moment. She was on her way out.
That was when she saw a set of legs step out in front of her. She tried to look up, but she couldn’t make it higher than the butt of whoever owned those legs. She heard voices shouting, but they were muffled to her ears. She was blacking out. The last thing she saw was the man at the end of the boat slip turn toward the pair of legs standing in front of her, and then muffled bangs came from his gun. The person in front of her dropped to the ground, and Cassie was then staring at the bottoms of a pair of shoes.
It was the last thing she saw.
37
Lawson drove toward the Malibu Beach Inn where Taylor was supposed to be with Lexi. All the while he was running scenarios, worrying about Lexi and Cassie, and trying to reconcile why Clint would’ve had Hector try to kill him. Something about the Clint and Hector connection was off. Clint may very well have tried to kidnap Lexi to try to make it look like Sloan did it so Lawson would go after Sloan, thus forcing him to help Clint take him down, but why would Clint have had Hector try to kill him? That would be counterproductive for Clint. If Clint wanted Lawson’s help, Lawson being dead certainly wouldn’t do him any good. And why had Sloan been so quick to shoot Hector? He had been so out of his element just before that, that he could barely even hold the gun on Lawson. So much so that he was shaking. Then a minute later he could just walk up to Hector and shoot him in the head?
“Okay, we got the trace,” Claudia said, still looking at her phone.
Lawson nearly jumped out of his skin. He was so deep in thought, so entranced by the circle of lies surrounding him, that he had almost forgotten Claudia was in the car.
Claudia continued, “We’re going the right way, but she’s not in Malibu. She’s in Marina del Rey.”
“Marina del Rey?” Lawson said. Nothing was making sense.
“Yeah, just right up here on the right actually.”
Lawson’s heart was thumping. He thought he had another twenty minutes at least before he got to Lexi’s location. The thought that she was right here excited him and terrified him at the same time. It meant that Taylor and Lexi had been forced from the hotel room. The hotel room where no one was supposed to know where they were. Victoria had been telling the truth. Taylor was working for her. Lawson was sick.
Claudia gasped. “What the hell is going on here?”
Lawson noticed the people running down the sidewalk, just a couple blocks from where Claudia was showing Lawson Lexi’s location on her phone. His adrenaline spiked so hard he was nauseous. The people running were panicked.
“I don’t know,” Lawson finally said. “But be ready to shoot.”
“Turn here,” Claudia instructed.
A black SUV came careening out of the entrance to the marina they were turning into. The windows were dark, so Lawson couldn’t see inside. His instincts told him to turn and follow that SUV. But they had Lexi’s cell phone location, and it was close.
“Is it moving? Lexi’s phone? Is Lexi in that Tahoe?”
Claudia used her fingers to zoom in on her phone. “No, the phone isn’t moving.”
Lawson continued into the parking lot. He was scared to death of what he might find. He had no idea if it was good or bad that she wasn’t in the SUV or that at least her phone wasn’t in there. He was out of the truck before he even had it in park. One glance down at the entrance to the boat slips told him his worst fears might be coming true. There was a man lying facedown in a pool of blood. He tightened his grip around his pistol and ran for the entrance.
“You can’t just run in there! There might still be a standoff!”
Lawson heard Claudia, but he didn’t slow down. He hurdled the dead man and raced down the ramp. He glanced down each slip as he passed, and if he saw no sign of movement, he just kept running. He couldn’t believe how far the ramp stretched. It was longer than any he’d ever seen. He passed his fourth slip with no sign of anyone, growing more aware that they might have just let the killer go by not following that Tahoe. He hoped with all he had that Lexi wasn’t in that SUV. He hoped she was here with Taylor hiding somewhere. But nothing inside him helped him believe that was the case. Something horrible had happened there.
His mind jumped back ten years when he swam up on the boat he was renting. The blood running down the back of it. How he walked inside the boat and found his wife dead on the floor. His baby, Lexi, crying in her playpen. His life forever changed. Surely this couldn’t happen to him again. He couldn’t lose his daughter too. Not today.
Please!
As he pleaded internally to find Lexi, he finally noticed something on a glance down a boat slip. He skidded to a halt on the ramp and backed up. When he got back out from behind the nose of a boat, he saw three bodies lying on the ground fairly close to him, plus more bodies out at the water’s edge of the slip. This was a massacre.
The sound of sirens jerked his head back toward the parking lot. Claudia was running toward him, and over her shoulder police cars were filing in. One of the bodies in front of him moved. Blonde hair.
Cassie.
Lawson sprinted toward her, maneuvering around a man lying face up on the slip. He hovered over her, slowly rolling her from her side onto her back.
“Cassie?”
He reached down and moved some hair out of her face. There was blood at the back of
her head, but not a lot. Maybe she would be okay.
“Cass, can you hear me?”
She squinted, then began to blink, trying to bring herself back from unconsciousness. A moan of pain escaped her lips, and she took a deep breath.
“You’re okay now,” Lawson said.
Claudia arrived behind him; she gasped at the scene. He looked up and she was checking the body in front of him for a pulse. It was a man. Lawson couldn’t tell much else.
“Lawson?” A painful groan carried his name from Cassie’s lips.
“It’s me. You’re okay.”
Then Cassie’s eyes shot open. “Lexi? Where is she?!”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
She tried to sit up but couldn’t. She pointed in the direction of the water. “She was there. With Taylor. Some men were trying to get her, but Clint was shooting them. Trying to stop them.”
“Clint Hues?”
“Yeah, I think. But there was another guy. He came up behind me.” She rolled back to her side, squinting through the pain. “Him.”
She pointed to the man who was shot right before she went unconscious. “Last thing I saw was Clint turning this way to shoot whoever that is. Clint must be with Lexi.”
Lawson stood and walked over to the man that lay dead on his stomach. He bent down and turned him over. Clint Hues’s blue eyes stared lifelessly up at him.
“I think you’re mixed up, Cass. This is Clint. He’s dead.”
Lawson’s wheels were turning. If it wasn’t Clint who wanted Lexi, it must really be Frank. But he still didn’t understand why Hector would try to kill him if he was really working for Frank.
Lawson said, “You don’t remember who the guy was who shot Clint? What he looked like?”
Cassie was finally able to sit up. “I never saw his face. I just assumed it was Clint. I followed him here. He was going to help Taylor and Lexi. At least that’s what I thought. Someone else must have been here already.”
Shooting Star Page 15