Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (23 page)

Circling back, he drove back up Magnolia Avenue past the motorcycle again without seeing either of them. After another couple of circuits, he pulled into an empty parking slot and checked his cell phone. No messages, no texts, no missed calls.

Damn it, Evie, where did you go? This wasn’t part of our agreement.

He accessed the company’s GPS locator application and typed in the code of the tracker he’d given Evie before they left Chickasaw County that morning. Hitting Enter, he waited, breathless, for a signal.

There. A bright red flashing dot appeared on the small map, moving fast. She was in a vehicle, he realized, heading north up 20th Street toward Birmingham’s downtown district.

Jesse’s gut coiled into a hot, tight knot.

Chapter Eighteen

“Was this a setup?” Evie kept her voice low, acutely aware of the two men sitting in the front of the panel van. She and Cav sat in the back, their hands cuffed to a pair of hooks bolted to the side of the van.

“I wish.” He looked authentically terrified, she noted. He had every right to be because the two men who’d shoved gun barrels into their backs and hustled them into the panel van hadn’t been playing around.

“Make one stupid move and you’re both dead,” the taller man had told them as he cuffed them into the windowless belly of the dark green van. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, he was built like a tank, with massive shoulders and arms the size of tree limbs. His companion, the driver, was smaller and less brutishly muscular, although he looked as if he’d hold his own in a fight. He had sandy hair and very pale eyes, striking in his tanned face.

Both men had
professional
written all over them, which almost certainly meant they were SSU thugs of some ilk.

“Have you ever seen either of these guys before?” she asked quietly.

Cav shrugged, his cuffs clanking, drawing a warning look from the dark-haired man.

Panic bloomed like a poisonous flower in Evie’s gut, threatening to swamp her with full-blown terror. She couldn’t let that happen. If she wanted to get herself and Cav out of this mess, keeping her head was vital.

They weren’t alone at least. Jesse was out there somewhere, and she knew, bone-deep, that he’d never stop looking for her until he found her. As long as the GPS tracker in her earring was working, Jesse would be able to track her location. The captors had taken the Ruger from her holster but hadn’t searched her for any other weapons, so they hadn’t found the slim, multibladed knife tucked in the bottom of her bra, beneath her right breast.

She hoped they wouldn’t search her again.

“What they’re looking for—” Evie paused, eyeing their captors. Neither man seemed to be paying attention to them. She lowered her voice further. “Do you have it on you?”

He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. She wasn’t sure if it was a yes or a no.

She tried to figure out where they were going, but all she could see was what was visible through the van’s windshield. And their captors blocked most of that view. Still, she got the sense that they were moving away from the business district into a residential area by the way the trees lining the road ahead dappled the light coming into the van.

Logic told her their captors would want to stash her and Cav somewhere private. Maybe a house or an old, abandoned building? It wouldn’t matter ultimately. As long as she could keep her earrings in her ears, Jesse should have a chance to find her.

The van finally pulled to a stop, and the engine cut out, filling the vehicle with oppressive silence. The big man with dark hair turned to look at them, his expression hard. “If I hear a peep out of either one of you, both of you are dead. Understand?”

Evie suspected he was bluffing—the SSU and the people they worked for needed to get their hands on the evidence Cav was hiding, and it would be almost impossible to do if he were dead. But she didn’t try testing her theory. Their situation was dire but not desperate enough to warrant a suicide mission yet.

The burly man unlocked Evie’s cuffs first, hauling her bodily out of the van before his accomplice opened the cuffs around Cav’s wrists. His arm wrapped around her waist as he half walked, half carried her around a shaggy crape myrtle bush that filled her view. When they cleared the edge of the bush, she got a quick look at where they were going as the man shoved her up a shallow pair of steps into a screened-in side porch.

Their would-be jail was an old two-story house with flaking gray paint that once might have been white. Tall crape myrtle bushes draped with aggressive kudzu vines blocked the house from most of the neighboring homes around the property. She could barely make out glimpses of the faded siding through the thick leaves and vines.

She decided not to struggle, as she had no way of knowing if there were people in the nearby houses who might hear her calls for help. Safer, for the moment, to let the situation play out according to her captors’ plans. If these men behaved true to SSU form, they planned to use her as leverage against Cav to get him to tell them what they wanted to know. They had no way of knowing that Jesse could find her with the flick of a button on his cell phone.

The next few hours might be horribly unpleasant, but she would almost certainly survive them. All she needed to do was to keep her head long enough for Jesse to locate her.

The side porch door led into a shabby kitchen not much bigger than the one in Evie’s small apartment. The place smelled of mildew and stale cigarettes, and the urge to sneeze tickled her nose. “What is this place?” she asked. It must have been a home once. Had the SSU bought the property or just taken it over like squatters?

The man’s answer was to shove her down a dark corridor to the far side of the house. He stopped in front of a small door, opening it to reveal a walk-in linen closet lined on either side with shelves. No windows and only the one door in or out.

The burly man pushed her through the narrow center aisle of the closet and into a rickety metal folding chair at the back of the closet. He grabbed both of her wrists in one large fist and fished a set of flex cuffs out of his pocket. Evie almost made the mistake of smiling, but she held it in, trying to infuse her expression with the appropriate amount of terror. It wasn’t hard—for all the hope she was holding out that Jesse would find her soon, she knew she could be in grave danger.

But at least she’d be cuffed with plastic with her hands in front of her where she could easily get to the knife hidden in her bra.

“Make noise and your friend will regret it. Understand?” The big man locked the door behind her, pitching the room into utter darkness.

She heard the ragged sound of her own breathing in the close, silent room and realized for all her trust in Jesse to find her, she was still scared witless. She’d never liked close quarters, and she particularly hated them in the dark.

Okay, Marsh. Get ahold of yourself.
She breathed evenly, trying not to let the tickle in her nose send her into a sneezing fit. She needed to stay calm, keep her head.

Only two things you have to do,
she told herself silently, easing her hands under her bra to slip the knife into her palm.
Stay alert and get ready to make your move whenever the opportunity arises.

She could do it, she thought, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin against the smothering dark.

She’d been trained by the best.

* * *

T
HE TRACKING BEACON
had led Jesse on a winding tour of north Birmingham, past the civic center and eastward toward the Red Mountain Expressway before the beacon came to a permanent stop.

Wherever Evie was going, she’d arrived.

On a detailed mapping program, he narrowed her location to a street about five blocks from where he currently was. He took a chance and made a quick drive down the street in question, taking in the surroundings as quickly and nonchalantly as he could.

There were five houses in a row on a narrow street, sitting relatively close to each other, their yards grown over with weeds, unpruned bushes and a generous infestation of kudzu vines that had grown up over bushes, fences and trees alike. The general unkempt state of the properties served to isolate them from each other, blocking views and no doubt discouraging any neighborly forays onto adjacent properties.

Evie had to be in one of them, but the tracker couldn’t pinpoint exactly which one. And if Evie was there against her will, choosing the wrong one could be a disaster, tipping off her captors that she had backup. There was no telling what kind of danger that knowledge would put her in.

Despite the impatient fear gnawing at his gut, he parked at the far end of the alley behind the row of houses and made a phone call, summoning every ounce of control he had. After a few transfers, he finally reached his target, Birmingham police detective Briggs Cooper, his uncle Jay’s son. Briggs’s deep voice rumbled over the line. “Jesse, how the hell are you?”

“Small talk later, Briggs. I have a situation.”

* * *

T
WO HOURS OF WAITING
for something to happen had killed Evie’s previous confidence. Only the faint glow of waning daylight seeping under the closet door drove back the unrelenting darkness, and if Jesse didn’t find her soon, even that small bit of light would be gone.

She fought the temptation to check her watch every few seconds to relieve the gloom with the faint glow of the illuminated dial, as watching the clock seemed to make the time move that much more slowly. Was there something wrong with the tracker in her earring? She didn’t dare check for fear she would drop the earring in the dark and be unable to find it again.

For the first time in over an hour, she heard a noise beyond her own breathing. A muffled cry—Cav, she realized, making out the words. “Hey!” he was calling. “Hey, guys? Are you still out there?”

She listened for a response, anxiety knotting her stomach. If these guys had wanted them dead, they’d have killed them already. But why hadn’t they already started trying to use her to convince Cav to give up his evidence?

She stifled a grim chuckle. Was she actually longing for a torture session just to break up the monotony of being stuck here in the dark?

“Hey, are you even out there? We’ve got a problem!” Cav’s voice sounded fainter than before. She thought she heard a low, choking cough. “You think I haven’t taken steps to ensure that if I die, the evidence comes to light? You think I’m stupid?”

The last few words were definitely punctuated by coughs. Evie pressed her ear to the wall on the side from which Cav’s voice had come. She heard more coughing.

Then she smelled it. The sulfuric odor of a gas leak.

Their captors hadn’t brought them here to ask them questions at all.

They’d brought them here to die.

* * *

J
ESSE WATCHED FROM DOWN
the street, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, as his cousin climbed the steps to the front porch of the dilapidated two-story house on the corner. It was the most overgrown of the five houses and the only one not owned by the city and scheduled for condemnation. It was owned by a company, not a person—Audiovisual Assets LLC, according to his cousin Briggs, who’d finally called ten minutes ago with the information.

“We’re pretty sure that’s an SSU company,” Jesse had told his cousin.

Briggs had brought a fellow detective for backup, a tall, barrel-chested mountain of a black man named Caleb Lowell. They arrived dressed in jeans and golf shirts, carrying clipboards, driving a slick Mustang Cobra nobody would mistake for an unmarked police car.

Briggs had gotten into Jesse’s car to tell him what was going down, then joined Lowell on foot. They’d made a show of going to two of the uninhabited houses first, in case anyone was watching.

Now they stood on the porch of the house in question, and Powell knocked on the front door, the sound loud enough to carry all the way to where Jesse sat in his car.

After a minute without a response Lowell knocked again. He looked at Briggs, then both men glanced toward the street. Briggs gave a nod.

Jesse checked the GLOCK’s magazine and double-checked the chambered round. He and Briggs had agreed that Jesse’s part was simple and singular: find Evie and get her out of danger. It would be up to Briggs and his partner to take down the bad guys and get Endrex to safety.

Briggs turned to greet him as he climbed the porch steps. “We’re hearing something inside, but it doesn’t sound like a voice. Since your GPS tracker shows your friend may be inside and possibly in danger, we think we can go in warrantless due to exigent circumstances.”

Jesse made an impatient face. “Let’s just do it.”

While Powell returned to the Cobra to retrieve the battering ram Briggs had brought with them, Jesse walked down the porch and tried looking in the window, his gut twisting. Would those men have left Evie and Endrex alone here? What if the sound Briggs had heard was an animal trapped inside? What if his GPS system had gone haywire?

What if Evie was already dead?

The sound of heavy footsteps on the porch stairs made him turn, and as he did so, a whiff of odor made him freeze in place. It was a foul smell, the sulfuric stench of rotting eggs.

It came from inside the house.

Powell and Briggs already had the streamlined battering ram between them, ready to slam into the door. The first hit would stress the metal dead bolt, slide the pieces against each other.

Possibly strike sparks.

“No!” Jesse sprang forward, closing his hand over his cousin’s arm. He caught Briggs in midswing, killing the momentum. The battering ram glanced weakly off the wooden door.

Briggs stared at Jesse as if he’d lost his mind. “What the hell, Jesse?”

“Gas,” Jesse answered, his pulse roaring in his ears. “I smell gas.”

* * *

I
F
I
GET OUT OF HERE ALIVE,
Evie thought,
I’m going to buy Megan a whole month of steak dinners.
Jesse’s sister’s knife-in-the-bra trick might be all that was standing between Evie and death.