Deadly Pursuit (16 page)

“Sorry.” Kira unwrapped her silverware and opened the napkin onto her lap. “I had to double back a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t—Sprite, please.”

“Great.” The server who’d materialized at the edge of Kira’s table detoured back to the bar, barely breaking stride.

“Fascinating.” There was a flapping sound and Kira pictured Brady turning the page of his menu, trying to decide between the steak and baked potato or burger and fries while checking his watch to see how soon he could be done with her. “I would have thought a wealthy trophy wife such as yourself would have her own driver and bodyguard.”

Kira fumed in silence until her temples began to throb. It was a crime to kill a federal agent, sure, but what about jabbing him in the back of his head with a fork while in a public place? How much time would she get for that?

But … no. She needed him. No matter how big a jerk he was. Taking a deep breath, she opened her menu and refused to rise to his bait. “Kareem wants me to use a driver, but so far I’ve held him off.”

“You do realize that there’s probably a GPS device hidden under the buttery leather seats of your luxury car …?”

Was that a minute amount of concern she heard, layered in with the sarcasm? “That’s why I wanted to meet you here rather than downtown at your office.”

“And your dear husband won’t be suspicious when he studies your credit card bill and discovers you’ve been slumming at a Friday’s?”

Kira shrugged even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “They’ve got a great turkey burger. And apparently I can’t quite rise above my humble beginnings.”

“Are you ready to order, sir?” The server was somewhere out of her line of sight, apparently talking to Brady now.

“How’s your turkey burger?” he wondered. “I hear it’s good.”

Kira bent over her menu and tried to smother her unexpected smile.

“It’s great,” the server told Brady. “Especially with cheddar and barbeque sauce.”

“Let’s do it. With fries.”

“Will do.” The server walked the two steps to Kira’s
table and handed her the Sprite, which Kira sipped. “What would you like?”

“I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger with extra bacon, fries and a Brownie Obsession for dessert,” Kira said. “Just keep the food coming.”

“On the healthy heart plan, are you?” asked Brady as the server headed back toward the kitchen, and this time Kira could almost swear she heard genuine amusement in his voice. It was hard not to twist at the waist and try to catch a glimpse of this rare event. Had she ever seen him smile? More importantly, could he smile without imploding his face?

“What can I say?” Kira replied. “Sometimes carnivores need meat.”

“Much as I love a great turkey burger, I’m not sure why I’m here, Mrs. Gregory. So why don’t you enlighten me?”

Oh, God. The moment of truth at last. “I need your help. And I can help you.”

There was a long and painful pause. If he wanted to make her squirm by not answering, it was a brilliant plan. Fidgety and nervous, she eased her head into a slow glance over her shoulder, making sure he was still there.

He was. Sipping his pink lemonade, the SOB.

“So sorry, Mrs. Gregory,” he finally said. “As I told you the last time you contacted me, and the time before that, if you need help, you need to go to the Red Cross because I’m not interested.”

Okay. So she’d expected this. He didn’t trust her and he was determined to make her walk over a few more hot coals before he committed to anything. She understood. And still the hysteria hovered in her throat, suffocating her by degrees.

“I need
protection
.”

She could almost feel the bastard shrug behind her. “They’ve got battered women’s shelters for that. If you’re trying to disappear, you need to talk to the U.S. attorney about qualifying for WITSEC. So there you go. You’ve got lots of options available. Good luck.”

There was such boredom in his voice, such absolute lack of empathy for her situation and what it cost her to sneak out and meet him here and the risks she was taking that she forgot herself in her desperation.

Turning at the waist, gaping at the back of his head and ready to climb over the booth until she landed in his lap and forced him to look at her, she pulled up short only when she saw that the server had reappeared with both of their plates.

Kira whipped back around and, no longer able to get enough air through her nose, floundered, her mouth opening and closing like a caught trout’s.
Breathe, Kira. Breathe.

“Turkey burger.” The server clunked the first plate on Brady’s table.

“Looks good,” he said. “Can I get some ketchup?”

Ketchup. Kira nearly burst into maniacal laughter and wet her pants with the panic. She was caught up in an endless black vortex of drugs, lies and violence, living with her convicted felon of a husband, a man who probably killed a person a day on a good day, two on a bad one, and every second she survived was a small miracle and an enormous personal triumph—and this man wanted
ketchup?

“Ketchup. I’ll be right back with that.” The server stepped closer and presented Kira with her plate. “Bacon cheeseburger for you.”

“Thanks.” Kira stared at the food, trying not to gag.

The server started to move off, but then doubletaked when she caught a closer look at Kira’s face. Shit. Kira swiped at her nose and tried to perk up, but too late.

“You okay, honey?”

How funny. The Friday’s server was willing to help her if necessary, but Brady, whose help Kira really needed, wasn’t.

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

The server moved to the next table, leaving Kira free to notice the loud and appreciative smacking going on behind her.

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Gregory?” Brady asked around what sounded like half his sandwich. “A fly in your food? The turkey burger’s great, by the way. Thanks for the recommendation.”

God help her. “He’s going to kill me. When I try to leave him, he’s going to kill me.”

This ugly truth, at least, stopped the chewing. There was another pause.

“Probably.”

Brady’s honesty, for some reason, calmed her. Finally, at long last, she could acknowledge the situation. Stare it down and formulate a survival plan beyond trying to keep her husband out of her bed every night.

She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t paranoid. She wasn’t delusional. She was right.

“So that’s it, then? I’m on my own? You’re going to stand by and let him kill me?”

Brady didn’t speak … didn’t speak … didn’t speak for so long that she began to let herself hope that maybe her life or death mattered to him because, hey,
if he hit a dog in the street with his car he’d probably stop to see if he could help the dog, right? But then his voice, lower now but no less resolute, shot her hope all to hell.

“You’re not my responsibility. Mrs. Gregory.”

Stunned, she sat there with paralyzed limbs and listened to him slide out of his booth. Then she heard the flick and flutter of what was probably a bill as he left it on the table. Finally, heavy footsteps trailed off toward the front of the restaurant and he was gone.

And she was alone. Again. Still. Always.

Seconds passed. She stared at her gooey hamburger. She thought about the efforts she’d made to become a worthwhile person even if she was a drug kingpin’s wife, the studying she’d done and the nursing degree that was almost hers. She thought about the secret bank account that was in her name alone and the pitiful remnants of her spending money that she’d managed to save in it because Kareem gave her only a little cash and encouraged her to shop with his platinum card so he could track her spending and keep her short leash in his firm grip.

She thought about how she’d landed herself in this situation in the first place by being the dumbest and most desperate nineteen-year-old who’d ever walked the face of the earth, and how she had no intention of spending the rest of her no-doubt short life paying for that mistake.

Most of all, she thought about how far she’d come and how much farther she had to go, and how she could get there—she knew it—if only someone would help her, just a little.

And then she got mad.

Snatching up her purse and jacket, she tossed her
own bill on the table and raced out into the parking lot. It took point-two seconds to spot Brady, who was sitting three spaces down in an idling and unmarked black sedan that screamed federal agent to anyone who cared to notice.

He didn’t see her because he had his head bent low over his phone, checking e-mail or some such.

Kira threw caution to the wind. If Kareem had someone following her today, she was pretty much screwed, but at the moment she was screwed no matter how she looked at it. So she marched up to his car, jerked the passenger side door open—what kind of self-respecting law enforcement official left his door unlocked?—and climbed inside.

Brady gaped while she dropped her stuff on the floor and pulled on her seat belt.

“Drive,” she barked.

“Fuck,” he said, and drove.

Funny thing about hospitals: they were all the same.

Every last one of them smelled of alcohol and fear, industrial strength bleachy cleaners and death. The personnel all wore Crocs in every twisted color under the neon rainbow and smiled those quiet smiles of concerned comfort when they knew damn well that they were going off to break in a few minutes and you’d still be stuck in the plastic chair in the waiting area, hanging on until you got word that your loved one was going to live or die. The fluorescent overhead lights, colored tape on the pristine linoleum floors and buzzing activity at nurses’ stations universally scared him to death.

Oh, yeah. Jack and hospitals went way back.

Resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, Jack tried not to think, which was hard since he had a whole brain full of fucked-up shit to consider.

Like how his whole No More Collateral Damage rule had been shot to hell.

Like how Amara had been shot saving his life and he, true to form, hadn’t protected her worth a damn.

Like how he was pretty sure he’d have to take the elevator up a couple flights to the psych floor and check himself in for a permanent stay if she …

He’d vomited, which was pretty funny.

Not right away. He’d held off during the race to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, when he held Amara’s hand and told her she’d be okay. He’d been through that drill before, so he did a real good job of sounding convincing. Then he held off until they wheeled Amara down the hall and into the exam room. He even managed to wait until the doctor came back out and told them she’d need surgery to patch the hole.

And then he calmly went to the nurses’ station and asked where the nearest bathroom was. Following the red tape on the fucking floor, he located the men’s room and an empty stall.

Whereupon he puked his guts out for, oh, about ten minutes or so.

Then he pounded his forehead against the plastic door six or eight times—yeah, that’d hurt—and sobbed quietly until he puked again.

Now here he was, waiting, her smell still on his skin, and he didn’t know if he could struggle through one more second of life and then face another second after that.

He heard footsteps and then someone appeared in his peripheral vision and sat in the chair next to him. It wasn’t the doctor, so he didn’t give a shit who it was and didn’t bother looking.

“How’re you doing?”

Mateo. Jack didn’t answer.

Silence for a few minutes.

“We got the shooter through the belly. Turns out she was a cute little thing with a
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
sweatshirt on. Funny, huh? She had a stolen car with enough firepower in it to kill two or three hundred people and a GPS setup that looked like it came straight from the CIA. Anyway, Kareem’ll have to find someone else to do the shooting from now on. She’s dead.”

Fascinating.

“We searched Amara’s stuff. She had a little pen-sized GPS tracker in her coat pocket. We figure that’s how the shooter found you at the motel.”

Again—fascinating.

Who cared about the whys and wherefores at a moment like this? Amara was shot. Debriefing the circumstances wasn’t going to make her any less shot.

Then he thought about the moving force behind all this violence and jerked his head up with a bitter fury strong enough to tear this whole hospital apart.

“And how’s our friend Kareem?” Jack asked. “Safe at home in his million-dollar mansion with his beautiful wife getting ready for his retrial with another top-notch lawyer?”

“Last I heard, yeah.”

If he’d had any contents left in his stomach, Jack would’ve vomited again.

Kareem was still free and sitting in the lap of
luxury because his fast-talking lawyer, who was nothing more than a prostitute in disguise, selling his wares to anyone able to pay without regard to the moral implications of what he did, had won him a new trial on procedural grounds.

Despite all his team’s hard work and sacrifices—and there’d been plenty, both personal and professional—the most dangerous drug kingpin Jack had ever encountered in his career was roaming the streets again, free to continue selling drugs, expand his evil empire, murder people and generally contaminate everything that came within the gravitational pull of his malevolent life—and all because of
procedural grounds.

Renewed agitation had Jack jumping to his feet to pacing, which was difficult in the tight row between chairs. Luckily the waiting area was deserted and there was no one nearby to complain about Jack’s relentless cursing. After a minute he wore himself out and collapsed back in that torture rack of a chair.

Mateo took another stab at conversation. “Sooo … Amara. She seems like the compliant type.”

An unexpected snort of laughter contracted Jack’s ribs, but this was no time for jokes, not when Amara’s safety was still at issue. “She needs to be protected when she gets out of here.” Jack hoped none of his feelings for Amara showed on his face because he
really
wasn’t up for an interrogation right now. “I don’t want Kareem going after her again, trying to get to me. Once the retrial begins and he can get a clear shot at me, I figure she’ll be safe to go back home and resume her life. Until then, I’ll need to look out for her because she doesn’t have a family.”