Killing Fear (42 page)

He jumped onto the balcony and through the open window. He ran through the rooms until he found a door and let himself out before the owners could even catch a glimpse of him.

He found himself on a street four blocks over from the alley where he’d been hiding from the man who wanted him dead.

Time to disappear.

THIRTY-NINE

“It’s beautiful,” Robin told Isabelle when she walked into the gallery early that afternoon with Will on one side and Mario on the other. The day was overcast with a fifty percent chance of rain later that night, but for now it was dry.

Her excitement from yesterday had been squelched by the message from Glenn, but she was determined to continue with her plans.

You’ll never know when. Tomorrow? Next month? Next year?

Glenn’s words haunted her, but he was right. She wouldn’t know when. And she refused to be a prisoner for the rest of her life.

“Isn’t it?” Isabelle beamed, a little wary of the two tall, armed men. “I decided the halogen lights worked best with your bold colors.”

Twenty-six paintings were on display in all different sizes, with two dramatic eight-foot murals framing the entry. Each painting had its own special lighting. A caterer had been hired to serve champagne and hors d’oeuvres and they were setting up in the small kitchenette in the rear of the gallery.

“Get ready, Robin. The guests are arriving,” Isabelle said excitedly and left to greet them.

“I’ll man the door,” Mario said. “I have one man on the back and two working as caterers.”

“Glenn’s not coming here,” Robin said. “It’s still daylight.”

Will forced her to look at him. “He wrote that to scare you.”

“He wants to kill you.” She swallowed her fears and nerves. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. He’s a master at psychological torture. But you’re stronger than that. I’m not leaving your side, Robin.”

“For the rest of my life? We both have jobs. You can’t be with me every minute of every day. And maybe that’s what he wants, to get us both together—”

“Stop.” Will put his hands on her face, his expression firm, sharing his strength and confidence. She breathed easier.

“Okay.”

“This is your big day. Don’t let that asshole ruin it. We have very competent people looking for him. We’re not dropping this. He killed two cops, Robin, don’t forget that. Cop killers don’t walk.”

She nodded, held his hand against her face. “I’ll be okay.”

Will watched Robin all afternoon. After her moment of fear at the beginning of the art show, she’d put on her game face and was gracious, polite, and professional. He saw through her act, but the performance gave her confidence and strength. He was proud of her.

The gallery was packed, the event obviously a success. As the crowd thinned out, his cell phone rang. It was an unavailable number. He picked it up as he moved to a quieter corner, his eyes still on Robin. “Hooper.”

“Nico. The target has fled.”

“What?”

“The target is no longer in Mexico.”

“What happened? Where is he?”

“I had him in sight twice. The first time he scaled a building and escaped through an unsecured apartment. But I learned where he eluded me. A few bribes later and I had word where he was headed. Almost had him again on a dirt road outside Tijuana. He shot a woman to buy himself time. She would have died if I hadn’t stopped to put on a field dressing.

“I never had him in sight again, though I tracked him to Calexico.”

“When?”

“Two hours ago.”

“And you lost him there?”

Silence. “I couldn’t cross the border. I called in a favor and have him identified as boarding a Greyhound bus heading for San Diego. Number 177 arriving at the main bus terminal at eleven-oh-six p.m.”

Will wrote down the information. “Thanks,” he said, then realized Nico had already cut off the call. In the back of his mind he wondered who the hell Nico really was and how someone as straightlaced as Hans Vigo had hooked up with him.

Will had no intention of waiting for the Greyhound bus to arrive in San Diego. He called in the information to Chief Causey to expedite putting together a SWAT team to apprehend the bus en route, then he told Mario what was going on.

He pulled Robin into a semiprivate corner behind one of her canvases.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, searching his face.

He rubbed her arms. “I have a lead on Glenn. I have to go.”

Her brows furrowed in worry. “Be careful.”

“Mario is going to take you home and stand guard until I get back.” He kissed her short and hard. “I love you.”

Will rode with the unmarked SWAT van east on I-8. It had begun to drizzle in San Diego, but as they drove the sky cleared up. Commander Tom Blade was on the radio in the back. “ETA twelve minutes,” he said.

“Do you have a visual?”

“The CHP is tracking the bus discreetly. We don’t want to alert Glenn or the other passengers that something is wrong. They have an unmarked pair of vehicles playing tag team with surveillance. Bus dispatch has ordered the driver to pull off at Exit 30 and feign illness. Protocol requires that all passengers disembark if the driver leaves the bus. We’re five minutes behind the bus.”

“Make sure the CHP knows how dangerous he is.”

“They’re aware.”

Something nagged Will. Why would Glenn get on a bus? He’d know he was trapped if anyone saw him. Bus terminals had similar security as airports. He wouldn’t be able to bring a gun on the bus, and Will didn’t see the bastard going anywhere unarmed.

Nico sounded confident that his information was correct, but he didn’t personally witness Glenn boarding the bus. Will was relying on information from an informant he hadn’t talked to.

“Where’s the passenger manifest?” he asked Blade.

“There’re nine adult males on board traveling alone, and four traveling with a companion.”

“I need names.”

“It’s on the computer.” Blade jerked his thumb.

Will scrolled down the list on the SWAT laptop. Nothing jumped out at him. He had Glenn’s fake names, the names Sara Lorenz had created for him. None were on the list, nothing even close.

“He’s not on the bus.”

“I don’t have time for this, Hooper. ETA is six minutes. The bus has just pulled off the road. CHP is in place. We’re going off your information, dammit.”

“He was there, I’m certain of it.” At least as certain as he could be based on his conversation with his mysterious informant. “But he got off somewhere. Did the driver stop anywhere after leaving Calexico?”

“Their dispatch said there were no scheduled stops between Calexico and San Diego.”

“What did the driver say?”

Blade instantly saw the potential problem. “We determined that the safest course was not to engage the driver in conversation but to get everyone off the bus as quickly and safely as possible.”

Will listened to Blade with growing dread. “Dammit, Blade, he got off the bus. Somehow, he got off and we don’t know where the hell he is.”

Bus passengers were detained outside the suburb of Alpine off I-8. A light drizzle rained down as the passengers hovered under a fast-food awning, but Will barely noticed.

Theodore Glenn was not on the bus. He was not among the passengers. And he stood listening to the old bus driver with fear.

“We was only on the road twenty minutes when the old man complained he was sick. I left him at the Motel Six right outside Calexico.”

“Do you normally stop the bus if someone is ill?”

“’Course not, we got a toilet on board. But he looked white as a sheet and said it was his heart. I didn’t want him croaking on my watch.”

“What time was that?”

The driver made a point to look at his log. Will grabbed it from him. There was no mention of a stop outside Calexico. The log indicated no stops until this one.

“Did you stop or not?”

“Look, if I make an unscheduled stop, I got this huge pile of paperwork to deal with, and the guy was sick and—”

“What did he look like?” Will interrupted, keeping his voice low and even.

“Old. Least sixty, sixty-five. White hair. Lots of it, but white as snow. He’d have been tall if he wasn’t so crouched over and walking with a limp. Coughed the entire time. No one wanted to sit near him. I was glad to dump him off.”

“Did you see him get on the bus?”

The driver shrugged. “Sure.”

“Are you certain?” Will asked, his voice rising.

“Yeah, I did,” the driver said, defiant.

Will strode over to the group of passengers waiting to continue their trip.

“Raise your hand if you remember the stop at Motel Six where a sixty-year-old white-haired man was let off the bus,” he asked them. Virtually all of them raised their hand.

“How many of you would be able to recognize that man?”

A couple people put their hands down, but most kept them up.

“How many of you saw that man board the bus?”

After some hesitation, one by one the hands went down. The only hand remaining was a young boy of about ten.

Will went over to him. “What’s your name?”

“Keith Gomez.”

“Are you traveling alone, son?”

He nodded. “My mom and dad got divorced. I come on the bus to visit my dad every other weekend. I’m going back home to my mom. She’s going to be worried if the bus is late.”

“We’ll explain it to her, Keith. You saw the white-haired man board the bus.?

He shook his head.

Will frowned. “You kept your hand up. I thought you understood that meant that I wanted only those people who saw him get on the bus.”

“He didn’t. See, there was this other man. He was sitting in the back, right next to the bathroom door. As soon as the bus started to go, he went in there. He was coughing a lot. He was in there a long time. Like ten minutes. When he came out he looked different. He had brown hair, then he had white hair. He saw me staring and winked at me.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“He was coughing a lot and told Fat Ernie—the bus driver—that his ticker wasn’t good. What’s a ticker?”

“It’s slang for heart,” Will said.

“So Fat Ernie dropped him off. Ernie said it was to sleep off a bender. What’s a bender?”

“When someone drinks a lot of alcohol in a short period of time. What did the white-haired man look like before he entered the bathroom?”

The kid shrugged. “Brown hair. Sort of old, like you.”

Will unfolded Glenn’s mug shot and put it on the table in front of the kid. It instantly grew moist in the drizzle. “Is this the man you saw?”

The kid nodded. “Yeah, but he looked a little different. I think that’s him.”

Will stood and walked over to Blade and the others. “He’s not going to be at the motel, but someone should check it out. I’m going to check the bus. The kid said Glenn changed his appearance in the bathroom.”

Will boarded the bus and went straight for the bathroom. Pulling on gloves, he went through the trash. He found a receipt and bag from a costume shop in Calexico. On the bag Theodore Glenn had written:

By the time you read this, I’ll have Robin.

Hurry home, William.

FORTY

Robin stared at the gun in her hands. She’d been holding it since the last time Mario checked in with her. He was outside her door, the only entrance and exit into her third-floor loft. One of his men had made sure all the fire escapes were secure and watched the doors into the building and underground parking garage.

Quiet. Too quiet.

Will hadn’t called, but she couldn’t expect him to from the field. He was working. How could she do this every day he went to work? Worry that he wouldn’t come home?

Stop.
She was making excuses. On the surface, because of her fear that what she and Will had was too good to be true; but deep down she knew it was because she feared Glenn would make good on his threats. That he would kill Will. And her. That this entire ploy was a ruse to put Will within Glenn’s reach. Dear God, if he killed Will…A groan escaped Robin’s lips. Though intellectually she understood that she wasn’t responsible for the deaths of her friends seven years ago, in her heart she knew Glenn’s obsession with her had contributed to the murders.

She turned her gun over and over in her hands. “I will kill you, Theodore Glenn. I promise, I will kill you.”

Pickles leapt onto her bed and made her jump. He purred loudly and massaged his paws on her lap.

She stared at the lamp in her room. Even if she turned it off, she still had the small light in the kitchen on. She hadn’t really tried to be in the dark since the last time she freaked out, and that was years ago.

She turned off the lamp.

Her apartment plunged into darkness. Pickles me-owed as her grasp on him tightened. She let go and he jumped down, running under her bed. Her breath came in quick gasps. She tried to focus on the dim light coming from the kitchen, but it seemed to be moving farther and farther away. Her heart raced and she frantically reached out for the lamp, fumbled, knocked it onto her carpet.

“No, no, no!”

On her hands and knees she found the lamp and turned on the switch. It flickered and came on. She righted the lamp on her nightstand and hated herself for her fear. Dammit, she was thirty-one years old! She’d faced belligerent customers, hurtful boyfriends, and Theodore Glenn in court. Back then she had testified against him with less palpable fear than she had right now when submerged in darkness.

Isabelle had suggested a psychiatrist would be able to help with her phobia, but Robin didn’t want to admit that it was a mental problem. How could she expect Will to sleep every night with the lights on? Last night she knew, even after his exhausting week, that he’d been awake half the night.

For Will, she would find a way to get over this. Maybe with him in her bed, she wouldn’t need a light to feel safe.

“Sorry, Pickles,” she said to the cat still hiding under her bed. She put the gun down on her nightstand so she could take a hot shower. Water always made her feel better. The ocean, the bath, the shower, didn’t matter what, water was soothing.