Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

Lacy followed Milo’s command. She jumped up, ran to her car, tumbled in behind the steering wheel and locked the doors. “Milo, this is crazy! I can’t just leave him here.”

“He’ll be all right. I’m trying to save
you.”

“Why?” She looked through the windshield and spied the two men, the older one now having taken a seat on a rocky outcrop, still talking. Apparently, they hadn’t heard her mad dash or the slamming of the car door.

“Lacy, turn on the motor and get out of there fast.” In that peculiar way the English have of ending a question on a down note, he asked, “Do you trust me?”

“Yes. I do. But my car’s headed the wrong way.”

“Turn around as quickly as you can. Is he watching you?”

“Yes, he is now.” The motor purred to life. Backing and turning at the same time, she hit a rock with her right rear tire, which lifted the back end and left the other rear tire spinning in the air. She jammed the gearshift into first and gunned it. Surely that noise got the men’s attention, but she didn’t dare look back. She heard a shout from behind.

“Okay, Milo. Now what?”

“Drive to the fork in the dirt road you are on and turn right.”

Lacy glanced at her rear-view mirror and saw Süleyman, shouting, waving his arms, running down the road behind her. Some hundred yards ahead, she saw that the road did join another dirt road, the one she was on being the less traveled and grassier. It seemed as if a right turn would lead her closer to the highway. “How do you know where I am? How did you know to tell me to turn right?”

“Your phone has GPS. I’m following you on my home screen.”

“Can you
do
that?”

“I
am
doing that. You’ll come to a paved road in about twenty seconds. When you hit it, turn left.”

“That seems like the wrong way. I think the highway is to the right.”

“You’re not going to the highway. I’m taking you around a back way to the gendarmerie. They know you well by now.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I’ll save the complete explanation for later, but for now just know that I’ve tracked down Jason Remmick. He’s part of a professional smuggling operation you’ve horned in on. Süleyman Güler is part of it, and he’s been given the order to kill you.”

“I don’t believe it. Okay, I’m coming to the paved road. Turn left?”

“Right. That is, correct.”

“This doesn’t look right, Milo. This road is heading toward nothing but scrub pine and rocks.” In fact, the road ahead was obscured by a heat mirage, making it look as though it were covered with water. Lacy wiped sweat from her eyes with her sleeve. Turning her head down and to the right, she saw she had a companion.

A puppy.

She’d brought one of the puppies with her. She had no memory of it, but she must have had the puppy in her hand when, at Milo’s command, she’d made the mad dash for the car. She also had no memory of laying it on the passenger seat, but there it was. “This really doesn’t look right, Milo. Are you sure this will take me north to the police station?”

A car roared up behind her, ballooning in her rear-view mirror. The mirage ahead vanished and revealed a sharp left turn in the road. The car screamed up on her left side, apparently to pass, leaving Lacy with no choice but to run off the road at the turn. The Ford tumbled down a steep, boulder-strewn embankment, seeming to move in slow motion, but in reality taking two seconds or less. The front tires hit a huge boulder and flipped. Lacy grabbed the puppy, opened the door, and jumped. She must have hit the ground head first because that’s when everything went black.

* * *

Dizzy. Thirsty. Lacy felt so weak she couldn’t open her eyes, and when at last she did she saw only a shimmering haze. She could hear the blood rushing through her ears, pounding behind her eyeballs. Her mouth tasted like vomit. Her body felt so hot, as if she were roasting on a spit. As if her skin had cracked open and was now dripping melted fat down onto .
 
.
 
.
 
onto .
 
.
 
.
 
what was it? A soft lump in the crook of one arm.

Forcing her head off the ground with every bit of strength she had, she forced her eyes open. Her eyelids felt scorched. She wondered if eyeballs could be hard boiled like an egg.
That’s crazy. I must be delirious.
Heat stroke. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.” She thought she was saying the words but she couldn’t be sure. She heard no sound, so maybe she wasn’t. She blinked a few times, and through the haze of her scorched corneas, saw the puppy. Was it dead? It wasn’t moving.
Oh, no! What have I done?

Everything went black again.

* * *

Lacy felt a tongue on her face, then slipped back into oblivion.

* * *

“I’ll stay with her.”

“Let us know when the saline solution bag is low. She may need another.”

“Will do.”

Lacy lay with her eyes closed trying to decide when to open them and let whoever was talking over her know she was awake. Now her skin felt covered in something cold. In fact, that’s exactly what she was covered with—a wet sheet. She heard a whirring. A fan? She shivered.

A familiar voice was whispering, “Please, please, please.” Over and over.

Faking it just a little while longer, she tried to organize her thoughts. It was Paul Hannah’s voice she heard. Where was she? Cold and covered by a sheet.
Was she in a morgue? Holy shit!

That woke her up. “Paul?”

“Oh, my God! Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in a hospital—a sort of hospital. Actually, more like a clinic. You’re dehydrated and suffering from heat stroke, but you’re going to be all right.”

“Where’s the puppy? Is it dead?”

“The puppy is fine.” Paul’s voice quavered. He cleared his throat. “The puppy was dehydrated, like you, but his mother is rehydrating him. It was the mother dog who found you. Why did you run away, Lacy? And why did you take the puppy?”

“Phone call from Milo. He told me to.”

“To steal the puppy?”

“No. To get out of there quick. He said Süleyman was out to kill me.”

“Jesus, Lacy. I told you not to trust that nut case. Did he accuse Süleyman by name?”

“Yes.” Lacy got up the courage to open her eyes. She saw Paul sitting by her bed. His eyes were red. Her own felt as if they’d been sand-papered. “Somebody ran me off the road.”

“I see. How did Milo talk to you?”

“My phone is the one he bought me in Istanbul. He had the number.”

“How did he know you were with Süleyman? Why did he say Süleyman was out to kill you? That’s crazy.”

“Smugglers. He knew where I was because he was following me on his GPS.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I mean
my
GPS. On my phone.”

“On a disposable phone with a prepaid card?”

Lacy was becoming cognizant of the fact that she’d been duped. But why? She wished her head didn’t pound so. “How long will I have to stay here?”

“I don’t know.” He stood and squeezed the bag of saline solution. Lacy traced the tube from the bag to her arm. “I have to tell the nurse this is almost empty. Be right back.”

While he was gone, Lacy looked around her room, at the rosy light of sunset slanting through a window, and saw another bed, parallel to her own but empty and spread with a clean sheet turned back on one top corner. She was covered with a single white cotton sheet, damp, and in the lee of a tabletop fan—for the purpose of lowering her internal temperature, she assumed. With her free hand, she lifted the sheet and found that she was wearing nothing at all.
I must remember not to throw this sheet off without thinking
.

She had to make sense of it. Somewhere, she felt, lay the answers. Did she know all she needed to know to figure out what happened? What else did she need to know?
Let’s start by going through the whole scenario assuming that Paul is right and Milo was deceiving me. Not trying to save me but trying to get me killed.

The car that zoomed up out of nowhere and ran her off the road must have been part of it. Part of a plan to kill her. The way it had sped into the left lane right where the road curved was crazy if the driver’s aim was simply to pass. His or her aim was to run her off the road and down that embankment at a speed that would probably result in her death. She made a mental note to ask Paul what happened to her rental car.

She raised her head an inch hoping to see her clothes, then lowered it quickly when a stabbing pain shot through.

If Milo was out to get her, he had to be in cahoots with someone here. A smuggler, perhaps. Someone at the camp who was part of the smuggling ring.
But what if it was Milo himself who ran me off the road?
Lacy shivered involuntarily. He could have been following me, not with GPS but in person. I paid no attention to another car that may have been behind me. He would’ve had to stay way back after I turned off the main highway. After I turned onto the dirt roads, I’d have surely noticed his dust cloud unless he really kept his distance. I hate to admit it, but it’s making sense.

Wait. Milo can’t drive.

You idiot.
If he lied about everything else, he’d have lied about driving. He had a license, didn’t he? And it was current. But why would he have gone out of his way, as he did, to help me in Istanbul?
You moron. He told you everything he wanted you to believe so you would take that cab ride to the Spice Market.

Meanwhile he called Jason and told him where he could find me. But how would he have known I’d come to the Pera Palace Hotel?
Imbecile!
The woman with orange hair saw me at the airport and followed me to my hotel. She may well have been following me the whole next day, too. Milo’s got my phone number because he bought the phone. He knows my car because he rented it. He’s probably got my credit cards and my passport.

By the time Paul returned with the nurse, Lacy was convinced her core temperature was coming down, but it was still double digits higher than her IQ.

“Tell me what happened. How long was I out? How did you find me?”

“Süleyman phoned me,” Paul said. “He was screaming, ‘She’s gone crazy! She drove off and left me here!’  He told us how to find him, and we went looking for you in the van. But we had no idea where to look. That whole area is nothing but wasteland and gullies. Süleyman came up with the idea of using the dog. You lost your hat on your way to the car, so we gave the dog a good whiff and told her to find you. It took her a while. She’d take off in one direction, stop, weave back and forth, then lift her head, sniff the air, and take off in another direction.”

“She wasn’t tracking me, she was sniffing the air for a scent of her puppy.”

Paul pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose with his middle finger. “Probably so. At any rate, it took her nearly an hour to find you. You were out cold.”

“Out, yes. Cold, no.”

“The old shepherd Süleyman had been talking to showed up in a donkey cart while we were loading you into the van so we handed the dog and the puppy over to him.”

“What about my car?”

“Totalled. You didn’t happen to buy the optional insurance did you?”

“I don’t know. Milo handled the rental transaction.”

“Doesn’t matter. We can figure it out later.”

“Doesn’t matter?”

“It’s only a car.”

“Paul, I think whoever attacked Sierra thought she was me. She was coming from your tent that night, someone said. I had left your tent a couple of hours earlier, but what if someone wanted to kill me and they saw me go into your tent but didn’t see me leave? And didn’t see Sierra go in either, so when she came out, he assumed it was me?”

Paul reached forward and laid his hand on hers. “Ordinarily, I’d say, ‘Who’d want to kill you?’ but obviously someone does.”

“That was little more than a day after I arrived. So there must be a connection to the man on the train. I hadn’t had time to make any enemies in camp yet.”

“And you hadn’t met Milo yet.”

“As far as I know. He could have been on the train.”

“Jason and Milo and mystery man are all on the train heading for our camp? Heading for a rendezvous with whoever is smuggling antiquities through our camp?”

Lacy raised her head carefully and saw that Paul’s hand was still resting lightly over her own. Lest he decide to move it, she laced her fingers through his. “I forgot to tell you. Mystery man has a name now. Clifford Craven. Ring any bells?”

Paul required a complete explanation. She told him about Henry’s trip to the gendarmerie and his identification of the John Doe as an electrician who did contract work at the museum.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him, Twigs. I’ll ask Bob, though. He knows most of the people at the museum.”