Chapter 54
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
To Do:
- Save Luke
- Kick some ass
Everything moved in slow motion. Luke’s eyes widened as Claire emerged from the stall, Taser and toilet seat blazing. Claire swiveled, taking in the scene, barely registering the five other men, until she zeroed in on the one with a gun. Surprisingly good-looking, dressed in a three-piece charcoal suit. She swung the Taser up just as he aimed his gun.
She squeezed the trigger, and electricity crackled as prongs traveled the length of the narrow bathroom. They bit into his chest. He collapsed to his knees and seized. The gun fired with an ear-shattering bang .
Claire screamed and ducked. Her ears rang, vision still fuzzy. She waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. She turned, quickly scanning the length of Luke’s body. He wasn’t hurt. She breathed a sigh of relief, then someone grabbed her shoulder.
“ Aaahhh ,” she screamed. She used the attacker’s momentum and flipped him up and over her body. He crashed through a stall door and cracked his spine over a toilet. He lay on the floor, unmoving. She chucked the toilet seat at him for good measure.
The floor was wet. Like, way wetter than a normal bathroom floor. Her damaged ears caught the sound of a rush behind her. The stray bullet had shattered a sink and lodged itself in a pipe. Water gushed out like a geyser.
She turned back to the men who held Luke, but he had freed himself and was already fighting one of them.
“It’s her,” one of the men behind her grunted. She whirled, mustache dangling over her upper lip.
Fear gripped her. She pulled her phone out and pushed the button for the virtual assistant. “Call Jack Hartley,” she commanded, then stuffed the phone down into her plastic wrap bodice. The phone rang.
A man who looked like he wanted to sell her a used car took a step back. His eyes widened, and he darted out the door.
She dug her second Taser out and clutched it. A solid right hook from Luke sent another man spiraling, and he flashed a grin at Claire.
“Claire?” a quiet voice in her cleavage called.
At the same moment, a third man drew his arm up behind Luke. A hunting knife glinted in the light.
“Luke—” The warning had barely sounded before her second Taser fired, finding purchase on the nipples of the greasy-haired knife wielder. He jerked and crumpled, dropping his weapon. Claire snatched it and whirled around. Her pants were wet to her knees. She was sweating profusely, and on her last Taser.
She spun, searching the bathroom, but the used car salesman had not reappeared.
“Claire?” the voice repeated, louder this time.
“Shit. Jack, I’m at the convention.”
There was a hefty sigh on the other end.
“What did you do?”
“I need backup. We’re in the women’s restroom on the first floor. Several members of ESA are incapacitated. Luke was?—”
Suddenly, the fire alarm in the corner of the room began to flash. A piercing siren wailed in the hallway.
She met Luke’s eyes. “The professor,” they said in unison.
They ran from the bathroom, stepping over limbs of incapacitated bad guys.
“This one.” Claire forced her way through the throng of bodies pouring out of Conference Room C. By the time they fought their way inside, the room was empty.
“Shit!” She buried her hands in her hair. “Which way did he go?”
There was an emergency exit at the back of the room.
They looked at each other. Luke pulled her into him and drew her into a desperate kiss. Heat washed through her, and then they broke apart. There was ice in his eyes as he gripped her arms like it might be the last time.
“You take that way,” he said. “I’ll hit the lobby. I love you. Go.”
Without pausing to answer, she turned and sprinted for the emergency exit. Splitting up was their only choice. She hurtled through the door, looked left and right, and chose a path. Soon she was following the hallway she had originally come in. She was close. She could feel it. Just a right at the employee elevator, then a left after the laundry room and?—
She ran smack into a man in a black suit. They bounced off each other, him staggering against the wall and Claire tumbling to the floor.
“Claire?” Jack Hartley’s impeccably sculpted hair caught the fluorescent lights overhead. A clear earpiece snaked up his neck.
“I gotta go.” She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the piercing pain in her side. “The professor?—”
“This way?” Jack followed after her. They sprinted together, her clomping along in oversized shoes and Jack leaping over janitor’s buckets and ordering hotel employees out of the way. Their heads on a swivel, they ran for another fifty yards before bursting through the emergency exit into sunlight.
“Fuck.” Jack buried his hands in his hair. “God damn it.”
Claire stopped in her tracks. She had never heard him swear before. Tanya would have scolded him.
There was a veritable sea of sweat from her boobs to her belly button thanks to the Saran Wrap bindings. Her thighs ached from her marathon bike ride the day before. And the professor was nowhere to be found. Now what?
Jack pulled a walkie off his belt and barked into it. “I need two agents to sweep the hotel top to bottom. The rest of you need to head for the streets and stop cars. We can’t let him get away.”
“Isn’t there a perimeter set up?” Claire’s question was nearly a whisper.
“No, Claire, there isn’t. We didn’t want to tip them off that we were here. We could have had him. We should have had him. If you hadn’t attacked those men, he’d be in custody right now. Fuck.” His voice cut like a knife. There was a hardness in his eyes that she hadn’t seen since she was a child.
She recoiled, a memory creeping back in. A cold-eyed Jack shaking his finger and shouting at Claire in kindergarten for forgetting her sweater at school. Her toes curled in her massive shoes, and she took a step back. She fought for words. Was he blaming her?
At another point in her life, she would have stood down. Accepted responsibility and put together an apology basket. But so much had changed since she was a six-year-old girl.
“No.” The word escaped from her like the bark of a chihuahua.
Jack turned to her, eyebrows raised. His knuckles were white where he clutched the walkie talkie.
She took a deep breath. A river of words threatened to escape. If this exact interaction had happened two weeks ago, she would have slid into a full-blown panic attack. But now she was Medicated Claire. She was Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy Claire. And Medicated, Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy Claire was pissed.
Even though her insides squirmed, she made firm eye contact and stood her ground. Maybe it was the fake mustache and men’s clothing, but she was raging with confidence.
“I know you’re frustrated, Jack. But you don’t get to blame me for this failure. They had Luke. He is always going to be more important to me than catching these idiots. I will choose him every time. If they had Tanya, you would have done the same thing I did, no matter the cost to your ‘operation,’” she said, throwing up finger quotes.
Jack opened his mouth, but she cut him off.
“In fact, you wouldn’t even know he was in California if it wasn’t for me. I am a goddamn proposal planner . I shouldn’t be better at tracking down serial killers than the FBI. Every day that he’s out there—that they’re out there”—she pointed to the street as if expecting to see a pile of them wielding machetes in a Hummer limo—“every woman is in danger. You need to do better. This isn’t my fault. Good day.”
She turned on her heel and ran smack into Luke. He was still wet from their fight in the bathroom, but there weren’t any visible gaping wounds or lacerations. Relief flooded her. He was safe.
“Let’s go home,” she barked at him and strode off in the direction of the car. The oversized shoes nearly tripped her, but she kept walking. Anything to put distance between her and Jack. Her insides were tangled up like yarn. So much for her dream of a united family. How dare he blame her?
They rounded a street corner. The hotel was hidden from view. Her shoulders relaxed by a centimeter.
Luke, who was almost jogging to keep up with Claire’s rage-induced stride, grabbed her wrist.
“What?”
“You just yelled at your dad.”
“No, I yelled at Jack.” Jack may have saved her life the previous summer, but it didn’t make up for two decades of silence. Roy was her father.
Luke raised one eyebrow. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.” She resumed stomping back to the car, then stopped. “I mean, he tried to blame me for blowing his operation.” She waved one hand back at the hotel. “Of all the shitty things that man has done in his life—which is a long list—that’s one of the worst.”
“I heard.” His voice was soft, his lagoon-green eyes more relaxed than they should be after nearly dying at the hand of half a dozen madmen. “I also heard you say you’d pick me.”
She drew herself up to her full height. “If you’re about to make fun of me for having feelings, I need to warn you that I am pumped full of fake masculine energy and I will dropkick you straight back into ESA custody.”
He cupped the back of her head with one hand and drew her roughly to him. Fireworks exploded behind her eyes when he crushed his mouth to hers. Her toes curled in her shoes, and warmth ran like lightning through her body straight to her crotch.
After a beat, he broke apart. “I’d pick you too. Let’s go. I’m sure the cops need to talk to us, and then we have to pack.”