Chapter Twenty-Three
Jack O’Sullivan was a fuckup long before his husband died. But for one brief second, when Ava Cavalcante had looked up at him from the floor of his stupid rental van, he’d felt like he had a chance at not letting someone down.
“Jack,” Ava said. The fear was a live wire in her voice. “Jack, what are we going to do?”
“Hold on,” Jack told her. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have a plan, not exactly, but he did know he wasn’t letting Ava go. Not today.
“Oh, fuck.” She reached up and clung to his hand. “We’re going to run for it?”
He could stop, of course. He could pull over and say he’d just picked this woman up while she was hitchhiking, and show them an ID that said Reed Grant, so when Ava indignantly said Jack, he could say she was also hallucinating.
The Jack O’Sullivan he had been even a few weeks ago, before he had encountered the wildfire that was Ava Cavalcante, would have done that easily.
But this version of Jack put his foot to the gas pedal. He jerked his hand back from Ava’s, rougher than he wanted to, but he needed both hands now. He spun the wheel, turning sharply left off the county road onto a dirt road that led toward the river.
“Where are we going?” Ava asked.
“Get up and buckle in,” Jack ordered. “Now, Ava.”
“It—they’ll see me.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “But they’re trying to pull us over anyway.”
The cop surged behind them, nearly closing the gap. More sirens wailed in the distance, the net around them closing so quickly Jack was furious with himself that he hadn’t seen it coming.
He’d only had one other job come this close, a hit he’d done in Arizona one February, on a new retiree who had pissed off both his mistresses enough to get them working together.
He’d been rich, too, though not as wealthy as Jacobson, and cops had swarmed the area so fast that Jack suspected, long after he’d made his escape, that the mistresses may have double-crossed him.
But they hadn’t caught him that day, and he’d be damned if they caught him today. If they caught Ava.
“Buckle,” he snarled at her.
This was going to get . . . bumpy.
The narrow road he was driving curved sharply through the forest, but Jack took the turns at full speed, his knuckles whitening from gripping the steering wheel so hard.
“What are we going to do?” Ava asked again. “Jack, we have to ditch this van.”
They did. There was no other way.
He had his go bag—he always had his go bag—which had his cash, ID, and weapons. Some food. Extra clothes, for both of them. He’d have to get a new cross-stitch kit the next time life slowed down enough to allow it.
“As soon as I stop the van, get out and run.” Jack rounded another corner, whipping into the small trailhead for some park.
Ava flung the door open, and Jack followed, snatching his bag with one hand and tossing it over his shoulder. He grabbed Ava’s hand with the other.
Just as they reached the cover of the trees, the cops tore around the bend and into the trailhead parking lot, sirens screaming.
Fuck, they were too close.
Jack dropped Ava’s hand and drew his Glock, loaded it.
One.
Two.
Three.
A dead shot to the van’s engine, and the boom it made going up in the forest hit him so hard his ears rang.
Then Ava’s hand was in his again, dragging him forward into the forest.
“Keep moving,” she insisted.
Jack was still getting his bearings after the explosion, but she yanked him onward, deeper into the forest toward the river.
“That was brilliant,” she said when their pace finally slowed. “You bought us time.”
“They’ll realize we weren’t in the van,” Jack said wearily. “I don’t know how much time I really bought.”
“Enough to get here.” Ava stopped and looked around. There were tall fir trees surrounding them, early lupine blooming at their bases. “Where is here?”
He could hear the Willamette from where they stood.
They had traveled steadily north, nearly parallel to the river as they went farther from Portland.
He should have gone farther, much faster.
He should have been states away, regrouped somewhere.
Maybe even retreated to the black hole he lived in out in Montana.
It was practically a bunker, a far cry from the apartment with the balcony garden he’d shared with Jay.
But he’d stayed. He’d stayed with Ava, with this wild hope that they’d actually be able to pull off this hit.
“We can take a boat,” Jack said. “Farther north, up to the perimeter of Cale Jacobson’s compound.”
Ava’s head jerked up. “We’re going back? Now? What happened to lie low and wait until the party?”
“Lying low didn’t work,” Jack told her grimly. “I don’t know how close we are to the nearest dock. We can walk the coast and hope we stumble upon some private marina or make the trek a few miles into town and get a boat from the marina there.”
Ava groaned. “Can we go back to you carrying me?” she asked. “I don’t hike. Just so you know.”
She was back to coping with it all through humor, but that didn’t mean she was no longer afraid. Jack reached over and squeezed her shoulder gently. “I’ll carry what we have.”
“I wish we had snacks. And that it was still this morning, when I thought it would all be cinnamon buns and orgasms.”
Jack nearly opened his mouth to say he could still give her the orgasms part, but that would have been a deranged use of their limited escape window. Still.
He chanced a look down at her.
Ava was looking back at him expectantly.
“You’re dead serious, and that scares me,” Jack said. “Come on. Let’s start walking.”
It was midday before they found anything remotely suitable, after at least three miles walking through dense forest and thick undergrowth, constantly stopping to listen for the sound of search parties or cops. A few times, a police helicopter circled nearby.
When they did finally stop at a quiet marina at a little inlet along the river, Jack told Ava to sit down while he figured out how to hot-wire the boat.
“I’m better than you are at hot-wiring things,” Ava said. “I think we already decided that? When I stole your rental car?”
“Don’t remind me,” Jack said wryly. She probably was better at most petty crimes than he was, despite having no criminal record that he could find.
He didn’t so much as run a stop sign, especially when he was on a job.
“All right, sure. Go ahead and try hot-wiring it. We’re also going to need to not look like .
. . well, us. If the helicopter circles and they have our descriptions, they’ll lock onto us immediately.
And I really would rather not blow up a second vehicle today. ”
“I mean, I’m sure there are solutions to escaping on this boat that don’t involve blowing it up?” Ava said. “But what do I know?”
She set to work on the boat, fussing with wires he didn’t recognize.
“How many things have you stolen?” Jack asked as she worked, his eyes scanning the forest and the sky above. “And how did you know how to do it all?”
“There are reference manuals for anything.” Ava shrugged one shoulder. “And sometimes the circulation deck got boring, so I’d watch YouTube videos about hot-wiring cars. Anyway, what kind of disguises can we even manage?”
Someday, in a moment when they were not running for their lives, Jack was going to want to know more about that.
But at present, they had bigger problems.
The speedboat was small, but it did have a canopy that would mostly obscure them.
“I, uh, have a fake beard,” Jack said. He always had a rotating assortment of accessories to throw people off.
Once he’d even worn a sleeve of tattoos that looked real.
Police, when they finally managed to get a description of the mystery man who’d carried out the hit, were looking for someone with a nature-themed sleeve tattoo, round glasses, and a full beard.
Ava snorted. “Of course you do. Don’t tell me you have a fake nose and eyeglasses, too.”
“I do have glasses,” Jack admitted. “Listen. It sounds cliché and goofy, but it works. People don’t look twice at you if one little detail is different.”
“Okay, Party City,” Ava said.
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“They have good candy,” Ava said. “Easy to shoplift.”
“That’s a . . . you amaze me,” Jack said. “At every turn, you are making the worst decision possible. I assume that has been a trend for most of your life.”
The boat roared to life. Ava turned to him with a triumphant grin. “You were saying?”
“Thank you, Boss,” he said, and kissed her forehead.
She startled at the gesture, and then quickly stepped back. “I’m sweaty,” she said. “And also, kiss my mouth. Weirdo.”
“Are you red?” Jack asked her carefully as he stepped onto the boat, scanning the trees one more time for potential threats. “You really don’t want a forehead kiss?”
“No,” Ava said. “No, I’m not safewording. That was just . . . intimate.”
That didn’t make sense to Jack, who had been inside Ava only this morning, but he was too tired and sweaty and fed up with running for his life to question Ava’s interpretation of the forehead kiss.
“All right, Ava,” Jack said. “Mind if I take the wheel?”
She stepped back without a single question or sassy remark, which meant something was really wrong. “Do you want me to grab your costume out of the bag?”
“It’s a disguise,” Jack said. “Yes. Please. Thank you.”
She dug around and then appeared beside him with the beard, glasses, and ball cap.
“I sort of think I should be the one to wear the beard,” she said.
“I always thought I would look cool as hell with a beard. Have you ever tried those Snapchat filters that make you look like a middle-aged bearded guy? Lumberjack vibes?”
Jack shook his head, glancing up from the wheel. “You can show me later,” he said distractedly. “Have you checked Cale’s calendar recently? I want to know if he’s made any changes.”
Ava plopped onto the bench seat behind him as she opened the app. “He changed his regular shoeshine, canceled it, actually, for the foreseeable future. And—it looks like this weekend is completely booked off. His calendar doesn’t say what it’s booked for, though.”
Jack considered for a moment. “No notes or shared invites at all?”
Ava paused for a moment. “No notes,” she said. “Oh, shit, he has a flight scheduled on his private plane for Sunday, destination Spain. He won’t be back for a month? What the fuck, Jack?”
Jack’s stomach twisted. It was too late, way too fucking late, to extricate himself from this mess now and leave this hit behind. But god, it had just gotten a lot harder. “We have to get him this weekend,” he said.
“But he’s booked somewhere all weekend.” Ava huffed in frustration. “How the fuck are we supposed to get to him?”
Her head snapped up, realization clearly hitting him at the same time as it dawned on Jack.
“You think—” she began.
“That they moved the gala up?” Jack asked. “So they could avoid further security breaches?”
“And also so they can get some good PR out there,” Ava said, grinning up at him. “Their stock has tanked the last couple of weeks. That was an unintentional side effect of attacking Cale, but I’m not mad about it. Oh, damn, Jack, look at this.”
Ava held up her phone.
Plastered across her news app . . . were their faces.
Ava’s, a zoomed-in shot of her the day she’d tackled Cale Jacobson outside the café. And Jack’s, his mask up and his cap pulled low, a grainy picture of him behind the wheel of that minivan.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“This is everywhere,” Ava said in wonder. “Jack, we’re fucked. How are we ever gonna get close to him now? We don’t even know for sure they’ve moved the gala. We don’t know that he’ll be at his stupid mansion.”
Running hadn’t worked.
Hiding hadn’t worked.
Jack’s meticulousness had always served him before this, the extreme caution he used keeping him safely out of jail and ahead of whoever was coming after him. But it hadn’t worked this time, and that might mean it was time for a change in strategy.
“I think we take a leap of faith,” Jack told Ava slowly. “We go to Cale Jacobson’s mansion, and we go now. And when we find him, we kill him. Together.”