Chapter 15
Fifteen
Good, I texted back. And it was. An excellent place to be. Nobody—specifically the two Russian men—would think twice about anyone being there. Not if the store was open around the clock. I’ll let you know when they move.
We went back to our surveillance. To tell the truth, I was starting to get tired.
It was getting close to two in the morning.
I’d been up since just after six. And it had been an eventful day.
The only things that kept me awake were the chill in the air, and the moisture that was slowly seeping through the knees of my jeans from their contact with the ground.
I was about ready to give up when something finally happened. A rectangle of light opened in the darkness and then was extinguished quickly. It stayed on my retinas for a while, as such things do, as I reached for the binoculars and lifted them to my eyes.
Yes, there they were. One man in the lead, with… was that a gun in his hand?
Surely not. I mean, normal people don’t walk around with guns, do they?
Or maybe, if they’re operating successful nightclubs and transporting the night’s take, they do.
He had a bag in his other hand, that might be full of money. It didn’t quite have the dimensions of Diana’s duffel, but there’d be room enough for a fair amount of newspaper in there.
Or maybe there was another—or additional—reason for the gun.
He opened the passenger door of the black sedan, and put the bag on the seat. Then he closed the door again. And opened the door into the back. And walked back to the door into the nightclub.
The girls filed out and over to the car, where they scrunched together in the back seat.
He slammed the door after them and went around the car and got behind the wheel.
Meanwhile, his associate locked up before getting into the passenger seat.
I saw the movement when he transferred the money bag from the seat to the floor before he sat down.
The lights came on. I grabbed my phone and texted Rachel. Get ready. They’re moving.
She didn’t respond. I hoped that meant that she was getting ready, and not that anything had gone wrong.
Down below, the black sedan pulled around the building and out of sight. I refocused the binoculars on the opposite side of the street, and saw Rachel’s car pull into traffic.
Time to go.
I jumped to my feet—not as quickly as when I’d been twenty—and made my way toward the Lexus. And while I’d like to think I didn’t sound like a buffalo moving through the brush, I wasn’t anywhere close to quiet, either.
Edwina was thrilled to see me, of course, and I had to nudge her over into the passenger seat before I could get in.
Then she kept insisting on sitting on my lap, and I had to keep pushing her over into her side of the car.
It wasn’t until I was down on Nolensville Road, that I was able to dig my phone back out of my pocket and dial Rachel.
“Where are you?”
They were well out of sight by now, of course. It had taken me several minutes to get down here. By now, both cars might be several miles away in several different directions.
“Going east on Harding,” Rachel’s voice said in my ear. “Probably headed for the interstate.”
This was good news, in a way. It was bound to be easier to follow them there, undetected, than on the smaller, mostly empty roads.
On the other hand, it would be easier to lose them there, too.
“Just keep the phone on,” I told her. “Put it on speaker and leave it in the console or somewhere, so we can stay in touch. I’ll try to catch up.”
I dropped the phone in my lap, where Edwina wouldn’t be likely to trample it, and stepped on the gas. The SUV shot off up Nolensville Road toward the intersection at Harding.
When Rachel announced that they were passing the interstate—without turning onto the ramp—I was still two blocks behind. “Where are you going, then?”
“Looks like straight ahead,” Rachel said. “Toward the airport.”
Hopefully they weren’t headed there. Hopefully they were just going toward the airport, not actually to it.
“Any other cars around?”
Rachel said there weren’t.
“I think I can see your taillights up ahead. Turn off somewhere, so they think you aren’t following them. I’ll take over for a while.”
“Roger,” Rachel said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m turning.”
She was. I could see the car ahead of me start to signal and then go off to the right.
Much farther ahead, the taillights of the sedan were winking in and out as it navigated through the industrial area on the other side of the interstate.
Up above us, a plane was coming in for landing, so close I could almost see faces in the lighted windows. I pushed down on the gas and sped up.
By the time I had the sedan more reliably in my sights, Rachel reported that she’d turned around and was behind me. “I can’t see you, but I’m coming.”
“I’m probably good for another couple of minutes,” I said. “We’re getting close to Murfreesboro Pike, though. More traffic, but they may notice if I turn the same way they do. It might be best if you’re ready to take over then.”
Rachel said she’d speed up and be ready. “Just don’t lose them.”
I promised I wouldn’t and we carried on.
On Murfreesboro Road, I let the sedan go right while I went straight.
Then I spent a couple of minutes finding a place to turn around—it wasn’t easy, since I had strayed onto airport property, and they like you to follow the road in a big circle around the terminal instead of turning around.
As a result, both the sedan and Rachel were way ahead of me by the time I got back to Murfreesboro Road.
“They’re turning east on Bell Road,” Rachel reported.
“I’m nowhere near Bell Road,” I told her. “You’re just going to have to turn, too, so we don’t lose them. I’ll try to catch up.”
“I’ll do my best to be inconspicuous,” Rachel said.
“Please. These are the guys I think beat up Zachary. We don’t want them to notice us.” Just in case they beat us up, too.
Rachel agreed that we didn’t. She followed them onto Bell Road toward the lake while I scrambled to catch up.
By the time I took a left on Bell, Rachel had followed the sedan onto smaller roads. She read them off to me as she wound her way through the neighborhoods southeast of the lake behind the sedan.
“They’re stopping!” she said finally, in an excited whisper.
“Pull over and stay where you are. Don’t go any closer. I’m almost there.”
I was almost there. It took a couple of minutes, during which Rachel gave me the exact address and reported that the car had driven straight into a basement garage, and she wasn’t able to see anything that happened after that.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “I’m coming around the corner now. With my lights off.”
I switched them off just as I swung onto the street where Rachel was parked.
I could see her car halfway up. And I was reminded of what Mendoza had told me a lifetime ago, the day before yesterday.
This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where cars were parked on the street.
Rachel’s little white compact stood out like a beacon.
I picked up the phone again. “Drive off down the road. You’re too conspicuous sitting there. There aren’t any other cars parked on the street.”
I imagined her taking the same look around as I’d taken when Mendoza told me the same thing two days ago. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’m going to pull into this driveway,” I said, and did. The house was dark and silent, and the inhabitants were probably dead asleep at this time of night. “Go around the block, park out of sight, and come back and join me.”
A second passed, and then Rachel’s car rolled off down the street.
With the lights on. I rolled my eyes, but refrained from comment.
Chances were nobody around here was awake to notice, and if the Russians happened to be looking out the window, then all they’d be concerned about, was the fact that she was leaving.
I stayed where I was, in the driveway of a house two doors down and across the street. The view of the house where Rachel had said the Russians went in, was pretty good.
It looked like your standard mid-century split-level, one of four or five I could see on the block.
A rectangular shoe box, it had pale brick on the bottom half and what looked like vinyl siding on the top half.
One door, a little offset from the middle, sat halfway between the top and bottom floor, with a double picture window to the left and two single windows to the right.
My right.
The driveway led directly to a two-car garage on the bottom floor, below the two single windows. On the opposite side from the garage, past the front steps, was another double window, only half as tall as the one above.
I figured the bigger picture window was probably the living room, while the two single windows were bedrooms with a window each. The basement room could be anything from another bedroom to a den or a workout room or something like that.
There were no lights on anywhere. Not even a sliver where the curtains didn’t quite meet. The inhabitants were either werewolves, who could see in the dark, or they’d boarded up all their windows.
A shadow suddenly appeared next to the car, and I swallowed a scream. Edwina, who had curled up to take a nap now that the car was finally still, raised her head and gave a short, sharp bark.
“Shhhh!” I told her. “It’s Rachel. You know Rachel. You like her.”
I unlocked the door and snagged the dog so Rachel wouldn’t sit on her. “That was fast.”
“I’ve been working out,” Rachel said and slid into the passenger seat. Edwina growled, but once she recognized Rachel—one of the two people who gave her treats and took her outside when I wasn’t there—she subsided.
“You didn’t tell me you were bringing the dog,” Rachel added.
“I was afraid she’d pee on David’s white shag rug. She isn’t used to the apartment yet. Plus I like the company.”
Rachel nodded. “What do we do now?”