Chapter 14
“ W hy are you getting naked?” Blue exclaimed, staring at her with a combination of dismay and fascination.
Jane didn’t answer. Instead she picked up a large rock, palmed it, wrapped her shorts around the rock and her hand, and shattered the back window of the car.
“What are you doing?” Blue hissed, his frantic gaze skirting the horizon. Certainly someone had noticed a half dressed woman bashing in a car’s window. But no. No one turned on a light, poked a head out a window, or showed up to arrest her.
Jane opened the driver side door, shook the glass out of her shorts, and put them back on. “Get in if you’re coming,” she said before slipping behind the wheel.
Blue scurried around to the passenger side, struggled the door open, and eased inside. “What, are you planning to hotwire this thing?”
“Of course not,” Jane said. She took the pilfered screwdriver, stuck it into the ignition, and used the rock like a hammer to bang it into place. Satisfied, she tossed the rock outside, closed the door, and turned the screwdriver. The car roared to life. She put it into gear and took off, all while Blue stared at her, shocked and speechless.
“What the actual world, Jane?” he declared at last.
She didn’t reply.
“You can’t drive,” he added.
“Who says?” she replied.
“You! You don’t have a license.”
“I said I didn’t have a license, not that I couldn’t drive. Who can’t drive a car? What am I, Amish?”
“I don’t know, Jane, do Amish people take off their pants and steal cars?” he said. Not only was she driving, but it was a standard transmission, something Blue had no idea how to use. And she was doing ninety on the freeway. Belatedly, he fumbled for his seatbelt. It was hard to buckle it one handed. Jane reached across him to help.
“Both hands on the wheel,” he snapped, but she ignored him and clicked his belt closed.
“In case we get pulled over. The fines on no belt are huge,” she said.
Was she joking? She was driving a stolen car, one stolen by her, and she was worried about a ticket? “Prison is not going to go well for you,” he mumbled.
She snorted a laugh but otherwise ignored him.
They sped out of the city. Blue wasn’t a genius with directions, but he was certain they were going the wrong way.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“To my criminal lair. We’ll see what the Kingpin wants to do with you,” she said, not bothering to look at him.
“Jane,” he pressed, but she said nothing else until eventually even he recognized where they were. “The airport? You can’t go to the airport.”
“Pretty sure I can,” Jane said.
“You have no ticket, no money, no ID, no shoes, no bra. ”
“I’ll alert Anna Wintour at Vogue I’m dressed all wrong for a heist and flight.”
“Okay, you’re mad, I get that, but you can’t stroll up to an airplane and say ‘fly me to DC’ without the things I mentioned.”
She skidded to a halt in front of the drop off gate, used a napkin from the floor to wipe down her half of the car and tossed it at him. “Watch me. Wipe down your side unless you want to go back to prison. Your prints are definitely on file.” Then she opened the door, got out, and disappeared.
Blue sat in the car for a solid two minutes, positive Jane would return, possibly in handcuffs. When she didn’t, he struggled out of the car, remembered he needed to wipe it down, and returned to the car. After wiping it clean of his prints, he sprinted inside, barefoot, his hands still tied in front of him.
Maybe they had detained Jane on entry. He imagined himself trying to explain to airport security. You see, officers, she’s apparently had some type of mental break that turned her from a mild-mannered anthropologist to one of the hookers from Grand Theft Auto. But when he walked inside, she wasn’t detained by one of the guards. In fact, she was nowhere in sight. As usual, JFK teemed with masses of people, too many to find one tiny doctor, even if she was barefoot and wearing silky pajamas.
As before, Blue had no idea what to do. Should he try to hail a taxi—barefoot and bound—make it back to the hotel, and call Ridge? Or should he look for a phone here and call his boss? He imagined trying to find someone at JFK that would believe him. It would take forever. They would detain him and probably call Ridge for him. He would rather be the one to tell the story, knowing already it was going to be humiliating and might possibly get him in a heap of trouble. The one thing Ridge had asked him to do, the one thing, was to keep an eye on Jane, to keep her safe.
He walked back outside. Security was already surrounding the car he’d arrived in. As nonchalantly as possible, he bypassed them, walked up to a cab, opened the door, and slid inside. “Hotel Manafort in Manhattan,” he said.
The driver took off, and Blue breathed a sigh of relief. Now he only had to hope his ID and phone were still in his room back at the hotel. Had whoever nabbed him also taken his things? He’d know in an hour.
“Wait here, my wallet is inside,” Blue said when they finally arrived back at the hotel. The cabbie turned to scowl at him.
“No way, buddy, I’ve heard that one before.”
Blue showed him his rope-bound hands. “Do I look like I can make an easy escape? It’s been a rough night. Just give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll throw in an extra twenty.”
“You got five minutes,” the cab driver said.
Blue hopped out, sprinted to the elevator, ran to his room, worked the key out of his pocket, opened the door and, to his great relief, saw his wallet and phone sitting where he’d left them. Had it only been a few hours ago that he had set them on his nightstand to go see Jane, full of hope and promise and romance?
Not pursuing that line of thought further, he took his wallet back downstairs and paid the cabbie. “I don’t suppose you have a knife in there that could cut me loose,” Blue said.
The cabbie reached under the seat, pulled out an eight-inch blade, sliced through Blue’s ropes, and took off. He seemed so unfazed Blue wondered if it wasn’t the first night he’d had to cut a rider free.
Blue turned back toward the hotel, palming his phone. He was out of excuses and time; he’d have to call Ridge. He hit the button on his phone.
“What’s the bad news, Blue?” Ridge greeted him.
“How do you know it’s bad news?” Blue replied.
“I have a sense about these things,” Ridge said. “How’s Jane?”
“She was fine the last time I saw her.”
There was a pause. “The last time you saw her? Explain quickly before I reach through the phone and rip out your tonsils.”
“My tonsils have already been removed.”
“Then I’ll find some new ones and paste them on you. Quit stalling.”
“We got taken.”
“Okay, I’m going to go ahead and assume that either you got free again or your kidnappers have a liberal cell phone policy,” Ridge said.
“We got free.”
“Who took you?”
“No idea. They knocked me out. Before that I saw black masks. I don’t think Jane saw them either, but you’d have to ask her. They talked to her, so maybe she heard something identifiable.”
“Get to the part where you lost her,” Ridge urged.
“I didn’t lose her; she lost me. Rather, she left me bound and barefoot at the airport after she stole a car like friggin’ MacGyver.”
There was silence on the phone so long, Blue thought Ridge had hung up. Then he heard Maggie’s voice. “Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Blue, what did you say to Ridge? I’ve never seen him laugh so hard.”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“No. You’ll end up the same way.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. He’s about to rupture something internal. Can you crack an appendix from laughing?”
“Promise you won’t laugh,” he said.
“I’ll try,” Maggie said.
Blue took a breath. “Jane stole a car and left me barefoot and bound at the airport.”
It took a second. He could practically picture her trying to push back the laughter, but of course she didn’t succeed. She erupted like Mt. St. Helen’s. “Pfffft,” was all he heard as she sputtered and dropped the phone.
“Good talk,” he yelled. “I can always count on you two for support.” He ended the call, Ridge and Maggie’s laughter ringing in the background. He had barely enough time to shower, pack his things, grab a cup of coffee and a pastry, and hail yet another taxi back to the airport. It was a good thing the trip was for work or he would have to take out a small loan for taxi fare. He was up to almost four hundred dollars now and counting.
The airport was as busy as it had been a few hours ago, if not more. Blue made it through security with no problems again and boarded his plane on time. He sat and stared at the empty seat beside him, expectantly waiting for Jane to arrive. When she didn’t, he felt antsy and anxious, wondering what had become of her. For the first time in a few hours, he had a chance to reflect on the events of the past day and night.
What if Jane had staged the kidnapping? That would certainly explain how she got them out of it with such ease, and also why she had disappeared after. But if she was the forger, what had been her motivation for the kidnapping? And why was Blue seemingly the only person who found her suspicious? And how was it possible he was both equal parts distrustful of and attracted to her?
Wherever she was, he hoped she was okay.