Chapter 8 #2
As I looked around, I saw a van driving in. Maybe caterers. I checked myself in the metal door knob. I looked bad, with reddened, goopy eyes and smeared makeup, but at least I looked human. The van was pulling into a parking space. It was show time.
I clutched the two syringes, and caught up with the driver as he got out of the van.
A tall black guy with a short beard, in a blue windbreaker.
I moved toward him rapidly. “Um, excuse me?” My voice sounded high pitched, breathless, quavering, and I didn’t even have to fake it.
“I was wondering if you could help me out.”
The guy looked me over as I approached, his eyes widening with alarm. Maybe I looked weirder than I thought. “Are you okay, miss?” he asked.
“Not really,” I admitted, lunging down to stab the needle into his thigh.
He let out sharp grunt, staring at me as he tried to speak… and failed.
He sagged to his knees. I guided him down as best I could, trying to keep his head from bumping on anything, until he was lying safely on his side.
I straightened up and called out to the guy who had just gotten out of the passenger’s side. “Hey! Excuse me? I think your friend is sick! He’s down here on the ground, passed out! I don’t know what’s wrong with him! Could you come over here?”
The other guy, younger, also wearing a blue windbreaker with the same lettering, hustled around the back of the van, alarmed. “What the hell? Galen? What’s the matter?” He crouched down over his colleague, shaking him, patting his face.
I stabbed the third needle into the younger guy’s shoulder, and let him fall, right on top of Galen.
“Gentlemen, I am so sorry,” I murmured to them.
“I really hope someday I can find you and make it up to you.” I crouched down and tugged the windbreaker, with no small difficulty, off the younger guy who lay face down over his friend.
It would be huge on me, but a lot less noticeable than a strapless ball-gown.
I tugged the two unconscious men out of the way of the van’s tires. Then I opened up the back, and was confronted with a huge ice sculpture, breathing out a fog of awful cold. Oh, God. I was going to have to put that poor guy into a literal ice-box.
I ran for the gurney, shoved it through the garage to the van at a dangerously high speed, rattling and bumping.
I got the gurney up right at the edge of the van and climbed inside, kitten heels and all.
I grabbed the top of the body bag, and slid Shane inside.
I almost didn’t manage it. He was so freaking heavy.
Six foot two or three, at least, and all solid muscle and sinew.
It felt like he was made out of cast iron.
I unzipped the body bag over his face and neck, to make sure he had air. His face looked terrifyingly still and gray. And now I had to worry about hypothermia, too.
Shane’s life depended on me getting somewhere fast enough to revive him, before he slipped away, from drugs, from depressed respiration, from the cold. The growing weight of responsibility was driving me wild.
I put my finger to his neck and had a little scare before I felt it… very slow, very faint. Go-go-go, Cass. Like a bat out of hell. Or he’ll drift away, and Reggie’s last chance along with him.
I shrugged on the windbreaker and suddenly thought of what Jana had said about the GPS.
I didn’t see anything on the dash, but I ran my hand under the frame of the van, all the way around just in case…
and oh fuck, yes. I got lucky. The magnetic casing of the GPS trace under the car frame was over the back left tire.
I pried it out, and left the thing on the pavement next to the two guys.
Then I dug the car keys out of Galen’s pants pockets, got into the van, and backed away, leaving those two slumped bodies, one on top of the other, behind me.
Hoping desperately that I had not hurt them.
Or Jana. Or Shane. Oh, please. I did not want to be responsible for hurting anyone.
Keep moving. When they stop you, they stop you.
There was a pair of cheap sunglasses in the beverage holder between the seats, big goggle-style ones.
I put them on. They were huge on me, but they did a good job of covering my smeared makeup.
My feet felt unsteady on the pedals. I’d never driven in shoes this ridiculous before.
I sped toward the gate, pulled to a halt, and held up the security pass lanyard that dangled from the mirror to show to the guy at the gate.
He leaned over, peered inside. “Wait. Didn’t I just let you guys in?”
“Me and my boss, Galen,” I said. “He’s sending me back to pick up the other ice sculpture. I should be back in about twenty minutes. Thirty, max.”
I hunched down, smiling, holding the windbreaker closed. Hoping he hadn’t registered the face of the guy in the passenger’s seat. Hoping he wouldn’t lean close enough to see the big, puffy skirt. That would definitely sound WTF alarm bells.
The guy beckoned me impatiently out. I took the briefest second to feel bad for the fact that he was about to lose his job, and then I swiftly rethought it. He’d be much better off finding a job somewhere other than this scorpion’s nest, for fuck’s sake.
The gate crawled open, while I jittered in the driver’s seat like a pan of popcorn. Tires squealed as I pulled out onto the road. Ouch. Smooth, Cass. Real unobtrusive.
And then I was out on the open road, in a ball gown, in a stolen van, a trail of drugged bodies scattered behind me and an escaped prisoner in the back.
I was having a hell of a time easing off the gas pedal.
A couple of hairpin turns where I started to spin into the guardrail forced me to slow down.
It would be tragically stupid to pitch off a mountainside now and fall to a screaming death.
I knew the countryside, theoretically. I’d spent several sleepless nights at Halliwell’s headquarters, studying satellite maps, memorizing every road, every stream or gully or forest. Just in case I found it necessary to run away.
I racked my brains for the first safe, secluded place I might be able to stop to give Shane his wake-up shot. I couldn’t wait until I got to my mouse-hole.
I called my hideouts mouse-holes because that was what Mom had called them.
She’d always been waiting for the cat to pounce.
She’d spent a lot of money outfitting our mouse-holes with stored food, clothes, documents.
We had never been forced to use them, but it was a habit that was hard to break, expensive though it was.
After she died, I saw no reason to stop the practice.
I was careful to contact real estate agents anonymously, to use shell companies and fake names to ship supplies and equipment.
The mouse-hole I’d outfitted near here was a humble cabin in the hills.
The agent had followed all my instructions, and when I’d checked it out, everything I needed had been there waiting.
An old but functional Jeep was parked outside under a tarp, with a full tank of gas.
It had everything I might need to hole up for a little while.
But Shane couldn’t wait, or I’d open up the back door to find a corpse.
I came up on an old logging road that led down into a thick stand of fir trees near a dry river-bed. I dug once more into the bag, and pulled out the yellow banded syringe, my hand shaking.
I got out of the van, tottered on my kitten heels on the rocks around to the back.
Threw the door open, and climbed in. Jesus, it was so cold.
The poor guy was probably getting frostbite.
I realized that the ice sculpture was a 3-D rendering of Halliwell Enterprises’ corporate logo, a huge stylized HE.
I zipped the body bag down, uncovering the scrapes and bumps and burns and blood smears on the poor guy.
I wished I could get that collar off him while he was still unconscious.
If he convulsed, he could hurt himself still further with that wire.
He might even fatally slice his own throat, like he almost had last night.
But I didn’t dare. I had to have some leverage. At least, the remote I had was a dummy prop. That made me feel slightly less cruel and evil. But only slightly.
He had a pulse, barely. So far, so good. I plunged the air out of the syringe Jana gave me to wake him, and injected him before I could psych myself out of it.
Then I waited for all hell to break loose. One second… two… three… four…
I’d just gotten to ten when he yelled, exploding into frantic movement.