Chapter 7 #2
I pressed harder on the accelerator. She had an hour head start, but she didn’t drive the way I was driving. Maybe she’d stop for gas. Food. A bathroom. Anything that ate up minutes between her and that apartment door.
I called again outside of Missoula. Straight to voicemail.
Again at the state line. Again somewhere past Coeur d’Alene.
Each time the same dead silence before the tone, and each time I hung up and gripped the wheel and did the math on how far ahead she was and whether the gap was closing or widening.
Spokane assembled itself around me. Strip malls, traffic lights, lanes multiplying. I barely registered any of it. The only thing in my head was the timestamp on that last intercept. Team in position. Holding. Waiting.
Complete the objective.
I turned onto Sera’s street with my jaw locked and my hands welded to the wheel. Found her building. A mid-rise apartment complex on a residential block. Nothing remarkable from the outside.
I drove past once and scanned the parking lot. No sign of her car.
I let out a breath I’d been holding since Missoula.
Then I read the rest of the scene. A dark sedan parked half a block east with a clear sight line to the building’s main entrance.
Two men inside. The driver had his seat reclined back, enough to look relaxed, not enough to lose the mirrors.
The passenger’s window was cracked despite the temperature. These weren’t amateurs.
A third man on foot. Northwest corner, leaning against a bus shelter with a phone in his hand. Casual posture, but his weight was forward. Feet set. Ready to move.
Three men. Three positions. Triangulated coverage on the building entrance. Professional. Patient. Exactly the kind of deployment a careful, methodical organization would use for a job that needed to be clean.
I circled the block. Found a spot on the south side with a line on both the building entrance and the parking lot. Pulled in. Killed the engine.
Then I waited. My skin burned under my shirt.
My ribs kept time with my heartbeat. The city pressed in from every direction, all sound and movement and uncontrolled variables, and I sat in the middle of it and watched the entrance to Sera Bolland’s apartment building and did not let myself think about anything except the geometry of the three men who were there to kill her.
Twenty-three minutes.
Her car pulled into the lot. I watched her find a spot near the east end, close to the building entrance. She parked and sat for a moment.
Then she got out. Closed the door. Walked toward the entrance.
The man at the bus shelter straightened. A shift of weight, his phone lowering to his side. In the sedan, the driver’s seat came up.
I was already out of my car.
Her apartment building had a side entrance on the south wall, a service door propped open with a rubber wedge.
Maintenance crew, probably. I was through it and into a service corridor with fluorescent lights and a concrete floor.
Main hallway ran east to west. The lobby was at the east end.
Sera would be coming through the front door in seconds.
I caught her in the first-floor hallway, ten feet past the mailboxes. I had to stop her without letting anyone else know what was going on.
As she passed, I reached out and closed my hand over her mouth and pulled her sideways into the alcove by the stairwell door. She went rigid. A full-body freeze, every muscle locking at once.
Then the freeze broke, and she fought. She drove her elbow backward into my ribs on the left side, the side that was already destroyed, and the pain was so complete that my vision went white and I almost released her.
I didn’t.
I pulled her closer and bent my head to hers. “Sera. It’s me. Stop.”
She twisted hard. Her other hand came up, fingers aimed at my face. I caught her wrist and held it, and she was vibrating with adrenaline, her eyes wide and unfocused.
“It’s Travis. Look at me. Sera. Look at me.”
She looked. The wildness didn’t leave, but recognition landed behind it. Her body stopped fighting. Her breath came in short, high pulls, the sound I recognized from last night, the sound that meant her lungs were tightening.
“Travis? What are you—how—”
“Kindt’s people are in your building. At least three outside, probably more in your apartment. They’re here for you. To kill you. We need to leave right now.”
The color drained from her face, but she pulled it together.
“How do you—where do we go?”
“South side. Service corridor. My car is forty feet from the exit. Stay behind me. Don’t run unless I run.”
I led her back through the corridor. The service door was right there. My car just beyond it.
I pushed the door open and checked. Clear left. Clear right. They were thinking she was inside. We needed to be in my car before they realized she didn’t go to her apartment door.
“Okay, here we go.” I put my arm around her and tucked her against me. They wouldn’t be looking for a couple and maybe wouldn’t realize it was her.
We moved. Sera kept close. Twenty feet.
The man from the bus shelter came around the south corner of the building. His phone was gone. His right hand was inside his jacket.
Shit. I didn’t know if he would shoot us in public, but I couldn’t take the chance.
His eyes found us and his stride broke into something purposeful. Behind him, a car door opened.
The man was between us and my vehicle. The sedan was pulling out of its spot half a block east, accelerating toward the lot entrance. No way to reach the car without going through him.
I grabbed Sera and ran.
I pulled her between two parked cars and across the side lot toward the residential street that bordered the south end of the complex. Behind us, the man from the bus shelter had broken into a full run. It wouldn’t take long for him to overtake us, but at least he wasn’t shooting.
The street was commercial. Other apartment buildings, storefronts, a parking garage on the opposite block. I scanned for cover. Anything that would break line of sight long enough to change direction.
“Left.”
I pulled her into an alley between her building and the next, a narrow corridor of dumpsters and fire escapes. A chain-link fence at the back, waist high. I grabbed her waist and lifted her over the fence, and the motion sent a bolt through my left side that I felt in my teeth.
She landed hard on the other side and stumbled. I landed beside her, caught her arm and kept her upright and kept moving. The guy was still behind us.
Another alley. Loading dock. A delivery van with its back doors open. I turned right, toward a cross street I could see at the far end, putting the building between us and the man.
He’d be calling for backup. We needed to figure something out.
Now.