A Dark and Lonely Place (47 page)

He sprang to his feet. “Where?”

“I heard men’s voices, echoes in the parking garage, and the sound of police radios. They’re in the building, sweetheart.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

S
he cut the lights as he snatched up his cell and called Katie. “Where are you?” he asked urgently.

“Almost there,” she said.

“Don’t come! They’re here.”

“Oh, my God, John! Please, don’t let them kill you!”

“I’ll try not to. Go to Joel Hirschhorn’s office in Coral Gables, on Biltmore Way, the building with the big stone lions out front. Hang with him until the family’s free. Love you, sis.”

He stepped to a window with a street view and, from behind the shade, saw a number of unmarked cars and clusters of armed men and women. He recognized a dark, armored van parked across the street as one used by SWAT. He turned to Laura. “Time to go, darlin’.”

She ran to pick up Françoise, but John shook his head. “We can’t,” he said. “Not now.” She nodded, tears in her eyes.

They moved quietly to the front door. He gently turned the knob, opened the door slightly, and listened. Too late. They heard boots on the stairs and pings from the elevator. He closed and double-locked the door.

They slipped out onto the wraparound terrace, locked the glass door behind them, and edged along the wall. John had attached the police radio to his belt and wore the earpiece. Laura had the leather lanyard with the keys around her neck and had tucked it into her T-shirt. She carried several thick bath towels to muffle the sounds. Working swiftly, they wrapped the towels around each end of the scaffolding and secured them with belts. John carefully slid the scaffolding under the bottom rail and pushed it straight across empty space and beneath the bottom rail on the next terrace.

“Robby said we should have two feet at each end.”

“Got it,” he whispered. “Don’t look down. Keep your eyes on your destination. I’m right behind you.”

Françoise began to bark inside the apartment. “Good little dog,” she whispered. “Hope they don’t hurt her.”

She slipped off her shoes, soft little ballet slippers, and put one in each pocket. He helped her over the top railing, held her arm steady, and said, “Go.”

She walked across quickly, barefoot and graceful, ignoring gusts of wind that lifted her hair and made him catch his breath, then grasped the far railing and vaulted over it onto the terrace.

He wanted to applaud. What a woman, he thought. He’d been afraid she would panic. He should have known better.

He swung a long leg over the rail, then the other, and ignored his own advice. He looked down. A mistake. No one was in the street below, which was good. But the height and the strong wind made him uncertain. He looked down again.

“No,” she whispered hoarsely from the other side. “Look at me, John.” She held out her arms. “Come to me.”

He did, and held her moments later. Together they gently pulled the scaffolding to the far side.

“Wait till I tell everybody that big, bad John Ashley is ascared of heights.”

“I am not,” he whispered. “I looked down to see if anybody saw us and it threw me off a little.”

Far behind them, Françoise’s barks grew frantic.

They moved quickly to the far end of the terrace and let themselves into the vacant apartment. Empty, it smelled of fresh paint. Paint cans stood in the living room, along with a ladder, a shirt, spattered overalls, and a painter’s cap.

Laura rolled up the clothes and put on the cap. “We might need these later.”

They listened at the door. All the action seemed to be around the corner, back down the hall.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Before they bring in K-9s.” He took her hand and they fled swiftly, quietly down the carpeted hallway toward the stairwell at the far end of the building. They saw and heard no one until, just a few yards from the door, they heard voices.

They literally skidded to a stop as two cops in flak jackets opened the door and stepped out of the stairwell. John pulled Laura back and around a corner. Flattened against the wall, they tried not to breathe.

“If they come this way,” John whispered, “I’ll try to take them. No guns.” He and Laura were armed, but shots would rain hellfire down upon them in a fight they couldn’t win.

The cops came closer.

“Nobody living here. It’s spooky as a morgue,” one said.

“Like a goddamn graveyard,” agreed the other.

New sounds and voices came from behind John and Laura. What they said wasn’t clear, but the voices grew louder.

Trapped, they were caught in a vise, with no way out.

“Is this the right floor?” asked one of the cops who’d come out of the stairwell. “Are we headed in the right direction?”

“Wait a minute,” said the other. “We’re s’posed to head ’round to the east, the beach side. That’s back the other way.”

“Goddamnit, let’s go. Betcha ten it’s another false alarm.”

Their grumbling receded as they walked in the opposite direction. John and Laura breathed sighs of relief, but the voices behind them—at least three or four of them—kept coming.

John edged to the corner. The first two officers were still walking away. It would be safer to wait till they were out of sight, but if they did, the oncoming cops would walk right up to them.

He took Laura’s hand. They moved silently toward the stairwell, praying, willing that neither of the men right in front of them turned to look back. John gently opened the heavy door to the stairwell. As they slipped inside, he lost his grip on the door and it closed behind them with a loud, metallic click.

“What the hell was that?”

The two cops wheeled and drew their guns in a mirror-image adrenaline surge.

“Hear that?” a cop shouted from the opposite direction. “Somebody’s down there!”

A companion called for backup. “I think we got ’im! We got ’im!”

John and Laura ran for their lives. They were two flights up as the cops drew down on each other, fingers on triggers. All held their fire, shocked at what they’d nearly done.

“Randy! What the hell you doing over here? I almost blew your fucking head off! You and Perez are supposed to be on the other goddamn side of the building!”

“You trying to get yourselves killed?”

“For God’s sake!”

“I nearly had a heart attack! No shit!”

They cursed, stomped about, shook their heads, holstered their weapons, and high-fived nervously, as cops all over the building rushed in their direction, guns drawn.

Seconds later the call echoed through halls, stairwells, and John’s earpiece.

“Cancel that. We did not sight John Ashley but captured McCall and Perez instead. False alarm.”

“QSL,” confirmed the unamused SWAT commander. “Nothing in the suspect apartment. But somebody does live there. Food in the fridge and a yappy little dog.” Françoise’s barking echoed from John’s earpiece and police radios all over the building. “Owner’s some French broad. Maintenance says her house sitter’s a good-looking nurse who’s in and out. We need somebody to fix the door before she comes home. K-9’s coming in for a floor-by-floor search.”

“Shoulda done that to begin with,” Perez grumbled.

“You’ll need a squad of ghostbusters to search this place right,” Randy said. “It’s a giant haunted house. I swear, I heard that click and it sounded like somebody racked one into the chamber. Thought my number was up, that Ashley had a bead on cop number three and he was me.”

John and Laura emerged at the penthouse level and dashed across the closed bridge to the parking garage. He was impressed but not surprised that she kept up with his long stride and wasn’t winded, she didn’t run like a girl at all.

She’d already been to the car, an older model gray Volvo, knew exactly where it was. He increased the volume in his earpiece to monitor the SWAT frequency, slipped the painter’s clothes on over his, and started the car. “God bless Robby,” he said. The gas tank was full.

They drove down several levels without headlights. Blue police flashers splashed shadows at the exit, but John turned away, to the entrance.
Laura slipped from the car, hit the yellow button, and the wooden arm lifted, as Robby’d said it would.

He pulled out onto the street, turned on the headlights, drove south, then doubled back around the block and headed to a causeway at the north end of the county.

John whistled in relief. “That’s as close as I want to get.”

“It was scary,” she said. “But looking back, it was fun.”

“Uh-oh. What are you, an adrenaline junkie? Once we settle down, what do I do to keep you from being bored?”

“We will never be bored.”

He knew she was right as they drove across the moonlit bay. The lights of boats on the water and planes in the sky seemed so much brighter than they ever had been before. He reached for her hand. “Tell me the truth,” he said.

“I always do, always will.”

“When you walked across that scaffold five floors up, you visualized yourself as a supermodel on a Paris runway. You did, didn’t you?”

“Hell, no. I visualized myself as a great tightrope walker, the one who made it across Niagara Falls from Canada to the U.S. I was so him that I had to restrain myself from doing a double somersault halfway across.”

“Glad you did. I woulda had a double heart attack.”

She studied the paperwork Robby had left in the glove compartment, and they cobbled together a story in case they were stopped.

“Okay, my name is Danny Ryan, you’re my wife, Isabelle, and this is your daddy’s car. His name is Eric Alan Brighton. He’ll be fifty-one in January and lives on Flamingo Drive in Miami Beach. Our car’s in the shop, so you borrowed his to pick me up from my painting job and drive across state to Tampa, where your only sister has gone into labor. It’s her first child; we’re the godparents and want to be there when he arrives.”

“She. I love little girls.”

“Okay.”

“Good,” she said. “What’s my sister’s name? I want to say Katie, but that might not be smart.”

“You’re right. How about Faith?”

“Faith is perfect,” she said. “How appropriate.”

He called Katie, said they were safe and had left Françoise in the apartment wearing her collar, tags, and leash.

They arrived at the fishing camp in the dark hours before dawn. Laura had fallen asleep. He parked some distance away. They got out to walk and were nearly there when the three-quarter moon broke free from a sea of clouds and illuminated their destination in a silvery splash of light.

She clung tight to John’s arm in the dark. “Is that it?” she gasped.

“It’s not much,” he said, “but only for a week or two . . .”

“No.” She stepped back, trembling, as though she could see something he didn’t.

“What’s wrong, darlin’?”

“It creeps me out, John. I have a bad feeling about this place.”

“You won’t when you see it in the light of day.” He kissed her. “It’s not so bad. You’ll see.”

Chilled to the core, despite the heat of the night, she still trembled.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

H
e groped for and found the key, hidden above the door. The Coleman lantern just inside still worked. Hard to believe he had left it there only six months ago. His world had changed so much since that last visit to watch a meteor shower. No place is darker than the heart of the ’Glades and no better vantage point for seeing heavenly light shows, the constellations, and millions of stars.

Nothing had been disturbed. As always, things needed to be fixed, cleaned, or upgraded. He and Robby intended to tackle those projects in the fall. Now they never would. The reality wrenched his heart.

He shook the dust from a blanket and a few pillows and did his best to make the bed comfortable. Laura said little. They’d both been ravenous on the road, but she had no appetite now. He brought in granola bars from the car, boiled water on a small Sterno camp grill, fixed tea for her and coffee for himself, then poured them each a shot of whiskey from a bottle in the kitchen cabinet.

He cranked up a battery-operated radio on which he managed to hear sporadic news mixed with static and interference, then tried to call Katie to see if she had met with the bail bondsman. As he’d feared, he had no signal. He could charge their cell phones in the car but would have to drive a distance to use them.

“It’s dark here, so dark,” Laura kept repeating. He adjusted the lantern for her several times before he realized that the darkness that frightened her was far more than a mere absence of light.

“Such a dark and lonely place . . .” She hugged her body and wished aloud that Françoise was with them.

“Dogs are fun out here,” he agreed. “They love it. They’re good company, a real comfort, but you have to watch out that the ’gators or
pythons don’t get ’em. We had a close call last year with Robby’s dog, Spirit . . .” He stopped, a painful catch in his throat. How impossible it seemed that they would never again spend time here, that his brother was gone forever, with no chance to say goodbye.

“Would’ve been nice to bring her,” he said bleakly. “But she’s not our dog. It just wouldn’t be right to take her. The owner expects her dog to be there when she comes home.”

Laura shivered in his arms that night. He thought she was cold despite the damp heat, but bad dreams kept waking her and her visions then seemed even more terrifying.

“I’m afraid,” she finally whispered.

“Of what?” he asked in sleepy disbelief. “You’re cool. Today we bought ourselves a little more time, enough to focus on how to fight back.” He rose up on one elbow to study her face. “How strong were you tonight? I never wanted a female partner on the job. Didn’t trust any of them enough to watch my back. But I’d never hesitate with you. You don’t cave under stress. You saved my life when I got shot, then you and Robby”—he swallowed—“did it again. So tell me, what could possibly scare a girl like you?”

“This place is so dark. I’ve never been here before. But I knew the moment I saw it that terrible things happened here. It’s as though I can hear sad echoes from the past. It scares me,” she whispered.