Authors: Linda Howard
Her gaze darted around, looking for whatever had alarmed her, made her think of him. He wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen him. Armies of people marched up and down the sidewalks, but he wasn’t one of them. She didn’t see anyone with that lithe way of moving, or that particular way he held his head. She closed her eyes, sucking in deep breaths as she tried to calm her skittering pulse.
She let herself lean on Amado for just a moment. “I turned my ankle a little,” she said, managing a faintly helpless tone. “Sorry.”
“Did you sprain it?”
“I don’t think so. Not much, anyway.” She gingerly rotated her right ankle. “I’m okay.” As she got into the car she took another quick look around. Nothing. There were a lot of dark-haired men, but no one like him. A brief glimpse of something, someone, had reminded her of him, but that was all. He wasn’t here. She would know if he were here.
Drea wrenched her thoughts away from the killer. She couldn’t let herself get distracted, or she’d make mistakes, any one of which could be fatal. She had to concentrate, and she had to move fast.
By the time Amado pulled to the curb in front of the library, she had herself focused again. “I’ll be about an hour, I guess,” she said vaguely as he helped her out.
“Take your time. Call me when you’re ready to leave.”
She could tell from the resignation in his tone that he expected her to be much longer than an hour. The Drea he knew, who they all knew, didn’t have much concept of time and was habitually late. If she thought something would take “just a few minutes” it would invariably take at least an hour, whatever “it” was.
“What’s your number?” she asked. “I think I have a pen…” She let her voice trail off as she began rummaging in the tote.
“Let me have your phone,” he said as a couple of irate drivers blew their horns at him.
She pulled the BlackBerry out of its little pocket and gave it to him. He was very patient; he didn’t sigh or anything as he quickly programmed his number into the device. “You know how to use your contact list, right?” he asked, just to make certain.
“Rafael showed me,” she said, nodding her head and mentally rolling her eyes.
The cacophony of horns was growing more insistent. “Take your time,” Amado said as he got back into the driver’s seat. Despite the increasingly impatient drivers, he still watched as she crossed to the steps and began climbing them. She put on a small limp, just enough that he would notice. Details added up. Not only would he be looking for her bright pink jacket, but also that telltale little limp.
Once inside, she went straight to the ladies’ room. Locked in a stall, she swiftly changed clothes and shoes, packing her things in the tote to be disposed of later. She switched wallets, removing her driver’s license and all her cash from the Gucci wallet Rafael had given her, and stowing them in the generic one she’d picked up at Macy’s. She left the credit cards in the designer one. Not only would using the cards be suicidal, but if someone less than honest found the wallet and used the cards, it would muddy her trail that much more.
She couldn’t leave it lying out in the open, though; that would be too easy, too obvious. Tucking the wallet back in the tote, she flushed the toilet as if she’d used it, and left the stall.
Two other women were at the row of sinks. Drea dawdled, washing her hands, fiddling with her lipstick and generally primping, until they left. Quickly she wet her hands and began dampening her hair, the water both darkening the color and straightening the curl. When her hair was wet enough, she combed it straight back, flattening it to her head, and twisted it into a tight knot that she haphazardly secured by sticking a pen through it. The knot didn’t have to hold for long, just long enough.
Just one more thing. Dampening a paper towel, she washed off as much of her makeup as she could. Then she exited the bathroom with her normal stride, just another busy, hurried, focused New Yorker. No one looked twice at her.
She strode out the exit. Removing the designer wallet from the tote, she held it down by her side, and paused by a trash can. As unobtrusively as possible she let the wallet drop, and used her toe to nudge it behind the can where it was mostly out of sight. Someone would find it, and soon. An honest person would turn it in to the library personnel; a dishonest one would take the credit cards and go on a spending binge. Either scenario worked for her, though the second one would be most troublesome to Rafael.
Quickly walking a couple of blocks away, she hailed a cab and gave the driver a destination. A direct route would have been faster but would also make her easier to track. When she exited that taxi, she walked another couple of blocks and took another one. She changed cabs a third time before reaching her final destination in
Time was getting short, the afternoon sun sinking lower. Drea went into the bank and requested access to her safe-deposit box. She signed in, retrieved her key from her bag, and a slim, young Asian-American woman ushered her into the small room lined floor to ceiling with boxes.
Drea’s was a small box, located near the floor. She had to squat to insert the key. The young teller inserted the bank’s key, turned both of them, and unlocked the door. Drea murmured her thanks and the young woman smiled as she left, leaving Drea alone.
Getting out what she needed took just a minute. She removed her clothing from the tote, then from the safe-deposit box she took the velvet bag containing her jewelry, and dropped it in the tote. The only other item in the box was the manila envelope containing the paperwork on her accounts. That, too, went into the bag. Then she stuffed her discarded clothing in the safe-deposit box, relocked it, and dropped the key in her bag.
She left the bank without looking left or right, intent on getting out of sight. Once out on the sidewalk, she hailed yet another cab and asked the driver to take her to a respectable motel. He grunted in reply. While he drove, Drea got out her BlackBerry and her account information, and set to work.
Five minutes later, it was done. Two million dollars had been wired to her account in
She turned off the BlackBerry, and sighed again as she leaned back in the seat. It was done. She had moved fast, and she was as exhausted as if she’d run a marathon. With luck, Amado was just now beginning to be worried and impatient. He hadn’t called her, so he definitely hadn’t yet gone looking for her. Soon, though. When she didn’t answer the phone, he’d go looking for her, figuring maybe something in the library blocked cell calls, the way casinos did.
When he didn’t find her in the library, he’d get worried. Because he thought she’d been sick, he’d get the library personnel to check all the bathrooms. After that failed, he’d call Rafael.
Given Rafael’s suspicious nature, he’d first have Hector check her bedroom, to see if she’d taken her things. Only when Hector reported that her makeup was still in the bathroom, her laptop was still there, her television was still on, and that she hadn’t taken any luggage with her would Rafael begin to think that something might have happened to her and he’d have his men start searching for her. They would concentrate on the area around the library. If some honest soul had found her discarded wallet and turned it in to the library personnel, then he might even call the cops.
Now there was an entertaining scenario: Rafael Salinas, going to the police for help. She’d almost pay money to see that.
He’d check with the hotels in the area, to see if she’d registered. Given how much he thought of her brainpower, he’d expect her to do something obvious, which was a big point in her favor.
She wasn’t that far away in terms of actual distance, but she was in a different state, and Rafael would never in a million years think she’d go to
Later, when he discovered that she’d robbed him blind, he would focus on her hometown. She knew he’d had her investigated, that he knew her real name and all that, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t going back to her hometown. She had no intentions of ever going back to that place. She thought some cousins still lived there, but she hadn’t contacted them since she’d left and had no reason to ever get in touch with them.
Jimbo, her older brother, had left before she had, and she’d never heard from him again. Good riddance, anyway. He was nothing but a loser. Her parents were divorced and had both sort of drifted away, too, focusing on their own lives and not much caring about their two offspring. Drea had deliberately cut ties with them, too. She had only herself, which was the way she liked it.
The taxi deposited her at a motel that at least looked clean, which was the best she could say for it. For just one night, she figured she could stand a lot worse than this.
She registered with a fake name, and paid cash. The bored clerk rattled off a list of rules and instructions, and slid a key to her. She was on the second floor, which was fine with her as she didn’t have any luggage to haul up and down.
The carpet in the room was stained and worn, the furniture was rickety, but at least the room didn’t stink. Drea ignored her surroundings and looked for a phone book. When she finally found it—secured on a chain—she flipped to the yellow pages and looked for a hair salon that was close to the bank, then she began calling. She called four before she found one that could give her an appointment at ten in the morning.
That was that. When the bank opened in the morning, she would withdraw her hundred thousand dollars, then go straight to the hair salon to have her hair cut and colored, and she’d be good to go. She’d buy some secondhand car, pay cash, and head west.
She was free.
RAFAEL TRIED TO LET ONLY ANGER SHOW; HE DIDN’T WANT any of his men to think Drea was actually important to him. Anger, though, was the smallest part of what he was feeling. Uppermost was fear, a gut-wrenching fear that he couldn’t shake. Until Amado showed him Drea’s wallet, which some kid had found behind a trash can outside the library and turned in—honest little fucker—Rafael had thought Drea was maybe trying to teach him a lesson, except that was foreign to everything he knew about her. But now he couldn’t console himself with that theory, what with the evidence of her wallet, which was empty of cash and ID, but all her credit cards were still there.
A stupid thief would take the cash and the credit cards and go on a spending spree that would lead the cops right to him. A smart thief would take the cash and leave the cards. Her driver’s license was gone, too. Identity theft was a big business, and a valid driver’s license was a valuable thing to have. When he added Drea’s disappearance to the fact that the credit cards were right there, not a single one missing, the most probable scenario wasn’t a good one. He couldn’t even hope the feds had picked her up—though fat lot of good Drea would have done them, unless they wanted to find out all she knew about shopping—because they wouldn’t have stolen her cash and tossed the wallet.
He had enemies, a lot of them. If one of them had grabbed Drea, then she was as good as dead. She might be kept alive for a while to be used as leverage against him, but he’d never see her again except in bits and pieces. In his world, violence was commonplace; the only things of value were money and survival. It was a world he thrived in, a business model he excelled at, but now it made him sick to his stomach to think of sweet, dumb Drea being raped and tortured.
He had all of his men gathered in the penthouse, the one place he was certain his conversations couldn’t be monitored.
“Should be, but who knows what kinda security they got? Who breaks into libraries? I’ll see what I can find out.”
Obtaining a search warrant was out of the question—no one even suggested it. Call the cops? What a laugh. The cops would piss around with all their legal shit—and that’s assuming they’d do anything at all. Rafael wasn’t wasting time with that; he’d do things his way. He’d find out who had snatched Drea, and then he’d hit the fucker with everything he had.
“Maybe, when she found out she’d lost her wallet, she went looking for it,” Hector offered.