Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (31 page)

Caroline remembered. Joey had been petrified. He hadn’t come out to his family yet. He wouldn’t have been able to explain why he’d been in Flatbush. It had been dusk when she’d started her journey into the city. The wind had blown cold off the Hudson and the bus drivers had cocked a curious eyebrow at the young girl climbing onto the bus alone.

“You came and got me,” Joey said. “You could’ve gotten in so much trouble, but you didn’t think twice about helping me. It was brave and it was kind.”

He paused. “It doesn’t mean you have to do this, though. You could both just stay here.”

Caroline knew what he was doing. He didn’t want to force her to do something any more than she wanted to force Annie. Everyone had to choose for herself what to do.

“I’ve got to do it,” she said. And she did. Thousands of people were depending on her to bring Annie safely to court. If she didn’t, every
SuperSoy
case would end. Today.

“Then you’ll do it,” Joey said simply.

“But what if it doesn’t work? You know how I . . . get,” Caroline said. She’d once told Joey that she felt like her mind was a fancy Italian race car. It could be blisteringly fast, or it could end up on the side of the road with smoke pouring out from under its hood.

“Why’d you quit software engineering?” Joey asked.

Caroline heard his implicit question. Why’d she leave her staid, safe job in the tech world? It was a good question. She’d never experienced fear there. She’d never spiked the terrors she’d routinely endured in the past weeks. She’d also never really felt like she was doing anything with any real meaning.

“I wanted to help people,” she said. To her ears, she sounded pathetically idealistic.

Joey cracked a smile. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Let’s see, I’ve trashed my car, barfed my way across the country, gotten chased, and now I’m hiding out with you because I think some people might want to kill me. So . . . it’s going great.” Caroline smiled back at her friend, but then the smile faded from her face. “You want to know why I became a lawyer? The answer is, I didn’t want to be ruled by my fears.”

She looked down. Her fears were kicking her ass at the moment.

“You and me both, honey,” Joey said. “Being scared is a natural response to living. But you get out there, and you figure it out. Honey, you can do this.”

Meeting his eyes, Caroline found conviction. Absolute belief in her. That certainty in her merit, in her abilities was the gift her best friend had been giving her for as long as she could remember. The question was whether she shared his certainty that she could see this nightmare journey through to the end.

“You’ll take care of Nolan while we’re gone, right?” Caroline finally said.

Joey smiled. “I promise.”

“The police station’s automated phone system is a complete nightmare, but I finally talked to a real, live person,” Caroline said. “They said they’d send a couple of officers to escort us into the courthouse.”

“Really? How’d you get them to agree to do that?” Judi asked. “I can’t even get them to come out here when the neighbors are dumpster diving in my trash cans. Don’t get me started . . .”

“I told them I had a subpoenaed witness who was worried about getting to a hearing safely. They said they’ll meet us at the north entrance between nine and ten a.m. The hearing starts at ten fifteen, so that should give us plenty of time to get upstairs.”

“That’s great,” Annie said, her dark eyes sparkling with relief.

“It’s still not ideal,” Caroline said. “An hour window is really big. The more time we spend out in the open, the greater our chance of detection. But if we aren’t there when the police get there, I’m worried they’ll leave.”

Judi nodded, her face showing her skepticism about whether the NYPD would wait.

Caroline tilted her laptop so Annie and Judi could see the map of the courthouse.

“What we need is a safe place where we can watch the north entrance.” Caroline met Judi’s eyes. “Is there a café or restaurant across the street?”

“No.” Judi shook her head. “Just some office buildings and a subway stop. There’s a dirt lot where they took down a building, but that doesn’t help us.”

From the corner of her eye, Caroline saw Nolan approaching. Judi and Annie must have seen him, too, since they stopped talking and took sips of their coffee with pretend nonchalance.

“Whatcha talking about?” Nolan asked. He wore a T-rex shirt, striped pajama bottoms, and a 49ers hat. At his hip, he’d tucked one of the kitchen implements from the puppet show.

“Nothing much. Grown-up stuff, honey,” Annie said. “Mommy just needs to do an errand today. You’re going to stay here with Joey until I get back.”

Caroline watched as Annie held her breath, waiting to see if Nolan would reject the proposed plan. Instead, Nolan looked down at his mismatched outfit.

“Everything I’m wearing is awesome,” he announced. “Just not together.”

“What’s the spatula for?” Caroline gestured with her chin toward the silver-and-black implement tucked into the waistband of his pants.

“It’s an ax. For fighting bad guys.”

Caroline smiled. “Good thinking. You can never be too ready for the zombie apocalypse.”

“No, not zombies,” Nolan said. “It’s for regular bad guys.”

Caroline caught Annie’s concerned look over her son’s head. Maybe Nolan had heard them talking.

“I know it looks like a spatula, but that’s just to fool the bad guys. They’re only going to
think
it’s a spatula,” Nolan explained. “I’m going to surprise them with it being an ax.”

“That’s genius,” Judi said, her face lighting up.

“It is?” Annie asked.

“I’ve got an idea,” Judi said as Joey came to lead Nolan back out to the living room.

Caroline and Annie squatted together in the aisle of Freddie’s lunch truck. The wheels bumped along the uneven pavement.

When the motion stopped, Caroline straightened to standing and craned her head forward toward the driver’s cabin, where Freddie sat piloting the truck through the dirt lot. She was pleased with what she saw. Freddie had found a spot on the edge of the lot, facing the courthouse. All around them, other lunch trucks were setting up, preparing for a day of business. Tucked among them, My Greasy Balls looked like just another vendor.

Freddie set the brakes and cut the engine with a jolt. He hopped out of the driver’s side and lifted the sides of the truck to reveal the service windows. When he climbed back into the truck, the floor swayed with his weight. Unlike his brother, Freddie’s thick figure bore the marks of a distinct love of carbohydrates.

“You girls doin’ okay?” Freddie asked.

“Super,” Caroline said, trying not to breathe in the scent of old cooking oil. Her stomach was already in knots as it was.

She glanced over at Annie, whose face held the same inward look it had borne in the Calvutos’ kitchen. Caroline wanted to reassure Annie, to tell her that they’d make it back, but the words died on her tongue.

“We need to stake things out,” Freddie said. “I brought supplies.”

Reaching into a plastic milk crate, he withdrew three sets of binoculars. He offered a pair each to Annie and Caroline. He hung the third pair around his own thick neck.

Taking the binoculars, Caroline looped the strap around her wrist.

“First thing we needs to do is figure out who our surveillance is,” Freddie said.

He pointed a thick finger at the side of the gray structure.

“That’s the north entrance over there,” Freddie said. “At lunchtime, hundreds of people are gonna come pouring outta there like ants. I always do good business in this lot. In the meantime, we should be able to see when your police escort shows up . . . and we should be able to see who’s out there that don’t belong.”

Caroline put her eyes to the binoculars and focused the lenses. She swept them across the front of the courthouse in a slow, deliberate arc. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. As far as she could tell, it was just another morning at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Lawyers in gray and blue and black suits holding briefcases. Litigants in everything from dresses to torn blue jeans. The occasional staffer or security guard hurrying up the stairs to work.

Beside her, Freddie made quiet grunting sounds as he examined the scene.

“Ah,” he said to himself, then, “Hmm.”

Finally, he put his binoculars down and turned to Annie and Caroline.

“I count three guys we gotta be watching out for,” he announced.

Caroline put her binoculars down and raised an incredulous eyebrow at the balding man. With his belly sticking out from his too-short T-shirt, Freddie was an unlikely expert on surveillance. Then again, she was an unlikely tech geek–turned–lawyer.

“There are three guys,” Freddie said. “They pretend like they’re walking by, but then they loop back around. They’re changing their clothes somewheres, but the shoes don’t change.”

At Caroline’s expression, he added, “Hey, you can tell a lot from a guy’s shoes.”

“Shoes?” Caroline repeated.

“Yeah. See the guy in the black jacket?” Freddie pointed at a man strolling past the doors of the courthouse.

Caroline put her binoculars back up to her eyes. Soon, she saw the man Freddie indicated. Balding across his head, the man wore a black leather jacket and tan slacks.

“I see him,” she said.

“He’s the same guy who walked by wearing a gray hoodie ten minutes ago. He’s wearing green Converse. He must’ve changed his jacket at his car or something, but he didn’t bother to change his shoes,” Freddie said.

“Good catch,” Caroline said, her tone holding appreciation for Joey’s brother’s abilities.

Freddie shrugged. “I saw it once in a movie.”

Caroline watched the front of the courthouse with new eyes, focusing on the shoes of the people on the sidewalk. Sure enough, over the course of fifteen minutes, she saw the same three men circle back along the sidewalk. Their clothes changed, but not their shoes. She realized there had to be a car parked somewhere around the corner where the men were changing. Or an alcove somewhere out of view.

She shivered involuntarily.

The obvious planning that had gone into Med-Gen’s surveillance disturbed Caroline. If there were creeps waiting on the sidewalk for them, there were probably creeps waiting inside the courthouse, too. She reminded herself that the metal detectors and marshals inside ensured that no one was armed.

They just had to get past the doors.

Caroline scanned the streets again. Still no police escort.

Settling in to wait, she kept the binoculars up to her eyes.

“Where are they?” Annie asked. The concern in her voice mirrored Caroline’s mood.

“Maybe they got another call?” Caroline mused aloud. She let the binoculars fall around her neck. She checked her watch—9:48. The hearing would begin in less than a half hour.

“Can I use your phone?” she asked, turning to Freddie.

“Sure thing,” Freddie said, fishing his phone out of his pocket and handing it to her.

Dialing quickly, Caroline called the NYPD. When she heard the menu, she keyed in zero. An automated voice offered her a menu of options.