God, he hated pulling his gun on her. But needs must and all that, and he had Holly and now Ant, too, whose lives were on the line just as much as his. And it beat stuffing her down inside that can with his bare hands.
His one concern was that she wouldn’t believe he would actually shoot her—well, he wouldn’t, no matter how this played out, although it was best for both of them if she retained some doubt on that point—but he pointed his gun at her like he absolutely would.
And pretended not to notice Holly gulping in air like a fish out of water.
“Scrunch down,” he ordered menacingly.
Glaring at him, she—thank God!—scrunched.
“Holly, hand me the lid,” he said, not taking his eyes off Caroline. When Holly did, he restored his gun to his holster and stepped forward to seal her in.
She fit, barely, with her back against the plastic and her knees—slim pale knees on a pair of very nice legs, he noted once again in passing—wedged almost beneath her chin. Her face was tilted up to look at him. It was tight with anger. Her eyes shot sparks at him.
“Stay put and be quiet,” he told her.
Her glare intensified. So did the jut of her jaw.
Holly was beside him now, looking down at Caroline, too. His face was a study in alarm.
“I’ll get you out of there just as soon as I can,” Reed promised her, just because he couldn’t help himself. Her glare didn’t soften one bit. “Hang tight.”
Stifling his misgivings—if there was another way out, he hadn’t been able to come up with it—Reed put the lid, in which he’d previously stabbed holes for ventilation so at least he didn’t have to worry about her suffocating, on the trash can, fastened it in place, and tried not to think about Caroline shut up in there in the dark. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulder.
With Caroline secured, he needed to move fast.
“Help me pick it up,” he said to Holly. “Grab the handle. Come on.”
With Caroline inside, the can was heavy, but not so heavy that the two of them, one on each side, couldn’t move it with relative ease. They didn’t have far to go.
“Stay right here with her,” he ordered Holly as they set their burden down again. Except for a few thumps from inside the can, there had been no problems. He was breathing a little easier: this part of the plan, so far, was holding up. “Don’t open the lid no matter what she does, and don’t go anywhere. Got it?”
“Where are you going?” Holly asked, sounding and looking panicky.
“Do what I told you. I’ll be right back. And, oh yeah, there might be some explosions. Wait for me.”
He threw the words over his shoulder as he took off running toward the opposite side of the house. His objective was the utility room that was the smallest by far of about a dozen rooms that opened onto the pool area, where the helicopter and the money—and SWAT and a bunch of snipers and God knew what else—waited for him. As he ran, he pulled his Leatherman knife out of the backpack and stuck it into his jacket pocket. When he reached the utility room—it wasn’t as dark as he would have expected; moonlight poured through the glass insert in the outside door—he drew his gun and unlocked the big closet that from its contents he’d discovered was used to store pool chemicals. Warily, in case a surprise was waiting, he pulled the closet door open.
Five of his hostages—the ones who’d been on the floor, minus Ellen Tremaine, whom he had judged to be too difficult to control—were crammed in there, seated on the floor, wrists secured behind them and ankles bound with zip ties, strips of duct tape covering their mouths. He knew none of them: they would be part of The Big Easy’s high society, which meant they ran in radically different circles from him. There were four women and two men, both of whom were reasonably close to his size and build, both in black tuxes like the one he was wearing. In the dark, as the saying sort of went about cats, all men in tuxes looked alike, or at least alike enough to hopefully make for a few confusing moments.
The hostages glanced up at him almost as one, faces pale in the darkness, eyes fearful.
Their expressions didn’t bother him, or at least only a little: he had already come to terms with the fact that from their point of view, he was a dangerous criminal. He’d made peace with it knowing that tonight his first duty was to Holly and Ant, and to himself.
“This is your lucky day,” he told them as, knife in hand, he bent down to slash through the thin plastic strips securing their ankles one by one. “I’m going to let you go before I blow this house to kingdom come. On your feet. Get out of here. Hurry up.”
They clambered awkwardly upright and spilled out into the utility room. Gesturing with his gun, he lined them up against the wall.
“You see that door?” He pointed at the door to the outside. Though he dared not get too close to the glass—he was wary of the snipers he knew were out there—he was able to see the glinting metal of the helicopter’s body. The blades weren’t rotating, which meant that there was going to be no quick takeoff
. That’ll fix me,
was his sardonic inner response to what he recognized as his fellow officers’ attempt to keep him on the ground. Then he added, “That’s your way out. It’s locked. All you have to do is turn the knob and it’ll unlock. You turn the knob, pull the door open, and run like hell.” Having their hands secured behind them would slow them down a little, which he was counting on, but it shouldn’t present much of an obstacle. Just to be sure, just in case it was possible that he was dealing with a bunch of nitwits who couldn’t figure it out, he thrust the knife into his pocket so that he had a hand free. Still holding his gun, he turned so they could see his back and, one-handed, demonstrated reaching for and turning an imaginary knob in a way that mimicked his hand being secured behind him as theirs were, waggling his fingers for emphasis. “Like this. Got it?”
Several of them nodded hesitantly.
“Good enough,” he said as his gaze ran over them: they looked like they were ready to run for their lives. He decided to heap a little more fuel on the fire. “The house is set to blow in about one minute. If I were you, I’d head straight for that helicopter out there. That’s the best path if you want to avoid the explosives I have set up outside. Good luck.”
Then he left them, closing and locking the door to the utility room behind him just in case any of them should get it into their heads to try to take refuge in the house. He had no explosives outside, of course, the same as he’d had no bomb in the house. Just one more lie in a night full of them, this particular one designed to keep the hostages from running straight into the arms of the hidden battalion of law enforcement ringing the helicopter for as long as possible. Knowing that the moment of truth was at hand, that what he was about to do would cause all hell to break loose almost instantaneously and either get him and Holly out of there or get them killed, he took a deep breath, holstered his weapon, breathed a prayer, and grabbed two flash bangs from the dozen or so in his backpack. Then he set off at a dead run back the way he had come.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
By the time he reached Holly, he had tossed all the flash bangs he had with him and was basically deaf from the volume of the explosions, despite the twin facts that he had thrown the stun grenades as far away from himself as he could manage and had stuffed earplugs in his ears to boot. Even with what he could hear, it sounded like Armageddon. Explosions were still going off like popcorn, courtesy of the flash bang he’d lobbed onto the bag of M-800 firecrackers he’d left at the top of the stairs. The house was filled with acrid smoke. SWAT was no doubt at that very moment crashing its way inside, adding to the noise and mayhem, and the hostages he’d released should be hightailing it toward the helicopter as fast as they could go.
“Holy God, Dick, what the hell?” Holly was crouched beside the garbage can, Reed saw at a glance as he bolted back into the room, pulling out the earplugs as he came and dropping them into the now almost empty backpack, which he slung over one shoulder. To Reed’s traumatized ears, Holly’s exclamation was barely audible. The kid sprang to his feet as Reed ran toward him. Even in the dark, he could see how white Holly’s face was, how scared he looked. He understood completely: his own heart jackhammered and his pulse raced.
He could almost feel death breathing down his neck.
“We got to go. Grab the can,” he ordered Holly, skidding to a stop beside the garbage can and latching on to the handle on its side while ignoring the angry thumping coming from inside it. “We’re going to run outside holding this can between us. All you have to do is hang on to the can, keep your head down, and run like hell. I’ll do the rest. But we got to
move
.”
“Oh, shit.” Even to someone as hard of hearing as Reed currently was, Holly sounded terrified. But he did as he was told, picking up his side of the can just as Reed did—one hand on the handle, one hand on the can’s bottom—and taking off on cue. Seconds later they burst through a door into the side yard on the opposite end of the house from the pool.
“Run,”
Reed growled at Holly, and they did.
The inky glimmer of the lake stretched out seemingly endlessly beyond the lush landscaping that marked the edge of the property. Lugging the can a little awkwardly between them, he and Holly galloped straight toward the cops who had been deployed around the mansion to form a perimeter designed to keep him—and Holly—from escaping. Behind them, explosions could still be heard coming from the house. Smoke billowed skyward in vast plumes of pale gray feathers. The air smelled of sulfur. Shouts and sirens and what sounded like gunfire (could still have been the M-800s for all Reed knew) and all kinds of other noisy commotion created an atmosphere of pure bedlam. The perimeter line, which Reed was certain had just a couple of minutes before been as stalwart and steadfast as any police commander could have wished, was now ragged. The cops had broken ranks. Some ran toward the house, weapons drawn. Others stayed in place, clearly uncertain where their duties lay, attention focused on the chaos unfolding in front of them. Pounding straight toward the onrushing cops and what was left of the perimeter line, acutely aware that he and Holly were coming under the scrutiny of many armed men whose job it was to catch them, conscious, too, of the weight of the garbage can and Holly’s panting terror as he held up its other side, Reed sent one more prayer winging skyward and employed his last bluff.
“SWAT,” he screamed. “Stay clear! We’re carrying a bomb.”
CHAPTER
NINE
W
HEN THE LID CAME OFF
the garbage can, Caroline sat there for an instant blinking up at the deep soft black of the night sky. Her pounding heart was just starting to slow. Her racing pulse was just easing off a bit. There was a low-grade ringing in her ears. The moon—God, was it fitting or what, that almost the first thing that met her eyes was that big, fat yellow globe?—shone steadily down. The smell of brackish water, of mud, of decaying vegetation invaded her nostrils as she drew in a lungful of fresh air.
It beat the smell of plastic by a country mile.
“You okay, cher?” Reed loomed over the top of the can, no more than a tall, dark silhouette with the moon at his back, looking down at her. The relief of knowing that he was not a deranged would-be killer with a bomb was swamped immediately by a wave of anger. Unable to reply because of the
duct tape
across her mouth, she had to make do with a glare. It seemed to reassure him. “Come on, stand up.”
Well, she actually would have stood up if she could have gotten her feet beneath her. But bent like a paper clip and wedged in as she was, there wasn’t much room to maneuver. In fact, there was no room whatsoever. Space was so tight that the whole time he and Holly had been running with the garbage can and she had been getting jostled around inside it her chin had kept banging into her knees. At one point she’d even bitten her tongue, and it hurt.
Plus her hands were zip-tied together behind her back. Not having the use of her hands definitely hampered her ability to stand up.
Either her lack of compliance with his command, or the baleful stare she was giving him, must have clued Reed in to her absolute inability to do as he wished. Reaching in, he slid his hands beneath her armpits and pulled her upright. Grimacing at the discomfort inherent in being thus forcefully unfolded, Caroline swayed a little as, when she was upright at last, the blood rushed from her head toward her feet, which had gone to sleep.
Right along with her poor bound hands.
“She looks pissed,” Holly observed as Reed wrapped a hard-muscled arm around her waist, slid the other beneath her thighs, and lifted her out of the can and into his arms.
Pissed? Really? She did? How surprising. Looking up at his handsome, familiar face, she discovered that she was no longer afraid of him. Didn’t mean she liked him.
“Get the stuff out of the bottom of the can, put it in the backpack, and let’s go,” Reed told Holly as he strode with Caroline toward the water. She glared at his chiseled profile: the tension in his face was unmistakable, and she didn’t care. Also, so the man was strong. So what? At the moment, as far as she was concerned, he could eat dirt. “As quick as you can.”
“Like the speed of light,” Holly promised. “Oh, man, I thought we was for sure gonna die in a hail of bullets back there. That was like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or something. Only we lived.”
“Yeah, well, we haven’t survived the night yet, so don’t get cocky. The can?”
“I’m on it,” Holly said, and, tilting the can, leaned down inside.
Caroline could have told him that there were several items at the bottom. Some of them were hard and uncomfortable, like the EMP device that Reed had stored in the pocket of his discarded tux jacket. She knew, because she’d been sitting on them. She was pretty sure their shape was immortalized by the bruising on her butt.
“That had to be uncomfortable,” Reed said. He was looking at her now and sounding all sympathetic, which was a hoot considering that, oh, yeah, it had been and he was the cause of it. He had an arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, which meant that she was curled against the solid wall of muscle that was his chest. She could feel the outline of his gun in its shoulder holster pressing against her upper arm. A turn-on? She knew a man with a gun was a turn-on for some girls, but, see, she carried one herself. Usually. Except when she was walking unarmed into a dangerous situation that her gut had told her from the outset was going to end badly, the point being that, for ignoring her instincts, she guessed she deserved what she’d gotten. A glance told her that her skirt had shimmied up. Way up. She was decent, but just barely. Her bare legs looked slim and pale curved over the solid black bar that was his arm in the misappropriated SWAT jacket. His large, warm, unmistakably masculine hand lay lightly along her uncovered thigh. It annoyed the hell out of her to discover that, despite everything, she actually liked the feel of his hand on her skin. In fact, the situation annoyed her on so many levels that she didn’t even try to sort them out. Since she couldn’t talk, she narrowed her eyes at him.