Stripped (40 page)

“Throw it away, Leo. If you throw it away, she lives.”

With a hiss of hatred, Leo flung the gun behind him, out of range.

“Smart move,” Blake said. “Now back off away from the car. We’re leaving, Leo.”

Leo retreated. He backed up slowly, retracing his steps around the front of the car and taking a few steps down the street. His hands were in the air. His eyes were dark with anger and pain.

“You don’t look good, Leo. Better call an ambulance after we leave.”

Leo kept backing away. Blake opened the car door and shoved Claire inside, pushing her across to the passenger seat. He clambered behind the wheel and pulled the door shut, keeping an eye on Leo. The old man seemed to be crumbling. His chest was heaving as he took labored breaths. His footfalls were erratic. He wasn’t even looking at Blake or the car anymore. He staggered back, bumping into a palm tree near the curb, and bent over, his hands on his knees. Blood began to spit from his mouth.

Blake started the car. He backed up and then turned for the street. As he spun the wheel, he saw Leo look up again, and with blood on his chin, the old man smiled, his face coming alive. It had been an act. Gasping. Staggering. Nearly falling. Blake realized finally that Leo had come to rest at the palm tree, inches from Serena’s gun. Leo ignored his pain and reached for it, and an instant later, he had the gun in his hand and was swinging it up, pointing toward the windshield of the Impala.

“Get down,” Blake told Claire.

He aimed the car at Leo and jammed his foot into the accelerator. The engine raced, and the car leaped forward, its tires squealing. Blake kept a hand on the wheel and jerked to his left, hearing the explosion of the gun at the same time that the windshield shattered and spilled glass into the car, covering him and Claire and the front seat with sharp confetti. The car shuddered as the front bumper struck Leo. A second later, the car jarred to a halt, and the air bags deployed, cushioning them as their bodies were thrown forward. The balloons collapsed, and he saw Claire jolt back against the passenger seat.

Blake looked through the shattered windshield.

The car was lodged against the palm tree. Leo was pinned between the car and the tree, his lower body crushed. The gun had fallen from his hands. He was still alive, barely, and he stared back at Blake with the ferocity of a man who has been defeated in a fight that means everything to him. Tears of agony slipped down his cheeks, but he didn’t cry out or say a word.

Blake got out of the car. He retrieved the gun from where it had fallen to the ground. Leo followed him, impotent, unable to move.

“You played this well, Leo,” Blake told him with genuine admiration. “Gino would be proud of you.”

Leo tried to spit at him. He couldn’t.

Blake glanced into the car and saw that Claire was watching him. He found himself feeling something like mercy. He shoved the gun in his belt and went around to the other side of the Impala. He opened the door, and Claire seemed to spill out into his arms.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her.

He let her stand up, and she was unsteady on her feet, but she didn’t seem to be injured. She was too stunned to walk, though, and Blake picked her up and carried her back to the trunk. He opened it and laid her inside next to Serena as tenderly as he could. He closed the trunk again and walked back to Leo.

“I know that the pain must be excruciating,” Blake said.

Leo didn’t look at him.

“Eyes open or closed, Leo. It’s your choice.”

Leo turned his head with what seemed to be a superhuman effort. His eyes were open. Blake nodded, brought the gun up to Leo’s head, and fired.

Serena reached for Claire’s bound hands and held them tightly. When the gunshot exploded outside the car, she knew that Claire was screaming behind the tape that gagged her mouth. She could hear the muffled cries as Claire buried her face in Serena’s shoulder in the dark, cramped confines of the trunk. She felt the dampness of tears through her shirt. Claire clutched her hands so fiercely that her nails were close to breaking the skin.

She felt the car rock as Blake got back inside, and then they were moving, their bodies bouncing loosely as Blake steered the Impala through the town-home complex toward the street. Serena recognized the familiar turns. She hoped someone had heard the shots and called 911, but she knew they would be long gone by the time a squad car responded.

Serena was bruised and sore. She had flown forward when the car thudded to a stop earlier, and she had banged her head against the rear wall of the trunk. Her arms ached from being held stiffly in place, and something—a tire iron?—had struck her squarely in the knee. The bone throbbed with pain.

She disentangled her fingers from Claire’s and rolled onto her back, landing hard on her shoulder blade. She had discovered earlier that she had enough play in her arms to bend them at the elbows and bring her hands up to her mouth. Her fingers clutched at the tape that was gagging her, and she peeled it slowly and painfully away. When her jaw was free, she rubbed it and took several long, deep breaths, gulping air into her lungs. She was sweating. The trunk was hot enough to make her light-headed.

The car rolled over a dip in the street, and her forehead struck sharply against the roof of the trunk. She cursed softly.

Serena braced her left foot on the floor and pushed herself back onto her side, facing Claire again. She found Claire’s hands.

“Claire, listen to me,” she whispered. “You can probably get your hands up to your face and get the tape off. Can you try it?”

She hoped Claire had enough strength, mentally and physically, to do it.

She let go and felt Claire squirming to reposition her arms and get her fingers near her mouth. Claire pulled the tape off quickly, and Serena heard her gasp.

“Shit, that hurt”

They both laughed. Serena was pleased that Claire sounded calm now and not frantic. She nudged closer and put her mouth close to Claire’s ear. “We need to be as quiet as we can. What happened out there?”

“It was Leo,” Claire said. “I think Blake killed him.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No. But I was scared to death.”

Serena laid her cheek against the soft skin of Claire’s face. “If’s okay. We’re going to get out of this.”

It’s okay, baby.

Serena felt a strange sense of freedom. Of strength. As if she had been given a second chance, a way to make up for the past. To save Deidre by saving Claire.

“Do you know where he’s taking us?” Serena asked.

“I have no idea.”

Serena didn’t want to speculate. None of the alternatives sounded appealing. She had tried to keep track of the stops and turns once they made it onto the street, but the route quickly became too confusing to follow. She knew they were still in a busy part of the city, because she could hear plenty of traffic noise, even late at night.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, Serena,” Claire told her.

“You didn’t.”

Claire was silent for a moment. “What was happening between us inside—”

“Let’s not talk about that now.”

“I need to know if you regret it,” Claire said.

“No, I don’t.” Serena knew she had to change the subject. “That was smart, what you did inside with Blake. Pushing me. Yelling at me.”

“Did you get it? Did you get the phone?”

“Yes. You have to get it for me. I shoved it in my pocket.” Serena shifted her arms as far as she could, and Claire’s hands explored around the front of her jeans until her fingers pressed into the hard shell of the wafer-thin cell phone.

“Can you slide down a bit?” Claire asked.

Serena pushed herself down, bending her knees to get more room when her feet bumped the side of the car. She felt Claire’s fingers at her waist, slipping inside the tight pocket. It was strangely intimate, to be doing this in the dark, in the hot interior of the car. Claire’s breasts were almost in her face. Her T-shirt clung to her skin like glue.

“Normally, I’d enjoy this,” Claire whispered.

“Hush.”

Claire found the cell phone and slid it between her palms. As she tried to pass it into Serena’s hands, she dropped it somewhere between them.

“Shit!” she hissed. “My hands are slippery.”

The car went through a sharp turn at that moment, and they found themselves sliding and rolling in the narrow space. The phone slid, too. Serena lost her sense of direction in the dark and didn’t know which way she was facing or which way was front and back. She was disoriented. “Claire?”

“Here.”

Serena tried to roll back next to her. “We have to find the phone.”

They performed an awkward dance as both of them tried to flip over and scour the black interior of the trunk. Serena brushed her legs along the carpeted floor, trying to feel the slim rectangle of the phone. Claire did the same. Serena began to feel the pressure of time, wondering how long it would take for Blake to reach where he was going. The phone had seemingly vanished from the trunk.

“Anything?” Serena whispered.

“No.”

The car turned again, and their bodies shifted. Serena wasn’t sure why, but she had an intuition that they were almost there, and she had learned to trust her sixth sense over the years. The road beneath them was bumpier, as if there were loose gravel on the pavement. The noise outside had quieted. They weren’t on a busy street anymore.

“We need to hurry,” Serena said.

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Claire replied. “It’s near my face. It slid over here on the last turn.”

“Try to get your hands on it before we turn again.”

Serena maneuvered herself in the direction of Claire’s voice. She bent her elbows again, bringing her hands near her face. She pushed herself closer and felt her fingers touch Claire’s forearm immediately in front of her. She followed the soft skin up to Claire’s hands and was relieved to feel the cell phone nestled between her fingers. Claire was holding it tightly.

“Okay, loosen up just a bit” Serena said.

She worked her own fingers into Claire’s hands and curled them around the phone. It was small and familiar. “I’ve got it.”

Claire breathed a sigh of relief.

The car swung through another turn, and Serena clutched the phone and tried to brace herself to keep from sliding. Claire bumped up against her. Serena almost lost her grip and bobbled the phone in her fingers, but then felt it sink back into her hands. She ran her fingertips over the keypad and tried to imagine the numbers laid out on the phone. The keys were almost flat, and she could barely feel them.

She pressed what she thought was the number two. The speed dial code for Jonny’s cell phone.

Nothing happened.

Serena tried another key with the same result. Finally, she realized that she had turned the phone off as she grabbed it from the floor in her bedroom, to make sure that an incoming call didn’t give away what she was hiding in her pocket.

“Shit, it’s off,” she said.

She hunted for the key that turned the phone back on and held it down. As she did, she felt the car turn onto a rutted stretch of pavement that rocked the vehicle up and down. The brakes squealed, and the car lurched to a stop.

The phone lit up. It began hunting for a signal. “Come on, come on,” Serena urged.

She heard the driver’s door open and Blake get out. His footsteps crunched on gravel.

“Hurry,” Claire said.

Serena punched the number two button again and held her breath. Blake was almost to the trunk. The phone began ringing.

Stride swung into the gated driveway of the town-home complex and knew something was wrong. The gate was wide open. He hesitated and felt his horror grow as he heard sirens drawing closer through the surrounding streets.

He tried Serena’s cell phone again, as he had been doing constantly on the drive west from downtown. There was no answer. He tried their home number again, too, and heard Serena’s voice as the answering machine picked up. The hollow feeling in his stomach became an awful pounding in his head. He accelerated into the winding streets past the maze of homes.

When he reached their street, he saw a body lying under the glow of a streetlight. A big man, slumped like a beached whale. Stride got out of the car, the engine still running. The man was facedown, half off the curb, with blood dripping in the gutter. Recently dead. The burnt smell of powder was still fresh in the air. Stride bent down and saw the hole in the man’s forehead, and despite the red trails on his face, he knew it was Leo Rucci.

He had held out a faint hope that it might be Blake.

Stride ran for the house with an awful vision of what he would find inside. The front door was open. He drew his gun and leveled it as he crept through the doorway. He listened for voices or movement upstairs but didn’t hear a thing. When he glanced automatically at the alarm box on the wall, he saw that it had been disconnected. His heart turned to lead and seemed to plummet to the floor.

He was about to scream her name, but he stopped himself. Blake might still be here.

Stride silentiy followed the wall to the stairs and waited, listening again. He scoped out the empty hallway and took the steps to the second floor. The three bedroom doors upstairs were all ajar. The first, their office, hadn’t been touched. The second was the spare bedroom, and he saw Claire’s clothes on the floor. He checked the bathroom and the closet inside and didn’t find anything amiss.

That left their own bedroom at the end of the hall.

He stared at it and didn’t want to go through the doorway. Reluctantly, he sniffed the air, and he was relieved that he didn’t catch the mineral scent of blood. He could see part of the bed ahead of him, its blankets rumpled.

Anyone who was there would already have heard him coming. “Serena?” he called, not expecting an answer.

Stride used the toe of his shoe to push the door open slowly. He led the way inside with his gun. His eyes swept the room in an instant, and his heart started beating again when he realized there were no bodies on the floor. But something had happened here. The nightstand lamp was on the carpet, and the nightstand itself was tipped against the wall. Debris littered the floor—a hairbrush, a hardcover book, lipstick.