Justice

by Karen Robards

  Once on his feet, Mark asked, “You mind if I turn on a light?”

  “Hell, yeah, I mind. Whoever got me sprung from the clink didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. I know where a lot of bodies are buried—literally, I do—and I figure they got me out before I could use that to make a deal. Now that I’m out, smart thing to do is kill me. I can see I’m not wrong: you found me. You had to get my location from somebody. Which means somebody is interested enough in me to know where I am. Which is why I’m in the process of packing up and moving on. Another hour, and you would have missed me. Turn on a light, and anybody coming knows I’m home. And that ain’t good. Might precipitate something I’d just as soon gave me the go-by. So you want to cut to the chase with your offer? Cause I got places I need to be.”

  See, the thing was, Dustin Yamaguchi—Gooch, for short—was one of those spook bad guys. He hadn’t always been—he and Mark had worked together when Mark had been a newbie Secret Service agent and Gooch had been on one of his first missions for the CIA, many years before—but about ten years ago Gooch had gone over to the dark side. Until finally he’d ended up out of the spook business altogether, killing people for money. But Gooch knew a great many other spook bad guys. Which was where Mark’s job offer came in.

  “I want you to use your contacts, check around, try to find somebody for me.”

  Gooch was wary. “Who?”

  “I don’t know who, precisely. If I did, why would I need you? But somebody deep inside is maybe trying to kill a friend of mine, and I want to find out if that is indeed the case, along with who it is, and who ordered it.”

  “What friend?”

  “Remember that lady lawyer I brought to see you?”

  “The cute little chickie? Sure.” Gooch sounded interested. “She your girlfriend? Didn’t really seem like your type.”

  Mark wasn’t going there, especially not with somebody like Gooch, who was a horndog from way back. “She’s my responsibility. My screwup is the reason why she’s being targeted. You know how it is: you break it, you fix it.”

  “You want me to whack whoever this is when I find them?”

  “I’m not completely sure there’s anybody there to find. I want you to nose around, listen to the word on the wind. If there is somebody trying to kill her, I want to know who it is before anything else gets done. Then you and I will talk again.”

  “What’s your time frame? And how much green we talking about?”

  That brought them to the details. By the time Mark left, carefully skirting the trip wire once again, he and Gooch had a deal.

  Not that he didn’t trust Hasbrough, who had agreed that protecting Jess was the Service’s responsibility and had vowed to pull out all the stops to find this guy. But Mark wasn’t naive: he’d worked in the field too long.

  Which was why when it came to Hasbrough—or anybody else who he thought was supposed to be on his side, for that matter—his motto was trust, but verify.

  In his experience, people tended to live longer that way.

  I don’t want to die.

  After hours spent entombed in a car trunk, Lucy sent that out into the universe with just about every too-fast heartbeat.

  The only reason she and Jaden were still alive was that the car had run out of gas. At least, the engine had finally stopped after sputtering a few times, and Lucy had thought an empty gas tank had probably been the reason. Or maybe the engine had simply conked out. Whatever, Lucy had known they were supposed to have been dead. She’d been conscious enough to be aware when the car had come to a halt at last, had been petrified with fear as she’d listened to the car door opening and slamming closed again, followed by footsteps on a hard surface.

  He’s coming. Panic had sent her scrambling as far back into her dark prison as she’d been able to get. But the footsteps had walked on by.

  A moment later she’d heard the rumble of what had sounded like a garage door closing. She had guessed it had been closing, because, just before the car had stopped moving, she had heard that same rumble, which had probably been the door opening.

  Where is he? What’s he doing?

  Now, all these hours later, she still remembered the sharp terror of her thoughts.

  She’d lain there, cramped and shaking, in total, complete darkness, waiting for whoever had taken them to pop open the trunk. The engine had still been running, so the guy couldn’t have gone far. No matter what he had done next, no matter if he’d had a gun or whatever, she’d been planning on going to jump out of there like a kangaroo on springs and run or fight or do whatever she’d had to do to save herself. Jaden hadn’t been moving, although Lucy had tried to rouse her again just like she had tried to rouse her umpteen times before, so Lucy had waited alone, sweating, terrified, crouched, getting ready to make her move, so that her legs had bunched under her, although the cramped space had made that difficult.

  Jump for your life. It had sounded like some kind of stupid game show, and she would have laughed hysterically at the idea if she hadn’t been pretty near hysterical, period.

  But nobody had come, nothing had happened, and finally her legs had cramped and she’d lain down to stretch them out as best she’d been able, and then she’d been too tired to get back up. For a long time she’d stayed curled up in a ball just listening to her own heart pounding, listening to the purr of the running engine, growing increasingly short of air in the suffocating heat, then getting sick and dizzy, wanting to sleep. She would have slept if she hadn’t been too afraid to close her eyes, but fear had kept them open, kept her conscious, until, finally, she had figured it out. She and Jaden were locked in the trunk of a car. They were probably in an enclosed space such as a garage. The engine was still running. Her head swam, and she felt like barfing up her toenails before passing out.

  Carbon monoxide.

  In a blinding burst of enlightenment, it came to her that that was what it had to be. He was going to kill them by using carbon monoxide, without ever opening the trunk. She wasn’t going to get a chance to run, or fight, or anything else, because she and Jaden were both going to be dead before the man came back.

  Please don’t let me die.

  Galvanized by a fresh burst of terror, she lost it then, screaming her head off and kicking at the seam where the trunk closed and pounding on the metal roof over her head until exhaustion or fumes or something overcame her and she collapsed into a sobbing, trembling ball, clutching at the unconscious but still breathing Jaden and praying like there was actually a God up there and He cared enough to help.

  Please please please please please …

  Two things happened almost simultaneously: Jaden woke up, and the engine coughed once, twice, three times, then died.

  No sound. No vibrations. Nothing. Nada.

  Her first thought was that the guy had come back and turned off the car.

  But she hadn’t heard anything. No rumble of a garage door opening. No footsteps. Nothing. And nobody came.

  Please. God. Please.

  She lay there, dizzy and sick and so scared that she was shaking, feeling stupid as she muttered another prayer to a god she was pretty sure didn’t even exist. But hey, the first one seemed to have worked. Or something.

  After a while, Lucy realized that the fumes must have dissipated, because she was feeling better.

  They were still trapped in the trunk of the car. They had been in there a long time now; she didn’t know how long exactly, because being locked in a closed, dark space that was hotter than an oven and smelled sickeningly of gasoline and motor oil—and she didn’t even want to think what else—probably made it feel like it was forever when it hadn’t been. But it had been hours, at least. Maybe as much as a day.

  The man hadn’t yet come back. Because he thought they were dead in there, she supposed, so what was the rush?

  If we don’t get out of here, we’re still going to die.

  “I’m thirsty,” Jaden whispered. It was the first thing she’d said for
a long time. Weak and sick, she lay curled on her side at the far edge of the space, out of Lucy’s way. They were both sweating and achy and miserable and scared out of their minds. The difference was, Jaden had given up, while Lucy wasn’t going down without a fight.

  “Yeah, me, too. Try not to think about it.”

  Legs folded beneath her, Lucy was bent into a pretzel as she used a screwdriver they’d found to pry at the seam where the trunk closed. She’d been doing it for a while. In the pitch black, it was difficult to tell if she was making any progress, but she thought she’d at least bent the metal some. The carpet was scrunched beneath her legs in an uncomfortable wave, because they’d torn it up trying to get to the well where the spare tire was kept. They’d found the tire, which had been useless to them, and a jack, which had also proved useless because they hadn’t been able to figure out how to work it in the dark, and the screwdriver. So far it had proven pretty useless, too.

  The head-on clink of metal on metal made Lucy think she’d hit the latch. If they could just somehow break it …

  “Hold this,” she told Jaden, reaching for her friend’s hand and curling it around the screwdriver’s hard plastic handle. “Whatever you do, don’t let it move.”

  “Why?” Jaden’s voice was apathetic. Lucy put some bite into her own voice to try to put some fight back into Jaden.

  “Just do it.”

  Jaden moaned, but she wriggled forward until she was in a better position to do as Lucy asked. Lucy kept her own hand in place until Jaden’s grip was strong and steady enough to do the job. Then Lucy wormed around until her back was wedged against the back of the trunk.

  Please, God. Please.

  Bringing her knee up as high as she could, she slammed the sole of her boot against the end of the screwdriver handle with all her might.

  Miracle of miracles, the trunk sprang open with a metallic clank. A light blinked on.

  The trunk light, of course, Lucy realized even as she cringed and threw up a hand to ward off what felt like a dazzling brightness.

  Jaden blinked at her. Her face was a shiny, sweaty white and her hair stuck out all over the place. Lucy thought she looked like a day-old corpse. For a moment neither of them moved. Lucy’s heart pounded like a Riverdancer’s feet. Her stomach turned inside out.

  Is anybody out there?

  The darkness beyond the trunk was degrees less black than the trunk itself had been, like a dark night compared to the inside of a cave. Except for the rasp of their own breathing, the silence was absolute. Cool air poured in. Not fresh, exactly, but cool. The feel of it on Lucy’s damp skin was phenomenal.

  Lucy was almost sure they were alone.

  “Lucy, you did it! You did it!” Jaden’s whisper was filled with awe.

  “We did it.”

  Tremulous with fear and excitement, they scrambled awkwardly out of the trunk. Lucy’s knees threatened to give way. For a moment after she hit the ground the world seemed to tilt. If she hadn’t grabbed the back of the car, she would have crumpled to the pavement. Jaden did collapse, her legs buckling beneath her.

  “Jaden. Come on.” Lucy crouched beside her, putting an arm around her, but Jaden was already pushing up onto her hands and knees.

  “I’m coming.” Moving slowly, Jaden made it, first onto her hands and knees, then to her feet. Lucy had already determined that they were, as she had suspected, in a garage. The big black car they had escaped from was the only vehicle in it, although it was easily a two-car garage with space left over. There were two overhead garage doors, Lucy saw as they headed toward the one directly in front of them. She let go of Jaden, reached it, pulled up on the handle hard.

  It was locked. So was the other one. So was the person-sized door set into the side wall. Locked from the outside, with the kind of locks that need a key. Flipping a switch she found on one wall led to exactly nothing: no door opening, no light coming on. There was no inside button that Lucy could find to operate the doors.

  Leaving Jaden sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, Lucy worked her way around the walls, looking for any possible way out. It was a metal building with a concrete floor. No windows. A pole building, Lucy had heard similar structures called.

  They were trapped inside it.

  Lucy was just facing the horrible truth of that when the trunk light went out.

  “Lucy,” Jaden whispered. “Listen.”

  That’s when Lucy heard it, too: the faint crunch of footsteps on gravel approaching the garage.

  Her first terrified thought was. He’s back.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” Jaden’s voice shook.

  They both knew who Jaden meant: Miss Howard’s killer. Lucy didn’t bother to answer.

  Who else could it be?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was 2:00 a.m., and Jess wanted to go home to her apartment. She was tired, scared, and traumatized from her recent near-death experience. Her throat was sore, she ached all over, and she needed sleep.

  The thing was, at Ellis Hayes, Saturday was a work day. Oh, not an official one. But still, everybody showed up. And she had things she needed to do. Not all of which involved her job.

  A knock on the kitchen door made Maddie and Sarah, who were sitting around the kitchen table talking to Jess, jump. Jess didn’t jump because she was expecting it. Judy had gone up to bed some twenty minutes before, pleading exhaustion, and Jess had immediately texted Mark, who, she presumed, was still somewhere nearby. Having remembered from the last time how unpleasant it was to get up early and go home in borrowed clothes only to get dressed again to go to work, Jess had no desire to repeat the experience. Besides, she was worried about Allison’s cat. And to tell the truth, she hated the idea of Mark keeping watch outside the house in the Suburban all because of her, which she assumed was what he was doing. He had to be nearly as exhausted as she was.

  “Who on earth …?” Sarah asked as Maddie, having no clue there was any reason not to, went to the door.

  “Ask who it is first,” Jess told Maddie sharply before she could open it.

  Sarah frowned at her, but Maddie did as she was told.

  “Mark,” came the answer, just as Jess had expected. Still, given recent events, it was wise to be careful.

  Maddie opened the door.

  “Hey.” Mark stepped inside the kitchen. Jess met his gaze. She could see properly again because she was wearing a spare pair of glasses she kept at her mother’s house. A glance told her that he’d lost the tux and was wearing a black tee and jeans instead. With his hair ruffled and stubble darkening his jaw, he looked handsome and tough and tired all at the same time. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, the small exchange feeling disturbingly intimate.

  Over, she reminded herself, but she was so glad to see him that she didn’t even care.

  “What are you doing here?” Maddie closed the door again.

  “He came to get me.” Standing up, Jess answered before Mark could. “I didn’t want to upset Mom, but I’m going home to my apartment. I have to go in to work tomorrow.”

  “What?” Mark looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

  “You don’t mean it,” Sarah said.

  “It’s Saturday,” Maddie protested.

  “In case it’s slipped your mind, just a few hours ago you nearly died,” Mark said, to which her sisters nodded vigorous agreement.

  The nearly identical sentiments, although expressed in different terms, seemed to unite the speakers. All three frowned at Jess.

  “I’ll go in late,” she promised Mark as she moved around the table toward him. She was wearing an old pair of her own knee-length khaki shorts and a green tee that could have been anybody’s, plus a pair of Maddie’s flip-flops. The opposite of hot, but she realized she was perfectly comfortable with Mark seeing her like that. “But I’m going in.” He looked like he meant to object with more force, but she forestalled him by speaking over her shoulder to her sisters. “Tell Mom I’ll come by on Sunday, would yo
u?” At their concerned expressions she frowned impatiently. “And you can both stop looking at me like I’m going to keel over at any minute. I had a bad experience, true, but I survived and I’m fine. And I’ll feel better sleeping in my own bed.”

  Remembering that to their minds “sleeping in my own bed” presumably meant sleeping with Mark, Jess suddenly felt self-conscious. Something of what she was thinking must have shown in her face, because both sisters’ expressions changed noticeably.

  “Oh, I get it,” Maddie said, while Sarah murmured, “Uh-huh,” while looking Mark up and down. Sarah added a twinkling, “Welcome back” to him while Maddie piped up with, “I bet Taylor’s excited. She said the best thing about you being with Jess was it kept you too busy to stick your nose into her life.”

  “Good to know.” Mark’s response was dry.

  Sighing inwardly, Jess decided the best thing to do was just let them think what they would for the time being.

  “See you Sunday, Maddie. If you’re not here, I’ll call you, Sarah,” Jess said on her way out the door, because presumably Sarah would have reunited with her sons and been back in her own house by then. Or maybe the boys and Sarah would be staying with her mother. Given the state of Sarah’s marriage, it was hard to tell.

  Outside, the world smelled like damp grass. A streetlamp in the alley kept the night from being utterly dark. Jess supposed there must have been a heavy cloud cover overhead to keep her from seeing any hint of a star or the moon. The humidity curled around her like smoke. For once the heat felt good.

  “So where is Taylor this weekend?” Jess asked as they went down the back steps.

  “She stayed with her mother. There’s a concert, and she has a date.” Mark’s tone as he said that last was so sour that Jess had to smile. “Next weekend she’s going on a class trip. I practically have to beg to get any time with her anymore, and then all we do is fight.”

  “You’re a good father to her. She’ll appreciate that when she’s older.”

  “I’ll believe it when it happens. You realize that your sister is going to tell my daughter we’re back together.”