ZEKE’S BABY
Page 33
She giggled. “I have to go. A customer is coming. Call me when it’s over.”
Before he could respond, the phone beeped as the call ended. He took a deep breath. “Okay, Goon, you and I are going to see if we can squeeze out without him noticing. Blade, stay where you are until we make our move.”
“This is killing my back!”
Royal began to snicker. “You should try it over here under the wheel.”
“I’m good,” Goon added helpfully from the back.
“Swell,” Royal sneered, then handed Blade his phone. “Call Hammer. Have him start working this way. Goon, let’s go.” He opened the door and slithered out then eased the door shut, staying low and out of sight, Goon doing the same. When Goon reached behind him, Royal touched him on the shoulder. “No guns,” he said quietly. “That will only make things worse.”
Royal and Goon crouched beside the SUV until they saw Hammer, walking across the parking lot like he belonged. When he reached the car nearest them, he looked down like he was looking for keys, then disappeared beside the car. He was at least fifty yard away, but he couldn’t get any closer because there were no other cars this far out.
“Okay, we’re going to play it just like we planned. I’m going around first and open Tony’s door. You help me drag his ass out of the truck and get him into ours. We’re going to have to be fast. One advantage this far out is we don’t have to worry about anyone noticing from the store. You watch and tell me when there’s a break in traffic. I’ll go on your word, and you come right behind me.”
Royal crouched at the corner of the Chevy, waiting for Goon’s all clear. “Go!”
Royal sprinted around the back of the SUV with Goon on his heels, Blade opening the door the moment they passed. Royal yanked the door open, and reached in to turn off the engine and release Tony’s seatbelt. They had the element of surprise and he was going to use it for all it was worth.
Tony instinctually grabbed Royal’s arm as he reached into the interior, twisting it way from the steering wheel. Goon reached in beside Royal, and grabbed Tony by the shirt, pulling him hard toward the door. The engine roared as Tony floored the throttle in his struggle against Royal and Goon. The belt came loose and Tony lurched toward the door, then grabbed the wheel in a death grip. Giving up on switching the engine off, Royal grabbed Tony’s shirt to help Goon pull him out. Tony released the wheel long enough to take a swing at him. The punch missed, and without his right hand on the wheel, they began to drag him out. Tony grabbed at the wheel again, hitting the gear lever in the process. The truck lunged forward under full throttle acceleration, jumping the curb and running down a small decorative tree.
Goon and Royal tumbled to the ground at the truck roared away. Blade dashed toward Tony’s truck as it slid to a stop in the grass strip between the parking lot and the road. He’d just reached the side of the truck when Tony must have recovered from his surprise, because the Ford roared, its rear tires spitting grass and dirt as he floored the truck again, bounding over the curb and into the road.
Royal was already getting behind the wheel when Goon and Blade piled into the SUV. Hammer was running hard to join them, but they didn’t have time to wait on him. Royal started the Suburban and the moment the engine started, he banged the truck into gear and floor the throttle, driving the SUV over the curb and through the grass onto the road as Tony had.
He saw Tony make the right at the end of the road at the light, but when he arrived traffic was already flowing across the intersection. He made a hole to a cacophony of horns but got caught at the next light behind a couple of cars, just as Tony made another right. Royal tried to edge around the two cars blocking him by driving up in the grass, but the concrete wall retaining wall and light pole prevented him from squeezing past. When the light finally changed he made the right and matted the throttle, but Tony was gone.
“Right, right, right!” Blade called, pointing frantically at his window with his hand.
“Do you see him?” Royal asked as the Suburban bellowed down the onramp and onto the interstate.
“No, but I wouldn’t risk getting caught at the light to make a left if I were in his shoes.”
Royal kept the throttle down until he reached the I-73, I-85, Business 85 interchange. There were so many loops and exits, all clustered together, Tony could have gone any one of a half-dozen different directions, and that was assuming he’d even come this way.
“Fuck!” Royal snarled, slamming the palm of his hand against the steering wheel as he lifted and the Chevy began to slow. “Goon, you okay?”
“I’m going to have a hell of a bruise on my shoulder, but yeah, I’m okay. You?”
“I think I damn near dislocated my shoulder, and having your fat ass falling on me didn’t help, but yeah, I’m okay.”
“Now what?”
Royal sighed and began working over to get off the interstate and turn around. “We go back for Hammer. We made our play to do it the easy way. Now we have to do it the hard way.”
“Damnit!” Goon snapped. “If the truck just hadn’t been running we would’ve had him!”
“He was lucky,” Blade said. “If he hadn’t hit the gear lever by accident…”
Royal nodded, then frowned. “Jesus Christ! Are we going to have to drive all the way back to South Carolina just to turn around?”
***
“I don’t see him,” Hammer said as he sat down in the SUV and closed the door. “You were gone so long I thought you caught him. What happened anyway?”
“No. We couldn’t catch him. He made a light I didn’t,” Royal explained. “By the time I cleared the light he was gone. We made our best guess on which way he went, but we didn’t see anything. After that…” He shrugged. “They don’t build exits on the interstates in North Carolina. It took us ten minutes to get to the next exit.”
“He must have seen you coming or something. You barely got the door open before he was gone.”
“He got lucky,” Royal said. “He won’t the next time.”
“So what’s the plan?” Hammer asked.
“Back to Greenfield to regroup. I didn’t bring my laptop, and we’re going to need more wheels to get a line on him.” Royal grimaced, knowing they missed their best, most likely chance to bag him. “One thing’s for damn sure: he’s going to be a lot more skittish now that he knows we’re onto him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Royal strode into On A Roll and headed directly to the bakery. “May I help you?” the woman asked from behind the counter full of baked goods.
“Is Stella here?”
“Just a moment.” The woman turned. “Stella! A customer wants to talk to you!”
“Be out in a moment!” Stella’s voice came from the back.
“She’ll be with you in just a moment.”
Gabriel nodded and stood, admiring the muffins, crêpes, bread, cakes and cookies on display. Stella had a real talent. “Gabriel? Did you…?”
He looked up and smiled. “Missed him. Can I talk to you a for a minute?”
“Clarice, can you cover for me a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
Stella stepped out from the bakery and nodded her head. He followed into the back of the store as she led him to the loading dock.
“What happened?”
“Just one of those things. He pulled into the parking lot right on top of us. When we made our play, he slipped away. It happens. It’s not the first time I’ve missed someone and it probably won’t be the last. But I need a favor.”
“What?”
“I need to use your Wi-Fi. I don’t have it at my place, and the clubhouse isn’t done yet. Do you mind?”
“No, not at all. What are you going to do?”
He smiled. “I don’t think he’ll trust you again, so now I have to do it the hard way, the same way I track down fugitives. I have contacts that I work with in various businesses. Normally I present a subpoena for the information, but I’ve been working with the
se people for a while and…” He let his voice trail away. “If they help me out I send them a little token of my appreciation. One likes Best Buy gift cards, another gift certificates to Amazon, that sort of thing.”
“Is that legal?”
“Strictly speaking, no.” He saw her eyes go wide. “Don’t worry. If anything happens, the fact I was using your internet connection won’t matter. I’ll be the one in trouble, not you.”
She shook her head. “I can’t go to jail.”
He chuckled. “Don’t worry, you won’t. I could do the same thing at Starbucks, but I don’t like working in a public place like that unless I have to, for obvious reasons.”
She nodded. “I’ll get you my key. Can I trust you if I give you yours back?”
He grinned. “That’s a big step.”
She sniffed out a brief laugh and gave him a sideway smile. “You’re not moving back in. This is just until you get your place setup, or the clubhouse, or whatever you’re going to do.”
“Thank you. You can trust me. I won’t come by unless you invite, or I ask first, okay?”
“Okay. Come on, I’ll get you the key.” He followed her into the breakroom where she pulled her purse from a locker and worked a key off the ring. “I’ll get you the extra one when I get home,” she said as she handed it to him. “Will you be there when I get home?”
“I can be, if you want.”
She giggled. “You’d better, or bring my back my key, otherwise I won’t be able to get in.”
He smiled and nodded. “I’ll be there.” He looked around. The breakroom was empty so he gave her a quick kiss. “Thank you.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Count on it.”
***
“April! Gabriel Prince, King Recovery.”
“Hey, Gabriel! How you been? I haven’t heard from you in a while. How’s business?”
“Pretty good. I need a favor.”
“A favor, huh?” April confirmed.
“That’s right.” He smiled. He’d never met April in person, but they had, over the course of the last couple of years, worked out a system of code words that sounded perfectly innocent, but they both knew what they meant. If he asked for a favor April knew she could expect a $250 gift certificate from Amazon to arrive in her personal email later that day...if she wasn’t too scrupulous about verifying he had a subpoena.
“I’ll be happy to take of that, Mr. Prince. What’s the number?”
Royal read her Tony’s cell phone number.
“Dates?”
“Say from Monday of this week until now, then I’d like to have the same information sent to me again on Monday.”
“Okay, give me a moment while I access the information,” she said. He heard her typing away on the keyboard, doing whatever it was she did to call up the location information on Tony’s cell phone. “I have the information. Email?”
“That would be great. Thank you so much for your help.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Prince. Good luck in apprehending your suspect,” she said, all business.
“Thank you, April,” he said, clicking the button on the Amazon website to send her the gift certificate.
He’d just closed the window on the Amazon website when his computer and phone chimed, announcing the arrival of an email. He opened the email and scrolled down the list of towers, when Tony’s phone accessed the tower, along with the tower’s location information. The information was arrayed in rows and columns that made it easy for him to import into Excel so he could slice and dice the information.
Fifteen minutes later he had a pretty good idea of where Tony was staying. His phone was pinging one particular tower far more often than any other, and there was a cluster of motels nearby. He called Eric and Sheila, his two contacts with the credit card companies, trying to narrow it down a little more, but there was no activity on Tony’s card since he left Greenfield, so he wasn’t completely stupid.
“I’ve got him,” Royal said into his phone when Doc answered. “He’s still in Greensboro, but he probably won’t stay for long there since we made him.”
“Hammer told me what happened. Bad luck.”
“Yeah. We’re going to turn and burn in a couple of hours before he can get out of town. We’ll get him this time.”
“Make it happen, Royal.”
***
Gabriel opened the door when he heard the rap, giving Stella a kiss as she pushed the door shut. “Your key,” he said, after pulling back from the kiss while he fishing it out of his pocket.
“Keep that one. I’ll get the other one.”
“You’re sure?”
She smiled and touched his face. “For now. Will you be here when I get home from the diner?”
“No. I’m leaving when you do, but I made dinner for you.”
“Really?” she asked, her surprise clear in her tone.
“Don’t get too excited,” he grinned. “It’s a frozen lasagna I found in your freezer. I can’t cook, but I can follow directions on a package. That’s my version of making dinner.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” she said as she followed him into the kitchen. The table was set and the frozen dinner was sitting on top of the stove, ready to serve.
“I took it out of the oven about five minutes ago. I wasn’t sure when you’d be home.”
She grinned then give him a quick kiss. “Thank you. Katrina is going to be disappointed she missed lasagna.”
He sat the dish in center of the table and scooped a portion onto their plates. “About that,” he said slowly, looking at his plate as he pushed the pasta around with his fork. “What do you think of the idea of me keeping her some? Once she gets used to me, of course. That would give Connie a break, as well.”
“That’s a big responsibility. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
He grinned as he glanced up at her then returned his eyes to his plate. “Sure? No. But I want to try. She’s my daughter, too. I need to step up and be a dad. I want to be her dad.”
She watched him over her fork as she chewed. “Let me think about, okay? There’s a lot for you to learn before you’re ready to fly solo.”
He chuckled. “I have no doubt, but I can learn. You know how I feel about you. I’m hoping we can be a family, someday.”
She nodded. “I know. I won’t try to keep her from you, but that’s a long way from being a family. We said we were going to take it slow.”
He nodded. “I’m not saying that I move in tomorrow. I’d like her, when we’re ready, to stay home with me sometimes. If you teach me to cook, I could even have dinner, a real dinner, waiting when you got home.”
She watched him a moment. “Why is it I have the feeling you don’t know what you’re saying? That, or your feeding me a line. Cooking for me? You never offered to do that before. Why the sudden change?”
“Katrina.”
“Katrina? What does she have to do with anything? You’re ready to give up your club and settle down because of Katrina? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m not saying that at all. Why do I have to give up the club? Every member of the Greenfield chapter, except me and Goon, have old ladies. That means they’re either married or in a committed relationship. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, Stella. Think of the club as my job, but when I’m not chasing down some asshole who skipped bail, I don’t see any reason why I can’t help you with Katrina.”
She nodded slowly. “I guess.”
“What’s the problem?” he asked gently.
“No problem.”
“There is a problem, I can hear it in your voice. If we can’t talk about stuff like this, we’re doomed from the start and I might as well give your key back right now and we’ll just remain friends.”
“It’s moving too fast! Now you’re talking about being a family? On top of that, unless you’re willing to live two lives, I don’t know how I feel about Katrina being around a bunch of motorcyclists.”