Hunted

by Karen Robards

  Her first faint hope that DeBlassis and the others were participating in an official arrest of Reed had dissipated even before they’d clapped handcuffs on her. No “You’re under arrest”; no identifying themselves as law enforcement. No Miranda. Nothing like that.

  These guys might be cops or feds, but what they were doing was strictly off the books.

  The threat of violence hung in the air, as tangible as the humidity.

  “So, Mexico,” DeBlassis mused, getting into the front passenger seat and turning to look at them as the SUV got under way. Having so recently had a gun held to her head by the guy, who looked like a cross between a football player and a choirboy, she wasn’t a fan. After an assessing glance at Reed, he nodded at the guy behind them, then looked at Reed again. “You want to rethink that?”

  The guy in the third seat leaned forward. Caroline felt his arm brush hers, felt his breath on her cheek. Then she felt something cold and sharp on her bare thigh. Looking down in surprise, she saw a small, wickedly sharp, silver-bladed knife pressed into the skin just above her knee.

  Her heart leaped. Her breath caught. Her muscles tightened, making the point of the blade dig into her skin. It was all she could do not to jerk away, which would have made it cut her.

  “Since when are you into hurting women, DeBlassis?” Reed growled. She could feel his anger and his fear for her from where she sat. It was coming off him in waves. His body was taut, muscles straining against the seat belt. Not that it did any good. She deliberately didn’t look at him, knowing that the growing panic that she was fighting to keep contained would be evident in her widened eyes, her dilated pupils, and send him right over the edge with rage. Stay calm, she told herself. Think.

  “We need to find the kid.” DeBlassis’ tone was almost apologetic.

  “This is beige upholstery,” Caroline pointed out in as calm a tone as she could manage while cold sweat prickled to life around her hairline and her palms grew damp. “If you start cutting on me in here, you’ll ruin it. You’ll never get the blood out.”

  DeBlassis stared at her, laughed. “Good point,” he said, and nodded at the guy with the knife, who withdrew the blade and sank back into the third seat with a grunt. Caroline felt weak with relief. Reed had visibly tensed; as the immediate threat to her was removed, she saw some of his tension ease, too. “We can wait.”

  Then her eyes were caught by something else, and she found herself watching in horrified fascination as a bright red bead of blood formed on her leg where the knife had been. Her stomach tightened. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Watching it start to trickle down her leg, she heard a ringing in her ears.

  She took a deep, steadying breath.

  “Holly really is in Mexico,” Reed told DeBlassis. She thought he was unaware of the steady thread of blood creeping down her thigh. “I put him on a truck for the border first chance I got.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” DeBlassis seemed to settle in more comfortably. He was turned sideways in the seat, watching them, his gun pointing at Reed almost negligently, not really aimed at him, although Caroline knew that could change fast. The implication in his words was obvious: once they got where they were going, they would torture her until they were convinced Reed was telling the truth.

  Caroline thought of the pictures she had seen of the corpses with the bullet holes in their foreheads, and went cold with fear. The goose bumps on her arms and legs had nothing to do with the temperature, and everything to do with the danger that she and Reed were in. These men were ruthless. They were killers.

  There was not a doubt in her mind that they meant to kill her and Reed.

  And right at the moment, she wasn’t seeing any way out.

  She went all shivery inside as her mind cast frantically about for possible avenues of escape, and kept coming up empty.

  “How’s Helena?” Reed asked. The question sounded almost idle, but DeBlassis stiffened.

  “My wife’s fine. She’s not in this.”

  “When you get back home, give her my love.”

  DeBlassis glared at him. Then he grimaced. His hand holding the gun jerked, and for a moment it pointed down. Then DeBlassis seemed to pull himself together, and the gun came back up again.

  “What’d you have to go and raise such a big stink for, anyway?” DeBlassis sounded genuinely angry. “Taking a bunch of VIPs hostage. Getting yourself all over TV. Trying to contact the Justice Department, stirring things up. All over that goddamned punk kid? I always knew he was trouble.”

  Reed said, “They killed Holly’s mother. You remember Magnolia? Holly found her body, shot in the head. Course, you didn’t do that. Happened after you left.” His eyes never left DeBlassis’ face. “They brought you back down here strictly to lure me in. Because they knew you were my partner, my good friend.”

  A muscle beside DeBlassis’ mouth twitched. “You think I like having to do this? I’d put this shit behind me, started fresh in Boston. Now we got no choice but to make you disappear.”

  “You’ve always got a choice.” Reed’s voice was hard. “Look, Caroline’s got nothing to do with any of this. I abducted her, for God’s sake. Look at her. She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s a woman. Like Helena. You don’t want to hurt her. Let her go.”

  “Like I could. Hell, I got orders.”

  “Orders from whom?” Reed asked as the SUV stopped and the driver got out. Caroline looked out the window with a stirring of hope that maybe they were in a populated area where it might be possible to do something like, say, press her face to the window and mouth the word help at passersby, but what she saw immediately dashed it: they were at a side gate to the abandoned amusement park. The headlights picked up a bright yellow metal sign affixed to the gate: Service Vehicles Only. It was dinged up, battered. The ten-foot-tall chain-link fence that surrounded the entire 225-acre property was crowded with scraggly weeds that had grown almost as tall as the fence. In the distance, the skeletal remains of the Mega Zeph roller coaster and a Ferris wheel curled against a dark, star-studded sky. Watching the driver drag open the gate, she thought of Holly. He was supposed to be waiting for them outside this very amusement park. Only he would be outside the main gate, where they were not.

  A knot formed in her chest at the realization that there was probably not going to be any help coming from anywhere. She wet her lips, trying to keep her breathing even.

  “The big boys.” DeBlassis glanced at Caroline as the driver got back in the car and drove through the gate. He addressed his next words directly to her. “You should know. Your dad’s one of ’em.”

  That didn’t come as any big surprise. Still, the confirmation felt like a weight settling on her chest.

  “My father won’t want me to be killed,” she said as if that were a certainty, although secretly she was far less confident.

  DeBlassis looked at her steadily. “Probably not, but he’ll do what he has to do to save his own ass. Just like we all will.”

  “We taking them to the theater?” the driver asked.

  “Yeah,” DeBlassis replied.

  Caroline remembered Holly saying that Ant was being held in the theater. The really bad stuff was going to start once they reached it, she guessed, and the thought brought fresh butterflies to her stomach. Right at that moment they were driving along a dark, deserted street in what could have been part of Small Town, USA. Or, rather, Small Town, USA, as assembled by Tim Burton. The brightly painted buildings were crooked and covered with graffiti. Dark stains that looked like mold were everywhere. Weeds grew through the concrete. Debris lay on the sidewalk and in the street. The effect was macabre, ghostly. She remembered this section of the amusement park: it had once been called Easy Street. The theater was not far ahead. Her heart started to pound again. Her throat went dry. The only plan she could come up with was, as soon as her feet touched the ground, to run like hell.

  It was not a good plan.

  “Rescue New Orleans,” Reed said abruptly, naming the charity f
rom the picture with Stoller and Rice. Caroline glanced at him in surprise. His gaze was steady on DeBlassis’ face.

  DeBlassis frowned. Caroline could see the driver, too: he stiffened. And she thought, Ah. We’re onto something with that.

  Then she realized that unless they somehow managed to survive, it wasn’t going to matter.

  “What about it?” There was no mistaking the defensiveness in DeBlassis’ tone.

  “I came across a picture of the group in the department files while I was looking into a rash of murders with the same MO as Magnolia’s,” Reed said. “The charity’s name seemed familiar at the time, but I just now placed it. I remember you being a part of it. I remember you talking about it, saying something like you were helping yourself by helping New Orleans. I remember that big Lexus you bought, and the vacations you took, and the size of Helena’s engagement ring. I kept wondering how you were managing to afford all that, given the amount of money we made. Then again, I was supporting a family, and you were single. That’s what I chalked it up to, anyway.” He smiled at DeBlassis. It wasn’t a friendly smile. “You were getting paid to do something on the side, weren’t you? I’m guessing, from the way this has gone down, that it was kill people.”

  “We need to go ahead and shut this guy down,” SUV guy said. His tone was ugly, and the tension in the vehicle was suddenly so thick that the air practically vibrated with it. Caroline’s nerves jumped. Her breathing quickened. SUV guy’s reaction told her that Reed had hit the nail right on the head.

  “Who’s he going to tell?” the driver scoffed.

  “Feeling smart, Ware?” DeBlassis asked. “Enjoy it, because it’s temporary.”

  “The victims were all street people,” Reed continued. “Dealers and druggies, hookers and pimps, gang members. I know the superintendent knows about what’s going down, because when I took my suspicions to him the shit hit the fan.” He stared at DeBlassis. When he continued, there was a note of incredulity in his voice. “Hell, did the city hire you to get rid of some of the bad actors?”

  “Not the city,” DeBlassis said, and the driver barked, “Shut the hell up, DeBlassis.”

  “What difference does it make?” DeBlassis snapped back. “He’s not going to be around to tell anybody.” To Reed he added, “You know how bad crime’s gotten since Katrina. It’s taking over the damned city. Pretty soon nobody’s going to be safe. Some of the bigwigs put together a freelance team of off-duty cops to clean up the worst of it. To get rid of the worst of the scum. We got recruited, told what needed to be done, and got paid. We were killing people but they were bad people, lowlifes, and it was actually a good thing for New Orleans. I looked at it like it was our civic responsibility, like we were taking the city back from the criminals one dead drug dealer at a time.”

  “Jesus, DeBlassis, you use jails for that, not murder,” Reed replied, and for a moment the two men stared each other down.

  “We’re here,” SUV guy said. With a small start Caroline realized that he was talking into a phone.

  Her blood turned to ice as they pulled up outside what was left of the ornate Orpheum Theater. Just like all the other buildings along what had once been a reproduction of a French Quarter street, it was brightly colored and marked with graffiti—and totally creepy looking.

  “Just FYI, I sent a copy of that picture of the Rescue New Orleans group to the Justice Department, along with an e-mail detailing my suspicions,” Reed said. Caroline knew it was a lie: he hadn’t had time to do any such thing. She also knew that just as she was, he was desperate to come up with some way out for them. They were running out of time. The thought made her so scared she was sick with it. She wondered if he was, too. If so, she couldn’t tell it. He looked utterly composed. He continued steadily, “I also sent them a copy of the same file I sent you. And I’ve been calling them with regular updates, just like I was calling you.” He smiled that less-than-friendly smile at DeBlassis again. “They’re going to come looking for me, and Caroline, and Holly and Ant. They’re going to investigate. You can probably come up with some sort of plausible deniability for what you’ve done to date. You kill two cops with the feds closing in, and you’ll be putting yourselves on the line for murder one.”

  “Get him the hell out of here,” SUV guy said. The driver had already turned off the ignition and was getting out of the vehicle. Caroline’s heart slammed in her chest as she contemplated the possibility of running. Would she get a chance? Would there be cover? If she went for it, she could get shot right there and then . . . She tried not to think about what taking a bullet in the back would feel like.

  DeBlassis was aiming his gun now, keeping Reed covered. As the door beside Caroline opened, SUV guy stretched an arm past her to unlock her seat belt. Then the driver reached in, grabbed her arm, and hauled her out. As her feet hit the crumbling pavement and the hand on her arm tightened to keep her from falling flat on her face, she knew this was it.

  Darting glances all around, she made an instant, panicked assessment. The night was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see and be seen. The full moon was already riding up the sky, and numerous stars were out, bathing the scene in an otherworldly glow. The street was wide. The buildings across the street looked to be made of one solid piece of plywood, with no alleys or gaps of any kind between the facades of various shops. To the left and right were long expanses of empty street: no cover there. No cover anywhere.

  There was nowhere to go if she ran.

  “Dick!” a boy cried. She shot a look in the direction of the voice and saw the shadowy figures of a man and boy close together, emerging from beneath the overhang. Even as she spotted them the boy somehow got free from the man who’d obviously just brought him out of the black hole that was the entrance to the theater and bolted toward them. He was a young teen, thin, dark haired. He ran like a sprinter with the finish line in sight.

  “You! Stop!” the man yelled. Caroline’s heart leaped into her throat as she watched his gun snap up.

  “No!” she screamed, and jerked away from the driver’s grip to spring toward the kid, who streaked past her like she wasn’t even there. Reed was just stepping down from the vehicle with SUV guy at his back. At the same time DeBlassis emerged from the passenger door to keep Reed covered. They all pivoted toward the oncoming kid.

  “Don’t any of you fucking move!” the driver screamed, dancing back a couple of steps, then everybody converged and Caroline found herself, Reed, and the kid who could be no one but Ant hemmed in by four men with guns.

  Oblivious, Ant threw himself against Reed, wrapping his arms around his waist, making him stagger back a step. The fact that Reed was handcuffed and that multiple guns were pointing at them didn’t seem to deter him one bit.

  “Hey, Ant,” Reed said to him, very low key under the circumstances.

  “They’re gonna kill us,” Ant cried. He was so scared his teeth were chattering. “I heard ’em talking. They were just waiting for you to get here and—”

  “Shut the fuck up.” SUV guy slammed the rear door and shoved Reed, with Ant still attached, toward the center of the street. Her chance to run lost, Caroline gravitated toward Reed, too, so that the three of them stood together in a wary little knot.

  Looking at DeBlassis, Reed said furiously, “Kid’s fricking thirteen years old and—”

  Gunfire cracked, the sound a loud pop pop in the night. The driver screamed and fell to the street. Time seemed to suspend for a split second. Even as Caroline realized what had happened everyone was crying out and jumping and scattering, and she was, too, falling back toward Reed and Ant as a voice bellowed, “Get your hands up! Federal police!”

  A jumble of thoughts exploded through Caroline’s brain at once: a jubilant we’re saved, followed by where are they? and finally, a questioning federal police?

  DeBlassis and the others were just starting to put their hands in the air. Growling, “Run,” in her ear, Reed nudged her into movement with a shove from his shoulder. Pulse
leaping, awash with the icy conviction that all was not well, she ran, bolting after Ant, who was streaking back toward the theater, with Reed maybe a step behind her saying, “Go, go, go.”

  “Federal police! Keep your hands up!” the voice yelled again. An instant later more gunfire cracked, an exchange of gunfire now, Caroline realized even as she pounded after Ant into a sliver of space that ran along the side of the theater. It was an alley, a tiny, dark alley. The gunfire was coming from a sheltered position nearby. She could see the dark silhouette of a man rising above a large concrete planter to snap off shots. A glance back showed her that DeBlassis and the others no longer had their hands in the air, that they had taken cover and were returning fire. A bullet zinged past, so close she could hear the sound of it whistling by her ear. With a little gasping cry she cringed and dodged and kept running. At the same time, out of the corner of her eye she saw a dark shadow run into the alley behind Reed. She saw bright flashes as this newcomer snapped off shots, too, not toward them but the other way, toward DeBlassis and crew. She heard Reed bellow, “Move your ass,” and on the wall saw a shadow of a figure in a hoodie and jeans and finally understood: Holly.

  Holly with a gun, yelling Federal police.

  Oh my God. It was a bluff.

  Steps behind Ant, she reached the end of the alley and was just bursting out into a landscape littered with toppled fiberglass statues and derelict rides and what looked like an entire roller coaster lying flat on the ground when a scream behind her made her look back.

  Her heart clutched.

  Reed had been right behind her. He was no longer there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE