by Debra Webb
“She can call a cab.” He let out on the clutch and stamped the accelerator, rocketing forward.
“You don’t understand!” Lucky turned fully in the seat to face him fully. “Please. I can’t just leave her there.” The promise she’d made to Victoria haunted Lucky now. “I have to be there for her. I can’t go back to the office without her.”
The man plowed the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Fine. It’s on the way anyhow.”
Lucky fell back against the seat. What in God’s name had just happened? She was going to be in big trouble for leaving Mrs. Colby-Camp, for failing to deliver Mr. Camp’s package and for leaving the scene of a crime.
She stole a glance at the driver. Leaving with the shooter of at least two of the victims had to make her actions even more criminal.
Dear God, she was so screwed.
And those people were so dead.
She told herself to get as many of the facts as possible. “Your name is Garrett?”
“That’s right.”
“And you witnessed those two men kill the driver?”
“I did. They dragged him out of the car and shot him on the spot. They were headed inside after you when I interceded.”
Wait. A frown furrowed across her brow, emphasizing the ache of tension there. “How did you know I was in the building?”
He said nothing.
“Do you live in the area?” she demanded. Not very likely since several of the blocks appeared not only run-down but abandoned.
Still he didn’t answer.
“Were you waiting for your connection?” Frustration and anger kicked aside the hysteria. “Or waiting to make some illegal deal?” Fury chased away the more fragile emotions.
“I don’t buy, sell or use drugs, lady.”
Then she knew. “You were following me!” For the life of her she couldn’t imagine why, but that had to be the case. Or maybe he’d followed Mr. Camp’s contact.
He made a hard left, pitching her around.
She righted herself, shoved the hair out of her eyes. “That’s what you were doing, isn’t it?”
He said nothing. He didn’t have to. It was true.
He had been following her or the woman, Jennifer. He had to be connected to her delivery for Mr. Camp. Whatever she did now, Lucky had to commit to memory every detail about this man. Mr. Camp would want to know. The police would want to know. She didn’t dare attempt getting a picture with her cell phone. Wait…where was her cell? She covertly checked her pockets but didn’t dare check the floorboard in case she’d dropped it. He did have a gun and clearly he wasn’t shy about using it.
He was tall. At least a head taller than her, maybe six feet or a little more. Sandy-colored hair. Brown eyes. Square jaw. Broad shoulders. Muscular, but not heavy. Lean. He’d rolled up the sleeves of the white button-down shirt he wore, revealing a couple of tattoos. She didn’t recognize the symbol on his right forearm and couldn’t see the one on the left well enough to make out details.
When he let her out at the clinic she could attempt to get his license plate number as he drove away.
The truck came to an abrupt stop. Lucky swung her attention to the street. The clinic. Relief washed over her. Thank God.
“You can give the police my description,” he said, jerking her attention back to him. “But it won’t do you any good.”
She held her breath, kept her gaze steady on his as she slowly reached for the door handle. “Why is that, Mr. Garrett?”
“I’m not in any databases. I’m nowhere.” He leaned toward her and she gasped. “I don’t exist, Ms. Malone.”
He had been following her! How else would he know her name?
“Now skedaddle.”
Lucky wrenched the door open and practically fell face-forward onto the street. The truck sat really high off the ground. She scrambled to her feet and rushed to the clinic entrance. Once inside, she would check on Victoria, borrow a phone to call 9-1-1 and then call Mr. Camp.
Breathless, she checked the waiting room for a bathroom. Relief gushed through her when she spotted the door. She hurried across the deserted waiting room and closed herself in the tiny room. Her hands shook as she turned on the faucet and then pumped a palm full of soap. Lucky scrubbed hard, memories she didn’t want to recall swarming her brain. She banished the haunting mental images and dried her hands. After a swipe of her left cheek she checked her blouse. Red spots stained the fabric. Nothing she could do about that. She buttoned her jacket—it was too dark for any blood splatters to show. Exiting the bathroom, she walked straight to the reception desk.
She closed her eyes for a second and searched for calm. Maybe she’d finally gone as crazy as her mother. Maybe she had imagined all of the past hour.
“May I help you?”
Lucky opened her eyes. The woman behind the desk peered up at her with blatant annoyance despite the cheery pink scrubs she wore.
“I’d like to check on Victoria Colby-Camp.” Lucky took a much-needed breath and ordered herself to calm down. She would get through this.
The woman flipped through her appointment book, then riffled through the files and papers on her desk. She shook her head.
Lucky’s stomach dropped into the vicinity of her thrift store shoes. She was too late.
“I’m sorry,” the woman finally said. “We don’t have a patient by that name.”
What? Stay calm, she told herself. “She may have left already,” Lucky suggested. “She came in an hour or so ago for a procedure.” Lucky leaned forward, glanced pointedly at the appointment book. “Victoria Colby-Camp. She must be on there. I brought her here myself.”
“Let me check to see if her paperwork is still in back.” The receptionist stepped away from her desk, disappearing into the corridor that led to the treatment rooms.
Lucky maintained her position at the counter, her heart thundering, denial raging through her. How could all of this have happened in such a short time?
The woman in the pink scrubs came back shaking her head. Her curly blond locks swung with the action. “I’m sorry, there must be some mistake. No one has spoken to or treated a Victoria Colby-Camp. She’s not on our schedule for today and she’s not here.” She shrugged. “She isn’t a patient of this clinic.”
The room suddenly closed in on Lucky. Fear clamped hard around her chest. “That’s not possible. I brought her here…watched her check in.”
“Are you certain it was this clinic?” the receptionist asked. “There are several others within a four-or five-block radius.”
“Of course I’m sure.” Lucky locked her knees to
prevent them from giving way. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
This was wrong!
“I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am.” Wait, maybe she’d used another name. Victoria had said she didn’t want anyone to know. “She may have used a different name.” Lucky rattled off her boss’s description.
She had to be back there, assuming Victoria hadn’t left already.
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist said, “no one matching that description has been in this morning.”
Impossible. “Thank you. I must have made a mistake.”
The receptionist turned her attention back to her work. Lucky bolted for the double doors leading into the clinic proper. The receptionist yelled something but Lucky didn’t slow down. She burst into the first room she encountered. A woman wearing a hospital gown gasped.
The doctor swung his attention from his patient to Lucky and demanded, “What’s going on here?”
Lucky could hear the woman in the pink scrubs calling for security, but Lucky just kept rushing from room to room. She checked the next room, and the next. One was empty; another was occupied with what appeared to be another doctor and his patient. In a dead run now, Lucky pushed through the double doors into the surgery area.
But that was as far as she got.
Two uniformed gorillas grabbed her and dragged her back to the lobby.
&
nbsp; “Consider yourself fortunate that I’m not calling the police,” pink scrubs lady said. “Now, go home and take your medication. You’re clearly delusional.”
When Lucky would have balked, the two uniformed men crowded closer, forcing her to back up against the front entrance of the lobby.
“Out,” one of them ordered.
Lucky turned around and pushed out the door.
In a daze, she ambled across the parking lot. She had to call Mr. Camp.
She stared down at herself. Where was her phone? The package? The need to crumble into an impotent heap overwhelmed her. She felt her pockets again. How had she lost her phone?
The blue truck that had brought her here suddenly rolled to a stop on the street in front of her. The passenger-side window slowly rolled down.
“You left this.” The driver held up the bloodstained package.
Lucky gathered her courage, barely holding back the tears, and walked over to the truck. She reached inside and accepted the package. “Thank you.” Her lips quivered in spite of her best efforts to maintain her composure.
“What’s wrong?”
What was she waiting for? All she had to do was borrow a phone. Call the agency. Call 9-1-1. Report the shootings.
Report her boss missing.
Lucky Malone was in big trouble here.
This whole morning was… There were no adequate words to describe it.
“My boss is missing.”
“This Victoria Colby-Camp you’ve been talking about?” he asked.
She nodded, a sob tearing at her throat.
He leaned across the seat and pushed the door open. “Get in. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”
It was in that instant—that pivotal moment—that Lucky realized what she had to do.
She moved her head side to side. “No.”
Garrett frowned. She hadn’t known him very long but she was pretty sure she saw sympathy in his eyes.
“I can’t go back without her.”
Skepticism replaced the sympathy. “How’s that?”
Lucky pointed to the clinic. “I left her here. Something happened while I was gone and now the people inside are saying she was never here. That’s a lie. They’re covering up something. They’ve kidnapped her or…” She couldn’t even think about the other possibility. “I have to find her.”
Lucky was pretty sure she had just stepped off the deep end. What she had just said to this guy sounded crazy.
She stepped back from the truck. “Thank you for your offer of help. But I can’t go anywhere until I figure this out.”
Garrett looked away a moment. He was the one shaking his head now.
Didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him. Lucky had to figure out how to do this.
Her boss had made her promise not to tell about coming to the clinic. She had to try and protect that promise. The only way to do that was to find Victoria without telling anyone else.
Lucky closed her eyes. That was even crazier than all the other insane events of the morning. She was a part of a homicide—a triple homicide. Calling the police was way overdue. She’d clearly suffered some sort of emotional breakdown.
“Well,” Garrett said, drawing her attention back to him, “I hope you find her.”
Lucky managed a jerky nod. Speaking was out of the question. If she opened her mouth again, the sobs would escape.
Instead, she stood there and watched the stranger drive away.
And she prayed.
Chapter Five
Dakota told himself to keep driving. That the lady’s problems were not his.
He glanced in the rearview mirror one last time, her image growing smaller and smaller with every turn of the wheels. But no amount of distance could exile from his head the fear he’d seen in her eyes, the desperation he’d heard in her voice.
“Damn.” He braked to a stop at the curb and fished his cell phone from his pocket.
Whatever stupid step he took next, he had to inform his boss. Not that he was slated for any other assignments just now, but with Keaton one never knew what he’d come up with. Like today’s crazy surveillance duty.
His boss’s voice followed the first ring. “Keaton.”
“We have a problem.” Dakota had already explained to his boss about the ambush at the delivery point and his necessary actions. Killing two people, even in self-defense, and then leaving the scene was not exactly within the boundaries of the law. But getting dragged through a homicide investigation was the last thing his boss wanted. Dakota had forwarded to Keaton the pictures he’d taken of the victims. The reason, like the man, was a complete mystery to Dakota. Keaton had assured Dakota that he had high-level contacts within the Chicago P.D. and he would see that Dakota’s account of the event was passed along to the proper channels.
“I dropped the lady off like you said but she didn’t want to go to the agency. She wanted to be taken to a clinic,” he explained. In their previous conversation, Keaton had insisted that the woman, Lucky Malone, could not be left at the scene for any reason. Enemies of Lucas Camp, according to Keaton, were like roaches. Where you saw one or two there were plenty more. And they would not want to leave loose ends. “But she’s all hysterical at the moment because the clinic appears to have lost her boss.”
“What?”
Something that sounded far too much like shock echoed in the one word. Couldn’t be. Nothing fazed Slade Keaton. “Malone says she left Victoria Colby-Camp at the clinic before going to make the drop for Lucas Camp. Now the staff claims the woman was never at the clinic. Like I said, Malone’s hysterical. What—”
“Find Victoria Colby-Camp.” Keaton’s voice was ice cold now, void of the shock or whatever Dakota had thought he’d heard. “Now.”
Dakota blinked. That was his plan, sort of. He couldn’t leave Malone back there. Not and sleep any time soon. But the missing woman had an entire P.I. agency that could look for her. Why was Keaton so interested in her whereabouts? “I’ll check the place out and see what I can learn.”
“Listen to me, Garrett,” Keaton ordered. “I don’t care what you have to do, who you have to kill. Find Victoria. Now. I want an update every hour. I want to know who is responsible for this. Whatever you do, don’t let Malone check in with her agency.”
“She’s not going to go for that,” Dakota protested. “She has—”
“Tell her Lucas sent you to protect her in the event of trouble. She is to lay low until the dust settles since what she witnessed has no doubt made her a target. She is to stay dark until he orders otherwise. As soon as I have something on the clinic I will contact you.”
Before Dakota could protest again, his boss severed the connection. Dakota stared at the phone. “What the…?” He shook his head, shoved the phone back into his pocket and muttered, “No problem.”
He didn’t mind taking back-to-back cases. Money was money. But this whole whacked-out scenario was off the charts.
After checking the mirrors, he executed a three-point turn and headed back in Malone’s direction. She stood right where he’d left her. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. “Get in.”
She looked at him, those big gray eyes still filled with terror. “I can’t leave. I told you that already.”
“Just get in.” He shrugged and threw up his hands. “We’ll figure this out.” He surveyed the front of the clinic. “You keep standing around out here and they’ll call the cops.”
Malone glanced over her shoulder, then reluctantly climbed into the truck.
“You call anyone and report what happened?” If they were about to have company he’d like to know.
“No. I…didn’t have my cell. I must have dropped it.” She shook her head, her face pinched with confusion. “I think I’m in shock.”
Dakota drove around the block, then pulled into a slot behind a row of parked cars in the lot directly across from the clinic. He exhaled a resigned breath. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything tha
t happened.”
Malone sat there a moment, evidently pulling herself together. “This morning as I was leaving the agency to make a delivery for Mr. Camp, Mrs. Colby-Camp asked me to accompany her to an appointment.”
“At this clinic?” Dakota jerked his head toward the sleek upscale building across the street.
His passenger nodded. “She didn’t want anyone at the agency to know. Especially not her husband.”
“Lucas Camp?”
Malone nodded.
Interesting. “So you came here with her and the driver?”
“Yes. I was…” Malone’s voice quavered and she had to start again. “I was supposed to wait in the lobby while she had the procedure.” She shrugged listlessly. “But Mr. Camp wanted me to make that delivery. I figured I could take care of that and be back before the procedure was completed. Now she’s missing.” Malone covered her face with her hands. “I shouldn’t have left her here. I should have told Mr. Camp I couldn’t make his delivery.”
Dakota glanced at the small package protruding from her pocket. “What exactly did the clinic staff say?” Hell, this Victoria could have discovered Malone gone with the driver and car and called someone else to pick her up. She might not be missing at all.
Malone cleared her throat. “They claim they have had no patient by that name or matching her description. When I insisted I’d brought her here they said I was delusional.”
A frown nagged at Dakota’s brow. “Did you call the office to see if maybe your boss changed her mind about the procedure and just left?”
Malone shook her head. “I guess I should have used the clinic’s phone and checked before I got hysterical.”
Dakota pulled out his cell. “What’s the office number?”
Malone looked confused.
“It won’t hurt to check before we jump to conclusions.”
Malone provided the numbers. According to the Colby Agency receptionist, Victoria wasn’t in her office this morning. She wasn’t at home and didn’t answer her cell. Not good.
