Nowhere to Run

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She looked away, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him smile at her confusion.

  “You really don’t want to like anything about me, do you?” he asked as he led her into the cover of the trees. “Careful where you step,” he added.

  “Let me go,” Carrie countered, “and I’ll be your best friend.”

  It was dark in among the trees, away from the lights of the parking lot. The ground was spongy and wet. Mud squished up over the soles of Carrie’s sandals and between her toes.

  He’d slid his hand down so that he was no longer holding her wrist. Instead, he was holding her hand, their fingers interlocked as if they were lovers rather than captor and hostage.

  She could no longer see his face in the darkness, but she could hear his ragged breathing. His leg must hurt him. He stumbled slightly, and his grip on her hand tightened and she heard his quick inhale. He was clearly in serious pain.

  But when he spoke, his voice was even. “I can’t let you go, Caroline. I’m sorry.”

  “Then I can’t be your best friend,” she said.

  “That’s too bad,” he murmured.

  Yes, oddly enough, it was.

  The sirens were louder now, and despite his injury, Felipe picked up the pace. Together they half ran, half skidded down an embankment to the street below.

  One dim street lamp illuminated a row of shabby houses, blue television light flickering from most of the windows. In one of them the volume was up too high. Canned laughter echoed among the cars parked along the side of the road. Farther down the street, a dog barked, but other than that, nothing moved.

  Here in the darkness, Felipe didn’t try to hide his limp. Still, he moved quickly along the line of cars.

  “What are you looking for?” Carrie asked.

  He turned toward her, putting one finger to his lips. “Shh.” Bringing his mouth up close to her ear, he said very softly, “We need transportation. I’m afraid I’m not up to walking back to St. Simone.”

  She pulled back to stare at him. “You’re going to steal a car…?”

  “Shh,” he said again. “Not steal. Borrow.”

  Carrie nodded. “Right. Tell that to the guy who owns the car.”

  Felipe ran his hand across his face. “If there was another way, I wouldn’t do this,” he said. “But I believe a life—your life—is worth more than a 1979 Subaru, don’t you?”

  He tugged at her arm, and she knelt next to him as he opened the driver’s-side door and quickly turned off the interior light. He pulled her in front of him, pinning her between the car and his body so he could use both of his hands.

  “I’m worth a vintage Ford Mustang convertible,” Carrie said. “Preferably from 1966 and cherry-red.”

  He glanced at her and smiled, his teeth a flash of white in the darkness.

  “I’m glad your sense of humor is back,” he said, disconnecting a panel from the steering column.

  “It’s hard for me to keep my sense of humor when I’m being held hostage,” Carrie said.

  It was also hard to keep her sense of humor with his body pressed against hers the way it was. As he worked to hot-wire the car, his arms were on either side of her, his weight against her. Carrie tried to shift away, but only succeeded in wedging herself more firmly against him.

  He pulled back slightly to look down at her. “You’re not a hostage,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. You’re in protective custody.”

  “Assuming you are who you say you are, Carlos-Raoul-Felipe,” she said.

  Felipe shifted his position, then winced as his weight came down more fully on his injured leg. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip. “I’m tempted to take you to my apartment in St. Simone, just to show you my police identification,” he said.

  “But no doubt you’ve got some dramatic excuse to keep us from going there, too,” Carrie said, trying to ignore the fact that his face was mere inches from her own. If he leaned forward another four inches, he’d be kissing her.

  “They’re looking for me. My apartment is one of the first places they’ll stake out,” he said. “It’s no dramatic excuse. It’s a fact.”

  “They who?” Carrie asked. “The police?”

  “The police and Richter’s men,” Felipe said. “They’ll both send someone around to watch my apartment, assuming I’d be stupid enough to show up there.” The car started with a roar. “Quick, get in.”

  Carrie scrambled across the stick shift and into the passenger seat. She reached for the opposite door and was about to throw it open, when Felipe firmly put his hand on her left knee.

  “Give me a break,” he said.

  “Let me go,” she countered.

  “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve told you?” Felipe said. “Put the car in first gear, please.”

  With her left hand, Carrie pushed the stick shift up into first position.

  With a jerk, Felipe pulled away from the curb.

  “If I let you go,” he said, trying hard to be patient, “you’re dead. Second, please.”

  Carrie shifted into second gear as Felipe rounded a corner onto a secondary road heading south toward St. Simone.

  “I do not want you to be dead,” Felipe said, “therefore, I will not let you go. As long as you’re with me, I’ll keep you safe. Third gear, please.”

  Carrie snorted, shifting gears. “Oh, you’ve kept me really safe so far.”

  Felipe turned to look at her. His eyes were dead serious. “A lot of it’s been luck, and circumstance,” he said, “but yes, so far, I have.”

  His hand was still resting on her knee. She looked down at it pointedly. “You can have your hand back,” she said. “I’m not going to jump out of a car going forty.”

  He glanced at her and grinned. “Thirty-five, you’d try it, but not forty, huh?” He squeezed her knee slightly, then put his hand on the stick, shifting into fourth gear. “Short of driving to the precinct or going to my apartment to get my ID, what can I do to make you believe me, Caroline?”

  Nothing. Carrie shook her head. “If Silver-hair—this Richter guy—if he’s such a threat, how come I haven’t heard about him before?”

  “He’s very low-key,” Felipe said. “Some mob bosses, they get off on people knowing who they are and how powerful they are, you know? But not Lawrence Richter. Instead of taking a seat on the city finance committee, or some position where the media would check into his background, Richter joined the public library’s volunteer board of directors. The papers and TV reporters don’t pay him any mind—he’s not paid after all—and, through the contacts he’s made, he has the ears of some of St. Simone’s most powerful politicians.”

  “Lawrence Richter,” Carrie mused. “Doesn’t exactly sound like he’s Old-World Mafia.”

  “The Mafia controls only a portion of organized crime,” Felipe said. “These days, organized crime is an equal-opportunity employer.”

  He used the back of his arm to wipe the sweat from his face. This car’s air conditioner wasn’t anything to write home about. He glanced at her and tried to smile, but she could tell it was getting harder for him to hide his pain. His face was pale—it looked almost gray in the headlights from the oncoming traffic. She wondered how much blood he’d lost.

  “Do you want me to drive?” she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise. “No,” he said. “I’m okay. Thanks.”

  She studied his face in the dim light from the dashboard. With his exotic cheekbones and liquid brown eyes, with his elegantly shaped mouth and sensuous lips, with that trim, athletic body, he could have made a fortune modeling for perfume ads or loose-fitting-jeans ads or, hell, even underwear ads. Maybe especially for underwear ads. Or, if he could dance even just a little bit, he could surely have made a bundle every night over at the Chippendale’s club at the corner of Gulf and Garden Streets. But he didn’t even seem aware of his striking looks—well, except for the fact that somewhere down the
line, he’d learned that women responded to his smile. Or maybe that wasn’t learned. Maybe it was instinctive.

  He could have slid along in life, getting by with that smile and those warm, expressive eyes. Instead—so he claimed—he’d chosen to become a cop.

  “What made you decide to join the police force?” Carrie asked.

  He glanced at her again. “Is this a test?” he asked. “If I don’t have an answer ready, that proves that I’m lying?”

  “You’re stalling,” she returned. “Do you need more time to make up your story?”

  “I became a cop,” Felipe said without further hesitation, “because of my brother, Rafe. Raphael. He was a robber. I figured someone had to go in the other direction and balance the family out.”

  “That’s it?” Carrie asked. “You just woke up one morning and decided that you had to be Wyatt Earp because your brother was Jesse James?”

  He looked over at her. “You really want to hear the whole story?”

  She pushed her hair back behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said. Oddly enough, she did. “Is Rafe older or younger?”

  “Older, by about five years,” Felipe said. “He first started using when he was fourteen—I was nine.”

  “Using?”

  “Drugs.”

  He stared at the road. Carrie could see the sudden tension in his jaw.

  “We shared a bedroom,” Felipe continued, “and he used to come in wasted and tell me not to tell our parents. He was my hero—how could I tell? Besides, it was a laugh at first. He was funny when he drank or when he got stoned. But then it stopped being funny when he started using the hard stuff.

  “It happened real fast—he was an addict at fifteen. By the time I realized what was happening, I couldn’t stop him. I don’t know how many times I tried to talk sense into him, but you can’t reason with an addict.

  “I could only pick him up off the street when he was too high to walk, and carry him home. I could only hide his stash from my father. I could only give him the money from my paper route when he was broke and hurting and needing drugs to ease his pain. And I could keep my mouth shut when he started stealing.”

  Felipe glanced at Carrie, but she didn’t speak. She simply waited for him to continue.

  “Rafe didn’t know it,” he said, “but I gave back most of the stuff he stole. He thought he was getting ripped off by some of the other guys in the ’hood, but it was just me, covering his ass.” He laughed, but the sound was devoid of humor. “Man, I was the perfect little enabler but I didn’t even know the definition of the word. I was Rafe’s worst enemy, second only to himself.” He turned to glance at her again. “You sure you want to hear more?”

  Carrie nodded. His words rang with a certain bitter truth. She actually wanted to believe him.

  “Rafe and I did the addict-enabler dance for eight years,” Felipe said, his gentle accent like music accompanying the soft hiss of the car’s tires against the road. “Then, the summer I turned seventeen, one of the detectives in the local precinct started an outreach program designed to help kids like me—and indirectly, help kids like Rafe.

  “By that time, Rafe had a few priors, nothing too big, and no punishment bigger than a reprimand. Still, this detective, Jorge Gamos, added up Rafe’s record with what he saw going on in the neighborhood. Gamos actually came out on the street and hung with the kids. He got to know us. He saw that Rafe had a habit, and he also saw my stress levels, which were pretty high by that time. I was seventeen—going on forty-five. I hadn’t been a kid since Rafe lit his first crack pipe. Anyway, Jorge Gamos saw what was going on, and he figured out—correctly—that my brother couldn’t have lasted so long on the street if it hadn’t been for me.

  “It took Gamos nearly a year, but he finally talked me into going to a meeting that he helped run—a counseling session for kids who’d lost a brother or sister to drugs. It was…eye-opening, particularly when he told me that I was going to end up right there, with those kids, talking about my brother Rafe. My dead brother Rafe.”

  Carrie wanted to believe him, but his story was probably fictional. Still, it was one hell of a good tale. “Did Rafe die?” Carrie found herself asking, as if Rafe were a real person, as if Felipe really had been a kid who’d lost his childhood to drugs.

  He glanced at her, a fleeting smile touching his lips. “Not yet,” he said. “I virtually turned him in. He came to me for an alibi, but I wouldn’t lie anymore. He was convicted and served an eight-month sentence. During that time, he detoxed. When I went to see him in the jail, he thanked me for helping him, and he swore he’d never touch crack again. He was clean and he was going to stay clean. I was attending the police academy by that time. I was going to be a cop. With Jorge Gamos’s help, I got Rafe an early release.”

  Felipe shook his head. “Raphael hit the streets and in a matter of weeks, he was using again. It nearly broke my heart. He’d conned me into getting him out of prison. His apology, everything he’d told me had been nothing but crap. None of it had been sincere. None of it.” He laughed bitterly. “He ended up back in prison, but after he scammed me, I washed my hands of him. I haven’t seen him in years. Apparently, Rafe’s been out of jail for a while now. Jorge tells me he’s really clean these days, that he runs a halfway house and works as a counselor for addicts and ex-cons. I’ve heard that counselors who’ve been addicts and ex-cons themselves are the most compassionate. Man, I guess he’s got that covered because he’s been there and back.” He leaned over and tried to turn the air conditioner’s fan higher. “That’s where we’re heading, by the way.”

  Carrie blinked. “You mean…right now?”

  “Yes. To Raphael’s halfway house.” Felipe glanced at her, his dark eyes even more mysterious. “It’s time for my brother to pay some old debts.”

  BY THE TIME Felipe pulled up in front of the A Street Halfway House, his left leg was on fire. He should have ripped off a car with an automatic transmission. Borrowed, he corrected himself. The car was only borrowed. And he’d memorized the plates so that when this was over, he could track down the owner and give him or her money for the mileage, gas and inconvenience.

  If he was still alive when this was over….

  He looked over at Caroline Brooks who sat quietly in the passenger seat, gazing back at him, unmindful of the fact that they were parked in the most run-down, dangerous part of the city.

  “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

  Her blue eyes were colorless in the shadowy darkness. Her hair looked silvery, reflecting what little light there was. He could smell her perfume—no, that wasn’t perfume. It was sun block that he smelled. Carrie wasn’t the type to wear perfume. The fresh tang of the lotion suited her better than any flowery fragrance could have. She smelled like blue skies and white sand and warm gulf water. She smelled like paradise.

  He’d had a bigger whiff when he’d kissed her back at the restaurant. He thought back to the way her lithe body had fitted against his…. Paradise indeed. Oh, what he would give to kiss her again.

  “I must be all right,” he said, finally answering her question. “The thoughts I am thinking are those of a healthy man.”

  She turned away. It was too dark for him to see the blush tingeing her cheeks, but he knew it was there.

  She was such a contradiction, this Caroline Brooks. Part of her was a tough-talking, rifle-wielding, no-nonsense fighter. But another part of her blushed at his sweet talk.

  Felipe reached over and took her hand, and she nearly jumped out of her seat.

  “I know it’s an inconvenience to hop over the stick shift,” he said, “but I need you to come out of the car this way. I can’t risk your running again.”

  Still holding tightly to her hand, he opened the car door and stiffly pulled himself to his feet. Pain hit him in one solid wave and that, with his light-headedness, nearly made him black out. But Caroline was right behind him, and she held him up, looping his arm around her neck and supporting most of his body weight
.

  “Can you make it inside?” she asked, “or should I get help?”

  Felipe tried to straighten up. “No way in hell am I going to face my brother on anything but my own two feet,” he declared, then realized he had spoken in Spanish. God, he was losing it fast. The concern in Caroline’s eyes was growing. “I can make it,” he said, this time in English. He forced a smile. “Thanks for not running away.”

  Regret passed briefly across her eyes. “Yeah, well, I should have,” she said, helping him around the car and onto the cracked sidewalk. “I’m leaving as soon as I get you inside.”

  “No, you’re not,” he countered. “I can’t let you.”

  “Watch it,” she said sharply, “or I’ll drop you right here and run.”

  “If you do,” he said, “somehow, someway, I will find the strength to follow you.”

  She turned to look up into his eyes, and he knew that she believed him. She may not have believed his story about his brother, she may not have believed that he was a cop investigating Lawrence Richter, she may not have believed that Tommy Walsh would kill her as easily as blinking, but she did believe that he would follow her.

  It was a start.

  CHAPTER SIX

  RAPHAEL SALAZAR was bigger than his brother. He was older, harder, leaner to the point of being wiry, and several inches taller. His hair wasn’t quite as long, though he, too, wore it pulled severely back from his face in a ponytail at his nape. But the biggest difference was in his eyes. Unlike Felipe’s, Rafe’s eyes were flat, cold and expressionless.

  He didn’t bother to greet his brother but simply came into the linoleum-tiled waiting room. Two other men, the two who had answered the door, stood slightly behind him. One was almost as broad as he was tall, his Bugs Bunny T-shirt stretched tight across his belly; the other was just a kid, looking barely even eighteen years old.