“Hey, this is private property,” JD yelled in belligerent French.
The men started down the hill at them as if they had serious business to take care of.
“I don’t think they’re here for a good cause,” Beth said. “We need to get the hell out of here. Now.”
“They’re the ones leaving,” JD said defiantly. “Let me see what’s going on. You stay here.”
When he started to walk toward the men, who were now moving more quickly, she grabbed him. “Not a good idea. I think they have bad intentions. And I saw somebody in back of those shipping containers. I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s leave.”
“Relax. I can handle myself.”
“I think they have guns, JD. I don’t like guns. Get me the hell out of here, dammit.”
She turned toward the car and as she did, one of the men yelled, “There they are!”
A bullet slammed into the corrugated wall, making a tinny sound that cracked through the night.
Beth kicked off her heels and sprinted toward the Bugatti, JD right beside her.
Another man, who appeared from around the building on the far side, ran right into them. For the second time in less than four days she found herself facing men with guns who wanted to kill her and she didn’t like it any better now than the first time.
Chapter 9
J D grabbed the man’s gun hand, spun him around and slammed him into the shipping containers.
Beth launched a barefooted kick that hit the attacker in the hip. Unfortunately, her kick had little impact as he and JD struggled for control of the gun.
Beth reached for the nearest weapon, a three-foot-long two-by-four leaning against a container. She brought it down on the man’s arm like an axe. The man yelped out in pain, and his gun dropped in the gravel. JD got in a couple solid punches to the man’s face and the guy staggered backward.
Beth hit the guy again with her two-by-four, this time in the back of the legs and he went down, hard. JD grabbed the gun and her and sprinted to the Bugatti, bullets slapping into the building and containers as they ran.
JD had the key in the ignition and the car moving before she could close her door.
She grabbed the gun from his lap, lowered the window, checked the action to make sure a round was seated and the safety off, then fired a few shots back at the men still standing in the gravel parking lot.
JD rammed the gear home and they took off like a rocket. She saw the two men running back to their car on the hill. One of them stopped and fired at them.
Beth fired three quick shots in his general direction, forcing him to suspend his firing and look for cover.
“Friends of yours?” Beth yelled as JD drove around a building and headed for the feeder road.
“If they are, I never want to meet my enemies.”
“What the hell are you into?”
“Me? You knew those guys were trouble from the beginning. You also know how to use a gun. And how to fight. Something’s wrong with this picture, Ms. Anne Hurley,” JD said as he danced the Bugatti around several small industrial buildings. “Who are you?”
“Just drive,” she snapped. She’d have to think of something fast, come up with another identity, but she couldn’t focus on that when men with guns were still trying to kill her.
“Where’d they go?” JD peered out of the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know,” Beth said, turning in her seat, adrenaline pushing through her veins so fast she thought her head would explode.
“I don’t see them,” he said. “Maybe they couldn’t keep up.”
The road JD took to get out of the area was different than the one they’d come in on. This one was blocked by a bulldozer and some construction equipment. JD turned the wheel and drove up a hill over some rough ground.
When they hit the tarmac JD went into overdrive and the Bugatti’s surge forced Beth to pay more attention to holding herself in place than looking for bad guys.
“Uh-oh,” JD announced. “Trouble straight ahead.”
The other car had gotten ahead of them somehow. It jumped out on the road and JD had to swerve left, jump the brim, then wrestle his car back on the tarmac. More shots were fired and this time they hit the Bugatti with solid thunks.
The other car turned and was right on their tail.
“Jesus! What the hell are they driving?” Beth asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, there’s sure a lot of power under that hood.”
Whatever they were driving, it was very fast and had only dropped back a few hundred yards. Now, with the road swinging in sharp turns, JD couldn’t milk the power he had at his disposal.
Suddenly, she remembered kicking off her shoes. “Shit!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What? Tell me.”
“Those were Jimmy Choos.”
“You know one of the guys in the car?”
“Me? No. I don’t know those guys.”
“Then who’s this Jimmy Choo?”
“My shoes. He designed my shoes and I left them back there in the parking lot. I liked those shoes.”
“You’re upset about your shoes?”
“They weren’t just shoes, they were designer shoes. There’s a big difference.”
He gave her a quick glance and a shake of the head. “Great. People are trying to kill us, bullets thick as ticks on a coon hound and you’re worried about your shoes?”
She could tell he was really scared and all the syrupy sugar and spice she’d heard earlier in his voice had hardened and cooled.
“They went perfectly with this dress,” she said. Though it did occur to her that even thinking about them was probably carrying her new rich-widow image a bit too far.
JD wheeled the car down the narrow lane into a tiny village. Nobody was out on the street. A good thing as they flew over the cobblestones at an insane speed. A car that is mostly engine isn’t very comfortable on cobblestones.
She didn’t have her seat belt on because she needed to be able to lean out the side window to fire if their chasers caught up. She took a couple of hard knocks and it felt as if her insides were in a blender.
Finally they were back on flat road and there was nothing behind them. JD slowed down to around sixty.
“You’re as bad as Giambi,” JD said.
“How’s that?”
“He has a closet full of shoes. You two are meant to be a team.”
He slammed up a hill, picking up speed as he went.
She searched again for headlights behind them but saw none. “I think we lost them.” She sighed, thankful they were safe inside this fantastic automobile. But it did bother her that the other car had been able to keep up. Who were they, and why all the shooting?
“If this car can’t outrun them they have something I never heard of. C’mon, humor me. You won’t tell me why somebody is trying to kill us, and you’re stressing about lost shoes?”
“Those shoes are classics, and besides, they cost a lot of money.”
“You’re rich. You can buy a hundred pairs of shoes.”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
She chuckled dryly and shrugged. Truth was, she’d never really been a big shoe girl, until she slipped on those Jimmy Choos. There was just something about them, and now she was hooked. Being Anne was having an effect.
“What’s that mean?”
“Just get us somewhere safe where we can talk.” After that attack, she knew she had to get real with him a lot sooner than she’d expected.
“And for your information, those shoes were not just shoes,” she said in their defense. “Certain shoes are like this car. There’s simply nothing else quite like them.”
He gave her a baffled glance, hoping, she thought, to see that she was just kidding. She was. Sort of.
As they drove through twists and turns on the mountain roads she paid some attention to how incredibly easily he handled this car, even after being
shot at. The man was a total professional behind the wheel and nothing shook his focus, not even bullets.
Then, after a while, when it appeared they were completely out of danger, he slowed and pulled off the road.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see how many bullet holes there are in the car. Giambi is going to have a heart attack.”
“Now might not be such a good time.”
He ignored her and got out to walk behind the car.
She got out, too, and went back to suggest that maybe they should get moving. He was squatting, touching one of the bullet holes, shaking his head and swearing.
“He’s going to be really pissed,” JD said, straightening up.
“Better they shot up the car than the driver, right?”
“Depends on who you ask. Salvatore would rather see me riddled with bullets than this baby.”
She smiled.
JD said, “This is a rare model. Those idiots don’t know who they’re messing with.”
“Or maybe they do,” she offered.
They both heard it before they saw it. The other car. The driver had turned his lights out and was coming fast down the grade about half a mile back, visible in the moonlight.
Now they saw it was a black Ferrari.
“Shit!” JD shouted.
“You want to maybe get back behind the wheel and get us the hell out of here? We can look at the damage later. If there is a later.”
He seemed a little surprised and dazed that the other car had continued the chase. He didn’t move, but instead stared in the other car’s direction. “They can’t really believe they can catch us.”
“It’s a Ferrari.”
“We’re still faster.”
The Ferrari came screaming down the hill through the rustic countryside in their direction at an astoundingly high rate of speed. Beth was getting scared now.
“That may be, but not when we’re standing still. Can we please get the hell out of here?”
They raced to the open doors of the Bugatti and jumped in. JD was swearing nonstop now. The car was half a mile behind, but it was coming at them full tilt.
“Make sure that seat belt is tight,” JD warned.
She belted herself in and grabbed on to her own seat for extra support. The windup of the engine shuddered every cell in her body. The zero to sixty in two-point-five seconds was enough to nail her to the seat as if she was taking off in a space-bound rocket.
The Ferrari was losing ground, but still coming as hard as it could.
“Persistent bastard,” JD grumbled.
“How’s the gas?”
“It’ll get us home.”
Then they had to slow for a truck and the Ferrari gained on them. She picked the gun up off the floor just in case.
“You a cop or agent of some kind?”
“No. An ex-soldier taught me at a gun range in Las Vegas.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. Just a friend.”
She checked the clip. Eight bullets counting the one in the chamber. The gun was a SIG Sauer P-226. “This is a nice gun.”
“You like guns?”
“When people are trying to kill me, it’s nice to have one around.”
JD said wearily, “We’re running through the damn French countryside turning it into a war zone. Where the hell are the gendarmerie? In the U.S. every donut shop for a hundred square miles would be cleared out. Highway patrol, local fuzz, SWAT in tanks, choppers. Here, thirty miles from Nice, nothing.”
“Maybe they have less crime here than in the States.”
He pulled out his cell phone. She immediately panicked, wondering who he wanted to call.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Calling Giambi. If we can’t get cops he can get an army of his personal badasses out here in a hurry. He’s got a chopper up on the roof of his casino. He may be seventy-eight, but he’s old school. Somebody shot up his car, he’s going to be madder than a nest of smoked-out hornets.”
She grabbed for the cell phone and they nearly crashed. No way was she letting him call Giambi about this. Not yet. She needed JD on her side first.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She didn’t get his phone, but she’d managed to stop him from making the call.
“Just drive. Keep it under the speed limit, find some country roads and get off this main highway. We need to have a chat.” She knew she sounded harsh, but she couldn’t let him make that call.
“To hell with you. I’m not taking orders, Anne, or whoever you are.”
He sped up and they shot through a canopy of poplar trees whose branches overhung the road.
“My place is near the Monte Carlo,” she said. “We can go there. Nobody knows about it.”
“We’re going to the casino. We’re protected there.”
“No.”
“Why not? That’s the safest place in Monaco.”
“We’re going to have a talk first.”
“What’s going on?” He downshifted as they hit a series of turns. “What do I have to know?”
“Don’t ask questions going a hundred miles an hour on a country road.”
“To hell with this. I’m calling Giambi.”
He tried again to make the call, driving with one hand as he worked his cell phone.
She grabbed the phone and when he moved to take it back, the car hit something in the road, maybe a pothole or some road debris. Whatever it was, it threw the line of the car violently to the left.
JD fought the wheel as they broke through a fence and lurched across a mound that sent them airborne.
At the speed they were traveling, once the car launched there was no way to save it.
Horrified, Beth let out a low moan as they bounced off the hill and took out another section of fence, hit a large rock and careened to the side. Beth asked him if he had it, but she could see there was no way he could control what was happening.
He didn’t reply.
They flew downhill, glanced off a tree and then rolled over and over until they came to a sudden and violent halt in the middle of a grove of trees.
Chapter 10
T hey were crushed together in the stillness, Beth on top of JD, the car on its left side, engine still running. She didn’t know how badly she was hurt and she was half afraid to find out. They were still inside the car. She asked wearily, “You aren’t dead, are you?”
“No. Not yet.”
She moved her arm, then a leg. Limbs intact. She was still a little stunned from having hit her head on something.
“JD?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you move?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“I think so. Nothing seems broken. Shit!”
“What?”
“I think I smell—”
“Yeah, gas. Let me turn off the engine. I’m not dying inside a burning car.”
He pushed his hand under her arm and turned off the engine. He was jammed in tight and she could see a trickle of blood from a cut above his eye. She hoped that was his only injury.
“See if you can open the door. It’s heavy. Push straight up,” he said.
The door was above her and the full weight of it was enormous. She couldn’t do it. The window was partially open, but not enough so they could get out.
“I’d turn the engine on to see if the window might open, but I don’t want to chance it with the leaking gas.”
The harder she pushed, the more her shoulder and hips squeezed down on him. He was wedged under the wheel and against the door and she could hear him grunting with pain with every move she made.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t budge it.”
She imagined fire. Then their pursuers showing up and watching them burn alive with smiles on their faces. If she was going to die, she would at least like to know who had caused it.
She began to panic. She hated being confined. When she was a little girl she’d gotten tra
pped inside a dark closet once and had waited most of the night for her father to return and let her out. She never forgot how scared she was that the house might catch on fire while she wasn’t able to get out. This was the same feeling, only the potential for fire was much more real.
She had to get out. Now.
“Think of something. Those guys could show up any moment, or this car could explode.”
“Let’s turn you,” JD said. “So your back is on my chest. We need to get your legs free so you can use them. That’ll give you the strength and leverage you need to push that door open.”
His voice calmed her. She focused on that, falling into the warmth and steadiness she heard there.
She turned so that her back rested on his chest. Then she pulled her legs up until her knees were tight against her stomach.
He helped her the best he could, pushing here, pulling there until she was able to get turned around completely.
Now her head was next to his. They were virtually laminated together, a couple of sardines in a flammable can.
He reached up, got his hand on the door lever and pulled to get the locking gear in the open position. “Okay.”
She grabbed the shift with one hand, the back of the seat with the other, then, knees still against her chest, she placed her feet on the door. She positioned one foot just a little above the other. The first time she tried to push, her right foot exploded in pain.
“Dammit!” she grumbled.
“What?”
“My foot.” It now throbbed.
“Don’t use it. Let me see if I can get my leg around you.”
He worked his right leg between her and the seat. “Okay, pull your right foot down.”
“When I say go, we drive everything we have into the door. If it doesn’t budge, back off and we’ll do it again. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“On three.”
He counted down and at three she drove her left foot, he his right, in an explosive move. There was a creaking of metal against metal and some movement.
“It’s going to open. One more time on three,” he told her. She could hear calm determination in his voice, and it soothed her fears. Her complete attention was now on opening that door.
“One. Two. Three.” She counted with him.
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