Finding You

by Jenna Bennett

  I checked, just in case. Yep.

  Nothing happened, though. No shots were fired. It seemed like an eternity passed, but by the clock it was only about four minutes before they both came around the corner again, together this time, walking normally with guns lowered. Obviously Stan hadn’t been there.

  “Nothing?” I asked when they were back inside the car. They hadn’t bothered to take the bulletproof vests off, so I guess they figured they might need them again.

  Ty shook his head. “No sign he’s been, either.”

  I glanced at the house. The roof was practically flat, the pitch no more than two feet from the peak to the gutter, so obviously there was no attic. “I don’t suppose there’s a basement?”

  “No basement,” Enrique said. “These little houses are sitting on concrete slabs.”

  So that was that, then. Stan wasn’t here. “I assume someone has spoken to the neighbors.”

  “You assume correctly,” Enrique said. “Someone went up and down this whole street yesterday. Nobody had seen Stan. Several people said they’d call us if they did.”

  “And you trust them?”

  “No reason not to,” Enrique said.

  Right. They probably didn’t want Stan on the loose any more than we did. “Where to next?”

  “He never had many friends to begin with,” Enrique said, starting the car, “and after what he did, he has less. Carmen gave me a list of people she thought he might turn to. We checked with all of them yesterday and didn’t get the impression anyone would help him should he show up. Especially with an unconscious woman over his shoulder.”

  “Sullivan and Martoni are both still in the hospital. Could he be using one of their places?”

  “It’s worth checking,” Enrique said and pulled away from the curb.

  Key West is a small place, and it was only a few minutes—no more than a couple of blocks—before we drove into an apartment complex in the same neighborhood as Stan’s parents’ house. It consisted of a half dozen buildings which had seen better days: a little tired-looking, with the bright tropical paint faded.

  “Who lives here?” Ty wanted to know.

  “Dave Sullivan. You see D-building?”

  D-building was, not surprisingly, between C and E. We pulled up in front of D-11, where the parking spot was empty. “I don’t think he’d risk taking her to a place where there are neighbors on both sides,” Ty said, looking around.

  Enrique shook his head. “Probably not. But we’ll check anyway.” He opened his door. “If nothing else, maybe we’ll figure out which one of them opened those handcuffs yesterday.”

  Ty nodded and reached for his own door handle.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Stay.”

  “Please.” Ty pushed the door open. “It’s for your own protection.”

  “You said yourself he isn’t likely to be here.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m willing to take chances.” He checked his gun before swinging his legs out of the car. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you, Cassie.”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer, just slammed the door behind him. Enrique locked it with the remote, and they walked off.

  This time there was no sneaking around corners. They just walked up to the front of the townhouse and into the little screened porch that protected the front door. Enrique got down on one knee in front of the lock while Ty kept an eye out for any activity.

  It took Enrique less than thirty seconds to open the lock. I have no idea whether he had a universal master or whether he was just that good with a lock pick, but they disappeared inside.

  It wasn’t a very big place, so it was only a few minutes before they came out again. A couple of people came and went in that time, but no one I recognized, and no one who even noticed me sitting there.

  “Nothing?” I asked when they were back in the car.

  Ty shook his head. “No Carmen. And no sign anyone’s been here.”

  “Did you look around?”

  “Can’t,” Enrique said, holstering his pistol before starting the car. “Not without a warrant.”

  “You went inside without a warrant.”

  “We thought we might have cause. Carmen might have been inside, unable to scream. But I can’t go through Sully’s stuff without a warrant.”

  He sounded frustrated.

  “So no idea whether he was Stan’s helper?”

  He shook his head. “The calendar didn’t have ‘Help Stan escape’ written on yesterday’s date. And I didn’t see anything else in plain view that would give me reason to suspect he was.”

  “So where do we go now? Martoni’s place?”

  Ty nodded. “May as well. If it wasn’t Sullivan who helped him, it had to be Martoni.”

  Enrique muttered something. I thought it might have been “I hope not,” but it was impossible to know for sure, and I wasn’t going to ask him to repeat it. If he’d wanted me to hear, he would have said it out loud to begin with. Still, I got the impression that maybe he liked Martoni a little better than he liked Sullivan. Or that he would be a little more upset if Stan’s helper turned out to be Martoni.

  “We can’t assume that the place he’s chosen to go to ground in has anything to do with who helped him escape,” Ty said. “This—” he gestured out the window, at the rows of townhouses and cars, “isn’t a good place to keep a hostage. There are too many people, and the walls are too thin. A single family house would be better. A large property would be even better.”

  “Not a lot of those around here,” Enrique said.

  I said it again, since nobody had really listened the first time. “What about the islands? There are private islands around here, right? Some of them have structures on them. Could he be in one of those?”

  “That would mean he’d have to either drag Carmen, kicking and screaming, through Key West to where he had a boat. Or, if she was unconscious, he’d have to carry her. She isn’t a small woman, and he isn’t a particularly big guy. Tall, but not heavily built. He’d find it heavy going after a couple of blocks.”

  An incongruous mental picture of Stan pushing a wheelbarrow with Carmen’s unconscious body down Duval popped into my brain, and I shook my head. “If he could get her out there, nobody would—” I bit back the words ‘hear her scream’ before they tumbled out of my mouth, “—know where they were,” I substituted lamely.

  Enrique shot me a look in the rearview mirror, and Ty rolled his eyes.

  I blushed. “Sorry.”

  Enrique shook his head. “Don’t be. You’re right. If he could get her to one of the islands, he could do anything he wanted to her, and we’d never find them. I’ll tell the Coast Guard to pay special attention to islands with structures.”

  “But it’s more likely they’re somewhere around here,” Ty said. “He’s not going to want to risk being caught again, and the more he has to walk around in public, the more likely it is someone will see him. He’d have wanted to get under cover as quickly as possible last night. It was late, but there were still people out.”

  Yes, indeed. Key West is the other city that never sleeps, especially around Spring Break.

  On the face of it, Martoni’s house had more potential. It sat closer to the south end of the island, and backed up to some sort of nature preserve. The houses were a bit bigger in this part of town, and sat a little farther apart. Many of them had fences surrounding the properties. The cars were fancier and newer, and the grass was a little greener. I guess maybe the folks on the north side had better things to do than water their lawns. Either that, or they didn’t want to increase their water bills.

  Ty whistled. “Nice.”

  “Martoni comes from money,” Enrique said, stopping the car outside a two story house behind a fence. “He went to college and got a degree before he joined the PD. Stan joined straight out of high school, and Sully spent a couple years in the army first.”

  “He doesn’t live here alone, does he?” The house was rather big
for one person.

  “It’s his family’s vacation place,” Enrique said. “He isn’t local. He used to come here with his family for vacations and decided he’d like to live here. And the house was just sitting empty, so he moved in. His folks don’t mind. There’s plenty of room for them when they want to come for a visit.”

  Plenty of room for Stan and Carmen, too.

  “Are his folks here now?”

  Enrique shook his head. “They live up north somewhere, Massachusetts or Maine, and they’re still working. They usually come down for the summers. Sometimes for Christmas, too, if Cody’s scheduled to work, but if he’s off, he flies up there. Says he likes to see snow for Christmas.”

  The Martoni family sounded nice. And the house was certainly lovely.

  “You’ve told them what happened, right?”

  “Of course,” Enrique said. “They’re flying down today. Should be in around one, although I guess they’ll be going straight to the hospital.”

  I would imagine.

  “So if Stan’s using this place, he’ll have to get out this morning. Surely he must realize that as badly hurt as Martoni is, his parents would want to come see him.”

  “You’d think,” Enrique said and opened his door. “Ready?”

  That last one wasn’t directed at me. Ty nodded and turned.

  “I know,” I said, before he could say it. “Stay in the car.”

  He nodded.

  Here we go again.

  I watched them pass through the gate and then split up, one to the left and one to the right. Both had their guns out and ready, and both were slithering through the underbrush like Natty Bumppo.

  I watched until they were gone, and then I leaned back against the seat. It would be a longer wait this time. It was a pretty big house, more than twice the size of the Laszlo family’s home, and they’d have to go through the place from top to bottom. Here, there might be a basement, and there might also be an attic. There was certainly a second floor, and enough pitch to the roof for a third.

  I might have been sitting there for two minutes, maybe, when there was a loud popping sound. I jerked upright, and leaned toward the window.

  Gunshot?

  Please don’t let it be a gunshot!

  A few seconds later, a figure came flying through the yard. At first I thought it was Enrique, because of the flashes of a white shirt I could see between the bushes and trees.

  But then he came bounding over the low wall separating the yard from the street, and skidded to a stop for a second, and I saw it wasn’t Enrique at all. He was tall and gangly, with a little head on top of a long neck, and a beaky nose that made him look like a stork.

  Stan!

  I sank down in the seat as far as I could go, and hoped he wouldn’t see me.

  It was idiotic, of course. This was the only car parked at the curb on the whole block, and it was just a few yards away from him. Everyone else had parked in their driveways, or underneath their carports, behind their fences and walls. While Enrique’s unmarked police car was just sitting here, like a giant beacon. Pick me! Pick me!

  Stan was on it like white on rice. I braced myself to have him yank on the door handle, and maybe try to break the window. What I didn’t expect, was for the door to open and for him to slide behind the wheel.

  He had a key.

  How did he get a key? Enrique had the key. What had he done to Enrique?

  I stuffed my knuckles in my mouth and bit down on them so I wouldn’t make a sound, still trying to make myself as small as possible so he wouldn’t see me curled up in a ball behind his seat.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to get kidnapped, really, but I couldn’t get out. If I could be small and quiet enough back here, maybe he wouldn’t notice me. Maybe he’d just drive somewhere and abandon the car, and wouldn’t ever realize I’d been here.

  The engine roared to life. Stan yanked the gear shift down and we leaped away from the curb and took off down the street with a squeal of tires. I did my best to brace myself so I wouldn’t rattle around and give away the fact that I was here. But I risked a glance out the window, and saw a figure come tearing out of the yard and stop in the middle of the street, feet apart and braced, gun raised.

  But instead of firing at the car, he just stood there. And I knew why. Ty knew I was in here, and rather than risking my life by shooting at the car, he was letting Stan get away.

  The only problem was, he had me with him. And Ty had no way of following.

  He must be kicking himself for insisting that I had to stay in the car.

  We squealed around a corner, and Stan reached up to adjust the rearview mirror.

  “Hello, Cassie,” he told me. “Long time, no see.”

  “YOU WON’T get away with this,” I told him. I don’t know why, since it made me sound like the stupid heroine in a stupid movie.

  “I’ve gotten away with it so far,” Stan informed me, which was certainly true. However—

  “So far is less than twenty-four hours. And you’ve lost Carmen.”

  “I didn’t want Carmen,” Stan said, as he maneuvered the car around a corner at warp speed. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like Ty or Enrique had any way of following. Enrique may not even be alive anymore.

  “What did you do to Detective Fuentes?” I asked.

  “Hit him over the head and took his car keys,” Stan answered.

  “Is he still alive?”

  Stan shrugged. “One less raft monkey won’t matter.”

  It would matter to me. And to Ty. And it would obviously matter to the rest of the Fuenteses. And Enrique might have a girlfriend somewhere, to whom it would matter. The Key West PD might not be too happy, either. Nor the state of Florida, come to that.

  It would do no good to tell Stan any of that, though.

  “Why didn’t you want Carmen?” I asked instead. “You took the trouble to grab her. You must have wanted her last night.”

  “That was when I thought I could get both Fuentes and Agent Connor by grabbing her,” Stan said, taking another corner on two wheels. At this rate, we’d be pulled over by a traffic cop long before anyone actually came in pursuit of us. “The way Connor was all over her at the trial, I figured he’d care what happened to her.”

  “Of course he cares what happened to her. He was back there. Didn’t you see him?”

  “He spent the night with you,” Stan said.

  Well, yes. But— “How do you know that?”

  “She told me,” Stan said.

  “Did you hurt her?”

  I didn’t really think about the words before I asked them. Once they were out of my mouth I kind of wished I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. For all I knew right now, Carmen was alive and well and really grateful for being rescued, not lying lifeless in a pool of her own blood in the Martonis’ basement.

  “Just a little,” Stan said, which didn’t sound all that good.

  I looked out the window. Houses and palm trees were flashing by, between occasional glimpses of azure sea. “Where are we going?”

  “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” Stan said, and chuckled merrily at his own wit.

  “Aren’t I going to find out where we’re going when we get there?”

  It seemed like maybe he hadn’t thought of that. “Can’t you just tell me now?” I added, crossing my fingers. If he did, maybe I’d be able to get my phone out of my pocket without him realizing it, and I could send a message to Ty.

  “Somewhere private,” Stan said, which didn’t sound so good, either.

  “Ty will find you, you know. Even if it means knocking on every door on the island.”

  “By then it’ll be too late,” Stan said, which sounded worst of all. “Now shut up and let me drive.”

  Fine. I sat back and let the landscape flash by while I thought about my options.

  I didn’t have many. He had the gun and at least forty or fifty pounds on me. He also had control of the car and a plan. I
had nothing. Not even the ability to open my door or my window to save myself if he drove us into the water.

  I had my phone, but I was sitting on it, and if I started twisting around in the backseat, Stan would surely notice and wonder what was up. And then he’d take the phone away, and with it, my only link to the rest of the world.

  And speaking of twisting around in the backseat... “Congratulations on getting away yesterday. It’s a pity you had to shoot your accomplice to do it.”

  Stan scowled at me in the rearview mirror. “How d’you know that?”

  “It was obvious,” I said. “You couldn’t have opened the handcuffs on your own. Someone had to open them for you. The only question was who.”

  “Fucking faggot,” Stan growled. “Rolled right over on me, didn’t he?”

  Actually, he hadn’t. Whichever of them he was, Sullivan or Martoni. Neither of them had confessed. And neither had struck me as particularly gay, for that matter, but then I hadn’t pegged Juan either, until he told me.

  But would I be better off letting Stan think that his accomplice—the one he’d shot—had confessed all, or that he was still keeping mum about his role in the escape?

  And did it matter either way?

  I was still trying to figure it out—quickly, and without letting on that I was trying to figure it out—when my back pocket vibrated. A second later it rang.

  Stan’s eyes whipped to me in the rearview mirror.

  “My phone’s ringing,” I told him as I dug for it.

  “Don’t answer it!”

  What was he going to do, shoot me?

  I looked at the readout. “It’s Ty.” No way was I not answering that. I’d risk getting shot. At least I’d hear Ty’s voice again.

  Yeah, stupid sentiment. But still, I punched the button and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Let me talk to him,” Ty said, his voice set to grim. He didn’t even bother to ask me how I was. I guess he assumed, since I was still able to answer my phone, that I was all right. And of course he knew that I’d been in the back of the car, and Stan had gotten into the front, and he may just surmise that Stan hadn’t bothered to stop the car to deal with me yet. It felt like an eternity, but per the dashboard clock, we’d only been driving for four minutes or so.