“Ah, shit.” Ryan saw it, too. “Okay, stop.”
“What?”
He shoved his pistol into its holster and, when she didn’t immediately do what he told her, grabbed the handles at the back of her chair to stop her himself.
“This thing is too damned slow. We’ve got to go. Here, put your arms around my neck.”
Jess realized he meant to pick her up at just about the time he scooped her out of the chair. She barely managed to hang on to her purse as she was swung up into his arms.
“What? What are you doing?”
“Picking up the pace.”
He was already running with her, racing down the hall away from whoever was coming up on that elevator, heading toward the north end of the building, where she had come up in the private elevator. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on for dear life. His arms were hard with muscle and strong around her, and he was carrying her in the most comfortable way possible for her, high and close against his chest as one would carry a cherished child. She guessed that he was mindful of her injury and didn’t want to hurt her, and she appreciated that.
Still, comfortable this was not. She was bouncing all over the place.
“If you don’t want to use the elevator, how do you suggest we get out of here?” she gasped out.
“The stairs.”
“Stairs?”
“Yep.”
“They’ll be here soon,” she warned. She knew from experience that the elevators in the building were fast.
“Figured.” He was running flat out, his hard-soled shoes pounding on the slick marble floor.
“They’ll see the wheelchair.”
“Can’t help it.”
Seconds later they had nearly reached the end of the long hall. It was a good distance from where whoever was coming up on the elevator would emerge but still within their sight if they looked left.
A tiny ping sounded in the distance.
“They’re here,” she whispered in a panic.
“Hang on.”
Another bound, and he skidded to a stop in front of the door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. Jess felt one arm shift as he grabbed the knob and jerked the metal door open. Then they were through, and he was holding her tight again. The narrow chute of steel-reinforced concrete had been designed to be fire- and blast-proof, but it looked surprisingly low-tech, beige walls and gray metal stairs with iron-bar railings. Jess could do nothing but hold on tight as Ryan clattered down the stairs with her.
“If you’re . . . heading toward the parking garage, you should know that there’s somebody down there . . . waiting for me. At street level. Near the private elevator, which means . . . near the building.” The ride had just gotten a whole lot rougher, which was why she was talking in bursts. Her grip on him tightened exponentially as her fear of falling or being dropped skyrocketed.
“Who?”
“Davenport’s secretary, Marian Young. She drove me here.” Jess suddenly felt sick. Had Marian known what Davenport intended? Maybe, but she didn’t think so. On the other hand, before tonight she would never have believed that Davenport might try to kill her, either.
“She alone?”
“She was when I left her.”
“Okay.”
His replies were clipped and brief for good reason. He was in great shape, there was no doubt about that. But she could feel his body heat increasing with each flight of stairs. By the time he burst out through another exit door onto the second floor of the parking garage, he was practically panting.
The scream of sirens hit her even before the door closed behind them, proof that the stairwell was soundproof as well as everything-else-proof. The flashing lights of some kind of an emergency vehicle burst through the large rectangular openings in the top half of the concrete walls to carom around the parking garage in disorienting bursts of blue. She could hear shouts, jumbled voices, the sounds of a crowd on the street just below.
That was good, right? Because there was safety in numbers, and all that?
But as far as she could tell, this level of the parking garage was deserted. If anybody wanted to attack them, this was the place. The walls were gray, the floor was gray, the high, concrete-beamed ceiling was gray. The lights set deep into the ceiling provided circles of distilled illumination in the areas directly below them and cast the rest of the vast space into shadow. Add in the revolving emergency lights, and it became almost mind-blowingly psychedelic. Jess thought they were alone, that no one was following them, but given the constantly changing nature of their surroundings, it was impossible to be sure.
“Do you have a car?” Her narrowed eyes continually scanned the shadows behind him, just in case.
“Across the street.”
She realized that he was heading toward the door at the far end of the garage. One flight down, and another door just like it would open onto Connecticut Avenue, at the opposite end of the garage from where Marian was parked. Jess felt a quick welling of pity as she pictured the other woman waiting in her car for Jess to reappear, with no idea that her world had just been smashed to smithereens. Marian would be sick with grief when she found out that Davenport was dead.
Ryan pulled open another door, and then they were in another stairwell, going down.
When he reached the bottom one short flight later, he pushed open the door. They had to cover only a few more yards through a shadowy corner of the garage before exiting through the door out into the street.
“Maybe we should go tell Marian what happened.” She spoke practically in his ear, her voice hushed.
“Yeah. No.”
He said it like that was that. Like it was entirely his decision to make. Which, since he was the legs of the operation at the moment, she guessed it was.
Her eyes straining through the darkness, she searched for Marian’s car. There were a couple of others, parked and left for the night or however long—but, yes, there it was, right where Jess had gotten out, waiting beneath the neon elevator sign which shed just the tiniest amount of light on the Volvo’s navy blue roof. All the lights inside and outside the car were off, but the elevator light above illuminated the interior just a little bit. Jess frowned. She couldn’t see Marian. In fact, if Jess hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the car was empty.
She was still craning her neck toward it when Ryan shouldered through the door to the street.
They emerged into a growing, jostling crowd, with people packed together on the sidewalk. Most people were barely moving. They were gawking. At something lying in the street.
Jess felt her stomach turn inside out. She couldn’t see anything, which was probably a good thing, but she knew what they had to be looking at. Multiple sirens, most still at a distance, filled the air, drowning out the noise of the crowd. About five blocks down, Jess saw the flashing lights of an ambulance as it fought to reach the scene.
“You can put me down now. I couldn’t manage the stairs, but this is flat,” she whispered in Ryan’s ear. Her voice took on an urgent undertone as she noticed a few glances directed their way. “We’re starting to attract attention.”
Ryan grunted in acknowledgment and set her on her feet, keeping a hard arm around her waist for support. Her legs felt rubbery, but she gritted her teeth and wrapped her arm around him and started walking when he did, responding to his assessing glance with a nod that said she was all right. Using his shoulder as a buffer, taking her with him, he wove through the crowd clogging the sidewalk with single-minded purpose. Against her body, she could feel the solid strength and heat of him.
“Duck your face down. I don’t want anybody getting a good look at you.”
Of course. She’d been plastered all over TV. People might recognize her. She had forgotten that. It occurred to Jess in a lightning burst of awareness that if she still harbored any doubts about Ryan and his intentions toward her, this was her moment to scream some variation of “This man is not my daddy!” and enlist the power of the many people surroundin
g them to get away.
The question boiled down to this: Was she safer with him or without him?
On the negative side, he was a Secret Service agent. And she was pretty sure he’d lied about having tests done on her IV.
But then he’d saved her life tonight, and in the hospital. He was a trained protection officer with a gun.
She was pretty sure he didn’t want to kill her, or want anyone else to kill her. Otherwise, she’d be dead.
So she was going with, with.
Shaking her head so that her hair covered most of her face, she lowered her head so that she was looking at the ground.
“Careful of the curb,” he warned in an undertone.
Then they stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, heading, she assumed, toward wherever he had left his car, dodging the vehicles that were still trying to force their way past and that would occasionally shoot free of the congestion like a cork from a champagne bottle.
The view was better as they crossed the street, because the bulk of the crowd stayed on the sidewalk. For the moment only a single police car was on the scene. The two officers were out of the car. One was trying single-handedly to redirect the honking traffic that was already backed up for blocks. The other was standing in the street, looking down.
Jess couldn’t help it. She followed his gaze. She caught just a glimpse of black dress pants and a white shirt, realized that it was Davenport lying sprawled on his stomach on the pavement, felt the gorge rise in her throat, and hastily looked away.
She was suddenly breathing hard. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She felt light-headed, woozy—and then she saw Marian.
Unmistakable with her upswept hair and gray suit, the woman burst through the crowd about two hundred feet away.
“John!” Marian screamed. Her face twisted into a mask of hysterical grief, she ran frantically into the street toward Davenport’s body.
In the space of a heartbeat, Jess saw what was about to happen but was helpless to do anything about it.
A small tan car shot past the cop trying to stop traffic and hit Marian dead-on. She flew up in the air, slammed back down on the car’s roof, and then was thrown to the ground as the car streaked away.
16
Marian!” Jess shrieked, pulling away from Ryan. Horror grabbed her heart like a fist and squeezed.
A couple of heads turned in her direction.
“Shut up,” Ryan growled, tightening his grip on her at the same time as he quickened his step. “Jesus, don’t draw attention to yourself.”
Jess didn’t fight him, but she couldn’t look away. Other people in the crowd were gasping, yelling, surging forward, crowding around the accident site. The cops abandoned what they were doing to run toward where Marian now lay crumpled in the street. One knelt beside her while the other held back traffic, which had now ground to a total halt because the street was completely, hideously blocked. Jess had eyes for nothing but Marian. The woman lay unmoving, her left leg bent at an unnatural angle. A pool of dark liquid was forming beneath her head.
Blood, black as oil as the streetlights hit it.
“I got the license plate number!” a man shouted, elbowing his way through the crowd toward the cops.
“Let the ambulance through!” someone else cried.
“Keep your head down.” Ryan pulled her up on the curb with him just as the ambulance rolled past. Behind it came two more police cars, strobe lights flashing, sirens screaming a warning into the night as cars nudged onto the sidewalk and wedged into a single lane to let them pass.
“Oh my God.” Jess could hardly talk. Her teeth chattered. Her breathing was suddenly way too fast and shallow. “I’ve got to go to her.”
“Like hell.” There was a brutal edge to Ryan’s voice that she had never heard in it before. With his arm clamped around her, he shouldered deep into the crowd, clearly intent on putting as much distance between them and the accident as he could. Suddenly, Jess could see nothing but a forest of people. “Anyway, there’s nothing you can do.”
His arm was like iron around her now, as though he feared she might struggle to escape. She didn’t. Too many terrible things had happened too quickly, and all she knew for sure was that she was afraid. They were on the edges of the crowd now, and he was moving faster, propelling her with him as he plunged past others rushing toward the scene, leaving it behind as quickly as he could. More police cars slowly forced their way through the stopped traffic. Cars moved aside to let them pass.
It started to rain, a slow sprinkle that hit her exposed skin like cold tears.
“The car just drove away.” Scarcely able to believe what she had just witnessed, Jess looked back, tried to see what was going on with Marian but could not. “It just hit her and drove away.”
“That’s what it did, all right.”
Jess’s heart clutched. Her head was up now, and he wasn’t saying anything about it, so she guessed it was safe enough. The rain was making her blink in an effort to keep it out of her eyes. “Do you think she’s—dead?”
“Hard to say. Believe me, everything that can be done for her is being done.”
They rounded a corner into near darkness. The wind caught her hair, whipping it back, driving a cold drizzle against her skin. The smell of booze and garbage mixed with the wet-earth scent of the rain. Jess realized that they had left the crowd behind. The thought scared her. Shivering, she looked carefully all around. Tall buildings rose up on either side; they were in an alley now. A starless and rainy alley lined with trash cans and Dumpsters and mounds of things she preferred not to think about. Rows of dark windows looked down on them like sight-less eyes.
Ducking her head against the rain, Jess instinctively leaned closer into Ryan, taking comfort from the solid warmth of his body. Watching what had happened to Marian had stripped the last of her illusions from her. This was big, it was real, and it was not going away. She felt exposed, like danger was closing in from all sides.
Like there was nowhere left that was safe.
Could someone be following us even now?
She looked fearfully back. A white plastic grocery bag tumbling toward them like a pale ghost in the wind made her jump. A sound—a rattle—rain on the trash-can lids, maybe—made her catch her breath. At the mouth of the alley, the flashing blue lights from the rescue vehicles pulsed, giving weird life to everything they touched.
Then the alley opened up, and they turned right into a parking lot filled with vehicles. There were lights, two tall halogen lamps at either end that emitted a foggy yellow glow, and row upon row of cars. It would be easy for someone to hide. Jess’s heartbeat quickened, but before she could look around more than once he stopped beside a small, dark-colored RAV4, said, “Hang on a minute,” and pressed the button to unlock the doors. Then he opened the passenger door and bundled her inside. A moment or so later he slid in behind the wheel.
As soon as he was inside, he locked the doors. The click as he did so was enough to make her jump. Even as she realized what the sound was, Jess wondered if he feared being followed as much as she did.
“Was that an accident?” Jess burst out, still looking warily all around as he started the car. She was wet, cold, and shaking like a leaf, and she folded her arms over her chest for warmth. The parking lot was filled with shapes and shadows, and she was on pins and needles in case someone should suddenly spring at them out of the darkness. “That wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He backed the car out in a fast swoop, then shifted into drive. A moment later they pulled out onto M Street. Jess felt a little safer because they were now moving targets.
“Put your seat belt on.”
He was wearing his, she saw. Hands trembling, Jess did as she was told.
“Where are we going?”
He glanced at her. “My house. It’s just outside of Dale City. You can stay there until we get this thing figured out.”
Jess wasn’t in any state o
f mind to argue. Without a better suggestion, she didn’t even bother to reply.
As a result of what was happening on Connecticut Avenue, traffic was already clogging up throughout downtown. He headed away from the congestion, driving fast but not too fast, making good time through the interconnected grid of streets, glancing just a little too often in his rearview mirror for her to think they were now safe. Rain fell steadily, and the constant rhythm of the windshield wipers provided a numbing counterpoint to the swish of the tires on wet pavement. She was shivering, which, she suspected, had very little to do with the fact that she was cold and wet and had a whole lot to do with the fact that she had just witnessed two violent deaths and nearly suffered one herself. He must have noticed because he cranked the heat. A moment later, the smell of damp clothes circulated throughout the car.
“Why would Mr. Davenport try to kill me? Why would he kill himself ?” The questions that had been tumbling through her mind spilled over as he braked for a red light. “If there was anybody I thought I could trust, it was him.”
“Babe, outside of your family, I’d say there’s nobody you ought to be trusting right about now.” He gave her a quick, grim smile. “Except me, of course.”
Jess looked at him and frowned. Some of the shock was receding, and her brain was slowly regaining its ability to function. Okay, time to focus here. Before she fell hook, line, and sinker for the whole “trust me” thing, he had some explaining to do.
Her eyes narrowed at him. “About that. What were you doing in Mr. Davenport’s office again?”
“Let’s just say I was monitoring the situation.”
“Situation?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, I don’t mean to be ungrateful or anything, but I think I’m going to need a little bit more of an explanation than that.”
The light turned green, he accelerated and turned left, and they joined a long line of cars heading up onto the Beltway.
“Just out of curiosity, what happens if you don’t like what you hear?”
Good question. Jess was already asking herself that. She was in his car traveling at around seventy miles an hour on an expressway filled with other cars going equally fast. They were alone. He was a highly trained federal agent; she was a highly trained lawyer. He was big, she was small. Plus, he had a gun. If it came down to a fight for her life, she didn’t like her chances.
Pursuit Page 15
