The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Stevens, Taylor

  Logan pointed at the scars on the wall. “They were shooting at something or someone—not this guy.” He ran the back of his hand along the wall and checked his fingertips. “No blood spatter,” he said. He searched the floor for spatter beyond the congealed pool. “I don’t think they hit whatever they were shooting at,” he said. “I want to bring that clerk in and verify the ID on these guys.”

  “What about Michael?” Gideon asked.

  “She’s not here, and all seven of these guys didn’t arrive in that one vehicle outside. There had to be another, and it’s gone. So, either she’s dead somewhere else or there were more people and they took her somewhere else. But if that guy over there is the boss, then my guess is that she’s free and on the move. If that’s the case she’s going to be heading in Miles’s direction as quickly as she can. We should probably do the same.”

  Logan paused, stared at the scene across the floor, and then stood. If the head of a local crime family fell off the radar, sooner or later someone was going to come looking. “I’m going to check out the back of this place, just to be sure Michael’s not here,” he said. “Go get the clerk. I want to identify these guys, and then I want to get the hell out of here before reinforcements show up and we take the heat for this.”

  The morning was still early, city traffic still light, and Munroe drove as slowly as was possible to drive on Buenos Aires streets without attracting attention. Moving through town inconspicuously wasn’t easy when driving a car dented from where she’d hit the warehouse wall, or a front grille spattered with blood, and a rear passenger window spiderwebbed from the absorption of several rounds against bulletproof glass. A few more miles and she could ditch the thing.

  She’d seen the SUV sitting by the side of the warehouse only after she’d spun out onto the road, and although in retrospect it might have been the smarter option to go back for it, at the time going back wasn’t a consideration.

  In the ebb and flow of changing lanes, Munroe’s mind ran in circles, attempting to put into place the series of steps that she would make next. There were loose ends, pieces to be ordered, and like a house of cards, each one balanced on the ones below. She needed clarity, but the adrenaline dump was slowing her down and making it difficult to focus beyond getting the car safely from point A to point B.

  She had to get food into her system, had to pump up blood sugar levels, and she craved sleep too. Food would be the faster and easier option. It had to wait just a little longer. First a trip to her hotel room to confirm that Bradford was safe, that he’d followed the plan. She needed to see it, know it, not only for personal assurance but also for guidance in deciding which direction to turn. Because the way things stood now, she had to get to Bradford as quickly as possible, or locate and then rescue Bradford. One or the other.

  If Bradford was alive, if he’d been successful in getting Hannah to safety, Logan would want his daughter, and Bradford would refuse. This was the way it had to be. Bradford was neither Hannah’s guardian nor the one legally assigned to take her home; he had no authority to do anything other than deliver the girl to her mother and would want her off his hands as quickly as possible.

  Once successful, Bradford would be driven to return to Buenos Aires, to search for Munroe, no matter how long it took, and continuing this mess was the last thing she wanted. She had to reach him before Charity did, and for reasons of her own had to reach Hannah before Charity did. On both counts, time was running out. It would take time, a day perhaps, for Charity to get to Montevideo, if she wasn’t already en route.

  Munroe entered the hotel with her head tucked down and one hand holding her sliced shirts closed. She made directly for the small ground-floor restroom. She’d seen her face in the car’s rearview mirror, and it wasn’t pretty. Her lips were swollen, both eyes blackened, and her cheeks and forehead bruised and mottled. All told, the facial coloring was far better than the sheet-white alternative, but it made blending in nearly impossible.

  She pushed into the unisex bathroom and locked the door. Facing the mirrors, water running, she scrubbed the blood off her face, hands, and arms, and plunged her head under the water to wash everything out of what was left of her hair.

  The best she could do about the slit shirts was to strip out of them, reverse the undershirt so that the opening faced the back, and pull the top layer back on over it. Blood had dried on the clothes, had drenched the arm she’d used to create the chokehold, and there wasn’t much she could do about that. Against the black, the stains weren’t obviously blood, they could be anything, and although she would have preferred to wash them out, or at the least scrape the residue off into the sink, this was a procedure that would take more time than she had, and she’d already been in the bathroom long enough to attract attention.

  She bathed her face in the cold water once more and patted herself dry. The water wouldn’t help much with the swelling, but it made her feel better.

  Munroe left the restroom for the front desk and, amid curious stares at her battered face, requested a key to the room. As was standard procedure, she’d carried nothing on her during the extraction. Her passport, money, and all personal effects had been left behind. And although she expected the room had since been cleared out—for Bradford’s sake, she hoped that it had been—she was compelled to make sure.

  The desk clerk did a poor job at concealing his disgust at her mangled face, and made no pretense of helping. Yes, the room was still paid a week in advance, but as she could not prove that she was one of the occupants, and he certainly didn’t recognize her, there was nothing he would do.

  The dangerous chemical cocktail brought on by the morning’s events still percolated through Munroe’s system, and any ability to maintain cordial interaction with a snot-nosed brat had ended hours ago.

  Chapter 35

  On the best of days Munroe had little patience for power-playing tug-of-wars with ignorance or arrogance, and today was not the best of days. She flipped the boss’s blade into her palm, sprung it open, leaned over the counter, and hissed a vivid description of what she would do to the desk clerk once she found him alone after work, and it took but a moment for him to compromise.

  Key in hand, Munroe took the stairs up, two at a time. She worked against the clock, against private security, which would soon be on their way, and the police that might eventually come.

  Munroe opened the door to an empty room. The place had been cleaned out. Not in a housekeeping sort of way, but in special-ops style, where no hint was left that either she or Bradford had ever been there. Munroe made directly for the bathroom, ignored her reflection, and lifted the toilet-tank lid. Disappeared with everything else was her money and her identification.

  She replaced the lid with relief. Bradford was gone. He’d followed protocol. Without money or documentation, getting out of the country and finding him was going to be a bit of a bother, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  Munroe tossed the keys on the bed, blocked the door open an inch, and ducked into an alcove before the stairwell. She’d been in the room a minute and a half, an entire minute longer than acceptable. The elevator opened, and a pair of uniforms rushed past. They stopped at the room door and kicked it inward, and Munroe slipped into the stairwell.

  She ran the way down, rushed the lobby to the sidewalk, turned left, and head down, moved forward at a brisk pace. She didn’t pause when she came to the stolen vehicle but slowed to a quick walk, heading past it toward a man several spaces down who was getting into his car.

  Knife to his side, she ordered him across the front seat and slid in next to him.

  The decision had been made in a split second and was one Munroe detested. Under conditions like these, getting across town shouldn’t have required carjacking; whatever she was, she wasn’t a thug, and preying on random strangers who had nothing to do with her predicament was not her way.

  Procuring a ride should have taken only a careful study of body language, a few smiles, and a sob stor
y. But nobody wanted to play host to Frankenstein, and with her face as it was, her options were reduced to forcing a ride or driving the streets in a moving target.

  Munroe peeled into traffic, sped away from the hotel only far enough to put distance between herself and whatever security was up to, and then, safely gone from the place, slowed to the speed of acceptable insanity.

  In the seat next to her, the man’s eyes were wide. He’d pushed himself as far away as he could, as if it were possible to become part of the door, and staring directly at her, with terror on his face, he stammered nonsense, as though he were speaking to an imaginary friend.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, but he continued on, as if her words held no meaning.

  He was a slight man, mid-fifties, gray hair, mousy suit that read bureaucrat not businessman, and from his lack of Spanish, was clearly not from here. Staying in the flow of traffic, Munroe focused on his blubbering, gathering a snippet here or there until recognition struck. His words were an incantation; the same few sentences whispered over and over. In Russian. The oddity was disconcerting, and barely escaping a collision, Munroe returned her focus to the road.

  “Ya ne sdelayu vam nichego plokhogo,” she said. In the stress of the moment, the switch from one language to the next came without thought, like flipping stations on a remote or shedding a jacket after arriving home.

  “I just need to get from one part of town to the next,” she said to him, “and then I’ll give you back the car. I promise.”

  The man’s eyes widened farther, if such were possible, and his mouth dropped open an inch.

  At least this was a predictable reaction: It happened often when others heard their mother tongue spoken in a foreign land and believed they’d found a compatriot. It didn’t typically happen under these circumstances, but was familiar territory nonetheless, and she’d have been able to answer questions as a matter of rote had he asked them.

  But he didn’t.

  The incantation stopped, his hands relaxed, he didn’t try to fight her, and she was able to drive in silence. For these, Munroe was grateful.

  On the street outside Logan’s hostel, Munroe stopped short at the curb, hopped out of the car, slammed the door, and paused just long enough to reopen the door, lean her head back inside, and apologize. She shut the door again, turned, and headed for the courtyard at a near run.

  Munroe moved through the inside area, didn’t bother finding the proprietor or asking for a key. These rooms had thinner doorframes, smaller locks; a solid strike to each, just left of the handle, would give her entry. Munroe reached Heidi’s room first.

  Knocked. Waited.

  Pounded. Waited.

  And then kicked.

  The frame splintered, the door swung inward, and not quite unexpectedly, the room was empty. Not the special-ops empty of the last hotel, but left-in-a-mighty-big-hurry kind of empty.

  She moved down the hall to Logan’s door, where she expected the same, but the need for certainty compelled her toward it. The door flung inward and she checked to a stop. Bradford had cleared out, Heidi was gone, but Logan and Gideon’s room still showed signs of occupancy.

  Munroe entered the room and closed the door, fiddled with the latch until it held in place. She stepped to the beds, felt them, and found them long cold. Among the items that had been left behind were computers, portable electronics, and on Gideon’s bedside table a book that he’d been reading.

  The boys were still in town.

  Munroe felt under Logan’s mattress for the money belt that should be there, snagged it, and pulled it out. He’d left his passport and several hundred dollars, half of it in Argentine pesos.

  With all of the other evidentiary pieces, there was only one reason these two hadn’t gone. Munroe would have laughed if she wasn’t so conflictingly angry about it.

  Bradford had followed the plan—to a point. Then he’d sent Logan and Gideon after her. The situation was beyond frustrating. People she loved and cared about were spread around the city. She had no idea where they were. No idea if they were safe, and she wanted nothing more than to track them down and protect them. But like a kid lost in a haunted amusement park, the only thing she could do to keep from making the situation worse was to follow the plan. Get to the meeting point and hope that they did too.

  Munroe took a portion of the pesos and thrust them into her pocket. Found a pen, scrawled a note to Logan, and placed it under the front cover of his passport. She shoved it all back under the mattress where she’d found it, then stripped out of her clothes, pulled replacements from Logan’s suitcase, and changed. She dumped the bloody items into a backpack and slung it over her shoulder. She’d been inside the room a total of four minutes.

  Inside the main house, she searched out the proprietress, ignored both her reaction and that of some of the guests, and left a message for Logan and Gideon. Provided the boys were still alive, they would be checking out soon, and assuming Logan with his emergency phone was still in contact with Bradford, this would be the fastest way to let Bradford know that she too was alive.

  The money she’d taken from Logan was enough to get a cab to the port, and from there to buy a one-way ferry ticket to Montevideo, the capital of neighboring Uruguay. The trip was only a three-hour skip over the water, but money to pay for a ticket was useless without documents for travel, and as such, the trip would predictably be a whole lot longer.

  When Munroe stepped outside, the Russian was still in his car by the curb where she’d parked. He’d switched to the driver’s seat but turned off the engine, and was now staring out the windshield. It had been fewer than ten minutes since Munroe had rushed inside, but to a man who had, by his own interpretation of events, narrowly escaped a violent act, ten minutes were ten lifetimes, and she would have expected him to have used that time to put as much distance between himself and the hostel as possible. And then maybe down a stiff drink.

  The man didn’t have the look of a trauma victim, and other than that he still sat where she’d left him, he didn’t appear to be in shock. Munroe cursed inwardly and made a slow, cautious return to the car. There wasn’t time to waste, but the Russian was there, and as she was at fault for bringing him to this point, she couldn’t just walk away.

  Munroe rapped knuckles on the passenger window, and the man turned as if he’d been waiting for her and was happy she’d come back.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. “Are you in trouble?”

  His questions weren’t what she’d expected, but she wouldn’t turn down an opportunity. “I could use a ride,” she said.

  He reached to open the passenger door, and she slid inside.

  “We Russians must stick together,” he said, and Munroe, following the path of least resistance, simply grinned. Her nonverbal response was neither acknowledgment nor contradiction, and he would read from the look whatever pleased him. Ambiguity was so much easier than truth and the exhaustive amount of time it would take to explain that she’d never even been to Russia, that she had a gift for languages, that the only reason he mistook her for one of his own was because in her second year of college she’d spent four months dating a boy from St. Petersburg.

  Better just to grin.

  The man turned the ignition key and Munroe asked for the Buquebus terminal, the lower end of the port, south of the commercial shipping docks, where the ferry lines to Uruguay were found. The Russian seemed familiar enough with the location and the route. He pulled directly into traffic, asked no help with directions, and drove the first several minutes in silence.

  “If you’re in trouble, maybe I can help,” the Russian said, “so far from home, we must ally.”

  “It’s been a bad morning, that’s all,” she said. “I’ve friends to meet up with and once I find them, everything will be well.”

  “You’re certain?” the man said.

  Munroe nodded, and he said nothing more.

  The port abutted the wide, busy avenues of Puerto Madero, as
if the city had decided to end things by jumping into the chocolate-toned water and then at the last minute would rather tiptoe in, adding a few more buildings before the very end.

  The Buquebus terminal, with its modern glass design and Jetway-style boarding, which ran from the second floor down to where the ships would dock, seemed more like an airport than a ferry transport.

  Munroe asked that the Russian drive beyond the parking area, with its policemen and security, just a little farther down the branching road, and so he continued beyond the terminal and ticket office, stopping as requested along a rusted fence that separated the docks from city traffic.

  She offered to pay for the ride, and he refused.

  With a good-bye full of unasked questions, and a reassuring handshake on her part, he pulled away from the curb, and she remained rooted, watching as the vehicle shrank away and then blended with traffic to vanish completely.

  Munroe turned from the road to the fence and headed farther back, to the run-down end of the wharf, where the buildings were old, the security lax, and where fewer pedestrians mingled. There she found a spot to hop the wires in order to gain access to where the employees gathered: a place where she could sit and observe without being noticed while cars lined up and the baggage men with their little tractors and trailing carts made ready for the next departure.

  The ferry to Montevideo was scheduled to leave in an hour, and one way or the other, she would be on it. The issue wasn’t ticketing per se, it was getting identification to purchase the ticket—and then proceeding through the appropriate immigration procedures—as if her face, messed up as it was, wouldn’t create unnecessary complications.