She’d made it two years and thirteen days. She wasn’t ready yet, hadn’t saved enough. Six more months and her plan would be in place, ready for execution.
Five grand and her little sister. That was all she needed to start a brand-new life a thousand miles away.
Miami was loud and colorful and always moving, made up of a jumble of Cubans, Haitians, Asians, South Americans, and Anglos, an exuberant smorgasbord of cultures, music, food, and art.
Miami was an easy city to get lost in.
But she hadn’t gotten lost enough.
Sweat prickled along her hairline. She took a step back from the window, hoping the sunlight’s glare on the glass would shield her presence.
Maybe he only had a general idea of their location. If he was still searching, if he didn’t already know exactly where she was…
But maybe he wasn’t coming for her first. The thought sent a cold fission of dread through her gut.
He was going after Eden.
She held her breath until he passed—never turning his head to the left or right, eyes fixed straight ahead as he weaved between the pedestrians thronging the sidewalk.
He always had been single-minded, like a dog with a bone.
She should’ve known he wouldn’t let go. Would never let go.
She leaned over the table to get a better view of the street. Maddox Cage paused at the corner and waved down a taxi. Dakota didn’t move until he slipped inside, shut the door, and the car pulled away from the curb.
“Excuse me, Miss,” said a heavy, middle-aged Indian guy at the next booth.
She didn’t know him. The usual regulars haunted their favorite bar stools, but this close to downtown and Miami International, the bar always served a steady stream of tourists and traveling business types.
People liked the Beer Shack’s funky vibe. The bar was lined with kitschy shiny yellow tables and elephant palms in huge ceramic planters adorned with fairy lights.
Famous locations throughout Miami—South Beach, Freedom Tower, the Coral Castle Museum—were immortalized in bottle cap art hung on the faux brick walls.
The radio was always playing a vibrant mix of rumba, salsa, timba. The mix of authentic Cuban fare and classic American selections was damn good, too.
With his sweating mug of Sam Adams, the man gestured toward the flat-screen against the far wall. He was in his fifties and nearly bald, a neatly combed circle of white hair ringing his shiny brown scalp. “Can you turn that up?”
“Sure thing.” She forced herself to move, to go through the motions, even as her mind spun with jostling, frantic thoughts.
She put the Coke glass down on the dirty table she’d been cleaning, leaving the plastic tub and rag behind. She pulled the remote from her moss-green apron and punched up the volume.
The Marlins’ loss recap had been interrupted. The screen showed an aerial shot of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, completely cleared but for a minivan parked on the street.
Several police cars and SWAT vehicles were stationed a safe distance away, three helicopters hovering overhead.
A breathless, wide-eyed news reporter gesticulated wildly about something. She couldn’t make sense of the woman’s jumble of words.
“I live near the west side of Chi-Town. Heading back tomorrow. Crazy, huh?” the guy said.
“What’s all the excitement about?” Dakota asked distractedly, forcing herself to be polite.
A low, frantic buzz filled her head.
Fear was already forming like ice around her heart.
She couldn’t just leave in the middle of her shift. She couldn’t afford to lose another job, but she had to contact Eden, had to figure out what to do.
“Some kind of bomb. Terrorist wackos, looks like. Probably ISIS. But Chicago PD caught it in time. Disarming it now, thank God.”
“Good thing,” she said.
He held his mug toward her. “Fill ’er up, would you?”
She grabbed the mug, refilled it at the bar, and returned it to the customer. He didn’t acknowledge her. His eyes were glued to the screen.
Her nerves were stretched taut. Anxiety squeezed her lungs. She needed a break. She needed to reach Eden.
She strode across the room and paused, keeping her back to the empty bar-height table behind her, the glass front door on her left, the bar counter several feet to her right.
The bar wasn’t busy yet. A handful of regulars hunched over their drinks, staring glassily at the second screen hung over the bar, showing the same view of the van in Chicago.
The steady buzz of their conversations was a constant hum in the background: Walter Monroe whining about his ex-wife; Jesse Peretti’s grass kept dying from the increased water restrictions due to the drought; Tamara Santos complaining about more forced overtime.
Mendo Del Rio always brought up politics, especially when he was itching for a fight. The Beer Shack owner and current bartender, Julio de la Pe?a, had been forced to kick him out several times.
Most of the time, the regulars discussed sports and deep-sea fishing plans, crappy boss problems, and the latest indomitable heat wave.
They were all regular people with regular problems. No one was hunting them.
None of them paid any attention to her.
She jerked her cell out of her cargo pocket—an old model Samsung that barely qualified as a smartphone. It was all she could afford, since she put every extra penny toward her bug out fund.
As she tapped the contacts icon, she kept one anxious eye on the street outside, in case Maddox decided to double back. He was cunning like that.
Wanda Simpson, her sister’s social worker, picked up on the fourth ring.
Dakota didn’t waste time on greetings. “I need to see my sister. Now. Today.”
“Well,” the woman huffed. “I don’t have time for this nonsense today, Ms. Sloane. You know as well as I do that you have court-appointed, supervised visits once a month and no more. Your next visit isn’t for a week—”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Ms. Sloane, your sister is medically fragile. She needs consistency. The judge, the psychologists, and I all agree that disrupting her carefully maintained routine would be detrimental to her well-being.”