What had he sent her?
Suddenly, there was no air in the SUV so she put down the window a little, the cold night coming in.
“Home,” she said in that falsely low tone. “Go home.”
Then she quickly ended the call.
Maybe he’d figured out what she was trying to tell him. Maybe he wouldn’t.
But either way, Detective José de la Cruz of homicide had just saved her life.
Someone on the inside was after her. And had killed her colleague and friend because of it.
Holding the cell phone to her chest, she tried to breathe, tried to think. And sometime thereafter, she realized she had come to a stop next to a green-and-white highway sign.
Walters 10
Upstate. She was seriously upstate.
The idea that she couldn’t go back to her apartment made her feel as if she were in a foreign country and did not speak the language. Then again, she had no idea where she could go, who she could talk to. What was safe. What she should do—
Another set of headlights rounded a curve in the road, coming toward her.
Snapping to attention, she threw the phone out of the window and into the opposite lane; then she punched the gas and continued on. She was in a stolen SUV, owned by drug suppliers, with a phone she’d lifted off a guy she’d shot and killed, stuck in an information vacuum where the wrong move could end her up where Roberts had.
Wherever that grave was.
Rio kept driving until she came into a little hamlet with a diner/grocery store combo, and a bank, and a gas station. She wasn’t hungry—but then she had no money.
At least the tank was full.
That gasoline, and this vehicle she didn’t own, were pretty much the extent of her assets.
God, what was she going to do? She’d assumed that as long as she could stay out of Mozart’s way until she could get to the station, she’d be fine. But now that was not an option.
She had to find a safe place to collect her thoughts and figure out what she needed to do. But like she knew this area at all?
As Lucan walked out of Willow Hills’s front entrance, the sense that things were closing in, smothering him, suffocating him, was like a tangible stalker, tight on his heels. He knew what he was supposed to do, knew where to do it, knew what he had to accomplish to be successful.
But in the very short distance between the Executioner’s private quarters and this very large, awfully decrepit exit, he’d made up his mind: Rio wasn’t going to be involved in what happened next. He was going to deal with Mozart directly. That way, he could make sure Kane stayed alive while not endangering her, and then he could . . .
Lose his fucking mind quietly and calmly.
Great plan.
But come on. She’d known she was in danger. He’d rescued her, for fuck’s sake. The conversation should have been about her getting out of the drug-dealing life, not him, but he’d been too distracted by emotion to be as smart and logical as he should have been. And wasn’t that always the way.
Closing his eyes with a curse, he slowed his breathing and got ready to dematerialize. Just get ghost and go. Leave in a scatter of molecules—
When nothing even remotely heading-out happened, he reopened his lids and looked back at the sanatorium.
All those lives stuck underground, suffering in lesser degrees until they dropped dead and were slung out of the building’s body chute to roast into ash by the sun. No one to mourn them, nobody missing them. Forgotten.
For fuck’s sake, most of the people in there couldn’t remember why or how they’d ended up in custody.
But they were going to have to wait for another savior to come along. He was not it. He was no hero, and never had been one.
Once again, with the closing of the eyes. Then the breathing. Deep breathing . . . slow. Easy—
When he still filled out his clothes and stayed stuck to the ground, when his body remained heavy and full in his skin, and the landscape continued to be unchanged, he lost his temper and started hoofing it. Another couple of hundred yards, he tried to dematerialize again. And then one more time, a further hundred yards along.
His head was just too fucked for him to concentrate enough to ghost away.
Long fucking walk to Caldwell from where the hell he was.
Man, this night just kept getting better.
Zipping his leather jacket up, he entered the scruffy tree line, pushing bare limbs out of his face, making his way to the chain-link fence. He was forced to claw his way up the thing and swing himself over the top. As he landed with a curse, he kept going.
Guess he was just going to have to “borrow” a human’s car off the county road.
Yeah, ’cuz there were so many people wearing out the pavement up here this time of night. He’d have a better chance of getting hit by a bus—
Monte Carlo.
Monte-fucking-Carlo, he thought as he fell into a jog.
José pulled his unmarked over to the curb in front of Officer Hernandez-Guerrero’s apartment building. When he got out, he made sure his jacket was open so he could get at his gun.
It was that kind of night.
The neighborhood was quiet even though there were no private houses, but congregations of tenants, corralled under communal roofs. Then again, this was a working-folks zip code where nine o’clock was wind-down time, even on the weekends, all kinds of TV-blue light strobing in the sliding glass doors that opened to shallow, one-unit porches.