Chapter Fourteen
Mia walked through the room her mother had taken at the seniors’ resort. Her belongings were set out neatly, not a thing out of place other than a damp bathing suit over the rail in the bathtub. At first Mia had been suprised when she found her mother’s message on the dating site they’d agreed to use as a virtual meeting place, saying she liked to vacation at the Silver Waves Hotspring Resort, but then she’d laughed and thought it was a good sign her mother had decided to have fun while she hid out and waited for Mia. She couldn’t guarantee there’d be much to enjoy about witness protection. And what better place to hide than among a resort full of seniors?
Neville wagged his tail at her from his spot beside the door. She hadn’t bothered to enquire about the resort’s pet policy. She wasn’t planning on staying longer than it took to get her mom packed and into the car she’d purchased with cash after she’d left Hudson’s ride at a bus station.
He wasn’t the only one with a bug-out plan—Mia was wearing a salt-and-pepper wig, a sun hat, and large sunglasses. She filled the ice bucket with water for Neville and directed him to a stay under the screened window where he had the best chance of catching a breeze. This side of the mountains, fall had failed to materialize and where the coast was cooling and wet, the heart of BC’s interior was enjoying an almost tropical extension of summer.
She could feel the heat of the sand even through her sandals and was suddenly grateful for the protection of the ridiculous hat. Long sleeves and pants covered her too-young skin and as she looked around at the years of sun damage on display, she reminded herself to stock up on sunscreen.
Sun loungers were set every few feet. Each one was occupied and rows of bodies dotted the sand down to the shoreline as well. Mia opted to move to the crushed shell path that ran above the line of loungers. She could see the entire beach from that vantage point, but it left her trying to identify her mother from behind.
She was nearly at the rocky slope at the far end of the cove before a familiar beach bag caught her attention. She was rushing forward, her lips rounding over the word Mom, when the person walking in front of her moved aside, and she could see the lounger was empty.
Or nearly empty. A book lay face down, spine cracked, carelessly discarded in a way that set Mia’s teeth on edge. Her mother was a voracious reader who would never treat a book so badly. The beach bag that had captured Mia’s attention was on its side, contents scattered. Mia forced herself to maintain a casual pace and strolled by, cataloguing the scene in her mind the way she thought Hudson might.
A piece of paper fluttered from under the book. Something about it was wrong, and Mia puzzled over it as she made the last few steps to the end of the promenade. She scanned the beach as she started back, thankful for the discretion of her sunglasses. No one was paying the slightest attention to her mother’s belongings, and Mia took the chance to step closer.
A rock pinned the book flat to the cushion. The page she’d seen fluttering didn’t belong to the book itself. The colour was off. That must have been what caught her eye. The scenario looked deliberate. And somehow malevolent.
The paper lifted again in the breeze, and the scent of her mom’s perfume rose with it, probably from the towel draped over the back of the lounger. Mia’s breath caught and she eased herself down before her legs lost their strength. She slid the book out from under the rock. It was the latest bestseller. Her mom was nothing if not current. Sure enough, a needlepoint bookmark rested between the back pages. Mia smoothed her finger over the stitches and blinked back tears. Messy, bumpy ones she’d set herself, and the tiny, neat ones her mother had put in to finish the project when Mia had given up.
She didn’t give up on things anymore. She was so close. So close to getting her mother away to safety. So close to ending this whole miserable chapter of her life. But where was her mom? Mia slid the bookmark between the pages where the book had been held open and unfolded the sheet of loose paper.
Gone to the hotspring.
A laugh escaped her and Mia flattened the paper against her leg. It was her mother’s handwriting. She’d been worried for nothing. Her mom knew Mia was going to come and find her and had probably been leaving notes to help her. She must have missed the one in the room.
She started to bundle her mother’s things together. The end was nearly in sight. She could get her mother safely squared away somewhere, then turn herself in to give her evidence against Abe. And maybe, just maybe, Hudson would forgive her.
“You must be Mia, then?”
She turned and beamed at the purple-rinsed senior on the next lounger. “I am.”
The older woman gestured to the paper tucked back in the book. “The young man said you’d be by.”
Mia’s heart stopped for a beat, then accelerated. Hudson? He’d found her? Heat rose up her neck and a smile spread across her face. Despite the risk to his own career, he’d tracked her down to help her. The final piece fell into place, and Mia knew without a doubt that she’d given her heart to the undercover cop.
“Has an awful lot of pictures on him, doesn’t he?”
The smile wouldn’t budge. “He does.”
The other woman shrugged. “I thought they were barbaric, myself—until my daughter talked me into getting one for my seventy-fifth birthday.”
Mia laughed out loud. “I don’t see a tattoo.”
The woman winked. “It’s in a safe place, love. I wasn’t quite as brave as your young man. Imagine getting tattoos all the way up your neck. Must have hurt like the dickens.”
Mia’s hand clutched around the book, curling the edges in toward the spine. Hudson didn’t have tattoos on his neck.
But Abe did.
#
“Hudson, if you don’t sit still, I’m going to pitch you out the side.” Mitch glared at him and reached over to tug the belt tighter over his lap.
Hudson grimaced and held his hands up in apology, then promptly loosened the belt again as soon as the other man turned away. He leaned as far as he could out the open door of the police helicopter, trying to get his bearings as they neared their destination. His tactical gear was hot and heavy, even in the rushing wind of the flight, but his fear for Mia was heavier still. He tried to will the helicopter to move faster and Mitch poked him again in the shoulder.
“We’ll get there, Hudson.” Static was thick in the headphones, but Mitch’s sympathy came through loud and clear.
Hudson pressed his fingers hard into his temples. “It took too long to put the pieces together. Larson is probably way ahead of us.”
The other man thumped his fist twice on Hudson’s thigh. He didn’t argue. Couldn’t argue. The analyst had been able to get into the back end of the police records system and track who had accessed Mia’s file. From there it was a simple matter of dragging the twenty-year officer who’d been passing intelligence to Larson into an interview room. The man had taken one look at Hudson’s face, bruised and still bloody from his encounter with Gio, and spilt his guts. He’d been on the take for years, financing a gambling addiction. Just hours before, he’d passed Larson all of the analyst’s work—including a complete list of the searches Mia had made on Hudson’s phone.
The dating website had stood out to Hudson, but he hadn’t quite known what to make of it. He actually had Raj to thank for reminding him of how important Mia’s family was to her. That had prompted the memory of Mia saying she and her mother had a plan. The dating site was a brilliant contact method, and the puzzle finally fit together.
The elation he’d felt realizing he’d be seeing Mia again soon had turned to fear when the brass had insisted they needed Hudson on standby until they were able to convince Raj to turn against Abe. With Hudson’s anxiety growing by the second, he’d made the suggestion to move Raj into the soft interview room. Designed for interviewing kids, it had taken only a few minutes of being surrounded by plush toys and children’s movies and games to tap into Raj’s desire to be a real, proper dad to his son—and the man started to reveal details of Cain’s organization that stunned the listening cops with its depth and complexity. Hudson was an instant hero, but it was Mitch who’d been able to finagle use of the force helicopter and convince management they were going to get photographic evidence of the original crash site. One serious detour and now they were only moments away from the resort.
Mitch kept trying to catch Hudson’s attention, to come up with some sort of plan that guaranteed charges that would put Larson away for the rest of his life. Hudson nodded mechanically. All he cared about was making sure Larson never got a chance to hurt Mia again. Good arrest, bad arrest, officer-involved shooting, he didn’t care. He’d do whatever it took.
The pilot’s voice rode the static over the radio. Hudson keyed his microphone before Mitch could respond. “The school’s too far. I’ll rappel onto the road.”
Mitch was shaking his head, but started getting ready when Hudson unbelted himself and started gathering his gear. Mitch transmitted orders to the rest of the men in the chopper. The pilot would put down on the playing field of the nearby high school and they would meet up with the local force to ride in as back-up.
Hudson felt none of the usual rush as the ground zipped up toward him. Mia. Her name echoed in his head with every beat of his heart. He had to get to Mia and was clear of his line and out of his harness before Mitch hit the ground. They set out at a jog, stopping once for Mitch to answer his cell.
Mitch put away the phone and let loose a string of expletives. There was no sign of Mia or her mother at the resort. The local police already there would start calling in the plates of vehicles in the lot and set up checkpoints at all the exits.
Hudson lengthened his stride. If they weren’t at the resort itself, the next likely place was one of the hot springs nearby. They were already halfway there. If he was wrong, Mia might well be lost to him forever.
#
“You won’t get away with this, Abe. The police are already on their way.”
Abe rolled his eyes and stroked Mia’s mother’s hair before pulling the lock straight and slicing his knife through it. He held the silver strands in front of her mother’s face, and she gasped and lifted a hand to her head.
“Ah, ah, ah. None of that now.”
She let her hand drop back to her lap. She was kneeling at the side of the hot spring with Abe’s knee pressing into her spine.
He let the strands drift into the still water of the pool and swirled them around with the tip of his knife. “My scrying pool says you lie. No cops.” He wiped the blade on her mother’s sarong and lifted it back to her neck. “No cops, no help, no hope.” He smirked at her. “Come on, now, Mia. I gave you, what, seven, eight years? Wasn’t that generous of me? The others didn’t get that long.”
Mia breathed deeply and tried to ignore the way the spring’s sulphur coated her tongue. “What happened to the others?”
Abe tilted the knife backward and forward, seemingly mesmerized. “Oh, this and that. You can ask them when you see them.”
The dappled light through the leaves caught on the knife’s blade, sending painful glare into Mia’s eyes. She shifted slightly and blinked to bring her vision back. She was close enough to see his eyes. The pinprick pupils and reddened whites. He was using. Not just using, but high as a satellite. Probably paranoid and absolutely dangerous. But still, she had to try.
“I’ll be seeing them?” She shifted again, trying to get closer to her mom.
He smiled at her, then tugged a handful of her mother’s hair until her neck was arched and taut under the point of his knife. “Sooner rather than later, if you don’t stay still.”
She froze. “I wasn’t lying, Abe. The cops really are on the way.”
She was lying. Like a rug on hardwood. She hadn’t spared the time to make a single phone call. Just bolted into the woods toward the springs. As soon as she’d seen the notice indicating that one of the pools was out of bounds, she’d lifted herself over the barrier and sprinted. Now she was running on adrenalin and was slick-skinned with fear. All she was hoping for was to win a single moment of hesitation, and that inspiration would hit and she’d know exactly how to whisk her mother out of harm’s way.
She inched forward again and slipped her mother’s tote bag off her shoulder. She held it open and tilted it, so Abe could see inside. “I just want to give my mom some water, okay?”
He smiled vaguely. “Not exactly a last meal, but the least I could do, I suppose.”
Mia swallowed bile and reached into the bag. “Want some water, Mom?”
“Yes, honey, I’d love some.” Her mother smiled into her face, and the shame of putting her mom into this position made Mia’s eyes water. Her biological father had disowned her when she started protesting against his company, and with her stepfather now gone, this woman was all the family she had left in the world. Her mother cleared her throat softly and Mia pulled herself together.
“I’d find it much easier to drink, young man, if you’d move that knife away from my throat.”
Abe rolled his eyes again, “I can see where Mia gets her demanding nature from.”
But he held the knife further away, seemingly distracted once again by the play of light on the blade. A flash, red this time, hit a rock to Abe’s left, then near her foot as Mia pulled out her mother’s metal water bottle. The flash came again, bursts, moving rhythmically from front to back like lighting on a landing strip.
Abe gazed at his reflection in the knife’s surface and preened. The pattern came again, and Mia had a sudden moment of clarity. She reversed her grip on the bottle, seizing it by the neck, and took another step before extending the bottle to her mother. At the last moment she pulled her arm back and launched the water bottle with all her strength at Abe, then grabbed her mother’s hand and hauled her across the edge of the pool.
Her mom barked her shins on the rock edge, but Mia pulled harder and let herself fall backward, cushioning her mom’s fall, then rolled so her body covered her mother’s. Abe’s cursing came a second later and his knife embedded itself in the ground a scant inch from Mia’s mom’s head. A gunshot followed instantly, and Abe froze.
“The next one won’t be a warning shot.”
Hudson. He really had found them.
Relief warmed her and turned her muscles to liquid. A hand was under her elbow, pulling her up, and then her arms were around her shaken mother and she was peering at the balaclava’d figure sighting down the barrel of a rifle at Abe.
“Stay behind me, ladies.”
She didn’t recognize the voice, but took several steps back to allow Hudson and the other man a clear field. She could see Abe trying to mount an offence. Trying to shake off the effects of whatever he’d taken. Trying, and failing, to put on the charming facade that had allowed him to live his psychopathic life undetected in society.
“Gentlemen, I’m not sure what misunderstanding has occurred here, but there’s certainly a silver lining for you.” He pointed his chin at Mia. “This woman is wanted for murder. You’ll find her warrant on your computer if you’ll have a look.”
“And the reason you had your knife to the throat of an innocent woman?” Hudson’s voice was low and menacing.
Abe waved a hand out from his body. “A misunderstanding, as I said. It wasn’t at all what you think.”
Hudson’s partner snorted behind his mask. “I think you were about to kill these two women.”
Abe put his hand to his chest, rounded his mouth and raised his eyebrows. “Me? A killer? How preposterous.”
Mia took a step forward, patting her mother’s hands where they clutched at her. “What’s preposterous is that you think there’s a way out of this, Abe. It’s over. I’ll pay for my part of what happened that night. Happily. It can’t be worse than what I’ve lived through these past years. But your sentence will be far longer than mine.”
He shrugged and lifted his eyebrows. “Sentence? Why on earth would a pillar of the community like myself be serving any kind of sentence?” He looked at the cop in front of him. “I can only imagine what you think you saw here, sir, but I assure you, I have all the evidence you’ll need to put this murderer away for good.”
“You’re a psychopath and a murderer and every word out of your mouth is a lie.” Hudson peeled up his balaclava so that it rested above his eyebrows, revealing his face. His bruises stood out in Technicolor relief. “Hello, Cain.”
Abe’s jaw clenched. “So I was right. You’re a filthy, sneaky, bastard cop. I should have had you killed when I had the chance.”
Hudson smiled. It was a hard smile, not the gentle ones Mia had grown to love, but it was real and she’d take it. “You probably should have.”
Bushes and branches rattled and shook as more police filed into the small clearing. One patted Abe down and cuffed him while another stepped forward to collect the knife in an evidence bag. The cops started tugging Abe down the path toward the resort.
“I want my phone call!” he yelled.
“You’ll get it,” Hudson assured him. “Right after we finish clearing out your warehouse and arresting your flunkies. All of them. A little birdy filled us in about the extent of your empire, you see. Things are going to be busy until then.”
Abe started swearing, and Mia’s smile grew to match Hudson’s. She stepped toward him, raising her face for a kiss, but stepped back again as customers from the resort trickled in, lighting the area with camera flashes as they tried to capture the excitement.
“Hudson, your face.” She pulled the balaclava down. If he was seen in uniform, his undercover career was over.
He pressed his lips against her forehead, then tucked her under his arm and pulled the ski mask up and off his head. He handed it to Mia with a wide smile, then extended his hand to her mother.
“Hello, ma’am. My name is Hudson McClure. I’m a traffic cop and I’d like your permission to court your daughter.”