Chapter 16
Jake answered the phone on the second ring, muting the television and grabbing a piece of paper.
“What’ve you got?” he said by way of greeting.
Deena watched him scribble on a paper, furiously writing down the information before disconnecting the call.
“Was that him?”
“It was. I need to meet him in thirty minutes.”
“You mean we need to meet him in an hour.”
“I would feel better if you stayed here.”
“No. We’re in this together, remember?”
“It could be dangerous.”
“Staying here could be dangerous too.”
Jake sighed.
“Fine. But I need you to stay in the car.”
“I’m not making any promises.”
He scowled at her, but she didn’t let him get under her skin. She was done with the situation, and she had run out of patience. She wasn’t going to cower and hide. Deena wasn’t that kind of woman.
She helped Jake gather their things, already used to traveling with their backpacks packed, just in case they couldn’t come back. Deena was getting better at staying on her toes, but she was nowhere near as cool about the entire process as Jake was. Watching him, she could tell that he’d lived out of a backpack on more than one occasion, and she wondered about all the things that she didn’t know about him.
Was he an avid hiker? Or did he prefer the city? How brutal was the Special Forces training, and was that how he’d learned to survive the hell they were living now? She had so many questions, but they were the types of questions you asked a lover, not a man you only knew for a few days.
Movement on the TV caught her attention, and she took the remote from him, unmuting it.
“Looks like they found your car,” she said.
“And it looks like half of Dallas PD is chasing it.”
“That’s good for us, isn’t it? He’s on I-67 heading south. By the time they catch him and realize that it’s not you, they’re going to have a long drive back to Dallas.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t want to be here to watch the end of this, anyway. It doesn’t look like my car is going to make it out in one piece.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the Corvette bumped the center divider, bouncing off and sliding for a few hair-raising moments before the thief got it under control again and pressed the accelerator even more.
“This is not going to end well,” Deena said.
“Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to watch my car get mangled on live television.”
“Where are we meeting him?” Deena asked as they got into the car.
“The Bachman Water Treatment Plant.”
“The one over by the airport?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t they closed today?”
“They are, and there’s nothing else down Shorecrest Drive, so that’s kind of the point. It’s a nice, quiet place to meet where no one is going to see us. With my face all over the news, it’s really the only place we can go that’s nearby.”
“How well do you know this guy?”
“Frank? Well enough. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
“I’m fine.”
Jake looked at her when they stopped at a light on Inwood. He smiled, reaching out and grabbing her hand. He brought her knuckles to his lips and kissed her hand.
“You are the bravest, toughest woman I’ve ever met. It’s going to be alright. Frank’s going to give us what he has from Oakfield’s office, and we’re going to take it straight to my lawyer’s house. After that, we’ll hide out for a little while until they catch all the players, and then you can go home and go back to your old life.”
“You make it sound so easy. We’ve been running for what seems like forever, and now your friend has some information that’s going to blow the whole mess wide open. Why not just go to the police to begin with?”
“Because the police have rules they have to follow. By the time they have a signed warrant, everything would already be destroyed. This way, we downloaded all of his personal files onto a flash drive, and we give it to the police.”
“What if something happens to it?”
Jake smiled, shaking his head.
“You don’t have to worry about that with Frank. He always has a second flash drive.”
“He doesn’t trust you?”
“It’s not that. He wants to make sure if someone he helped ends up dead, he has proof. He doesn’t want anyone getting away with murder, and he really doesn’t want the police to come back at him and say that he’s the one who killed his client. He’s protecting everyone.”
“It’s weird that he has to think about things like that. I guess you don’t realize how messed up the world can be until you’re in the thick of it.”
He squeezed her hand again, and she returned the gesture.
“I know I offered before and you said you didn’t want to. But we’re going to be right next to the airport. After we meet him, if you want me to drop you off and send you out of state for a couple weeks until this blows over, I can do that.”
“I can’t leave my life for weeks. I have bills to pay and a job.”
“Can’t you take a vacation?”
“If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I know you don’t get it because you’ve always been rich, but there’s no self-care package for the little guy. Some people get vacations and sick leave, and they have company-provided healthcare and all that. But down here, where a lot of us live, you work until you get ahead, and then you work some more. If I’m sick, I miss work, and that means I miss the opportunity to make money. There is no sick leave when you rent your own chair, and you only make money if you have clients.”
“If you owned the salon, would you run it like that?”
“In a perfect world? No. I would run it like a regular business, and there wouldn’t be chair rentals. And if someone was sick or their baby was sick, they would stay home, and someone else would run their chair. They would have sick time and vacation, and they would have medical insurance like a real job. But you have to fill those chairs to get work like that, and ain’t no one getting their hair done enough for all that in Deep Ellum.”
“But they would in Highland Park Village.”
“They’d be lined up and on a damn waiting list there.”
Jake took the road around the airport, then turned left onto Shorecrest Drive. He drove thirty miles per hour down the narrow road, his eyes watching everything around him, always ready to implement a Plan B if something went wrong.
“There’s Frank’s car,” Jake said, pointing to a little blue sportscar.
“That’s a fancy car Frank’s got there.”
“You don’t think he puts his life on the line out of the goodness of his heart now, do you?” Jake laughed.
“I guess not.”
“Frank makes the big bucks, and he likes to flaunt it. But he’s a good guy. I know you’re not going to listen, but I’m going to ask one more time.”
“I’m not staying in the car.”
He pulled up a short distance away and parked the car in the first pull-thru spot, facing the blue sportscar at an angle. The sun glinted off the windshield, making it impossible to see into Frank’s car, and she knew by the way the sun was glaring into the Audi that Frank couldn’t see into their car either. Would he be intimidated when he saw a second person that he wasn’t expecting? Or did he know about her and would he easily put two and two together without missing a beat?
Frank’s driver’s door was open, but he was still sitting in the car, one all-white tennis shoe barely visible on the ground from so many yards away.
“Why didn’t you park closer to him?”
“We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. If people drive by or they’re walking on the pathway around the lake and see us, two cars side by side with the drivers still inside looks like a drug deal or something else suspicious. It only takes a few seconds for someone to call 911 and report us.
But they look up and see two cars parked in actual spaces, and at a seemingly random distance away, and they think we’re just a couple of unlucky workers stuck here on a Sunday. It looks like nothing more than coworkers chatting before they head home for the day, and we don’t raise any alarm bells. It’s the perfect cover.”
“Do you ever shut it off?” she asked.
“No. But it’s second nature, and I hardly notice that I’m doing it anymore. I don’t think Frank thinks about it either. It’s just something that you always do when you’re used to it.”
He opened his door but left the engine running, and Deena followed suit. When he got out and started walking unhurriedly toward the other car, Deena got out too.
The lake was on their left, with a line of strategically planted trees that hid the water treatment plant from the pathway that encircled the entire length. Deena caught glimpses of the lake through the trees, but it was hard to see with Jake between her and the foliage. She knew what he was doing. The trees weren’t very dense, but they were the only hiding place in the parking lot. He was putting himself in between Deena and possible harm. She wondered if he even realized he was doing it.
Frank was still in the car, fiddling with the glove box or something on the front seat. It was hard to tell with the sun glinting off the windshield. They were still over a dozen yards away, but Frank must have seen them because a hand appeared on the side of the door, pushing it the rest of the way open. The top of a baseball cap appeared, and then Frank stepped out of the car, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, completely relaxed.
Deena froze.
“Frank’s a woman?” she whispered to Jake, who had also stopped.
“That’s not Frank.”
Deena was still watching the woman, and something in her mind clicked. She’d seen this woman before, but she couldn’t place her. She didn’t recognize her face, and she definitely hadn’t met her. But still, something was familiar and-
All at once, it hit Deena, and she realized that the woman who wasn’t Frank was lifting her arm. Deena launched herself at Jake, taking him down with her as a shot rang out and a plume of dust erupted from the ground where he’d just been standing.
“Killer!” she screamed as she fell toward the ground.
Jake grabbed her mid-dive, using their momentum to roll them the rest of the way behind a tree, then stood in one smooth motion, pulling her onto her feet.
“Head for the lake!” he yelled, yanking her forward as he took off.
Another shot rang out, and a tree nearby exploded in a hail of dry, dusty bark. Deena covered her face, but she kept running, almost groaning when she saw the lake ahead. There was a grassy area, then a walkway and another grassy area before they would reach the rocks lining the shore to prevent erosion before it dropped straight into the water.
They were going to be exposed for several seconds before they could reach the water. Hopefully, they had enough of a lead, and the killer wouldn’t be able to get off a good shot unless she stopped and aimed. Deena wasn’t stopping, and even the fleeting thought that there might be alligators in the lake didn’t stop her. The woman chasing them had tried to kill Deena once before, and Deena would rather take her chances with the gators.
They were almost to the walkway when tires squealed, and a car’s engine hummed as the driver tramped down on the accelerator. Deena’s heart sank, but she kept her eyes on the lake and kept running. She was almost there, and she wasn’t going to slow down and let that crazy bitch run her over with a car. She was going to survive this and the short swim across the lake to the other side. Failure wasn’t an option.
Failure was death.