20 Takedown Twenty (30 page)

With mounting horror, Kate realized what he intended to do. He was going to jump. And this time, he didn’t have a parachute.

“Don’t!” she yelled, launching herself at him, hoping to take him down with a flying tackle before he could make a suicidal mistake. Too late. She missed him by inches, and hit the concrete hard just as Nick leapt off the building toward the hovering chopper. Her heart stopped for a couple beats while he was in midair, and resumed beating when he latched on to the helicopter’s landing skid. He held on with one hand, blew her a kiss, and the chopper veered off toward the Las Vegas Strip.

Within seconds of his escape, Kate was on the radio, trying to get a police chopper into the air and patrol cars on the ground to chase Nick’s helicopter. Kate knew it was a waste of time and effort, but she went through the motions anyway.

There were half a dozen identical Las Vegas Aerial Tours choppers in the airspace above the Strip, and even though only one of them had a man hanging from a landing skid, by the time she got the word out Nick’s helicopter had disappeared. It didn’t help that in all the excitement, she’d failed to note the chopper’s tail number and had nothing to give to air traffic controllers so they could track its transponder. Not that it would have mattered. The helicopter wasn’t actually part of the tour company’s fleet. It had just been painted to appear as if it was.

Kate sped straight from the hospital back to the room she’d booked at Circus Circus, the least expensive hotel on the Strip. She approached her door quietly, one hand on her holstered gun. She slipped her key card into the lock and slowly eased open the door, hoping Nick Fox had been arrogant enough to pull the same stunt twice, hoping to catch him in the act.

No such luck. The room was empty and smelled like a freshly chlorinated swimming pool. She sat down on the edge of the bed and sighed. Not her best day. And she knew she’d catch a lot of crap for letting Nick get away instead of finding an excuse to shoot him. She certainly had plenty of them, the latest one being the picture of “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” that she’d managed to snatch off the wall before anyone noticed it.

Kate stared glumly at her reflection in the mirror and started to take off her Kevlar vest. And that’s when she noticed it. She didn’t believe it at first, and had to look over her shoulder to confirm it, but there it was: a Toblerone bar on her pillow.