"The seat's vinyl," she pointed out, glancing down at the worn black surface. It was an old yellow cab that had clearly seen years of service. Its interior smelled like moldy pine, and she saw the reason— a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. "A little water won't hurt it. Anyway, I'm already in, which means the seat's already wet, which means it's too late. How about if I tip you five dollars on top of the fare?"
And there goes more of the last of this month's money.
But under the circumstances, being broke till payday was the least of her problems.
"Okay," he agreed, his eyes lighting up, then turned around and pulled out into traffic.
If only all my problems could be solved that easily.
Giving the address of the parking garage next to the DA's office— she'd ridden to the Justice Center with Bryan that morning, leaving her own car at work—Kate slumped in the seat. She was soaked and freezing, and the interior of the cab felt as cold as a refrigerator, so she tried to cope by folding her arms over her chest and squeezing her legs together and curling her wet toes in their shredded nylons in an effort to warm herself up a little.
Her eyes closed. Instantly, images of the carnage in the courtroom began replaying against the screen of her closed lids. Judge Moran, the deputies—they had all gone to work that morning just like she had, and now they were dead. It was unbelievable. Horrible.
It was almost me.
Her shivering intensified. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. The families of the dead would have been notified by now. Picturing police officers arriving at each victim's door made her stomach turn over. If she had been among the victims, they would have gone to tell Ben at school. ...
Stop that,
she told herself fiercely as her heart started to pound.
It didn't happen. And it won't. Whatever it takes.
Which brought her right back to the nightmare she didn't want to face.
What am I going to do?
Panic clawed at her insides. As the cab progressed in fitful starts through the gridlocked streets, her mind raced, frantically searching for a stratagem, a loophole, any possible means of escape from the new nightmare in which she was trapped. Gritting her teeth, clenching her fists, she finally faced the terrible truth.
Her past had caught up with her.
And now that it had, there was no stuffing the genie back in the bottle. She was just going to have to deal.
Her stomach knotted. She swallowed hard. Her eyes opened but remained blind to the mix of old and new, ornate and plain, mid-rise and high-rise stores and office buildings and condominiums shoe-horned into every downtown block. Likewise, she did not register the crawling, honking traffic, the changing traffic lights, the dripping, autumn-bright trees, the sheets of rain.
Instead she saw, through the mist of years, the crowd she'd hung with once upon a very bad time.
C h a p t e r 8
SHE HAD ALWAYS DISLIKED Mario Castellanos. As a teen, he had been a loudmouthed braggart and a bully. A thug. A lowlife. Bad news in a big way.
As far as she could tell, he hadn't changed a bit. Except now he was bigger. Badder. Way scarier. The street punk had morphed into a hardcore criminal.
Who held her life—and Ben's life—in the palm of his meaty hand.
There had to be some way out, but if there was, she couldn't see it. Right now the best she could come up with was that she was going to have to do exactly what he said, because there just wasn't any other choice.
Which sucked. In fact, recognizing the awful truth and facing it for what it was made her stomach feel like it was being turned inside out.
Claiming that she had shot Orange Jumpsuit was just the first step down a road that, in the worst way, she didn't want to take. Doing it terrified her. She wouldn't face any legal liability over the killing—if ever there was a case that screamed self-defense, shooting the man who had taken her hostage at gunpoint would have been it—but the lie shook her. Her life wasn't about lies anymore. That was all over, all in her past.
Or at least it had been.
"Long time no see," Mario had said, smiling, after he'd told her who he was immediately after murdering Orange Jumpsuit right in front of her eyes. Orange Jumpsuit was slumped dead at his feet. The shot that had killed him still echoed in the narrow corridor. The smell of cordite and blood and death and fear—hers—had hung heavy in the air.
Her eyes, wide with shock and disbelief, had met Mario's. She could see the swaggering teenage boy she had known thirteen years before in the steroid-pumped man standing in front of her. He would be thirty-one now. The bulk of him, the bald head and deep tan and facial hair, the automatic depersonalization of the orange jumpsuit, the sheer unexpectedness of the encounter—all had combined to keep her from recognizing him until he had called her by her old nickname: Kitty-cat. Then she had known him at once, with a certainty that was as painful and shocking as an unexpected blow to the gut.
I didn't get far enough away. I should have kept running, to Florida maybe, or California.
Looking at him once she knew, she realized that his eyes were the same, a warm spaniel brown that belied the casual cruelty that had disgusted her more than once. His thick nose still bore the crescent-shaped scar from where Roger Friedkin's grandmother's poodle had bitten him. The dog had disappeared not long afterward, a coincidence that Kate had not questioned until months later. Mario's mouth was still thin-lipped and tight, so that even when he smiled he looked mean.
He had been unpredictable and dangerous then. She had no doubt at all that he was even more unpredictable and dangerous now.
"I just saved your life," Mario had added when she didn't say anything. "You owe me."
Her pounding heart beat like a drum in her chest. Her mouth went so dry she had to swallow before she could speak. She tried to breathe normally, tried to stay cool. Tried to ignore the fact that a still-warm corpse was bleeding out at her feet, and one of the monsters that had haunted her nightmares for so long had crawled out from under her bed at last to terrify her by the hard, cold light of day.
"Thank you," she said.
He laughed, a low, genuinely amused sound that sent a chill racing down her spine. She'd known he was after more than her gratitude, just like she'd known that had it been in his best interests to do so, he would have let Orange Jumpsuit kill her without so much as turning a hair. Mario didn't give a flip about her. The only person she'd ever known Mario to give a flip about was Mario.
"Thank you's not gonna cut it, Kitty-cat." His tone was playful, and he reached out to tug on a strand of her hair, which had given up the ghost and fallen from, its neat bun to spill over her shoulders sometime back.
"I figured." Putting up her chin, she jerked her head back just enough so that her hair was pulled from his grasp. He let it go. She knew how he worked, knew how all thugs like him worked, because she'd grown up in a world that was chock-f of them. The first rule of survival was don't ever let them see fear. That was also the second, third, and fourth rule. "So, what do you want?"
"Out of jail. And I want you to get me out."
He squatted down and began wiping the gun on the hem of Orange Jumpsuit's pants. The dead man's face was gray now. His eyes were still open but glazed over. Blood still trickled sluggishly from his mouth, and the blossoming stain on his chest was still spreading. He sat in an expanding scarlet puddle. Kate looked because she couldn't help it, then deliberately averted her gaze to Mario. He was still wiping down the gun. The fact that he didn't feel the need to hold her at gunpoint, didn't even feel the need to keep his bulk between her and the door, told her that he didn't fear she would make a run for it.
And he was right. Their shared past held her in place like invisible, unbreakable strands of spider silk.
"I can't do that." Her tone was abrupt. No need to pretend they were friends. They had never been.
"Don't give me that."
Apparently satisfied with his cleaning efforts, he let the murder weapon slide to the floor beside Orange Jumpsuit's leg without touching it again. Then he picked up Orange Jumpsuit's dropped gun in its place. He stood, his size menacing in such tight quarters. He held the gun negligently, not pointing it at her, but
still...
She had always been ninety-nine percent certain that it had been Mario who had pulled the trigger.
Kate had to fight the instinctive urge to step back a pace. That was Kate's natural reaction to a thug with a gun, anyway. But Kat—and she had once been Kat—had never backed down from anybody in her life. And it was Kat, who she discovered in that instant was still alive and well and functioning inside her body all these years later, who kept her standing tall, standing her ground.
"So you're a big-time
prosecutor
now. Hey, girl, I'm proud of you!" Mario smiled at her and gave her shoulder a gentle, "good going, good buddy" kind of punch. When that didn't elicit anything more from her than a narrowing of her eyes, he dropped the good-buddy act and continued in a harder tone: "That's good for you, and I'm thinking it's even better for me." "Are you? How so?"
"I'm looking at some hard time here, twenty-to-life, for nothing.
Nothing.
Violating probation. Possession of a firearm. Persistent felon." He grimaced. "Bullshit charges, but looks like they're going to stick. Assholes wouldn't even let me post bail. For nothing, I'm stuck in jail, right, probably till I'm so old my dick shrivels up. When these guys started hatching their little get-out-of-jail-free plan, I told 'em, hell, yeah, count me in. But they were idiots. They blew it. Nobody was supposed to get killed. Guy on the outside was supposed to drive up under the window with a U-Haul. The plan was to blast out a window, leap down onto the truck, get inside, and haul ass. Once Soto shot that judge, far as I was concerned it was all over. I knew they'd hunt us all down to the ends of the earth. I aborted the mission. I was unclipping the keys from that deputy's belt so I could get the hell out of this hallway when Rodriguez here came back in with you." He smiled. "I took one look at his little prosecutor friend, and I couldn't believe my ..."
Brriing.
The phone's shrill summons had sliced the tense atmosphere like a knife. Kate had jumped, looking at the phone with horror. It was almost certainly the cop in the courtroom outside. Her lifeline, but also, now, in a new and terrible way, her enemy.
"Bottom line is, I came up with a better plan," he continued, ignoring the ringing phone. "Want to know what it is?"
"What?" It was all she could do to get the word out. She already knew, she already knew. ...
"You. My old friend Kitty-cat. 'Member that security-guard dude we took down that night in Baltimore?"
Oh, yeah. His name was David Brady.
Brriing...
As the phone rang again, Kate practically jumped out of her skin. Her nerves were twitching, her heart thumping, her blood pumping so fast that it was all she could do to stand still. This could not be happening....
Do not show fear.
"I had nothing to do with that."
He smirked. "Baby, you were there just like the rest of us. You know the law better than I do. You know that's all it takes. Somebody lets the cat out of the bag, we're looking at Murder One."
He's right. Oh, God, he's right.
Brriing...
"I was a kid! Fifteen. And I didn't even go inside the store."
"Doesn't make you any less guilty."
Youth is a mitigating circumstance.
But as she'd learned later, David Brady had been an off-duty cop. Justice tended to come down hard on people who killed cops.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to tell on you." Mario must have read the fear in her face, because he smirked at her. " 'Less you don't do what I tell you, that is." His gaze shifted downward. "Pick up that gun."
He nodded to the gun he'd used to kill Orange Jumpsuit.
When Kate hesitated, staring down at it without moving while her mind raced a mile a minute, he looked at her again and added in a sharper tone,
"Do it."
At the moment, he held all the cards.
Brriing ...
She did what he said numbly, without another question or protest, not even bothering to make a show of standing up to him. It was useless, anyway. He knew how completely at his mercy she was. And so did she.
As she straightened, she saw that the gun in Mario's hand— Orange Jumpsuit's gun—was now pointed straight at her. Her heart skipped a beat. For a moment she didn't understand. Then she did. She was now holding a loaded weapon. Once upon a time, under similar circumstances, Kat might have thought fast enough and been ruthless enough to have shot him with that gun.
Problem solved.
The intervening years had rendered Kate too civilized.
She took a deep breath. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Her stomach twisted itself into a pretzel. Her knees turned to Jell-O.
"You can't tell on me without telling on yourself," she said.
Their eyes met. He smiled at her. It was a small, self-satisfied smile.
"But see, that's the beauty of it. Way I see it is, of the two of us I got a whole lot less to lose."
Brriing.
Oh, God.
"Okay, baby, listen up. Here's how this thing is gonna go down."
She sucked in air. Her insides shook. Her grip tightened on the gun.
She listened.
And when she was done listening, she picked up the phone.
C h a p t e r 9
BEN'S SCHOOL, Greathouse Elementary, was a large, boxy, two-story brick rectangle with neat rows of aluminum-clad windows looking out over a grassy playground and sports field in back and a tree-lined circular driveway in front. The building was old and institutional-looking. The trees were redbuds, pretty when they bloomed in the spring, according to some pictures Kate had seen, but shapeless and gray now under the steady onslaught of the rain. The driveway curved to the edge of an overhang that sheltered the front steps and the main entrance. Matching signs on either side of the covered part of the concrete walk that led to the stairs warned
No Parking, Fire Lane.