“So what’s the plan?” Holly wasn’t going to shut up—Reed had known Holly long enough that he hadn’t had any real expectation that the kid would, although hope always sprang eternal—and as for standing there, he was twitching and grimacing and hopping from foot to foot with apprehension. Reed ignored him to concentrate on Caroline.
“What are you doing?” Caroline’s voice was sharp. But she didn’t resist as he quickly and prudently secured her wrists behind her back with the zip tie he’d extracted from his pocket. He might feel a little bad about it, but he couldn’t afford to take any more chances. Until he had reason to change his mind, she was his hostage.
“Being careful,” he replied, and let her go. She turned sharply toward him, glaring at him through the darkness.
“This isn’t helping,” she snapped. “Take it from me, you’re out of time. Do you
want
to get yourself killed?” She nodded at Holly. “Do you want to get
him
killed?”
“Yeah, Dick, what about me?” Holly almost wailed.
“Not especially,” Reed answered Caroline. She didn’t have to tell him he was out of time. He could almost hear the proverbial clock ticking. But there were things he had to do, and they had to be done right if he and Holly were to have even a sliver of a chance of getting out of there alive. Grimly he focused on Caroline. “Sit. Right there on the floor.”
Caroline looked at him with disbelief.
“What?”
“Do it,” he ordered her. “I don’t have time to argue about it. Either sit or—” He left the rest of that blank, gave her a threatening look instead, and had his answer in her indignant huff as she folded herself toward the floor.
“Good girl,” he said—he kept having trouble remembering she was no longer seventeen—and she responded by snapping, “This is the stupidest thing you could do.”
“She’s got the keys to the cuffs on her.” Sliding one foot in front of the other like he didn’t trust the floor beneath them, Holly came scooting toward him. Keeping a cautious eye on Caroline, who was clearly growing less afraid of him by the second, Reed moved to meet him. If she did something like, say, jump up and take off running, he didn’t like to think what he was going to have to do. “You want to get ’em from her and get these things off me. And the blindfold. Like,
now
.”
“I’ve got the key.” Reed pulled the blindfold off Holly’s head as he stepped behind him to free him from the handcuffs. God, he was jacked up on adrenaline. It was as if he could feel his nerve endings jumping under his skin. Every muscle in his body was taut. His blood raced through his veins. He was sweating, and he, born and bred in the sultry Louisiana swamps, almost never broke a sweat. Keeping his cool, keeping his focus, was a necessity, so he gritted his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and channeled his inner Zen master. Even as he inserted the damned tiny key into the damned tiny lock, more by feel than by sight, he did what he could to keep his body’s instinctive response to the deadly peril it was in under control. Silently counting to ten, he rolled his neck to loosen it and shrugged his shoulders up and down to slow his breathing. Dixon and company had something in the works for him, he knew. They wouldn’t have caved so easily otherwise. How much time did he have before whatever they had planned for him started going down? The closest he could come to an answer had to be, not much.
“He’s better off with the handcuffs on,” Caroline informed him. “When it hits the fan, he’s less likely to get shot.”
“We’re gonna be out of here before then, right?” Holly tried to look over his shoulder at him as Reed succeeded in unlocking the cuffs. “Dick?”
“If we’re lucky,” Reed replied, then as Holly said, “Shit,” Reed added, “Edie tell you who took Ant?”
“She thought it was somebody from child welfare.” Holly shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
The handcuffs fell away, and Reed stuffed them into his pants pocket along with the key. Later, they might come in handy. “Me neither.”
Holly grabbed his arm so hard that Reed could feel each individual finger digging into his flesh through his jacket. “We got to get him back safe. You hear?”
“We will.”
“You don’t think they’ve done anything to him already?” Reed could hear the nervous strain in Holly’s voice.
“As long as they don’t have us, they won’t touch a hair on his head. He’s their leverage,” he replied.
“Oh my God, you’re not buying into what he’s been saying about police officers wanting to hurt his thirteen-year-old brother!” Caroline exclaimed. “Tell me
that’s
not what this is all about.”
“You don’t know shit about shit, Ms. Cop,” Holly said.
Reed pushed out air through his teeth. “Shut up, Holly. Drop it, Caroline. Right now we’ve got other fish to fry.”
“Reed, listen: whatever your plan is, it’s not going to work. You need to give yourself up to me.” Caroline’s tone was earnest.
She sat with her slender bare legs folded in front of her on the marble floor, and her upturned face looked pale in the moonlight. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the classic oval shape of it was apparent. It was a pretty, delicate face, slimmer of cheek and higher of cheekbone than it had been at seventeen. Her eyes were maybe a shade less innocent, but just as wide and luminous, and her mouth was just as lushly tempting. God, he’d wanted her that summer ten years ago! In a way, it was both his good luck and his bad luck that the negotiator they’d called in tonight had been Caroline. He hadn’t foreseen it, and while it made things dicey in that he didn’t want to hurt her and she wasn’t as afraid of him as she should be, on the other hand if he’d been looking for the ideal bargaining chip, he couldn’t have found one more perfect.
She continued, “If you don’t you’re going to be killed. Him, too, probably. Surrendering to me, right now, is your only chance.”
“You ain’t gonna let her snow you with that, are you? We surrender and we’re dead,” Holly said at almost the same time as Reed told her, “Give it up, Caroline. Me surrendering isn’t going to happen.”
“You can’t get away,” she said urgently. “The house is surrounded. There are snipers. SWAT. The works.”
“She’s telling the truth about that.” Holly rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Oh, Jesus, what are we gonna do?”
Reed heard the lurking panic in Holly’s voice, but besides telling him, “I got this under control,” there wasn’t much he could do about it. He had to get a move on: at this point, every second counted. Every instinct he possessed told him that whatever was going to go down was going to go down soon. Even as Caroline said, “You don’t have much time,” Reed got on with implementing the plan he’d come up with when he’d heard that Holly had been taken. It had been modified on the fly a number of times already. Once he’d realized that Ant’s life was in all likelihood on the line, too, it had also, with the addition of Caroline, gotten way more complicated than he liked. Still, it was roughly workable. He hoped. Grabbing the backpack he’d brought down from the library with him, the one that he’d left waiting by the door, he pulled two windbreakers from it. They were standard black NOPD issue with SWAT emblazoned in big white letters across the front and back.
“Lose the hoodie. Put that on.” He tossed one to Holly. While the kid looked at it incredulously then made a face before he did as he was told, Reed stripped off his own tux jacket and bow tie. Dropping them into the big plastic garbage can he’d carried in earlier from the garage, he checked to make sure his 9mm was still secure but readily available in its shoulder holster, and shrugged into the second jacket himself.
“We gonna pretend to be SWAT? What’re we gonna do, try to blend into the crowd when they burst in to kill us?” Holly practically reeked of dismay even as Reed tossed him a black SWAT baseball cap with a terse, “That, too. Tuck your hair up under it.”
Caroline, watching, said, “Oh, wow,” in a less-than-impressed tone that could have been an echo of Holly’s.
“That’s your
plan
?” Holly continued as Reed took his hoodie from him and dropped it into the garbage can. “Ah, hell, this ain’t good.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“Y
OU
’
LL GET KILLED,
” Caroline warned. “Both of you.
Nobody’s
going to fall for that. Oh my God, really, truly, this is not going to work. You have to believe me: surrendering is your only chance.”
“They gonna drill us soon as they see us,” Holly moaned as he slapped the cap on his head and started tucking his hair up under it as instructed. He was pale with fright. “No way are they gonna think we’re SWAT.”
“Reed, are you hearing me?” Caroline’s voice rose perilously. “He’s right: no way is anyone going to fall for this. If you surrender to me right now, I can walk you out of here. Nobody will harm you if you’re with me. Either of you. I give you my word.
Please
.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Just because they were giving voice to some of his own doubts didn’t keep Reed from being fed up. “
You
need to trust me,” he told Holly as he pointed a monitory finger at him. “Are you out of jail? Who did that?” Then he pointed at Caroline. “And
you
don’t know a damned thing about it. So give me a break here, and lay off the surrender crap. Like I said, it’s not going to happen.”
He was busy taking one last size-it-up look at the garbage can, which was sturdy black plastic complete with lid, about forty-gallon size, and apparently new. Having come in through the garage, he’d noticed it in passing, thinking at the time that he might be able to use it to simulate the most terrifyingly big bomb ever, then accepted the fact that locating and isolating the people he needed to corral without attracting any undue attention might be a little difficult with a giant garbage can in tow. But then, when Holly had told him about Ant and he had realized that his plan needed to be adjusted to accommodate this new wrinkle, he’d remembered it. It was, he judged, perfect for the new use he had in mind for it. So he’d fetched it in the little bit of time he’d had after breaking off communications with Caroline, dumping out the miscellaneous sports equipment that had been stored within and lugging it into the hall.
“As long as you didn’t do something terrible to the hostages, we can even still—” Caroline was saying as he confirmed the location of the lid with a glance and then took the two strides that brought him to her side. She broke off, looking up at him wide-eyed as he bent over her to scoop her up in his arms. He got the job done quickly but a little awkwardly—she was heavier than she looked, and he wanted to take care not to put too much pressure on her bound hands. She didn’t struggle, but as he lifted her off her feet she sucked in air and her voice sharpened to a squeak: “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m sorry about this, cher,” he told her as he dumped her, feet first and sputtering, into the garbage can. The top of the can reached a little above her waist. There was, he saw with relief, plenty—well, enough anyway—of room for her to fit all the way inside if she hunkered down. He was pleased to discover that he had calculated correctly. Despite the fact that speed was increasingly of the essence, the sudden impulse to try to keep her as safe as he could made him lean over and zip her body vest back up.
Never could tell when or where bullets might start to fly.
“Have you lost your mind?” she demanded as she watched his hands at work on her zipper. Why she was wearing a slinky silk top low-cut enough to show some very nice cleavage, along with a snug little skirt that ended a pretty fair distance north of her knees, was something that he would have liked to ask about, but he didn’t have the time. Just like he didn’t have time to think about, much less enjoy, the electric zing that he experienced as his knuckles brushed up the front of that slinky top. “This is a trash can. You just put me in a trash can. You have to be insane. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the answer. You are totally, certifiably insane.”
“Uh, Dick, I’m not seeing where you’re going with this,” Holly said uneasily while Reed, having finished with the zipper, tucked the reinforced front of her vest back in place and chucked Caroline under her chin by way of a reply.
She scowled at him.
“Look, Holly, just because he’s gone nuts doesn’t mean you can’t save yourself.” Caroline turned those big eyes of hers on Holly, who was breathing hard enough now that if Reed had been in possession of a brown paper bag, he would have passed it to him. “Even if he won’t, you can surrender to me.”
“Leave Holly alone, Caroline.” Reaching into the backpack again, Reed grabbed the roll of duct tape he’d stashed away in there, said to her, “I need you to scrunch on down inside there,” and tore off a strip.
“What?” She stared at him like he’d just grown a second head. “
No
. What is the point of—”
He couldn’t have her yelling her head off or he and Holly would be screwed, and he didn’t trust her enough just to order her to be silent and assume she’d obey. Sliding one hand behind her head, he did what he had to do and plastered the strip over her mouth.
“Mmm.” Jerking away from his hold, she made an inarticulate sound while her eyes blazed at him.
“Scrunch down,” he told her. She shook her head violently at him.
“Scrunch down,”
he barked. It was the harshest tone he had used to her yet, but he was getting a bad feeling here. His skin crawled, and that meant, if he used past experience as a guide and coupled that with what he knew of the present situation, something he wasn’t going to like was heading his way.
He could almost feel that red dot on his forehead.
She shook her head at him again. The sudden jut of her jaw—he remembered that defiant jut of her jaw and what it signified the instant he saw it directed at him—told him that if he wanted her crouched inside that garbage can, he was going to have to put her there.
There was no way he was going to get physical with Caroline. But his other choices for getting her to do what he needed her to do were limited. In fact, they were
almost
nonexistent.