24: Deadline (24 Series) (17 page)

There was the small matter of money, too. With a bag containing what she’d been able to pick up from Don’s apartment and the clothes on her back, Laurel had exactly twenty bucks and change to her name. But then she remembered what Trish from the Double Eight bar had told her, about the nice guy from out of town who was recruiting girls to work the kitchens in a casino across the state line. A job and a way out. Two days ago, desperation and panic had made that seem like the smart choice.

But the casino wasn’t where the guy had said it was. There was only more road. The elderly bus carrying Laurel and Trish and a handful of others just kept on rolling down the interstate, only stopping now and then to pick up more groups of other folks who seemed just as down on their luck as she was. Not just girls, either. Older people, men and women who could have been Laurel’s mom and dad, with nothing in common but the same kind of hard-knock stories. Everyone desperate for a job, struggling to find a way to make a buck when the factories they had worked in had relocated to the Far East or been shut down entirely, when the welfare wasn’t enough to pay for food or meds or heat. She heard one man mutter about a promised job as a construction laborer, and it was then that Laurel started to think that all of them had been lied to. There wasn’t any casino. There never had been.

But she wasn’t really, truly afraid until the sun went down, and they were still driving, and the men on the motorcycles with the black leather and hard eyes came riding into formation with the bus. One of them caught her looking as she peered wide-eyed out of the window, and he grinned back at her. He had a mouth full of chromed teeth and tattoos on his face that looked like claws.

The older guy, the construction worker, he was the first one to say anything about it. He demanded some kind of answer from the driver and the nice-guy recruiter from Indianapolis. So they pulled onto the shoulder in the middle of nowhere, then they walked him off the bus and beat the shit out of him. Right there in full view of everyone else, pushing him back and forth between the bikers, punching the man bloody until he finally collapsed in a ditch. Laurel couldn’t see if he was still breathing.

When the driver got back on, he didn’t need to ask if anyone else was going to complain. No one else dared. The recruiter told them that there was good, solid work for every person on the bus, but anyone who thought they could make trouble would go the same way as the older guy. They returned to the road and drove on in silence.

Trish started quietly weeping, at least until the recruiter stalked up the aisle and made her quit that with just a look. Dark-haired and elfin-faced, most people considered her prettier than dishwater-blond Laurel with her farm-girl build, and the other woman was convinced that they had inadvertently signed themselves up with sex traffickers
. But that kind of thing only happens in other countries,
Laurel thought.
Not here
.

The only thing she knew for sure was that with each mile they put behind them, she was getting farther away from any kind of safety.

Then the bus turned off the highway and rattled over a railroad cutting, and Laurel caught sight of a sign for a town called Deadline.

*   *   *

Chase’s breathing became slow and regular, and Jack knew his friend had drifted away into some badly needed sleep. He turned his attention back to the window, scanning the motel parking lot and the street beyond.

In one way, it was strange that the two men had just picked up where they left off. After the years that had passed between them, after the bad blood and the experiences they had both suffered through, an outsider might think it was hard to fathom. But the reverse was true; Jack and Chase had bonded under fire, and that kind of connection never really went away. Jack didn’t count a lot of people as friends, not in the real sense of the word. Chloe O’Brien. Bill Buchanan. Carl Benton. Chase Edmunds was on that very short list too, for what it was worth. Too many of them were gone, and Jack regretted that Chase had almost ended up the same way.

The fact was, it was
easy
to slip back into the old partnership. It was something they were good at, and in their shared time at CTU they had done good work, they had saved a lot of lives.

There was still the one unvoiced doubt, though, still that implicit question that Chase had not yet brought to the surface. Jack admitted that he had used Chloe to keep a weather eye on Chase after he faked his own death—but he had never interfered with the other man’s new life until now.

Why?
Jack sighed. He didn’t have an answer for that. There had been a number of times when he could have reached out to his former partner, but he had never risked it until today.

Because it wasn’t of use to you,
said Nina’s voice from the back of his mind.
And you’ve always been about making the most expedient choice, haven’t you, Jack?

He scowled and kneaded the grip of the shotgun, silencing the traitorous thought. Jack looked down at his wristwatch, at the steady sweep of the second hand, and he thought about the railroad a few miles distant. It would be hours until the cargo train passed through. Hours for him to sit here and watch the world go by.

Out there in the night somewhere, the FBI fugitive pursuit team and Suvarov’s SVR hunter-killers were searching for him, sifting whatever fractions of data and fragmentary leads he might have left behind. If they came, he would be ready, but Jack hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

What he wanted was to get through this without firing another shot. To just watch the clock and let the time run out. Jack reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and fished out a small fold of thick paper. He opened it, revealing a careworn photo of his daughter, his son-in-law and their little girl. The three of them smiled back up at him, frozen in that untroubled moment, free of all the darkness that dogged Jack’s shadowy life.

By tomorrow afternoon he would be in Los Angeles, and he would see Kim and tell her it all. He owed his daughter that. He couldn’t just vanish again, not after last time. Talking to Chase had brought all that back, giving him fresh understanding of exactly what he had left behind the last time his family had believed him missing and presumed dead.

I can’t put Kim through that a second time,
he told himself.
I won’t
. After a moment, he carefully refolded the photo and put it safely away.

Out on the street, movement caught his eye. A battered old Greyhound bus was slowing to a halt across from the motel.

*   *   *

For Laurel, Deadline was like a horrible flashback to the no-account place she had grown up in, and it loomed large on the other side of the windows as the bus rolled down the main street. It was everything she had spent her life trying to escape from, trying and failing time and again to break free of the pull of a dead-end town, always wanting something better but falling short of the means to get it.

She wondered if it was some kind of payback for all the bad things she had done in her life. Was it karma, in a way? Had a higher power decided that Laurel Tenn was never going to be free, and dragged her back to this?

She shook off the bleak thought as the bus grumbled to a halt in front of a gas station and the recruiter stood up, pointing at them with a stubby wooden baton that had seemingly come from out of nowhere.

“Okay,” he barked. The pleasant smile he had worn back in Indianapolis was long gone, and now he was shark-eyed and tired from the journey, his tone clipped and angry. “We’re almost there, so listen up. You wanna take a piss, use the restrooms here. You’re not gonna go all at once. Women first. Four at a time.” He beckoned them, and Laurel got to her feet with Trish and two others. “Nobody screw around.”

A cold breeze hit her legs as she stepped onto the gas station forecourt, the thick mix of diesel engine exhaust and gasoline stinging her nostrils. Laurel wiped a hand over her face and pulled her thin jacket tight over her shoulders, daring to look toward the bikers who had escorted them the last few miles. The one with the chrome teeth was laughing loudly at something another man was saying. The other guy, muscular, shaven-headed and hard-faced, had been waiting for them. He studied the bus passengers with an indifferent sneer. She got the sense that he was in charge.

Laurel caught part of their conversation and her blood ran cold. “You pick out one you like?” said the hard-faced man.

“I get a choice?” said Chrome Teeth. “Rydell’s getting generous all of a sudden?”

“Always rewards hard work, don’t he? Thought you could use some entertainment.”

The biker noticed Laurel looking in their direction and she turned away, moving quickly toward the women’s restroom around the side of the gas station proper.

“What is it?” said Trish, her voice still breathy from when she had been crying. “Oh god, what are we going to do?”

Laurel was afraid to look behind her for fear the hard-faced man was following them, and she pushed the other woman into the restroom as quickly as she could. “I think … I think you’re right,” she managed. “They don’t want no cooks and cleaners here. The others, I dunno, but us…” Laurel trailed off. Her thoughts reeled with horrific possibilities of all the kinds of abuse she could be put to. She stumbled to the sink and held on to it. Her stomach twisted and Laurel felt as if she was going to vomit. Panic built up inside her like a flood, and she could feel it seconds away from breaking free. The fear was like nothing she had ever experienced before. If it got loose, she knew it would consume her.

“I can’t go back out there!” Trish whimpered. “Laurel, please don’t make me.”

“Don’t start crying again,” she told her, but it was already too late. Tears streamed down the other woman’s face and Laurel knew that if she lost control, she would end up the same way, paralyzed by her terror. She grabbed Trish’s arm and shoved her into one of the vacant stalls, locking them both inside.

Others came and went, cycling through the restroom as the two young women pressed into the corner of the stall and waited. Just as Laurel had feared, there was no other way out of the cinder block toilets aside from a small skylight in the roof, and that was out of reach, the cracked and dirty glass up there threaded through with wire and nailed shut. The stall stank of pungent industrial cleaner and human waste.

“We have to call the cops,” whispered Trish, after long minutes. “I don’t got a phone. Did you see one outside?”

“What cops?” Laurel hissed back at her. “You think they’ll come running?” She shook her head. “Girl, we’ve gotta get out of this on our own. Get a car, or something.”

“I don’t know—” Trish was shocked silent as one of the other stall doors banged.

Outside, Laurel could hear the grumble of the bus engine starting up again. Was it possible they might be missed if they just stayed in here, stayed quiet? For the first time, she started to entertain the possibility of
escape
.

She dropped into a low crouch and peered through the gap under the raised door, ignoring the stronger smell closer to the floor. The other stalls were empty, all the other women who had chosen to use them gone and back on the bus. Laurel opened the latch, and Trish grabbed at her, trying to stop her from turning the handle.

“No, no,” she gasped. “No, don’t. We’ll stay here. Just stay.”

“We can’t,” Laurel shot back. “We’re like rats in a trap. Come on, this might be the only chance we get!”

She opened the stall and walked quietly toward the restroom door, straining to listen. Laurel could hear voices, and she recognized Chrome Teeth cursing angrily.

“How the hell should I know?” she heard him snarl. He was coming closer.

Behind her, Trish’s hands were flapping at the air in front of her like trapped birds, and Laurel fought down the urge to slap her, to try to knock some sense into the other woman. “He’s going to find us,” Trish bleated.

Suddenly the door was opening inward and Laurel caught a glimpse of the tattooed biker as he pushed his way into the room. “What the hell are you stupid—”

She didn’t give him the chance to finish. Without thinking about it, Laurel launched herself at the door and slammed her full weight into it with unexpected force. The door flicked back on its two-way hinges and cracked the biker in the face, sending him staggering across the asphalt.

Acting on pure animal fight-or-flight reflex, Laurel ran through the open door, aware of Trish hesitating a split second before she came racing out after her.

Laurel broke into a sprint, dashing away between the gas pumps, aiming herself down the main street in the opposite direction from which they had come. “Trish, go!” she called.

She heard a high-pitched shrieking yelp, and risked a glance over her shoulder in time to see Trish losing her balance and tumbling to the ground. Chrome Teeth had recovered swiftly and managed to catch her, grabbing the black ponytail that fell over Trish’s shoulders and using it to savagely yank her off her feet. Laurel felt sick inside, hearing the other woman cry out as she collapsed.

Callous, rough laughter sounded behind her. “Get that skank, you asshole!” shouted the biker. Laurel bolted across the mouth of an alleyway and ran for the first building she saw—a glass-fronted convenience store, washed out by the harsh glow of fluorescent lamps.

She stumbled through the door, almost colliding with a spinner rack of comic books, and found the shocked face of an overweight man behind the counter. “You have to help me,” she blurted out.

But the man stepped back, raising his hands. “I don’t want any trouble,” he told her, terrified by her appearance.

The door rattled open behind Laurel, and she turned to see the big, hard-faced man enter, his lips drawn back in a cold smile. He glanced between her and the guy behind the counter, and licked his lips. “You think he’s gonna give you a hand, little sister?” She saw his name—Brodur—written on his jacket. “
Naw
. What he’s gonna do is turn around right now, ain’t ya?”

The other man looked at the floor, and sheepishly turned away, retreating into a back office.