For the Love of Pete (2 page)

He glanced at her once assessingly and said, “Hold on.”

The force of his acceleration slammed her against the Beemer’s lush leather seat. Then they were flying, the car eerily quiet as they sped through Evanston.

“Do you think he’s a pedophile?” She clutched at the car armrest anxiously.

“No.”

The yellow Hummer had turned at the corner onto a medium-sized boulevard lined with small businesses and shops. Zoey was afraid they would’ve already lost him by now, but two stoplights ahead, the Hummer idled at a red light.

She leaned forward. “There he is. Up ahead at the stoplight.”

“I see him.” The words were quiet, but they had an edge.

Well, too bad. “Can’t you go any faster?”

He sped past a forest green minivan.

“The light changed. He’s moving again.” Zoey bit her lip, trying to still the panic in her chest. “We can’t lose him. We just can’t. You need to go faster.”

Lips glanced at her. He didn’t say anything, but Zoey heard a kind of scraping sound, like he was grinding his teeth. She rolled her eyes. Men had such delicate egos. She hauled her cell out of her jacket pocket and began punching numbers.

“What’re you doing?” he asked. The Beemer swerved around a Volkswagen Beetle in the left lane, briefly jumping the concrete divider before thumping down again in front of the Beetle.

Zoey righted herself from where she’d slid against the passenger door. “Calling 911.”

He grunted, and she wasn’t sure whether that was an approving sound or not. Not that it mattered.

There was a click in her ear and a bored voice said, “911. What is the nature of your emergency?”

The Hummer had turned right at the light onto Dempster. Lips steered the Beemer into the turn going maybe forty mph. The Beemer’s tires screeched but didn’t skid. Points to BMW engineering.

“A baby’s been kidnapped,” Zoey said to the 911 operator. “We’re chasing the kidnapper.”

The operator’s voice perked up. “Where are you now?”

“On Dempster, near uh . . .” She craned her neck just as Lips swerved again, nearly sending her nose into the passenger-side window. “Shit.”

“I beg your pardon,” the operator said, sounding offended.

“Not you. I know we’ve passed Skokie Boulevard—”

“We’re on Dempster and Le Claire,” Lips said tightly.

Zoey repeated the information.

“Tell 911 that it’s a yellow Hummer,” Lips said as he accelerated around a postal truck, imperiling the paint on the Beemer’s side. “The license plate’s obscured by mud, but there’s a dent in the back left panel over the wheel.”

The Hummer suddenly swerved into the right lane and took a ramp onto the Edens Expressway.

Zoey gasped in the middle of her recitation. “He’s gotten onto the Edens going north.”

The Beemer barreled up the ramp and abruptly slowed. In either direction on the freeway, as far as the eye could see, was a four-lane-wide trail of cars.

“Shit,” Zoey muttered.

“I beg your pardon,” the operator said again. Must get sworn at a lot in her job.

“Not you,” Zoey replied and then said to no one in particular, “This is why I never take the Edens after three. They’ve been doing road construction for, like, ten years here.”

“I’ll be sure and tell the guy that when we catch up with him,” Lips ground out.

If
they caught up with him, Zoey thought and bit her bottom lip. The Hummer was already several cars ahead and moving, whereas their part of the traffic jam was stopped dead. There was a good possibility that they’d lose the Hummer in the traffic. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the massive lump of yellow steel. She wasn’t letting it out of her sight. That truck contained a kidnapper with a gun and a very important little piece of humanity. ’Cause the kidnapper hadn’t taken just any baby.

He’d taken Pete.

Chapter Two

Thursday, 4:48 p.m.

F
BI Special Agent Dante Torelli kept his eyes fixed on the UNSUB in the yellow Hummer, but he was aware all the time of the woman sitting beside him. She strained forward against her seat belt as she talked on her cell, as if she could make the cars ahead move by sheer force of will. And maybe she could. So far she’d appropriated his car, invited herself along on a high-speed chase, and seemed quite comfortable telling him how to do his job.

Dante eased up on the clutch and tapped the accelerator, rolling his nearly new BMW 650i convertible forward a few feet before braking again. He’d been briefed when she moved into the apartment building a couple weeks before, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember her name now. She lived on the second floor, he knew. His place was on the third, next to the couple he was helping guard.

Except it really wasn’t his place at all. It was an apartment shared by four FBI agents in twelve-hour shifts of two. He was undercover as a regular city guy, working nine to five during the day and coming home at night to a midpriced apartment. His real job was working the night shift, keeping an eye on a guy named Ricky Spinoza, his girlfriend, Nikki Hernandez, and their toddler daughter. Ricky just happened to be the key witness in a federal trial. Dante and his partner, Jill Petrov, played the part of a boring, happily married yuppie couple. The day shift were a couple of guys young enough to pass as computer geeks working out of their apartment.

Ahead, the Hummer was slowly widening the gap between them. Dante couldn’t tell if the driver had noticed yet that he was being tailed. Not that it mattered—neither of them could go any faster in this mess.

His passenger was one of those women who didn’t bother with makeup and was in-your-face about not dressing to please a man. Right now she was wearing a navy pea coat, orange mittens, and an orange and purple knitted hat with ear flaps that looked like it was made by color-blind reindeer herders. Red-blond braids snaked out from under the flaps. And she had on a long pink fuzzy scarf that clashed with everything else. Oh, and boots. But not the sexy kind with a heel. Nope. This chick was wearing big ugly boots like something a bear hunter would wear. Except he’d bet his Cartier watch that she’d be more likely to take out the hunter than the bear if she had a gun in her hand.

Dante glanced in the rearview mirror, looking for any way to get around this traffic logjam. The dirty gray Toyota behind him was right on his tail. Even if there was an opening on the side, there was no way he could back up enough to clear the bumper of the SUV in front.

“Shit,” he muttered.

The woman shot him a reproving look and went back to talking to 911 on her cell. Like that was going to help. The Chicago PD was notoriously slow to respond. The Hummer would probably be in Wisconsin by the time the local cops showed.

Actually, beneath the god-awful reindeer-herder hat, she had kind of pretty eyes. A clear, sharp blue. Her face was round, not because she was fat, but because that was the way it was shaped, all soft curves. Cheeks pink from the cold, a little nose, and full, sweetheart lips. Her body was probably round, too, somewhere beneath the pink scarf and shapeless coat. When he’d covered her body with his he’d thought he’d smelled something in her hair. Not flowers or perfume. A more familiar scent that he couldn’t quite place.

Not, of course, that it mattered what her body looked like or what scent she wore. He was on a job. And with that thought, a realization hit him.

“You were stalling me.”

She took the cell away from her ear and looked at him, brows furrowed. “What?”

“That whole parking-place thing. You were stalling me so he could grab the kid.”

Her mouth dropped open. “What are you talking—”

He jammed the brake a little too hard, making her jolt in her seat. Then he leaned his arm on the wheel and half turned toward her. “Don’t even try an innocent act. We know who you are. We know about your relationship to Nikki Hernandez. We know you consider yourself that baby’s aunt.”

Her face had gone blank beneath the multicolored reindeer hat, and for a moment he thought she’d deny it. But then she said, “Pete.”

“What?”

“Her name is Pete.” She inhaled and laid the open cell in her lap. “And, yeah, I am her aunt—there’s no ‘consider’ about it.”

“And did you help this guy”—he jerked his chin in the direction of the Humvee—“kidnap Pete?”

“If you know that I’m Pete’s aunt, then you know that I’d never do anything to harm her.” She looked at him steadily, her blue eyes clear. “So, no, I didn’t help this asshole.”

He stared at her a moment longer. She seemed honest, but then there were a lot of sociopaths out there who could lie with a perfectly straight face.

She cleared her throat. “So, you’ve known all along that my mother fostered Nicki.”

He’d turned back to the road, frowning as he watched the traffic creep forward another couple feet. “Yeah. We did a full background on Ricky Spinoza and Nikki Hernandez. And if we hadn’t caught you on Hernandez’s background, we sure would’ve when you signed the lease on that second-floor apartment.”

“So?”

He clenched his jaw. “So, Spinoza and Hernandez were both clearly instructed to tell no one—
no one
—where we were hiding them.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not just anyone,” she shot back. “I’m Nikki’s sister.”

He glared at her a moment. She was a problem that should’ve been foreseen when they’d done the write-up on Hernandez’s file. Foreseen and headed off before she’d gotten the notion to move into the same apartment building where they were holding Ricky and his family in protective custody. If Dante’d been in charge of this operation, he sure would’ve seen that she was a big fat problem waiting to happen. But Dante had joined the Chicago office only a little over a month ago. He’d not been in on the initial planning of this case.

He grunted and looked away from her. “The brass went back and forth for a whole day on whether or not to let you rent that apartment. In the end they decided it was better to have you where we could keep an eye on you, in case you and Hernandez were cooking something up between you.” He looked at her curiously. “That was a gutsy move—taking the place right below where we were holding your sister and her boyfriend in protective custody. Why’d you do it?”

“If you did a background on Nikki, then you know how close I am to her and Pete.” Her lush mouth had tightened. “I saw Pete almost every day before they went into hiding. I couldn’t stay away from her when Nikki called and said they were coming back to Chicago. I just couldn’t.”

Dante stared at the traffic ahead as he thought about that. His left calf was beginning to ache from pressing down on the clutch. This was the one problem with driving a stick. It was a bitch in stop-and-go traffic. He eased up on the clutch as they crept forward a couple of feet. The black SUV ahead stopped suddenly and Dante tapped on the brake, the BMW’s wheels skidding on packed snow and nearly sliding into the SUV.

Ricky Spinoza was a low-level mob bag man—definitely not the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer. He’d gotten into debt and decided to fake being robbed of the mob money he’d been carrying—almost a half a million dollars. Unfortunately for Ricky, his acting skills had not been nearly as up to par as he’d thought, and he’d quickly come under suspicion by his mob bosses. He’d been on the verge of being picked up and taken for a final dive off of Navy Pier when Ricky had had the smartest idea of his life: he’d decided to turn state’s evidence.

Ricky and his family—his girlfriend, Nikki Hernandez, and their baby, Pete—had been protected by the FBI for a year now, being moved from one place to another. They’d been brought back to Chicago only in the last couple of weeks in preparation for Ricky going on the stand to testify in the biggest mob trial Chicago had seen in decades. The trial to put big Anthony DiRosa—Tony the Rose—away for good. Because, as it turned out, idiot Ricky Spinoza had actually witnessed Tony the Rose popping an underling who had displeased him. The mob boss had a nasty temper, and with Ricky’s evidence, it would put him in the federal pen for the rest of his life.

The SUV began to move, and Dante’s attention snapped back to the traffic. The cars all rolled forward about twenty feet and then ground to a halt again. They were on an overpass now, the yellow Hummer almost a hundred feet ahead, nearing an exit at a snail’s pace.

Dante flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “What’s your name?”

“What?” She’d started talking on the phone to the 911 operator again, and now she turned and stared at him as if he’d made a kinky pass.

“Your name. I forgot it from Nikki’s file. What is it?”

She scowled. “Zoey.”

He glanced at her, brows raised.

She sighed heavily as if the question was a real bother. “Addler. Zoey Addler.”

“I’m Special Agent Dante Torelli.”

She nodded. “Nikki told me who you guys were, but she didn’t have time to give me names.”

He cocked an eyebrow in question.

“We met a couple of times to talk,” she said. “On the stairwell or in the laundry room. I hadn’t seen Pete in all those months you had them in protective custody away from Chicago, and—”

But Dante cut her off with a curse under his breath. The yellow Hummer had reached the off-ramp and was exiting the freeway.

“Dammit!” Dante leaned on his horn. “Tell the 911 operator that he’s getting off on Old Orchard.”

Zoey relayed the information as Dante rolled down his window and waved at the car ahead. If the SUV moved even an inch, maybe—

But the SUV driver blew his horn back, flipping the bird out the window.

Meanwhile, the Hummer had made Old Orchard.

“Shit.” He had literally nowhere to go. The cars were too close together, and even if he could get to the side, there wasn’t decent room for a car, because they were on the overpass. “
Shit!
”

“He’s pulling into that gas station,” Zoey said.

Dante looked, and wonders of wonders, sure enough, the yellow Hummer had pulled into the corner BP not a block from the overpass. The black SUV ahead lurched forward, the traffic awakening sluggishly.

“Blow your horn again.” Zoey examined him critically. “Don’t you have one of those magnetic police-light thingies to put on the hood of your car?”