Hold Me (17 page)

“Hold on to me. We’ve got to keep moving,” Luc said.

She obediently put her hand on his shoulder. She forced herself to breathe, to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other while he felt his way along the wall and started back down the stairs.

They seemed to go on that way for hours, Luc picking his step, Katie following, their breath loud in the silence. Then, at last, she searched for another stair beneath the sole of her sneaker and there wasn’t one.

“We’re at the bottom,” Luc said softly.

“Thank God.” Truer words had never been spoken.

“There’s a door here somewhere. I just hope the hinges aren’t rusted shut.”

“Don’t say that.” Katie shuddered.

More minutes dragged by while Luc’s hands moved slowly over a surface she couldn’t see. She could only sense his arms lifting, muscles shifting, the tension spinning out, pulling taut, driving her insane.

“Ah,” Luc said.

“What?” She’d clutched at the back of his shirt while she’d waited. Now she twisted the material in her fists.

“I found the latches and the handle. Doesn’t need a key, thank Christ.”

“Will it open?” Katie’s heart was pounding.

“Let’s find out.”

Katie forced herself to let go of him. Made herself get out of the way. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but she knew he needed room to maneuver. Still, when she wasn’t touching him, she was lost. Adrift. He had been the only real thing there in the darkness with her. Her only point of reference.

She heard some scuffling noises, the sound of metal rasping against metal, and knew Luc was fumbling with the latches.

“Cross your fingers,” he muttered and she did. All of them. Toes too.

Katie heard him curse with strained effort. For a few blood-curdling seconds nothing happened. Then she heard him take a step backwards. Then another. He was pulling the door.

With no noise other than Luc’s labored breathing, no indication at all that there was movement, blessed light began to outline a rectangle in the blackness. Luc shifted again. It grew brighter, wider, until she had to close her eyes against the glow. Fresh air flooded the chamber, and she gulped it like food.

“Good enough,” Luc grunted. “Shit, I’m too old for this.”

Katie opened her eyes and, as they adjusted, saw that now there was a thick panel open at an angle and a space in the wall large enough for a person to squeeze through. Outside, the opening was covered by a loose green hedge. Camouflage, she thought, but not so much that it blocked access. She could see the grass and trees beyond the branches and the sun shining through.

“Remind me to check the mechanism on this door when this is finished,” Luc said. He peered out, then took a gun out of the waistband of his jeans. “I think I gave myself a damn hernia.”

“O-okay.” Katie stammered, shocked at the casual implication that they would be talking after this whole thing was over. She’d never even thought about the future.

Luc seemed to realize what he’d said because he cursed, checked the clip on the gun and glared at her.

“Stay here.”

“Your ankle—”

“Forget my damn ankle. I said to stay here.”

“Sir, yes sir,” she muttered. But he was already gone.

Katie pressed her body up against the cold stone wall and looked after him.

He’d disappeared.

Just that quickly he’d blended into the land around the Museum as if he’d never existed. As if he’d become a part of the beautiful, weedy gardens.

She was alone with her worry for him, her worry for the unknown person Frankie Silvano had kidnapped. Whoever it was, they’d kill her when they found out they had the wrong woman. She knew it.

A man carrying a machine gun strolled into view.

Katie hastily slid back into the darkness. He didn’t yell or give any indication that he’d seen either her or the door, so she had to assume the hedge was doing its job.

She inched forward again. Where was Luc? Was he okay?

Noises echoed from the stairs behind her, making her jump and whirl to stare up into the blank emptiness. A loud crash. Shouts. Rushing footsteps reverberating strangely around the long, narrow stairwell.

Katie’s breath stilled.

Oh, God. The men must have broken through the fireplace.

She looked back through the door. Some of the sound had carried outside to the man with the machine gun, because she saw him staring at the hedge, weapon held ready. He took a step forward.

Katie never knew where Luc came from. One minute he was nowhere in sight, the next he’d tackled the man with the machine gun down to the ground, ripped the weapon out of his hands, and was mercilessly taking him apart with some well-placed punches, with thick, wet thuds of fist against flesh. The thug never even had a chance to react.

After his opponent lay still and crumpled, Luc jumped to his feet and gestured to Katie. Shaking, she scrambled out of the door and through the hedge.

When she got closer to him, she got a better look at the man on the ground and swallowed. “Wow.”

Luc wiped his hands on the bottom of his shirt and slung the machine gun over his shoulder by the strap. Then he looked at her, the scar tight across his face, his eyes flat.

“I did what I had to do,” he said.

“I know.”

There were more sounds from the dark staircase she’d just left. The men must almost be at the bottom.

“Come on.” Luc held out his hand. Katie took it.

He dragged her behind him, around the side of the house, out to where the Nova was parked. As they came around the corner, Katie saw a large, black shape lying still in the driveway.

“Spot!”

“Those bastards.” Luc’s gait was lopsided, favoring his hurt ankle, but he dropped her hand and ran faster, skidding to a stop beside the dog. Kneeling, he pressed his head to her side.

“Is she alive?” Katie panted when she caught up. There was blood, but she couldn’t tell if it was Spot’s or somebody else’s.

“She’s breathing,” Luc said. “I can’t leave her here. Help me get her to the car.”

Each of them grabbed a handful of fur, dragged the heavy dog over to the Nova, and stuffed her into the backseat. They had just finished when there was shouting from the house.

“Give me the keys.” Luc held out his hand. “I’ll drive.”

“Keys.” Katie stared at him, her mind blank. She frantically rummaged through her purse. “God, keys.” She stopped and looked at him again, her eyes wide as a wave of sheer panic broke through her. “Luc, they’re in the kitchen. I left them on the counter in the kitchen.”

“The counter?”

“Habit. After we got back on Saturday.” Why, oh why hadn’t she listened to her father and put a spare key in her purse? Probably because her father had been the one who’d told her to do it.

“Perfect. Absolutely fucking perfect. Cover me.” He shoved the confiscated machine gun into her hands.

“Cover you? Cover you? Are you crazy? I don’t know how to shoot this thing!”

Luc muttered something she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear and grabbed the weapon. He made sure it was loaded, pulled back the safety and shoved it at her again.

“It’s got a full clip, and I took off the safety. Just point it away from me and squeeze the trigger.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody!” she wailed.

“You’re probably not going to hit them.”

Before Katie could respond to that, he jumped in the car, sprawled across the seat, and yanked the covering off the steering column, presumably to hotwire something. She didn’t have time to argue with him anyway because about six or seven men were running toward them from the castle.

Okay. “Well, here goes nothing.”

Katie lifted the nose of the machine gun over the hood of the car, aimed in the general direction of the men, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The weapon kicked back violently, and she lost control for a moment. Glass shattered all over the front of the Museum.

“Oops.”

“Not the windows!” Luc cried as the Nova roared to life.

Katie didn’t respond. She just dug in her heels more firmly and pelted the trees and bushes around the house with a hail of bullets. Men who had been advancing shouted and leapt for cover.

She laughed. Served them right.

“Bitch! Whore! I’ll get you!” Frankie’s voice screamed across the yard and Katie’s nerves jumped. “You can’t get away. You can’t get away from me.” The little man detached himself from the side of the house and ran at them, firing his gun, apparently berserk with rage.

Katie froze.

“Get in! Get in!”

Luc was there next to her. He grabbed the gun, pushed her into the passenger seat, then sprayed the area with bullets.

Frankie went down with a sharp yell. Luc scrambled around to the driver’s side, pausing only long enough to rake shots over the five or six cars scattered in the parking area, ripping tires and metal. He jumped into the driver’s seat and thrust the machine gun at Katie.

She took it with shaking hands and he threw the car into gear.

The Nova spun gravel, then sped up the long driveway. When they had reached the end of it, Luc looked in the rearview mirror and cursed.

“Shit, I didn’t get them all,” he said.

“What?”

But she heard other cars and knew the chase was on.

“I can probably figure out how to make the machine gun work now if you want me to,” Katie told Luc. She tightened her death grip on the door handle when he swung the Nova onto a small country road. Three black sedans followed a minute or two later. Why was it always black sedans, she wondered. Why not blue Mini-Coopers? Or silver SUVs? The Silvanos must be traditionalists.

“Should I shoot at something?” she asked.

“Thanks for the offer, but no. The farmers in the area would probably like to keep their cows alive.”

“Ha, ha. Very funny. I’m just trying to help.”

Luc glanced in the rearview mirror and then over at her. “With the way you handle a gun, I’m not sure it’s safe to even have you in the same car with one.”

Katie gasped at the unfairness of that. “Hey! I told you I’d never shot one before.”

“I know, I know.” He looked over at her again briefly and scowled. “But why in hell did you have to take out those stained glass windows? Do you have any clue how much they’re going to cost to replace?”

“No.” She squirmed. “You noticed that, huh?” Some gunshots whizzed by, but the road was bumpy and the Nova was sending up great clouds of dust, which helped to obscure them from view.

“The gaping holes in the front of the building were kind of hard to miss.” He made a sharp turn, and the tires spun. “If you keep your head down, do you think you can you see if Spot’s okay?”

“I’ll try.” The Nova didn’t have a big opening between the seats for a center console or arm rest or anything fancy like that, but there was a split in the middle so they could recline separately. With a little maneuvering Katie was able to slide her arm through that. She ran her hand over as much of Spot as she could reach from that awkward angle, then turned to face the front again.

“There’s some blood, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from,” she told Luc. “Why isn’t she waking up?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded worried. “But I don’t have time to think about it until I lose these guys.” He made another turn and sped down an even smaller dirt road that trickled haphazardly between two cornfields. In fact, Katie didn’t think it was a road at all. She suspected it was just a lane the farmer used to move his equipment around.

She glanced back through the rear window and ducked when more shots were fired. “We’re not going to get away this time, are we?”

“Oh, hell, sure we will.” Luc’s voice sounded strained, but almost cheerful. “Here, hold the wheel for a second.”

“What?”

Instinctively, Katie grabbed the steering wheel when Luc let go. He reached over and got the machine gun, opened his window, twisted around, and shot back at the sedans.

“What are you doing?” she shouted at him as she struggled to control the car.

“What do you think I’m doing?” He kept his foot jammed on the accelerator, his upper body turned out of the window, firing more shots. Tires squealed behind them. “Just try to drive straight.”

“Drive straight?” Katie looked out of the windshield and gulped. She could see curves up ahead through the rows of green corn stalks. Really, really sharp curves. With banks of rock and dirt on either side.

And the car was going way too fast to handle them.

“Luc!”

He ignored her, continuing to shoot at their pursuers. The cloud of dust behind them had reached epic proportions, which made the Nova harder to hit, but also kept Luc from getting a good shot at anything. Or so she guessed from his very imaginative cursing.

But to tell the truth, Katie wasn’t paying much attention. She was too busy watching those curves in the road getting closer.

Taking one hand off the wheel, she pushed at Luc’s leg to try to get him to ease up on the gas pedal.

“Luc, slow down!”

“What?” Irritated, he turned and finally saw what she saw. “Holy shit.” Spinning fully into the seat, he shoved the weapon at her and grabbed the steering wheel.

“Don’t shoot anything,” he ordered.

“But—”

“I mean it, Katie.”

Grumbling a little, but glad that the car was back in Luc’s capable hands—and out of hers—Katie carefully put the safety back on the gun and propped it on the floor. Luc braked, Kato screeched, and they hit the first curve.

When the car swerved violently, Spot woke up. Barking.

“Jesus Christ. Be quiet!” Luc shouted at the dog. “Sit!”

He’d managed to slow the car down a little, but they still whipped through the turns like a roller coaster ride while stones and clods of mud and dirt spat out around them. The Nova veered into a deep gully on the edge of one of the embankments, but with brute strength Luc wrestled it back into the two ruts passing for the road.

There was a horrendous sound of crunching metal behind them.

“What happened?” Katie looked up over the seatback.

Luc took one hand off the wheel long enough to push her back down. “Damn it, you sit too.”

“It looks like they crashed or something.” She spun to face him. “We got away!”

“Not quite,” Luc replied grimly, glancing in the rearview mirror. “They’ve already straightened themselves out. All we got was a little time.” He made a sharp turn onto another farm road and Katie pitched sideways into his shoulder.

“Would you give me some warning before you do that?” she snapped at him.

“Sounds familiar.”

“Funny.”

Now that Spot was up, she was easier to reach. Katie ran her hands over the dog again, looking for an injury. Spot didn’t show any sign of pain until Katie touched the back of her head, then she yipped and pulled away. Katie frowned and faced forward again as the car jostled and bumped and bottomed out and finally hit smooth pavement.

“There’s a wound on her head, but it doesn’t seem too bad.”

“Good.” Luc sounded a little preoccupied.

Katie saw that they were now on a nice, straight, empty asphalt two-lane road. The black sedans had fallen behind, thank God, and hadn’t made the turn yet, but she knew they would. They would.

Luc grabbed her arm. “We need to switch drivers.”

“What?” She stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

“Yes. Look, those assholes will be behind us any minute. We need to take them out—”

“I told you I could shoot the machine gun thing.”

“—and you can’t hit the side of a barn—”

“I can so hit a barn! Didn’t you see what I did at the house?”

“—so we have to switch.”

“You couldn’t think of this before we were driving eighty miles per hour?”

“Ninety.”

“Whatever.” There were the sounds of squealing tires behind them. Frankie’s men had made the turn. “We can’t just, like, stop.”

“No. We can’t.” He glanced at her.

She stared back at him, hardly able to believe what she thought he was suggesting. He couldn’t be thinking…he couldn’t mean…

He was. He did.

“You want to switch drivers while we’re driving?”

“Yeah. The advantage of an, um, vintage car like the Nova is that it’s big.” His eyes moved over her and even under the circumstances she felt herself grow unaccountably warm. “And you’re short.”

“Petite.”

“Exactly. So it should work.”

Katie restrained herself from punching him because he was still driving. A bullet whizzed by, and one of Kato’s new side mirrors shattered.

The one on her side of the car.

“Okay, then. What do you want me to do?”

“Get in my lap.”

“Excuse me?”

More gunshots sounded behind them. Something “pinged” off the trunk and somewhere glass shattered. They both ducked instinctively.

“Don’t argue with me!” Luc shouted. “Just come on and do it. Once you have control of the car, I’ll slide out from underneath you.”

Katie still wasn’t sure about this whole thing, but she edged closer to him on the seat. “Well…all right…”

She wasn’t prepared for the way his arm snaked out and pulled her over and up into his lap. Luc blew at her hair and she shivered.

“Katie, I can’t see around your hair. Will you take the wheel already?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Sorry.” She blushed.

Once she had the wheel, he shifted his legs, somehow switching so his left foot was on the accelerator instead of his right one, then slid out from under her, his body rubbing against hers intimately as he moved. All of those bullets shooting past the windows didn’t seem to matter so much.

Well, they didn’t matter until one of them caught the already broken mirror on the side of the car and Katie realized just how high her head was above the back of the seat.

“You should have just let me drive in the first place,” she said.

“I didn’t think about it, okay?” He sounded irritated. “I guess I’m only human after all.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Put your foot over mine on the gas pedal,” he directed. Katie obeyed and he slipped his foot out from under hers while he slid over into the passenger seat. With barely a bobble, she was now driving the car. Katie shook her head. Amazing.

“Thank Christ there’s no center console in this thing. That would have hurt,” Luc muttered.

Katie giggled. Giggled! She really must be hysterical.

He grabbed the machine gun she’d propped against the door and rolled down the passenger window. Then he took a minute to pin her with a dark and steely glance. “Now drive fast.”

“Yes, sir.”

Katie stomped her foot even harder on the gas pedal, although it was already pressed down to the floor. Kato shuddered, but he truly was a mountain cat at heart so he didn’t stall.

Luc leaned out the window and shot in earnest at the cars following them, his concentration complete and his skill with the weapon evident. But hitting something moving at almost a hundred miles an hour while you were doing the same was difficult at best, and since the Nova shook with effort, it kind of stacked the odds against him. He shot, missing and cursing, until there was a squeal and loud crash behind them.

Katie looked in the rearview mirror. One of the sedans had made friends with a telephone pole, and was now smoking and crumpled by the side of the road.

“You got one!” she cried out.

“About goddamn fucking time.” Luc ducked back inside, then put his hand to his head and winced. “Sorry. Christ, my head hurts.”

Katie glanced over at him. “Are you going to throw up?”

“No.”

“Good.” She shivered. “Because here they come.” The two remaining black sedans were bearing down on them again.

Spot barked and lifted her head, but Luc shoved her back down. “Stay.”

“Will she listen?”

“Probably not. Don’t worry about her, just drive.”

“I’m trying to.”

Luc checked the ammunition clip then turned to lean out the window again, methodically pulling the trigger. A second later, the front window of one of the sedans chasing them shattered, the car veered wildly off the road, flipped and exploded into fire.

“Two,” Luc said.

The Nova practically flew up a steep hill until, almost too late, Katie realized the road was a dead end, and they were at the intersection of a busy crossroad.

“Oh, God.” She eased up on the gas without really even thinking about it.

“What are you doing? Why are you stopping?” Luc yelled at her. “They’re right behind us.”

“I know that!” Katie shouted back at him. Taking a deep breath, she punched down the accelerator and sent Kato jolting out onto the cross road, making the cars already there scatter for safety. A moment later the one remaining black sedan followed.

“Shit,” Luc muttered.

“I’m doing the best I can.” Now that they were on a flat, straight road again, Kato’s engine was cranking. Katie frowned over at Luc.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate… Jesus Christ, look out!” he shouted

Katie jerked her attention back to the road and realized they were coming up behind a long line of traffic moving very, very slowly for no obvious reason. She slammed on the brakes while Luc braced himself against the dashboard.

The Nova drew to a shuddering halt, gently kissing the bumper of the car in front of it.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

The sedan was coming up fast behind them. There were so many cars around them now, so many innocent people who might be hurt or killed by a stray bullet. Katie knew that she had to act quickly. This was no time for common sense.

“Hold on,” she yelled to Luc.

“What?”

Without answering or even stopping to think about what she was doing, Katie swerved out into the lane for the opposing traffic and sent Kato right up the middle of the road. They forced the drivers coming toward them over into the shoulder while horns blared and tires squealed.

The black sedan followed without hesitation.

Luc, who’d been taken completely by surprise, rapped his head on the window frame when the car jerked and swerved.

“Ow. Shit. What are you doing? Are you crazy?” he shouted.

“I hope not.”

While Luc muttered curses and prayers beside her, Katie clung to the steering wheel. They crested a rolling hill. As they started down the other side she finally saw what had caused the backup. A huge crane was lumbering slowly along at the head of the line of traffic, doing fifteen miles per hour at best.

But what caused the breath to die in her throat was the vehicle she could now see coming at them.

“Oh, crap,” she whispered.

She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it. It was a house—a house for sweet Christ’s sake. Well, half a house. Half a double-wide trailer, to be precise. The oversized truck pulling it was already running in the shoulder and it still took up more than the width of its own lane of the road.

Katie’s heart pounded heavily. The road now dropped off sharply on their left, cars were on their right and murderers were behind them. They were boxed in. She heard Luc cursing, low and violently.

“You have to keep going now. Get past that crane.”

Katie didn’t bother answering because she knew he was right. She demanded even more speed from the Nova, and its wheels practically left the ground.

The truck pulling the house had seen them and stopped, but the crane still continued its slow pace forward, its operator apparently blissfully unaware of what was happening behind him. Katie was praying out loud now as she watched the gap between the two large vehicles narrow. The Nova had nothing left to give.