One Wrong Step (19 page)
Authors: Laura Griffin
Tags: #Romance, #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Contemporary
McAllister stood up. His jeans and T-shirt clung like a wetsuit. He’d managed to keep his boots somehow. Water slurped as he trudged through some mud to a nearby outcropping of rock.
Where Enrique sat, breathing hard, his knees tucked up against his chest.
Relief swept over her.
Enrique looked up with wide eyes as McAllister braced a hand on his shoulder and said something. Even from a distance, Celie could see the boy shaking. But he looked okay, otherwise. Wet and frightened, but breathing.
She flopped back against the rock, wincing when her head connected. For a minute, she just lay there, shivering and wheezing and trying to figure out what had just happened.
Then a shadow fell across her, obscuring even the dim purplish light reflected down from the city’s cloud cover.
McAllister loomed over her, chest heaving. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She coughed up some more water and pushed herself up into a sitting position.
The distant wail of police sirens filled the air. Celie glanced around, but she didn’t see any cars or lights. Just the bridge and the churning, rain-swollen lake and the trees lining the shore.
McAllister stripped off his T-shirt and handed it to her. “Put this on.”
She looked down at the ball of dripping white fabric in her hands. It was smeared with muck, but at least it would cover her transparent beige bra. “Thanks.”
She wrestled the shirt over her head, noticing the scrapes and cuts on her arms for the first time. She was pretty sure they’d come from the pavement when she dove for cover from the bullets. By the time she’d managed to pull on the sodden shirt, the sirens had become shrill and insistent.
McAllister planted his hands on his hips and looked up at the bridge. She couldn’t believe she’d jumped from such a height. She glanced at Enrique, who was standing on the steep hillside now, soaked and shivering and waiting for guidance.
“You ready?” McAllister looked down at her and held out his hand. She nodded, and he pulled her to her bare feet. Her sandals were probably at the bottom of the lake by now. Mud oozed between Celie’s toes as she picked her way over to Enrique.
“Are you all right?” She enfolded his skinny body into a hug. He’d somehow managed to swim to shore, even weighted down by his clunky basketball shoes. His skin felt cold.
“Enrique?”
She pulled back and stared down into his face. He nodded.
Together, they started hiking up the hill. It sounded like a convention of emergency vehicles up there, and she hoped one of them was an ambulance. “Let’s get you checked out just to be sure.”
As operations went, this one was a clusterfuck.
Two missing suspects, three missing civilians. Plus a gunshot victim on the other side of the bridge—some innocent bystander, according to the Austin police.
The one scrap of success Rowe had to show for the night was the man in black, whom he’d just finished Mirandizing. Rowe had chased him down the slippery, shadowy jogging path that paralleled the lake, finally overtaking him near the canoe docks. They’d wrestled in the mud, the guy grunting and throwing bony elbows as Rowe disarmed him and got the cuffs on. He’d been carrying a small but lethal Chiefs Special.
The perp hadn’t said anything so far. Rowe wasn’t even sure if he spoke English.
But he looked American. Rowe eyed him as he sat in the back of the Buick, his hands cuffed behind him. He no longer wore a cap, and Rowe saw now that his hair was light brown, his skin pale. Not likely a relative of the Barriolo brothers. Rowe would bet money he worked for Saledo and was here to intercept the cash. If so, Rowe had to wonder, how in the world had he found out about this meeting?
He wasn’t just some flunkie—that was clear. As soon as he’d stepped off the bridge, the guy had had the brains to transfer the money to a bag he’d brought with him. This maneuver would have backfired if the duffel had had an exploding dye pack in it. But because it merely had a tracking device sewn into the lining, the move had effectively derailed Rowe’s plan to sit back and follow the cash.
Now Rowe stripped off his slimy windbreaker and tossed it in the front of the Buick, right on top of the gray zipper bag he’d seized with the perp. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked the display. Still no callback from Stevenski. He’d tried him twice now, with no response. Rowe looked across the bridge and saw the telltale white antennae of a television news crew jutting up into the sky. The media had wasted no time making the scene. At this very moment, Kate Kepler was probably phoning her story in to her news editor before the night’s final pressrun.
Rowe turned toward Abrams. He and another agent had shown up ten minutes ago to help supervise the fiasco. “You got this guy?” Rowe asked him, nodding toward the Buick.
“Yeah, I got him,” Abrams answered. “Hey, and I just heard from one of the uniforms. Someone spotted your missing civilians on the other side of the lake.”
“Really?” Why hadn’t Stevenski called?
Abrams smiled. “Yeah, sounds like they decided to take a swim.”
John hiked up the hillside, scanning the faces of emergency workers and trying to locate Rowe or Stevenski. His gaze landed on a pair of paramedics loading a woman into an ambulance.
“Hey, wait!” John sprinted over to the rig. “Kate?
Kate!
”
She lifted her head up from the gurney.
“What the hell happened?” Jesus, her arms were covered with blood.
She tried to say something, but an oxygen mask blocked her mouth. She reached up with a bloody hand and tugged it down. “One of those guys shot me.” She nodded toward a white bandage on her right arm.
“Holy shit, Kate!”
One of the medics glared at John. “Save it for later. We’ve got to get her to the hospital.”
The paramedics continued to situate Kate in the back of the rig while she spoke. “It hurts like hell.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “Can you call my dad? Tell him to meet me at—Where are you taking me?”
“Brackenridge,” said the medic closest to Kate.
“Okay, but…” John raked his fingers through his hair. “What’s your dad’s name? What’s his phone number?” He grabbed hold of the door and levered himself onto the ambulance bumper. Blood saturated Kate’s clothes, but she was lucid and alert.
“Here.” She twisted and turned on the gurney until she dug a cell phone out of her back pocket with her left hand. She tossed it to John. “He’s on my speed dial. Wozniak, too. Call in this story, will you?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Hey, you mind if we get moving here?” The paramedic shoved John out of the way and pulled one of the doors closed.
“I’m totally serious,” Kate answered. John couldn’t see her face anymore, but her voice was loud and clear. “I gave him the lowdown on the way over here, and he’s delayed pressrun until we get this story in.”
The second paramedic hopped down and slammed shut the other door.
John looked at the cell phone in his hand and cursed as the chartreuse rig rolled away.
17
M
cAllister stood just outside the ambulance bay at Brackenridge Hospital. The waiting room staff had insisted he go outdoors if he needed to make a cellular call, so he was stuck in the drizzle, juggling Kate’s phone as well as his own as he enviously watched hospital workers file outside to suck down nicotine during their breaks.
Life was full of surprises. Tonight, for instance, he’d learned that Kate Kepler was the only daughter of James Kepler, who, besides being a computer geek, was one of the richest men in Austin, if not in the entire state. He was notorious, too, for some sort of shady business dealings he’d been involved with about ten years back. John couldn’t remember the details, but it wouldn’t take him long to turn up something on the Internet.
Another surprise was that the man didn’t look like a geek at all. A few minutes ago, he’d arrived at the hospital in a silver Tesla Roadster with plates that said placom, an allusion to PlayComp, the software company he’d founded. After whipping into a handicapped space, he’d leapt out of his car and charged through the emergency room doors like some sort of angry bantamweight fighter. He’d been wearing athletic shorts and a RunTex T-shirt and an intense look on his face that said he wanted answers about his little girl,
now.
The gum-smacking receptionist just inside—who wore pink scrubs tonight and told everyone who approached her she wasn’t at liberty to discuss the status of any patients, and could you please take a seat in the waiting area?—was toast.
John punched at his keypad and once again connected with the night editor’s desk at the
Austin Herald
. The guy was a friend, but tonight John was pushing the boundaries of that friendship by blowing his deadline completely out of the water.
“Hey, Pete, I’ve got that info for you.”
“McAllister! Shit, I’m dying here! We were supposed to go to press ten minutes ago.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. They wouldn’t tell me her status at reception, so I had to sneak upstairs and sweet-talk one of the nurses. Sounds like Kate’s stabilized but headed to surgery.”
“Stable condition. Got it.” John heard keys clacking as Pete typed this new information into the computer. “Damn. What type of surgery?”
“Something with the bones in her arm. Bullet tore everything up, apparently.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah,” John agreed. But having been at the scene, he knew things could have turned out much worse.
“Wozniak just arrived,” Pete said. “He wants IDs on the civilians involved and a quote from one of the FBI guys.”
Great. It was bad enough McAllister had to call in this story at all, but if he included names, he could kiss away any chances of ever talking to Celie again. Forget about getting back in her bed, he’d be history.
Unless, of course, she was pregnant with his kid. Under that scenario, they’d be permanently intertwined for the rest of their lives. How fucked up was that? What was even more fucked up was that John was starting to believe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Three days ago, he’d been so angry at her he could hardly see straight, and now here he was, worried about pissing her off.
“No can do, man,” John told Pete. “One of the civilians is a minor, so we can’t ID him. Other one wants us to protect her identity so this drug cartel doesn’t come after her. I’ve got a request from the FBI to keep her name out of print.”
The last part was a lie, but John felt no compunction about telling it. If Rowe
had
known John was writing a story about this, he most likely would have declined to identify the civilians involved.
Not that John didn’t already know their names, but still.
“I don’t think that’s gonna cut it with Wozniak, man. Wait, here he comes now….”
John heard shuffling as the phone was passed to Wozniak, John’s direct boss, who also happened to be higher up in the
Herald
food chain than the night editor.
“What’s this caca you’re feeding us, McAllister? We were supposed to go to press almost an hour ago, and we’ve held off for
this
?”
“I was just giving Pete an update on the gunshot victim. Kate Kepler.” He threw the reminder in there as a distraction. “She’s going into surgery right now, but it looks like her condition is stable. As for the identities, like I told Pete—”
“Fine. No names, but I at least need ages and occupations.”
John searched his memory banks. “The kid involved is an eleven-year-old boy, middle school student, resident of Austin. The woman is thirty-one. Also lives here in town.”
“This is that friend of yours, right? Where’s she work?”
“She’s a social worker.” John would have said student, but in a college town, that would just make for a bigger headline.
John watched as a familiar Buick rolled past the ambulance bay and slid into a handicapped space beside James Kepler’s Tesla.
“Great,” Wozniak sneered. “Nothing like specificity in a
news
article. I just love throwing all this vague shit up on A-one. Above the fold, no less. You don’t even have the name of the arrestee in here, McAllister. Do you realize that?”
Rowe climbed out of the car, and John glanced at his watch. It was 2:44. If they held this story even five minutes longer, they probably would delay the trucks that made deliveries to newsstands all over downtown. As it was, the story wasn’t even appearing in the suburban edition of the
Herald
. That edition had gone out right on schedule.
Which was fine with John. The less exposure this story got, the better, as far as he was concerned.
Wozniak was still yammering in his ear.
“Hey, give me one minute, and I’ll get a quote from the FBI,” John interjected. “Two minutes, max.”
Silence. “Have you listened to a damn thing I’ve said, McAllister? Time is
money
! Shel is gonna have my head on a platter!”
“I have an agent standing right here waiting to be interviewed.”
John waved his hand and caught Rowe’s attention just before he went through the emergency room doors. He hesitated a moment, casting a glance into the ER, then walked over.
“I’ll call you right back,” John told his boss.
He clicked off and met Rowe beneath the narrow overhang, where they’d at least be out of the rain. Not that it mattered. Like Rowe, John was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that were already soaked through. Unlike Rowe, though, John had bought his T-shirt off a vagrant near the hospital for ten bucks, so it had the added benefit of smelling like week-old garbage.
“Any word on Kate?” Rowe wanted to know.
John gave him a quick update and concealed his curiosity as the FBI agent actually appeared shaken by the news that Kate was in surgery. Rowe stared through the hospital doors for a moment, then glanced back at John with gray eyes that looked like ice chips.
“You shouldn’t have told her about the meeting,” he said.
John felt a prick of guilt. “We needed to get hold of you, and Cecelia didn’t have your number. How was I supposed to know Kate would show up?”
Rowe’s expression darkened. They both knew that was bullshit. Of course Kate would show up—she was a reporter.
John hated blame games. Bottom line, if Kate hadn’t jumped in, Celie and Enrique might be dead. John was sorry Kate was hurt, but he wasn’t sorry she’d been there.
“Look,” he said, “I need a quote for the paper tomorrow. Anything to say about the man you guys arrested? You know his name or his position in the Saledo organization?”
“We haven’t identified him yet.”
John watched Rowe, trying to mask his surprise. He’d expected a simple “No comment,” or maybe even a “No comment, asshole.” John decided to press him.
“Okay, what about the rumors floating around that the two missing suspects ditched their Avalanche at a Chevron on I-35 and carjacked a green sedan?”
Rowe’s brows knitted together. “We’ve got a BOLO for a dark green Mercury Cougar with Texas plates. I don’t know the tags, but I’ll get them for you as soon as I can.”
John eyed him suspiciously. This was way more cooperation than he’d been expecting. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Yeah.” Rowe glanced at the ER doors. “Somewhere in your story, you need to mention that federal agents confiscated two hundred thousand in cash. Don’t leave that out.”
John frowned. “What’s the deal with the money?”
“Just put it in there, up near the top if you can. It’s important for the safety of everyone involved that the message gets out that the money was confiscated.”
“You mean for Saledo? He knows it was confiscated. His guys were right there—” John halted, realization dawning. “Unless those weren’t
Saledo’s
guys? They’re part of some other organization?”
Rowe’s stony expression was his answer.
“Son of a
bitch
! You knew this all along, didn’t you? You set Celie up!” John stepped forward and jabbed a finger at Rowe’s chest. “She risked her life for you guys, and now she’s still on Saledo’s shit list! How’s she supposed to hide from him now?”
“She doesn’t have to hide,” Rowe said calmly. “If Saledo believes the money was confiscated by federal agents, he won’t come looking for it.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that? That woman trusted you.” At John’s urging, Celie had trusted him. He never should have talked her into going to the feds for help. “You used an innocent woman just to get an arrest.”
“She’s not innocent,” Rowe retorted. “No one forced her to steal two hundred thousand dollars. And it looks to me like you’re using her, too. Or am I wrong about that?”
John’s phone buzzed, and he checked the number. Wozniak.
Fuck.
Rowe stepped back and nodded toward John’s phone. “That’s probably your editor. Pass that along about the money, like I said. You guys do your jobs, and let us worry about ours.”
The sun was just rising over the apartment complexes of east Austin when Celie left the Bluebonnet House for the last time.
Miraculously, she didn’t cry.
She was too busy worrying about the Ramos children, whose mother had pulled another disappearing act. When Celie and an APD officer had taken Enrique home, they’d found four-year-old Britanny by herself in the apartment. Her mom had “gone out” for the evening, apparently oblivious to the fact that her son hadn’t made it home from school.
It was a miserable end to a miserable ordeal, and the only upside Celie could see was that Enrique hadn’t been injured.
He’d told police that after being picked up on the way home from school, he’d spent the next several hours in a cheap motel room with his abductors eating pizza and watching ESPN. Celie hoped the paramedic who’d checked him out hadn’t missed anything. Some kinds of abuse didn’t leave marks.
Celie walked past the gated playground, where she’d spent so many hours with the children she loved, past the basketball court and the half-finished rec room. Her feet moved over the sections of new sidewalk where, less than a month ago, she’d helped Kimmy Taylor and Brittany Ramos flatten out their tiny hands and press them into damp concrete.
Her gaze skimmed over their childish signatures, the marks they’d gleefully left there for posterity, and Celie regretted not pressing her own print into the cold, wet slab.
Had she left a mark on this place at all?
She was fairly sure that she had, but she couldn’t kid herself into believing it was a good one. The mistakes of her past had caught up to her, and her very presence here had endangered the life of an innocent child. That, more than anything else she’d done, would be her undeniable legacy to the Bluebonnet House. It overshadowed Easter cupcakes and algebra tutoring and countless games of Hi Ho! Cheery-O played with kids around the kitchen table.
Coming here had been a mistake.
Celie’s flip-flops snapped against the pavement now as she walked down the sidewalk. After checking Brittany and Enrique into the shelter for the night, and after a tense conversation in Chantal’s office, Celie had relinquished her Bluebonnet House ID badge, trading it with Chantal for a pair of cheap rubber sandals that probably wouldn’t even make the trip home.
A block away from the shelter, Dax was waiting in his white Toyota Prius, just like she’d asked him to. When he spotted her in the mirror, he leaned over and pushed open her door from the inside. Celie slid into the passenger seat.
“Thanks for coming.” She gave Dax a wobbly smile. “I’m sorry I got you out of bed. I owe you one, big time.”
“No problem,” Dax said. “On my way out the door, I got a phone call from John McAllister.”
“He called
you
?”
“He was looking for you. It was about your Volvo? He said to tell you he left it in the visitors’ lot and gave the keys to the security guy, Terrance.”
“Oh.” Celie rubbed the bridge of her nose, wishing there was something she could do to ward off the migraine she felt coming on. Up until this moment, she hadn’t realized she’d been picturing herself crawling into bed next to McAllister. In the back of her mind, she’d been hoping he could help her forget about the whole awful night they’d just endured.
Which was ridiculous, she realized now. He may have plucked her out of Town Lake, but he was still angry over the way she’d lied to him. The rift between them still existed. Otherwise, he would have come to get her himself. Or he would have stayed and waited for her at The Overlook. He knew darn well Dax would have buzzed him upstairs.
“So,” Dax said. “Looks like you spent the night in a swamp.”
Celie glanced down at her clothes. She was still wearing the mud-smeared shirt McAllister had given her. It had a red scuba flag on the front, which had kept her from looking like a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest while she’d talked to the cops.
She flipped down the passenger mirror and cringed when she saw her face. “Yikes.”
“Johnny’s a ‘yikes,’ too,” Dax said. “After he called, I looked out my window and saw him picking up his Jeep. I’m guessing he participated in last night’s mud-wrestling extravaganza?”
Celie took a deep breath and spilled the whole story, starting with Robert’s stash of money and ending with the past two hours at the Bluebonnet House. Celie had made Toaster Strudels for the Ramos children in the kitchen while Chantal argued about their fate with a rep from Child Protective Services. After much discussion—which, unfortunately, Enrique and Brittany had overheard—it was agreed that the kids would stay at the Bluebonnet House until April Ramos could be located. If and when the police tracked the young mother down, CPS would make alternative arrangements for the children.