Sins of the Father (13 page)

Then he mentally kicked himself for wasting the time.

All thoughts along those lines evaporated when the men in the room started yanking on the sliding glass door, slamming it over and over into the flimsy chair. The aluminum frame wasn’t going to hold for much longer.

One of them raised a gun to smash the glass.

“Go!” he said, giving her a shove toward the railing.

Once she committed herself, she was surprisingly graceful. She climbed over the rail and then launched herself at the rippling water, moving like a high-diver.

Peter was less graceful, but just as committed. He flopped over the railing, nearly falling, and then jumped, feet first and arms flailing, into the pool.

The water was shockingly cold, short-circuiting his brain and forcing all the air out of him in a bubbly rush. His kicking feet scraped bottom as he awkwardly dog-paddled upward toward the surface. He got his head above water and found that he had somehow twisted around on the way up, and was facing back toward the balcony from which he’d just jumped.

It was occupied by three men in dark suits.

The biggest of the three was a ruddy-faced blond with a stubbly, steam-shovel jaw and a massive, barrel-chested gorilla’s build that seemed to deeply resent being stuffed into his ill-fitting suit. A good three inches of thick, freckled forearm stuck out of the too-short sleeves. His pistol was dwarfed by huge, hairy fingers.

The other two were a hamburger-and-hotdog pair. One was tall, thin, and white, the other short, stocky and black. Different in every way, except they both wore the exact same cheap blue-and-gray striped tie, and the same practiced bad-guy scowls. If they had guns—which Peter didn’t doubt for a second—they had yet to draw them.

Doctor Lachaux was climbing out of the other end of the pool, and so Peter started swimming toward her. He had to do it one-handed, the precious virus clutched against his chest in the other.

The blond gorilla fired at Peter, missing him by an inch and sending a tiny, needle fine spray of water up into his face. Peter swore and called out.

“The gate!” he cried. “Run for the gate!”

Doctor Lachaux looked back over her shoulder at him and made a nervous, rabbit-like lunge toward the gate, just as a glass-top patio table a few feet in front of her exploded into a thousand glittering shards. She cringed and spun toward the balcony, staring up at the shooter like a deer in the headlights.

Peter dragged himself up out of the pool and tackled her bare, wet legs, knocking her to the ground just in time for a bullet to pass through the air where her head had been.

A hotel security guard appeared on the other end of the pool and shouted, drawing fire from the men in the balcony. He pulled out his own pistol and fired off a shot.

“Go!” Peter cried, shoving Doctor Lachaux in the direction of the gate. But she wouldn’t budge. She was turtled up on the concrete lip of the pool, arms over her face and shaking her head.

“Move, will you?” Peter looked back over his shoulder as the security guard cried out. He’d been hit in the belly, but was still firing. Judging from the amount of blood, it didn’t look good for him. “Hurry,” Peter added.

“I can’t,” she wailed, curling up tighter. “I don’t want to die!”

Knowing that the security guard might have bought them their only opportunity to get away, he weighed his options.

He didn’t know her.

He didn’t owe her anything.

Clearly the thing to do was to leave her behind, and save his own ass.

But she owed him. If she were killed, there would be no payoff. No way to get Big Eddie off his back. And even though his tidy little deal was rapidly devolving into lethal chaos, he still had to pull this off.

So he grabbed Doctor Lachaux’s arm, and hauled her to her knees, gripping her chin and tilting her face up toward his.

“Look at me,” he said. “We need to get out of here,
right now
.”

Her eyes flickered in the direction of the bleeding security guard. There was way too much white visible around her pale blue irises.

“Never mind him,” he said, turning her face back to him. “Just look at me, okay? I’m gonna get you out of here.”

She looked up at him, pulling in a deep, shaky breath.

“You ready?” he asked.

She swallowed hard and nodded.

“Then let’s go,” he said.

He tucked the sparkly purple vibrator into the waistband of his pants like a weapon, slung a protective arm around Doctor Lachaux’s shaking shoulders, and duck-walked her as fast as he could toward the gate, keeping her head low. He could hear footsteps behind them, pounding on the metal exterior stairs that led from the third floor breezeway.

But he couldn’t risk a backward glance.

On the other side of the gate sat Peter’s rental, a light-blue hatchback. He pulled Doctor Lachaux around to the driver’s side, keeping the bulk of the car between them and the action in the pool area. Then he thrust his hand into his pocket.

The key wasn’t there.

They were screwed.

“Where’s your car?” Peter asked.

“I took a cab,” she hissed. “I’m not allowed to drive—I’m epileptic!”

Peter swore and started randomly trying door after door of the cars, checking to see if any of them were unlocked.

No dice.

Finally, he came to the end of the row—and the end of his nerves. It was looking like they were just going to have to make a run for it on foot when the last car in the line proved to be unlocked.

That was the good news. The bad news was that it was a tiny, two-seat vintage Jaguar E-type coupe that was unlike anything else on the road. It would stand out like a sore thumb—and of a make and model that was notoriously finicky about starting.

Well, beggars can’t be choosers
…

He yanked open the door and checked around for hiding places. Under the visor. Under the seat. Glove box.

Nothing.

“Check the wheel well,” he whispered.

Doctor Lachaux did what he asked, fumbling around inside the wheel well on the driver’s side of the coupe. While she searched, Peter peered over the roof at the open pool gate.

“Found it!” she said. “Here…”

The big blond guy picked that moment to appear, scanning the lot, gun sweeping back and forth like a bloodhound’s muzzle casting for a scent. Peter ducked down and pulled his companion into a crouch beside him.

Too late. The blond spotted them and fired. His bullet blew the rear tire of a neighboring car with a bang, and Doctor Lachaux let out a terrified yelp, dropping the car key from her shaking fingers. It bounced off the asphalt between her feet and slid under the car.

Shit.

Peter crouched down and felt around to grab the key.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry… I just…”

“
Got it
,” he said.

He looked up at her and saw that she was crying, her whole body tense and curled in on itself as if she was expecting to die at any moment. An option that was entirely too possible. He felt a twinge of guilt at having thrust her into the middle of all this.

He also saw how wet her blouse was—completely see-through, as he’d predicted. Once he noticed this fact, it was impossible to unnotice.

Another gunshot hit the side window of the car right next to them.

“I thought virologists had to have steady hands,” he said, trying lamely to take her mind off the bullets. “You know, from mixing up all those Ebola daiquiris inside the hot box.”

To his surprise, it worked. She unwound noticeably.

“I guess I’m a little off my game,” she said, flashing a shaky smile. “Nobody shoots anyone in the lab.” She climbed into the car and slid across to the passenger side. Peter got in behind the wheel.

“Well, if you shoot the person holding a vial full of live Ebola,” he replied, jamming the key into the ignition and cranking the engine to life, “They tend to drop it. Then everybody loses.” He glanced back over his shoulder, slammed the little car into reverse, and floored it.

The blond guy was stalking down the row toward them, and had just raised his pistol to shoot again when the sudden appearance of the car forced him to dive out of the way.

There was a
thunk
as something hit the frame of the coupe somewhere on the left rear side—someone else, presumably one or both of the matching-tie thugs, must’ve squeezed off a couple of shots. But the bullet didn’t appear to have hit anything critical, and Peter hurriedly shifted into first. He floored it and made a sudden squealing left through a one-way entrance, taking out the mechanical arm that was supposed to lift after a ticket was removed.

It didn’t even occur to him that there might have been security spikes—not until he was already pulling a screeching left across the wide parkway.

Luck was with him. No blowouts—nothing to slow him down.

Unfortunately, their pursuers were also unimpeded when they came speeding out of the hotel parking lot right behind the coupe, driving a slick black sedan that might as well have had a vanity plate that read “THUGCAR.”

When Peter hit the intersection, the light was red, so he went to the right and cut through a crowded gas station. He swerved and barely missed a teenage boy with an arm full of junk food, causing the startled kid to send his supersized blue raspberry Slurpee flying across the coupe’s windshield.

Momentarily blinded while he fumbled for the wipers, Peter let up on the gas, but kept the front end pointed in the direction of the exit. Doctor Lachaux reached across the wheel to hit the wipers for him, just in time for Peter to avoid T-boning a white minivan. He still clipped the rear bumper on his way out, losing a side mirror.

The black sedan remained hot on their tail as he floored it again and went screaming down the otherwise quiet suburban streets, shooting past cookie-cutter mini-malls and smoothie shops and big box stores. There was something so wrong about conducting a breakneck car chase through the bland, forgettable ’burbs.

Not that Peter had been in any other car chases, but he’d seen plenty in the movies, and he was pretty sure no action hero had ever crashed his getaway car into a gourmet burrito franchise. He came close to being the first, though, and avoided it only by swerving at the last possible second, sending the little car up over a decorative flower bed and into a neighboring mall lot.

Casting a quick glance over into the passenger seat, he saw that Doctor Lachaux had jammed herself up against the door, one hand braced against the dash and the other gripping the headrest, her knuckles white. Her blue eyes were wide and wild, and her plump lower lip was caught between her teeth.

Before he could stop himself from checking, he confirmed that her blouse was still soaked. Which reminded him that his own clothes were also wet—clinging in a revealing and unforgiving way.

He really needed to concentrate on not killing anyone.

Or dying.

He managed to focus his attention back on the parking lot in front of him, just seconds before he had to avoid taking out an oblivious blond woman in mom jeans and pink sneakers, wandering along the row pointing her key fob aimlessly in an attempt to locate her vehicle.

As he swerved and barreled past her, she shot him a dirty look.

Suddenly he slammed on the brakes, pushing himself back to avoid cracking his head on the steering wheel. Doctor Lachaux gasped.

In front of him an ancient, dandelion-haired senior citizen was tentatively trying to wedge an enormous mint-green seventies-era sedan into a narrow parking slot. He laid on the horn while the flustered old bird backed up, scooched forward, and then backed up again.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, he spotted mom-jeans, stalking toward the Jaguar like a huffy little denim tugboat. Infinitely worse, he saw the black car, careening over the beleaguered flower bed and rolling down the aisle of parked cars, blocking any escape in that direction.

It would arrive in a matter of moments.

“Come on, come on,
come on
,” Peter muttered through gritted teeth as the old lady inched slowly forward. He was ready to punch the accelerator the second there was enough space behind the massive old car.