Twisted Innocence (Moonlighters Series Book 3) (27 page)
Creed hung up and Cathy handed him his clothes. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “Help me get dressed.”
Cathy did, then hammered him with questions as they headed out.
Max was waiting at Creed’s car, which was parked in his parents’ driveway. Thankfully, Creed’s parents weren’t home, or they would have tried to stop him. But it wasn’t his own safety he cared about. It was Lily’s.
“We wired your car so we can monitor what’s going on,” Max said.
“No, they’ll find out and hurt Lily.”
“He already knows we’re all over this. There are police at Holly’s house. They know you would have gotten us involved.”
“I have to hurry. He’s going to call any minute.”
“Then leave the wire in place. We want to follow you to wherever he intends to send you.”
“No, he said to come alone,” Creed said. “I have to do what he says.”
“All right, but we’ll set up near where you are in case we have to move in.”
“What if they find out and object to that?”
“Creed, we’re not going to let you go off the grid with them. This is the way it has to be.”
Creed didn’t have time to argue. He got into his car and tried to think like his enemy. Why would Miller risk this, knowing the police were swarming around?
His phone rang as he pulled out of the driveway. He swiped it on and set it on speakerphone. “I’m alone. What do you want?”
“I want you, Creed. Come to 202 Sherman Avenue. It used to be a car wash, but it’s out of business. Wait in the parking lot, and when I’m sure you’re alone and no cops are in the vicinity, I’ll give you further instructions.”
Creed made a U-turn and headed in that direction. “Do you have a remote to detonate that bomb?”
Miller only laughed.
“Do you have a remote?” Creed yelled.
“As a matter of fact, I do. But it won’t take the remote to blow that car up. Just a little movement.”
Creed felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. “If you hurt my baby, I will spend the rest of my life tracking you down . . . There won’t be anywhere you can hide.”
More laughter. “Just go to the address, Creed. Do as we say and things will go better for the baby.” Miller ended the call.
Creed wiped the sweat from his forehead. His mouth was dry; he could hardly breathe. He pulled over for a moment, typed the address into his GPS, saw where to go. Then he clicked on Holly’s number again, hoping she had it on vibrate so it wouldn’t wake Lily.
Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Creed?”
“Have they gotten the bomb disconnected?”
“Not yet,” she said, her voice trembling. “She’s still sleeping. What do they want you to do?”
“He gave me the address of some car wash. I’m headed there now.”
“He’s going to make you do something devastating. Commit a crime, kill somebody . . .”
“I’ll do what I have to do.”
“I don’t want you to die. I just . . . found you.”
He noticed a helicopter circling overhead. “You weren’t looking for me.”
“No, I wasn’t, but now . . .”
“Holly, there’s no choice,” he cut in. “It was stuff I did that got me into this. Whatever happens, I caused it. I can’t let Lily or you suffer for my sins. If I have to die for my daughter, so be it.”
Holly was silent for a long moment. Creed saw the car wash up ahead, and a building in back. “I’m there now. I’ll call you back.”
“Creed?”
He hung up and pulled into the parking lot. No cars, no sign of life. He drove into a bay.
The phone rang again and Creed clicked the speakerphone. “I’m here.”
“Go into the building. Door’s unlocked. I’ll be watching you through the security camera. I’ll see every move you make.” Creed got out of his car and started toward the building, the pain in his arm shooting through his bones.
“Now, listen carefully,” Miller said. “You’re going to walk in there and go to the desk in the office. In the top drawer, you’ll find a loaded revolver.”
Creed felt sick. They
were
going to make him kill somebody.
He opened the door and went in, found the office and the .38. He took it out of the drawer and checked; it was fully loaded. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“Walk to the middle of the lobby where the tarp is. Sit down on the tarp, then finish the job we started.”
Creed’s mind raced. What was Miller telling him to do? The gun . . . the tarp . . . the job . . .
Suddenly it hit him. They wanted him to be his own victim.
T
wo men from the bomb squad, clad in padded gear and helmets like those Holly had seen in war movies, tried to get her to back away from the car. She refused.
“I’m the only one who can keep my baby calm,” she said in a voice as quiet as she could manage. “If the bomb goes off and kills her, let it kill me too.”
“We don’t have that option, ma’am,” Saginaw, the lead bomb expert, told her. “We have to clear the area. This bomb looks powerful enough to maim, dismember, or kill everyone within its radius.”
Sweat dripped into Holly’s eyes. “You’re wasting time,” she said. “I’m staying with my baby, so leave me alone. Get. The bomb. Off of her.”
They conferred for a moment, and she fully expected someone to tackle her and cuff her and haul her away from her daughter. But no one did. Clearly the others were taking
the bomb seriously enough not to want to walk into its radius to remove her, or risk making noise enough to wake Lily.
“Ma’am, we’re trying to protect you.”
“Stop calling me ma’am and focus on my daughter instead of me.”
“We’re not sure the bomb is hooked up,” Saginaw told her. “First of all, he didn’t have a lot of time to plant it. We can’t see where the wires are connected.”
She let out a ragged breath. “He’s fast. He set the bomb under Michael’s car, and he didn’t have much time then either. Don’t take any chances, please.”
“The bomb does appear to be live. It’s the same type of device that was put under Michael Hogan’s car. That had considerable power, and add to that the gasoline in the car’s gas tank . . . They might have this thing set up to detonate remotely, but we can’t locate the detonator without moving the baby. Disconnecting the car seat from the base might be the trigger to detonate, but we’re seventy percent sure that these wires wrapped around the seat are just for show.”
Seventy percent wasn’t good enough. “He had time to plant it. It didn’t take him long with Michael’s car.”
“We’re considering everything, ma’am.” The other guy opened the opposite car door after examining it for wires, then slipped onto the seat, videoing the wires on that side of the car seat.
Holly couldn’t breathe.
The moment Michael heard of the standoff at Holly’s house, he notified Cathy, Juliet, and Jay, all of whom rushed to be there for their sister, even though the police had closed off the street, evacuated the surrounding homes, and roped off a perimeter far beyond the bomb’s reach.
Cathy got Holly on the phone. “Honey, are you all right?”
“Yes,” Holly whispered. “Lily isn’t.”
“You need to get out of there,” Cathy said. “Let the bomb squad work on it, but you don’t have to be there.”
“I’m not leaving,” Holly repeated. “If Lily goes, I go. If she wakes up, I need to be here.”
Cathy burst into tears. “What can we do, honey?”
“Just pray,” Holly whispered. “That’s what we need.”
M
ax and his men set up a mobile command center in the parking lot of a skating rink just blocks away from the car wash where Creed had been sent. Michael paced outside the van, his phone to his ear. He’d found the owner of the car wash, learned it was rented to an LLC called Denton Enterprises. “I need to know about that building. Is the power still on?”
“Yes,” the owner said. “We’re trying to sell the car wash, so we’ve kept the power on.”
“What about a security camera? Do you have one inside?”
“Yes, and it’s still functional too.”
“Does it save video to a hard drive on the premises, or is there a wireless link that sends the image somewhere else?”
“Wireless link,” the owner said. “I can give you the login info if you want to get on that wireless network, but I don’t know who’s monitoring it right now.”
Michael took down the info, then stepped into the van. “Which one of you is the computer tech?”
A young, bald guy with Buddy Holly glasses lifted his hand. Michael told him about the camera. “If we get on their network, what can we find out?”
The computer guy—who went by the name of Dex—scratched his ear. “I could pretty quickly locate the computer monitoring the image. I could also set up a feed so we could monitor it as well. But I need to get close enough to the building that I can access their wireless signal.”
“The owner said it’s video only, no audio. He told me the location of the camera, right over the front door. I think we could go in through a window in another room at the back and not be seen. Then, while you work on getting on the network, I can assess the situation.”
Max didn’t like it. “It’s too dangerous. They could have snipers all around that place, or it could be rigged with bombs too. It could be a trap.”
“Send a team ahead of us to scour the area for snipers,” Michael said. “But if he has people on the premises, he wouldn’t have to monitor things on camera. He would have had them kill Creed and be done with it. No, he set this whole thing up so that he could manage it from a distance.”
“Or so you would come.”
“I’m willing to risk it, Max. We have to find this guy. He killed our brother and he’s not going to kill that baby!”
Max turned on him. “You think I don’t know that? But I’m still on the police force. I have to follow protocol. We have policies and procedures for good reasons. If you go in there like an action hero and get blown to smithereens, I have to deal with another dead brother! You want me to face Mom with that bit of information?”
Michael sat down on a crate, his head in his hands. “Then
let’s think this through. Barker is Miller’s bomb guy. We were watching him all night and all day, until he got away in the alley. We know the bomb was placed on the baby’s car seat in the past hour. He’s only had time to go to Holly’s and plant the bomb. No time for a car wash.”
“He could have rigged the place yesterday.”
Michael thought it over. “No, I don’t think so. Miller expected Creed and me to both be dead. He needed time to regroup after his failures yesterday. I doubt he would have instantly had a Plan B. He probably came up with this plan last night, at the earliest, and we know that Barker didn’t leave his house last night.”
“The question is, are you willing to stake your life on that?”
Michael checked his watch. Time was running out. “Yes, Max. I am. I trust my gut on this.”
Max turned to Dex. “Do
you
trust his gut?”
“No,” Dex said. “But I do trust his facts. I’m willing to go. It’ll make a great story to attract chicks.” He grinned.
Michael glanced at Dex, wondering if the kid was taking this seriously enough. He turned to the satellite image of the car wash and pointed out his route. “We’ll go on foot, come up through the woods.”
Max stared at the map for a moment.
“It could work. I can do this, Max. You know I can.”
“But what about Dex? He sits in an office all day.”
Dex shoved his glasses up his nose. “Throw me this bone so I can prove I’ve got some chops. I’m all in.”
Michael smiled.
Max raked his hand through his hair, then nodded. “All right. But whatever you do, don’t let Miller see you on camera. And give Creed a warning not to give away the fact that
he sees you or is talking to you. If Miller has a detonator, we don’t want to give him a reason to set it off.”
While the team went ahead of them to search for snipers, Michael armed himself, then made sure Dex was armed. Though the computer whiz might be rusty with a gun, he would have had some training before joining the force. Dex loaded his computer into a backpack, and they set out to run through the woods to the building, with Michael praying that Dex would be a help and not a bumbling detriment.
They hid in the trees just behind the car wash. The team hadn’t found any sign of snipers, but a helicopter circled suspiciously overhead, lower than Michael would have expected this far from an airport. Did Miller have someone monitoring the building from the air, or was that a police helicopter? No, Max never would have ordered air surveillance. He would know it could set Miller off. It had to be Miller’s.