At that same moment, Jake saw a familiar face smiling at him from a balcony overlooking the alleyway. A beautiful woman with auburn hair and deep green eyes waved at him. Annie Bulloch, Kaplan’s girlfriend.
“Gregg, I found a place for you to meet me.” His voice slurred a little with his exhaustion. “I see your girlfriend. I’ll be at her house. Meet me here.”
“Jake, wait—”
Nausea overwhelmed him. He lowered the phone to his side and flipped it shut, raised his left hand to wave at Annie. The nausea passed, but his shoulder hurt even more. His right hand still clutched his side. He heard her call to him.
“Inspector Pendleton.”
“Ms. Bulloch.”
“Please call me Annie. You look terrible, are you okay?”
“No, as a matter of fact I’m not. I need your help.”
“Certainly, come on inside and let me get you something. Just come through the back gate,” she said.
He opened the cypress gate from the alleyway, walked through and closed it behind him. The back of the house was simple, a narrow red-brick structure with a garage on the ground level and two identical balconies, one directly above the other, on the second and third floors.
Annie leaned over the white railing on the second-floor balcony motioning for him to come through the garage.
She pointed to it and said, “Take the stairs in the garage up to the kitchen. Just come on in.”
“Thanks, Annie, you’re a life saver.”
CHAPTER 46
Kaplan yelled into his phone, “NO. NO.”
It was too late. He heard the click and knew Jake had hung up. He slammed his phone closed too hard, lost his grip and the phone crashed onto the concrete sidewalk, shutting down from the impact.
“Shit.”
He picked it up. It had shut down.
He tried the on switch, but nothing happened. He removed the battery, then the SIMM card, reinserted both and pushed the on button again.
“Come on — work, dammit, work.”
The phone rebooted and went through all the steps to acquire a signal. He ran toward Annie’s house, taking a circuitous route so he could approach her house from the end of the alley behind her house.
He hit the talk button twice to send it to last number redial. Nothing happened. The phone had shut down again.
He swore.
Jake entered the garage, his back to the wall as he squeezed past her red Mazda MX-5 Miata. The convertible top was down. Overhead fluorescent lights reflected off the shiny black leather seats. Sunglasses perched precariously on the rear view mirror. A silver lipstick tube stuck out of the ashtray. Her FAA identification badge was on the passenger floorboard, along with the NTSB observer’s pass from Annie’s visit to the crash site.
The garage floor, painted gray with black flecks, was spotless. Storage cabinets lined the walls and two bicycles attached to pulley systems hung from the ceiling. He wondered if Kaplan and Annie ever used them. The garage looked spacious with just the pint-sized Miata inside, but two full sized cars wouldn’t fit.
He reached the top step, stretched out his hand searching for the doorknob when the door opened.
Annie motioned him inside. “Come on in, Mr. Pendleton. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Thanks, Annie. Water would be great and, please, call me Jake.”
He walked into the kitchen, noticing the bay window. An open book was placed pages down on the cushion. Smoke Screen, by Sandra Brown.
Annie handed him a bottle of water.
“Oh my God, you’re hurt,” she said, pointing to his side. “What happened?”
He looked down and saw that blood had oozed through the cut in his leather jacket.
“Annie, I need your help. Someone took Beth, my fiancée.” His voice broke up in panic. “We’ve got to call the police.”
“Jake, come in here and sit down. Let me look at your side.” Annie walked casually to an open door. “The first thing we need to do is stop that bleeding.”
He followed her into the living room, dark except for a sliver of sunlight coming through a three-inch opening in the curtains. He walked over to the window and squinted into the bright sunshine outside. Dozens of people, apparently holiday celebrators, sauntered along the sidewalks.
Then he noticed an old black relic of a car on the far corner across the street and a sign nearby that read, “Police Barracks.” He saw the gate where he exited and it occurred to him that he went to the wrong corner of the cemetery.
His eyes were drawn to the familiar Suburban parked in front of Annie’s house with lettering on the side … NTSB.
“What the—”
Annie interrupted, “Let me get the lights. There is someone I want you to meet. Let me introduce you to my cousin.”
She flipped the switch on the wall.
In the lighted living room stood Pat McGill.
CHAPTER 47
“Pat! What are you doing here? What’s she talking about?”
McGill looked grim. “I told you about her in the car on the way down here. I have a cousin in Savannah, remember?”
“The other day at the site, why didn’t you say something?” His voice trailed off.
“You didn’t need to know,” McGill replied.
“A man’s been chasing me … he did this.” He opened his jacket to show his blood-soaked shirt.
“They got Beth. A woman called me on my cell phone and … she … said …”
He turned and looked at Annie. Another wave of nausea swept over him. He leaned back against the wall to keep from falling.
“Oh my God, you’re Jillian,” he whispered. “Pat, what’s going on here?”
The woman looked at McGill, then at Jake.
“Beth is fine,” she said. “She hasn’t been hurt in any way.”
“I want to see her now,” he said.
McGill looked toward a hallway and said, “Bring her in.”
Beth walked slowly into view, a silenced Beretta held to her head. A huge hand gripped her elbow.
When the man walked into view behind her, Jake saw it was the man who had been chasing him.
His knees buckled and he slid down the wall and sat on the floor. His head was spinning. The room went blurry. Ears ringing. He could make out only shapes and silhouettes.
He heard Beth yelling but couldn’t understand the words. More ringing. Louder. McGill said something but he didn’t understand it either. The pain in his side overwhelmed him. The loss of blood finally caught up to him and the room faded to darkness.
When he regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor with a pillow under his head. His jacket and shirt had been removed. Beth had wiped his knife wound clean and was holding pressure to stop the bleeding.
A wet washcloth was folded and placed on his forehead. He was weak from the loss of blood. He blinked his eyes a couple of times, then he saw Beth.
“Welcome back. That big son of a bitch, Ian, they call him, Ian Collins. He told me that he cut you. It looks deep, I think it’ll need stitches.”
Jake tried to raise his head and look around. He winced. “Try to be still. Here, drink some of this,” she whispered. “Jillian — or Annie — or whoever she is, gave it to me, it’s a lot like Gatorade. It will help. They say they’re trying to figure out what they’re going to do with us. Ian wants to kill us but Pat won’t let him. Ian said some man named Michael knocked him on the head and that’s how you got away from him.”
“He was the man who was in our room the other night,” Jake mumbled. “His last name must be Sullivan. That’s what Ian called him.”
Beth leaned close to Jake’s ear and whispered, “What are we going to do? I’m scared.”