Lucky Thirteen (13 page)

I was musing over my lack of progress on the cases when I noticed the BMW that had pulled away from the curb behind me was still following. I pulled off the freeway and the BMW followed. Coming to a stop by the side of the road, I stepped out of my car and began to walk back to the BMW, which was stopped several yards behind me. Dark clouds hovered overhead adding to the ominous mood of the encounter. Just before I made it to the BMW, it screeched away from the curb, barely missing me, and rapidly disappeared into the distance. As it passed, I was able to make out the fact that a man in a black leather jacket and sunglasses was driving. I walked back to my car and drove back onto the freeway.

During my drive to the coast I saw neither hide nor hair of the black BMW. The sky had become decidedly cloudy and it looked as if the weather was about to get ugly. After parking the rental car, I looked around the lot before entering the hotel. It had begun raining, hard, and the wind was beginning to blow. Once inside the hotel, I headed directly for my room in the hope that I would find Alex waiting for me. At that moment, I didn’t want to be alone.

The moment I opened the door I heard Alex having a one-sided argument with someone. I stepped further into the room to find him having a heated conversation on his cell phone. I began to say something and he raised a cautionary finger to stop me.

“I don’t know where he is, I haven’t seen him all day. All I know is that you’d better find him and find him fast!”

Alex slapped his clamshell cell phone closed to end the call. I walked over to him and he opened his arms to give me a hug.

“Alex, what’s the matter?” I asked, laying my cheek against his warm chest.

“We’ve had a break-in to the computer records database. My security program indicates that someone posing as the system administrator downloaded all the credit card records for the hotel, this after we’d only been operational for four hours. The hotel administrators are furious and I can’t find Mark.”

“You don’t suspect that he had anything to do with the theft, do you?”

“It was either him or me. We hadn’t handed the passwords to the computer system over to the hotel computer room staff yet.”

“They don’t suspect you, do they?”

“They suspect everyone,” Alex said, releasing me and grabbing his coat off the back of a chair. “Right now, I need to go smooth some ruffled feathers, then I need to find Mark Halifax as soon as possible.”

Alex turned back to give me a kiss on the cheek. He flashed me a sorry excuse for a smile before racing from the room. I was about to run after him and offer to help when the telephone rang. I decided that I’d better answer it in case it was Mark.

“Hello?”

“Is this Chloe Boston speaking?” a woman asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“We have a fax waiting for you downstairs at the reception desk.”

Oh yeah, the fax from Bryce. I’d nearly forgotten.

“I’ll be right down to pick it up,” I assured the receptionist.

I took the elevator to the lobby and made my way to the receptionist’s desk. I waited impatiently for someone to serve me and then spoke much too harshly.

“I’m Chloe Boston. I understand that you have a fax waiting for me,” I said.

“Hold on, let me check,” said the woman behind the counter.

Let me check? I thought. What gives? You just called me, I wanted to say. The woman was gone only a moment before she returned to the counter carrying two sheets of paper.

“May I see some form of ID, please,” she said.

I showed her my driver’s license and she handed me the papers and walked away. The top page was a standard fax cover sheet addressing the fax to yours truly. The second page showed a clear black and white picture of Mark Halifax.

“Hello, Chloe,” I heard a familiar face say from behind.

I turned to face Mark Halifax in person. I dropped the hand which was holding the fax of his picture to my side. Mark was smiling at me and wearing a black leather jacket with a pair of sunglasses pushed up onto the top of his head. I wanted to strike him. Instead, I turned back to the counter in desperation.

“Excuse me, miss!” I called to the receptionist who had just walked away.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he warned. “Things could end up very messy for the both of us.”

I turned back to see that he had his hand in the pocket of his jacket. I had no doubt that his hand was wrapped around the handle of some form of firearm. I looked him in the eyes, noted he was still smiling, and almost spit into his face.

“Gordon Simms,” I said in an attempt to wipe the smile off his face.

And it worked.

“How unfortunate that you know that name,” he hissed. “Now, I suggest you come with me.”

I took a step toward the elevators and Simms grabbed hold of my arm, none too gently, and guided me instead toward the front door of the hotel. The wind had kicked up a great deal since I’d been outside. It was raining hard in a diagonal fashion.

“Sir, I wouldn’t go out there right now if I were you,” a bellhop warned.

“Don’t worry about me,” Simms assured the man, continuing to walk me toward the door. “I’ve driven in far worse weather than this.”

We stepped outside and were nearly knocked off our feet by a violent gust of wind. Simms guided me across the parking lot to a black BMW which he beeped from a distance before opening the passenger door and shoving me in. I was already sopping wet and cold. I looked around the interior of the vehicle in the hope of finding something to strike Simms with the moment he slid into the driver’s seat. I found no suitable bludgeon other than a portable computer sitting on the backseat. I realized that this computer probably held the data that had been stolen from the hotel computer, but before I could reach back to grab it, Simms was in his seat with a black automatic pistol fully exposed.

“Suppose we take a little drive,” Simms suggested, starting the car with his free hand and backing out of the parking space.

With the wind and rain buffeting the car, Simms drove from the parking lot and pulled onto the freeway headed out of town. He drove slowly, as did the few other vehicles on the freeway, since visibility was almost nonexistent. As he drove, he kept the gun and a wary eye on me the whole time. I gazed out hopelessly into the oncoming storm realizing that I had to act soon if I was going to stay alive to see nightfall.

We drove in silence away from the beach resorts and back into the country. Simms insisted that I unbuckle my fanny pack and throw it into the backseat of his car, most likely to ensure that I was unarmed. The whole time we drove I wracked my brain for some means of getting out of the vehicle alive; or better yet, wrestling control of the vehicle from Simms and kicking him out onto the roadway. I determined that the first step in any plan I was likely to devise would have to begin with distracting my kidnapper using my renowned gift for gab.

“Is it mere coincidence that the man behind the doping of Soft Spoken Hal, the murder of Herman Lutz, and the kidnapping of Miss Hightower is also the man responsible for stealing the financial records from the Century Ambassador Hotel?”

“Chloe, you’ll never know how surprised I was the night I was invited by Alex to have dinner with you at the Hightower mansion,” Simms confided. “But I’m afraid you have it at least partially wrong. I have no idea where our hostess, Miss Hightower, has been squirreled away.”

“But you admit to murdering Lutz?”

“What does it matter? Do you really think that you’re going to get away from me to tell your story to anyone?”

Actually, that’s exactly what I was thinking. So far during our conversation, the pistol aimed at my heart hadn’t moved one inch. I did notice that Simms
was having
to pay a great deal of attention to the road to maintain his excessive rate of speed. I viewed that as a possible advantage as I prepared to act. Perhaps I was suffering from a kind of insanity, but I was not feeling fear so much as growing rage.

“So, you plan on murdering me as well?”

“What do you think?”

I thought that I had no choice but to act, and act now. As a particularly heavy downpour of rain all but obscured vision out the windshield, I tensed my muscles and secured my feet against the floorboards. In two quick motions, I slapped the pistol away and grabbed for the steering wheel. The pistol went off, producing a deafening roar within the confined space. I felt no immediate impact or pain so assumed the bullet had missed me. While Simms and I struggled for control of the vehicle, I felt the tires of the car leave the roadway.

I didn’t see the accident, but I definitely felt the concussive impact as the BMW collided with some stationary object just off the road. All the loose items in the vehicle became airborne as did the bodies of Simms and myself. I collided with the airbag as it deployed, but still the impact was jarring. Simms was pinned behind the airbag that deployed out of the steering wheel which caused all the air to be expelled from his lungs. I sat in my seat for a moment gathering my senses as the airbag deflated and I felt a warm trickle of blood run down my forehead. I looked down into my lap to see that the laptop from the backseat had somehow managed to land right in my lap. Shaking my head to clear it, I grabbed for the door handle and was out of the car faster than you can say boo.

The storm outside was now at full force. I lowered my head and ran for the trees that I could barely see through the rainfall. I assumed that if I could lose myself in the forest Simms would be unable to follow. I ran with the laptop held out in front of me to prevent the tree branches from lashing my face. All things considered, I thought I was setting a decent pace until I had to pull up short to catch my breath.

I leaned my back against a particularly large pine tree. I could hear nothing but the raging of the wind and my ragged breaths. I peeked around the tree to see if I’d been followed. I saw nothing, but heard a pistol shot and the sound of a bullet burrowing its way into my cover. Barely having caught my breath, I began to run deeper into the forest. I ran in a straight line, opting for distance from my pursuer rather than trying to avoid further bullets launched in my direction. This time I stopped running not when I was out of breath, but when I felt nothing but air beneath the soles of my sneakers.

I’d come across a deep ravine bisecting the woods.

Tumbling down a steep bank of mud, I struggled for a foothold but didn’t stop my descent until I was
lying
face first in the raging waters of what had once no doubt been a peacefully running stream. I fought to push my face up above the waterline to catch a breath. When I rolled out of the worst of the torrent, I was surprised to find that I was still holding onto the now battered and sopping laptop. Part of me wanted to give it up as hopeless, but Alex has been able to recover information off of badly damaged computers before.

Over the sound of the creek I clearly heard footsteps above which prompted me to crawl through the mud and bury myself tight up against the creek’s bank.

Almost sure that I was about to be found and murdered, I tried to slow my breathing and remain still in the hope that I wouldn’t be discovered. The feet above my head continued to crunch through leaves and branches as my pursuer searched for me. Then they sped away back into the woods. I breathed a sigh of relief and wrapped my arms tightly around my body in a futile attempt to fight off the bitter cold that was making me shiver.

After waiting for what I took to be a sufficient period of time, I pushed myself away from the muddy bank of the creek and peeked into the woods. I saw and heard nothing to fear. It took time and effort to climb the stream bank which ate into my patience and energy reserves. It was no use trying to dry off or pulling my drenched shirt closer around my body for warmth. Instead, I trudged further into the woods as the rain continued to beat down on my head.

Eventually I held the laptop over my head to keep the worst of the rain out of my eyes. There was no sign of Simms in the woods. For that I was grateful. Now if I could just find someplace dry and warm to hole up, preferably someplace that served a tasty cheeseburger.

As I walked deeper into the woods, the ground became soggy and the trees gave way to cattails. There was no doubt I was lost. The further I walked the higher the water came until I found that I was wading through water up to my thighs. I was cold and too exhausted to go back and try to find a way around what had obviously now
become a swamp
. Eventually I pulled myself up onto dry land where I took a seat on an old log to rest.

Fortunately, the force of the rain had begun to slacken. It was beginning to get dark. I noticed a log floating in the water toward the bank. I monitored its progress toward shore until I was distracted by a curious itching sensation near my ankle. I rolled up my pant leg to find an ugly black slug attached to my skin. It was a leech which was busily feeding on my blood. Jumping up, I pulled off my sneakers, unbuttoned my jeans, and clumsily kicked them off my legs. There were several more leeches attached to my calves and thighs. In a fit of squeamish desperation, I plucked the leeches from my body and threw them into the bushes. Blood seeped from the wounds where they’d attached themselves, but I succeeded in clearing my body of the nasty little parasites.