‘Excuse me, ma’am…’ one started and she ignored him, heading for the red glow of an exit sign.
‘Hey!’ the chef yelled again, petulant as a toddler. ‘You can’t barge in here…’
She turned back to the chef, put the phone down for a second. ‘My ex is in the lobby. I have a restraining order against him. Excuse me.’
The chef started to apologize, conciliation in his voice, but she didn’t wait. She hit the door. A hallway, another exit sign at the end. She ran through that door into the cloud-broken light of Houston winter, the narrow lot behind the hotel empty except for valet slots lining the back lot, the hum of traffic from 610 like a ghost whispering in her ear. Next to the lot sat an office building, a squat crystal of green glass, ten stories high, and beyond it a concrete parking garage. Deserted on a Saturday. Then an Italian restaurant with a gargantuan neon sign, then a steakhouse, both lots a third full.
And then the Cadillac wheeled around the back of the lot, thundering for her.
Eve turned and ran, skimming the back of the hotel, aiming for a loading bay at the far corner of the hotel. She jammed her hand deep in her purse, closed her fingers around her Beretta. She turned to fire but the car was now seven feet behind her, slamming brakes, and she went across the hood, the windshield, the air in her lungs whooshing out. With a gasp she fell off the Caddy, the asphalt biting into her face and palms.
A car door creaked open by her head.
‘Nice braking, man,’ a voice above her said. Jamaican accent. She scrabbled to her feet; her ribs, her legs thrummed as if on fire. Her gun and phone were gone. Dropped.
‘Eve Michaels,’ the Jamaican said. He smashed a pistol across her head. She hit the pavement again, blood trickling along her cheek. The Jamaican picked her up, handcuffed her, shoved her in the car.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ A gravelly male voice, not Jamaican, yelled. ‘Waste her and let’s-’
Then the distinctive double pop of a silencer. Eve waited to draw breath, wondering if the passing from life to death was truly so instant and painless that you didn’t realize it had happened. But she still needed to breathe. She did. A car door popped open, and she heard the dull thud of dead weight hitting the pavement. Then the car started.
She risked a glance upward. The Jamaican, in the driver’s seat, leveled her own gun at her.
‘Eve,’ he said. ‘You see how it is? That guy wanted to hurt you. I killed him. Makes me your friend.’
She put her head down on the backseat.
If she raised her head, Whit might see her. He would be heading back to the hotel. He’d chase them, get himself killed. Stupid kid.
Just let him go. Stay down and keep him out of it. Do the right thing for once in your life, Ellie. She thought of him as a baby, her easiest because he was the last and she was too tired to worry about every little cough or scrape. She sure hadn’t wanted another but here he came, her best. The only person ever in her life to truly come looking for her. Like she mattered.
‘Here are the rules,’ the Jamaican said as he made two sharp turns to the right, ignoring car horns pealing behind him, heading onto Westheimer, then onto the frontage road of Loop 610. ‘You stay down. You get up, I shoot off a finger. Get up again, I shoot off a tit. Clear?’
‘Clear,’ she said thickly. Her head hurt like it’d been cut open and the brains rearranged. ‘I won’t make trouble.’
‘Good call. Hey, you want a stick of gum? Lots of spare spearmint up here.’ The Jamaican gave a little laugh.
Eve closed her eyes. Let me go, Whit. Let me go, baby.
33
Whit spun Gooch’s van in a screeching U-turn back toward the hotel. A Ford truck, a Lexus, a Blazer, and a Jag passed him, and in his rearview the Jag spun, following him again, and he spotted the license plate. BLEEV.
Bucks. So much for a separate peace.
Whit floored the van down Westheimer, dodging around slower-moving cars. Cars honked at him and in the rearview mirror the Jag closed on him. Two men in it. Bucks driving. A guy he didn’t know, who looked like an accountant, balding, glasses.
Caught between the wolves hunting his mother at the hotel and Bucks. Lose them first, tell Eve where to meet him, or grab Eve then try and lose them? The wrong choice could mean death. In less than a minute.
On the phone he heard his mother scream.
He headed for the hotel, the steering wheel in a death grip. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty, veering hard around a truck.
Whit tore into the porte cochere at the Greystoke Hotel at thirty miles an hour. He sent one valet diving for safety. Whit nearly clipped a Porsche roadster, smashed an ornate potted fern, spraying the fragments across the flagstones. Screams and angry yells echoed behind him. He sped around the hotel’s corner, then around it again into the back lot. The Jag hadn’t pulled in after him. Waiting for him to pull out. Or blocking the exit around the other side of the hotel. A body lay before him in the parking lot.
Oh, God, no, he thought. But it was a man, not his mother, and he pulled up and leaned out to look. A man he didn’t know, two daubs of blood on his forehead, eyes wide and staring, mouth open, a grayish wad of gum on the lips like a withered tongue.
His mother’s red phone a foot from the guy, the screen broken and battered. The hat she’d worn atop her wig next to it. He opened his door, scooped up her phone and hat, stood by the car for a tense eternity.
‘Eve!’ he yelled. ‘Eve!’ Then, ‘Mom!’
Nothing. Him parked by a dead man, anyone could come around in a minute and see him with the corpse. He got back in the van and waited. Thirty seconds passed. She wasn’t here.
The Jag edged around the building, now behind him. No choice. He floored the van, swerved onto the narrow alley feeder that led back onto Westheimer, nearly side-swiping a parked truck, driving past the turn-in for the valet parking, the Jag revving hard, now near enough to ram him.
Pings sounded against the van’s back door and his driver’s side mirror broke. Shooting at him. He couldn’t outrun them, not in the van.
Whit ripped through a red light, barely missing an old Chevy pickup, and rocketed up the entrance ramp onto Loop 610, the vast highway that circled the heart of Houston. In the rearview mirror a man, the bookish one, leaned out of the Jag’s passenger window and emptied a rifle toward Whit, the cars around him braking and peeling away, drivers suddenly caught in a war zone. Whit jerked, as though he were hit, and the Jag slowed. A pickup truck and a Lexus SUV arced away from him, slamming into each other, spinning, barely holding onto the road, a Cavalier’s driver standing on his brakes, rear-ending the Lexus. Cars stopped, trying to pull over out of harm’s way, other drivers scrambling past them, not knowing about the battle in the lanes ahead.
Then Whit saw a patch of empty lane, spun the wheel with all his strength, prayed the van wouldn’t roll. The van turned 180 degrees, the burnt smell of smoking rubber and strained engine thickening the air.
He was now facing against traffic on a Houston highway, a suicide drive, and he slammed his foot on the accelerator. Straight at the Jag, stopped by the other collisions.
He saw Bucks’ face, the mouth working in shock, saying you crazy motherfucker.
The bookish guy opened his mouth in a scream, ducked back into the car, struggling to pull the rifle through the window. Whit stopped by the driver’s side, had his gun out and aimed at Bucks’ head.
‘Where is she?’ he screamed. ‘Tell me or I’ll kill you!’
Bucks wriggled, trying to get out of the line of fire and Whit thought shoot him. But he didn’t. A car missed the van by inches and he would die if he sat here, more traffic coming over the rise from 610 out of Bellaire.