Betrayed

Chapter 12

Thankful to be out of the building at last, Elena walked to her car. She thought she had the information her brother so desperately needed. She had taken a big chance getting it, and she should be relieved to have accomplished her mission. But as she unlocked the vehicle, she couldn’t help having second thoughts. Could she really drive back to her apartment and turn over something so vital that a man had been killed because of it?

She’d gone to Arnold Blake’s office to get the information. Then she’d had a confrontation with a security guard. And now she was feeling sick to her stomach. Not only because she’d almost gotten caught. Something Alesandro had said was rattling around in her mind, and now she understood the implications. If Blake had been holding the information, nobody had done anything with it yet. But if it came on the market from another company, someone was going to be blamed. And S&D security would remember this incident.

And now that she was thinking straight, the idea of stealing from Lincoln Kinkead made her sick. He’d always been straight with her. He’d given her a good job with good possibilities for advancement, and she couldn’t knife him in the back.

She pulled her phone out of her purse and called her home number. The phone rang, and she thought Alesandro wasn’t going to pick it up. But finally after five rings he did.

“Do you have it?” he asked immediately.

“I think so.”

“Then bring it to me.”

The words were hard to speak, but she said, “I can’t.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I can’t do it. You’d better get out of my apartment and find somewhere to hide until I figure out what to do.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Shane Gallagher.”

“That guy I met?”

“Yes.”

“You puta!” he screamed at her.

“That’s what you think—that I’m a whore?”

“When you’re killing me. I need that information. I need it to be safe.”

“I’m sorry,” she said and hung up because she couldn’t stand the fear in his voice or her disgust with him. Or with herself. Alesandro had gotten her to do something she never would have done on her own. Not in a million years, and now she had to put it right.

Instead of heading home, she used her phone to find Shane Gallagher’s address and drove to his apartment building.

Shane was relaxing in his boxers, sitting at his computer when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was Lincoln Kinkead. He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. What did the head of S&D want at this hour?

“Something wrong?” Shane asked.

“There may have been a breach of security tonight.”

“What happened?”

“One of the security cameras went offline, and when it came back on, Elena Reyes was coming out of the ladies’ room on the IT floor. There’s no record of what she was doing before that.”

“Shit.”

“Indeed.”

“I’ll be right over.” He clicked off the phone and charged into the bedroom where he grabbed a pair of jeans and a shirt. After putting them on, he pulled on socks and shoved his feet into running shoes. He was just heading back to the front of the apartment when someone knocked at the door, and he stopped short.

His Sig was in his desk drawer. He got it out and took it with him to the door. When he looked through the spy hole, he saw Elena Reyes, of all people. She was the reason Kinkead had called, and now here she was. But why? She was standing stock-still, but with the distorted image of the fish-eye lens, it was impossible to read her expression.

“Elena?” he called out to see her reaction.

She jumped.

Pulling the door open, he found her standing in the hallway, looking pale and upset—and also with an expression he hadn’t seen on her face before. He decided it was steely determination.

He’d just been talking to Kinkead about what she might have been doing in the building. Strange that she was standing at his door looking like she was in the middle of a mess. But maybe the lunch and dinner and helping her after her car broke down had made her trust him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, apparently having second thoughts about this midnight visit. “Maybe I shouldn’t get you involved.”

“But you’re here now, and you must have had a reason. Come in.”

When she stepped into the apartment, he closed the door and turned the lock, making her jump.

“Something bad happened,” she whispered, reaching out to touch his arm.

“Okay.”

She didn’t continue, only stood in the short hallway looking sick.

Unwilling to let her back away from her mission, he prompted, “Something bad happened?”

“My brother…”

“The guy I met at your apartment?”

“Yes. He said they were going to kill him. That’s why…” Her voice trailed off.

He ignored the last part and asked, “Who?”

“Bad men.”

“Can you be more specific?” he asked, wishing she would just lay it all out.

She swallowed hard. “He said he had done some work for them. Then they must have found out about me. That I worked at S&D. They beat him up, and he came to me. He said there was something I could do—to save his life.”

When she stopped short again, he kept his face hard. “That isn’t making a lot of sense. How were you supposed to save his life?”

“He said Arnold Blake had stolen something from S&D, but he hadn’t given it to the men. He was holding out for more money, only they killed him when they were…questioning him.”

Shane thought back over the events at S&D. Everything she was saying could be true. “And what—exactly—is your involvement?”

“My brother sent me into the building to search Arnold’s office. And I’m pretty sure I found what he wanted me to get.” She gulped. “But I didn’t take it to my brother. I came here instead.”

He pinned her with his gaze. “Why not?”

She raised one shoulder. “I couldn’t…”

“What did you find?” he demanded.

“A phone in his desk.”

Shane snorted. “And that’s supposed to prove anything?”

“Why would he leave it there? You don’t leave your phone at work, do you? And if you were going to steal something and keep it around, maybe you’d hide it in plain sight. Like in that Edgar Allan Poe story I read in school.” She snapped her fingers. “Wasn’t it called ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

She kept talking, giving him reasons why she thought the information her brother had asked her to get was hidden in the instrument. And as she spoke, what she was saying began to make sense. That was interesting, because Shane had ordered Blake’s office left the way it was—as a trap. In case someone went there looking for whatever Blake had presumably stolen.

“In his emails Blake specifically told you to phone him? And he called his game SIMon Sez? With the first part of ‘Simon’ capitalized?”

She nodded.

He hit her with a fast question. “Were the two of you into something illegal together?”

“No! Would I be here if that were true?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “You could be trying to throw me off the track after you got caught in the building.”

Panic bloomed on her face. “I thought you could help me. I guess I was wrong.”

She had just finished speaking when a knock sounded at the door.

Both of them went rigid.

“Who is it?” Shane called.

“S&D security.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We have reason to believe you are sheltering Elena Reyes, and we want her for questioning.”

Shane thought about that. Kinkead had asked Shane to come in, not hold her at his apartment. And how would Kinkead even know she was here?

“Hold up your identification.”

The demand was greeted by several low pops as holes appeared in the door, inches from where they were standing.

Bullets from a gun with a silencer.

Shane pulled Elena back and around the corner moments before the door burst open and two men rushed in. Pulling his gun, Shane got off a shot in their direction, making them dodge and giving himself a moment to consider what to do. He wondered if the neighbors would call in the incident to the cops. Or would they figure they were just hearing a loud television shoot-’em-up show?

But he couldn’t count on the police coming to the rescue. That meant he was in a very awkward position, caught between goons with guns and a woman he didn’t trust.

He already knew she’d done something unethical, if not strictly illegal. But she’d apparently had second and maybe third thoughts and come to him instead of bringing the phone to her brother. That seemed to count in her favor, but it could be a ploy to get herself out of trouble.

Taking a considerable chance, he decided to trust her—for the moment.

When he turned to her, he saw she was thinking she’d gotten herself into more trouble than she’d bargained for.

“Too bad I didn’t bring my climbing equipment home.”

She nodded.

“There’s a back way out of the apartment,” he said. “The kitchen door. Lucky for us, it’s around the corner from the main entrance here.” He gestured toward the door where the thugs had crashed inside. “And it opens into the hallway near the stairwell. You go out that way and down to the garage—on the level below the lobby. You know my car, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s in space 52 about halfway from the stairs to the main door.” He sighed as he fished his keys out of his pocket and handed them to her. “Drive it up to the stairwell door, and wait for me.”

“And you’ll come right after me?”

“As fast as I can.”

He was trying to get her to safety. But was it safe to send her into the hall at all? Did the gunmen know about the back exit? Or had they come here on the spur of the moment without any preparation?

He risked darting back to the kitchen, opening the door a crack, and looking out into the corridor. “All clear. Go. The stairs are to the left.”

He saw the fear, but also the determination in her eyes as she followed his directions.

Movement in the apartment’s front hall had him rushing back and getting off a shot as one of the gunmen came around the corner. But Shane couldn’t keep shooting at them. Shots inside the building were eventually going to attract attention, and if one of the residents came to investigate, they could get hurt.

He had to give Elena time to get downstairs. Looking around for a way to keep the bastards busy, he spied the metal office trash can that he’d left by the back door when he’d taken out the rubbish.

Working quickly, he snatched up two dish towels and dribbled water onto them from the faucet before stuffing them into the can. Then he set a wad of paper towels in on top of them and lit the towels with a match from the box he kept in one of the kitchen drawers. The paper flared up, but when the fire burned down to the dish towels, they started smoldering and giving off smoke instead of more open flames. Excellent. Because his aim wasn’t to set the apartment building on fire.

From inside the kitchen, he used a broom handle to push the smoking can toward the front door, coughing as he inhaled some of the fumes. He gave it a shove, and it scooted across the floor toward the front of the apartment where he could hear the other guys coughing, too.

“What the hell?” he heard one exclaim.

“Get out if you don’t want to get fried,” he shouted back.

Then he ducked out the kitchen door and quietly crossed the hall, following the route Elena had taken. When he was in the stairwell, he started running, taking the steps as fast as he could without tripping over his own feet. With a sigh of relief, he reached the garage level and snatched open the door.

In a hurry to catch up with Elena, he burst into the open area, then stopped dead when he saw a man grab her and hustle her into the backseat of a vehicle.