All He Has Left(18)

Then one of the men turned and put his eyes directly on Jake.





ELEVEN


Jake spun around, hoping the guy in the dark windbreaker hadn’t recognized him because of his ski cap and glasses, and began to quickly move toward the back of the bar again. His heart was hammering in his chest. If the guy still had eyes on him, where would Jake go? He peered up ahead. It looked like his only option was to hit the kitchen and try to find a back door into the alley behind the strip of buildings. He slipped through a big group of people standing around a table. As he did, Jake cast a quick look over his shoulder and cursed again. Both of the men in windbreakers were fully locked in on him and now making their way through the crowd in his direction. They knew it was him. It was no longer time for Jake to be casual about this—it was time to run like hell.

Jake bolted for the kitchen. Pushing through a swivel door, he nearly collided with a waitress coming from the other direction with a tray full of food. Jake swerved, ducked under the tray, lost his footing, and then slid on the slick kitchen floor into a wall with a crash. Everyone in the hot and loud kitchen turned to stare at the unexpected interruption. Jake pushed himself up, his eyes searching in all directions, looking for the exit. He spotted a hallway over to his right and scrambled for it. Inside the hallway, Jake reached up and pulled down a large row of metal shelves behind him. Various dishes and boxes crashed down everywhere. He hoped it would buy him precious extra seconds. He could now hear shouting going on back in the kitchen. A man clearly yelled out, “FBI!”

Pushing through the back door, Jake stumbled out into a dark alley. There were several dirty metal dumpsters directly in front of him, pressed up against an adjacent brick building that was connected to a multilevel parking garage. Jake wondered if there was some way to block the back door to the bar but couldn’t find anything to do the trick. Because BBG’s was in the middle of the strip of buildings, Jake had about the same distance to make it to either side street. He chose left and took off running again. But he got only a few feet in that direction before a man in a similar windbreaker appeared in the alley up ahead of him. Jake skidded to a sudden stop when he saw the man reach down to his side and pull something out. Was it a gun? He wasn’t going to get close enough to find that out. Pivoting, Jake took off in the opposite direction.

As he passed by the back door of BBG’s again, he heard it swing open behind him. The other two guys were going to be close on his heels now. Jake was about fifty feet from the next side street when yet another person appeared. Same dark windbreaker. But this was a woman. And not just any woman. Jake stopped, stared, completely stunned. Dani?

He knew her face so well, even if it had aged slightly. He would still dream about her sometimes and had often wondered how life might have turned out if he’d chosen differently. But seeing Dani standing there in front of him in this moment with a gun held at her side was surreal. Jake felt trapped. But he noticed she never raised her gun. He looked over to his left, where the parking garage butted up against the adjacent building. Entry into the parking garage from the alley was completely blocked by chain-link fencing. Jake spotted one corner of the fence that had been peeled back.

Without thinking twice, he rushed over to the fence, dropped to his knees, and began to squeeze his way headfirst through the tight opening. He could feel the metal wiring scrape down his entire body as he wriggled himself all the way through. A second later, Jake was into the parking-garage level. He hit the floor in a full sprint. The FBI agents were yelling at him to stop. Not wanting to give them the chance to shoot, Jake ducked behind a row of parked cars, kept his head low, and basically crab-walked as fast as he could toward an exit on the opposite side of the garage. He knew one thing for sure. Like earlier when he’d run, he couldn’t stay out in the open for long. There was no way for him to outrun radio signals—especially when dealing with the FBI. They might already have a drone or something else flying overhead.

Rushing out of the parking garage, Jake found his way onto another sidewalk. While the bigger crowds were back on Sixth Street, there were still plenty of people meandering about on Seventh and making their way in that direction. Jake darted to his left, trying not to run so fast that he drew suspicious looks, searching everywhere for a way to disappear. He spotted a taxi parked on the curb up ahead of him. He considered it for a moment but didn’t trust that the driver would adequately speed away. Jake couldn’t risk that. Still, he had to do something quick. The FBI agents would be on him any second.

Cutting across the street, Jake hopped up onto the opposite sidewalk and hustled toward another alley. For now, he would just keep running, alley to alley, staying in the city shadows as much as possible. He was surprised he did not hear police sirens nearby. Was the FBI acting alone? Jake found his way onto Eighth Street and was about to duck into yet another dark alley when he noticed something up ahead of him. Part of the sidewalk was sectioned off by construction barriers. A truck labeled City of Austin Watershed Protection Department was parked on the curb right next to the barriers. It looked like there was an open manhole in the sidewalk. There were no workers standing around. Jake thought he spotted a guy inside the truck, talking on the phone. This would certainly be off the grid. But where the hell would the city’s underground drainage system take him?

There was only one way to find out. Jake slipped around the barriers and then carefully crawled down the manhole on a steel ladder before finally setting foot onto wet concrete inside a drainage tunnel about five feet deep. Pulling his phone out, he turned on the flashlight. He stood in a couple of inches of brown water that looked to be moving to his left. Using his phone to guide him, Jake followed the water’s path while staying hunched over the entire time to keep from banging his head up against the ceiling of the tunnel. He tried not to think about how claustrophobic he suddenly felt while being trapped inside this tunnel. Instead, he focused on getting to Piper. That kept his feet moving forward.