Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(106)

I hated them. Intensely. Virulently. Which, perversely, made me want to see them. Turnabout is fair play. If they’d once been able to study us like animals in a zoo, well, we had the control now. And there was nothing in Z’s terms that said we couldn’t monitor them.

I bent over, and while my husband cursed out some FBI agent for not having magically done exactly what he’d told her to do exactly when he’d demanded that she do it, I started powering up control screens and exploring the surveillance options.

“Mom?” Ashlyn appeared beside me.

“Just kicking the tires, honey. Now, if we wanted to see the view from the cameras outside the prison, which buttons would you hit?”

Ashlyn leaned around me, tapped the control screen where a white button indicated security and we both studied the menu that came up next.

The screen had a clock in the lower right-hand corner. It read 3:09. Two minutes till our captors gave up and launched a counterattack. Possibly even blew us up, as Justin was alleging.

I didn’t think Z would take out the room. He struck me as the kind of man who’d neatly eliminate the door. That way he could march through the smoking rubble, pull out a Glock 10 and tend to the rest of his business up close and personal. Waste less ammo.

On the monitor, a white van suddenly came into view. Growing larger and larger until it nearly filled the screen. I found myself staring at Radar, sitting behind the wheel. He was not looking up at the camera, no doubt mounted above the prison’s intake door, but was looking toward the passenger’s side, as if expecting someone.

Picking up. He was picking up Z and Mick, his cocaptors.

But he was supposed to be on the roof. Armed to the teeth and ready to fire upon first responders.

Unless the money had been paid. Wired straight into the account. Justin had been right: Rich men had nine million more reasons to make a quick getaway than poor men.

The clock on the bottom of the screen hit 3:10.

Radar, holding up his phone, saying something I couldn’t hear to a person I couldn’t see.

My gaze, flying up to find Justin. “Did they pay? Is it okay, did the insurance company pay?”

Justin, into the phone: “Have the funds been received? It’s three eleven, tell me the funds have been received?”

The FBI agent, her voice as crisp and authoritative as ever: “Justin, I have word that the money is being transferred right now.”

Radar, still studying his phone, hitting some buttons. Talking to the person I couldn’t see.

“Justin, the funds have been delivered. Can you please advise us as to your location? We have officers standing by for the safe recovery of your family.”

“Mom!” Ashlyn cried, clutching my arm, bouncing even higher at the news. We were safe, funds received, we were safe, the police would be on their way.

Justin, sounding abruptly tired, as if the good news had taken more out of him than our impending deaths: “We are currently at the new state prison. Located—”

Boom!

I turned toward the control room door, breath already catching. Expecting to spot Z, striding through the smoke and rubble like the Terminator, ready to mow down all the officers in the police station, or, in our case, a helpless family stuck in a control room.

The locked door was intact, the bank of barred windows intact. No Z. No smoking rubble.

“Mom!” My daughter, yanking on my arm as she screamed hysterically.

I turned back just in time to see Mick come barreling out of the door I’d assumed was a supply closet. He was grinning madly and, true to Z’s words, was armed to the teeth.

“Miss me?” he called out.

Then he leveled his semiauto, and while we stood there, the proverbial fish in a barrel, he opened fire.


WHILE WYATT DROVE, Tessa worked the phone. She got Chris Lopez on the line, demanding to know anything and everything he could tell them about the state prison Denbe Construction had built in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Surrounded by six hundred acres of mountains, marshes and deep wilderness. Closest town twenty miles away. Nearest PD even slightly beyond that. A facility so remote it was set up to house its own security team, except given that the prison was never funded, those barracks remained empty.

Help wasn’t anywhere close. Looking at fifteen to twenty minutes ETA for first responders.

While the police radio crackled to life with fresh reports. Sound of shots fired coming over Justin Denbe’s cell phone. Sound of female screaming. Call now dropped, unable to reconnect with the Denbe family.

“Drive faster,” Tessa ordered Wyatt.

“Now see, this is why you should hang out with sheriffs. We not only know how to drive faster, but we can also drive smarter.”

Abruptly, Wyatt swung the vehicle left. They careened onto a dirt path Tessa would’ve sworn was a deer trail. She grabbed the oh shit handle just as he hit the gas.

The cruiser launched, then settled into a bone-crunching gallop.

“In the state of New Hampshire, the shortest distance between two points is rarely paved. But if you know where to look, you can almost find a dirt road. Ten minutes,” he announced. “Ten more minutes, then we’ll have the prison in our sight.”


“THE DOOR,” Justin was yelling. “The door, the door, the door!”

At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Justin had gone down, the first shot from Mick’s gun dropping him like a rock, red blooming across his shoulder. Ashlyn had screamed, then instinctively dove behind me, leaving me standing alone, on one side of the vast control desk, Mick, still grinning madly, on the other.