Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(107)

He turned his gun toward me. I ducked, then heard a grunt and watched him rock to the side; Justin, down but not out, had kicked him in the side of the kneecap.

“Door!” my husband yelled again.

Then I got it. We were trapped. In a space this small, Mick would mow us down in a matter of seconds. Escape back into the prison, where we could get out or at least spread out, was our only chance at survival.

I bobbed up, ducking my head as I frantically stabbed at the touch screen, willing myself to stumble upon the door controls. We’d been in the security menu. I’d seen a door lock override. Where, where, where…

Another shot. Two, three, four. My shoulders hunched reflexively and I practically felt the whistle of the last bullet as it whizzed by my ear.

Then my daughter was suddenly standing, her eyes wild, her long hair a tangled mass as she heaved up a rolling desk chair and threw it at Mick with all her strength.

“I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I f*cking hate you.”

A second desk chair went flying and now Mick was ducking for cover, swearing as he tangled briefly in one set of rolling chair legs, went down, tried to recover, got nailed by Justin again in the kneecaps and landed hard.

There! Override. I jabbed at the bright red button. “Are you sure?” a dialogue box squawked at me. Override releases all inner and outer doors…

Override, override, override! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Ashlyn had found the walkie-talkies. A dozen had sat in a neat row of charging stations around the outer perimeter. Now she turned them into missiles, humming them one after another at the top of Mick’s head. He cursed again, pinned behind the control desk by her relentless assault.

The control room door swung open just as Ashlyn hurled the last walkie-talkie. I couldn’t see Justin, but I heard his voice, commanding clearly:

“Run, goddammit. Get her out of here!”

I didn’t need to be told twice. We had our deal, parent to parent. Either one of us was expendable. It was Ashlyn who mattered.

I grabbed my daughter’s hand and pulled her from the control room.

While behind us, Mick once again opened fire.


WYATT HIT THE CREST OF THE HILL HARD. Briefly, the cruiser was airborne, and in that moment, Tessa spotted it. A vast compound at least ten miles away, perched up on a knoll, dominated by a large, obviously institutional building, and surrounded by miles and miles of razor-wire fencing.

The cruiser landed. They both grunted on impact. Then Wyatt was fishtailing back down the dirt road, hurtling them out of the woods, onto pavement. A hard right, and they were headed north, flying up a newly paved road as trees blurred into a long green tunnel around them.

“That’s huge!” Tessa exclaimed. “How will we find them?”

“Follow the sound of gunshots. You wearing a vest?”

“Yes.”

The whole team had donned them at two thirty. Expecting that the call might lead to action, and while you hoped for the best, a good cop always planned for the worst.

Tessa couldn’t help but think of Sophie, her daughter, who’d already lost a parent. And then, her daughter’s own prophecy, Look for them in a cold, dark place. What could be colder and darker than a mothballed prison?

As Sophie had said, Ashlyn needed her. The whole family needed her.

“I want the shotgun,” Tessa said.

Wyatt flattened the accelerator to the floor, and once again, they shot forward.


WE CLEARED THE CONTROL ROOM into the main corridor.

“Dad,” Ashlyn gasped, her hand still clasped in mine.

“Out, out, we need out.”

“Dad!” My daughter actually dug in her heels, tried to halt our progress.

I whirled on her, my expression so fierce, or maybe just so insane, my daughter gasped. “You forget him, Ashlyn Denbe. You forget me, too, if it comes to that. You get out of here. This is your last order, the one instruction I want you to remember. You survive. Your parents demand it of you.”

“Mom—”

“Shut up, child. He’s coming. Now run!”

She did, straight down the hall toward the outer doors. I’d like to say Ashlyn was motivated by my speech, but far more likely, she was spooked by Mick’s inhuman roar as he finally cleared the control room, staggered into the hallway and turned toward us.

I had a brief image. A huge pumped-up bear of a man with blood streaming down one half of his face where some of Ashlyn’s missiles had found their mark. He was clad all in black, covered in some kind of vest that virtually sprouted guns and ammo. And a knife. Strapped to his outer thigh. A huge, gleaming hunting knife that I could already tell he’d love nothing better than to use to gut me.

He leveled the gun first. Aimed it straight at me while I stood, still rooted in place. He pulled the trigger. Forty feet back, an easy distance for a man of his training and marksmanship. The gun clicked empty.

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled at the irony.

Then, Mick threw the gun to the side and charged.

I ran, following my daughter’s lead to the front doors. If we could just get outside, so many places for cover. And the police had to know. They’d been on the phone, they had to have seen something, heard everything. They’d be coming.

If we could just get outside.

Ashlyn hit the double-glass doors first. She was running so hard, the doors parted like water before a diver. I spotted a thin seam of brighter daylight, then she was through.