Run With Me (23 page)

I don't slow down as I see the
cabin disappear in my wing mirror. Not until I reach the gate that
leads onto the mountain path heading down into Concrete. I pull to a
brief stop at the edge and finally allow myself to breath. Only now
do I realize how much I'm shaking, how fast my heart is pumping. I
take my hands off the wheel and hold them together, trying to calm my
rattling digits. Then I let out what can only be described as a moan
of total fear and relief bundled into one. Tears spill out of my eyes
and I feel my breathing rise to short, sharp bursts. But I'm safe.
I've escaped.

Then I feel a sharp pain in my
right shoulder, followed quickly by a sensation of total calm.
Accompanied with it is a voice, and the sight of a shadow rising
behind me from the backseat.

“
Got you,” growls the man as
he pulls the syringe from my flesh.

I feel no fear now, no sense of
dread. I can do nothing but watch as the world turns black and my
eyelids slide shut.
He got me all right. Time to die now.

Colt

I spend the next few hours
tracking back and forth through the woods, hoping to pick up some
sign, some signal, of Kitty's whereabouts. I move outwards from the
base of the tree where I found the tracker, exploring my way further
into the forest before returning and moving in a different direction.
My blanket search of the immediate area surrounding the tree brings
up no clues, and a sinking feeling begins to labor at my chest.

I call her name now, louder and
louder, my voice growing rough and course. If she'd have heard me,
she'd return at the sound of my voice, and in the quiet of this
secluded wood, my words will travel for miles. I know then, that
she's either left the scene, or is unable to answer. I don't know
whether that means she's incapacitated or dead.

The blood on the low branch of
the tree, and the tracking device, discarded to the mud, are the only
clues I have. She must have lost the tracker, or perhaps it was taken
from her and then thrown to the ground. In that case, surely he'd
have turned it off? Or maybe not. Maybe he forced the truth from her
– that the tracker would draw me near – and so left it there as a
lure? But that makes no sense either. If he wanted to lure me to this
spot to kill me, he'd have been here, waiting. He'd have set a trap
to take me out as soon as I arrived. So, the only logical conclusion
is that he knew nothing of the tracker, which means that Kitty either
put it there herself or lost it.

The only option that seems
viable to me is the latter. She wouldn't have thrown the tracker
away, they'd be no reason for that. So she must have dropped it as
she tried to escape. Perhaps she climbed the tree and it fell from
there? The fact that it was half buried into the soil would suggest
that it hit the earth with some force. Falling from a decent height
up in the tree would certainly be sufficient.

The conclusion I come to fills
me with dread. Either she's escaped from here, or she's been taken.
If the latter, she's as good as dead. If the former, how will I find
her now? How will she find me? And without Dale, without this cabin
as protection, she'll be picked up by the police in no time. Given
the other alternatives, that might be a good thing. It may present me
with some time to take out Carmine while she's safe in their custody.

I return to the cabin to look
for any further clues. Her bag is missing, suggesting she escaped
with it. I see a book lying on the table, one marked with the title
“Last Words.” I open it and see page upon page written by hand,
most likely others who have been here before starting their new
lives. I don't spare it a thought, but check to see if Kitty has
added to it.

She has. I stare for a moment at
the beautiful pencil drawing of her, standing, smiling, outside the
cabin. She's wearing a look on her face that I'm yet to see – a
huge, wide, smile, like she hasn't a care in the world. A hope rises
up in me that I will see her like that one day. Yet it's only a weak
hope.

I shut the book tight and
continue to explore the cabin. Nothing else catches my eye, and I'm
starting to grow desperate. If she's run away, she'll have gone
downhill, back towards Concrete. She has her bag, so she has money,
and with her altered appearance she should be able to move around
slightly more unnoticed somewhere remote like this.

I decide to drive down to the
town and check any motels or lodges she might have decided to rest
in. There are only a couple and neither are any help. In any case,
she's a smart girl and won't stop anywhere so close to the cabin. No,
she'll have most likely tried to get out of town as soon as possible,
especially if she thinks it's too dangerous to wait it out for me to
arrive.

The truth is, she could be
absolutely anywhere by now. I don't know when she left the woods. It
could have been just after she put on the tracker, or just five
minutes before I arrived. The only thing suggesting that her
departure was more recent was the state of the blood on the branch
and Dale's body. Both showed signs that they'd been there for some
time.

In that case, she could be a
hundred miles away. From Concrete hitchhiking would have been her
easiest way out. Maybe she made it to another town and managed to
find a motel there? In reality, I just don't know, and no amount of
speculation is going to help me.

I sit behind the wheel of my
rental car and consider my options. Keep searching for her in the
vain hope that I'll come across her is one. It's a low percentage
move, and I don't even know if she's alive or whether she's been
taken. Option two would be to return to LA and continue with my plan,
one which is fraught with difficulty in itself. I have to assume that
Kitty can fend for herself for now, and the best way for me to help
her is to get back to LA and finish the job I started.

Once I've taken out Carmine
maybe she'll see it on the news and will then be able to go to the
police and explain everything, omitting my involvement of course.
It's the most logical course of action and the one I decide upon.

It takes me half the day to
return to LA, and I push any feelings of guilt I might have at
abandoning my search for Kitty so easily to the back of my mind. In
any case, if Kitty is on the run again the best thing I can do for
her is to kill Michael Carmine. If anything worse has befallen her
then, at the least, his death will be some sort of retribution. But
that thought, also, has been pushed to the back of my head. I won't
believe she's dead. I refuse to.

I start by returning to the bar
to scope it out, just as I did before. I'm exhausted after my night
and day spent traveling up to Washington and back again, but I don't
allow myself the luxury of rest right now. I position myself in a
well hidden spot down the street and set to my vigil, now more in
hope than expectation. I know, after interrogating that manager, that
Carmine won't be back at the bar any time soon. And if he didn't know
I was coming after him before, he certainly will do by now.

As I suspect, my watch over the
bar yields no results. But I have another idea in mind, one I can
only put into action once the bar has shut down and gone quiet. I
sit, and wait, watching as the place clears out. Only once the dead
of night has descended do I step from my car, dress myself in a
suitably covert outfit, complete with black balaclava, and venture
out towards the bar.

I know the outside of the bar is
rigged with cameras. There's one that looks out onto the street, but
I can avoid that one easily enough. Then there's one down the
alleyway, the one that spotted Kitty after witnessing the crime that
put all of us into this mess. That one won't be so easy to avoid as
it points straight down towards the opening onto the street.

I move towards the edge of the
alley and take out a small mirror from my pocket. It's extended onto
the end of a handle and can swivel to give me a decent look in any
direction. I hold it, just an inch or two, around the side of the
wall. In the reflection I can see the camera, hidden inside a brick,
invisible to someone not looking for it.

Aside from the camera, the alley
is bare but for an important detail – a light, hanging just above
the camera, showering its glow towards the street. The position of
the light suggests that the camera itself isn't able to record in the
dark, which gives me an idea. I step away from the alley, move across
the street to a position where the camera can't see me, and take out
my pistol. I'm a good enough shot to take the light out with one go.

Now I'm moving fast. I dash
towards the alley once again, knowing the flash of the bulb will
momentarily prevent the camera from seeing much at all in front of
it. I move past it as quickly as possible, only slowing to a stop
once I'm past it. I have to hope that no one is actually watching and
that anything being recorded won't be seen until the following day.
I'm sure they'll know just who it is anyway.

That brings a thought to my
head. Is this a trap? It would be a logical move for me to try to
extract information from Carmine's office in order to find out where
he is, and this is the only one I know of. In fact, I'm surprised
there's no security here. That would act as a deterrent.
A
deterrent
, I repeat in my head. He doesn't want to deter me...he
wants to draw me in.

I stop, just outside the stairs
that lead down towards Carmine's office, and turn my head. Am I being
paranoid here? I can't tell any more if my suspicions are reasonable
or just me being overly careful. Is Carmine really trying to trap me?
Or is it just that he wouldn't expect me to be so bold, or perhaps
that there's nothing in his office to incriminate him anyway. Maybe
I'm giving him too much credit? No, that's not it. If anyone is as
suspicious as I am it would be Michael Carmine. When you're as
entrenched in the criminal underworld as he is you have to learn to
watch your back in your sleep.

I stand there for a few minutes,
my hand gripped to my pistol, just waiting to hear a car screeching
around the corner. But nothing comes. I wait another few minutes,
then more until I'm satisfied that I'm safe and no one's coming. I
have to be completely satisfied. That's my way.

Now I step forward, down the
rickety metal staircase, and towards the back door that leads into
the building. As I expect, it's locked, barred with a heavy padlock
on the outside. I quickly shoot out the lock and it falls to the
ground with a metallic thud. I pull on the handle, but the door
remains tightly shut. Must have a regular keyhole lock as well. I aim
my weapon at the keyhole and shoot. The lock immediately caves in and
disappears to the other side of the door, which now swings open
easily.

Inside it's dark and has that
distinct, pungent smell of alcohol. I stop at the doorway and turn my
head inside, searching for more cameras. I can see none, and they're
unlikely to be hidden as they are outside. I step forward now, into
the dark, and take a flashlight from my belt. Carmine's office, I
know, is just at the end of this corridor.

The room is also locked as I
arrive, but it doesn't present any more of a problem than the back
door. Once I've shot out the lock I find myself standing in front of
Carmine's desk, just as I did a little more than a week ago when I
was first assigned to track Kitty down. An odd smile arches on my
lips at the revelation that it's only been a week.

As per usual, I stop and listen
for a couple of moments before proceeding. It's completely silent
here, so any sound of footsteps or a car arriving down the alley are
likely to be easy to hear. The room is simple and bare. Other than
the desk and the large chair positioned behind it, there's little
more than the barest of furniture: a couple of basic chairs up
against the walls either side of the desk; a sofa in the back corner;
a filing cabinet behind the desk to the right; a few pieces of art
littering the walls. Simple, no nonsense. You'd expect nothing less
from the man.

I move quickly towards the desk
and scour the neatly piled files in the center of it. I find nothing
of interest. Just files relating to the actual running of the bar, as
you might expect with any regular venue such as this. But I know this
bar isn't just any bar, and this office isn't just any office. So I
keep going, flicking through every page in the hope of finding some
morsel of information about where Carmine might be. But there's
nothing here, not on the desk.

I start searching through the
drawers, quickly running my eyes over anything and everything I find.
It bears no fruit. I turn my attention to the filing cabinet –
always the most likely place to give me what I need – and begin
looking through the folders inside from top to bottom. The top two
drawers are nothing but account information for the bar – again,
this is nothing unusual – while the bottom two are filled with
alphabetically listed files. The listings appear to be names.

I rush my eyes over them, and
immediately know what they are. Files on targets and business
associates, potential threats and contractors. The file they gave to
me about Kitty – that will have been one of them. A copy, no doubt,
but a collection of information on one of their members of staff. I
check quickly down to 'M' and find Kitty Munroe. Yep, it's the
original file. Carmine really does cover his back against anyone
associated with him.