No. This had to be one of the gunmen. They weren’t all chasing after Jake. One of them had her.
* * *
“This damn well better be good news,” Tom growled into the phone as he picked it up. It was late now—so late that all the who’s who of River City were gone, the party long over and he had already fallen asleep until the ringing cell had awakened him.
Fortunately, the ringing had not woken up his wife. She lay on her back, snoring away. He would have killed that bitch if he’d thought he could get away with it. But he knew he’d be blamed if anything happened to her.
So he’d found another way to get rid of her. Take all of her and her rich daddy’s money.
A smile curved his lips as he thought of his escape. Everything was in place. Well, almost in place.
He slid out of bed and walked into the bathroom. After closing the door between it and the master bedroom, he asked, “Did you kill her?”
“Not yet...”
“Not yet!” Rage coursed through him, chasing away the last vestiges of sleep. Hell, he would probably be awake the rest of the night now. “It shouldn’t be this damn hard to catch that stupid little girl!”
But she’d already been missing for months.
He should have tried harder to find her then. But he’d been certain that she’d show up for court, and she’d be convicted and sentenced to jail. He didn’t really believe that flash drive existed.
Despite the flicker of doubt he felt now and then.
“I’ve...got...her.” The man finally spoke again, but he sounded winded, like it was a struggle for him to talk at all.
Tom didn’t know which one it was. He didn’t think he’d talked directly to this guy before. But usually his men didn’t talk, they just listened.
And followed orders.
“Then why isn’t she dead?” Tom impatiently asked him.
“Uh...” The guy’s voice trailed off again. He sounded weak.
Tom hated weakness. “Why not?” he demanded to know.
Had she said something about the flash drive? Had she threatened that it would be turned over to the authorities if something happened to her?
“She’s pregnant.”
Thinking of all the times his wife had begged him over the years to start a family, Tom snorted. What was the big deal about getting pregnant and having babies?
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” he asked.
The guy had been fine with killing a woman. Why get squeamish about killing a pregnant one?
“I—I—uh...” the man stammered.
His patience gone, Tom sighed. “Bring her to me,” he said. “I want to talk to her first anyway.” He wanted to find out what the hell had happened to that flash drive—if it even existed in the first place.
“To—to the house?” the man asked.
What an idiot!
“Hell, no!” he growled. If any woman was going to die within these walls, it was going to be his wife.
Maybe he would find a way to do that anyhow, a way where he would not be blamed.
“Bring her to the warehouse,” he ordered. He didn’t wait for the man to agree. He knew that he would, so he just disconnected the call.
It was better this way. Tom would get his answers from little Miss Lillian Davies. And once he knew the truth about that damn flash drive, then he would pull the trigger and kill her himself.
Yeah, this was better.
When he killed her himself, he would send a message to his men to never mess with him and he would have the assurance that she was no longer a problem.
Lillian’s lungs burned with the breath she’d been holding since that barrel had pressed against her temple. Even though the man had pulled the gun away to take out his cell phone and make a call, she hadn’t released it.
She’d overheard that call. The cell phone must have been on speaker because she had listened to every vicious word her former boss had spoken. She had no doubt now that the man, even after learning she was pregnant, wanted her dead. As if framing her for a crime hadn’t been cruel enough...
Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back. She wasn’t giving up yet. She still had time to escape, especially when she heard her captor place another call.
“Not now, Jimmy.” The voice emanated from the speaker of the man’s cell phone.
Jimmy must have been the man left behind in the van. Why hadn’t she noticed him right away?
“We’ll get you to the hospital,” the man assured him, “once we find her.”
Jimmy was hurt. That was why he’d stayed in the van, why he must have been lying in the back when she’d looked through that open front window. How badly was he hurt?
Bad enough that she could overpower him?
“I’ve got her,” Jimmy interrupted. “She walked right up to the van and climbed inside with me.”
“Did you do it yet?” the guy asked, his voice rising with excitement. “Did you kill her?”
“The boss wants us to bring her to the warehouse,” Jimmy replied with obvious relief. “He wants to be the one to pull the trigger. Get back here. You need to drive.”
Jimmy must have been too injured to drive. So he would probably be too injured to chase her if she could manage to escape.
She reached for the door handle. And that barrel pressed against her temple again.
“Don’t even try it,” Jimmy warned her. Then he told the man on the phone, “Hurry the hell up!”
He was worried she would get away from him. And Lillian was worried that she wouldn’t.
What about Jake?
Had he escaped the men? She wished Jimmy would have asked about him. But obviously she was the one they’d been after, and her bounty hunter had just gotten in the way.
“You aren’t going to shoot me,” she said. Or he would have already done it. She wrapped her fingers around the door handle and popped it open.
And the gun cocked. “I will shoot you,” he promised.
“You heard Mr. Kuipers,” she said. “He wants you to bring me to him.”
