was no answer from Olivia. Daniel risked a sideways glance. Her eyes had closed again. There was a cell phone in his jacket, but that was in the backseat and he wasn’t in any position to reach it. Could he afford to stop, grab his phone and call the police before he reached the hospital? No. He had one task right now and one task only—saving the life of the person in his care.
“Thank You, God, that we’re both still alive,” he prayed aloud. “Please have mercy on everyone else who might be in danger. Please prompt someone else to alert the authorities. Any help and guidance You want to give me right now would be awesome.”
An engine roared behind him. The sound echoed off the concrete walls. There was the crack of a gun being fired and the clang of a bullet hitting his tailgate.
He raced up the final ramp. Another shot was fired.
His truck’s rear window exploded in a spray of glass.
Glass hit the back of Daniel’s seat and fell down around them like rain. He clenched his jaw, pressed the gas pedal to the floor and forced his mind to block out everything but the growing space of sunlight ahead. The ticket barrier was unmanned, and he wasn’t about to stop at the machines to pay for parking. He just had to hope some security guard somewhere had seen this all go down on a monitor and called the police.
He swerved around the barrier and clipped the edge of the wood. Then he was outside, blinking in the bright summer sun. Smoke poured through the tunnel behind him. A few passersby were stopping to film it on their phones. A couple more took pictures of his broken back window as he merged into heavy downtown traffic. Hopefully someone had the sense to call 9-1-1. Another murmur slipped through Olivia’s lips. Delicate color had returned to her cheeks. Sunlight filtered through the window, setting her hair alight in a cascade of red and gold.
Tires screeched behind him. His gaze shot back to the rearview mirror. A black van with tinted windows shot out of the parking garage and forced its way into traffic. It was five car lengths back. No one was firing now, but the van whipped back and forth between lanes as the driver fought his way closer.
The gunmen were following.
Emergency vehicles streamed toward him on the opposite side of the street. That was one prayer answered—someone had called the authorities. But would they head straight to the garage, or would anyone notice his predicament? He flashed his lights, honked his horn and waved a hand out the window in the hopes of grabbing an officer’s attention. The cops flew past. Apparently a broken back window hadn’t been enough to raise suspicion. And he wasn’t about to stop.
The gunmen were now only two car lengths behind. He cut through a parking lot, swerved into an alley and came out on another street. The van followed. He could see the driver now. It was the tall one of the three. He’d pulled a hood over his head to keep the mask covering his face from drawing the attention of anyone not looking straight on. But Daniel could still see the mask—black, oval-like fencing gear and utterly featureless. Would they be brazen enough to open fire on a busy Toronto street? The light ahead of him turned yellow. Daniel gunned the engine and flew through. He hit the other side of the intersection seconds before it turned red. The van followed tight on his tail. The vehicle was now so close he could practically feel it tapping his bumper.
The hospital sign appeared ahead. Cars lined up to enter the hospital parking lot, but Daniel wasn’t about to wait. He aimed straight for the emergency-vehicles ramp. Two cop cars and an ambulance sat near the emergency room door. He hit the brakes beside them.
A smattering of hospital staff and police ran toward him.
The black van kept going, disappearing into traffic.
“Hey! You can’t park here!” A paramedic reached him first. “You have to go around to the lot—”
Daniel threw the truck into Park and leaped out. Shards fell from his clothes. “This woman needs help and might have a head trauma. There was a car bomb inside the courthouse parking lot. People shot at us. A man named Brian Leslie was just murdered. Wait—be careful. The truck is full of broken glass.”
Two paramedics eased Olivia out of the truck and onto a stretcher. Daniel turned to follow her. A hand tapped his shoulder.
“Sir, you’d better follow me.” It was a hospital security guard, flanked by a uniformed police officer.
“Absolutely. I want to give a statement. Just let me get her stuff first.” He turned back to the truck. The messenger bag had spilled all over the floor. He scooped the contents up quickly. Her press photo identification badge was hooked on the edge of the seat. He pulled it loose, allowing his eyes one moment to linger over the adventurous curve of her smile. “Her name is Olivia Brant. She’s a newspaper reporter.”
The security guard took her belongings from him. “What’s your connection to her?”
I’m her bodyguard.
The answer he’d have given in his former life flew through his brain automatically and he just barely caught himself before it left his mouth. “Absolutely none. I just happened to be there when the bomb exploded and saw she needed help.” His eyes glanced toward the emergency room door. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay and give my statement here. Just in case she needs anything. Or at least stay until you’re able to reach her emergency medical contact, so she’s not alone.”
He had no real reason to stay. Yet something inside was urging him not to go.
“Sir?” The officer’s tone was definitely a little sharper now. He took another step toward Daniel. “I think you’d better come with me.”
* * *
Words swam in a jumble of black-and-white on Olivia’s computer screen. A pencil spun between her fingers. It had been two days since Brian Leslie had been murdered and her memory of the event was still nothing but an incoherent mess of disjointed images. She leaned back in her chair and listened to the clack of her colleagues’ fingers hitting keyboards. It was Friday afternoon and she seemed to be the only one blinking bleary-eyed at a story that wouldn’t come together. She added a few more pencil lines to the sketch in her small pocket-size notebook.
A blank oval face, like a black fencing mask, stared back at her through a haze of charcoal smoke swirls.
“Hey, can I borrow that a second?” Ricky rolled his office chair across the alcove from his desk to hers. “I want to check it against something I saw online.”
“Help yourself.” She shrugged. “It’s all I can remember of the killers. But it’s not much to go on.”
The young photographer picked up the notepad and rolled back to his computer. “I never knew you could sketch like this. Why aren’t you in the graphics department?”
She shrugged. “I really enjoy writing.” And editing, graphic design, ad layout and photography. Over the past few years she’d settled into a pretty comfortable role at the newspaper as a “bit of everything” journalist who could write one day, edit the next and field a decent classified ad page in between. But being good at a little bit of everything wasn’t the same as proving to Vince that she belonged on his new, smaller team.
Last summer, Vince had gotten into a major battle of
