Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 63165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
“We’ll find him,” Yuri says, stating it as fact. “He can’t vanish with her in broad daylight without leaving a trace. He took the staff bay to the service tunnel. I’m tracing the tunnel cameras now.”
“Who signed that tunnel access order?” I ask.
“You did,” he says without looking up. “Last winter, for the plaza renovation.”
That one’s on me, I know. But as I think back to it, I realize Marcus was the one pushing for it. I only signed off to get him off my back. There were more important things to focus on at the time.
Still, I can’t help wondering how I missed this. Were the signs there the whole time? Have I been blindly trusting him out of some misplaced loyalty while he’s been secretly planning to fuck me over?
I’m going to kill him when I find him. If he’s touched one hair on Mari’s head, I’m going to make it very slow and very painful.
Yuri’s phone pings. He pulls up a new clip.
“Service tunnel Camera Three,” he says. The screen shows the black SUV from the first bay sliding into the tunnel, then stopping at a gate to wait. A second SUV appears thirty seconds later and falls in behind. The timestamp matches up. The plate on the first SUV is a company pool plate. The second has no plate. Then both disappear under the camera’s frame. I lean forward and stab the intercom.
“Cut right. Take the back ramp to 43rd,” I tell the driver. “We’ll sweep the service alleys on foot. Put us by the receiving docks.”
“I’ve got three more teams rolling,” Yuri says. “One to the boutique that manages the trust, one to the Newark yard, one to the Delancey club. If Marcus thinks he can trade her, it’ll be to buy time from the people taking our money.”
“He won’t trade her,” I say. It comes out too sharp. I make myself steady it. “He’ll hide her. He’ll try to leverage her to get distance from me. He wants a corridor to leave the city.”
The SUV brakes hard at the curb. We get out. The alley behind the building is narrow, walled by loading docks and dumpsters. A delivery guy smokes by a steel door and decides to finish his cigarette somewhere else when he sees us. I stop him.
“You see a black SUV leave in the last twenty minutes?” I ask.
He takes another long drag of his cigarette. “I don’t know.” He shrugs.
I take a fifty from my wallet and hold it, not offering, just showing. “Try again.”
His eyes flick to the bill and then to my face. “Two,” he says. “One with two men in caps. One with a woman in the back, I think. I didn’t see her face. The glass was dark.”
“When?”
He checks his phone. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago?”
“Which direction were they headed in?”
He points south. “Up the ramp and then left.”
I nod and slip him another fifty for his trouble. Yuri and I head back to the car, and I tell the driver to head south.
23
MARI
Iwake to concrete, cold air, and a plastic bite digging into my wrists. It takes a second for the shapes to click into place. I’m upright. My arms are wrenched behind the back of the chair. The chair’s edges cut into my forearms. It feels too hard to be rope. Zip ties, maybe?
The room looks like a forgotten basement under a warehouse. Dirty cinder block walls. A single strip light that hums and flickers. There’s almost nothing here except for two pillars, one metal door, and what looks like an elevator. I wonder if it works.
There’s a folding table, a laptop, and a stack of files I recognize from Levcon’s archives. I force my heartbeat into a steady rhythm and try to breathe.
Marcus is perched on a crate pulled up to the table, not looking at me yet. His jacket’s off, his sleeves rolled. His tie hangs off the table while he stares hard at the screen in front of him. He doesn’t look friendly now. He looks cold and calculating, and it terrifies me.
“Morning, sunshine.” He smirks, a cruel glint in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hit you that hard, but it’s for the best. It made getting you down here a whole lot easier.”
I swallow. My head throbs, the pain radiating from a single spot. I wonder if there will be a bump. I desperately want to touch it, to inspect it, but I can’t move my hands.
“Where are we?” I ask, my throat hoarse and my voice much drier than I expected.
“A place I pay cash for,” he answers coldly, effectively telling me that Lev won’t find us here. “But it’s just temporary. We’re not staying long.”
I look at the laptop on the folding table. It isn’t mine. There’s no Levcon asset label. It’s old and bulky, a junker if I ever saw one. He follows my gaze.