Shielding Instinct, page 26
“Absolutely. Yes. I’m looking forward to getting home and —” Hawkeye stopped when his phone buzzed. He pulled it out from his thigh pocket. “Go for Hawkeye.” He paused. “I have Petra here with me. I’m putting you on speaker. No one else is in our area to overhear.”
“Petra? Reaper here.”
“Hi?” She leaned forward to speak over the phone as Hawkeye held it out.
“I’m looking for information you might have about the girl from today’s search. She’s in the hospital and had a seizure. She remains uncommunicative. The hospital is seeking information that might help them to understand her medical situation. When you saw the family at the tidepool, was anything mentioned about her health? Did you see any medications?”
“No. Nothing. I can tell you that I never saw anyone say anything to her, and she didn’t talk to anyone. She seemed in a bad mood, and they let her have her storm cloud at a distance. That’s her brothers, too. They didn’t try to get her to join in as they played. Also, they were staying here in the hotel. Is it possible for the manager to go into their room? I know they were leaving the island, but it’s possible that a bottle was missed, or a pill fell onto the floor with identifiable markings.”
“We already looked,” Reaper said.
“The girl,” Petra said, feeling the warmth and joy of the conversation she was having with Hawkeye recede into the distance, replaced with fear. “Is she in imminent danger?”
“I can’t say. That they were calling and asking for any possible information is a big red flag. They have to be worried. They couldn’t go into her case much more than to ask for information specifically around what might have caused the seizure.”
“Okay. I’m going to think about all this and see what I can come up with. Off the top of my head, I have nothing.”
“Thanks, Petra. Out.”
Hawkeye’s body had changed. He sat up straighter as he expanded his muscles. The word that came to Petra was that he was “primed.” His focus was hard on her. “I don’t know you very well yet, but I know you,” he said.
Petra blinked at him.
“You have a plan to get that information, and it’s not a safe one. When you said you were going to see what you could come up with, what you meant was that you were about to go find out why that child is in a medical crisis.”
Petra paused. “Yes. You’re right.”
“All right. Cooper and I are in.” Hawkeye stood, gathering the last of his food and balling it up to shove into the trash. “What’s the plan?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hawkeye
Petra said that from her experience with communications while saving Terry from the blowhole, the place that made the most sense for the kidnapper to take the dad was The Social Club with their famous drinking pig. From the off grid house, the dirt road would come out onto the pavement only a quarter mile away, heading south. To the north, it was a much longer drive to get to the next piece of civilization.
So they headed toward The Social Club.
“Petra, why would he want or need civilization. All he needs is connectivity.”
“Not true. He needs connectivity and control. If you had a gun, a phone, a recalcitrant human being, you’d also want a light source, right?” Petra asked.
“I would, but not when it risked being seen.”
“I’ve been in the passenger seat of cars that have driven by there a few times this weekend, so I’ve had the advantage of looking around. The sign says that it closes at nine. But the lights that are near their parking lot are public streetlights. And I’d bet the light over the club itself stays on. There’s a copse of trees just to the south of the entry. I’d bet this guy is taking Herb there because while he’ll be able to see, he won’t be seen. They could probably make a bunch of noise, but they’re too far away to be heard. Few people on the road. And most of all—”
“Connectivity. I’m not doubting you. That all sounds right to me. But he has a gun, and we do not.”
“I have a badge.” Petra tapped her belt. From his place in the driver’s seat, Hawkeye couldn’t see it, but was sure it was there.
“You were in Afghanistan. You up close and personally know the power of the gun. He won’t lay it down and cower under the power of the badge.”
“Of course not. But the kidnapper said out loud to his buddy that he wasn’t interested in killing anyone. In his mind, he will hesitate.”
“Uh-uh,” Hawkeye said. “That’s not a good enough strategy.”
“I sort of have one,” Petra said, watching the trees—a dark violet against the deepening sky—blur by. She turned back to him. “I’m wondering what Cooper’s capacity is. My understanding is that all Cerberus K9 are—what do they call it?—a nose and a bite.”
“Not true. Truffles is a caving rescue dog. Valor is a search and comfort dog.”
“But Cooper is.”
“Yes,” Hawkeye acknowledged. “A nose and a bite.”
“I don’t want to put you in any kind of trouble, Cooper,” She crooned as she reached over the seat to rub Cooper. “And I don’t think I would be putting you in harm’s way. I want to apply a little shock and awe. Imagine this, you and Cooper get out of the SUV and position yourself in the area as my backup.”
“Whoa. No. If you’re going in. I’m going in.”
“You? All six-feet-three of you?” she asked.
“Six-feet-four. But that’s right. All of me will be standing next to, if not in front of, all of you.”
Petra nodded slowly. “I made a mental note of what you just said. I’m folding it up and sliding it into a memory pocket to go back and read again later. It was probably very romantic and gallant. I’m too focused on a child in danger to appreciate it fully at this moment. What I want you to hear me say is that your standing next to me, Hawkeye, would be much more dangerous,” Petra told him. “Look, Rowan et al. are waiting for the two kidnappers to split forces so they can free the Johnsons. I don’t want this guy to go sprinting home and endangering people. I think he’s the only one with a gun. So, having said that, my plan is that you and Cooper hide as backup. I wait until they drive in and settle.”
“If they drive here and settle.”
“If they don’t, I was wrong.” Petra said, “My lips are buzzing with adrenaline—the helpful kind. The kind that turns up the volume on my senses and makes me feel bigger and stronger.” She licked her lips.
Hawkeye felt the adrenaline coursing through his body, too.
“While I’m waiting for them to show or not show, I’ll try to figure out where else they might have gone. My thoughts as of now: I think they want this over with. I think they’ll take Herb out as soon as the guy is reasonably sure that the club is closed and everyone drives home. Remember, they want their cake and to eat it, too. They plan to get on their boat and head out tonight so they can deliver the Johnson Family to wherever it is they’re supposed to deposit the family. Send the pictures to the Prokhorov Family. The Prokhorov Family pays them and checks the task off, so these two guys don’t go on a Prokhorov Family hit list.” She held up a finger. “Okay, I’ll tell you that one in a second. Back to this scenario. I think the kidnapper will go to the club because he’s doing a scary new thing, and the club is a known and comfortable site.” She took a breath. “Okay, in my plan, you’re in place. I drive into the parking lot and roll down the window.”
“From inside the SUV?” Hawkeye asked.
“Yes.”
“Could you park so the engine is between you and them?” Hawkeye asked.
“Sure. I can do that. I pull in, park so my engine is between us, roll down my window, and turn on my interior lights so they see I’m alone. I yell, ‘Hey, Herb I need to talk to you about your daughter for like half a second. She’s in the hospital.’”
“Just like that. ‘Hey, Herb.’”
“I know his name. I know where he is. I’m not being an aggressor. I mentioned his daughter—who is missing, and they think she’s dead—”
“And this so shocks them that—”
Cooper started whining when Petra pulled her hand back.
“No begging, Cooper,” Hawkeye said. “We’re on a mission. Working.”
The whines immediately stopped, and Cooper scrambled to sit up in his seat, gaze scanning. Hawkeye would laugh if this wasn’t such a crazy-as-shit plan and if he wasn’t about to agree to it.
“This is the place?” Hawkeye asked, as a car pulled out from the side and turned south.
“That’s it.”
“So, you yell, then what?” Hawkeye asked, driving a hundred yards farther, then sliding off the side of the road to park in the shadow.
“From there, we wing it,” Petra said, undoing her belt. “My presence there is going to be a bit of shock and awe. Head scratching for sure, possibly a flight response. If the kidnapper flees, he may take Herb, or he may abandon Herb in order to get back to Jenny and the kids and warn his cohort. But I’m going to start talking right away. My voice is going to be so laissez-faire, so ‘everything’s fine’ that—like that mama bear story I was telling you about—it won’t occur to either of them to do anything other than tell me what’s wrong with the girl. I say thank you. Maybe a little finger wave. I roll up the window and drive off. Once I’ve driven off, I’ll wait for you and Cooper right here with my lights off. It’s far enough but not too far.”
“And Herb?” Hawkeye asked.
“Herb isn’t my mission. The girl is my mission.”
“You held up your finger,” Hawkeye said.
“What?” Petra canted her head.
“You held up a finger and said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you that one in a second.’”
“Oh, another place we might be able to get the information. But that one, I think, would be more dangerous. It’s if they evade Rowan’s team and are running for their boat. I might be able to scream toward the boat that I need to know about any medicines the girl takes, and Jenny might try to scream the information back to me. Fetal microchimerism being a thing. I think she’d try.”
Hawkeye shut his eyes and shook his head. “No idea what you’re talking about.” He opened his eyes and held up a hand. “I don’t want to know.”
“Fair enough.” She climbed out of her side of the car and scooted around the front to take his place in the driver’s seat.
“I hate this,” Hawkeye exhaled. “I care about you. You’ll use every cell in your brain to stay safe, right?”
“Absolutely. And you will, too.” She stretched up and kissed him. But this wasn’t a warm lingering kiss. This was tight and cold. And somehow, that reassured Hawkeye. It wasn’t a possible-last kiss; it was a ‘let’s kick ass and take names’ kind of kiss. It must mean that in all the scenarios she ran through her brilliant head, she believed in good outcomes.
Did he?
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Petra
Petra was fine with this.
She really was.
Pulling out from the shadows, she did a three-point turn, drove past where potentially the car with Herb in it would exit onto the road, did another three-point turn, and positioned herself so she could see without being seen.
Had Quantico been a while back?
Yes.
Did she practice this kind of fieldwork on the daily?
No, not even on the annually.
Stakeouts weren’t Petra’s thing. Riding on planes next to demon-dispelling, prayer-bead-munching acolytes was her thing. Attending meetings to know what was going to be allowed on one’s person during the great vacuuming flight into the cosmos before the lizard people arrived—no plants, soil, or polyester—was her thing.
But honestly, how hard could this be?
Pull in and block their car.
Don’t put your vehicle in park but reverse. Get the steering wheel lined up properly for peeling out. Be ready to drive crouched low in the seat.
That last one was a little bit fingers-crossed thinking. Hawkeye was right that the only thing that might stop a flying bullet was the engine block.
Out and away.
Their vehicle had been a cloth top, and that top had been folded down. They didn’t need to get out of their car to use the light source.
That could be problematic—Oh! Oh! Here they came.
All right.
In Petra’s head, the plan was so much easier than the doing.
Focus. There’s a child in the hospital. She’s having seizures, and the doctors don’t know what to do.
For Petra, when she presented a couple days ago as a medical mystery, as a conversant adult with a “fiancé’s” support, they let her walk out the door unsolved. The hospital couldn’t release the child until someone fixed her, right?
The child—that’s why Petra was here.
This was what she was doing.
By the light of a full moon, Petra put the SUV in neutral. Slowly but surely, the gravel began to crunch as gravity tugged and her tires rolled. After picking up momentum, she moved the shifter to L to engine brake without needing to tap her foot brake with their red look-at-me lights.
She felt a shiver go through her body as the kidnapper’s vehicle eased into the parking lot and over to the space she’d predicted.
Petra loved it when her predictions were right. And honestly, it wigged her out a bit. If she didn’t know enough about brain science, she would call this psychic.
Once her SUV edged up on the parking lot, she turned on her engine, flipped on her lights, and followed all the steps.
Car in reverse, the wheel turned, the engine as a bullet blocker, and the window goes down.
“Hey, Herb, it’s me from the tidepool. Hey, got a sec?” Cool as a cucumber. “I won’t interrupt what you’ve got going on. But your daughter is in the hospital, and the doctors need to know what’s happening with her health because she’s not doing well. Is she on seizure meds?”
“I don’t know what to do here,” Herb said in a voice that sounded like perspiration.
“Who is she?”
“An author,” Herb said. “She was in the car with me when we went to the tidepool.”
“How did she know you’d be here?”
“She took a wild guess,” Petra called in a singsong. “Just the medical info, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Amanda, my daughter Amanda, she had measles when she was an infant.”
“What’s happening right now?” the kidnapper asked.
Shock and awe is happening.
As a breeze picked up and the branches swayed, Petra saw a gun pointing at Herb.
“Measles,” Petra repeated. “What did that do to her? They said she had a seizure?”
“Uhm. Yeah. She’s—” Herb had to stop and pant. And when he did, the gun inched closer and waggled to get him talking. “She’s Deaf,” he stammered, “and has a learning disability that makes her about the mental age of a three-year-old, and she has epilepsy. But that wasn’t a problem when she took her medicine.”
“Move on now. You need to go and tell the doctor. Go on,” the kidnapper called.
“Sorry. I’m sorry, two seconds more. I need the doctors to know because if she were to die, the authorities would want to know who to blame. Better to keep her alive, right, Herb?” Petra came very close to threatening a guy with a gun. Shit.
“My wife said that she thought Amanda would be fine with a natural syrup that she was making. It takes her all day to make it. It’s got lots of steps and lots of ingredients. I don’t know what to tell you other than we needed some medicine that would work if a pharmacy was too far away.”
“Shut up,” the man hollered. “Actually, you, in the car. You come and talk to me.”
“No need. I’m leaving now.” Petra shifted her foot from the brake to the gas pedal, draped her arm over the seat and looked over her shoulder as she pressed the pedal down to back out of the lot.
“I said, come talk to me.” The bang was as unexpected as the pop that followed.
Petra jumped as high as her seatbelt would allow, her shoulders came up protectively around her ears and stuck there, her elbows tight against her body.
The SUV’s steering wheel pulled hard to the right. The guy had taken out her front tire.
Petra worked to organize her body into following her plan, peel out, screech off into the distance, circle back to collect Hawkeye and Cooper.
But Cooper was having none of that.
A streak of black against black pulled her attention around. Cooper bunched his haunches underneath him and leaped.
The shrill of Petra’s scream filled the air.
She supposed her limbic produced the sound in service of Cooper by pulling attention her way.
Petra hated when she was both living the emergency and also, somehow, an onlooker sitting on a stool in the corner, calling out her observations.
That’s what was happening to her now.
Cooper flew over the top of Herb and locked onto the kidnapper’s gun arm.
Petra had her belt unlatched, her door open, and was rolling away from the SUV.
Herb was racing across the parking lot.
And somehow Petra was on his heels. Then she was diving, arms scooping around his knees, and they both went crashing to the ground.
In her mind, she was back in the lake, protecting her neighbor from the bully.
And just like at that lake, once she had the guy in a hold, the good idea fairy flew away.
Hawkeye was calling Cooper off the terrified kidnapper, in the glow of the overhead lamp, Petra could see blood dripping down the bad guy’s injured arm.
Good. He should be in pain.
Petra pulled her badge around—the one she swiped through the machine to identify herself as she entered the J Edgar Hoover building—and commanded, “FBI, don’t move!”
Nope. This didn’t at all go to plan.
***
While they waited for Rowan and his buds to finish up at the house, Petra had called the hospital with the information about Amanda Peterson.
