“Well, you look like you’ve had a little work done. It’s so hard to gauge people’s ages these days.”
“If you must know, I’m Laura Lee Jackson—and I’m the last person you’ll ever see alive.”
“Not if I kill you first,” Ms. Wilson said.
She fired two shots in Laura Lee’s direction, who was already moving before Ms. Wilson fired the first round. The other woman drew two guns and fired back. Ms. Wilson expected this move and dove toward the hall where men had been trying to box her in. She tore through three men in seconds and was running. She heard the clattering of cowboy boots behind her, and Laura Lee Jackson screaming behind her, “Don’t kill her. Bring her to me.”
“Bloody unlikely,” Ms. Wilson said as she slipped into a room and locked the door behind her. She turned and found a guy strung up to a shelving unit. “They haven’t found you yet? I guess I’ve been keeping them preoccupied.” Ms. Wilson looked around the room to find something to knock the man out. She couldn’t find anything, so she looked at the man and said, “Sorry, but this is going to hurt.” The man screamed something through the duct tape and rag over his mouth as she flipped her gun over and pistol-whipped him against the side of his head. There was a crunching sound, and the man’s head went slack.
Ms. Wilson scrambled back up into the air duct system. She’d gotten faster and faster at traversing this path and made it back in fifteen minutes. She went to her computer and flipped through all the cameras she’d installed while out. Finally, the image of the woman with fire-engine-red hair appeared on the screen. Ms. Wilson turned on the audio, but the man she was talking to had his back to the camera, so she could barely hear him.
“Don’t worry…she’ll pay… I know, Lizzy…dead…all of them.”
The redhead, who called herself Laura Lee, wasn’t audible because she was anger-whispering. Ms. Wilson enhanced the image for a few seconds until she could see the woman’s face more clearly. She studied it for a moment. Something just wasn’t clicking. She made out the words “Pennington University” and “rally.”
Then it hit her like a ton of breaks. “Did the man call her ‘Lizzy?’” Ms. Wilson rewound the audio and enhanced it as best as she could, and she was pretty sure the man called the woman Lizzy, not Laura Lee.
Ms. Wilson searched her system for the name “Elizabeth.” She searched personnel files and finally saw an image she hadn’t thought about in twenty years. “Well,fuck!”
Chapter Fifteen
Ethan
Ethan was bored enough to watch RTN but tired of hearing about the Houston arena, so he popped in one of Blayne’sI Love LucyDVDs.
“Kicking it old school,” he said to himself, putting his feet up on the coffee table and folding his arms behind his head. He was asleep halfway through the first show.
A knocking jarred him from his sleep an hour later. He got up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes and yelled, “Give me a second,” through a yawn. He wondered if he should have cried anything.
“Open up already,” he heard Ric’s voice call.
“Dude, give him a minute,” Orr said over his bandmate.
“What if he’sschtuppingBlayne in there? Do we really want him answering the door?”
Blayne opened the door. “There’s noschtuppinggoing on here. I was sleeping. What are you three doing here?”
“We haven’t seen you in days,” Orr said.
“You weren’t answering your phone,” Ric added.
“I’m just here for the pizza,” Zach said.
“Pizza? I didn’t order—”
“We come bearing,” Ric said as Lucas came around the corner with a stack of pizzas, a box of beer and a couple two-liter bottles of soda.
“You’re using my assistant as a pack mule?”
“He was bored,” Orr said as he patted Lucas on the back. The slap almost made Lucas stumble.
“Get in here,” Ethan said, grabbing the pizzas from Lucas’ arms.
In minutes, the guys were lounging around the kitchen or on the sofa, eating pizza and tossing back beers.
“So, what’s going on?” Ric said. “This is an intervention.”
“Yeah, I see that nasty bruise on your arm,” Orr said. “Did Blayne hurt you?”
