Jim drove faster. “I need her address.”
“Oh, my God,” Colleen said, “let me see…”
“Interior camera currently shows…” Bobby said. “Yeah, she’s okay, I don’t think he hurt her, but he’s in her condo with her. She’s put some distance between them, she’s a few feet away from him now. She appears to be talking to him, doing something on her computer as he looks over her shoulder. He’s got…” He swore again. “It’s a Glock, LT. Nine millimeter.”
Colleen rattled off an address that Jim quickly input into his GPS. “I’m ten minutes away,” he reported.
“We’re about twenty,” Bobby said. “Wait for us, Jim! Colleen, call Wes. And Senior Chief Becker.”
“I’m on it,” she said.
“Colleen,” Jim asked, his heart in his throat. “The gunman. Is it Brad?”
“No,” she told him. “I don’t know who it is, but it’s definitely not Brad.”
***
Greg Ramsey wanted to know where the hell Betsy, his soon-to-be ex-wife, was.
It was funny—not funny-ha-ha but alittlebit interesting-funny—at first, anyway, because Ashley honestly couldn’t place him as he came stomping down the outdoor corridor as she was attempting to unlock the front door to her condo.
She knew she’d seen him before, but she simply couldn’t remember from where. And then it stopped being any kind of funny when he brandished that deadly looking gun and demanded that she tell him where Betsy was hiding.
And everything clicked into place.
The break-in. The search of her apartment—including the pockets of her clothes. Greg had been looking for information, for files, for records, for hand-scribbled notes, for anything that would tell him his soon-to-be ex-wife’s whereabouts.
“I honestly don’t know where Betsy is,” Ash had said, and Greg had shoved that gun up right beneath her chin, slamming her head and shoulders against the wall beside her front door. She hit so hard that she saw stars.
“She’s in a shelter,” Ashley said quickly, aware that one jerk of his finger on the trigger would end her life. God, she didn’t want to die. “I honestly don’t know which one, but just give me a chance, and I can find out.”
That wasn’t really a lie. She could find out. She probably even would find out. But there was no way in hell she was going to let this man get anywhere near the woman he’d already spent years abusing. She’d die first.
But as he roughly grabbed her keys from her hands, unlocking the door and pushing her and her bag inside, she looked up toward where she knew those cameras had been recently installed.
Was anyone watching? She honestly didn’t know. And no way was she simply going to passively wait to find that out.
Instead, as Greg had dug into her handbag to take possession of her phone so she couldn’t call 9-1-1, she’d told him, “I’ll need my computer to access the file. But first, you need to know that I made plans to meet Jim, my Navy SEAL boyfriend, here for dinner. At 7:30. If I don’t text him, to tell him that something’s come up, he’s going to knock on that door. And when I don’t answer, he’s going to kick it down, and you’ll probably kill him, but not before he kills you, too, so please let’snotdo that.”
Greg had backed away and set down his gun—he was not as comfortable holding it as he pretended to be—as he looked at Ashley’s phone. She gave him the code to unlock it, and spelled outSladeas she prayed he wouldn’t notice that the only texts she and Jim had exchanged were from the hospital, waiting for Kenneth to get out of surgery.
I found a treasure trove of vending machines and got us tiny bags of corn chips and pretzels. Do you want anything to drink?
Hoo-yah, thanks, I’d love something with caffeine.:-)
Not exactly romantic.
But Greg wasn’t exactly romantic, either, and he’d typed in the text message to Jim that she’d dictated, starting with the bright red flag ofSweetie.
Jim was on his way. He had to be, even though he hadn’t yet texted her back. But he was smart, he was sharp, he was everything Ashley had ever wanted—except for the flaming asshole part of him.
Still, she knew without a doubt that hewason his way.
***
Bobby and Colleen were still ten minutes out as Jim pulled into Ashley’s condo parking lot.
Guest parking was clearly marked, so he pulled into an empty slot even as he quickly looked around, finding the door to her second floor apartment, as well as the stairs that would get him there.
