The SUV crossed the street.
“Think I’ll hit the ladies’ room before I go.” Gina picked up the to-go bag and her backpack and slid her hand into the front pocket. Fleur stood at attention, ready to go.
“Straight back through there.” Doris pointed to a hallway at the rear of the restaurant as she got to the register, but Gina and Fleur were already halfway through the dining room.
The SUV pulled up and parked sideways, blocking the door.
“What the…?” Doris said, looking up at the SUV, then over at Gina.
“No idea.” Gina was already in the hall leading to the restrooms. The restrooms were on the right, the kitchen on the left. Straight back at the end of the hallway was a door to what she hoped opened outside to the back of the diner. Without slowing, she walked straight down the hall.
“Hey, miss? You walked right past the ladies,” Jeff called from the kitchen across from the restrooms.
The bell over the front door chimed as she hit the closed door at the end of the hall. She jogged into a storage room.
With no visible exit.
“Miss?”
She drew her gun from the backpack and spun around. A man in a white apron stood in the doorway.
“I said you went past the—whoa!” He put his hands up.
She dropped her arm to her side. “Jeff? I need you to be cool. I’m not going to hurt you or Doris, but those two men out there will. They won’t hesitate to shoot you to get to me. Please, how do I get out of here?”
The bell over the door rang and they both jumped.
“Please.”
And God bless him, Jeff looked into her eyes, nodded, and motioned for her to follow him out of the storage room. Unless of course he was leading her to her death.
“Howdy, ma’am,” Gina heard her former co-worker say to Doris. “I’m Special Agent Dale and this is my partner, Special Agent Harris. Are you here alone?”
Jeff eyed Gina and she shook her head quickly and mouthed the wordliar. Then she prayed Doris would bluff.
“Well, no. There’s Jeff in the kitchen,” Doris said.
“That’s all? No patrons?” the second man said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s…just me and him.”
“We’re gonna need to ask you some questions.”
Jeff hurried Gina and Fleur into the kitchen. He pointed to a door toward the back.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’ll be all right now,” she added, hoping it was the truth.
Then she took off, looking for a car—any car—she could steal.
FOUR
Lachlan, present day, Los Angeles
Lachlan followed Elissa to her office. The door was almost completely covered over in stickers, which Lach only allowed because very few Watchdog clients ever got this far back into the bowels of the building. There were stickers of Marvel heroes. Some were for surfboard and kayak companies. Others from video games Elissa and Nash played on their downtime. Knights and dwarves brandished impossible-looking and impractical weapons while Orcs snarled at them. Wait, that one wasn’t an orc—it was Bigfoot. A Susan Stoker sticker. Right, the other half of Elissa’s door was covered in romance authors’ swag—Susan Stoker, Caitlyn O’Leary, Bella Stone, Elle James, Kris Michaels, Anna Blakely, Rayne Lewis. And smack dab in the middle of the door was the beat-up title page torn from a Riley Edwards paperback signed to Elissa—a souvenir from Elissa’s mission in Hawaii. That book had ‘literally saved the world’ according to Elissa’s report, and Lach believed her.
Inside her office was a temple to all things computers. As Lachlan closed the door, Elissa was already moving the guts of a computer off a chair to give him a place to sit. Sam curled up in the only corner free of gadgets, printouts, or bobble-heads, on a dog bed usually reserved for Reggie, the Lab who had been assigned to Nashville when he came to Watchdog.
Elissa plopped down into a chair in front of her main computer. “So, ever since Kyla came on board with her research on Loki, I’ve been trying to suss out all the players.Allof them, including Gina’s friends.”
