“Uh... what?”
“I’m sorry for snapping at you like that,” Kitt hurried to say as he turned on the car and shifted it into drive. “I’m not angry. I promise. We just needed to get out of there.”
The tires didn’t squeal as we pulled out of the parking lot. In fact, we barely went faster than the speed limit, yet there was an intensity to the way that Kitt gripped the wheel that said he was forcing himself to stay calm and not floor the pedal as hard as he could.
“So... you’re not actually mad?” I asked as I struggled to wrap my head around the situation.
Kitt’s eyes remained focused on the road, but one of his hands left the wheel to wrap around mine instead. “No, I’m not. We just needed to get out of there quickly and your interruption was the best excuse.”
I glanced back through the rear window at the coffee shop that was nearly out of sight far down the street. “So, you think it was a set up?”
Kitt shook his head, but his brow remained furrowed. “Lily Kim is the FBI director’s secretary. Gabe told me about her, and claims to trust her, so I don’t think she would set us up. Although I don’t know her personally and I’m not going to trust her too much. No, the real problem is that if she can find us, thatmeans others can as well. We needed to get out of there and find somewhere safe while we decide what to do next.”
The car took a turn, and the coffee shop disappeared from view.
I settled down and secured my seat belt as I prepared myself for another long drive. “What to do next? Do we even have any kind of plan? The others still haven’t contacted us, and Miss Kim didn’t tell us anything specific. I’m glad she warned us that we were in danger of being found and that the bell ringers are making more moves, but that’s not useful to us right now.”
“Oh, she gave us plenty of useful information.”
Kitt picked up the empty teacup sitting in the cup holder between us. I hadn’t even noticed him snag it on the way out when he dragged me from the coffee shop. Before I could ask why he’d bothered to bring along Miss Lily’s leftover garbage, he turned over the cup to reveal a memory card taped to the bottom.
CHAPTER 18
Jordy
It tookseveral hours of driving around before Kitt declared us safe enough to stop for a while. I’d dozed off at some point during the car ride, so I wasn’t exactly sure where we ended up. For all I knew, we’d simply spent the day driving in circles. Not that it mattered to me. One location was the same as the next, as far as I was concerned. So long as we were safe, then I was happy.
We ended up stopping for the night at a very expensive-looking hotel. I’d protested at first. We didn’t need to stay anywhere fancy. I’d lived my entire life without luxuries. A weekend without room service and a Jacuzzi tub wouldn’t kill me.
However, Kitt claimed he’d chosen the hotel based on its security. Anyone off the street could just walk into a regular hotel, but this one was on much stricter lockdown. It was the kind of hotel often used by celebrities that needed to fend off crazed fans and paparazzi. We weren’t even allowed into the building until we proved we could pay for a room, which Kitttook care of on his own, and then we were escorted directly to a private elevator which took us straight to our room and was apparently under the watch of guards at all times.
How much did a place like this cost, and how had Kitt managed to afford one of the rooms on short notice?
I couldn’t even imagine, though based on everything I’d learned about the man, I was starting to suspect he wasn’t just a lawyer with good connections. Kitt had money of his own. That was the only explanation.
Whatever. I wasn’t going to question it. Right now, more resources could only help us.
I was much more concerned about whatever was on the memory card that Lily Kim had left for us.
Basically, the situation could be summed up like this.
Grace Calderon, the main supplier for the bell ringers who’d been in charge of the actual trafficking side of things, was making plans to leave the country. The memory card included everything Lily Kim had managed to gather about Grace Calderon’s plans and would probably be enough to catch the woman if we acted quickly.
There was just one problem. We still hadn’t managed to get in contact with Logan, or Clay, or any of the others. We were still on our own.
Kitt and I sat across from each other at a table in the hotel room, looking down at the screen of his phone that he’d used to display the information from the memory card. Neither of us spoke for a while, but I couldn’t stand the silence. By then, night had fallen, and I could see the lights of whatever city we were in flickering outside the window, but the thick glass didn’t let in any of the noise outside. There wasn’t even the sound of a ticking clock to mark the passing time. All I could hear was the rapid patter of my own heartbeat, and I hated it.
“We have two choices,” I said, just to break the silence.
Kitt nodded. “We do. We can either go after Grace Calderon ourselves, or we wait to reconvene with the others, let her get away, and focus our efforts on the remaining leaders of the bell ringers.”
I never used to mind my memory before I knew it was unusual. I thought everyone struggled to filter through all the details of their memories, so I’d never seen it as anything worth complaining about. Now that I knew it was unusual, and that most people actively struggled to recall the details of their past, I found it incredibly unfair. I already understood what Kitt was talking about. The two main leaders of the bell ringers that we could focus on were Preston Vanshaw, the leader, and Edgar Barr, the financial backer and biggest client. Remembering these two men in general would have been enough for this conversation, but my mind didn’t work in general concepts.
No, the second Kitt mentioned them, I was immediately bombarded with images of the two men. Every crease in their faces, their exact height and the color of their eyes, even the way they smelled, was as clear to me as if they were standing in front of me right now.
“Jordy,” Kitt called as he gripped my hand across the table. “Jordy, listen to me. Focus on my voice.”
As he talked, his thumb rubbed against my palm. The two sensations together grounded me, and I managed to focus back on the present moment around me.
