“Everette Freeman,” I said as I slipped my foot out of my unbuckled shoe. Bless Melanie for lending me such sharp heels.
Olena nodded at the Florida man’s name. “His arrest was actually good for my business. Less competition,” she said with a snide wink.
“So you kept operating, even from prison,” I said, and pressed the sole of my shoe into my palm. Olena was too busy smugly recounting her machinations to notice what I was doing beneath the fluff of my skirt. It didn’t take a genius to know she was telling me everything because she planned to kill me.
“Where I could,” she said sourly, as if she didn’t like the reminder of prison. “I have many hands doing my work, but they cannot fully function without me, the brain.”
I had a solid grip on my shoe now, the heel pointed outward like a little couture spear. I knew it was of the highest quality because it belonged to Melanie Browning. I hoped she would forgive me for getting blood on her Jimmy Choo. “You must be happy to be back, then,” I said and shifted in my seat. Olena had taken to gazing out her window and didn’t see me reach for my seat belt and fasten it. The click drew her attention.
She smiled and a laugh bounced her shoulders. “You think a safety belt is going to help you tonight, princess?”
I calculated the likely outcome of the next sixty seconds and decided it was my best shot. I looked Olena square in the eye and spoke with a determined resolve. “Yeah. I do.”
She flinched when I suddenly moved my shoe to my right hand, but she wasn’t my target. I sat forward and jammed the sharp heel into the ghost’s meaty neck. I shoved as hard as I could, feeling it pierce flesh and twist through tendons until a spurt of blood splattered the windshield.
Olena screamed. The ghost gurgled a startled cry and hit the brakes but swerved into the median as he tried to reach for his neck. My seat belt locked against my shoulder with a hard bite, just as I’d planned, while the car’s movement threw Olena into the side window. Her head cracked off it hard enough to splinter the glass and leave her dazed. The car’s nose had scraped off the median in a way that left our back end jutting into the middle of the road. Horns blared in brief warning before the car behind us hit the side of our back end. Olena smashed into the window again, her arms flailing like a rag doll and her temple now bleeding. The ghost slumped sideways, still grasping at his neck, and fighting for air. We’d spun and come to a stop, now facing the opposite direction we’d been driving. Oncoming headlights barreled at us as brakes screeched but not in time. Another car hit us head-on, sending the front airbags exploding and the windshield shattering. Olena flew backward and then forward, smashing into the back of the seat in front of her and crumpling into a bloody heap. The seat belt punched me in the shoulder again, but it did its job and held me in place. I could feel a bruise already blooming beneath my skin. My head spun, but we’d finally stopped moving.
I clawed at the buckle on my other shoe and ripped it off, knowing I was going to have to run, and then lunged at Olena. I shoved my hand into her dress, the same as she’d done to me, and grabbed the diamond.
“Thank you for my freedom,” I said to her dazed, bloody face and scrambled for my door. The cool night air rushed in, and I had one foot on the pavement when her bird hand clawed into my arm like a talon.
I screamed at her nails digging in and found my other shoe. I held it by the strap and whipped it at her, wishing I could do more damage but needing to get the hell out of the car. The heel cracked off her forehead and sent her reeling back.
“Get back here, you little bitch!” she screamed as I shoved my way out the door.
Outside, the dark night hung thick with misty fog and the grittiness of the air surrounding a busy roadway. Traffic had stopped on our side of the bridge and had only begun to slow on the other as rubberneckers slowed to see what had happened. Cars still whizzed past, sending a rush of air billowing my skirt and my hair flying. The drivers of the two cars that had hit us were out in the roadway, clutching their heads and asking if we were all right.
I didn’t have time for pleasantries. I had to go.
By now we were closer to the east side of the bridge than the west, so I took off in that direction. The cold pavement made my bare feet ache, but it didn’t take long before they were numb. Nor did it take long for a gunshot to ring out into the night.
I flinched and dove behind one of the stopped cars. I sat on the ground and peeked around its bumper to see Olena limping up the road, gun in hand, looking madder than hell.
“Shit,” I hissed. Of course she had a gun. If she hadn’t had it stashed in the glove compartment, she probably snatched it off the ghost. “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered. If I took off running, she’d try to shoot me, and someone would get hurt. Traffic had stopped, and more and more cars full of innocent people were in the line of fire.
“Give it back!” Olena screamed, closer now, and fired the gun again.
I flinched and covered my ears. This was not good. I had no weapons—not even a shoe. I was barefoot in a gala gown on a bridge full of cars with a five-million-dollar diamond in my bra and a madwoman shooting at me.
“Think,” I said, and knocked my head back against the bumper. My car-shield was a minivan, surely with an innocent family inside. If I’d been a better nanny—or arealone, even—I’d probably know a secret button to push to release a hatch, which would let me crawl inside. But then I’d bewiththe innocent family inside their car while a madwoman shot at me, and that wouldn’t bode well for anyone.
Still, I was desperate. I stood up from my crouch and peered in through the minivan’s back window, looking for anything that might help. My breath caught when I recognized a Buggy-Baby stroller collapsed inside. I sawX3stamped onto one of the rods. “No way,” I muttered.
You could still break down a door with it, Alisha had told me.The titanium rods are triple reinforced but light as a feather.
Break down a door … or stop a madwoman from killing me or hurting anyone innocent.
Pressing my luck, I peered around the van again. Olena was five cars away, still charging like a bloody bull.
I frantically looked for a back release latch on the van and found one in the form of a handle I promptly yanked. The hatch slowly rose with a ding. The family was too busy ducking in their seats to notice. A cartoon with a little blue dog played on the screens hanging from the ceiling. I could hear the dad in the front seat, on the phone with a 911 operator, surely. The mom had climbed to the middle seat and thrown her body over the car seat strapped there. The only person who noticed me stealing the stroller was the little girl sitting in the very back seat. She curiously looked at me through her little smudged glasses as she hugged her doll. The last thing I needed was for her to scream and alert her parents I was robbing them of their very expensive stroller.
I gave her my friendliest smile and then held my finger to my lips. “Shhh. I’m a good guy,” I whispered. It wasn’t entirely true, but I’d learned bending the truth with children was permissible, if not necessary.
She considered me with a tilt of her little head and then mirrored me in pressing her finger to her lips. “Shhh.”
“Thank you,” I said and pulled the stroller from its keep.
Olena was right around the corner now; I could hear her labored breathing and her footsteps scraping the pavement. “Where did you go, princess?” she called.
