“Where?” He started to sit up, his head pounding where he’d been hit, and his stomach not feeling much better.
“You don’t get to ask questions.” Wallace pointed his gun at him. “Not when you’re in this much trouble.”
Carlos might have thought this was official if it weren’t for the fact that Maloney laughed at what Wallace had said. He tried to surreptitiously check for his phone, but it wasn’t in his pocket. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted it on the landing beside Halstood’s dead body.
She motioned with her gun. “Get up. Before my finger slips and you end up with your brains all over the wall.”
As soon as Carlos rose, Wallace grabbed his arm. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“I’m starting to get a really bad feeling.” Eliana turned around in the waiting room. “He said he was here, so where is he?”
When she and Tony had stepped off the elevator a short while ago, coming back from searching the cafeteria for sight of Carlos, a nurse and an aide from transport had been escorting an elderly woman in a wheelchair into the elevator car. If they needed to, they could ask the staff here if anyone had seen him.
There was no way Carlos would have left without telling her where he was going. But what else could possibly have happened other than him leaving of his own accord, or bumping into someone he knew? The doctor might have even taken him back to see Luci.
She swept past Tony and went to the reception desk, where it took the staff member a second to look over from her computer. The lady tugged off the reading glasses she was wearing, letting them hang on the chain in front of her. The name tag on her peach-colored sweater said Megan, and she was at least sixty. Not much older than Eliana’s mom.
“Hi.” Eliana smiled at her. “I was wondering if you have seen my friend? His sister Luci Ryson is back there, and he might have gone to see her?”
Megan shook her head. “No one has been in or out in the last hour. Your friend, the one sitting with you before, was here. I don’t know where he went.”
“Thanks.” Eliana went back over to Tony. “She doesn’t know where Carlos went.”
Tony frowned, dark circles under his eyes. This guy was no spring chicken, either. But then, even she was tired right now after such a long day, and her throat still hurt from that Dreamer trying to strangle her. So she figured she didn’t look that great either right now.
She wanted to slump into a chair and close her eyes, but that wouldn’t relieve the fear in her heart that something had happened to Carlos. “I want to walk around to look for him.” She headed toward the elevator, but Tony tugged on her arm.
“Let’s try someplace else, since we’ve been up and down the elevator already, and he isn’t in it right now.” He motioned toward the stairs. “While we do that, why don’t you call him again and see if we can hear it ring?”
“Good idea.” She dialed Carlos’s number.
Why wasn’t he answering his phone?
Hers rang against her ear, but she couldn’t hear Carlos’s cell phone anywhere. Not until Tony pushed open the door to the stairwell. And then, she could hear the distinct chime of his phone echo up toward them. “He’s in here.”
She ended the call and tucked the phone into her back pocket.
Tony raced down the stairs ahead of her, faster than she would’ve thought he could move. Not that he was a slouch. He seemed to react more quickly than she did, as if training had ingrained those tendencies in him.
Added to the fact that he was intent on protecting her because of some debt or something he owed to her mother, Eliana didn’t figure that anyone would be leaving her alone anytime soon.
“He’s here!” Tony rounded the landing at the floor below. “Wait. Who is this?”
She scrambled down, almost falling to her knees before she managed to stop herself beside a body lying at the base of this set of stairs. “It’s Officer Halstood.”
Tony rolled the cop over to his back, revealing the badge clipped to his belt. No gun in his holster. The older man looked around. “Someone got into a fight.”
She spotted Carlos’s phone and a discarded pistol.
Tony lifted his chin. “Would Carlos maybe have killed this guy?”
“Only in self-defense,” Eliana said. She just knew that Carlos wasn’t the kind of person who took a life without serious consideration. “Halstood must have attacked him. But where would Carlos have gone after that? He left his phone here.”
“Maybe this Halstood guy tried to protect him from someone else, someone who killed Halstood and took Carlos?”
He’d been kidnapped?
