“Do it,” I say to Rossi, who stands at the open door.
“Are you sure sure?” he asks.
“I will cut your head off if you don’t do it now,” I say threateningly.
“Okay,” he says and takes the bolt cutter. “Good luck.”
The ankle monitor falls off my leg, its alarm blaring.
“I don’t need luck,” I say darkly. “I am too good for luck.”
With that, I drive off into the night.
I let down the car window.
Air streams into my lungs.
I can breathe again.
I am free.
Who cares if I always have to watch my back when I am free?
Being free is the only thing that matters.
16
REID
PLAYLIST: BLACK BETTY – RAM JAM
The alarm blares on my phone, telling me the connection to the ankle monitor was lost. I saw it coming from a mile away, the moment she ran.
She couldn’t handle whatever just happened, and therefore, she runs. She’s a runner. No accountability, no emotions, no confrontations. Hunted by her own dark past.
In the end, things did not go exactly as planned, but I made her break the deal. The only problem is that after all that happened between us, I don’t want her to run. I don’t want her to go back to being a felon. A thief. A con artist. I want to see her grow past it. I want to make her see there is so much more to life. And most of all, I want to kiss her again.
I know what my evaluation at the end of all of this will state, when I failed the routine polygraph, because I let myself be seduced by a subject.
“Rach,” I say when Rachel answers the call. “She’s done it. She cut it.”
“She did not,” says Rachel.
“Yeah. I’m in her studio. I need you to follow her tail. Take Emmett and Hoboken; I want the full force coming down on her.Every place associated with her needs to be watched, especially that area around the docks where she was several times last year.”
“Done,” says Rachel.
“I’ll search this studio in the meantime, because I’m already in,” I say. “She went over the damn roof, cut it somewhere at Tudor City Plaza. I lost it there. Check for her Porsche, run it through the system, and have it tracked. I want to know where she went, what people moved around that area, and what other moments were there.”
“On it,” she says. “Hang on.”
I’m on hold, she’s probably coordinating the rest of the team, and I start searching the studio.
“Okay, teams are on their way. There are three cameras we can get. She drove the Porsche into Tudor Plaza, and we lost it there for roughly a minute until it reappeared on a traffic cam at 2nd. Hang on. Looks like she drove to Jersey?—“
I hear heavy typing.
“I’m searching for the plate in all CCTV footage because she drove into Weehawken, and there is one cam out of order?—
