Not cool.
She’d faced challenges before. It hadn’t been easy being a curvy female engineer when she’d had to tell a masonry guy he’d fucked up the specifications for a foundation. Or they’d used the wrong size of rebar.
A length of rebar would have been useful a few minutes ago.
Hindsight.
Lilith had acted and made sure Tasha got away. The least she could do would be to find help, go back and make sure Lilith was all right. And then there was Erin, still safely asleep in the car, she prayed.
She pushed away from the safety of the building and set off for the bar. As she rounded the corner onto the main drag, she noted thankfully that none of the fixtures had been damaged in the quake. The light from shops and restaurants was reassuring.
Two blocks down, the front door of Chill flew open. Two men in denim and leather emerged and planted their big bodies like sentries in the middle of the sidewalk, one looking north, and the other south.
They looked an awful lot like the two goons who’d followed the big guy into the bar.
Gideon.
His men were looking for her. She couldn’t say how she knew that was what they were doing, but it felt dead-on, and nothing about the feeling was good. The desire she’d felt earlier to return and work things out with Owen and this Gideon person evaporated.
She’d spent her professional life in meetings observing the differences between company owners and CEOs versus their plant managers and CFOs. The owners and CEOs listened more than the second group, who generally made her life miserable their repetitive questions and doubts on subjects about which they knew diddly squat. The owners and CEOs took her measure quietly and then made decisions.
Men like that didn’t talk pointlessly; they took what they wanted.
She ducked into an alcove formed around the recessed entrance to a shuttered store and huddled. When her heart rate slowed, she peeked around the corner. The two men stood with their heads together then split to march in different directions. One of them would pass her location in moments. She tried on the notion of flagging him down, asking him to go with her to find Lilith.
She remembered they way they’d flanked Gideon, like he was the don and they were his loyal foot soldiers.#p#分页标题#e#
So no, then.
Because they were the guys who’d row the boat out to the middle of the lake and throw some poor slob overboard simply because the don said so.
She squeezed deeper into the alcove, grateful she’d worn a black dress that blended with the shadows, and waited. When Gideon’s guy passed, she ducked out and scuttled down the sidewalk in the opposite direction until she reached the end of the block. She turned right, trotting west toward the ocean a couple blocks until she could cut through the parking lot that filled the broad expanse between the side streets.
Running low and ducking behind cars whenever possible, she made her way to her rental and paused there long enough to check that Erin was still breathing, still asleep. Her head still lolled against the headrest and her hands lay open palmed and limp in her lap as if she hadn’t moved since Tasha had wrestled her into the vehicle.
She put her hand on the door handle.
And realized the vehicle was still locked.
Her keys.
Shit.
Her keys were in her purse, which was… where? The last time she remember having it was just before those things had appeared. She must have put it down when she’d stopped to take off her shoes. With any luck (questionable, considering how things had been going for her lately), her purse would still be laying on or near the sidewalk across the way.
With a regretful sigh, she propped her remaining Laboutin on the hood of the Kia and crossed the quiet parking lot. The silence and absence of humans filled her with dread.
When she reached the sidewalk, she turned right and left, hunting for any sign of Lilith.
Nothing.
She turned west, anxiety rising like an evil tide as she left the relatively well-lighted area near the parking lot for the deeper reaches of the side street. “Lilith?” she called softly. “Where are you?”
Something that looked like a body lay on the sidewalk up ahead. Tasha picked up her pace.
Lilith lay face down on the cold concrete, her face turned to one side. Tasha dropped to her knees and pressed a trembling finger to Lilith’s neck, felt a strong pulse. She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding.
She shook Lilith by the shoulder. “Can you hear me? You’ve got to wake up.”
The other woman mumbled. Tasha shook her again. “Come on! You don’t want to spend the night out here.”
Lilith’s head moved from side to side, and her eyes fluttered open. After a moment, she levered herself upright where she sat blinking in the gloom.