Page 52 of Don't Let Go

He shrugged. “Personality conflicts. Not everyone appreciates me for the charmer I am.”

That did make me smile. “You are pretty perfect.”

He gave my hand a squeeze. “Thanks for noticing.” Only his attention wasn’t on me now, it was on the monitors behind me, I twisted to watch a dark SUV enter and begin a slow drive toward the parking slots.

Too slow a drive.

The rasp of metal on leather told me he’d freed his gun from the holster, but he hadn’t let go of my hand.

“Wait,” I said, tracking the car as it all but crawled toward a parking spot. Dark SUV didn’t have to mean government or reclamation agents. It didn’t have to mean anything.

Still, when it finally pulled into a slot, I swore my nerves had been pulled too taut. Then the driver’s side door opened, and a woman exited the vehicle at a dead run for the bathroom.

Relief spilled through me like water being released from a drain. The rasp of metal on leather told me he’d put the gun back as we tracked the woman’s mad dash for the facilities. Then I glanced back at the car. No other passengers were visible.

“Give me a closeup on the bathrooms,” McQuade said and I split the screen, keeping an eye on the cars while I switched to the camera on the bathroom doors. There wasn’t one inside the bathroom and we all needed boundaries.

That was definitely one for me.

One by one, the other cars left, but it took our friend in the SUV alongtime to leave the bathroom. While McQuade stayed fixed on it, I scrolled through the other angles to make sure we hadn’t lost track of her.

By the time she finally emerged, however, I wasn’t the only one blowing out a harsh breath. She looked pale and sweaty. Her walk back to the car was almost pained. Road trip and upset bowels were not a good combination.

Despite the lightness of our earlier chat, neither of us relaxed even after the SUV finally pulled out and returned to the highway.

Just fifteen more minutes and the guys would be here.

Fifteen more minutes and we could put miles between us and this place.

Why did I think that we were asking for a lot with fifteen more minutes?

Chapter

Eighteen

MCQUADE

William Henry Mackintosh expired three hours and forty-seven minutes after he arrived courtesy of Remy and Locke. It took a little under thirty minutes for him to regain consciousness, then another twenty of him screaming before he passed out again. Finally, at the ninety-minute mark, we got him awake and talking.

Granted it was another couple of hours for the gibberish to be translated into English, after which I put a bullet in his head. It ended his suffering and mine.

Irritating man.

Locke skipped the questioning by moving up to drive. We didn’t invite Patch into the interrogation. She didn’t need to see this. Thankfully, she didn’t ask so we got to avoid that fight.

Remy and I bagged the body up silently. The plastic layers on the walls made cleanup straightforward. I stripped off the plastic body suit that kept his blood off me. Once everything was bagged and stored, I checked my watch.

“We still need to find a place to get rid of him.” One drawback of being on the move constantly. We were going to have to make use of multiple dump sites. We were still in Nevada and heading south again.

“We’ve got some options in Arizona,” Remy said before opening the door to the soundproof room where we’d worked. I was a half-step behind him. The door closed with a pressurized hiss. It required a code to open it.

I didn’t try to fool myself that my sugar bear could get in there if she wanted. I just had to trust that she didn’t want to. “Who do you know in Arizona?”

To be fair, he’d trusted my sourced support in Colorado. While I didn’t expect it from someone with his pedigree and background, I could probably trust it. The real mistake would be assuming he didn’t have contacts of his own.

“I know quite a few people,” he said, a faint smirk on his lips.

I swallowed my snarkier response as I caught sight of Patch scowling at her computer screen like it had betrayed her.

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