Page 4 of The Perfect Escape
Unbelievable. Margaret Curtis used the year she was born as her password. Not very smart on her part. Punching in the numbers, I brought her phone to life. Just as I suspected, no more than 30 minutes ago, she contacted her brother. I handed her phone back to her. It didn’t take long to figure out who Brax was. “Call your brother.”
After Margaret completed the call under my instructions, we had a meeting place. I had to hand it to her; she did exactly as I asked, with no visible sign of nervousness. With her phone in hand, we left her grungy doublewide trailer. Patton saw no evidence of a landline in the trailer, so there was no risk that she would call her brother back to warn him it was a set-up. Even if she found another way to contact him, which I was sure she would, it would have been a stupid move on her part. Hopefully, threatening her job was incentive enough to make her think twice. Margaret Curtis denied giving her brother information on Reyna’s adoption, but my gut said she did.
As we got into the car, Patton looked over to me. “I don’t know about you, boss, but I need a shower.”
“I agree. Meet me back at the Regency at noon.” Disgusted as well, I got what he meant. In the span of our brief chat with Ms. Curtis, she smoked half a dozen cigarettes. At fifty-nine, her addiction made her look twenty years older.
∞
Heading over to a park bench near the Androgyne Planet sculpture,I waited for Giles Curtis to show up. Patton was seated across the fountain, keeping an eye out. We both had no clue what Curtis looked like other than a photo Patton pulled from the Internet from sixteen years ago. He was one of those men who was hard to miss. Just like the men inThe Society,he had a military background. I had never met the man, but my father told me that Giles Curtis was Salko’s right-hand man and did all of his dirty work.
Pushing back my shirt cuff, I looked down at my watch to see that it was 1:45 p.m., which meant that Giles Curtis was fifteen minutes late. My gut told me he wouldn’t be showing up. There was no reason for him to suspect that he was meeting someone other than his sister unless Margaret Curtis tipped him off. Pulling her phone from my pocket, I swiped the screen and entered her four-digit password. I couldn’t call him, but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t send him a text. Typing a message as though it was his sister showing concern, I waited for him to respond.
Margaret’s cell vibrated instantly with an incoming call. I could have just let it go to voice mail, but if I didn’t answer it, he just might show up at Margaret’s house and find out it wasn’t her who sent him the text.
Swiping the screen to answer the call, I remained silent as he spoke. “I know it’s you, Cross, and you just fucked up. The minute my sister called me, I knew something was wrong. She knows not to call or text me.”
How could I have missed that all the calls were incoming and not outgoing?
“Curtis, I only want to talk. Nothing more. Your boss has something of mine, and I want it back.”
There was silence, and I had a feeling he was considering meeting me. Nothing would make me happier than to find out what his connection was to Reyna and if he knew where Salko might have taken her.
“I’ll meet you, but on my terms.” Curtis just made a wise choice. Probably the best choice in his pathetic life.
“Where?”
After getting the directions to the location where Curtis wanted to meet, I walked over to Patton, who was still waiting on the other side of the fountain. When I approached him, it didn’t take long for him to realize that something was up. “Let me guess. Giles Curtis is a no show.”
“Not exactly. He wants to meet in Gainesville, where Reyna used to live.” I found it odd that he would choose Reyna’s childhood home as the place he wanted to meet.
“Seems kind of strange that he would want to meet there, don’t you think?” Patton scratched his bald head before pacing in a complete circle.
“I know what you’re thinking, Patton, but we both know we don’t have a choice. If it could help us find Reyna, we have to go.”
After leaving the park, we had a few hours before we had to leave for Gainesville. It was only an hour’s drive, and before we left, I thought it best to see if we could track where Curtis was just before he called.
As we pulled inside the warehouse, I could see Axe and Calvin sitting in the computer room through the entrance door. Upon my instructions, Marcus was monitoring Margaret’s trailer in the event she left, while Sean remained Kenzi’s shadow. I was pretty sure she wasn’t in danger since Salko got his revenge when he took Reyna. On the other hand, he was still crazy and unstable, and I didn’t want to take the chance that I was wrong.
For now, my top priority was to find out where Curtis was. Axe and Calvin were both computer geniuses, but Patton was the master hacker. There wasn’t anything that he couldn’t hack. If the information was out there, Patton knew how to get it. After I gave him Margaret’s phone on the way over, he wasted no time finding out where her asshole brother was. If he was still in Atlanta, it would save us a trip to Gainesville.
Patton and I each pulled up a chair in front of a vacant computer. I focused my sights on his magic fingers as he began typing away at the keyboard. Bringing Margaret’s phone to life, Patton entered the password and pulled up her brother’s contact information. He resumed typing, and a series of numbers appeared on the screen. I had no clue what they meant, but small dots appeared when Patton opened another app with a map. It was a map of Atlanta. “What the hell?” Patton cursed as he continued typing on the keyboard.
“Tell me what you see, Patton.” Whatever the numbers on the screen meant, he knew the answer.
“I don’t get it. It’s like Curtis is in a hundred places all at once. It’s impossible. His cell is bouncing off of all the towers.” Pushing away from the desk, he tilted his head back, rubbing his hands over his face.
“What could cause this?” I asked as the dots multiplied.
“He has to be using a jammer. It is the only explanation.” Patton pulled himself back to the table and began typing on the keyboard.
The screen went completely black before it lit up again. The numbers were no longer multiplying by the hundreds. Only one number popped up—Margaret’s. “Shit,” Patton quickly unplugged the computer and pushed away from the desk. “Shut down all the computers. Now!”
Axe and Calvin were up off their seats, scrabbling to turn off all the computers while Patton struggled to pull the tracker from Margaret’s phone. When every computer screen had gone black, Patton turned to face me. “I think we stopped it in time.”
“Stopped what?” I looked at him, completely confused by what happened in a matter of minutes.
“Curtis. He had to have known we would try to locate his position. He used the information I was entering to locate our position by using Margaret’s phone. He knew she didn’t have it. And we did.”
