Page 25 of Come For Me
Chapter Ten
Their little group walked silently through the empty office. Olivia had to force herself not to bump a wall or scuff a shoe, anything to break the monotony of quiet that filled her ears like a rushing tsunami. Startling one of the three men with guns trained on her would not be good, however. Here in the open of the main room, they seemed especially twitchy. She’d made it this far. A few more minutes—minutes that would allow Dain to free her friends—wouldn’t push her to the breaking point.
Cecil led the group through the rows of cubicles straight to Stan’s office. Olivia kept her eyes averted from Stan’s body, her heart aching. To distract herself as well as the others, she turned to Kelly. “What happens after this, after you have the money?”
Kelly watched her and Cecil with penetrating eyes that seemed to miss nothing. “What happens is I disappear. What happens to Derrick is on him, not me.”
Cecil had his hand on the doorknob to Stan’s office, but at Kelly’s words, he jerked back around. “You aren’t going to hand over the money to your boss? What—”
“Of course I will; don’t be ridiculous. Not that I’d care if something happened to you, but I have no intention of spending my life on the run from the mob. Cops, no problem. But not the family.”
He said the last word with a warmth that made no sense to Olivia, as if the men he was talking about really were tied to him by blood. The thought made her stomach cramp.
Cecil’s shoulders slumped, probably in relief. He pushed the door open.
“So you get the money you need, pass it along to your bosses, then what?”
Kelly gestured her ahead of him into the room. “Then I take the little bit extra I skimmed from the accounts and find a nice sunny place to retire.”
He’d have to. After this, his face would be all over the news. The only way he could stay in the States and not be recognized was with plastic surgery.
Inside Stan’s office Olivia took a slow look around. She’d spent a lot of time in this room with her coworker. Stan had trained her for the past five years to eventually take over the accounting department. Framed photos on his desk showed his frequent fly-fishing trips, the golden retriever he’d adopted last year named, oddly enough, Baby. Where would Baby go now? To Stan’s sister? The thought sent Olivia’s hand to her belly once more, as if her fingers could shield her child from harm.
Kelly nudged her roughly in the back. “Where is it? Where are the codes?”
“In the safe,” she told him with a nod to the corner. Stan’s office was the exact opposite of her own: to their right sat his wide oak desk flanked by full bookcases, in the center was a small seating area, but in this office the left-hand corner was taken up with a large cabinet. Olivia walked over to it. Keeping her body between the key-pad lock and the men in the room, she entered a series of numbers, then waited for a beep.
The lock snicked opened.
The heavy door resisted her efforts to open it, but with both hands she managed to pull it away from the safe. As she stepped to the side, Kelly crowded in behind her. Piles of papers lay stacked in neat rows on several shelves. The bottom of the safe contained two square boxes. She reached for the one on the left.
The box was slender, light, barely big enough for the three-ring binder Olivia had seen inside it time and again. She passed it into Kelly’s eager hands before turning back to close up the safe.
“What the fuck is this?”
The shout startled her so badly Olivia found herself crouching down, searching frantically for an incoming blow. Instead she saw Kelly, open box in his white-knuckled hands, his body shaking with rage.
The box was empty.
Oh God.
Godzilla charged her. She skittered away, leaving him to rifle through the safe at will. The second box was removed, opened—nothing. Kelly’s thug tore the contents apart to no avail. The binder containing the pass codes wasn’t in the safe.
“Where is it?” Kelly screamed.
Olivia’s heart felt like it would crush her ribs at any moment, it beat so hard. She’d backed herself into the corner opposite the safe, needing the wall at her back, needing to feel safe, and yet what stood out to her in that moment wasn’t the guns reappearing or the snarling faces, but the spit that left Kelly’s mouth as he screamed. That spit made him look rabid. Terrifying. He stalked her across the room, and every step was in slow motion. Every second, every word, every speck of saliva that left his mouth seemed to travel at the speed of a glacier. She knew he was coming, knew she had to get away, and yet her body remained frozen there in the corner, helpless, paralyzed.
“Boss!”
Godzilla’s counterpart stood in the doorway looking out. Between one blink and the next, Kelly turned his head. She knew what he was seeing, knew the moment its meaning registered. His eyes went wide; the vein at his temple popped out. His arm rose, semi-auto pointed straight into the main room.
Dain.
She didn’t remember giving the signal to her muscles and bones. She didn’t remember crossing the room. All she knew was one moment, her husband’s name was choking her, and the next, she rammed into Kelly, arms out, using all her weight to throw him away from the door. But she was too late. She knew it when thepop pop popof gunfire sounded in her ear. When glass shattered at the front of the office suite.
When Kelly swung his arm around, slamming the gun into the side of her head.
Dain heard the shout at the back of the room. One last look showed John David bringing up the rear of the line of Georgia Financial employees hurrying toward the emergency stairs next to the bank of elevators. He was grateful they were out of danger, but they didn’t hold his heart. His heart was at the back of the room with his wife. His everything. He wouldn’t breathe until she was safe.
