Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [138]
Shada was in full stride, and as they made a hard left down another street, Jack could hear her yelling at the girl to keep up. Then the girl went down in the shadows beneath the overpass. Shada kept going. The girl had fallen, and Shada just left her.
Or did Shada push her down?
The girl was still on the sidewalk, holding her ankle, when Jack caught up with her.
“Are you okay?”
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. She got up slowly, then nearly fell over again when she put weight on that ankle.
Jack glanced ahead, beyond the darkness of the overpass. Shada was out of sight, long gone—with the cash. Jack hated to think what might happen to Vince without the ransom, but he couldn’t let a teenage girl go back to the Dark.
“Let me help you.”
“No!”
She was panic-stricken, and Jack tried his most soothing voice. “You’re safe now. Stay with me.”
“Leave me alone!”
Jack looked around for help and saw that they were right in front of a place called Pitcher & Piano, which, to a jet-lagged attorney from Miami, sounded like a law firm. “I’m going to take you inside here and call the police.”
“No!”
“You’ve been brainwashed by—”
Her punch to his chest took Jack’s breath away. “I’m not brainwashed,” she shouted, “and I can’t call the police!”
“Yes, you can.”
“If I’m not back with the money in ten minutes, he’ll kill me!”
“He has to find you to kill you!”
“No, he doesn’t!” she shouted.
“Just let me—”
Her scream was deafening—long and shrill, like the cry of a mortally wounded animal, and the fact that they were beneath an overpass made it even louder. A man came running out of Pitcher & Piano—it was a bar, not a law firm—and grabbed Jack.
“Let go of her!” the man shouted.
“I’m trying to help her.”
“I said, Let go!”
He took a swing at Jack, but Jack deflected it. Jack managed to keep a tight grip on the girl’s coat, but she only encouraged her Good Samaritan.
“Help! Get him away from me!”
The man was smaller than Jack, but the girl’s plea gave him added strength. He pulled Jack to the ground, and the girl broke free. The two men rolled on the sidewalk, and the speed with which the girl ran away—right through the pain in her ankle—left no doubt that her life was on the line. Hers and Vince’s. Jack pushed the man aside, jumped up from the sidewalk, and chased after the girl.
“Stop!”
She flagged a taxi to the curb. Jack was still a hundred feet away, but the thought of the girl getting away in a taxi made him kick into a higher gear. He had his cell phone in hand and was trying to dial the police, but that was impossible while running at full speed. He closed the gap quickly—that ankle was really bothering her—and she was almost within reach when the man from Pitcher & Piano tackled him from behind. Momentum carried them all the way to the taxi, and Jack reached for the girl’s ankle as she yanked the car door open. The man knocked Jack’s arm aside, and the girl jumped into the taxi.
“No!” Jack shouted, but the door was swinging shut, and the girl would soon be on her way to God only knew where. Jack was still on the ground, the man was on top of him, and he couldn’t stop the door from closing. In a split-second decision, Jack tossed his cell phone onto the floor in the back of the cab.
The door slammed shut, and the cab pulled away.
“Sorry, pal,” Jack said as he swung at the man’s jaw. The blow stunned the poor fellow, and it was enough to discourage him from giving chase as Jack hurried down the street in pursuit of the girl’s taxi. He dug the cell phone from Reza out of his coat pocket as he ran, stopped for a second to dial Chuck, and took off running again.
“You have spyware on my cell, right?” said Jack.
“Well . . .”
“It’s okay, Reza told me as much this morning!”
The black taxi was well ahead of him, but in the light of dawn it was still in sight. Jack talked fast as he raced down the sidewalk. “I tossed my phone into the back of the cab.”
“What cab?”
“I lost Shada, but the girl’s in a taxi with my cell phone. Follow that