Kissed Blind (A Hot Pursuit Novel Book 2) (14 page)

“What’s this? Have you done this before?” I leaned in.

He studied the screen. “No, but I watched them go through the simulation at the meeting you missed. I’m sure I can figure it out. It’s been a little while, but it’ll come back to me.” He pulled the keyboard closer to the edge of the desk, and with the stroke of a few keys, he’d gotten us into the system we needed to access.

I wrinkled my forehead. “We’re not going to get in trouble for doing this, are we?”

Vance shrugged. “It’s part of our job. Relax, Sandra Dee.”

He continued to navigate through various screens before locating the chipping program. He stopped when he got to a blinking cursor. He leaned back in his seat and scratched his beard, creating a sound like fingernails raking over Velcro.

“What? Why’d you stop?” I pivoted in my seat and faced him.

“You wouldn’t happen to know the number of the card we gave him, would you?”

“You mean you gave it to him and never jotted down the number?”

He exhaled through his nose and his lips thinned. “I know you’re not thinking of giving me shit for this right now.”

“I hate to overstate the obvious, but yeah, it sure looks like it.”

“I forgot, okay? Cut me some slack. The stuff with Pop has me thrown off a little.”

I nodded. “All right, all right, slack given.” I thought for a second. “The number should be in his client file, right?” I glanced at a stack of papers that had accumulated over on his desk. “It should be in there.”

He grabbed my face, and I thought for a second he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t. “You’re a genius.” I tucked my head down to hide my reddening cheeks, and he smiled snatching the stack of papers. He rifled through them and found the sheet he was looking for. He pointed to a series of numbers. “Read those off to me.”

I rattled off a sixteen digit number as Vance typed them in. After entering the last digit, his fingers hovered over the keyboard. “The moment of truth. Hopefully this works.” He hit enter, and a map of Cincinnati loaded onto the screen. A blue rotating circle spun and spun, and we waited to see if it would locate the chip hidden in Oliver’s wallet. A few seconds passed, and a green dot blinked on the screen. We read the location.

“Central Parkway? Where?” I blinked trying to think of a reasonable place he could be in the area. “Nothing’s over there, except for District One.” If I was going to take someone and hold them hostage, doing it next to one of the police department’s district buildings wasn’t the smartest idea.

Vance exhaled and laced his fingers behind his head. “Abandoned buildings are all over the area. He could be in any of those. Plenty of perfect hiding places.”

“Yeah, abandoned, crumbling buildings if you want to die and get eaten by roaches the size of your hand.”

He ignored my remark. “We should go.”

“You’re right. We need to get a look at the location and get this mapped out, prepare our game plan.”

“Give me your phone.” Vance held out his hand.

“Why?” I hesitated handing it over and glared at him. I still hadn’t completely forgiven him for breaking into my phone months ago.

“Would you give it a rest? God, one time, and you’ll never let me live it down. You need to update the B&B app so you can access the tracking locator. I can only assume you haven’t updated it yet.”

He was right, I hadn’t. “Fine.” I handed him my phone.

He installed the update and walked me through the tracking system. “The tracking locator works inside the B&B app. See here, there’s a new feature listed on the ‘Home’ screen.” He tapped an icon and entered the same sixteen digit number I’d read off to him. “There, now in a second it’s going to pull up the GPS and your phone should, in theory, give us directions.”

My mouth hung open. “That’s amazing.”

“Isn’t technology grand?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Okay, let’s motor and scope it out.”

Down in the car, Vance used the Bluetooth system to tie into my phone, and a man’s voice directed us where to go. We were only a few blocks away. We pulled up to the curb on a vacant stretch of Central Parkway. Not a soul walked the streets, which I wasn’t sure was a good thing or bad. Off to the side of the road was an old concrete bridge. Past it was a field of nothing, which led down into one of the major interstate highways. If ever I wanted to kill someone and hide the body that would have been a perfect spot.

A wave of dread rippled through me. “Vance, do you think they killed him already and dumped the body?”

“I hope not. I’d think they’d want their money first.” He cleared his throat.

“The blue dot hasn’t moved.”

“They have him tied up. He’s alive. Camille said she heard him.”

“Then, I don’t understand.” I pause and glanced around. “There’s nothing here. Where’s he supposed to be?”

Vance snatched my phone and took a closer look at the screen. He set it down on the dashboard and looked out my window. His eyes narrowed and he muttered, “I wonder,” under his breath.

“What? You think he’s under the road?” I laughed.

“Actually, I think that’s exactly where he is.” He fished his phone out of his pocket and began an internet search.

“Huh?” I tried to peek at his screen.

“They might have him in the subway system under the city.”

“Have you lost your mind? There’s no subway system under the city?”

“Actually, there is. Look here.” He tilted his screen, and a website loaded, detailing an abandoned subway system project. He scrolled through photo after photo of gates overgrown with weeds, graffiti covered tunnels, concrete staircases that led into black abysses, and old construction photos. He pointed at a spot on the map. “See, here are some of the tunnels running through the city—under the city. It was a huge project started in the twenties. They only built a few miles of the tunnels before it lost funding and the project was abandoned.”

“We have an unused subway system under our streets?” I scrunched my nose, and he nodded. “How do you know about this? And better yet, how do
I not know about this?”

“It’s one of those things I picked up along the way. When I ran cross country in high school the coach organized runs all over the place. Changing the terrain was good for training and kept us engaged. One day I noticed these really huge double doors under a bridge. Me and a buddy went back after school one day and broke in. It’s pretty cool down there. Spooky, but cool.”

“You broke in? You rebel. I can’t believe you did that.” I leaned back into my seat and stared through the windshield. “I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing anymore. We might be in over our heads. What if he gets killed? That’ll be hanging over us for the rest of our lives.”

“We’re protecting our client, and doing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. I just need to study the grid and get my bearings. They’ve already gotten through the gates that’re supposed to be locked.” He studied the map and my phone, bouncing back and forth between the two. “And I bet they have him in an area like this one.” He pointed to an image of a series of concrete walls off a raised platform. Beneath the picture was a caption saying the area had been converted in the sixties as a nuclear fallout shelter. “There’s even a bathroom down there. It’s isolated and has everything they could need for a short time. It’s more perfect than one of these old buildings.” He pointed to a dilapidated brick business up the road whose lights had gone out long ago. He continued to scroll through images and brief articles. “We’ll use this northern access point. And, it’s going to be dark down there. We’ll have to borrow some thermal vision goggles. It’ll be easier for us to see them if we follow heat signatures.”

“Vance,” I sighed.

“It’s going to be fine. We’ll be together, and there aren’t two better people out there who can do this.”

With every ounce of my soul, I believed him. “Okay, then let’s go back and get what we need.”

.              .              .

Vance and I studied all the maps
Google
had to offer until we had them memorized. We put
Kevlar
vests on underneath our shirts and borrowed thermal vision goggles from the B&B supply room. We met down in the hallway outside of the women’s locker room and returned to the car.

“I’m guessing there are only two or three people holding Oliver, tops. Anymore and they’d have too many cooks in the kitchen,” Vance said.

“And more people to split the pot with.”

“Right,” he agreed. “I have zip ties to immobilize them once we take them down,” he patted a pocket on his pants. “We won’t know until we get there what kind of weapons they have though, or how they’re holding him. The only thing we can do is get there and check it out.”

“Got it.”

“We’ll have the element of surprise too. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell they think we’re coming. That combined with our fighting skills, and they ain’t got nothin’ on us, baby.” He twitched his confident brows.

I grinned. “No, they don’t.” He started the car, and I checked the pulsing beacon on my screen. “Still no movement.”

“Good.” Vance drove us back to the same spot. “I’m going to park over there.” He pointed up the road to a gravel parking lot surrounded by a chain link fence. We’d park at the curb where a street light stood, but no light shone from its broken bulb. “The gate should be over there. We’ll have to walk about a quarter of a mile once inside the tunnels to get to where they have him. The acoustics down there will be loud so minimal talking.”

“Agreed.”

Vance parked and took a cleansing breath, letting it out slowly. “You scared?”

“Hell no, I’m not scared. Never.” I twisted my diamond stud earring and squeezed the back on a little tighter. I’d like to say I was fearless from my hours and hours of training, that I had prepared for any situation life threw at me, but the truth was this situation made me a little nervous.

Vance held my head in his hand, and he wore an almost imperceptible grin. “Liar. We can handle anything when we’re together, right?”

“Without a doubt.” I nodded, but it didn’t slow my rapidly beating heart.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, ever. I’ve got your back.”

“And I have yours.”

All the spit in my mouth had evaporated. He studied my face, and I studied his as an empty feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. This was the most dangerous situation we’d ever walked into.

“We should go,” he said.

I inhaled a sobering breath. “Yep, let’s go.”

We walked along the side of the road; the cool air stung my nostrils. We slipped into the grass and slid down an embankment out of view. My gun was strapped to my side, and a smaller pistol was attached to my ankle. We arrived at the portal.

On one side we faced the concrete monster and a foreboding set of doors, to the other was the interstate where cars innocently drove by. I held my phone in my hand and watched for any movement from the tracking chip in Oliver’s pocket. Still nothing. We silenced our phones, I dimmed the light on my screen, and we checked the sound in our ear pieces. Vance slowly opened the doors to the abandoned tunnels, and I held the cut chains dangling from the doors. 

When I stepped inside behind Vance, I lowered the goggles over my eyes and surveyed the area. Everything around us was various shades of gray. The concrete walls radiated stagnant air and were covered in spray paint. We walked in a few more steps. The ceiling was high and arched for the subway cars that never made their virgin trek, and a dark tunnel led to our final destination.

Vance whispered in my ear. “You lead. I’m right behind you.” I held my thumb up but barely heard him over the pounding of my heart. This space was the exact place where children’s nightmares were created, and maybe even a few of my own. At any moment a ghoulish clown oozing green slime from his teeth could have jumped from the shadows, and it wouldn’t have surprised me.

I took a few steps forward, my shoes crunching on the pebbled ground below. We crept forward, carefully crossing over metal tracks and making as little sound as possible. Something moved along the wall up ahead, its small narrow body scurried and glowed white. Rats, another thing I hated ranking just below big bugs. A disgusted shiver ran up my spine, but I pushed my revulsion aside, making my way toward the blue dot on my screen.

The tunnel opened to a set of platforms on either side of us. As we walked in farther, the ground recessed. I walked closer to the platform to our left, and my head became level with the upper concrete deck.

“We’re getting close,” I whispered.

“Good. Don’t pay any attention to your little buddy running away. I can feel your skin crawling from here.”

“It’s a disease infested rat. They’re disgusting.”

Vance shushed me as the faint beat of music began to play. I stopped dead in my tracks. “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and The Shondells started playing. We put our backs to the wall and looked toward a faint light emanating from one of the bunkers ahead. Based on my screen, Oliver was on the other side of the cinderblock wall less than fifteen feet in front of us.

The moment of truth had arrived, and no white flags would be waved. We crept forward, walking toward the unknown together. How many men would we find on the other side of the wall? Would Oliver be dead or alive? Would there be a body count?