Star Witness (12 page)

She could hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire behind them, and her shoulders tightened reflexively. Then she heard the deep revving of a car engine. Harte had stunned her attacker enough to make him let go of her, but they were in their car now, and it would be no time until they caught up with them again. She could barely catch her breath in the rain, and in only her white tank top, the chill had long since seeped under her skin. She gritted her teeth and concentrated on staying on her feet. As Harte led her into the dark recesses of the alley, she glanced around in trepidation. She hoped he knew where he was going.

The overhanging roofs gave a bit of protection from the rain. Once they were safely underneath, Harte slowed to a walk, then to a stop.

Dani wiped her face and squeezed water out of her hair as she gulped in huge lungfuls of air. All at once, a massive shudder shook her, a delayed reaction to the brutish thug’s hand on her. Between that and the cold, she couldn’t stop shaking.

“Harte, are you shot?” she panted. She didn’t see any blood, but he hadn’t answered her when she’d asked before.

Beside her, Harte leaned against the building’s wall. He shook his head, breathing hard. After a few seconds, he straightened and looked toward the entrance of the alley, listening. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to keep going.”

“Where?” she asked as he grabbed her hand.

A bit of brightness behind them rose through the gray like a hazy sunrise. “It’s the car,” he said. “Move!”

But as he moved into the alley, he saw that it was a dead end. A high wooden fence stretched between the two buildings. They were trapped. Twisting back, Harte could see the headlights. They’d blocked the entrance of the alley. He saw two men climbing out, then a third.

Without waiting to see if a fourth man got out, Harte pushed Dani behind him so his body would shield her as he desperately searched for an escape. Even if they could climb the fence, they’d be sitting ducks. Then he saw a door set into a side wall. “This way,” he said. “Stay behind me.”

He rattled the doorknob, then stepped back and rammed the door with his shoulder. Nothing happened. He took two steps back, prepared to ram the door again, but Dani grabbed his arm.

“Get out of the way! I’ve got this!” Dani cried. She grabbed the lock-pick set from her purse and unsnapped the cover. Her hands were soaking wet, just like the rest of her, and shaking with cold and fear, but she managed to pick up the right tool. She shouldered her way in front of Harte, bent over the doorknob and after a shaky false start, got the pick inserted into the lock.

Harte grabbed her upper arm. “Dani, what are you doing? They’re coming. Get behind me.”

Gritting her teeth, she worked the pick.

“Dani!”

“Wait,” she snapped as the tumblers slid. “The door’s open. Let’s go.” She opened the door and grabbed his arm, pulling him inside. She kept her grip on the knob as Harte stumbled in behind her, then slammed the door shut and turned the dead bolt. They were inside and, at least for the moment, safe from the faceless men pursuing them. Collapsing back against Harte, her eyes closed, she gasped for breath. She’d done it. She’d picked the lock. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d picked all the locks in her granddad’s house, learning the feel of the tools and the faint differences between tumblers sliding apart and slipping back together. But she’d never dreamed she’d actually use her knowledge in a life-and-death situation for real.

Her pulse was racing so fast that it echoed in her ears. Harte wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind, pulling her closer against him. His chest rose and fell against her back. His breath was cool across her wet forehead. With a sigh, she let herself relax against his long, lean body. Through their wet clothes, she felt the heat of his body envelop her. A shudder, equal parts cold, fear and desire, shook her.

“Dani?” he whispered.

She went still. Did he want her to move? She hoped not, because she didn’t want to leave the heat of his body. She was soaked, and while April in New Orleans could hardly be called cold, even in the rain, she felt chilled to the bone.

As she waited to see what he was going to say, she concentrated on the feel of him pressed against her. Warmth wasn’t all she needed from him now. She greedily soaked up the feelings of safety, comfort and a deep, rich yearning she’d never felt before.

He was silent and still for a long moment. His breath had calmed, and she could feel his heart beating fast but steadily against her back. Or at least she imagined she could.

He lowered his head and whispered in her ear, “How the hell did you do that?” She felt his lips graze the sensitive skin of her ear, and her insides quivered with longing. It took her a moment to figure out what he was talking about.

“Oh, the lock,” she muttered; then deliberately, she turned her head so that her mouth was close to his. “I picked it,” she whispered.

He made a small noise like a gasp as her mouth brushed his. “You what?”

“Picked the lock. Granddad gave me his lock-pick kit when I was ten. He said, ‘You never know when you might need to get through a door.’”

She felt his chest rumble with laughter. “That’s illegal.”

“So sue me,” she said lightly, then turned in his arms, rose on her tiptoes and kissed him. It was a tentative brushing of lips against lips, but it sent desire arrowing through her, all the way down to her toes.

Harte lifted his head slightly, and Dani moved with him, straining upward, keeping her mouth against his. For a moment that seemed suspended outside of time, he didn’t move, and then she felt him relent. It was a subtle relaxing of his tense muscles, a tiny dip of his head as he took the kiss to the next level. She felt his tongue touch her mouth, felt his arm slide from her shoulders down her back to pull her even closer...

She lifted her head to meet his deeper kiss, just as an odd sound broke through the steady drumbeat of the rain.

Harte stiffened—he’d heard it too.

Her heart skipped a beat. “Do I hear shouting?” she breathed.

He nodded. “Right outside the door,” Harte whispered as the noise suddenly stopped. He straightened slowly, his hand still around her waist. “Move away—without a sound.”

She opened her eyes for the first time and met a solid wall of darkness. She held out her hands in front of her, trying to keep her balance. Total darkness was so disorienting. She felt as though a single misstep would send her tumbling into a bottomless pit. She wanted to close her eyes again. She wanted to be back in Harte’s arms.

Finally, slowly, she became aware of a faint lessening of the total dark. She searched, making herself dizzy, until she found its source—small windows set high in the walls of the warehouse. At last, she had something she could look at to maintain her balance. She took one cautious step, then another. She braced herself, not wanting to crash into something.

By her fourth step, she’d nearly convinced herself that she could see vague shadows in the darkness. Whether they were real or figments of her imagination, being able to focus on something made her feel better.

Then her fingers touched something. She gasped. “There’s something here,” she whispered to Harte.

“Keep going, slowly,” he whispered back. “What does it feel like?”

“Paper?” she said, but that wasn’t quite right. It was too hard. “No. Plastic?” she guessed.

She started to take another step, but Harte laid a hand on her shoulder from behind.

“Wait,” he said, stopping.

“What is it?”

“Shh.”

She held her breath, but didn’t hear anything. “You heard them, didn’t you?” she whispered.

She felt Harte shake his head. “Not yet. But they will be here soon,” he said grimly.

“Maybe they doubled back to look at the building. We don’t know how many doors there are.” She paused. “Or if they’re all locked.”

Suddenly, the door they’d come through rattled. The men were trying to force it open. Then a ferocious pounding filled the air. They were kicking the metal door.

“Keep going,” he said. “We need to get away from there, and fast. I need to see how many other entrances there are.”

His words were cut off by a sharp, ricocheting sound. “They’re trying to shoot the lock. They gave up on forcing the metal door open.”

“The lock’s a Schlage,” Dani said. “It’ll take them forever to break it by shooting at it.”

“It’s a what?”

“A Schlage. The strongest and most reliable padlock in the world. Granddad had Schlage locks on every door. When you’ve tried to pick one, you develop a healthy respect for them.”

Several rounds fired within a few seconds. Each one ricocheted just like the first. Then they heard more shouting.

“Maybe one of them caught a ricochet,” she said hopefully.

“Maybe it’s the boss, telling them to surround the building,” Harte replied.

“Surround?” she said in surprise. “How many men do you think are out there? I only saw three.”

“I think there are four, unless there’s another vehicle. I don’t think so, though. I can’t believe these guys can still maneuver that car out there, with all the wind and rain. Come on. We need to find a place to hide.”

“Why can’t we just wait here until they give up and then sneak back out this door?”

“If I were the boss, I’d find the freight door and try to ram it with the car.” He took her hand and started forward, into the blackness.

As soon as she put out her hand, it bumped a solid, rounded surface in front of her. “Oh, wait. I’ve got a flashlight,” Dani said, fishing in her purse. “I forgot about it.”

She felt him shrug. Then he said, “You’ve got a lot of stuff in that purse, don’t you?”

She couldn’t help chuckling. “You have no idea.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

She pulled the flashlight out and turned it on. The narrow beam shone on a massive, gaping red-and-blue mouth lined with dozens of sharp white teeth. It loomed over her, poised to rip her apart. She stared into the gaping maw, a shriek ripping its way past her tight throat.

After a moment of paralyzing fear, she whirled and grasped at Harte’s shirt as she tried to suck air into lungs that felt collapsed with terror. She held on to him with all her might.

Harte pulled her close and took the flashlight from her numb fingers. A noise like laughter rumbled up from his chest.
Laughter?
Carefully, she turned her head enough to peek back at the thing that had nearly attacked her.

Harte shone the flashlight’s beam over the monster’s dreadful eyes, gleaming white teeth and garish slashes of color. Her knee-jerk reaction was to bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder. But there was something familiar about the garish face. Her cheeks began to warm as she figured out what she was looking at.

Harte laughed out loud. “I’ve heard about these, but I’ve never seen one,” he said, chuckling. “We’re in a warehouse used to store Mardi Gras floats.”

She unclenched her fists from his shirt and turned around. Slowly, with Harte shining the flashlight around, the nightmarish bloody beasts morphed into the familiar fiberglass, crepe paper and feather decorations she’d seen in every Mardi Gras parade.

The awful mouth with its razor-sharp teeth that had threatened to devour her belonged to a colorful Chinese dragon head mounted on the front end of a brightly painted double-decker float dripping with gold, purple and green Mardi Gras beads.

Next to the dragon was a gigantic leprechaun face topped with a kelly-green hat. She remembered seeing both floats in last year’s parade.

Similar garish and vaguely disturbing shapes stretched beyond them until they melted into the darkness. Even though she knew what they were now, the back of her throat still fluttered with fading terror and she couldn’t stop shivering. “This can’t be Mardi Gras World?”

He shook his head, still chuckling. “No. You’ve seen Mardi Gras World, right? It’s a museum. This is just a storage warehouse.”

“Stop laughing,” she snapped. “I was scared.”

“Sorry,” he responded, but the amused tone was still there. “Shh,” he said. “Listen.”

She did. The shooting and banging had stopped. “I don’t hear anything.”

“I think they’ve abandoned that door,” he said.

“You think they’re looking for the freight door?”

“It’s what I would do. If I only had four men, I’d leave one at the door we came in and the rest of us would look for the best way to break in...” As he talked, he fished his phone from his pocket and flipped it open. “I’ve still got nothing.” He pressed a couple of buttons. “Can’t call out or send a message.”

“The storm must have knocked out a bunch of cell towers.”

Harte nodded. “If we can’t call for help, they can’t either. Let’s go,” he said. “I want to see where the freight door is—and how many other doors there are. Then we can plan how we’re going to get out of here.” Glancing around, he continued. “If we’re careful, we can use the floats like a maze. There must be thirty in here, maybe forty.”

“That’s thirty or forty too many for me. They’re creepy.”

“Come on,” he said, leading the way into the darkness lit only by the flashlight’s narrow beam. She followed his winding trail through the dozens of floats, giving the huge fiberglass monster heads as wide a berth as she could while still keeping up with him.

He stopped abruptly and she almost ran into him.

“Here’s the freight door. It looks pretty sturdy and it’s on the opposite side of the building from the door we came in.” He glanced around. “They’re going to use their car to break it in, I’ll guarantee you. Come on. Let’s circle around this side of the building.” He gestured. “Stay away from both the freight door and the door you opened.”

They made their way diagonally away from the freight door. When they reached the wall, Harte slid along it, feeling for a door. Dani stayed behind him.

“Here,” he said finally. “If I haven’t totally lost my bearings, I think this door is just about halfway between the freight door and the one we came in and on the opposite wall.” He caught her hand and drew it toward him. “Feel the lock. Is it like the one you picked?”

“It feels like a Schlage. It’s got a turn bolt on the inside, just like that one. All we should have to do is turn the latch and open the door.”