“The bathroom’s over there,” he said, pointing to a door. “I’ll fix us something to eat …”
She’d stayed with him until dawn, and hell, even after all these years, she wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. Regardless, she didn’t think she’d be getting anything to eat tonight. It was really dark in the basement. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, and she was trying.
She took a breath and told herself to calm down, to take a cue from him.
“How long are we going to stay down here?” A fair question, she assured herself, and not just a knee-jerk reaction to being bitchy and breathless with near-death anxiety. They were under the building, in some kind of basement, an underground storage room, or a supply area, or a utility access, or maybe an old coal bin. And his whole argument about not crashing was pitifully weak. Tires had left earth. They’d been airborne, even if only for a second. Corinna had scraped her front end on the landing, and if anyone had ever used that supposed “ramp” they’d come down to get an automotive vehicle in here, Jane would eat her socks.
“As long as it takes.”
Oh, for crying out loud.
“As long as it takes for what? Because if you’re waiting for me to—”
“Shhh,” he said softly, interrupting her.
Fine. She could shhhh.
She took another breath. Then she heard it, the sound of the other cars. Steele Street muscle was unmistakable. Even from a distance, she could tell Roxanne from Angelina and that was Roxy up there. Coralie sounded like Corinna, and she was coming in from the other side of the building. Angelina must have gone in another direction, probably trying to cut them off at the pass. Roxanne was little more than a brief sound signature echoing in the darkness, but Coralie was prowling the parking lot, the low rumble of her engine tracking west to east behind them. Then Jane heard sirens.
Cops.
She stiffened in her seat, the sound giving her a start. Coralie must have been startled, too. The GTO revved back to full-bore life and took off, and the police car followed her. For one long minute after another, she and J.T. sat silently in Corinna, in the dark, listening to the fading sound of the sirens and to each other breathe.
Cripes. Cops—the last thing she needed. She had a clean record now, and there were a few folks, like Lieutenant Loretta, of the Denver Police Department, whose good graces Jane worked very hard to retain.
So maybe she should have thought about that before she’d ended up sliding off the map into the basement of an abandoned factory over on the west side with a guy with God knew what kind of criminal tendencies.
As a matter of fact, sitting in the dark at the bottom of a virtual pit with a man who had no recollection of himself as one of the good guys—well, on second thought, maybe that hadn’t been her best move.
“Is there a way out of here?” she asked, tossing a question into the great pool of silence between them, trying to sound nonchalant, like it was a matter of business, not of survival.
“The way we came in.”
She gave him an incredulous look, not that he could see it, which in no way stopped her from flat-out staring in his direction like he was nuts.
“And Plan B?” she asked, because his Plan A sounded like a homeless kid’s Christmas list: a whole lot of wishful thinking.
“We don’t need Plan B,” he said. “This is doable.”
“With a jetpack and a winch?” She didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but she was damned skeptical.
“No.” He started the car, and suddenly she could see the basement in the twin-beam illumination of Corinna’s headlights.
The place was a dump, literally, full of junk and garbage. It looked like bad things happened here, and that was the voice of experience. She’d been homeless. She knew about the Christmas list, and she knew what homeless looked like, and it looked like this.
“I’ve gotten a car up that ramp,” he said. “Driven one out of here.” He paused for a moment. “It was a deal for a guy named … Sparky. Yeah, Sparky … a BMW 535i, black, an ’89.”
Oh-kay. That definitely got her attention. He couldn’t remember his own name, but he remembered a car he’d stolen. Oh, yeah, he was J. T. Chronopolous, all right. She knew Sparky Klimaszewski, remembered him