for any and all expenses. I hadn’t exactly expected to disappear, but it was one of those things you did when you had kids. You made sure that if anything happened to you, there was someone there to take care of them. A backup plan. Particularly when there was no father in the picture—and the grandparents were all the way down in Southern California. Laurie had been Rhea’s best friend since preschool, and I’d known her mom for a long time, so she’d been the obvious choice.
Thank God I’d had the forethought to set this up. Thank God Laurie’s mom had followed through on that promise.
I sent one more prayer of thanks heavenward and then launched into the story I’d come up with while I was waiting for her to answer.
“I’m so sorry, baby. One of my friends surprised me with a trip out of town, and—”
A sudden screeching of tires interrupted me, and my eyes flew up and toward the opening of the parking lot. Though I didn’t really have to look. We were in an underground parking garage in Reno in the evening and on the weekend, when most of the office buildings were already closed—if they’d been open today at all.
Someone screeching into the parking garage at this time of day, on a weekend? Yeah, I already knew what I was going to see.
Because the other thing was that people didn’t come tearing into a parking lot like a bat out of hell if they were just casually parking. They didn’t come in like that unless they expected to find someone there who they knew they’d have to catch unawares.
I had no idea how they’d found us. I didn’t know why it had taken them so long or how they’d figured out where we were. But that didn’t matter. We were in trouble, and that meant I had to get the hell off the phone and work with Jack—again—to get us out of it.
“Baby, I have to go,” I muttered. “I’ll call you back as soon as I can, okay?”
“Oh, okay. Sure, Mom.”
Suppressing the wave of emotion that came with knowing my baby was okay, I hung up and went scrambling up toward where Jack was sitting, grabbing my things as I went and feeling for the gun that I’d stored in his bag after our last shoot-out. I needed it, because I wanted to be prepared this time. I wanted to get the first shots in—and I was going to hit those guys before they hit us, if I could.
Because we’d thought we were going to be able to get out of here before they found us. Turned out we were running late on that one, though. I didn’t know how, but the bad guys had found us, and we weren’t even remotely prepared to use our emergency exit yet.
Chapter 24
Alice
We scrambled out of the van, guns in hand, and ducked down behind the vehicle, trying to get as much cover as we could. But it only took a minute for the bad guys to come to a screeching halt, the small car emitting more people than I thought should have been able to fit into it. They came rushing out, all of them screaming and brandishing guns in our direction.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Jack muttered, moving quickly to stand in between me and where the men were disembarking from their car.
“What are we going to do? How did they find us after this long? Where the hell did they come from?” I hissed, trying—not very successfully—to see over his broad shoulders.
Seriously, if I was going to be any help at all in this particular battle, he was going to have to at least let me see the guys we were supposed to be shooting. And preferably get out of the way of my gun—and the bullets I was planning on using.
Though I wondered, in that moment, whether he was going to let me be a part of this battle at all. Or if he was going to try to play hero and keep me out of it. That would have been suicidal, of course. There was no way he could take that many men on by himself.
At the same time, I would have been lying if I’d denied the thrill it sent through me to think that this man was willing to put himself on the line for little old me. I didn’t get heroes often in my life. The fact that I’d found one in