Love at First Sight - By B. J. Daniels Page 0,39

ecstatic to hear his voice. “Jack, I found him!”

“Karen? Where are you?”

“In a phone booth by the carousel.”

“How did you get away from the men guarding you? Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“Jack, I can see him. He’s sitting in a car under the Higgins Street brid—”

The explosion drowned out everything, setting the sky on fire. Bricks and dust and flames showered down like fireworks across the river. For a few seconds Karen could only stare in disbelief.

“Karen? Karen? Are you still there?”

“The hotel, Jack, it blew up.” No, not the hotel. Just the top floor. “Jack, the floor of the old hotel where they’d been keeping me. It just blew up.”

She heard Jack swear. “Karen, I’m on my way. I’m just a few minutes away. Stay on the line with me.”

She turned then to look back at the car under the bridge. The navy blue car hadn’t moved. But the man who’d been behind the wheel was gone. “Jack, he’s—” She heard the crunch of gravel behind her and turned just in time to see the man from Liz’s hotel room. In that instant, she realized what it was about him that had made her recognize him the second time at the hotel and again in the car. “Oh, God, Jack, it’s—”

The blow to her head radiated pain, then stars, then blackness.

JACK TURNED ON his lights and siren, knowing that Captain Baxter would hear about this and he’d be fired if not thrown in jail. He didn’t give a damn. He had to get to Karen, and fast.

Karen had said she could see the man. Jack assumed she meant the man she’d witnessed with Liz at the Carlton the night of the murder. Sitting in a car under the Higgins Street bridge. Then something had exploded. The hotel where Baxter had hidden Karen. How could that be? And then the man was gone, Karen said.

But it was her last words that Jack couldn’t get out of his head. “Oh, God, Jack, it’s—”

It’s what? And why had she stopped talking and the phone gone dead as if someone had hung it up?

He floored the Jeep around a corner just missing a UPS truck. Hadn’t he known something was wrong? The second letter. It had only been a diversion, while the killer’s real target was the hotel and Karen.

Karen said the floor she’d been on at the hotel had blown up. The killer had known where she was. Jack wondered how she could have gotten away. Not that he cared. He didn’t question the gods of fate. Especially this time.

But had she walked into another trap the killer had set for her?

Just let her be safe.

The Jeep screamed around a corner. Just let her be safe. He repeated it in his head. A mantra. If he’d owned a rabbit’s foot he’d be clutching it right now. He felt as if his entire future hinged on the next few minutes.

The Jeep roared under the Higgins Street bridge and screeched to a stop in clear view of the carousel and the phone booth. Across the river, black smoke boiled up from the top of some old brick hotel. He could hear the cry of sirens and smell the smoke, but all he cared about right now was the phone booth and the small crowd gathered around it.

He leaped out of the Jeep and ran toward the crowd, propelled by a fear that had his heart lodged in his throat.

The people parted to let him through and he saw her. She sat in the corner on the concrete floor, supported by the walls, her head tilted to one side, her eyes closed. She looked as if she’d fainted and simply slid down the phone-booth wall.

He started to flash his badge but remembered he didn’t have it. “I’m a police officer. Did anyone see what happened to her?” He could hear the band organ playing at the carousel. What had happened to all the cops who were supposed to be covering this stakeout?

“She was like that when I saw her,” someone said.

Jack knelt down beside Karen and felt for a pulse. Strong and steady. Just like her, he thought with overwhelming relief. He felt her forehead. Cool and dry. That’s when he noticed a bump the size of a golf ball on the side of her skull.

“Someone call an ambulance,” he ordered.

“Already did. It’s on its way,” a voice from the onlookers informed him.

“I think she must have fallen and hit her head,” someone else outside