Suspect Witness

She opened the stained bamboo closet door. Inside was nothing but a row of old-fashioned wire hangers. She ran a thumb over one, thinking that these hangers could be used as a weapon if necessary. They weren’t much, but they’d be better than facing any threat empty-handed.

Her hand quivered. Whoever was after her was more sophisticated than coat hangers. They’d blown up a car. They meant business, and they meant to kill her. It was as Mike had said and she hadn’t wanted to believe—only worse. A slight headache began to pulse low in the base of her skull. She missed her friends, her family, her apartment—and she missed her cat.

She’d delivered Edgar to her sister the day before she’d run. Sarah had been sworn to silence and Mike to vigilance. They’d both be fine. The cat would be well cared for, spoiled and more than likely a few pounds over his ideal weight by the time she got home, and her sister would have had the baby she shouldn’t be having. A single woman with no career aspirations and no man willing to stick around wasn’t the ideal candidate for motherhood. But that was Erin’s opinion, not Sarah’s.

Home.

Her thumbnail pinched into the palm of her hand.

“Focus,” she reminded herself as the wave of homesickness, loss and despair washed through her. She took her mind from other places back to the moment and to reworking the plan. She couldn’t worry about family or friends or even cats; there was nothing she could do for them but stay away and stay alive.

She looked at the closet, closed the doors and went through her list of defenses. The list was meager. She had pepper spray from a night market stall. Other than a self-defense course she’d taken with another primary grade teacher, she had little in her favor.

As she thought through the events of the past few days, she realized that she had to get out of the country in a very short time. This escape was only temporary. She didn’t know how good the people hired to find her were, but she suspected they might be very good. They’d found the school she’d worked in, they’d found her new identity and they’d attempted to kill her.

“Stay calm,” she reminded herself. But there seemed no end in sight and no one she could approach for help.

She looked at her watch as if that would give her the answers that weren’t forthcoming.

Her headache was escalating.

She sat down on the bed. She’d run three quarters of the way around the globe and they’d found her. She’d changed her appearance yet again. And she’d been on a cash-only basis since leaving home. She needed to do more.

She wasn’t sure where she was going next, but she knew what she needed in the short term while she was here.

Her nails bit into the palms of her hands. She relaxed her hands and took a breath—panicking would get her nowhere.

“Damn boyfriend dumped you,” she murmured with a laugh that held no humor at all. “And then along came Josh.” She hated every aspect of this story, from its very necessity to its needy woman overtones to using an innocent man—possibly toying with his affections. All of it was distasteful and all of it was necessary. She pulled a box of hair dye from her pack.

Josh Sedovich, an easy man to reel in. She thought that without arrogance but instead with the thoughts of an attractive woman who knew she was attractive.

She wouldn’t hurt him, just engage in some harmless flirtation—the illusion of a couple.

She sucked in a deep breath. Her life was an illusion, an illusion that hurt.

Chapter Seven

Josh shielded his eyes. Despite the threat of rain later in the day, the sun beat hot and relentless even in late afternoon. This was the least popular time of year, as the rain made things muggy and uncomfortable. It wasn’t usual for numbers to drop too much, but with renovations on some of the more distant accommodations, tourism was noticeably down. That was good news—less activity to monitor, fewer potential incoming threats.

The drone of a plane’s engine pierced the sultry heat.

It was on schedule. He watched as the plane landed.

He’d just gotten word that, as he had suspected, the last hit had been by one of the Anarchists’s gang members. Bobbie Xavier was not the brightest tool in the shed, but he was one of the deadliest. Josh had gotten confirmation that his diversion had worked. Bobbie was on his way to Hong Kong.

But with the recent news the stakes had just gone up. The Anarchists had hired someone else, a man who wouldn’t work in tandem with Bobbie, and one who wouldn’t depend on luck or the mistakes of a woman who had never had to disappear before. The man was a professional. He had a record of success that ended in a trail of death, and he had a record of outsourcing. That meant the numbers on her trail could and more likely would, go up. That meant that there might not just be one. In the near future, there might be two or three. They needed to get out of here, maybe sooner than he’d previously thought.

Sid Mylo was not someone to take lightly. Why the hell were they hiring someone with Sid’s capabilities to go after someone like Erin? Sure, she had been on the run for five months, but—and that was the next mystery—why had it taken them that long to send someone after her? Until now they had depended on the muscle of the various club members across the states as the alert had gone out and the nets had gone up. But they hadn’t looked outside the continental United States.

“Erin Argon,” he muttered. It was the real woman he would be bringing back, not the actress Erin Kelley. He wondered how she could have gotten herself into this mess. She didn’t look like the type to date bikers. But that was exactly what she’d done.

He knew some women got off on that. Some dated criminals slated for death row, sought out men who were bent on destruction, their own as well as that of others. But it was rather disconcerting to think that a primary-school teacher would spend her free time with men who had questionable ethics. Drug dealers, pimps and murderers—and that was only the beginning of the crimes that could be attributed to various members of the Anarchists. It didn’t seem to fit anything he knew about her. And whether she’d learned her lesson after one colossal mistake, he didn’t know. Only she knew that. And it wasn’t something he needed to know. That knowledge would no more save her than hiding out in Mulu would.

He pulled open the door of the hotel lobby.

The concierge stood by the desk. His brown pants and jacket seemed to fade into the background. But his posture and wide smile, despite his solid but short stature, made him immediately stand out.

Their eyes met and held in a moment of understanding before the concierge looked away.

Josh waited a few minutes, glancing through a display of pamphlets before turning to the concierge. “Must be nice to work here.”

He looped his thumbs into the belt loops of his shorts. In listening range was an older couple that seemed to be involved in their own discussion, but they glanced over at him with what he thought of as a tourist’s curiosity.

“Yes, sir.” The concierge met his gaze this time with a rather puzzled expression, as if he didn’t know where the question was leading.

“Josh.” He held out his hand. “Three,” he mouthed. It was the number of days, maximum, that he planned to stay before getting Erin out of here.

“Tenuk,” the concierge said with a rather solemn grace and tapped his finger silently, one, two, three. It was confirmation, nothing else.

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