Xavier stepped back into the woods, quickly, cautiously, surveying the area in all directions, waiting—
A bullet smacked into the tree six inches from his head.
Xavier dropped down and rolled away, lifting his own weapon and searching the shaded, wooded area for movement, for a breath that wasn’t as quiet and controlled as it should be.
Nothing.
Could be the man on the path had been designated as expendable from the beginning, and the shooter in the woods had used his partner to flush Xavier out.
Not bad, he thought. Wouldn’t work, but not bad.
Shooter number two couldn’t be far away. X
avier hunkered down, breathing slow and easy. He could outwait this guy, but he had things to do and he was getting impatient. Maybe the oldest tactic in the world would work. Moving silently, taking care he was completely hidden, he picked up a small rock and tossed it to the left. It didn’t make a big noise, but he hadn’t wanted it to. Instead it was the kind of soft sound a slip of the foot might make.
A shot fired; he saw the flash, and then he heard the shooter step forward, one almost-silent step in the dirt and fallen leaves. It was enough.
Xavier fired twice, and the second guy crashed to the ground. Not taking any chances, staying low, he moved toward the fallen man, eyes on his target.
The guy wasn’t dead. Soon, but not yet. When he saw Xavier, he tried feebly to lift his weapon.
Xavier stomped his boot down on the guy’s wrist, then put a bullet between his eyes. It took only a moment to return to the path and drag the first shooter’s body into the woods before the hue and cry was raised and Felice knew her team had failed. The time it might buy him could be critical. He scraped his boot along the disturbed dirt on the path, wiped his prints off the weapon, and stuck it back in guy number one’s hand. That might entertain the detectives a little bit, especially if the weapon could be traced back to the dead man.
He went back to his truck. Just in case anyone had seen it and connected it to the two dead men in the woods—he didn’t see how, but people did strange shit, like take pictures of vehicles with their cell phones—he’d need to stow the truck in a secure location other than his condo and use a different vehicle for a while.
As he left the parking lot, he used his cell phone to pull up the program that would tell him exactly where Lizzy was.
Chapter Eighteen
Instead of working her way out of the city, Lizzy worked her way in. D.C. was a big, crowded city teeming with people: tourists, politicians, everyday residents living their lives. She could blend in if she had to. There was abundant public transportation, especially in the heart of the city, but there was no way she could risk the Metro. There were too many cameras, and too few exits if she was cornered.
Thank goodness she had some cash. Her paranoia—which had not been paranoia at all, as it turned out—had served her well.
She strode down the sidewalk as if she knew where she was going. Her mind churned. What the hell good were all her supplies, when she’d left them at home? Damn it, she should have put everything in the backpack and thrown it in her car. Yeah, she’d had to dump her car, but … oh, hell, she was second-guessing herself. Would she have had the opportunity to swing by her car, grab the backpack, and take off again? As things had played out, no. She’d screwed up. She should have taken the backpack into the restaurant with her. A lot of people used backpacks in the city; she wouldn’t have stood out.
But now those things were as lost to her as if they were locked in a vault somewhere, and she’d wasted the money buying them. She didn’t dare go home. If the bad guys didn’t get her there, the police would. She was a car thief, and, oh, yeah, she’d also committed assault while stealing the guy’s car, so she was pretty sure that had moved her into a whole different category of criminal. She wasn’t just a thief, she was a dangerous thief. Yeah, home was pretty much out of the question.
Which begged the question: were they the bad guys, or was she? If she couldn’t remember, how was she to know? She might have done something really horrible in the past. After all, she seemed to be pretty good at evasive driving, and she was drawn to hunting knives and guns and pepper spray. Why?
She waited for the question to trigger a headache, but nothing happened.
No, she had to be logical about this. They had obviously known exactly how to find her. If she was such a bad guy, why wouldn’t they have done something before now?
Instead they’d waited, and watched. Nothing had happened until she’d started remembering. Despite her best efforts to act normal, she’d done things out of the ordinary, such as ditching the people following her, destroying her cell phone and not turning on the replacement, and oh yeah, let’s not forget the surprise trip into Virginia. To anyone on the alert for such clues, she’d practically taken out a billboard.
Hindsight was so crystal clear, which did her a hell of a lot of good. She should have done nothing for several days, maybe even a week or so. Crap.
Moaning about it didn’t do her a damn bit of good. She needed to figure out what she should do now, under the circumstances as they were rather than what she wished they were.
Her first instinct was to run, to get as far away from the area as possible, but wouldn’t they be expecting that? Good guys or bad guys, they would be expecting her to run.
She needed time to think, time to get her bearings and come up with a plan.
The woman she’d become, the boring, predictable woman whose face she didn’t recognize as her own, would be in a panic now. But the woman she’d been before, the woman who was trying to come through, that woman wouldn’t panic. She knew the value of control, calm … a plan.
She felt as if she were divided into two people: Lizette who never did anything, and … who? Who was she, really?
Lizzy.