Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
“Will do,” she confirmed. “You know, driving a truck with one hand, having to shift as well, is not so easy holding a wiggly puppy. I have to say, I’m doing a good job.”
“A dog?” Sam asked her.
“The Morkie, remember?”
Sam’s phone rang then.
“Honey, just keep talking to us,” he said as he answered his phone and told whoever was on the other end to wait one moment. “I’m leaving now to meet you. You should see cars with lights come up alongside you at any second now. There will be more guys downstairs to meet you as soon as you get there.”
“Thank you,” she said, exhaling. Her adrenaline was dropping, and I was certain that the fear was starting to leach the energy from her body.
“How many guys did you say there were again?” I asked to keep her mind busy.
“Five,” she told me. “One tried to grab me, and another one tried to hit me with the butt of his rifle, but I was careful, so no one got in any hits. Plus, one of them had an asp baton, and once I got my hands on that, I was good.”
One might wonder how my daughter knew how to use an asp baton or knew what an RPG was when she saw one. I blamed George Hunt, her bodyguard, for the baton part—though blame wasn’t the right word, I was glad she could use that—and I blamed my husband, who’d been playing Call of Duty with her since she was very young, for the RPG part.
“Okay,” Sam said as he walked back over to me. “Duncan has Kola and Jake, and he’ll meet us downtown with them. Hannah, honey, we’ll all be there when you get to my office.”
“Sounds good,” she said, and I heard the crack in her voice.
“Did you hear your father?” I asked as I followed Sam out the back door. I waited while he locked it and then waited again outside the gate as he went to back his car out of the garage. “Your brother and Jake are fine,” I repeated, because there hadn’t been much of a reaction and I knew my daughter better than that.
“Oh thank God,” she murmured, and I knew she’d been worried about them.
“So what kind of phone is it that you’re using?” I asked, trying to keep her mind occupied as I got into Sam’s monster SUV that he backed easily out of the driveway.
“It’s some weird ancient flip thing that’s probably a burner.”
“A burner?”
“Oh, Pa, you live with a US marshal, you know what a burner phone is.”
“But should you?”
She scoffed. “Yeah, of course and…you know, I think this collar is homemade. It’s really beautiful.”
“I’m sorry?” I questioned her as we wove through traffic, Sam having turned on the blue lights that were built into the SUV behind the grill. He didn’t have a siren, thankfully, but the lights helped move people out of his way.
“The puppy’s collar has a beautiful little vine woven into the blue and—oh, his name is Opie. How cute is that?”
“So cute,” Sam responded, and Hannah finally laughed.
We reached Daley Plaza at the same time two police cars, then two other cars with blue lights, led by Hannah—driving an enormous covered truck that looked like an army transport—and followed by two more police cars, did. She waved as she parked the truck, and it jerked forward before sputtering and then dying. The door opened just a bit. It had to have been heavy, and Sam was there when she leaned out. She passed the dog down to me and then fell into her father’s arms. He hugged her tight just as we saw Duncan drive up in his Maserati Levante, because of course, if you had an SUV and were married to a billionaire, it was a Maserati. Kola and Jake got out and ran over to us as I hugged Hannah, and Sam handed Kola the dog that I had given him so I could squeeze the life out of my kid.
“Oh, cute,” Kola murmured, petting the dog, who licked his chin. “Where did the puppy come from?”
Hannah explained to her brother all about saving the sweet baby.
“You always find the cutest animals,” he told his sister, clearly remembering the kitten she’d found for George a while back.
We all went to sit down on the benches as Sam and Duncan first hugged—Duncan had taken care of his son and one of his son’s best friends, and that was no small matter—and then walked over to where the police and ATF were.
“I think it’s nice that everyone wears the name of what they are on their tac vest so you can tell them apart,” Jake commented, and we all looked at him. “What?”
It was definitely too hot to be wearing even the rain slickers. At a quarter to one in the morning, it was still seventy-four degrees. The next few days it was supposed to be up to a hundred, and I was not looking forward to the kvetching from the people I lived with. I would also need to explain that the thermometer could not be set lower than seventy no matter how much everyone wanted it to feel like frozen tundra inside.