Shadow Woman: A Novel Read online

  “Not that I know of, and if there was, there’d be someone in here bitching about it all day,” she said.

  “Okay, thanks.” When she’d left, he checked the image on his phone again. He watched for a while, puzzling it over as he finished his coffee. After a few minutes her speed varied. She moved along pretty slowly for a few minutes, then there was an increase in speed before her speed leveled out again.

  Something occurred to him. There was one rather far-fetched possibility that actually made him smile. He switched the mode to topographical and laughed. That slow speed had come on one side of a hill, the burst of speed on another.

  She was on a bicycle.

  He was impressed by her thinking. No ID was required to buy a bicycle, no registration to worry about, she had enough cash on her to afford one, and she wouldn’t have to worry about driving a stolen car or hitchhiking and being picked up by a nutcase. And who would think to look for her on a bicycle? She’d surprised even him. That was part of the fluidity of her thinking, because absolutely no one would expect her to escape on a bicycle. With a helmet and sunglasses on, she’d also have a damn good disguise. No one would look twice at her.

  The road she was on would eventually lead to Charlottesville. He checked a couple of things with his phone and discovered there was a bus terminal there. She could dump her bike and buy a ticket to anywhere. That terminal was far enough away from D.C. that it probably wasn’t being watched, close enough that she might remember the location from her training. She’d had multiple escape routes memorized, and one of them might have included the Charlottesville terminal.

  He definitely didn’t have to worry about catching up with her, not as long as she stayed on the bicycle. He’d been worrying about when and where to confront her, her reaction to seeing him again, the difficulty of any witnesses being present. If he let her wear herself out, the coming confrontation would be much easier … for him, that was. It wasn’t a small consideration. When he’d been training her, she’d occasionally cleaned his clock. Not on a regular basis, but often enough to make her cocky. Not many people could take him down, but she was just sneaky enough to surprise him a couple of times, and she didn’t mind playing dirty. In his mind, he could still see the glee in her smile the first time she’d managed to put him on his back.

  Another cup of coffee was called for, after all. Xavier lifted his empty coffee cup in a silent request for a refill. There was no reason he couldn’t sit here for a while and let Lizzy get a bit farther down the road. He could even think of it as payback for what she’d done to his motorcycle.

  She had her bike, and he had his. The coming chase would be no contest.

  Oh good lord, yes, she had let herself get into terrible shape. Lizzy simultaneously pedaled and cursed every cookie she’d eaten in the past year, every extra pound. There weren’t many of them, thank goodness, but oh, if only she’d started running a couple of months ago instead of just this week. If only she were in the same shape she’d been in back in the day.

  She paused in her thoughts. What day was that, exactly? She didn’t know, but she did know she once would have been able to handle this trip without feeling as if she were being tortured.

  The straps of the cheap backpack, being thin on the padding, cut into her shoulders. Her legs ached. Her butt was numb. Sometimes she’d stand up to pedal and give her butt some relief, but that was harder on her legs.

  She’d been on the bike about an hour. There was currently little traffic on the two-lane road, so she chanced a glance at her wristwatch. Assuming it was keeping correct time … make that forty-five minutes. Evidently being tortured made time pass more slowly. By her calculations she had another four hours and fifteen minutes of cycling time, and that didn’t take into account the breaks she’d have to take along the way.

  She ached everywhere, and she needed a bathroom already. Maybe she should have said no to that third cup of coffee at breakfast. If necessary, she could make a trip into the bushes on the side of the road, but that would be a last resort. Not only were there homes behind the trees that lined the road, there could be poison ivy, ticks, mosquitos.

  She would laugh, if she weren’t afraid the laughter would turn to tears. Someone was trying to kill her, and in the past twenty-four hours she’d resorted to car theft—twice—stolen drunk Sean’s cash, lied to an impressionable young woman to get a motel room, and possibly led stone-cold killers to an innocent late-night shopper’s door. She no longer knew who she was, and she didn’t even have time to think about that, not until she was safe, but here she was, worried about modesty and the dangers of Virginia roadside wildlife.

  She couldn’t let herself dwell on that. She had to concentrate on moving, on surviving. When she was safe, then she’d think about stuff.

  One step at a time.

  Every hard uphill battle came with an eventual blessed downslope, but really, how could Virginia be mostly uphill? Why didn’t the down portions ever seem as long as the up portions? That was just wrong. She treasured the moments when she could sit up and catch her breath, let the wind rush into her face, let her aching muscles relax. Traffic was light on the two-lane road, but on occasion she’d be forced to move to the far right edge, coasting along as a car sped past. Usually those cars would shift over and give her some breathing room, but now and then they didn’t, blasting by so close that the force of the air would make her wobble. Some people were jerks.

  She wasn’t oblivious to the possibility that X might be driving one of those cars. All he’d have to do was run her down, plow his car into her and then drive off, leaving her as nothing more than a wet spot on a back-country road.

  Her instincts had tried to tell her about him, there in Walgreens when she’d panicked and run. Then her hormones had played a nasty trick on her with those sex dreams, and she’d let that tangle up her thinking. It really pissed her off now, that she’d wasted perfectly good dreams on the asshole who was trying to kill her.

  Thinking about X distracted her for a while, but not long enough. Soon her aching legs had retaken priority in her thoughts, damn it.

  When she rounded a gentle corner in the road and saw the gas station straight ahead, she could have cried, she was so happy. Bathroom, more water, something to eat, a few minutes of rest, however brief. She had to keep moving, and she was already so sore that she knew if she stopped for too long she’d never get started again.

  Two meetings with Felice in the tank in less than a week was noteworthy. Al hoped that no one in the building was actually making note. He was surprised that she came as quickly as she did when he contacted her, but considering what she’d done…

  This time he was waiting for her, standing with his arms crossed. As soon as the door closed behind her, he spoke.

  “You stupid bitch.”

  She stopped in her tracks; her shoulders went back and her face tightened. He had her on the defensive.

  “I did what needed to be done,” she responded. “I did what you wouldn’t do.”

  “No, you’ve royally fucked things up. It’s bad enough that you made this decision on your own and then went outside, but to go to an outside team of incompetents calls into question your competence. It was a stupid move.”

  It wasn’t smart to call Felice stupid twice in a couple of minutes, but at this point he didn’t care if he pissed her off. If she was going to send a team after him, she’d already done it. Even worse, if Xavier thought for a minute that Al had been in on the plan, he was coming, too. Al had always known what they’d done might come back to bite him in the ass, and here he was, waiting for a bullet or worse. Xavier was the “worse.”

  Felice recovered her composure and walked toward the coffee machine. “I have people on it.”

  “Your people,” he said, “not mine.” She continued to methodically make herself a cup of coffee. Al hadn’t heard from Xavier since the failed hit on Lizzy, not a word. And that meant Felice hadn’t just gone after Lizzy, she’d also made an attempt on