Takeover

“Run it.”

“I hate driving!” she snapped at him.

“You’ll be fine. Just keep throwing.” He rolled his window down a few inches, and even the hot breeze came as a relief. He caught Theresa’s eye. “Don’t think about jumping out.”

She had no intention of it. The idea of the pavement scraping off most of the skin on her face dissuaded her, but more than that, she was not ready to let go of Lucas and Jessica. Paul might be dying because of them, and they were not going to go free. “What about the explosives, Lucas? The ones you cooked up on Jessie’s stove last night? By the way, where did you find a health-food store open in the middle of the night?”

“What?” Cavanaugh breathed in her ear.

She prodded the lab coat with her free left foot and felt a thin item under her toes-probably a pen. She never carried much else in her pockets. “You can make plastic explosives with Vaseline and potassium chlorate, otherwise known as salt substitute. It’s sold at health-food stores, among other places.”

“Didn’t use that,” Lucas said, tossing loose bills into the wind.

“I used Solidox, for welding. There’s a twenty-four-hour hardware store in a place called Maple Heights. Turn left on Ninth, Jessie.”

Lucas must have removed it from the teller cages across from the security guards, or he would have used it to prevent the cops from pursuing. “So where’s the explosive?”

He smiled at her. “Right here, with us.”

She thought of a suicide pact but dismissed that immediately. Lucas had planned, very carefully, to get away, and he would not abandon that plan. And whatever else Jessica might be, she clearly was not the kind of mother who’d let any harm come to Ethan.

Harm to Theresa and Chris Cavanaugh, however, was a different story. If they lived to tell, the whole day’s efforts would be for naught. Jessica and Lucas would be hunted down, convicted on two counts of murder, and go to jail for the rest of their lives. Ethan would be raised by strangers.

Theresa and Cavanaugh had to die. No other option existed.

Not a pen, she suddenly thought. A scalpel. The sterile, disposable scalpel she’d used to cut the bloody carpeting from the trunk of this car. She had put the protective cap back over the blade and slipped the scalpel into her lab coat.

“The explosives aren’t in the car,” she pointed out. “We went over it.”

“Nope. They’re in the backpack.”

She and Cavanaugh slid forward suddenly as Jessica hit the brakes.

“Watch it, Jessie.”

“A car pulled in front of me. What do you mean, in the backpack? Get them out.”

“We discussed this.”

“The picture’s in the backpack!”

“Exactly. The picture that you couldn’t resist stealing, even though as soon as they realize it’s missing they’re going to know that you’re not some sweet little innocent secretary!”

Jessica continued to snake a hand into the duffel now and then to throw more money out the window. Theresa could only glimpse the top of the girl’s head, not her expression, but she sounded as if her vocal cords were made of solid titanium. “It’s a damn Picasso!”

“I had the perfect plan! All we had to do was get away, and no one ever would have figured it out, and you had to screw it up because you couldn’t keep your hands off some stupid piece of canvas!”

“It’s one of the Vollard Suite!”

“It’s not worth the rest of our lives!”

Theresa recalled how the dog had barked when Lucas forced Jessica over to the elevators, but not so much, now that she thought about it, when he returned. That was because Jessica was carrying the plastic explosives, or at least part of them. Jessica the artist, who knew where the fancy furnishings from the executive’s redecorated office had been stored and how a tiny amount of explosive would blow the door’s lock, and who returned from that trip with paint flakes on her pants. Jessica, who loved art almost as much as she loved her son, and possibly more than she loved her boyfriend, because she might have ruined their chances for a future together.

This was why Lucas had been so angry when she returned to the lobby with the backpack. Not because she brought less money than he counted on but because he found the painting when he unzipped the bag.

“You had to have the money!” Jessica countered. “Why did we have to hang around for that stupid shipment? We could have lost them in the convention-center traffic if we left earlier!”

“If you hadn’t taken that painting, we could have started over again somewhere. You would be an artist, I’d manage the gallery. But if they figure out we worked together, they’ll never stop looking for us. We’re going to have to stay underground forever now, Jessie, and that’s going to take a lot of money.”

Theresa continued to watch him but hooked her foot underneath the loose part of the lab coat. Slowly she inched the pocket up as she inched her free left hand down. If Cavanaugh felt her movements, he gave no sign.

Lucas calmed his voice but spoke with teeth gritted against each other in a way that would have been comical if they hadn’t been hurtling down a city street in a car carrying $4 million and a bomb. “If it gets destroyed, they’ll assume some other bank worker took advantage of the confusion to sneak it out.”

“If it just disappears, they’ll assume the same thing.”

“If he turns around,” Cavanaugh breathed into her neck, “we’ll strangle him. You may have to grab the gun. Keep the barrel pointed up.”

She moved her head in a nod, tiny enough to be taken as swaying with the vehicle. Her fingers dipped into the pocket. She had always appreciated the deep pouches, but now they made it difficult to reach the scalpel. Her thigh protested as she used her foot to pull the pocket a fraction of an inch higher.

It took only the slightest glance down for Lucas to notice her raised knee. “What are you doing? Stop wriggling.”

She squirmed more, and the plastic weapon slid into her hand. “There’s not a lot of room back here.”

But while Lucas watched her, his mind stayed on his girlfriend. “It’s your fail-safe, Jessie. If they catch us, you can always say you were coerced. But if they catch us with that painting, they’ll know you were in on it with me, and you’ll never see Ethan again. Everything I’ve done has been for you, can’t you see that?”

He did it all for love, Theresa thought. He’s been trying to tell me that all day.

Jessica tapped the brakes, then sped up. “Where are we going?”

“Drive into the bleachers. Just like we talked about.”

Bleachers? Suddenly Theresa realized why they were heading north on East Ninth, when there was nothing at the end of it but Lake Erie. The Hall of Fame induction concert. Those tall scaffolds covered in rock-and-roll-black cloth on the East Ninth pier, where she and Paul had scouted out the reception facilities on the Goodtime II.

“What if I get the wrong spot and hit a pole?”

“Just drive where I point. Brian told me exactly where to go.”

“What about them?”

“Keep throwing the money, especially the closer we get.” Lucas peered over the headrest. “I’ll take care of them.”

Theresa’s heart sank. Cavanaugh’s arm tightened around her waist.

Jessica remained silent, apparently mulling this over. Theresa heard sirens behind them, but not nearly close enough. In Lucas’s sideview mirror, she could glimpse pedestrians milling in the street, stopping cars to pick up the scattered bills.

Could she stab him? She’d have to get him in the neck. Disposable scalpels were handy, but also cheap and thin, and they would snap in half at even medium pressure. It would be a one-shot deal.

The jugular or nothing. A shallow slash would only make him mad.

She could press it into Cavanaugh’s hand. He was stronger, trained in hand-to-hand. Let him do it. He’d have to reach around her, but he could use his right hand, and she would have to use her left. She would be free to grab the gun barrel, to keep Lucas from shooting them in the time it took him to bleed to death.