Well, then it didn’t matter what happened to me!
I ran around the side of the motel and hoisted myself over a redwood fence and onto a balcony-the restaurant. I hurried through an open sliding-glass door to the main room, hurrying past a young kid, probably an off-duty waiter or kitchen help, who smiled accommodatingly. “Anything we can do, sir?”
“Kitchen opens at five o’clock,” he called after me.
I rushed out through the dining room, knowing that the cop who had shot at me was probably only a minute away, probably followed by several others. Surely the two who had been in the spill pipe behind me had to be up here by now as well.
I figured my one reasonable chance was to somehow get out of town, then call Carrie and hope she could pick me up somewhere. Or, at this point, hand myself over to her brother, which all of a sudden seemed like a far better option than ending up in a local jail.
But even that seemed a million-to-one now.
I ran into the main lobby and looked out the sliding front doors, and saw the cop who had shot at me running up the driveway, his gun drawn.
I looked down the hallway and heard the two cops who’d been behind me in the drain coming up the outside stairs.
I was cornered. I thought about putting my hands in the air and ending it all right here. I was so damn beat from all this running… I felt like a prisoner who’d been forced to hold his arms up, over his head, for hours, and if he let them drop he’d be killed, and all he wanted to do was let them down, just for a second, to feel what life was like, regardless of the cost or the outcome, whatever fate was in store.
I looked at the guy behind the desk, tears welling in my eyes, and was about to simply say,
Then I realized that I couldn’t do that. No matter how much my arms hurt. No matter how long this had to go on.
Because the outcome wasn’t about me, but about Hallie.
The cost of dropping them was my daughter’s life.
I turned to the guy behind the counter. I said, “Something’s going on! There are police all over here. I heard shots. I think the guy they’re after is that doctor from Jacksonville. I think I just saw him run upstairs.”
The guy looked alarmed and then craned his head to look out the front door, at the policeman coming up the driveway. I went over to the staircase, pretending to head after the culprit, and while the desk clerk’s attention was focused on the cop, I ducked down a hallway around the back and found a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Which, thankfully, was open! I slipped through it and found myself in a janitorial staging area, with buckets and mops, shelves stocked with cleaners, and another door that seemed to lead outside to a delivery staging area.
A driverless white van marked CAROLINA PIE COMPANY was pulled up there, clearly delivering that night’s desserts. As I passed by I looked in for the keys.
And then I saw it.
A black delivery guy in a gray work uniform was saying to a hotel employee in the delivery bay, “So this is all, then? Guess I’ll see you Monday, sugar.” He had a large laundry bin with him, stuffed to the brim with white sheets and linens.
And just outside there was a delivery truck, R &K INDUSTRIAL LAUNDRY, CHARLOTTE, with its cargo door open and a metal ramp leading into the bay. While the driver had the female hotel staffer signing for his pickup, I slipped outside and looked into the truck, its cargo bay filled with identical large laundry bins.
I heard a commotion back inside the hotel-people shouting-and I realized that at any second the town’s entire police force was going to converge right where I was standing.
I hoisted myself up, crept to the back of the truck, pulled up some dirty sheets from one of the bins, and jumped in, covering myself up.
Now, if the driver could just get on with it and get the hell out of here!
It took a few agonizing seconds, seconds that seemed to stretch into minutes as I lay curled up in the bin, until I heard the grating metal sound of the loading ramp being yanked up and the heavy cargo door slamming shut.
The bay went dark and silent, and all I could do was pray for the driver to get moving!
It seemed like an eternity, and then I finally heard the cab door close and the truck’s engine start up.
Then the truck lurched forward.
I was sure that at any second I would hear someone order him to stop and the truck brake to a halt.
But I didn’t. We just went on. The truck stopped for a second at what I took to be the main street and slowly made a left turn.
I allowed myself a yelp of joy inside the bin as it chugged into third gear and steadily picked up speed, my mind flying back to the motel, which must now be flooded with cops, closing it off from all directions, the three who were first on the scene calling to their partners from the second floor.
I’d made it!
Chapter Sixty
I bounced along for what seemed like an eternity, alternately exhilarated at my escape and petrified that at any second I’d be surrounded by police cars with blaring sirens and the truck would come to a stop.
Joyfully, after about twenty minutes of advancing along slowly and around turns, we went into fourth gear and it felt as if we had now gotten onto a highway.
Probably I-77. Heading back to Charlotte.
I did my best to come up with some plan for what to do. First, I had to get out of the area; then I had to wait for Hofer to get in touch with me. This meant getting myself on a bus headed south, or if I was lucky, doing what I’d done before-finding a car.
Or getting back in touch with Carrie. She would surely bring the evidence we’d uncovered to the FBI and the police.
But first, I had to call Liz. She was Hallie’s mother. She had to know what was going on.
I took my own cell phone-I needed to make sure she would take the call. I was pretty sure the driver wouldn’t hear me over the engine noise. It rang a couple of times. It was 4 P.M. and I never knew Liz to leave the office much before six. I knew she’d recognize the number.
Hopefully, it wasn’t being monitored by the police!
At last she picked up. “Henry…?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Liz. Liz, listen, I know who’s got her!”
I told her what I’d discovered. About Hofer. And why he was doing these things to me.
His daughter.
“I spoke with her, Liz. Or at least I saw her.” I didn’t tell her about the details of the photo. About the ticking clock that was over her head. “She’s alive. Probably scared out of her mind, of course. But she’s alive.”
There was an immediate lift in Liz’s voice. “Now we can go to the police!”
“No. We can’t. Everything’s still the same. I had another run-in with the police. In North Carolina. I was on the line with him and then the cops showed up. It was a million-to-one shot that I got away. You’re probably going to hear about it on the news…”
“What’s that rumble I hear? It sounds like you’re in a train station.”
