Chapter 4 - THE WARRANT
Darkness changed everybody.
Emily heard Marcus become faster.
She heard Dr. Ortiz become quieter.
She heard Matthew stop breathing for half a second.
Then emergency lights snapped on.
Red strips along the floor turned the hallway into something unreal.
“Backup generator?” Matthew asked.
“Cut too,” Marcus said.
“That’s not county procedure.”
“No.”
Another crash came from the outer door.
A deputy shouted.
“Open under authority of court order!”
Pike laughed in the holding room.
Matthew looked at Marcus.
“Get him out the south exit.”
Pike stopped laughing.
“No.”
Marcus grabbed the back of his chair.
Pike kicked at the wall.
“No, no, not outside.”
Emily stared.
The man who had chased her through the storm was suddenly terrified of the people coming to “rescue” her.
“Why?” she asked.
Pike looked at her.
“They’re not here for you.”
The next impact bent the steel door inward.
Matthew’s gaze snapped to the security monitor.
The feed was black.
“They’re here for him,” Emily said.
Marcus already had a sidearm in his hand.
“South corridor.”
Dr. Ortiz grabbed Emily’s elbow.
Emily flinched.
The doctor let go instantly.
“Sorry.”
“No, I—”
Emily swallowed.
“It’s okay.”
That was not true.
But it was close enough to keep moving.
They hurried down a narrow service hall.
Pike’s chair wheels rattled behind them until Marcus cut the restraints and forced him to run.
Matthew opened a fire door.
Cold air rushed in.
Beyond it, a concrete ramp dropped into a dark loading tunnel.
Emily stopped.
“You have a tunnel?”
Matthew said, “It used to be a produce warehouse.”
“That is somehow worse.”
“Move.”
They had gone twenty yards when gunfire exploded behind them.
Not one shot.
Several.
Emily dropped instinctively.
Matthew pulled her behind a concrete pillar.
Marcus returned fire once.
Dr. Ortiz shouted, “I am a doctor, not a combat accessory!”
Elias’s voice echoed from the dark.
“Car’s ready!”
A second vehicle waited at the far end of the tunnel.
Not black this time.
An old white delivery van.
Emily almost laughed.
Matthew opened the side door.
“Get in.”
She looked at Pike.
“He comes too.”
Matthew frowned.
“He tried to kidnap you.”
“He also knows what 318 is.”
Pike said, “Kidnap is a strong word.”
Emily turned on him.
“You shot at the car.”
“I shot at the trunk.”
“That is not better.”
“Everyone get in,” Marcus snapped.
They did.
Elias drove without headlights for the first half mile.
The van smelled like fertilizer and old apples.
Emily sat on the floor because there were only two seats.
Matthew sat across from her, one knee raised.
Pike sat between them with fresh restraints around his wrists.
Dr. Ortiz pressed gauze to a shallow cut on Marcus’s arm.
“You are all very inconvenient patients,” she muttered.
Emily looked at Pike.
“Start talking.”
“About?”
“318.”
“No.”
She stared at him.
“You risked getting shot because you don’t want Nolan to have that key.”
Pike said nothing.
“You called my father’s documents his last mistake.”
Nothing.
“You recognized my mother’s voice.”
That landed.
Pike looked away.
Emily leaned closer.
“Tell me.”
He rubbed his bound wrists.
“Your mother had a sister.”
Emily blinked.
“No, she didn’t.”
“Yes.”
“My grandparents only had one child.”
“Officially.”
Matthew said, “Careful.”
Emily turned on him.
“Do not tell him to be careful.”
“I’m telling you not to accept every useful lie because it hurts in the right place.”
The words cut.
She hated him for being right enough to say them.
Pike watched them.
Then he shrugged.
“Fine. Don’t believe me.”
Emily clenched her jaw.
“What was her name?”
“Margaret.”
Her mother’s name had been Evelyn.
Emily searched her memory.
Family albums.
Birthdays.
The old lake house.
A photograph surfaced.
Two girls standing on a dock.
Her mother and someone who looked almost exactly like her.
Emily had asked once.
Her father had said it was a cousin.
She had forgotten the name.
Her hands went cold.
“How old?”
“Two years younger than Evelyn.”
“What happened to her?”
Pike looked toward the back doors of the van.
“She disappeared the year before your mother died.”
Matthew’s face changed.
“Disappeared how?”
“No body.”
“No police report?”
“There was a report.”
“Then why is there no public record?”
Pike smiled without humor.
“That question is why your father hated Sheriff Brant.”
Emily sat back against the metal wall.
Her head hurt.
The van hit a pothole.
Pain shot through her bandaged foot.
She barely noticed.
“Where does the key go?”
Pike closed his eyes.
“Union Station.”
Matthew said, “Locker 318?”
Pike nodded.
“It was supposed to be temporary.”
“When?” Emily asked.
“Eleven months ago.”
The week her father died.
She held the key so tightly its teeth cut into her palm.
“What’s inside?”
“I never saw it.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Your father gave me the key.”
Emily stared at him.
“You worked for him?”
“Once.”
“You chased me through the woods tonight.”
“I was trying to get you before Ambrose’s men did.”
“You shot at us.”
“I didn’t know who Carter had in that car.”
Matthew said, “You could have called.”
Pike looked at him.
“And tell Matthew Carter I had Arthur Hale’s daughter and his key?”
Emily saw the same flicker in Matthew’s face again.
Pike smiled.
“There it is.”
Emily turned.
“What does he know about you?”
Matthew did not answer.
She looked at Elias through the open divider.
“Stop the van.”
“No,” Matthew said.
“Stop it.”
“We’re on a county road.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should.”
Emily reached for the door latch.
Matthew moved faster.
His palm hit the metal beside her hand.
He did not touch her.
But he blocked the latch.
“Do not open that door at forty miles an hour.”
“Then tell me the truth.”
His eyes stayed on hers.
The van slowed.
Not because Elias had been asked.
Because a line of flashing blue lights had appeared across the road ahead.
Marcus swore.
“Roadblock.”
Emily looked through the windshield.
Sheriff Price himself stood in the center of the lane.
He raised one hand.
Elias braked.
Pike’s face went gray.
Matthew said, “Reverse.”
Too late.
Two SUVs blocked the road behind them.
Deputies stepped out with weapons drawn.
Sheriff Price approached slowly, rain rolling off his hat.
He stopped ten feet from the van.
Then he called out through a loudspeaker.
“Matthew Carter, I know you’re in there.”
Emily looked at Matthew.
May you like
The sheriff smiled through the windshield.
“And I know exactly why you don’t want Emily Hale to find out who your father was.”
