Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

in the plane. Kurt had seen me, but he had no idea who I was.
    Then there was Jeannie. I’d only had the sack of cash for fifteen minutes, twenty tops. It wasn’t enough time to pull off a kidnapping and arrange a trade.
    They must have been watching us. Maybe Scud or Trish got suspicious and sent a goon to follow me. I thought of the beachfront bar Jeannie and I had drinks at earlier and wondered if one of Trish’s henchmen were there spying. Was it someone who’d sat with Jeannie at the bar? Bought her a drink? Maybe when I’d left Jeannie, I wasn’t alone on the beach like I’d thought. Or, maybe I’d walked past someone hiding in a car in the motel lot.
    However they’d done it, it still didn’t explain how Trish knew I was on the plane. I chewed on various scenarios and kept returning to the simplest explanation: Scud.
    The men who’d loaded the plane would have found him after we left. If he were still alive—and I cursed my naïve, amateur self for not checking—he’d tell them I shot him. Trish would call to explain what happened to the money. They’d realize I was their stowaway, and I’d puzzle over the predicament in a gravel pit in God-knows-where at three o’clock in the morning with a battle-scarred body and so much cash I could spare a few bills for toilet paper.
    I palmed a fist of gravel and hurled it into the night.
Scud.
    Headlights approached. I wasn’t keen on hitching a ride, but I had no idea where I was, and couldn’t exactly call a Yellow Cab. I grabbed the duffel, abandoned the parachute, and struggled up a mild embankment to the roadside, where a beat-up El Camino stopped along side me, exhaust rumbling. I was relieved to see a woman behind the wheel.
    Inez, a nineteen-year-old Latina with a disturbing eyebrow piercing, drove us through a series of poorly marked farm roads. We commiserated about her go-nowhere bartending job and the fictitious low-life who’d abandoned me roadside because I wouldn’t put out on our second date. Four cigarettes and a king-sized Snickers later, she agreed to sell me her cousin’s dumpy, piece-of-crap car for twice its worth. I paid her with Trish’s money, and her only reaction to the large stack of bills I counted was a smile wiser than her years. We’d each have explaining to do, but no one could argue either of us got a bad deal.
    At the curb in front of her house, she got out of the car and patted its roof as I slid behind her sticky steering wheel. I tried not to stare at her garage door, which was so run down its panels sagged on one side. I offered another hundred-dollar bill for whatever money she had on her, and she dug in her purse and thrust forty-seven bucks through the driver’s side window. I took note of her address as I pulled away. If I didn’t end up dead or incarcerated, Inez could have the car back later and keep Trish’s filthy money.
    A few miles up the road, I parked the El Camino in front of a pump at a twenty-four hour gas station where I topped off and found a map. Turned out I was two hundred miles away from Houston, outside Corpus Christi. A flight path from the Houston area over Corpus Christi suggested Trish might have been heading to Mexico. I bit my lip and thought it over while I filled the largest size coffee cup I could find. I took the coffee black, paid with Inez’s small bills, and got back in the car to head for Jeannie.
    By quarter after five, highway traffic was picking up, but there was still no hint of sunrise. I glanced at drivers I passed, and at those who passed me, and felt like a social outsider. They were listening to morning talk shows on their way to respectable office jobs.
    Finally, Richard called me back.
    “Clement’s alive,” he said. “The shooting’s all over the news.”
    A car coming up behind me blinked its headlights and I moved out of its way.
    “Thank goodness,” I said. “Does the FBI know where Casey is?”
    “I don’t know what they know. What about you? Are you okay?”
    I brought him up to speed.
    “I’m staying home til one of my buddies gets off duty. He’ll keep an eye on my family,” he said. “Then you and I have a date.”
    “Where?”
    He read a street address. “Edward Kosh turned up in the drop zone files you gave me. Don’t know about you, but I’d like to stop by and say hello.”

Chapter Twenty-seven
    Kosh’s beachfront paradise was a mere thirty minutes from the drop zone, and ten minutes from my motel, a coincidence that didn’t