I drove out of Manhattan as fast as I could, and kept right on driving.
It was me and a high-priced call girl on the lam in a stolen bulletproof Range Rover that belonged to a Russian mob boss who surely wanted to kill us both with extreme prejudice. Forget finishing my next book. This had TV series written all over it.
Of course, in the TV series the call girl would surely have a heart of gold. In real life, she was a bit surly and apparently had a bladder the size of a garbanzo bean.
“I need to pee again,” said Jade.
Seriously? “We just stopped a half hour ago.”
“I have to goddamn pee. What do you want me to do?”
“You could start by showing a little more gratitude,” I said.
She huffed. “I said thank you at the gas station. Thank you for stopping.”
“I was talking about back at your apartment.”
Jade fell silent for a few seconds, the only sound in the car belonging to Steely Dan and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the radio. You don’t wanna call nobody else…
“He’s going to find me,” said Jade.
“No, he won’t.”
“He finds everybody.”
“You didn’t even know who Vladimir Grigoryev was before today.”
“I knew enough. I heard stories,” she said. “Wherever you’re taking me, he’s going to find me.”
I hadn’t told Jade where we were headed. I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Elizabeth. I wasn’t merely covering my tracks. I was eliminating them.
I’d removed the SIM card from Jade’s phone and disabled the GPS on the Range Rover. I had also yanked out the fuse for the emergency call button. As for any after-market tracking device, I was 99.9 percent confident there wasn’t one hidden anywhere on the car. The reason was simple. You don’t get to be a Russian mob boss in the United States without knowing that the FBI and NSA have easy access to them.
As for my biggest concern, I’d caught a break with Tracy taking Annabelle to his sister’s house in Marblehead. I didn’t know Grigoryev’s next move, but I didn’t want him looking for leverage with loved ones if he couldn’t find me.
I glanced over at Jade. I’d tried calling her by her actual name, Ingrid, when we first started driving, but she told me not to. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want any of this to be real,” she said.
A few miles later I took the next exit off I-91 and pulled into a McDonald’s so Jade could use the bathroom.
“I’m going to grab a soda,” I said as we pulled into a spot. “Do you want anything?”
“Yeah, a large Diet Coke.”
“Why don’t we make it a small,” I said.
It took her a moment. Small-bladder humor. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” she said. There was even a hint of a smile.
“It’s going to work out,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “And thank you—for back at my apartment. Saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Do you want a free one?”
“What?”
“A quickie in the backseat.”
“Uh—”
“I’m kidding!” She laughed. “I totally had you!”
She sort of did. “Good one,” I said.
“Besides, I can tell women aren’t your thing.”
I blinked. She wasn’t kidding about that. “Really? You can tell that?”
“In my line of work we tend to have pretty good gaydar,” she said, putting on the winter coat she’d packed in her suitcase. “You clearly prefer men.”
I flashed my wedding band. “Only one in particular.”
Jade went off to the bathroom, and I grabbed two Diet Cokes, plus a couple orders of fries because it’s not humanly possible to enter a McDonald’s without ordering fries.
“Can you finally tell me where we’re going?” she asked, not long after we crossed the border into New Hampshire.
“Soon,” I said. “We’ll be there soon.”