Mistress

Chapter 35

“George, you’re going to have to trust me,” I say into my cell phone as I walk through the covered parking garage near Reagan Airport.

“Trust you?” George Hotchkiss screams through the phone. “You tell me my daughter is still alive, and now you tell me to just forget the whole thing?”

That about covers it, yeah.

“Just for now, George. Give me some time to figure this out.”

“Why the hell should I do that? Why should I wait one damn second?”

“Because your wife already lost a son, at least, and maybe a daughter, too. Don’t make her a widow on top of all that.”

That seems to quiet him. “Just give me a couple of days, George. Promise me that much. Then you can make whatever noise you want.”

I punch out my cell phone after I finally get a concession from Diana’s father that he’ll keep quiet for forty-eight hours. I don’t know if those guys in the bathroom were bluffing, but somebody is taking this very seriously, and I don’t want the deaths of Diana’s parents on my conscience, however she may have felt about them.

I pull out my keys and start to climb on my bike when I hear a squeal of tires, a car racing down the ramp from the upper level of the parking garage. It’s a black stretch limousine. And it stops right in front of me.

I brace myself. I’m a sitting duck. I’m standing in a parking space with cars on either side of me and this limo cutting off my only route of escape.

I have no good options. I don’t even have time to panic.

The tinted passenger-side window rolls down. A handsome, well-appointed Asian man stares at me.

“Well, well,” I say.

“You’ve been looking for me,” says Jonathan Liu.