36
SAVANNAH
First, I heard a crash. Then a loud pop. Was that gunfire?
“Ben! Ben!!”
He didn’t answer.
“Ben,” I whimpered over and over, but it didn’t help. “Oh, my God, was he shot?”
Ryan sat down at the conference table beside me and gripped my shoulder. Kyle pulled out his phone and contacted emergency services. Lang disappeared and returned with Kat, who was on the phone with Bond in the medical bay, telling her to join us.
“Pasco—” Kat started.
“I have eyes on him. But…” He typed into his computer, and a grainy image of the highway came into view. Three cars were stopped on the shoulder of the road, one of them—the one Ben had borrowed from Kyle—crumpled. Cars whizzed past in the lanes of traffic, oblivious to the wreck.
“Dispatch is sending police and an ambulance,” Kyle reported.
“There he is!” I jumped to my feet to get a better view of the screen. “Someone’s pulling him out of the car.”
“And putting him into theirs,” Ryan said. “Pasco, I’ll call Jensen, see if he’s on the ground yet locally.”
Kyle reported what was happening to the emergency operator and asked for more police to look for the car.
“I’ll contact X and get our extra resources in place,” Kat said. “Wheeler, after you talk to Jensen, track down Mai and get her in here. I don’t want her hearing this from anyone else.”
“Hear what?” I asked. They all seemed to grasp something I was missing.
“Savannah, here, sit.” Lang held my arm and helped me back into my chair.
“What’s happening, Logan? May I call you Logan?”
He nodded. “Of course, you may.” His voice was smooth and soothing, like Bond’s. He glanced at the big screens on the wall where Pasco was projecting different traffic cam images, then turned my chair away from them. “That accident was intentional. He was run off the road so someone could take him.”
“Who? Devlin? Anson?” My mind was slowly processing the overload of information I’d seen and heard. “That’s why there was a gunshot. I think they shot him.”
“Unconfirmed,” Logan said.
My stomach lurched, and the room spun. I pushed back from the table and bent over with my head between my knees. Tossing my cookies now would only distract the team, and they needed to focus on finding Ben.
“It wasn’t a gun,” Pasco said. “Refining the footage, we can see it was an air compression tool used to wedge open the door. That’s how they got him out so fast.”
“Two police units just arrived on scene,” Kyle said. “Do you have the make, model, license number, anything I can give them about the car they took Hayes in?”
“I have all the above,” Pasco said, typing frantically. “Texting it to you. And I have them live on traffic cams. I’ll send you the coordinates. Wheeler, what’s Jensen’s ETA?”
“Fifteen,” Ryan answered.
Bond arrived in the conference room. “Do we know if he was injured?”
“Looked like a head wound,” Logan said.
I shifted to try to see the screen. If I could catch a glimpse of him, maybe I’d be able to tell if he was all right. Another wave of nausea hit me, and I bent over with my head between my knees.
“Bond,” Lang said.
I felt the doctor’s cool hand on my neck. “Savannah, let’s get you into the lounge.”
