Page 53 of Undertow

“We can’t just drive away,” he said. “They’ll follow. Or they’ll call it in and someone will be waiting down the highway.”

“No question,” Cara said.

“We need a distraction.”

Gabe looked at her. “What kind of distraction?”

Cara turned from the window and looked at the room—at the team, at Elena, at Gabe.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “It won’t be pretty.”

28

The lockbox code was almost always the property address backward.

But it didn’t work.

Cara tried it again. Nothing. She stepped back and studied the house she’d chosen by instinct—three blocks east and one block north of the SUV. Mail piled on the porch. No tire tracks in the gravel. No condensation on the windows. January on the coast was full of places like this, empty and waiting for someone to need them.

She moved off the porch and around the side, looking for a window with a bad latch. There. The bathroom. Single-hung, old frame, the kind that swelled in the rain and didn’t seat right. She was reaching for it when Gabe’s hand closed over her wrist.

“Hold on.”

He reached into his back pocket and took out a flat leather case—small, the kind of thing that looked like a wallet if you didn’t look too closely. Unfolded it. Inside, a set of lockpicks that had absolutely no business being in the possession of a small-town police chief.

Cara stared at him. He was already walking back to the front door.

She positioned herself next to him, shielding his hands from view as he worked the lock. It took him all of ten seconds.

The deadbolt turned. She raised an eyebrow.

Gabe pushed the door open and looked back at her.

“I had a misspent youth.”

“You were in the FBI.”

“Not always.”

Inside, the house smelled like dust and lemon cleaner. Cara moved through it fast—checking windows, mapping exits. The garage held a ten-year-old Subaru wagon. The keys were on a hook by the kitchen door, because coastal Oregon.

“So we have a car,” Gabe leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded, watching her. “We loop around and come in from the north. No connection to the rental house. Then what?”

Cara didn’t answer right away.

“They’ll be armed,” Gabe continued. “And we have to assume they’ll recognize us. They’re surveilling that house for a reason. They’ve got photos, descriptions—maybe both. So what’s our play?”

He was right. Two people driving past a surveillance team in the middle of the night wasn’t a distraction. It was a gift.

She studied the kitchen, her gaze moving past the counter, and the microwave, past the sad little spice rack and the coffee maker with the carafe still inside, to the living room, where a low cabinet sat against the wall with its door slightly ajar.

Bottles. A whole row of them. Bourbon, vodka, something pink that had probably been a mistake at the time and was definitely a mistake now. The kind of collection vacation renters left behind.

She grinned.

“What.” Gabe said in the tone of a man who’d seen that expression before and associated it with things going sideways.

She headed for the bottles. “They won’t recognize us. Not if we play our parts right.”