Page 89 of Dark ’N’ Deadly

Her heart hammered faster. This is not good.

The crafty old mobster must have hired a master carpenter to create a hidden room, but that still didn’t explain how Pritchard planned to escape undetected, let alone with two hostages. Or two bodies.

Pritchard reentered the basement. “Years ago, Harley met an old mob boss—Mangano—at a restaurant in New Orleans. Turns out the IRS had pissed him off, too. You can imagine the instantaneous camaraderie. Mangano offered Harley use of the house anytime he wanted.”

Tess still didn’t understand what was happening. She looked at Jesse, who could barely stand.

Pritchard opened the panel door wider, and she had visions of an enormous cavern stocked floor-to-ceiling with stolen swag, weapons, and bodies.

The men motioned for Jesse to go through first, followed by Tess, with the man named Russo taking up the rear. Lighting inside the room was dim, and the air was dank and musty. She squinted, trying to gauge the size of her surroundings, but couldn’t. Something about the room felt…off.

Another click, and more lights successively flickered to life. Tess could only stare in horror as the room kept growing. They weren’t standing in a room at all. Her thought about them digging a hole to China hadn’t been that far off the mark.

They were standing at one end of a tunnel. One with no end in sight.

Two large blue golf carts stood twenty feet away. Another bad sign. If they needed golf carts to get to wherever they were going, then the end zone had to be pretty far away.

The old mobster had taken a page right out of a drug lord’s playbook and dug himself a tunnel. A tunnel to where?

The door behind them clicked shut. They were underground. Radioactive or not, the subcutaneous tracker in her arm might not have enough juice to send a signal back to Matt’s receiver, which meant…

No one would know where she was or where they were going. That was why Pritchard hadn’t been worried about the police presence camped out on the front lawn. It didn’t matter.

Her breath quickened. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead. Soon, she and Jesse would disappear, and Eric would never know how to find them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Eric paced in front of the house, never taking his eyes off the front door. Tiger stayed with him, occasionally stopping to smell the air, but his dog didn’t hit on anything.

He glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed since Tess had entered the house. Five of the longest fucking minutes of his life.

The curtains in front of the windows were drawn shut, and none of the spotters he’d stationed around the house with long-range scopes could see inside. Overhead, the whop-whop from the chopper told him their eye-in-the-sky was nearby.

He clicked the radio. “Got anything?”

“Negative,” the pilot came back. “No movement at the back of the house or in the orchard.”

“You still got her?” he called out to Matt, who’d been keeping tabs on Tess via a handheld monitor. Matt gave him a thumbs-up that did nothing to quell the rising worry in his gut.

Something wasn’t right about this whole thing. He could feel it in his bones. They’d expected the body wire to be found, so it hadn’t surprised him that the sound had cut off so soon. That wasn’t what bugged him. It was Harley. The man might be psychopathic, but he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have set this up if he didn’t have a plan.

He strained his ears, but nothing came to him. Not even Tiger’s ears twitched.

Another glance at his watch. Barely a minute had gone by since the last time he’d checked it. This whole thing stank to high heaven.

“Uh-oh.” Matt held the monitor in a different direction then walked in a slow circle. “Eric, I lost the tracker.”

“What?” He stalked to Matt and looked over his friend’s shoulder. Aside from the green background, the blip that had been there on the monitor was gone. “How is that possible?”

“It’s not,” Matt said. “She has to be in that house.”

Sonofabitch. He snapped his head up and stared at the front door. “Fuck it, we’re going in.”

“Got your back,” Dayne said.

Eric and Tiger charged to the door. He pushed on the door latch, but it was locked. He unhooked Tiger’s leash, stuffing it in his pocket as he ran to the nearest first-floor window. He pulled a flashlight from his belt, shielding his face while he slammed the back of the flashlight against the glass. The window shattered. A few shards flew at his forearms.

Drawing his weapon, he whipped open the curtains, then aimed inside. Empty.