Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

Chapter 15

Alec Graves
Bisbee Municipal Airport
Bisbee, Arizona

Jaclyn's paper had contained today's date, an address on the outskirts of a town called Naco, and an injunction to be there at four p.m. sharp. Convincing James to come with me had been the easy part. Convincing Jasmin and Jessica to stay at the hotel and cover for the fact that the two of us were gone was much harder. Getting out of the hotel without anyone seeing us was somewhere between the two extremes of difficulty.

James was looking a lot better with another day of rest under his belt, but I was sincerely hoping that we'd be able to avoid a fight today. I wasn't sure that either of us was in good enough shape to get in a fight this afternoon and then turn around and run an op for Brandon tonight.

Actually, getting out of the hotel was a lot easier than I suspected getting back in would be. The Rest Easy apparently did most of its laundering onsite, but that was during normal times when the hotel was running with a significant number of empty rooms. Brandon's decision to make the Rest Easy the base for all operations against the cats meant that the hotel was nearly one hundred percent booked and had been for weeks.

The owners were doubtlessly turning handsprings of joy, but it had caused the hotel manager some difficulties. For instance, keeping all of the linens clean had required ferrying a load of laundry over to another hotel in town at least twice a week.

Jasmin had hit on the idea of smuggling us out in the laundry trucks and it had worked like a charm. She and Jess had grabbed a couple of the large carts that the hotel staff used to transport dirty linens and brought one to each of our rooms.

The concept of riding around in a basket full of other people's dirty sheets was mildly gross, even despite the fact that as a shape shifter I was immune to pretty much any disease you could think of. I compensated by stripping the sheets off of my own bed and laying one down on top of the rest of the laundry and then using the other one to cover myself with. The last thing I saw before Jasmin covered me up with some clean towels from my bathroom was Jasmin rolling her eyes at me.

It was more than a little unnerving to sit quietly in the basket and just hope that the plan went off without a hitch. In theory we should be okay. We couldn't completely mask our scent, but nobody would think twice if they caught a whiff of James or me around the baskets or along the trail that they were taken between our rooms and the truck. The logical answer, that they were just smelling the sheets that we'd slept in, was the right answer, just not the complete answer.

The real risk was that one of the other shape shifters would get close enough to the carts to hear our heartbeats. All of the material packed in around us should go a long ways towards muffling the sound of our pulse, but it was the one part of the plan that had given me the most concern from the start.

Luck was with us though and half an hour after I climbed into the cart I felt the unmistakable movement of a vehicle in motion. James came out of his pile of laundry at the same time that I climbed out of mine and then we just waited quietly for the truck to arrive at the other hotel. Once we were there we watched until the driver was distracted chatting up one of the girls who worked on the housekeeping staff and then snuck out of the truck.

The next phase of my plan relied on the fact that Donovan had been siphoning money off from Kaleb's investments for the last two decades. Most of the embezzled funds went to an account under one of my mother's aliases, but Rachel and I both had significant balances with several national banks under pseudonyms of our own.

James and I walked into one of the banks in question and walked out twenty minutes later with twenty thousand dollars which we used to first rent a car from the local vehicle dealership and then charter a helicopter to take us from Nogales International Airport to Bisbee Municipal Airport. James had thought that chartering a flight was excessive, but it was a lot faster than driving all of the way to Naco and it had the benefit of meaning that if we wanted to we could return a different way than we'd come.