On the Run (Big Mike and Minnie Book 1) Read online

  On The Run Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  About the Author

  ON THE RUN

  BIG MIKE AND MINNIE

  Susan Amanda Kelly

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Amanda Kelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design and Book Production by Gomboc Words. (VS24022016)

  Big Mike and Minnie On the Run/Susan Amanda Kelly. - 1st ed.

  ASIN: B018KTWEHO

  ISBN 978-0-9949660-1-8

  Chapter One

  “How about I loan you my coat?” a businessman offered, pausing beside Minnie. He made a show of appreciating Minnie’s bare legs, the beginnings of a flirtatious smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He was towing a scuffed, grey, wheeled case like most of the people exiting the airport. He was clean cut, thirtyish and about as exciting as last year’s fashion, but Minnie’s gaze lingered on his thick, warm overcoat. No. She was a little mad at men. “It doesn’t match my skirt,” she said and teetered purposefully away. Home. Caffeine. Aspirin. Fresh lipstick.

  Minnie had chosen to wear a short, fuchsia pink skirt because it was fun, flirty and fit for a balmy Californian evening. But here she was — under-dressed, frozen, no luggage — exiting JFK airport into the ice-locker that was New York in fall. She paused on the sidewalk to get her bearings, searching for the nearest taxi rank. A river of weary people, disgorged from other red-eye flights, poured past her. Bumper-to-bumper traffic filled the street ahead of her. Most of the yellow cabs seemed to be coming from the right.

  A man stepped in front of her. Minnie halted. For a moment she thought it was the flirtatious businessman blocking her path. It wasn’t. This man was older with brown eyes and lank, dark, unwashed hair. No overcoat. Just worn jeans, a nubby black sweater and a tattered denim jacket hanging over his arm. He was tall but too lean for his height. It took a lifetime of baking in the sun without sunblock and a good moisturizer, to get skin like that. It hung loose on sharp bones. The poor man probably lived rough on the streets. Minnie fished her last fifty dollars out of her pocket and pressed it into the stranger’s hand. “Buy yourself a hot breakfast,” she said, patted his arm and breezed past, aglow with goodness. That was the last of her cash, but she still had the credit card she’d stolen from her brother, tucked into her bra.

  The man appeared in front of her again. Minnie jerked to a stop. He smiled, a slow baring of yellowing, uneven teeth. “I don’t have any more money,” Minnie said, feeling the first frisson of unease. It was ridiculous to be afraid. JFK was one of the busiest airports in New York — there were hundreds of people near her. Only feet away, there was a crossing guard wielding a red stop-sign paddle.

  “Smile,” the disheveled stranger whispered.

  Minnie took an instinctive step back, but the stranger moved closer, fast, his right arm snaking around her. For a disbelieving second she thought he was trying to cuddle her and started to slap at his chest. But something hard — a gun barrel? — ground into her back. Minnie opened her mouth to scream—

  “Act normal or I’ll put you in a wheelchair,” he said softly. His breath was stale.

  “I gave you fifty dollars,” Minnie said. “Shoot that businessman over there. He wouldn’t give you a dime.” She gestured at the three slick executives diverting around them, dragging their wheeled luggage. They all scanned her bare legs as they passed, but were oblivious to her plight. Typical. She guessed the stranger’s gun was hidden by the denim jacket he had draped over his arm. Yes, she could scream but none of the men within earshot could run faster than a speeding bullet. If any of them spotted a gun, the only running they would do was away from her bleeding body.

  The stranger ground the gun barrel into her lower spine. “Why don’t we try this again? I said smile, Minerva Coolidge.”

  He knew her name. Was he a stalker? Minnie smiled obediently, her mind racing. She was a fashion model, only one show away from being a supermodel. Sure, she got lovesick fan mail — it came with the job — but how would a stalker know she was returning home to New York, today?

  “Good,” he said. He dropped a kiss on her smiling mouth before she could flinch away. Blegh. She managed to keep her toothy smile fixed in place. She had had to kiss a camel once for a photo shoot. She could do this.

  “Our car is across the street, Baby,” the stranger said in a loud voice, obviously for the benefit of passersby. He pulled her onto the crosswalk, barely waiting for the crossing guard to hold up his paddle to halt the traffic.

  The guard was a dumpy man, his white shirt straining over his belly, one donut away from type-two diabetes. He wouldn’t be able to subdue her kidnapper physically — unless he sat on him — but he had a whistle in his other hand. He could whistle for help. She bugged her eyes at him but his gaze was riveted on her bare legs. She rarely had cause to regret her hotness but today, she almost wished she were an eight instead of a twelve. Her kidnapper curved his body around her like a possessive lover, blocking the crossing guard from view.

  They skirted the chrome bumper of a battered red truck that had nudged its way onto the crosswalk. Minnie mouthed help up at the windscreen. But the driver chose that moment to bend over and root in his glove box and then they were past him, the opportunity lost. They reached the other side of the road. The crowds thinned the further away from the taxi rank they got. Her kidnapper pushed her towards the short-term parking lot. It was deserted.

  She had to do something. Anything! But all she could see in her mind’s eye were her father and brother’s faces, last night, when they had told her that they weren’t allowing her to return to her own home in New York because it was unsafe. They had quoted a ream of crime statistics. Arguing with them was pointless so she had stolen her brother’s credit card and cash, had gone to the bathroom and had climbed out of the window. She had hitched a lift to the airport. Her family would have the satisfaction o
f being proven right, at her funeral. Her family…

  “Do you know who my family is? They run one of the scariest outlaw motorcycle clubs — Hell’s Crew — on the west coast. They’d gut you for this. Let me go and I’ll forget this ever happened.” Right after she called her father, brother, the FBI, the CIA and that creepy Congressman who had been bombarding her with flowers for the last six months.

  Her kidnapper laughed, pushing her ahead of him. “I know your father and brother. Know what this means?” He held the back of his right hand in front of her face. Minnie squinted down at it. To anyone watching them, he was showing her the time on his watch, not the red, horned, devil tattoo inked on the back of his hand. Her heart rate spiked. She recognized the marking. The tattoo meant he was a member of The Devils Ride motorcycle club. TDR.

  “I know exactly what it means,” she said striving for calm. That tattoo was bad news. She was safer with a love-crazed stalker than a TDR biker. If a TDR biker was kidnapping her, it meant TDR was declaring war on her family’s club. She was stuck in the middle. People caught in the middle never survived a battle, unharmed.

  “What does my tattoo mean, Minerva Coolidge?” He smiled, revealing his crooked teeth again. “Your pictures don’t do you justice,” the whisper was low and intimate. He dropped the gun barrel to nudge it between her buttock cheeks.

  Her temper flared. She was a Coolidge and people didn’t disrespect a Coolidge. “You forgot the apostrophe on your tattoo. I’m sure it’s supposed to be The Devil’s Ride.” Her voice was perfectly even now. “It means you did prison time and someone called ‘Devil’ marked you as his bitch,” she said with syrupy sweetness.

  His face darkened with anger. His arm jerked upwards-

  “Not the face,” she said, raising her arm. “It’s my fortune, with my ass following a close second.” She sounded braver than she felt.

  “Minerva Coolidge?” a deep, male voice yelled from some distance behind her.

  Minnie twisted her head to locate the owner of that voice but her kidnapper wrapped his palm around the nape of her neck and squeezed hard. She bit down on a whimper of pain and wrenched herself loose. She whipped her head around to see who had shouted her name.

  He stood on the other side of the road, briefly visible in a gap between two white tourist buses. He was a giant. A brute of a man. His skull was shaved bare, his brow bone prominent over hooded eyes… He was staring straight at her. “Help!” she yelled, but a car horn drowned out her cry. A passing bus blocked him from her line of sight.

  Chapter Two

  Fifteen minutes earlier…

  Big Mike studied the Saturday morning crowds coming out of JFK airport. This was a waste of time. He had as much chance of finding Minerva Coolidge today as he had of getting a shot of scotch in downtown Riyadh. Still, he kept looking for a tall, blonde, pretty woman. Real pretty. That was the description her brother had given him, twenty minutes ago, on the phone.

  “JFK processes thousands of people an hour. How the hell am I going to find one blonde woman? You don’t even know her flight number,” Big Mike had said into his cellphone. He was on his way to an interview for a job he was fairly sure he didn’t want, but he still hated being late.

  “There’s no mistaking her,” Crash Coolidge said. “She’s pretty.”

  “What’s the nature of the threat?” Big Mike said.

  “Some bikers… they might grab her. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  ‘Bikers,’ in this context, was code for outlaw motorcycle club members. Crash’s family ran an OMC called Hell’s Crew.

  “Turf war?” Big Mike guessed. He had personal experience of that world.

  He listened to Crash breathing on the other end of the call. Then a single, muttered word, “Please.”

  The desperation in the last word swayed him. Crash Coolidge never asked anyone for anything. He also never sounded afraid. “All right, I’ll try and find her. I don’t know the city but I’m familiar with the layout of the airport.” He had done some security planning for JFK a few years back and his brain never misplaced a map. “What do I do with her if I find her?”

  “Put her on the next flight back to L.A. I’ll pick her up here and make sure she doesn’t bolt again. She stole my credit card — use that to pay for everything.”

  Families. No surprise that this one seemed more screwed up than most. Years ago, in the army, Crash Coolidge had been placed in his platoon. At their first meeting, Big Mike had clasped Crash’s proffered hand, immediately registering his empty eyes and the permanent, loose, physical readiness of a predator. The tiny hairs at the base of his neck had stood on end and the primitive part of his brain had whispered Run. Big Mike had considered transferring Crash to somewhere away from other human beings — counting bullets in an ammo depot, maybe — but finding out that Crash belonged to an outlaw motorcycle club had stopped him. OMC membership meant Crash was capable of loyalty to something outside of himself. Now it seemed Crash was capable of more than loyalty — Crash loved his sister.

  Big Mike let his gaze sweep across the crowd, moving steadily left-to-right, and back again, looking for a fair head. An arctic wind blasted him. His leather jacket protected his torso but the cold wind blew straight through his jeans, chilling his bones. He had spent so long in places where the winds were warm and thick with desert sand, with exotic names like Shamal, Simoom and Sirocco, that his blood had thinned. He stamped his feet to keep them warm. A traveler gave him a nervous look and abruptly changed direction to avoid him by a wider margin. Good. He didn’t like being jostled.

  What if Minerva Coolidge was already outside? What would she do? This was obviously an unplanned trip so she probably hadn’t organized a ride home. So she’d head to the taxi rank. He turned and jogged in that direction, keeping parallel to the road, passing the clutch of people waiting at the crosswalk that led to the parking area. This was a fool’s errand but the remembered desperation in Crash’s voice made him persist.

  It was her legs that first snared his attention. Long, bare, golden legs in his peripheral vision. It was too cold for bare legs.

  She was on the other side of the road, seemingly half of a couple, heading towards the short-term parking lot. Her companion had an arm around her.

  She was wearing a short-sleeved white top with a tiny, bright pink skirt. Either she was a lot tougher than he was and didn’t feel the cold, or she had dressed for a warmer day. In California? He should have asked Crash what his sister had been wearing last night. He frowned. The woman’s companion wasn’t wearing his own jacket — it was draped over the arm he held at her lower waist — but he hadn’t offered it to his underdressed, chilled woman. She stumbled. The man was making her walk faster than she could manage in her too-high, impractical shoes.

  “Minerva Coolidge,” Big Mike yelled. The woman’s head turned in an instinctive response. He got a brief glimpse of a pale face partially obscured by thick, gold hair before the man with her grabbed the back of her neck. Her eyes met his. A brief flash of intense blue. Then she yelled something but it was lost in the rumble of a passing truck. Big Mike stepped into the road without thinking and narrowly avoided being turned into roadkill by a white tour bus. He hunted for a break in the traffic. Two more buses passed with no space between them, the same advert for toothpaste plastered on their sides. Finally, there was a gap. He took it at a run, ignored the honking and yelling that erupted in his wake.

  On the other side of the road, on the sidewalk, he turned three-hundred-and-sixty degrees.

  She was gone.

  He was sure he had just found Minerva Coolidge. She was being abducted. The abductor had a car in the short-term parking lot. Once he got her into his car — the trunk would be the best place — Big Mike had little chance of finding and retrieving her. He walked fast, staying on the sidewalk, parallel to the lot, looking down the aisles. Nothing except rows and rows of empty cars and trucks. No clear line of sight down the aisles because some butted at right angl
es to others. He was careful not to run — the area was criss-crossed with cameras and a running man, without luggage, at an airport, would draw attention. A man of his size in casual clothes was more likely to cause alarm than a businessman hurrying, toting luggage. The ‘If you see something say something’ campaign had left a lot of watchful citizens in its wake. Until he decided what to do, he wanted to look like every other traveler at an airport on a Saturday morning.

  He had lost her. He had grown up in an outlaw motorcycle club. That was a lifetime away but he had lived enough of that life to know that Minerva Coolidge was in serious trouble. He was in danger of being the last person, apart from her abductor, to see her alive. The minutes were ticking away.

  He recalled the layout of this parking lot. The picture snapped into place in his head as clear as the first time he had seen it. He quieted himself deep inside, thinking of nothing but his position on that map and the relative location of his quarry. The noisy traffic, the cold wind, and the sharp tang of exhaust fumes dissolved. The lot could take two thousand cars. It had four exits. If he staked out an exit, he had a twenty-five percent chance of picking the right one. Poor odds for Minerva Coolidge.

  He could call the police but he couldn’t count on an immediate response. He also didn’t know the model of the car being used and his description of Minerva Coolidge was near-useless. Tall and blonde. Great legs. Scared. A picture of her pale face flashed into his mind, disrupting his inner silence. He pushed it away.

  He could call in a bomb threat. Police would flood the area within minutes. He scanned his surrounds casually, checking to see if the airport authorities had installed any new cameras since the last time he had worked here. No, there were none visible. In the event of a bomb threat, every exit would be immediately manned by security staff. That would spook the abductor. Maybe enough to consider abandoning his victim. Decision made, Big Mike pulled out the spare, burner phone he always kept, and started to punch in the number for the local FBI office-