brought your modem over for me to repair. That's it."
"Good. Whatever you do, don't mention the documents. If anyone asks, just say you didn't see any papers at all."
"Okay, but why?" "So Parrish won't kill you, too." Her teeth began to chatter. Oh, God, she was so cold, the light wind cutting through her wet clothes. "I'm not kidding. Promise me you won't let anyone know you have any idea I was working on anything. I don't know what's in these papers, but he intends to get rid of everyone who knows of their existence."
There was silence on the line, then Kristian said in bewilderment, "You mean he doesn't want us to know about that Knight Templar guy you were trying to track down? He lived seven centuries ago, if he existed at all! Who the hell cares?"
"Parrish does." She didn't know why, but she intended to find out. "Parrish does," she repeated, her voice trailing off.
She listened to his breathing, the sound quick and shallow, amplified by the phone. "Okay, I'll keep my mouth shut. I promise." He paused. "Do you need any help? You can borrow my car-"
She almost laughed. Despite everything, the sound bubbled up in her throat and hung there, unable to work its way past restricted muscles. Kristian's mechanical monument to testosterone was a sure attention-getter, the one thing she most wanted to avoid. "No, thanks," she managed to say. "What I need is money, but the ATM I just tried ran out of cash, and I was mugged as soon as I walked away from it anyway."
"I doubt it," he said. He doubted that she was mugged? "What?" She was so tired she could barely move or think, but surely he couldn't mean that.
"I doubt it was out of money," he said. Suddenly his voice sounded older, taking on the cool intensity that meant he was thinking of computers. "How much did you take out?"
"Three hundred. Isn't that the limit for each transaction? I remember the banker said something about three hundred dollars when we set up our account."
"Not three hundred per transaction," Kristian patiently explained. "Three hundred per day. You could make as many transactions as you wanted, until the total reached three hundred for that twenty-four-hour period. Each bank sets its own limit, and the limit for your bank is three hundred."
His explanation fell on her like words of doom. Even if she found another ATM, she wouldn’t be able to get more money until this time tomorrow morning. She couldn’t wait that long. If the police could freeze her account, they would definitely have it done by then. And she needed to get out of Minneapolis, to find some safe hiding place where she could work on the documents and find out just why Parrish had killed Ford and Bryant. To do that, she had to have money; she had to have access to a phone, to resource material.
"I'm sunk," she said, her tone leaden. "No!" He almost yelled the word. More softly he repeated, "No. I can fix that. How much is your balance?"
"I don't know exactly. A couple of thousand." "Find another ATM," he instructed. "I'll get into your bank's computer, change the limit to . . . say, five thousand.
Empty out your account, then I'll change the limit back to the original amount. They'll never know how it happened, I promise. "
Hope bloomed inside her, a strange sensation after those past nightmare hours. All she had to do was find another ATM, something easier said than done when she was on foot.
"Look in the phone directory," he was saying. "Every branch of your bank will have an ATM. Pick the closest one and go there."
Of course. How simple. Normally she would have thought of that herself, and the fact that she hadn't was a measure of her shock and exhaustion.
"Okay." Thank heavens, there was still a directory chained to the shelf. She opened the protective cover. Well, there was part of a directory, at least, and it contained the most important part, the Yellow Pages. She thumbed through them until she
Alan Cook
Unknown Author
Cheryl Holt
Angela Andrew;Swan Sue;Farley Bentley
Reshonda Tate Billingsley
Pamela Samuels Young
Peter Kocan
Allan Topol
Isaac Crowe
Sherwood Smith