Son of the Morning

"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, thenKristian 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 perday. 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 ofMinneapolis , 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 reached "Banks," and located her own bank, which had sixteen of those so-called convenient locations.

She estimated it would take her half an hour to get to the nearest one. "I’m going now," she said. "I’ll be there in thirty to forty-five minutes, unless something happens." She could be picked up by the police, or mugged again, or Parrish and his goons might be out cruising the city, looking for her. None of the things that could happen to her would be pleasant.

"Call me,"Kristian said urgently. "I’ll get into the bank’s computer now, but call me and let me know if everything went okay."

"I will," she promised. The thirty-minute walk took almost an hour. She was exhausted, and the laptop gained weight with each step she took. She had to hide every time a car went past, and once a patrol car sped through an intersection just ahead of her, lights whirring in eerie silence. The spurt of panic left her weak and shaking, her heart pounding.

Her familiarity with the downtown area was limited to specific destinations. She had lived, gone to school, and shopped in the suburbs. She took a wrong turn and went several blocks out of her way before she realized what she had done, and had to backtrack. She was acutely aware of the seconds ticking away toward dawn, when people would be getting up and turning on their televisions, and learning about the double murder in her quiet neighborhood. The police would have photographs of her, taken from the house, and her face might be on hundreds of thousands of screens. She needed to be somewhere safe before then.

Finally she reached the branch bank, with the lovely ATM on the front of it, all lit up and watched over by the security camera. so if someone got killed right there they’d have a tape of the murder to show on the evening news.

She was too tired to worry about the camera, or the possibility that another couple of jerks might be watching her. Just let someone else try to mug her. The next time, she would fight; she had nothing to lose, because the money meant her life. She walked right up to the machine, took out her bank card, and followed the instructions, asking for a full two thousand.