Never Broken by Lori Duffy Foster

Author:Lori Duffy Foster [Lori Duffy Foster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Level Best Books
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Lisa sat on the bed of her hotel room and dialed. Once again, it went to voicemail. It was the third time Lisa had tried to call Toren at home and the third time she’d gotten his voicemail. She left the same message she’d left earlier: “Call me as soon as possible.” Then she emailed him. She probably could have called Dorothy herself from the hotel phone and told her she was staying at the Holiday Inn. Chances were slim that anyone could have tapped that phone so soon even if they knew she was there, but hotels keep records of outgoing calls. Lisa didn’t want to take the chance.

Lisa was fairly certain she hadn’t been followed. After stopping at the drugstore, she’d driven around for about an hour, watching for any headlights that appeared continuously in her rearview mirror. There were none as far as she could tell. Then she took a last-second turn off the highway, turned right immediately off the ramp onto a block lined with tall buildings, shut off her headlights and pulled into an alley. She followed the alley around the building into a parking lot behind it, waiting there for twenty minutes before she dared to start moving again. Thankfully, it was familiar territory for Lisa. She’d once covered a murder that had occurred in that same parking lot.

When she was sure the coast was clear, Lisa pulled out again, careful to keep her headlights off until she was on the street. The room was reserved under Joe Theodore’s name, and she registered as Amber Fleishman, the name of the author whose novel she was currently reading. Four more days of this. Lisa wasn’t sure whether she had the energy or the creativity to pull it off.

Sleep was getting hard to come by, so Lisa took two of the Benadryl she’d bought to help bring it on. While she waited for the medicine to kick in, she laid out the tax maps of Iron City Heights across the bedspread. Warehouses didn’t usually have basements, but it was always possible the bakery site had one. Or maybe the sweatshop was beneath the bakery itself. The building was small and narrow, but from what Saul said, his captors didn’t give the slaves much room. They could easily cram a dozen or so people, each with a sewing machine, into a space that small and still have a separate room for them to sleep in, especially if they packed them in like animals. Only one side of the bakery was parallel to another tall building, forming an alley. That would have to be where Saul came out when he escaped.

She wondered how the guards could stand it. They didn’t live in the sweatshop, but they spent at least eight hours a day watching over their slaves. It had to be nauseating—the stench, the lack of ventilation, the potential for disease. Of course, they’d have to be crazy to take part in this operation in the first place.

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