She fished around in her bag and finally scraped together all her loose bills. He could just whistle “Dixie” for all she cared when it was time for her to get out. Unless he took credit cards, he would be out of luck for the second half of his transportation fee. She let him see the pistol, then leaned back to listen to Willie Nelson blaring from a CD. Her mind raced. Should she cut and run? If she did that, she would have to go back to the house in Georgetown to take what little money she had stashed under her mattress. The thought made her blood run cold. A lawyer with money under the mattress! What is wrong with this picture? Maybe she should go to the office on Nebraska Avenue, tidy up, and leave from there.

She had several changes of clothes in the small closet, and her car was in the parking lot. That meant she would have to pay someone to shovel it out. Once she paid off this hick driver, she would have only coins left. The petty cash in the office would barely get her a cup of coffee. Talk about being between a rock and a boulder. Unless…she could get to Baron’s office before he did. She looked down at the Rolex on her wrist. She knew the security guard’s routine, only because of the late-night trysts in Baron’s office back at the beginning of their affair fifteen years earlier. She knew the combination to the ugly safe, too. What Baron didn’t know was that she knew about the safe built into the floor under his desk. While she didn’t know the combination, she knew where he kept the secret numbers. At least she thought she knew where he kept the numbers. Men were so predictable.

Once, during some heavy-duty pillow talk, Baron had blurted out about the cash he kept in the safe. At the time he’d said it was to whisk her away to some exotic getaway where no one would ever find them. While she had never seen the brochure to that exotic getaway that he’d boasted about, he’d said it was in the safe, to be utilized at the proper time. Well, this sure as hell was the proper time. Too bad he wouldn’t be accompanying her on the junket. The only thing she didn’t know for sure was how much cash Baron kept in the safe. For the most part, Baron wasn’t a liar, so she had to assume the amount would be robust. And he’d once bragged about a fortune in bearer bonds that had come his way via the death of a wealthy client with no heirs.

All she had to do was get in and out of his office, make her getaway, and the world would be her oyster.