Free The Chosen by Sharon Sala

later they were back on the street. Bart was sipping coffee between bites of his sweet roll when his cell phone rang again. Juggling the coffee and roll, he opened the briefcase and, once again, grabbed the phone.
    â€œThis is Bart. Yes…I know I’m late, but I’m less than ten minutes from the office. No…I didn’t oversleep. The car wouldn’t start. I had to take a cab. Yes…I have the figures. See you in a few.”
    He disconnected again, dropped the phone back into his briefcase and took another bite of the roll. At that point, he glanced toward the rearview mirror and realized the driver was staring at him.
    â€œPlease pay attention to the traffic,” Bart said shortly.
    The driver’s gaze slid from Bart’s face to the traffic. In the mirror, Bart could see him smiling.
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    This fare was the third one of the morning for Jay. He’d had no idea when he’d picked the man up that he was going to be special. But the moment he’d heard him identify himself as Bart, he knew. The Lord was helping him fulfill his mission. Bartholomew. One of the chosen twelve.
    He glanced into the rearview mirror again, making sure his fare was otherwise occupied, then pressed the button on the armrest, automatically locking all the doors.
    The click was minute, the sound lost in the surrounding noise of traffic and horns. As he pulled up to a red light, he reached behind him and shut and locked the small door in the clear, Plexiglas panel that separated the front seat from the back.
    Scofield was occupied with wiping the sticky residue from the sweet roll off his fingers as Jay pressed a button beneath the dash. A small amount of ether was released from a tiny plastic tube hidden in the seat behind Bart’s head.
    Within seconds, Bart’s eyes were rolling back in his head. By the time the light changed, he was slumped over in the seat. Jay went through the intersection, then backtracked and drove toward the warehouse district. Within the hour, Bart Scofield had a new place of residence and Jay had another disciple.
    He knew, though, that unlike the others he’d picked up, Scofield was a man who would be missed. Which was why, when he didn’t show up at the office and his co-workers began calling his cell phone, he couldn’t answer, because the phone was now at the bottom of the Potomac.
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    By the time noon came and went, and because he was the mayor’s best friend, a missing person’s report had gone out and detectives were tracing Bart Scofield’s movements that morning. All they knew for sure was that he’d taken a cab from home to work. They had his address and were checking all the cab companies to see which one had picked up a fare at Scofield’s home. It wasn’t until they came up with a company that had sent a cab to Scofield’s address, only to find that he was already gone when they arrived, that they began to believe something more was going on.
    They were now looking for an outlaw cab.
    Their driver was a loner—driving a personally owned car without working under the auspices of a local company. They called them outlaw cabs because they often stole other drivers’ fares.
    Sometimes they worked their own business by being available on the streets during rush hour. At other times, they scammed fares from company cars during slow times by having a scanner that picked up calls going out to other drivers. All the driver had to do was show up at the address ahead of the company cab, steal the fare and collect the money. With this being the case, it was going to prove far more difficult to discover who had picked up Bart Scofield. And they had to find out who had picked him up, because once the report of the missing man had gone to the D.C. police, the media quickly descended. Because Bart Scofield wasn’t a nobody. He was the mayor’s golfing buddy and best friend.
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    January was at her desk when she saw Kevin