Ace Is Wild (26 page)

Chapter 17

“HERE WE GO,” DANIEL SAID.

Vivi watched, fascinated, as he shifted from sexual innuendo to dealing with the task at hand. His dark eyes went from one kind of intensity to another. Not that it mattered since both kinds were scary. It was probably good that they hadn’t had sex, because he was the kind of man who poured all his skill and all his concentration into whatever he was doing. Considering what he’d done to her with one kiss in a stairwell, with the threat of arrest just feet away, that much undistracted focus would probably kill her.

He laid a hand on her shoulder and she gave a little yelp and shoved it off.

“Jesus, what’s your problem now? One of your spirit guides goose you?” He didn’t wait for an explanation, wrapping his hand around her wrist and towing her after him.

She stumbled a little, but the activity helped her forget about his skin on hers, and when reality got through to her she jerked her wrist free and crossed the street under her own steam. Daniel led her halfway down the block, behind a bus dropping off and picking up passengers.

“You’re pulling the old bus routine?” she scoffed. “I expected you to have a little more imagination.”

“I’m using it all up on you,” he said, adding, “not in that way.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right,” Daniel said, “it was just me back in Heather’s upstairs hallway.”

Vivi chose to ignore that.

Daniel used the bus as cover to start running in earnest, threading his way through the pedestrian crowds, Vivi trailing along in his wake.

They’d headed away from the two federal agents, but the feds had been too close for the bus to put them off the trail for long. Both took up the chase, playing bumper tag with cars when Daniel led Vivi across the street mid-block. Worse, one guy cut left, the other went right, talking on a wrist unit.

“Calling in local backup,” Daniel said.

“With my luck it’ll be Cranston.” But Vivi already knew she and Daniel were trapped because the entire block was wall-to-wall buildings, and there was a federal agent at either end.

Daniel didn’t see it as a no-way-out situation. Daniel was an outside-the-box thinker. He ducked through the nearest doorway, a bakery, saying over his shoulder, “One of the agents will follow us, the other will stay outside. They’ll coordinate through their wrist units.”

“At least that means they’re not talking to the locals,” Vivi said, following Daniel straight through the bakery in blatant disregard of the objections of the hairnet clad woman behind the counter and the goggling customers. Since most of the customers were female, and they weren’t goggling at her, Vivi didn’t think the staring had as much to do with their effrontery as it did Daniel’s backside.

Behind the bakery was an alley that ran the length of the block, and again the sidewalk openings would likely take them directly into the arms of an irate FBI agent, or any localbackup that may have arrived. So Daniel repeated the process, back to front, with the business on the other side of the alley, which happened to be a massage parlor. Among other things.

They ran straight through, just like with the bakery. The similarities ended there. No one was wearing a hairnet for one thing. Several of them wore a lot less, and not just the guys on the table.

Vivi would have expected women in that profession to be a lot less sensitive about nudity, not to mention immune to performance anxiety. But they shrieked and covered various body parts Vivi was trying her best not to see and Daniel wasn’t taking the time to appreciate.

They hit the front door without stopping, barely hesitating at the street. At least one car screeched to a stop to avoid hitting them. On the bright side, a quick look at either end of that block told her there weren’t any cops—at least none in marked cruisers.

On the down side, the footrace was taking a toll on Daniel. His limp was getting more pronounced, and there was pain in his eyes. And things went downhill from there.

The fed who’d taken the shortcut behind them burst through the front door of the massage parlor, looking confused until he spotted them across the street. And then he looked confused again, and a little worried, because when Vivi tried to take off again all Daniel did was take her by the hand and wait for the agent to join them. The confusion was cleared up when Daniel punched him in the nose.

Blood splattered, bone crunched, and the guy went down to his knees. Daniel didn’t wait to find out if he was getting back up. He dragged Vivi back across the street, back through the bordello/massage parlor—more shrieking and covering up—back through the bakery, where Daniel should have been on the menu. They completely retraced their steps until they wound up where they’d started, including the part where they didn’t have a clue what to do next.

Vivi had her hand pressed to the stitch in her side. Daniel was rubbing at his left thigh, and taking stock. It was getting to be late afternoon, lots of vehicular traffic on the narrow streets, lots of foot traffic on the sidewalks.

“We need to split up,” Daniel said.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“We stand out too much as a couple.”

“Right,” Vivi said, “you don’t stand out at all by yourself.”

“I can’t help my height, any more than you can help your . . .” He passed a look over her body and let the rest of the thought trail off into the obvious. “You go that way,” he said, pointing north.

“Where are you going?”

“Make a right turn at the end of the block, walk for five minutes, and make another right turn. Find a place to lay low and I’ll meet you in thirty minutes.”

Since Daniel started walking south, Vivi had two options: chase after him and argue or do as he said. She chose Door Number Two. For one thing, it didn’t feel like a mistake. And Daniel hadn’t left her much room for improvisation.

She went to the end of the block and followed Daniel’s instructions. Five minutes of walking took her three blocks, she made another right turn and saw a Boston P.D. cruiser making a pass, driving slowly and searching the crowd.

Daniel was right, she had no trouble blending in. But being short didn’t do her a whole lot of good if there wasn’t any crowd to blend in with, and the pedestrian traffic was getting thin as everyone made their way to dinner.

Vivi slipped through the nearest door and found herself in a beauty parlor straight out of the ’50s, including the eye-watering stench of perm solution and cigarette smoke.

“Can I help you?” she was asked by a woman with a two-pack-a-day voice. Her latest contribution to the ambience hung out of her mouth, ash an inch long quivering on the end. She looked to be in her fifties, she was built like Jabba the Hut, and her fingernails might have been lacquered from a freshly opened vein.

“I just wanted to get in out of the heat for a minute,” Vivi said.

“Don’t think I can bring it, huh?”

Vivi looked at the woman’s hair, fluttering around her head like a big blonde haystack, circa
Desperately Seeking Susan.
“I, uh, really didn’t plan on having my hair done, today. No money,” she added with a shrug.

“This one’s on me, honey,” the woman said, curving one bony, slack-skinned arm around Vivi’s shoulders and heading for a chair covered in cracked and faded turquoise vinyl.

“No, really, I can’t. I’m sure you have a paying customer—”

“Who says you ain’t paying,” the woman said, handing Vivi a stack of business cards. “May not be cash, but honey, the advertising will be worth every penny.”

NINETY MINUTES LATER, DANIEL WAS BACK AT THE rendezvous point. For the fifth time. He’d lost the feds, he’d lost the Boston P.D. He’d lost Vivi. He’d quartered the area for about a ten-block radius and found no sign of her. Not that he knew what kind of sign he was looking for; it wasn’t like she’d left footprints or hung a piece of clothing on a street sign to point the way. Then again, if she took off a piece of clothing to hang on a street sign, he could just look for the crowd of men. She hadn’t been wearing all that much.

He should have headed back to the loft instead of staying in that area, out in the open. But he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that leaving would be the wrong course of action.

He had to do something besides stand there, though, so he took out his cell phone. Much as he hated to do it, he figured he’d call Mike, find out if Vivi had been picked up by any law enforcement agency. The only other possibility was that she’d eluded everyone—including him—in which case he’d go back to the loft and wait for her to make an appearance.

“Hey, mister, looking for some action?”

He glanced over his shoulder and felt the tension drain out of his muscles. “That’s not an offer you want to make unless you’re prepared to follow through,” he said.

Vivi stepped up beside him, half-smiling. “You weren’t supposed to recognize me.”

It was her eyes that gave her away. One look in the amber depths and he’d know her anywhere, even with her hair straightened and streaked, blonde and red among the darker strands. It should have been garish but it suited her—and it served to prove why women everywhere colored their hair. They said it was for a change of pace, or to make them more attractive, but really it was to make every man who looked at them wonder which color was the real one. And think about how much they’d like to find out.

“You’re taking all the fun out of this,” she said.

“It’s not supposed to be fun.”

“C’mon, it’s a little fun.”

He tried not to smile, but he couldn’t quite hold it back. And then he could. “We’ve got company,” he said quietly.

He felt Vivi tense beside him, just as the second federal agent who’d been chasing them materialized out of the evening crowd, too close to make a break for it. Especially as he hand his hand beneath the light jacket he was wearing.

“Are you going to shoot us?” Daniel asked him.

“You broke my partner’s nose.”

Vivi nudged Daniel.

He ignored her. “I could have done a lot worse.”

“Why don’t you come along quietly, make this easy for everyone.”

“Including the hit men, since they’ll know just where to find me.”

Vivi nudged him again, but when he looked over at her, she was staring into oncoming traffic. Daniel followed suit—and maybe if he hadn’t been using most of his concentration to make himself believe his own eyes he might have spent a few seconds figuring out how to capitalize on it.

Vivi came up with a game plan first, but then Vivi didn’t have to waste any time on mental adjustment. Bizarre was Vivi’s stock-in-trade. She took a step forward, hands up, in apparent placation mode.

The fed took a step back. “Stay where you are, ma’am.”

“I’m not going to jail for him,” Vivi said, “and I’m not a ma’am.”

She took another step, the fed backpedaled again, putting him at the edge of the sidewalk.

“I’m not letting you take me in, either,” Daniel said.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“I don’t have to stop you, Maxine will.”

The guy was clearly baffled by that. He looked at Vivi, then back at Daniel, who was waiting for the inevitable question, and when it came, when the guy asked, “Who’s Maxine?” Daniel pointed to the 1952 red Ford pickup truck that jumped the curb and hit the fed. It didn’t hit him hard enough to cause internal bleeding or rupture his spleen or anything, just enough to take him out of any footrace for the next eight weeks or so.

“My leg is broken,” he wheezed out through the pain.

Daniel wasn’t paying attention to him, mostly because a teenage boy had catapulted himself out of Maxine’s driver’s seat and attached himself to Vivi.

“It’s not my fault,” he babbled, both hands wrapped around her wrist tight enough to cut off circulation. “I don’t even know what happened. My boss told me to take the truck for a quick drive, make sure nothing rattled.”

“He must work for George—he’s the glass guy,” Vivi explained for Daniel’s benefit.

Daniel took another look at Maxine and sure enough the glass had all been replaced. The bullet dings had been bumped out smooth and repainted. The fed hadn’t left any damage behind, so all in all, Maxine looked pretty good, considering what she’d been through in the last couple days.

The kid was still hanging on Vivi, still talking a mile a minute. “I was just driving around,” he said, “not even thinking about where I was going, you know? But then the steering wheel got stuck and I ran into that guy and am I going to jail? Because I really don’t want to go to jail. I want to go to Harvard, and I don’t think Harvard lets in criminals.”