Ace Is Wild (33 page)

“I’ll find a way to pay you back,” Daniel said. “I always pay my debts.”

Eric went kind of pale. Vivi didn’t blame him. Judging by the tone of Daniel’s voice and the look in Daniel’s eyes, he wasn’t offering future favors.

“Honest, dude,” Eric said, “I don’t want anything from you.”

“I’ll take you up on your offer,” Heather said.

“I didn’t make an offer,” Daniel said. It was more of a threat.

Heather shrugged. Very dramatically. “Too bad,” she said. “You might like to walk on the wild side once in a while.”

Daniel chuckled. “You think you’re wild? You’re not even close.”

Heather didn’t take that well. She jammed her hands on her hips, her mouth dropped open but nothing came out. Apparently she was searching for a suitably nasty comeback and coming up empty—which was surprising since Heather excelled at nasty. In the end, the best she could come up with was a vague threat.

“You’ll be sorry,” she said, and then she slinked her way back up the steps and went inside.

Eric went with her.

“There’s something going on there,” Daniel observed.

“If you’re talking about Eric, he’s harmless,” Vivi said. “He might sell us out to make a buck—if he had any clue who to sell us out to.”

“What about Heather?”

“Heather was concentrating elsewhere. It’s hard to read someone in her state.”

“What state would that be?”

“Horny,” Vivi said bluntly. “Until just before she went inside. Then I caught something . . . malicious.”

“I insulted her,” Daniel said. “She’d probably key my car if she could find it.”

“It felt stronger than that.”

“I’ll run a check on her first thing in the morning.” Daniel got to his feet and held out a hand to Vivi.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“Yeah, you are.”

She stood, but she didn’t climb the steps. “I thought you weren’t going to tell me what to do.”

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Daniel said. “I’m just agreeing with you.”

Chapter 22

ERIC WAS ACTING WEIRD—WEIRDER THAN USUAL,
and that set off Daniel’s trouble radar. He was expecting something to happen, but he wasn’t expecting to hear his phone ring about five minutes after he and Vivi got back to the third-floor apartment.

“There’s a bomb in the building,” a strange voice said when Daniel answered. “It’s armed and set to go off in five minutes.”

“This isn’t Flip, so it must be Hatch,” Daniel said.

Vivi froze halfway across the room, then went racing back, dragging Daniel’s head down to hers so she could hear the conversation. What there was of it.

“Four and a half minutes. Come out or blow up.”

“And I just take your word for it?”

“The bomb is under the floor of the apartment you’re staying in.” And Hatch disconnected.

Daniel felt Vivi sag next to him, but he didn’t have time for weak knees. He wrapped a hand around her wrist and headed for the door. “You wrestled Flip’s gun away from him,” he reminded her. “You can handle a bomb.”

Daniel thought she was resisting when she pulled free, but she only curled her hand into his and followed him down the stairs. They went into the apartment directly under theirs, and there, duct-taped to the ceiling right beneath where their bed would be, was a bundle of wires and what appeared to be dynamite, wrapped with more tape. A cheap timer ticked off the minutes and seconds in glaring red. Just under three minutes.

“Do something,” Vivi said.

“I’m not an explosives expert. I’m just as likely to set it off as turn it off.”

“Two and a half minutes,” Vivi read off the display. “What do we do?”

“We go out,” Daniel said.

“And get captured?”

“No choice.” It was one of the common-sense rules of being a field agent: Always have an escape route. He’d checked out the building when he and Vivi had first come to stay there. It was a warren of apartments. They could get lost in the place long enough to call for backup, but there was no way they could escape a bomb without getting captured. “Two hit men, two doors,” he said for Vivi’s sake. “Same goes for the windows since they’re only front and back. And I doubt the fire escape would hold up to a heavy wind. The only way out is through the front door.”

“How about the roof?”

Daniel took her by the hand and pulled her out of the second-floor apartment. “Even if we had time to get up there, it’s too big a risk. The bomb may not have enough firepower to damage more than a floor or two—”

“Eric and Heather!” Vivi raced down the stairs ahead of Daniel and began to bang her fists on the door to the apartment Eric was using.

Daniel joined her, both of them pounding and yelling. Heather shouted something back that sounded like, “You had your chance,” so Daniel backed up against the wall opposite the door and gave the doorknob a good shot with his good leg. The old wood of the jamb splintered and the door crashed in.

“There’s a bomb upstairs,” he yelled through the opening, “get out or die.”

Eric stared at him, brow furrowed, having trouble processing the danger. Heather was already on her feet. “Jesus,” she said, ditching Eric and racing out the door.

Vivi stuck around, trying to make Eric understand he was about to die. Daniel heaved her over his shoulder and raced for the exit, Eric hot on his heels. The place exploded just as they went through the front door, a punch of heat and noise, and a blast of air that tossed Daniel face-first onto the sidewalk, Vivi on top of him. Everything went gray and fuzzy, but somewhere in his groggy brain he got the sensation of movement, and when his brains unscrambled he found himself in the back of a van, hands and feet secured by the plastic ties that were replacing handcuffs everywhere.

Vivi lay next to him, completely still. He nudged her, but she was out cold. At least he thought she was out, but when the van came to a stop she rolled over and looked at him.

“Waterfront,” she said.

The doors opened and sure enough Daniel smelled water and heard it slapping against a man-made structure, probably a dock or wharf. Neither of them were gagged, so they must be in an area where they couldn’t be overheard in the event a little recreational torture was planned before the main event. Unfortunately, that didn’t help much since they were hauled out of the van, carted onto a boat, and taken down to a tiny galley belowdecks.

The boat barely looked seaworthy, an older model with a wooden hull and decks that hadn’t seen varnish in a couple of decades but appeared to be no stranger to dry rot. The general theme continued in the galley. Lots of wood accented with brass, musty smell, not well maintained. The postage stamp-sized table had a tarnished brass railing to keep things from sliding off in rough seas. It was also convenient for securing prisoners.

Flip took a length of chain, ran it through Daniel’s wrists, and padlocked it around the railing. He took another plastic tie out of his pocket, looped it through the one around Vivi’s wrists, and tethered her to the porthole hinge on the opposite side of the galley from Daniel.

The boat motored away from dry land, but it was pitch-black out, which made it impossible to tell where they were headed. Daniel figured it was Boston Harbor rather than the Charles River or Fort Point Channel, and they were probably going out far enough for Hatch and Flip to toss their bodies into the ocean once the deed was done.

It wasn’t long before the boat stopped, the motor cut out, and Flip appeared in the hatchway. He looked a little green around the gills. “Everybody comfy?” he sang out weakly.

“Aside from being bounced off the pavement a little while ago,” Vivi said, “this sea air is hell on my hair.”

“Sure, but the wild, curly thing suits you much better than that straight, streaky mess.”

“How do you think it will look soaked in blood?” Daniel asked Flip.

“Well, blood is never a good look.”

“Neither is having a building fall on your head.”

Vivi was silent. Probably hadn’t had time to process everything, what with being abducted and facing the prospect of her own death. Judging by the expression on her face, it had all come crashing back in.

She swallowed audibly. “Eric . . . Is he . . .”

“That place folded like an accordion,” Flip said, “but nobody got hurt. Eric and his little chippy girlfriend got out. Huh, if they had any brains they wouldn’t have been there at all after they gave you up.”

“Eric’s not connected, huh?” Daniel’s comment was directed to Vivi, but Flip answered.

“That putz? He’s nobody. We knew where she lived.” Flip hooked a thumb in Vivi’s direction. “When the orders changed from killing you to getting her, we went back to her neighborhood and asked around. Didn’t take us long to run across Heather, and Heather brought us to Eric. The rest is history.”

“More like felony,” Daniel put in. “Several felonies, if we’re keeping track.”

Flip shrugged.

“Why didn’t you use a fake bomb?” Daniel asked him.

Another shrug, one-shouldered this time. “We knew who we were dealing with. You were armed, so we couldn’t go into the building after you. We had to get you to come out.”

“Why not just wait?” Vivi wanted to know. “We would have come out eventually, and there wouldn’t have been any reason to . . . to . . .”

“He still would have been armed, and you’d have come out during the day, most likely.”

“It’s not like you were worried about innocent bystanders getting hurt before,” Daniel said.

“We were worried about witnesses.”

“So you decided to plant a bomb and arm it in the middle of the night?”

“We didn’t think you’d be fooled by a fake one, so we had to use a real one.”

Daniel knew the rest, but he took a minute to fit what Flip had told him into the overall puzzle. No lightbulbs popped on over his head, and there was no aha moment. In fact, he wasn’t any further ahead than before. “Why did the orders change from killing me to getting her?”

Daniel was watching Flip, waiting for a response, but Flip’s cell phone rang—“Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” by Cher—and he went above to answer it.

“Now’s your chance,” Daniel said to Vivi.

“My chance for what?”

“Do your thing, get a premonition, tell me how to get out of this. ”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “I can’t just turn it on and off like a light switch.”

“You did at Quincy Market.”

“This isn’t exactly the market. We were almost blown up a half hour ago, and now we’re trussed up like garbage bags out in the middle of Boston Harbor with a gay hit man who’s nursing a bad case of whiplash and a black eye because of us.”

“If you don’t put it out of your mind and concentrate on getting us out of here, we’re going to be at the bottom of Boston Harbor. And if we’re lucky, they’ll kill us before they tie cement blocks to our feet and dump us overboard.”

“You’re not helping,” she snapped.

“Compartmentalize, damn it,” he snapped back.

She gave him one last glare then closed her eyes and made a face that looked more like constipation than concentration. It was no surprise when her breath burst out of her and she shook her head, her eyes meeting his. “It’s no good.”

Daniel lost it, just a little. Okay, he lost it a lot. He had enough presence of mind to keep his voice down, but mentally he was nose-to-nose with Vivi, shouting at her. “You keep jawing about how you can help me solve this thing, and every time I ask for help you’ve got some excuse why you can’t.”

“They’re not excuses. This isn’t exactly a science, you know. Stress—”

“Stress, my ass. You make a big deal about being a psychic and talking to the spirits, but what it’s really about is you getting off on being different. You cock your head and shut your eyes and spout some bullshit prediction that has more to do with observational skill and a good grasp of human nature than anything else.”

“You really think I like being this way? I’ve been an outsider all my life—in kindergarten, for God’s sake. Do you think a five-year-old wouldn’t give anything to fit in, to not be teased every day? I don’t have any friends, I can’t have a normal relationship with a man because they’re all so afraid I can tell what they’re feeling. People think it’s cool having psychic ability, but they don’t want to hang around with someone who can do what I do.”