Blowback (The Black Cipher Files Book 1) (8 page)

I pushed open the door, effectively ending our conversation. The guy behind the podium greeted Lucas by name then eyed me speculatively.

He looked to be in his mid-fifties, although sometimes it was hard to judge. He still had a head of thin black hair combed to one side, and a wide smile with one gold filling on the left eye tooth.

The little man bowed slightly and led us to a table in the back. “What will you allow me to serve you, Mr. Lucas?” He spoke in Cantonese. I translated roughly. My Cantonese is a little rusty.

“The usual, times two,” Lucas replied in Cantonese. He shot a glance at me, then switched to English, “Trust me. This will be heaven.”

As long as it didn’t send me to hell, I’d be happy.

Lucas leaned over to whisper in my ear. “I’ll taste it first.”

The man glanced between us, his eyebrows raised. “I am happy to meet your lady.”

I could have sworn Lucas flushed.

He spoke quickly and fluently in Cantonese while I waited and pretended not to understand. Something about a favor and a car.

The man bowed again. “As you wish.”

Within five silent minutes, a waiter came out and served us family style. Huge plates of Kung Pao chicken, fried rice and a vegetable dish that looked suspiciously like the fuzzy carton of leftovers in his fridge.

“I bring you vegetables. Good for you, Mr. Lucas.” The waiter bowed.

The Chinese food was surprisingly appetizing. True to his word, Lucas tasted everything first. After he proved the food was safe, I dug in. The sauteed green beans and chicken packed a punch. I sipped the green tea from our communal pot and hoped Lucas hadn’t developed an immunity to any kinds of drugs. I let the warm liquid slide down my throat, cooling the heat of the spicy peppers.

The waiter handed the bill to Lucas along with a set of car keys.

Lucas paid, thanked the man in Cantonese and led me toward the back exit. The unexpected move unnerved me. I didn’t want to go through that door.

The men here could all be plants. The Lucky Dog could be a front for something more sinister. To try to get me to trust Lucas. But to what purpose? I must be losing my mind. Maybe the drugs I’d been given were inducing a case of paranoia.

On the other hand, I never trusted anyone. I never worked with anyone and I was in the unusual position of needing to work with him until I got the damn syringe back.

And if I was honest with myself, I had this blind spot, this weakness about Lucas Goodman that I couldn’t seem to shake. I stopped him before he opened the door to the alley. “I held up my end. Now it’s time to get to a lab.” And test the contents of the syringe.

“We’re on our way.” His tone was expressionless but something in his voice had me taking a closer look. He was frowning. But not at me--it seemed to be at himself. “And once we’re done at the lab, you owe me.”

“Fine.” I shrugged off the need to make sure he was okay.

Lucas yanked open the door to the alley. He said forcefully, “I just want to find Johnny.”

Maybe Lucas was closer to this kid than I’d thought. “Why?”

Lucas usually moved with a fluid grace, an unconscious easy lope. His stiffness gave away the depth of his unease as he strode toward a car in the alley. “Money.”

But I didn’t believe it. His apartment didn’t scream money but it didn’t scream, ‘I’m poor, I need money’ either.

“Try again.”

“You’ve got your secrets.” He stared at me over the hood of the car and smiled grimly. “I’ve got mine.”

***

We returned to his apartment in the car borrowed from the Lucky Dog’s owner.

Lucas had given me a black-haired wig in a chic bob. Out of somewhere he’d found a spandex dress in basic black and a push up bra in the right size.

After I slithered into the dress and adjusted the wig, I went out into the living room. I looked down at my shrink-wrapped body, then back at him. “You go out in drag often?”

His lips quirked but he offered no explanation.

He wore an understated suit in an interesting shade of olive green and glasses tinted another color green shaded his eyes. We were bland enough that the guards wouldn’t remember many details.

Lucas’s gaze traveled over the length of my body, lingering over the cleavage. My nipples beaded and desire throbbed low in my belly. Not happening again. I waved my hand in front of his face. “Hello. My eyes are up here.”

“And they are a picture to look at too.”

My body wanted to warm at his smile but I refused to give in to the attraction. I had much bigger problems than a wayward sex drive.

I wanted the syringe back. Now. “Syringe.”

“Right before we leave.” He went into the back bedroom.

Frustration sizzled along my nerve endings. I plucked at the skintight dress. “Couldn’t you have come up with something less revealing?” I muttered.

Lucas’s voice drifted through the doorway. “Yeah, but this way I get to enjoy the view.”

“Is there an Office Depot around here?”

He walked back into the living room. “What do you need?”

Sharing information was a foreign concept for me, but I couldn’t see anyway around it. “Untraceable cell phone.” I needed to contact Carson. He was my control and I’d been out of contact, since the loss of the ring, for hours. After my last experience with the pay phone at the bus station, I didn’t trust using a landline.

“I have a couple of those pay-as-you-go cell phones with phone cards.”

“Registered to you?”

He just looked at me. Okay. So he wasn’t stupid. I knew that. I also knew that I never trusted anyone.

Could
I trust him? Maybe...but I wasn’t going to. “I’m sure there’s an Office Depot along the way.”

“Right.” Lucas looked at me for another second before turning away. He didn’t try to change my mind, which conversely did make me more inclined to trust him.

“We’ve got a lot to do.” He glanced at the titanium steel dial of his watch. I tried not to notice the strength in his wrist and failed. “What first, the lab or the store?”

The time was nearly eleven. My first priority had to be getting this solution to a lab. The store might be closed. The phone would have to wait until later.

“Lab.”

“The lab is out in Livermore.” He picked up the keys we’d gotten with our bill.

Livermore. East Bay. Lots of government contract work. “How long will it take?”

“About an hour, maybe less, this time of night.”

“Will your friend be there at this time of night?”

He swung open the door to his garage and gestured with a courtly sweep of his hand. “I already called. She’s meeting us there.”

“You didn’t give her any specifics over the phone, did you?”

He just looked at me with a small bit of censure in his gaze.

“Turn around.” He keyed in the code to open the refrigerator. The keypad was silent, no beeps I could recall and re-enter myself.

True to his word, he pulled out the syringe and handed it to me.

“Just like that?” I questioned, suspicious.

“Look at it,” he said drily. “It’s the same.”

His words spooked me. He really could read me. The feeling was strange and extremely uncomfortable. So I took his advice and examined the syringe carefully. It was the same.

Going over to the bins opposite the door, he grabbed several containers. “Sterile evidence cups.”

I set the cups on the counter.

Efficiently I uncapped the syringe. I looked at the needle. Serious size. The liquid gleamed innocuously. I wondered what they had wanted to inject into my body.

In the course of my training and my work, I’d taken plenty of drugs that were bad for me. I could speculate until I was blue in the face. I needed more than speculation, I needed identification.

I squirted the liquid into two equal portions in the evidence cups, screwed on the lids, and tucked them into the little black sequined purse. I saved the syringe. It was possible we could get prints off of it, but not likely.

“Ready?” he asked.

Before we left I needed to get into character. Tight black dress, fake eyelashes, and full makeup. Hmmm, southern charm school.

I smoothed a hand over his sedately patterned tie, drawing his gaze. Then, I thrust my shoulders back and straightened my spine and tossed my head in a flirty move. The act lifted my breasts, pulling his gaze right where I wanted it.

“Let’s go, sugar.”

TEN

At almost midnight, the lab parking lot was deserted. Powerful halogen lights illuminated the blacktop as Lucas drove slowly into a visitor parking space.

The Lucky Dog’s Ford was a nondescript sedan, somewhere between tan and beige. Lucas angled the car, parking so the license plate would be in the shadows and impossible to identify on security camera tapes.

“Don’t get out. I’ll come around and open your door, like a true gentleman.”

Lucas sauntered around the front of the car and opened my door with a sweeping gesture. Leaning over, he held out his hand and gently pulled me out. “By the way, Mr. Lee has strict instructions to report the car stolen if we’re not back by a certain time.”

Shit. There went that plan.

I sashayed to the glass-fronted doors with Lucas trailing behind me. What I wanted to do was punch something. Every time I had some semblance of a plan, he figured it out.

How the hell did he do that?

I must have looked perplexed because he answered as if I’d spoken.

“Remember. I was you.” Lucas pressed an intercom button beside a numeric keypad.

Through the bullet-proof glass, I saw the security guard, maybe twenty-one, with peach fuzz on his chin and a buzz cut flipped up at the forehead. He sat behind a fake wood, half-circle console monitoring the cameras.

“Lab is closed.” The tinny voice announced from the intercom.

“Thanks, but we’re not here for the lab. We’re driving through and stopped to see a friend of ours. Barbara.” Lucas zeroed in on what would put this infant at ease and hitched up his pants so his white socks and black shoes showed beneath the hem. Very non-threatening, easy going, everybody’s happy. “She told us she had to work late, but we could stop by before we headed down South.”

“One minute, sir.”

I tilted my head, examining my fingernails. I pretended to frown over a chipped nail while I peered through the cover of my eye lashes, searching for any other cameras than the one aimed at the door. I found two more. One on each corner of the building, doing a sweep of the parking lot.

I stayed to the side and slightly behind Lucas, using his body as a shield.

The buzzer sounded.

I was one step closer to finding out what was in that syringe.

As we entered the lobby, the guard stood, puffed out his chest, hands on his hips, drawing attention to the gun belt resting low on his waist.

“I’ll have to ask you to sign in.”

“No problem, son.” Lucas signed two names with a flourish.

Fred and Betty Stone. Are we heading back to Bedrock after this?

Lucas rubbed his index finger over an eyebrow, drawing the guard’s eye to a large gaudy gold ring on his right hand and away from his smirk.

“I’ll need to see identification.”

Shit. My brain must be fried. No i.d.

Lucas reached into his back pocket and flipped open an alligator skin wallet. As the guard leaned over to look at it, Lucas diverted his attention by talking and gesturing with his hands.

“Barb’s an old friend. So glad we could touch base with her.” Lucas snapped the wallet closed as the steel-reinforced door to our left swung wide open.

The guard was trying to figure out if he should ask to see it again or let it go. Nice moves.

A woman, Barb presumably, strode toward us in a pristine lab coat and nylons. Her high heels tapped out an even rhythm on the black granite floor, except for a tiny falter when she saw me.

She was gorgeous, with skin the color of a frothy latte, large chocolate brown eyes, and a pixie cut of thick black hair. High cheekbones brushed with blusher and full lips painted a soft amber subtly emphasized her beauty. She’d taken the time to do her makeup before we got here. When she smiled, her focus on Lucas was warm and very friendly.

“So good to see you.” She kissed him on the cheek.

Although her smile didn’t slip, as she turned to me, she assessed me with sharp interest and not a shred of welcome.

As Lucas draped his arm over my shoulder, I cursed him silently. He’d slept with me yesterday. How long had it been since he’d slept with her?

I saw the ‘oh shit’ realization hit him.

Time for damage control. Barb needed to be put at ease. I needed her expertise. I shimmied out of Lucas’s light grip and walked cautiously toward her, hands out.

“Barb, sugar, I’m so pleased you could fit us into your busy schedule.”

“Anything for you and Fred.” She held my hand in a fierce grip, her knuckles white.

I hugged her stiff form and whispered in her ear, “Get us somewhere private.”

“I can’t take you on a tour. Security, you know. But there is a visitor’s lounge.” She hustled us to the steel door. Then she swiped an employee badge through a reader, punched in a series of numbers, and practically shoved me through.

As the door shut behind us, I noted the security cameras along the ceiling. The hallway was wide with dark grey industrial carpeting, startlingly white walls, and very bright halogen lighting. Interspersed at regular intervals were light grey doors, all with keypads and magnetic card readers to grant access, and cameras aimed at each entrance.

“Do y’all have a little girl’s room?” I patted the tips of my wig, staying in character in case there were cameras I couldn’t see. “I need to use the facilities.”

“Sure.” Barb turned a corner, tugging me with her and Lucas trailing behind us. At the end of the hallway was an open lounge with a water fountain, a row of chairs, and a door that didn’t need clearance to access.

As we approached the doorway, Lucas looked as if he was going to follow us right into the visitor’s bathroom. I turned away from the camera and glared at him.

“I’ll wait right here.” He dropped into the chair, picked up a magazine from the little end table, and pretended to read while shielding his face.