Hell on Wheels (14 page)

Not likely.

Not with four of the Black Knights in residence.

“What?” Ozzie asked, instantly alert. The kid may be a nuisance of legendary status, but he was as much a warrior as any of them. He instinctively knew when the customary shit was about to hit the proverbial fan.

“Guy in the corner,” Nate said. “He’s gonna try’n’ make a break for it. We’re not gonna let ’im.”

Ozzie turned just in time to see Mystery Man slowly lift himself from his shadowy seat. Upon standing, Mr. Mystery faced the trio in the booth. Ali, Becky, and Buzzard—that dick—were completely unaware of the little war of calculated movements and cold, intense eye contact that was waging around them, which was just as well. Then Nate noticed the unmistakable hollow outline pressing into the fabric of the front pocket of the guy’s jacket, and his head nearly exploded. That distinct circle was pointing straight at Ali.

The fucker dared?

Rage poured through him, hot as iron through a smelting furnace, but there was nothing for him to do about it. One wrong move and Ali could take a bullet. And that just wasn’t going to happen.

Not on his watch.

Not ever.

He stood stock-still and silently seethed. Had anyone been paying attention, he felt sure they’d see him pulling a teapot routine, steam pouring from his nostrils and ears.

The instant Mystery Man slid out the back door, both he and Ozzie bolted, grabbing for weapons as they went. The cold steel of his 13RTK Recon Tanto blade felt truly satisfying as he palmed it with one hand while reaching into his waistband for his .45 with the other. Just in case that wasn’t enough, he had two extra seven-round clips in his jacket pockets.

He just never felt quite dressed without enough firepower to start a small war, which probably said something rather unpleasant about his psyche, but who cared?

Not him.

He could hear the heavy footfalls of Dan and Boss behind them as both men sprang into action. Years of instinctual readiness made them react in less than a split second.

He smiled at the taletell
shnick
of Dan chambering a round into his baby—the Ruger P90 he’d inherited from his father.

The Knights liked to tease Dan about spending more time caressing that gun than he did his wife.

My
wife
isn’t likely to have to save my life anytime soon
, was Dan’s stock reply.

Well Nate, for once, was mighty glad to know the little .45 was in good working order. Because they were likely going to have to shoot someone.

Mystery Man had had the extremely bad sense to point a gun at Ali. Chances were fairly good—unless he had one hell of an explanation—the dude wasn’t going to walk away from the encounter without a couple of extra holes in him.

The four of them burst through the back door into the alley. The overflowing dumpster across the way had gone from ripe to emanating what Nate could only assume must be poisonous fumes, but Mystery Man was nowhere in sight.

Damnit!

With a hand signal, he motioned for Boss and Dan to head left while he and Ozzie searched right.

Geez. This whole thing with Ali was steeped in un-fucking-believable. To recap, she’d been mugged, bugged, and threatened with a bullet. And all of that in less than thirty-six hours.

Grigg, my brother, what the hell did you get us all involved in?

***

“The part of hovercraft doesn’t suit you, Frank,” Becky snarled as she tried to keep up with Ozzie and the program they were simultaneously trying to hack. “Breathing down my neck doesn’t make this process go any faster, it just makes me nervous.”

So
back
the
hell
off, you big, dumb, blind, exasperating oaf!
She couldn’t say that last part. Not if she valued her job—which she did. Unfortunately. There was something about eating three times a day that appealed to her. Then, of course, there was her lollipop habit. Not cheap.

“Didn’t you tell me just this morning that you were learning all of this in order to take on a more lucrative position within our organization? Well, stress comes with the job, Rebecca. Get used to it.”

Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. Grrreat. God, he made her want to get a name change.

And yes, she’d told him this morning after she’d confessed how she’d broken into Grigg’s personal email account that she was learning these rather, er, dubious computer skills from Ozzie in order to better serve the team. Frank’d been ape-shit pissed enough about that little revelation, she figured it was probably prudent he not know Ghost was teaching her to shoot, Billy was giving her private lessons on explosives
,
and Steady was schooling her on rudimentary field medicine.

Yepper. It was best to just keep all that to herself. Ease him into the idea of her joining the team, really joining the team, a little at a time.

But first, she had to handle him looming over her, casting that monster shadow with his unbelievably wide shoulders, heating her back with the insidious warmth of his hard thighs, smelling like hot leather and cold beer and…Frank—which she could totally do. Yessiree, she could handle it. No problem.

Her fingers typed in the wrong command, and she cursed.

“I’m in,” Ozzie announced, and she threw her hands in the air.

In consolation, she unwrapped a grape Dum Dum and angrily plugged it into her frowning mouth. She nearly cracked a tooth, but seconds later the explosion of sugary flavor helped her focus on the task at hand instead of Frank’s distracting nearness.

Oh, and the teensy tiny minor fact that he was a total dill-hole where she was concerned.

Exiting her machine, she rolled her chair toward Ozzie’s monitor and watched code zip across the screen. They were plugged into the City of Chicago’s surveillance system. Not a totally difficult hack job, but the resident computer virtuoso had beaten her again.

Whatever.

She’d continue to practice. At everything.

Because maybe then Frank would take her seriously, instead of viewing her as the necessary nuisance that kept all their covers intact. Maybe then he’d see her as a grown woman instead of the grease-covered, lollipop-sucking little sister of one of his men. Maybe then—

“Now we just need to upload the partial picture we got of Mystery Man from Delilah’s security camera into my program and compare it to possible matches in the city’s system. If we can get a better picture of the guy’s face, we can run it through the facial recognition software and determine just who in the world we’re dealing with,” Ozzie explained while his fingers continued to blur above the keyboard.

“Did you get a chance to see this guy?” Dan asked Ali. “Is he the one following you?”

Ali leaned in closer to the upper right hand corner of Ozzie’s monitor where the grainy photo of Mystery Man flickered rapidly as it was compared to the city’s surveillance footage.

“Looks like him,” she murmured, concentrating on the picture. “The hair’s right. The build’s right. He’s certainly not my mugger. That guy was huge. More the size of Frank, but…” she frowned at the photo, “I can’t positively tell if that’s my elusive shadow or not,” she finished with frustration.

Yes well, they were all frustrated. But the fact that the guy had simply disappeared after supposedly pointing a gun at Ali’s head wasn’t what was putting a hard kink in Becky’s mood.

Nope. Her kink had everything to do with a certain man whose
nom
de
guerre
was Boss.

Why did he have to be such a hardass? Why couldn’t he just admit—

Suddenly the flickering stopped, and two photos appeared side-by-side on Ozzie’s computer screen.

“Damn, the boy’s good,” Dan whistled when the two snapshots pulled from the city’s site revealed less than the one taken from Delilah’s. They were clearly of the same man, but in both photos the guy’s face was averted. “Seems to know just where the cameras are and is careful to avoid them.”

“Told ya,” Ghost muttered. “The guy had spook written all over ’im.”

“CIA?” Frank asked, thankfully turning away and taking his heat, smell, and omnipresence with him. She could finally draw in a full breath.

“If I had t’ hazard a guess,” Ghost replied.

She noticed how Ali’s eyes widened at that particularly disturbing news and wondered if the woman consciously realized she’d just taken a step closer to Ghost, or if Ghost realized he’d unhesitatingly placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

Those
two
are
fighting
a
losing
battle
, she thought.
They
should
just
do
it
already
and
get
it
over
with.

Yeah, right. Who was she trying to kid? Like she had any expertise when it came to the vagaries of romance, considering the only things keeping her warm at night were flannel sheets and Mr. Blue.

She was
such
a loser. Here she was, twenty-five years old, not too sore on the ol’ eyes—at least that’s what most of her friends of the male persuasion assured her—and all her action came from a seven-inch piece of sculpted bright blue rubber that required D batteries.

“Fuck!” Frank raked a hand through his hair and winced when he realized he’d let his potty mouth run away with him again in front of the ladies. She wondered if he was careful to act like a gentleman when he headed up north.

Oh yes, Becky knew all about his visits to Lincoln Park. She just didn’t know who he was visiting. And short of following him—she still had
some
pride left where he was concerned, thank God—she’d exhausted all other avenues of discovering who his secret trysting partner, or partners, ugh, were.

“First, it’s the FBI; now maybe we can add the lovely CIA to this unholy alphabet soup mix,” Frank growled. Shaking his head, he glanced at his timepiece. “It’s oh-one-hundred. Let’s hit our racks for the night. Maybe tomorrow will shed some light on this…this,” he shook his head again, “whatever the hell this is.”

Yeah, and maybe tomorrow Becky would finally get up the nerve to tell him how she really felt.

And also maybe tomorrow pigs would fly.

***

Ali couldn’t sleep.

It had nothing to do with her eight-hour nap or her strange surroundings, because even though the guest loft at Black Knights Inc. was more the size of a hotel room, just big enough for a little kitchenette and a white-tiled bathroom with a shower stall—at least Grigg had been telling her the truth about
something—
it was still beautifully appointed and completely welcoming.

The warm brick walls added texture and ambiance to the silver ductwork and exposed pipes overhead. Whoever did the murals out in the shop had obviously put their hand to different work, evidenced by the abstract diptych painting above the bed. The technique was totally different, but the barrage of color was unmistakably signature. It tied in beautifully with the turquoise-and-green coverlet on the bed and the area rug partially covering the lacquered, original-wood flooring.

So the room and the to-die-for feather mattress weren’t the problem. Neither was her insomnia due to Peanut curling his substantial self against her side with his motor running full tilt.

Well…maybe that had a little bit to do with it. It was sort of like lying next to a jet engine.

But no, her real problem? She was scared.

She thought she was scared when she hopped in her car back in North Carolina with the intent to make it to Chicago without stopping to sleep. Now, she understood she’d only been spooked. Because at the time she’d expected to show up here, present her problem, pass it off to Nate, let him handle it, and head back home after maybe a minor excursion to the shops on the Magnificent Mile.

Oh ho! Boy, had she been naïve. Not only did that
not
happen, but she also learned she was bugged, her brother had gone off the reservation, his FBI contact was dead, and she was likely being followed and threatened at gunpoint by the CIA.

Now she was well and truly scared.

Whose life was she living?

Not hers, that’s for sure. Things like this didn’t happen to kindergarten teachers. Unless of course those kindergarten teachers had older brothers specializing in covert operations for the government. Which, unfortunately for her, she did.

Dang
it, Grigg! What in the world were you thinking getting me involved in this?