Hollywood Tiger: BBW Tiger Shifter Paranormal Romance (Hollywood Shifters Book 3) (10 page)

Hank caught sight of her, and snarled, “Where did you come from, you fucking mutt?” He kicked viciously at her.

She scrambled away, streaked around the side of the trailer, and dove under. She shifted back, and still trembling all over, pulled out her dress and shoes.

It took her almost a minute to get back into them. When she crawled out, she looked for Dennis. Still gone. She tried to call him, her fingers shaking so badly she could barely handle her phone. No answer. Haskell—

Did he matter anymore? All her instincts urged her to follow Hank, who was still visible as he dodged past panicking people. Styrofoam cups flew everywhere and people stampeded. A couple of horses galloped by, being chased by wranglers.

Mindy ran past them all, slowing only when she spotted Hank moving between cars on the street directly below where her car was parked.

He clicked, and the lights flickered on a black Mercedes with tinted windows. She whirled and began running for her car.

“Mindy?”

“Dennis!” She slowed to a fast walk. “Where were you?” And, not waiting for an answer, “I saw you gone, so I went to stick to Haskell, but I heard Hank—” She gave him a fast, succinct report of what she’d heard. “So I thought I’d better follow him.”

They reached her car right then, and she unlocked it.

“Mine is faster,” Dennis said.

“Actually, it’s not, because mine has been modified,” she said quickly. “And yours is farther away. But maybe two of us should follow him?”

Dennis looked both ways so uncertainly that she spoke the words before her mind could stop her: “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

Then she caught herself and stared, aghast.

But his gaze snapped to hers. “I do,” he said with that resonating timbre, and she know that he meant it. “I trust you,” he said deliberately.

Every cell in her body flashed with a kind of luminous heat that nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with a heady sense of
rightness.

Dennis slid into the shotgun seat, and she fired up the engine. As she gripped the wheel, she thought,
This is love.

“Hang on,” she said, hearing the unsteadiness in her voice. “It’s going to be a wild ride.”

Chapter Ten

Mindy’s voice was low and husky, “It’s going to be a wild ride.”

Dennis had one second to wonder what he’d just done, but he shook it away the way his tiger shook water off his back. Whatever happened, he wanted it to happen with her—by her side.

It just felt so right.

She pulled into a side street with quick, efficient moves. No careering, tire-screeching here, which only sheds velocity in the sloppiest way. She drove down a side street, pulling almost to a stop at the stop sign while she looked all ways, and “Ah.”

Again, no zero-to-sixty in five, though he could feel the Honda’s engine shifting with the supreme confidence of a Porsche, and it hummed with fuel-injected efficiency and power. “What did you do to this thing?”

“Hang on,” she murmured, her eyes constantly moving, though the car stayed on a smooth trajectory. Zip, zip, she jinked around a lumbering truck and a slow van full of tourists. About five cars ahead, the black Mercedes was accelerating toward the signal to turn south down the steep hill onto Highland. Smoothly Mindy sped up, catching the edge of the yellow, and riding through inches behind the car in front.

With a flick of the wheel she moved around the slower car and then back again, settling in behind a fast-moving local delivery van. The Mercedes was three cars ahead. Mindy cruised efficiently, hands at ten and two on the wheel, but not white-knuckled, and she said, “One of my friends at my favorite dance studio has a brother who modifies cars. He wanted to know how badass he could make a Honda Civic, and I told him to go for it—I lost two targets in a job the year before, one time being spotted and the other time I wasn’t fast enough. Which added a ton of time on the investigation.”

“I could see why a Civic would not be your first choice for this job.”

“There he goes, diving west on Franklin again,” she said suddenly.

Dennis had missed it—he was watching her profile.

The delivery van chose that moment to begin slowing as its driver no doubt checked his GPS, and with a quick flick Mindy whipped around him, straightened, then cut the corner of Franklin cleanly—and dropped back, as the Mercedes was now the car in front of them.

“I wasn’t driving this, but something else,” she said. “I traded it in for this one.”

“This was an improvement?” he asked, wondering how badly strapped she was.

“Yes.” She sent him a quick glance, her lips parted, her manner alert as a pointer on the hunt. “Look around us. We’re on a narrow road right now, but as soon as we reach a major boulevard, or the freeway, I bet you’ll see ten cars exactly like this.”

“Shit,” he exclaimed. “You’re right.”

“Stay well back, change lanes once in a while, and they
never
notice another old white Honda.”

“Damn. You’re totally right—”

“Hold on, I think he’s heading for Hollywood Blvd.”

When the Mercedes turned right, Mindy held back, then sedately made the turn. The Mercedes was several blocks ahead—and the light ahead turned red.

“Shit,” Dennis said. Then eyed the dashboard. “What did you add here?”

It looked at first glance like a typical Honda dash, except for a couple extra discreet buttons. “Fancy sound system?”

“No. Camera front, sides, back views. Sometimes I have to drive right next to the target, and the worst thing you can do is be seen peering into their car. Aside from the danger to other drivers.”

He let out a laugh that was more a release of tension then humor, and when the light changed, she was quick off the mark, but again, no tires screeching—no wasted motion. Yet she began, in tight, efficient steps, to shift in and out of traffic, climbing past the slower cars.

“There he is,” he said. “About four blocks up.”

“I see him. Unless it’s another model with somebody else in it. We’ll stick with it and see.”

All the way down Hollywood Blvd they drove. By the time it ended, she was again two cars behind the Mercedes, and he was shaking his head in amazement at her skill.

“I think I know where he’s going,” she said. “If I’m right, he’ll cut to the south here, then over, and then head for Laurel.”

And again she was right. When the Mercedes hit Laurel, it was speeding recklessly—but no worse than the regular traffic. Dennis had noticed before that the regulars did not drive safely or generously on Laurel Canyon, a narrow switchback road lined with expensive houses. But no one looked at the view—if you weren’t racing, too, they tailgated so close you could look up the angry executive’s nostrils in your rear view mirror. Which always made Dennis slow down at least ten mph.

Mindy kept the flow, cornering with such efficiency that the blocky little car handled like a low-slung racecar.

“Where did you learn to drive?”

“You mean like this?” she asked. “I took lessons from a guy who teaches police officers how to safely do high speed chases.”

“Did you go to a law enforcement training academy to train?”

“No, he’s the friend of the only step-brother I like. He’s in the air force, so I rarely get to see him. My step-brother, I mean. One Christmas, after I started doing this, I told him how I’d screwed up a couple times and lost targets. Told him my plan about the Honda, and he said I should learn to drive fast if I was going to put a fast engine in this thing. I hadn’t even thought about that! So I took his advice, and contacted the guy he recommended. It was really fun,” she added, beautifully feathering a corner.

“So you always wanted to hunt down cheating husbands?”

“Wait—” She eased back. “He’s not going to the studio—he’s turning west onto Mulholland.”

“Well that would explain ‘the house,’” Dennis said.

Mindy eased back more, and then gave a tiny nod when the Mercedes turned a sharp left. The car after kept going straight, and so when the one in front of Mindy and Dennis didn’t turn on a blinker, she threw on her blinker and eased right. The big Jaguar riding their bumper impatiently roared by, with three cars after it, then a car turned left—and Mindy efficiently cut right in behind it.

“Sorry,” she said with a quick contrite look out of those big brown eyes. “I interrupted you.”

“You go right ahead and do what you’re doing. He would have lost me somewhere down in that snarl around Hollywood Blvd,” he added. “Give me a compass and a map and I can orient, but I am shit in the city. And even if I wasn’t, I can’t drive like you.”

“I think either you’re born with a sense of direction or not,” she said. “I seem to have got it, that is, I always know where north and south are.”

“Like dogs,” Dennis said, and when her hands clenched on the wheel, he felt a shock of regret. “Mork, that didn’t come out the way I meant it to. I think dogs are cool, and beautiful, and there is no creature more loyal. Did you know that the reason dogs turn around and around before they take a dump is because they want to align themselves along the magnetic pole? At least, so a guy I met in Malaysia insisted. But I couldn’t help noticing that his lab, about the nicest animal I ever met, paid no attention whatsoever to the magnetic poles.”

Her hands had incrementally relaxed as they sped along the narrow road, with the hazy San Fernando Valley open all down the right side.

And since she had nothing to say about dogs and their pooping habits—
idiot
, he thought privately,
why did you bring
that
up?
—he said, “Anyway, I wanted to know how you got into this gig.”

“Purely by accident.” Her voice was calm. “It was my dad’s second wife, who had been really nice to me when I was little. After she and my dad split, she inherited a property that turned out to be worth a lot, and she fell right into the clutches of a Haskell. My step-sister was complaining about this guy. Everyone thought he was sleazy—except her mom. Blinded by his bullshit.”

“So you did what?”

“Well, he’d started a dot com with my step-mom’s money. And, um, when I was a teenager, I learned how to dress in bland colors, and move around the perimeter of rooms, and basically hide in plain sight. Self defense. I was good at it. So I thought, hey, why not give it a try in a grownup situation—and, well, it took me two days. He’d got an apartment and everything for his new girlfriend. Paid for by the company—with my step-mom’s money.”

A pause, a flick of the wheel. “I discovered something I was finally good at, and it felt really good to catch out all his lies. I gave the evidence to my step-sister, because her mom hadn’t asked for this. Ratting out someone’s lover is seldom a win/win, which is why I always wait for them to come to me. Anyway, my step-sister confronted her mom, and I guess there was a big scene. But she couldn’t resist checking on him, and, well, busted him flat. She shitcanned his cheating ass. A month or two later, I got a call from a friend of a friend of a relative, and by then I’d been kind of studying up. He’s slowing. Is he looking for . . . no, there’s a delivery truck.”

They maneuvered around that, then she said suddenly, “It’s your turn. You said your first photo gig was the tiger cruise. Was that your first investigative report?”

“No—nothing to investigate. Tiger cruises are very what-you-see is what-you-get. My first investigation is pretty grim, so I’ll give you the Twitter version. I have an uncle who lives on a ranch. Taking in rescue animals. Noticed that they were getting a lot of dogs dumped in the desert, hurt and underfed. I was a kid—this was the year before I went into the service, a couple years after the tiger cruise report. My aunt and I did this one together, me with my camera, and she did the digging, teaching me how. She uncovered a so-called dog breeder. He’s still in jail,” Dennis finished with satisfaction.

Mindy drew in a deep breath that he could hear. “Good.” Then, in a tighter voice, “Okay, he’s slowing again.”

She slowed as well. The car between them flashed its lights impatiently at the Mercedes, which pulled over to let it pass. “Shit,” she said. “Dennis, duck down.” With her left hand, she pulled a black scarf from the side pocket of her door and threw it over her head then tucked the ends into the front of her dress as they approached the Mercedes.

Dennis grunted, squishing down as low as he could in the small space, and shoved the damn cane between the seats to the back. He noticed that Mindy didn’t glance over as she drove past the Mercedes at a steady pace. She hit the button for her side camera, and he heard a muted clicking come from inside the shotgun seat door.

Mindy kept driving. “I’ll try to find a place to turn around.” She slowed when she spotted a side road leading up to a private residence. “Gate, nowhere to safely hang a U,” she muttered, and passed on by.

They passed two more gated roads with no room for safe turning.

“Is he behind us?” Dennis asked.

“Yes, but hanging back.

“Shit. Think he made us?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “He’s not crowding our tail, at least. I’m going to edge up our speed. Stay low.”

“Right.” He grunted as he contorted his arm to reach back for his cell, then fumbled it between his knees. It was blinking with a missed call—from Mindy, just as she’d said.

He glanced sideways up at her. “I think it’s time to report in.” Which he should have thought of fifteen minutes ago—except he’d been so wrapped up in Mindy, her driving, and her actually talking about herself for once, that he’d forgotten he had a team. Well, part of a team. He hit Sloane’s number on the speed dial.

Mindy kept driving, then said, “If he keeps pace like this, then maybe the next step is to try some—oh, crap!”

Mindy slammed on the brakes, and Dennis sat up to discover two big, heavy vans blocking the road in front.