Niklosi's Nightmare (First Wave Book 10) (4 page)

Decano shook his head and followed.
He wasn’t as confident as the rash, young Traze, but he went ahead with it for
the time being, thinking there was no harm in getting specifics for when they
contacted Grai.

“Someone want to tell me why Nik’s
in the back of a police car and why I can’t get him on the shengari’,” Disc,
their pilot called out when they were inside the transport.

“The cop tasered Nik, and it
probably knocked out his beast. We think it’s his mate and that’s why he didn’t
just escape her, so we’re just giving him a little time to get to know her
while we scope out the situation,” Traze said confidently.

Decano shook his head while he
moved into the cockpit and stood next to Disc. He looked down at the car as
they followed above it and again felt like they needed to call someone.

“Or the Taser to the forehead and
mace in his eyes could have temporarily disoriented him, and he’s been waiting
for us to get him,” Decano countered, a bad feeling growing inside of him.

“He would have called out to us
knowing we were close by and we didn’t hear from him,” Traze argued, still
believing everything was all right.

“He wouldn’t have given us away to
the cop no matter what!” Decano countered.

“I’m just the pilot,” Disc said,
“but I think you need to call Grai or Ivint.”

“And tell them what?” Traze
erupted. “We don’t know anything yet until we see where they’re taking Nik!”

Decano and Disc exchanged wary
glances, and Disc finally shrugged.

“You two fight this out, but if you
fuck this up, I’m calling Grai, Ivint, and the whole damn Alliance to come
laugh at your asses,” Disc warned.

“Gee, thanks,” Decano huffed out.

“This is going to be easy, just
wait and see. Seriously, have you looked at what they’re calling a cop car?
Whatever jail they’re taking him to, we’ll be able to port him right out of
when he’s ready,” Traze said with a laugh.

“He looked ready when she put him
in the car! Why the hell don’t we just yank him out of there now?” Decano
countered, getting frustrated with Traze.

“Great! So we can cause another
damn UFO abduction story!” Traze huffed out in frustration.

“How is an alien being convicted of
murder going to work for us?” Decano snapped back.

“Why?” Traze moaned. “Why are you
being so dramatic?”

Decano looked at Traze’s dramatics
with a raised eyebrow, wondering if he even had a clue he was the one with the
drama problem.

Traze rolled his eyes.

“Look, you know it won’t get that
far. We’ll see where he’s going and plan his retrieval from there. In and out
quick,” Traze suggested, hoping they’d go along with it.

Traze had a major reason for
wanting to fix it on their own: Lieutenant David Jacobs. Tracking the Relian
unit was his first official mission without David, and he wanted to prove that
he no longer needed to be mentored by the ex-Navy SEAL and could command
missions on his own.

Quick thinking decision making was
one thing he really sucked at, and Traze was hoping to knock the mission out of
the park and earn his own team. Niklosi’s arrest was thrown into his lap by
fate and was the perfect opportunity he needed to prove himself to his brother
and David, and he wasn’t going to pass it up.

Besides
, Traze
thought,
what could go wrong when it’s just a small female and an old man if
we have to get Nik by force?

“We’re heading into the town of
Baker’s Creek,” Disc called out.

Traze whipped out his comm and
entered in the name. He laughed as he scrolled through the information. When he
looked up, he saw Decano had the same idea and was reading on his comm.

“OK, 354 residents spread out over
62 square miles of heavily wooded mountains. One cop, paid for by the
residents, whatever that means. I think we got this,” Traze said with a huge
grin.

Decano wasn’t the least bit
convinced it was going to be as easy as Traze thought it would be. Far too many
things could go wrong, and he would have felt better if they called Grai—if
only to let him know something had gone wrong. Unfortunately, the chain of
command left Traze in charge the moment Nik was put in the car, and it wasn’t
his call to bring in the big guns.

Decano looked at Disc, who was
shaking his head, and he sighed heavily, wishing there was another option.

“Where’s the police station?”
Decano asked Disc as he looked at the one-block town laid out beneath the hovering
craft. There wasn’t even a stop light to be found.

Disc pointed to the right of his
seat where a live video feed from beneath them that was displayed on a screen.

“It’s the renovated gas station,”
Disc said.

“A gas station is the police
station?” Traze asked with a laugh.

“I have a layout. It looks like the
holding cells are in the building, and the office is where the garage used to
be,” Decano said as he looked at his comm. He didn’t like the situation at all.

“Move directly over the building,”
Traze told Disc. “I want to check something out.”

Disc moved the craft and tweaked
the live image on the screen until they could clearly see around the whole
building.

“Woo hoo!” Traze said as he pointed
at the screen. “Right here! They have the breaker box outside! I’ll flip the
breaker while Decano gets Nik.”

“Hey! This is your fuck up, not
mine. You go in, and when you get caught, I’ll call Grai,” Decano argued,
crossing his arms over his chest.

There was no way in hell that
Decano was going to encourage Traze’s ridiculous idea of breaking Nik out of
the jail. If they were going to help Nik, they should have done it before they
got into the town. Now they needed to call Grai and let the big guys handle it.

“Come on, you big baby! Look,”
Traze said as he pointed at the vid, “there’s Nik. Exactly where the cells are.
There’s a door that leads to the cell area from the outside. Hit it with a
pulse blast, and it’ll silently take out the lock. I’ll hit the power, you go
in and grab Nik, and we’re out of there.”

“Why the hell can’t you just port
him from the cell?” Decano asked, completely unconvinced Traze’s plan would
work.

“You know he either has to have a
port stone on him or he has to be in the open. He has no port stone because you
never should have let it get this far, and he’s in an iron cage. I could adapt
the port to account for the iron, but there’s no telling what I could port back
with him if I have to change the port parameters on the fly,” Disc warned them.

“So, worst case scenario if we wait
until we modify the port is that we could bring back a toilet with Nik. Or we
can foolishly try to break him out and really turn this into a national news
fiasco?” Decano asked, trying to make the man-child see that this wasn’t going
to work.

“You’re being over-dramatic,” Traze
said with a grin. “We can’t wait, or his fingerprints are going to get a hit
with Freedom Security International, then we’re going to have a national news
fiasco,” Traze countered, knowing that a mercenary being charged with murder
would be big news.

“Exactly why we need to call your
brother!” Decano warned in exasperation. “I’ve known your brother longer than
you’ve been alive, and I’m telling you, he’s going to be pissed as hell if you
don’t call him.”

“I’m with Decano on this. And I’m
going to start the port recalibration now, just in case,” Disc said, hoping
Decano and common sense would win out.

“The longer we stand here arguing,
the more this is going to blow up in our faces! Fuck you guys; I’ll do it
myself,” Traze huffed in anger.

He walked back to the door, hit the
button on the wall, and dropped into the middle of the road. Disc and Decano
cursed when they saw him run behind the police station.

“Damn idiot is going to get us all
killed,” Decano grumbled. “Call Grai before this goes even worse for us all.”

Disc nodded his head and sent a
call through the shengari’ to Grai as he watched Decano drop from the craft and
run behind the building after Traze. He was really hoping that Decano could
hold off Traze long enough for him to get direction from Grai.

“What’s wrong?” Grai asked him just
as Disc watched the lights go out in the building.

Disc held his breath, hoping like
hell he wouldn’t have to explain it to Grai when he saw a light stone activate
inside the building. Several flashes went off and it went dark again. Disc was
waiting to see the three men come out of the building and groaned when he saw
one lone human run outside and turn the power back on.

“Grai, everything went wrong. We
have two, I repeat two, potentially three, team members in police custody. Town
called Baker’s Creek, Missouri. Just from observation, I would say the charges
will be murder and attempted escape.

“Tell me this is a fucking joke,”
Grai asked as he sat up in bed and looked at his vibrating comm.

Grai looked at the information
scrolling across the screen, and he jumped out of bed and began dressing as
quietly as he could so he wouldn’t wake Tristan and Grace.

“What’s wrong?” Tricia asked with a
yawn as she stretched.

“Traze, Decano, and Niklosi have
been arrested for murder. We just got an NCIC hit on Nik’s prints. Fiorn’s
group is scrambling to bury it, but we need to get them out of jail,” Grai
muttered, caught between worry for his team and brother, and his impulse to
strangle Traze the moment he saw him.

Tricia sat up and slid out of bed.
She went to her closet and began pulling on a pair of dress slacks.

“What are you doing? Go back to
bed, honey,” Grai said, hoping she’d get some rest.

“They need a lawyer until you can
figure out how to fix this. We can’t let them go unrepresented. Criminal law
may not be my specialty, but I can practice in that state, and I can help,”
Tricia said, as she finished putting on a silk blouse and jacket.

Grai sighed, knowing she was right.
He hated he needed her brilliant lawyer mind in a situation like this at all,
but he was grateful she was so willing to help.

“You’re amazing. I’ll have Blade go
with you,” Grai said as he kissed her temple and sat to pull on his boots.

Tricia pulled on a pair of pumps
and sent up a prayer that Blade and his unique skills wouldn’t be needed.

Chapter
Three

Niklosi was livid by the time they
reached the old gas station the cop had called her police station/jail. There
had been more than a dozen opportunities for Traze and Decano to intervene
along the road, and they’d done nothing to help him escape.

“OK, Nik, we’re here,” BJ said as
she pulled her car under the overhang where the gas pumps used to be.

She got out of the car and sighed
in gratitude when she realized Mojo had already arrived and she wouldn’t be
alone with the unnerving man in the back seat.

BJ opened the back door and jumped
back in surprise when Nik got out of the car and stretched his arms over his
head. She immediately put her hand on her gun and looked at him warily,
wondering if he was going to resist now that he’d broken free of the cuffs.

“Oh, stop acting like I’m going to
kill you. I could have strangled you from behind long before we got here if I
was going to. I’m a little big for zip ties,” Niklosi growled, unexplainably
hurt and angry about the fear he saw flash in her eyes.

BJ was startled and creeped out by
his admission. She’d no idea he’d gotten out of the ties while she’d been
driving and couldn’t believe the man she witnessed kill someone so easily
hadn’t bothered to just kill her and be done with it. With his size and
strength, he could have easily overpowered and killed Buford as well and gotten
away.

BJ cleared her throat and looked
away from him when she realized she was just staring at him. She gestured to
the door of the station set in a wall where the garage door used to be.

“Let’s go inside,” BJ said evenly,
praying he would, but keeping her hand on her gun just in case he didn’t.

Niklosi looked to the door and
snorted.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said.

He strode to the door and yanked it
open so hard the wall shook violently before he stepped inside, and the door
shut behind him. Nik looked around the office area, noting the tall, thin man
with thick, black-rimmed glasses who stood and put his chair in front of him.

BJ ran in behind Nik and watched as
Mojo stood, his mouth hanging open in surprise.

“Oh my, Lord Jesus!” Mojo whispered
as he craned his neck to look up at the larger man.

“Mojo, this is Nik. I’m going to
put him in lock up real quick,” BJ said before she turned to Nik, and gestured
to the door to the holding cells.

“Nik, I need you to head in that
door over there,” she ordered.

Niklosi turned and noted the open
door and the iron bars in the next room. He rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“This is fucking crazy,” Nik
whispered as he walked over to the door.

When he passed through the doorway,
he noted two cells with their own toilets and sinks, and he stepped into the
first cell and closed the door behind him until he heard it lock. Then he
turned dark eyes to the cop.

“Happy now? Don’t I get a phone
call?” Nik asked sarcastically.

BJ looked at him in surprise before
she shook herself out of it. Something wasn’t right. She wasn’t sure what it
was, but nothing in her experience added up to this stranger and his
complacency considering his charges.

BJ stared at him for a few moments
longer before she shook her head and walked out into the office area. She
turned her chair so that she could see into the cell area and keep an eye on
the Houdini wanna-be.

“What the hell, girl?” Mojo
demanded the moment she sat in the chair.

“Something weird is going on,
Mojo,” BJ whispered. “I want you to get his information and the evidence taken
care of yesterday.”

“Yeah something weird is going on!
You brought in a killer without handcuffs! What’s got into you girl?” Mojo
asked.

BJ leaned over the desk.

“I did put cuffs on him! He broke
out of them during the drive, and I didn’t know!” she whispered.

“He didn’t kill you? Buford said
you saw him kill someone,” Mojo said in awe.

“I did see him kill someone,” BJ
said, sneaking a glance at the huge man sitting on the bunk in the cell.

BJ shivered at the look in Nik’s
eyes and could have sworn he could hear them talking even though she knew he
was too far away.

“Then why didn’t he snap your neck
and just run?” Mojo asked, refusing to look at the giant in the holding cell.

“I don’t have a clue,” BJ whispered
as she dug through her desk for a fingerprint card and her ink pad.

She found what she was looking for
and held them up triumphantly.

“I’m going to get some answers now.
Power up all your toys and download everything while we wait for Buford to get
Irwin,” she said and stood, taking long strides to the holding cell.

“Be careful, girl. I got a bad
feeling,” Mojo whispered as he watched her go.

Mojo made the sign of the cross and
said a prayer before he clapped his hands together and opened up his laptop.
His long, fingers deftly skated across the keyboard as he did his part to help
BJ with her new case.

Nik watched the female stride into
the cell area with a small metal tin, a folder, and note pad. He’d heard
everything she and Mojo had been saying in the outer office and tried to
suppress his sudden urge to goad her. He ran a hand over his head instead and
listened to his newly-awakened beast tell him that he was running a check of
his body and brain systems.

I just gotta hang in here until
Targe gets back on the shengari’ so I can talk to Grai. Then wait until they
get me the hell out of here
, Nik reminded himself as he watched the cop
pull a chair up to the cell and sit down in it.

He tried not to smirk when he saw
that she’d placed the chair out of his arm’s length.

“Nik, I need to get your
fingerprints and ask you a few questions. Are you feeling well enough for that?
Do you need to see a doctor from the Taser or the mace?” BJ asked him gently,
hoping that he would continue to be a gracious prisoner.

Nik rubbed the rapidly healing
spots on his forehead and shook his head.

“No, I’m fine,” he muttered.

Nik was quickly realizing just how
out of control the situation had become and was deeply regretting his decision
not to knock her out and leave when he’d had a better chance of escaping.

“Nik, I really appreciate what a
gentleman you’ve been. I’ve been a cop a long time, and I’ve never encountered
the kindness and compliance you’ve showed,” BJ said, then wondered if she’d
said it as a tactic to get him to talk or because it was true.

Nik sighed and rolled his eyes even
though he was glad she wasn’t afraid of him. Without understanding why, he put
his right hand outside of the bars. When she gave him a bright smile, he found
himself grinning back before he carefully controlled his expression into one of
indifference.

“Thanks, Nik,” BJ said, wishing
he’d smile again.

He looks a lot less intimidating
when he smiles
, she thought,
and completely drool worthy.

BJ quickly grabbed the fingerprint
card and opened the ink pad. She smiled up at him as she took his finger and gently
pressed it into the ink.

“So, what’s your name?” she asked
conversationally, keeping his mind off the fingerprinting.

“I already told you; it’s Niklosi,”
he said, keeping his eyes on what she was doing.

“Ah,” BJ said with a smile at him.
“You said it was Nik. But I like Niklosi better, it’s unusual. Is it Russian?
Armenian?”

She finished up with the
fingerprints and handed him a few wet wipes to get the ink off.

Nik gently took the small wipes
from her hand and tried to ignore the curious energy he could feel emanating
from her, but he found himself looking up into her hazel eyes anyway.

She was a beautiful woman. It was
the first thing he’d noticed about her after he saw the Taser in her hand. She
was small, but not the too-skinny type that most humans found attractive. She
looked more like a real woman to him with rounded hips and a little extra
padding on her thighs and stomach.

Under any other circumstance he
would have actively tried to bed her, but these were not those times, and he
needed to keep his attraction tamped down and his senses open for his
inevitable escape.

His gaze held hers, and with a
smile of his own he shook his head.

“I think I’ll take that advice to
keep silent,” he said then leaned his back against the bars that divided his
cell from the other one.

BJ sighed dramatically and shrugged
her shoulders.

“I can’t imagine killing someone is
easy, and if you need to talk, just let me know. Until then, Mojo is working on
a few things, and it’s tying up the phone lines. The second he is done, I’m
going to bring the phone in for you,” BJ said then waited to see if Nik had
anything to say.

“You don’t have a cell phone?” Nik
asked in surprise.

Not that he cared, Nik knew Targe
would be ready to contact Grai any minute now.

BJ blushed a little and shrugged.

“Sorry, we don’t have any towers
around here, and believe it or not, we all like it that way. Regular old land
line phones work just fine for us,” BJ said, not apologizing for the simple way
they lived.

“But your boy Mojo out there has a
top of the line laptop, there was an ultra-high definition camera in your car,
and there’s some pretty sophisticated surveillance around here for such a small
place without cell phones,” Nik noted with curiosity. It didn’t make sense.

BJ nodded her head in respect for
his situational awareness, but it only fueled her curiosity to learn more about
who he really was. She’d bet money that he was a mercenary or ex-military.

BJ headed back out into the office
and handed the fingerprint card to Mojo, who took it and immediately ran it
through the scanner on the desk.

“Give me 10,” Mojo said without
even looking up from the screen of his laptop.

“No worries, I’m going to start
logging the evidence,” BJ said and moved over to the box Buford had dropped off
while she was fingerprinting Nik.

She’d just gotten through the
murder weapon and the knives when she heard something. BJ leaned over to look
in the cells and saw Nik was still sitting on the bunk before she turned to
Mojo.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

“Hear what?” Mojo asked, still
staring at his screen.

BJ looked around, convinced she’d
heard something although she couldn’t figure out what it was. After a few
seconds, she shrugged and pulled out the bag with the strange stone inside.

She had just felt the weight of the
stone in her hand when the lights went out. The building went dark, and BJ
stood, drawing her weapon as she unconsciously clenched the stone in her hand.

“What the hell?” Mojo whispered as
he closed the top of his laptop, extinguishing the only light in the building.

BJ heard the whisper of a sound
coming from the holding cells, and she worked her way across the room in the
dark. She heard what sounded like someone trying to open a cell door, and she
holstered her gun and drew the spare Taser she’d grabbed when she’d come in the
building with Nik.

Damn, I wish I could see
, she
thought.

She gasped when the stone in her
hand burst into a brilliant white light and illuminated the room.

BJ immediately saw a man trying to
open Nik’s cell, and she depressed the Taser and watched as the young man hit
the floor screaming.

“Mojo, go outside and check the
power box!” BJ yelled out.

She clutched the still-illuminated
stone in one hand while dropping the Taser and pulling her gun on the newcomer
with her other. She heard the front door slam as Mojo ran out.

BJ sighed in relief when the lights
came back on, and she watched in surprise as Nik stared at the young man on the
floor and slowly shook his head.

Suddenly the illuminated stone in
her hand stopped shining and went back to being a dull, milky white stone in
her hand. BJ looked at it curiously for a moment before she slipped it and the
evidence bag into her pocket.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Nik said
to the man before he turned to look at BJ. “You may want to make sure you put
him in that cage, or you’ll be charging me with another murder.”

BJ just nodded her head and turned
her attention to the dark-haired young man who was now glaring at her.

“Yo, Hill-Da-Bitch! That shit wasn’t
fucking cool!” Traze huffed out as he reached behind him to yank the Taser
barbs out of his shoulder.

BJ wasn’t sure who was more
surprised when Nik grabbed the guy from behind and slammed his back into the
bars. Nik put his arm around the Traze’s neck.

“Show some fucking respect, or I
will pick you apart and chuck your pieces in that cell for your brother to
find,” Nik growled in the man-child’s ear.