All Jacked Up (14 page)

Aubrey opened her mouth, but he was already gone, oozing his way into the wide-open stretch of parking lot. He moved quietly, like always. What surprised her was how such a big guy could melt from one shadow to the next. Becoming one with the darkness she would have called it, if there had been anything even remotely Zen-like about Jack Mitchell.

She strained her eyes and ears, but she was never quite sure she’d spotted him—until she realized the vehicles were shrinking several inches in height, one after the other, accompanied by a gentle whooshing sound that could have been the wind. Or air being let out of tires. She hoped he was using the little spigot—

“What?” he said in a gruff whisper, materializing beside her.

It was a real testament to her familiarity with Jack that she didn’t make a sound. Unless you counted the fact that her pounding heart was probably audible a mile away.

“I only let the air out of the tires. It’s not much, but it’ll slow them down some.”

Aubrey looked back at the police station.

“You made your choice. Stick with it and you might just get through this.”

“Is that optimism I’m hearing?”

“Fatalism,” Jack said, setting off into the darkness with the supreme indifference of a man who knew he’d be followed. “People like you slip through trouble like chokecherries through a crow’s colon. It’s the poor slobs who cross your path who have to watch out.”

“You didn’t just cross my path, Jack. You stuck a gun in my face and yanked me onto your path, and now you won’t let me off it.”

“Just rub it in, why don’t you.”

He and Carlo stood in the shadows at the side of a small-town police station just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. They’d driven all night to get there, and the horizon to the east was a slightly lighter shade of black than the rest of the sky. Sunrise wasn’t far off and it looked to be a showy one. Too bad they didn’t have time to enjoy it, Danny thought. It might be their last.

“Hell, I don’t even know what town this is,” Carlo said around a yawn.

Neither did Danny, but they’d followed the directions they’d been given, and here they were. “Don’t matter,” he said. “The problem is gonna be getting her out of there.”

“You sure she’s inside?”

“You want to call and ask him if he’s sure?”

“Maybe he sent us here so we’d get arrested.”

“If he wanted to get rid of us, he wouldn’t use the cops.”

Carlo snorted. “He uses cops all the time. But he don’t want us arrested. We know too much about his operation.”

Danny swung around to peer through the predawn gloom at his nephew.

“What?”

“You actually said something smart.”

“It was an accident,” Carlo said.

“Everything with you is an accident. And I know too much about his operation. You’re mostly mouth.”

Danny studied the parking lot. A couple cop cars and a smashed F-250. Five people inside the station house tops, he estimated, if the guy with Aubrey Sullivan was in there. And it wasn’t a very big place, judging by the outside dimensions of the building. The windows were too high to peep through, but Danny figured there was one main room that served as a lobby and work area, maybe a small interrogation room. But they had no reason to interrogate the librarian, so she wouldn’t be in there.

He and Carlo could storm the place. They’d get the cop at the front desk for sure, at least one, maybe two others. It’d be ballsy. Might even work. But they risked a chance of hitting Sullivan. And it was bound to make the national news. Either of those two things happened, he and Carlo were going to get fed their co-jones. Danny snugged a hand into his crotch, deciding he liked his balls right where they were.

“There has to be another way into this place.” Danny turned away from the front door and began to work his way around the building. “A back door maybe, or . . .” Danny hunkered down by a small square opening low to the ground at the back corner of the building. “. . . A basement window.”

Carlo toed the mangled windows lying nearby. The glass was intact but the aluminum frame looked like it had been through a tornado. “Looks like somebody got here before us.”

Since their voices hadn’t set off any alarm bells, Danny figured the coast was clear, but he looked inside to make sure. Nothing but an empty hallway with a stairway at one end and a brown door at the other, and no cops in between. He swung his feet over the sill and dropped inside, motioning Carlo in behind him.

No question where the stairway led so he tiptoed to the door and eased it open a crack. Beyond it were three jail cells. The one on the right held a sleeping man, and the center cell was empty. So far so good, he thought, opening the door far enough so he could see the final cell—and discovered it wasn’t empty.

Carlo stepped up beside his uncle. Before he could give them away, Danny slapped a hand over his nephew’s mouth and shoved him against the wall. He motioned for Carlo to stay put, then went back to peek around the edge of the door. It wasn’t the guy shadowing the librarian, but something about the mope had bells ringing from here to Washington, D.C.

“Crap,” he said in a whisper barely loud enough for Carlo to hear.

“Wha—Oof.”

Carlo got a shot to the head this time. “Use that,” Danny muttered, pulling the door shut. “Guy’s a two-bit hustler from D.C.,” he explained in a voice barely louder than the breeze rustling the leaves outside. “Name’s Horace George. Has a PI license, but the law ain’t exactly his Bible. Money is, and Sullivan’s worth a lot. You remember that pickup at the far end of the lot? The one that was all dented to hell?”

“You think that’s his?” Carlo whispered. “You think he was chasing her and she did that to his truck?”

“That’d be my guess,” Danny said absently, running scenarios in his head and coming up with only one possible move. “We gotta take him out.”

“I think we should let her have him.” Carlo rubbed his ass. “Maybe she’ll get all that destruction out of her system.”

“And maybe he’ll destruct her and then where would we be?”

Carlo thought about that a minute. A full minute. “We gotta take him out.”

“We gotta break him out first.” Danny opened the door and they walked in. Carlo pulled a set of lockpicking tools out of his coat pocket while Danny went to check on the sleeping prisoner.

“He’s drunk. Passed out,” Horace said. “Who are you?”

“Aw, Horace, you don’t remember me?” Danny said. “I’m crushed.”

Carlo tripped the lock, nodded at his uncle, then went to keep lookout on the outer door.

Danny walked into the cell and clapped Horace on the shoulder. His grip was anything but friendly. “She still alive?”

“She who?”

“The woman who did that to your truck.”

Horace studied Danny’s face, then Carlo’s, apparently deciding there was no point in playing dumb. “She’s alive.”

“She upstairs?”

“Yeah.” But the second answer didn’t come as quick. Horace tried to cover it by shrugging Danny’s hand off. He should’ve worried more about meeting Danny’s eyes. “They had her down here in protective custody, but they came and got her a little while ago.”

“Right, and you’re on your way to Vegas to enter the World Poker Tour.”

“Huh?”

“She got out, didn’t she?”

“How could she get out?”

“How could she trash a pickup truck with a Focus?”

Horace didn’t have a snappy comeback for that, and Danny was tired of talking to him, so he shoved Horace out of the cell and down the hall. Carlo boosted himself up through the window first. Horace turned around, took one look at Danny standing behind him, his jacket flipped open to reveal the gun shoved in his waistband. Horace decided to follow Carlo.

Danny wasn’t as agile as the younger men, but he managed to haul his old ass through the window. Then he led the way around the edge of the parking lot, keeping to the shadows.

“Thanks,” Horace said when they got to his truck.

He reached for the door handle, but Danny got there first. “You don’t think we’re gonna leave an enterprising guy like you behind.”

“I’ll head straight back to Washington,” Horace said. “I won’t tell anybody you’re here. Hell, I don’t even know you’re name, Danny . . . Shit.”

Before the “t” hit the airwaves Carlo had Horace by the armpits. Danny snatched his ankles and they swung him into the bed of the truck. Carlo vaulted in after him, there was an “oomph,” and then silence. By the time Danny climbed behind the wheel and started the truck, he saw Carlo’s thumbs-up in the rearview mirror. At least, Danny thought as he backed out of the parking space and took off, the kid wasn’t a total screwup. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

If they didn’t follow in Horace’s doomed footsteps.

By the time they hit the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, the sun was trying to fight its way over the eastern horizon and not having much luck. A layer of storm clouds, weighted down with Noah’s Ark-quality rain potential, restricted sunrise to a dull orange stain between the horizon and the cloud bottoms.

“Kind of pretty, isn’t it?” Aubrey said from the passenger seat.

“It looks like somebody blew up the Outer Banks.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“You start the day your way, I’ll start it mine.”

Jack steered the car into a gas station that was as far from Larry’s One Stop as Aubrey was from common sense. About a dozen pumps marched in rows under a soaring overhang studded with fire sprinklers, birds’ nests and lights bright enough to guide the space shuttle in for a landing.

A building ran the length of the overhang, freshly painted, ruthlessly ordered, signs professionally made and correctly spelled. The one thing it had in common with Larry’s? There was no one in sight. No one gassing up at the pumps, no kids on bikes from the surrounding neighborhood, no cars parked at the front of the store while the driver ran in for a pack of cigarettes and a designer coffee. Just one bored clerk who had no problem seeing through the clean, wide windows that lined the front of the building.

Jack stopped behind the farthest bank of gas pumps, and when Aubrey got out and headed for the little store, he let her go. She’d raise hell if he didn’t, and if he wasn’t in the mood when he was fully rested and not wounded in a dozen places, he damn sure wasn’t up for her brand of hell after a couple of sleepless nights, a belly flop over Niagara Falls, and a header out of the back of a speeding truck.

Aubrey surprised him by angling between the pumps, her face turned away from the store windows like she was gazing casually off at the sunrise. She fished in her backpack, keeping it, too, out of sight of the clerk, who glanced listlessly out the window and then went back to watching the tiny TV hanging between the overhead cigarette racks behind the counter.

Aubrey pumped change into the vending machine by the front door, bent to retrieve what she’d purchased, repeated the process and came back to the car, again keeping her face turned away from the front windows.

Jack caught the can of Coke she flipped to him, popped it open, and took a long pull. He stood there a minute and enjoyed the rush of caffeine and sugar, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing he wasn’t the only one making adjustments. In spite of her know-it-all attitude and the way she argued every time he tried to educate her, Aubrey had actually been paying attention. “You’re learning,” he said to her. Too bad it wasn’t a waste of time in this instance.

“Wow, Jack, was that a compliment?”

“That was shock.” He chugged the rest of the soda, crunched the can between his hands, and flipped it over his shoulder on his way to the washer solvent dispenser. When he didn’t hear the can hit the ground, he smiled to himself. It felt good to put her back in her place, fetching him refreshments and cleaning up after him. At least for the moment life made sense. And then she had to go and ruin it.

“Feel better?” she asked with the kind of sarcasm that told him she knew he was wallowing happily in the male chauvinist moment.

“I’ll feel better when this is all over and you’re nothing but a fading memory, which is more than you’ll be able to say about me.”

“You are kind of hard to forget, Jack. Not exactly a good quality for an undercover agent.”

“Who said I was trying to be forgotten?” He held out a couple of twenties, expression bland.

She looked at the money, then at him, thinking line in place. “You want me to go inside to pay? Why?”

“If we don’t pay first, they won’t turn on the pump.”

“Can’t you work around that?”

Jack did a double take. “You have a coronary every time I try to boost a car, but it’s okay to steal gas?”

“Have you seen gas prices lately, Jack? Do you notice how they go up every time someone breaks wind in the Middle East?”

“And?”

“It doesn’t really feel like stealing to me. And we need to conserve our funds—my funds—in case there’s an actual emergency.”

“Now I see your point,” he said, not the one she made with words, the one that came through loud and clear from her downcast eyes and sullen attitude. “You’re cheap.”

“If I go inside to pay, they’ll know we were here.”

“They’re going to know anyway, eventually.” He pointed up at the corners of the overhangs, each equipped with a small black box. “They recorded the license plate when we drove in. If we take off without paying the cops’ll be on our tail inside of two minutes. Eventually works for me. Two minutes doesn’t.”

“But why do I have to go inside?”

Because it was the best of two bad choices. If she went inside, there was a real chance she’d spill her guts to the guy behind the counter. But he couldn’t leave her with the car. He’d shut it off, but Aubrey had watched him hot-wire it. “It’s a man in there,” he said. “If it was a woman I’d go in.”

Aubrey snorted softly. “You’d probably still be better off sending me—and get that look off your face. I meant she’d probably take one look at you and think you were about to rob the place.”

“Forget it. I’ll go myself.”

“And leave me out here to pump gas?” She snapped the twenties out of his hand. “I know how you like to keep those macho roles all to yourself.”

“No unnecessary conversation,” he called after her.

She stopped, turned, and smiled sweetly. “Of course not.”

That smile wasn’t meant to be convincing, and the way she swung her ass was a message too. She wanted him to watch her walk away, and she wanted him to think about what she was saying to the clerk as she handed over the money. And she wanted him to wonder why she wasn’t coming out of the store once her mission was accomplished.