Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) (16 page)

I LOOKED UP, feeling a distant warning jab in my mind. I realized only then just how lost I’d been. Like coming out of a trance, I suddenly saw the world again.

Reality crashed down around me.

Seeing the car looming ahead of me, I slammed on the brakes, skidding the MacLaren to a fishtailing stop. Thanks to the insanely responsive brakes, I managed to halt a bare inch before I would have plowed Black’s insanely expensive car into the bumper of an LAPD black and white. Someone left the damn thing blocking the whole mouth of the lot’s driveway, driverless and with its blue and white bars flashing overhead.

I still had the phone to my ear.

Dex, one of Black’s employees, was talking a mile a minute.

“I don’t give a fuck!” I snarled. “You need to get down here right now!”

“We’re coming, Miriam. I’m telling you that we need people up here, too, running the intel. And we already have people there, Miriam... they’re with the cops now.”

I jammed the car into reverse, craning my neck around as I backed up the MacLaren at around thirty miles an hour. I looked for some way to try and get around the cruiser, but he’d left only a few feet on either side. Clenching my jaw, I suppressed the urge to plow into the damned thing and use the MacLaren to shove it all the way into the lot. Then I heard something else Dex said on the phone and glared back at the receiver.

“Stop telling me that you can’t get here tonight! They
took
him. Do you get that?”

“Miriam, calm down...”

“Don’t fucking start with me, Dex!” I snapped. “If you give me another of those ‘Black can take care of himself’ speeches, I swear to God I’m going to rip your lungs out when I see you and make you eat them!”

Dex fell silent. I could almost hear him take a breath.

“I wasn’t going to say that, Miri. I wasn’t. I swear to God. We’re taking this very seriously.”

“Good. Then get on the goddamned plane. Now.”

“Miri, we’re already stocking one, but––”

I’d had enough, though.

Hanging up the phone, I stared at the different sides of the lot, thinking there had to be another entrance. Finally, I gave up and yanked the steering wheel to the right. Executing a quick turn, I parked the car about a foot from the curb, more or less perpendicular to the black and white. Using a voice command on the emergency brake, I turned off the ignition by pressing the big blue button to the right of the steering column and jerked on the handle of the car door. The door slid up smoothly, still moving as I exited under it.

Of course, I didn’t know how to close the damned thing. Finally, I barked a command at the dashboard and the door began lowering on its own.

I hadn’t figured out Black’s keyless-smart-yet-also-manual car yet, but at least he’d programmed it to accept commands from both of us. The MacLaren had keys, too, although I hadn’t yet figured out how to use them.

Knowing Black, those had some kind of tech component built in, as well.

Squeezing myself around the police sedan, I walked through the gate of the chain-link fence and toward the group of officers in uniforms and black kevlar. They all stood in a pretty small area, clustered inside two rows of parked city cars, as well as two armored vans that stood nearby with their back doors open. All of the cops looked armed to the teeth, and from their formation, I had to assume they were about to leave.

I scanned faces in the group until I found Mozar standing next to a Latino man I didn’t recognize. Both of them were wrapped in blankets and looked beat up.

Before I could open my mouth, Mozar turned his head.

He locked gazes with me and his eyes widened.

I couldn’t help noticing that his skin was paper white, almost inhumanly white. His hand shook when he raised it with a water bottle, and he seemed to have trouble drinking from the mouth of it before lowering the bottle again.

Adrenaline kickback, most likely.

“Miriam,” he said, his voice rough. “This is a staging... you can’t be here right now.”

My jaw hardened to stone. “Go fuck yourself, Mozar.”

A few officers turned their heads, eyebrows raised.

A few of them smiled, too, almost involuntarily.

Mozar shook his head. “Miriam, I’m sorry, but I’m very serious. You’re not cleared to be here right now. You have to leave.”

“No... I don’t have to leave. You have to clear me. Now. I’m coming with you.”

He shook his head, vehement, glancing at an older man with gray hair wearing black kevlar. “That’s not possible. This isn’t an LAPD operation anymore. We’re supporting Home-Sec in this. I couldn’t clear you even if I wanted to... and the fact that you’re the wife of...” He seemed to realize what he was saying and trailed.

If it was possible, his skin whitened even more.

“Look, Miri. We’re doing everything we can. You have to trust us––”

“Where’s Evan?” I demanded. At Mozar’s blank look, I raised my voice. “Hawking! Where the fuck is he?”

“Miriam, you’re shouting...”

“I know I’m fucking shouting! I’m going to keep shouting until someone answers my goddamned questions!”

Two sets of hands caught hold of me on either side. Without thought, I writhed under their grip, struggling violently to free myself. I elbowed one of them hard enough in the face that he let out an
ooof
sound, right before he moved behind me, renewing his grip, a lot more tightly that time. When I looked up, I saw two men I didn’t know, both of them huge, both looking at me with regretful, apologetic looks on their faces.

Both had smoke smudges on their faces like Mozar, and looked like they’d already been in some kind of firefight. They were still holding me when the older man in the armor motioned for the rest of the group to head for their cars, right before he looked at Mozar.

“Keep her here,” he said, his eyes warning. He glanced at me, then at the two men holding me while I struggled. “All of you,” he said. “Just calm the fuck down. We’re on this.” He looked directly at my face. “We’ll get your husband back, ma’am. Don’t worry.”

“Like hell you will!” I was still fighting to get free. “You have a mole in your department! For all I know, you’re him. I can’t trust you! I can’t trust any of you!”

The man’s eyes grew openly startled.

Then, as he continued to look at me, that surprise turned to pity, right before he aimed a much harder glare at Mozar. Motioning between himself and the homicide detective, the Homeland Security agent spoke in a low threat.
 

“You and me. We’re having words when I get back. I’ve already told your captain the same.”

Mozar didn’t answer, not even to nod.

Then the older guy in the kevlar walked away, not looking back. The rest of his team followed. I was still staring after them when a women’s face slid directly into my view, blocking my line of sight.

She had dark brown eyes, but they were sharp, almost inhumanly intense.

“Hey.” She caught hold of my arm. “You’re Miriam, right? His wife?”

“I don’t fucking know you.” I glared past her at Mozar. “Where’s Hawking? Is he still out there? Is he working with Homeland Security now?”

“Hawking is dead,” the woman said.

I turned, staring at her.

Seeing something in her eyes, not quite tears, but a pain that caught me off guard, I couldn’t answer her at first, or even think. I couldn’t help but hear the truth of her words. I read her mind without hesitation, and found more or less what I’d expected to find.

She’d seen Hawking shot.

More than that, she and Hawking had been involved.

“Goddamn it,” I said. Tears came to my eyes without warning. They blinded me before I could really think about that, either.

When I’d blinked back enough that I could see again, I saw that pain in her eyes grow more intense. It hit me that she probably hadn’t fully let the information in until just that moment. But I couldn’t make myself care enough to not ask the next question.

“Did you see them take Black?”

After a short pause, she nodded. “Yes.”

Looking at her, then looking her over, I realized she’d been shot. Her shoulder was wrapped in a makeshift bandage, but she probably needed to go to the hospital.

“He saved our lives,” the woman said.

That time, one of the men standing beside me spoke. I realized only then that both of them had let go of my arms. When I looked up, a buffed Latino man with hazel eyes met my gaze.

“Your husband was the big guy, right? Black hair? Blue uniform?”

I stared at him. “Uniform?”

That time, Mozar answered. He still sounded exhausted, not like himself at all. “Miri? I had him wear a uniform, remember? We talked about that.”

Somehow, my mind stuttered on that, of all things.

Maybe it was the realization that I really wasn’t going with them to find Black. Maybe it was knowing there was nothing I could do right then, even if I did go. I was useless until Black woke up from whatever they’d hit him with and I could feel his mind again.

I had to believe that was the only reason I couldn’t feel him.

Black was unconscious. Mozar told Nick on the phone that they’d knocked him out.

I would feel him again as soon as he woke up.

I would feel him, he would tell me where he was, and I would go get him. If I had to, I’d bring a fucking army with me to do it.

Until then, I couldn’t do much. The kidnappers were gone. Nick told me over the phone that members of the SWAT team saw them loading Black onto a boat. The few remaining officers in the unit had been wounded, low on ammunition and heavily outnumbered, so they’d been forced to remain under cover while they took Black away.

But Black had been alive.

Nick was
adamant
that Black was alive.

But I didn’t want to do this again. I couldn’t fucking
do
this again.

So I found myself just standing there, watching numbly as SWAT and Homeland Security piled into the two armored vans like I wasn’t even there. Within seconds, the last one climbed inside and both sets of rear doors slammed closed.

The engines started. Without a pause, the vehicles began exiting the lot.

More cars followed them to the front gate.

I watched them bump their way through the gate’s main opening––not the one where the patrol car blocked the way to the street, but a different entrance further up, past the security booth at the end of the loop of parked vehicles. I could barely see the cars passing right in front of me. My mind was entirely blank.

Then Mozar’s words reached me. Fighting to remember what we’d talked about before dinner––to remember any of what happened before I got that phone call from Nick about thirty minutes earlier––I nodded, but it was to no one, really.

Mozar exhaled, sounding tired.

“Miri, if they wanted him dead, they would have just shot him and left him there, like they did with Hawking. They went to a lot of trouble to get him alive.”

I turned, staring at him.

The woman in front of me stared at Mozar too, although I suspect for a different reason. That suspicion was confirmed when a plume of fury left her.

Somehow, the sheer depth of her rage snapped me out of my fugue state.
 

Still staring at Mozar, I remembered I didn’t trust him at all.

In that same half-second, I was reading his mind. Ethics didn’t even cross my mind. I found myself going through a smattering of memories. The SWAT leader who shot Hawking in the head and chest, Mozar’s shock and fear as gunfire erupted all around them. Black crashing the unmarked police car into a giant metal storage unit. Black leading them through a maze of those crates, SWAT guys pushing at Mozar’s back to keep him moving at Black’s pace.

I saw Black go down.

I choked when I saw it; I couldn’t help it.

I saw the woman standing in front of me run to him then kneel, trying to turn Black over, yelling at him, trying to yank him to his feet...