Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) (7 page)

“No,”
it said.
“First shot was fatal. You can go, Mr. Black. In fact, I was just advised to tell you to leave now. The body has been seen by another party. Authorities are being notified as we speak. You’ll be shielded from here, but if additional measures are required to keep yourself from being ID’d, I am told you may use them at your discretion...”

Black didn’t bother to answer.

He knew exactly who the “other party” was that the man in his earpiece referred to.

Ian Stone had been hunting Black the same as Black had been hunting him. Cat and mouse, wolf and rabbit––they switched roles hourly, daily, sometimes by the minute.

Lowering the gun, Black slid out of view of the window.

He dropped to the floor, immediately disassembling the rifle and putting the pieces in the long case that lay on the thin, olive-green carpet. Again, he worked with a speed and an efficiency that fascinated me. He already had most of those pieces back in their foam molds inside the case when he reached up to turn off the headset, then shifted the direction of his consciousness back towards me.

You still there, Miri?
he sent.

I’d learned to play dumb. It probably should have made me nervous, just how good I was getting at playing the oblivious girlfriend. Then again, I’d been trained to use whatever I had when circumstances demanded it.

Do I even want to know what that was?
I let my thoughts hold a faint edge.

I felt Black sigh.

I tried to give him opportunities to tell me things, to open up to me about where he was, what he was doing, how he really felt. I tried to keep an open line between us, in case he changed his mind...
 
in case he needed me like that.

So far he hadn’t. Not once.

I felt the shame there, even now, lingering in the background like smoke. In the foreground, I felt him thinking quietly that he needed to get better about blocking me. I felt him thinking I was too much in his light now for him to be sloppy about holding that line. He couldn’t afford to be half-assed about partitioning his thoughts, not while he was here.

When he didn’t answer, I pressed him again.

What are you doing right now, Black?
That time, I let him feel more of my real feelings. Concern bled through my thoughts and I felt it disarm him, making his jaw clench.
You must know I’m worried about you...

Fighting back his reaction, he sent me a pulse of reassurance.
Just some work for a client,
he sent back, and more or less truthfully.
I know you’re sick of hearing this, but I really can’t tell you any more than that right now, Miri. I would if I could.

What client?
I sent.
Who? Can you tell me that much at least?

You already know who.

Black...

I’m not quite as dumb as you think either, baby.

I started to protest, but felt him smile.

He sent me a pulse of heat.

When I reacted sharply, my light flaring into his, he pulled back, clenching his jaw a second time. I felt his own pain worsen. I felt a denser want there, keening upwards, nearly violent before he brought it back under control. I felt him thinking about sex. Images flickered there...
 
wanting. The job made it worse. The stress. He wanted the comfort. He wanted the comfort and the connection. Hell, he wanted the physical outlet.

He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.

I remained quiet, just outside the wall he’d thrown up between us.

I hadn’t reacted like that on purpose, much less done it to hurt him, but I still felt guilty. I honestly couldn’t help it anymore. Whatever kept us so tightly bound together now––whatever made it so easy to hear his thoughts and the voices that lingered around him––that same thing also made me want him so badly at times I could barely control myself. When I was this tangled in his mind, I had to do everything in my power not to pull on him.

I felt him missing me.

For both of us now, it was like an ongoing, physical ache.

He’d come close to telling me that a few times, too.

Close. But he hadn’t done it.

I felt him thinking what a fucking coward he was with me still.

The wall between us shifted, grew porous.

I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can,
he promised.
I’m finishing this as fast as I can, Miri. I swear to the gods I am...
 
I promise.

I let him feel my skepticism.

Not that he was lying about trying to get back to me.

More that he was downplaying the danger he was in, as well as how bad things really were for him there.

You’re really not going to tell me anything?
I sent.
Nothing about what you’re doing, or what this is really about...
 
or why you agreed to it?

Bringing down the lid of the case and fastening the metal clasps on either end before he spun the combination lock on the outside, locking the gun within, he sighed. I felt him struggle with a heavier feeling that wanted to take over his light.

Shoving it aside, he shook his head, rising to his feet with the handle firmly grasped in his fingers.

No, baby,
he sent softly, weaving an apology into the words.
... I’m not.

IT WAS FEBRUARY.

It was a cold, windy, sometimes-rainy and sometimes-blue skies February, and I sat in an Italian restaurant on California street, my mushroom gnocchi with cream sauce growing colder by the minute. I hadn’t even touched it. It just sat there on a plate between my elbows, and now even the smell made my stomach roil with nausea.

I bit my lip, fighting frustration as I stared at the man sitting across from me.

We’d had this conversation before, he and I.

Not these exact words.

More, it was the whole gist of the conversation, which felt a lot too similar to a conversation I’d had with him in Bangkok a few months earlier. He’d refused to take me seriously in that conversation, too. He’d also refused to believe that Black was in danger.

Just like that time in Bangkok, Kiko sat next to him, listening to us argue, her dark eyes probing as they scanned my face.

“––Dex, please,” I said, holding up a hand as I cut him off. “I don’t need to hear all this. I’m not arguing protocol with you. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the company’s operational protocols. I’m telling you, something is wrong. Something that falls outside of your damned
protocol...”
Biting my lip to keep from raising my voice more, I deliberately subdued it instead. “Aren’t you intelligence trained? Do you really need to list out protocols to shut me up? Or do you want to listen to what I’m saying and think for yourself?”

Dex frowned, glancing at Kiko, who raised her eyebrows.

The only thing noticeably different––in my mind, at least––between the conversation we were having now and the one we had in Bangkok were the clothes the three of us wore.

Rather than a sundress and sandals, Kiko, a small-bodied but densely-muscled Japanese woman, wore form-fitting black pants and a black T-shirt, the basic uniform of Black’s team. She looked like what she was in that outfit––ex-military.

Dex, the handsome, thirties-ish African-American man sitting next to her on the leather booth, wore a tailored, charcoal-colored suit, presumably because he’d been to see a client earlier that day, or would be seeing one after lunch. He looked significantly less military now than he had when I first met him in Bangkok, but I knew him as another of Black’s vets, and definitely one with an intelligence background, despite my jab.

Like Bangkok, this meeting had been my idea.

Like Bangkok, they’d been stonewalling me at every goddamned turn.

Unlike Bangkok, I found I cared a lot less about my previous “rules” around when to use my psychic ability on other people.

Truthfully, I was struggling more every day with the emotional side of things, and that made this conversation a lot harder. I’d talked to my shrink about it––a sweet, ex-combat vet by the name of Roger who did trauma counseling for people who’d experienced violent ordeals. Nick insisted I go see someone when he finally heard the bare bones of the story around what happened to me in Bangkok.

I hadn’t told Nick details, definitely not about the seer side of things, but he knew what Black’s employees knew––namely the part about me being abducted and held by a mercenary who worked for human traffickers out of Russia.

Nick had been horrified, of course.

Predictably, he’d also blamed Black.

He immediately insisted I go see Roger as well, who did crisis counseling work for the police. And yes, Nick was right to pressure me to see someone professionally, although I fought him on it when he first brought it up.

Roger seemed to think my new hyper-emotionality was a normal side-effect of the trauma, and ultimately a good sign I was working through things.

Personally, I wasn’t so sure.

I couldn’t tell Roger that though, or anyone else really...
 
including the two people sitting across from me now.

I’d asked them to meet me down here, at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant across the street from the office building on California Street. So far, it looked like I was completely wasting my time.

“You’ve been talking to him more than us, doc.” Dex’s voice remained studiously casual, but I felt him watching me warily with his coffee-colored eyes. “I’m not sure what you expect us to do about it. If you want him to come home, tell him to come home.”

I bit my lip, looking between the two of them.

“Do you know who he’s working for right now?” I said.

Silence. I sat back in my chair, forcing my expression still.

“Do you?” I said.

“No, doc,” Dex sighed. “And frankly, it’s none of our––”

“––He’s working for Mr. Lucky.”

Ignoring Dex’s annoyed scowl, I looked between them, noting recognition even as I used my psychic ability to read them to confirm the extent of it.

“He got bullied into a minimum six month contract with him,” I added. “...doing God knows what. So...
 
you understand my concern, right? He’s working for a mafia lord based out of Russia. A human and drug trafficker who’s rumored to cut his opponents into pieces and feed them to his dogs when they piss him off. I’ve been reading about him...
 
this ‘Mr. Lucky.’ In your very own files. They say he keeps children as pets. That he has women chained to his dining room floor to give blowjobs to the guests at dinner parties...”

Seeing Kiko in particular wince and grimace, glancing around us in the restaurant, I glared between the two of them, ignoring her unspoken request to keep my voice down.

“If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Lucky is
the
human trafficker operating out of Europe these days. Maybe in the whole world. You really think Black would work for him willingly?”

Could that be true?
I heard Kiko think.
Why the hell would Black tell her that, even if it was true?
Adjusting her butt on the seat, she glanced around the restaurant again nervously.
Black wouldn’t work for that psychopath...
 
would he?

I felt her doubt, even as she wondered at possible angles.