Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (35 page)

As he left, I heard Raphael say to Clarice in a muttered, near-threat.

“I want to hear
everything
later, sweetie. Everything.”

Clarice, a.k.a. Jessica Rabbit, murmured a quiet promise in return.

“You may go, too, Clarice,” Ms. Culare said, making it clear she’d heard them, too.

Both of them let out sighs, and again I might have laughed, but I was busy fighting to think through what I’d just learned from Raphael.

I looked down at Ms. Culare, even as I thought it.

“I should go, too,” I told her. “I’ll be in touch.”

That time, I was surprised to see a glimmer of frustration in her brown eyes, one that nearly mirrored Raphael’s. I didn’t let it stop me, or even pull me entirely out of my own head. The wheels were turning by then, fast enough to be smoking, and to be pushing me to decide where I should go next. So instead of answering Ms. Culare’s frustrated look, I followed Raphael and Jessica Rabbit out of her office without another word.
 

It occurred to me only when I’d taken the elevator down to the building’s main lobby, that Ms. Culare had been equally curious about how I’d known those two men.

Still, it was probably better if I didn’t push my luck, telling her too much.

As it was, I knew I’d have to bring Gantry into this now. I knew we’d probably have to do something a lot more drastic to deal with this whole situation, given that Razmun and Evers had been working together for awhile. That meeting in Misty’s Boom-Boom Room was only one of many such meetings between them, that much was clear.
 

Now that they were involving this Eastern European mafia group directly, things would definitely get more dangerous for all of us. That meant Nik and me, sure...but it also meant Jake, Gantry, Irene and possibly other people I really cared about.

The fact that Razmun and Evers had gotten me on this job, probably so they could track me, or maybe so they could make me disappear, worried me more than I really wanted to think about.

Maybe even now they were telling the mafia group what I was up to, so the crime syndicate could make me disappear. Knowing Evers, he probably knew Gantry and the cops were watching him. He probably wanted me gone in a way that would be difficult to trace back to him.

More than anything, I was frustrated. Mostly because I still felt like I was squinting at a puzzle with a number of key pieces missing.

I’d resolved to call on my friends at the Seattle PD, again, too.

No matter how pissed off Jo was at me. I needed to try again. If that didn’t work, I’d send Gantry...or maybe Irene. Maybe both of them. Maybe they could get Jo to listen.
 

Or at least come up with a more convincing story.

I needed to know the exact connection between Misty’s and those missing girls. Jo clearly knew something, which was why she’d tossed me in that direction. I could
guess
a connection, sure, but a guess alone wasn’t super helpful at this point. Not if I wanted to stop them before they put a hit out on me...assuming it wasn’t too late for that already.

Anyway, Jo obviously wanted me to to get at some connection or piece of evidence she couldn’t go after herself. She at least had a solid guess about Misty’s, so if she hadn’t pursued it on her own, someone must have warned her off.
 

Probably someone inside the PD itself. Jo didn’t rattle easily, so it had to be something official. Meaning yeah, whatever rich bigwig owned Misty’s likely had connections. Probably something high up in national or international law enforcement.

Whatever picture all of these pieces formed, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

Given that that same group already had me in their crosshairs, however, I didn’t have a lot of choice at this point but to see it through. I might have done it anyway, because yeah, I’m dumb like that. And I promised Jazzy’s father.

As it turned out, I didn’t make it to the police station.

I didn’t make it a full two blocks.

I was walking, fast, looking for another cab...when, out of nowhere, everything went dark.

I didn’t see them come up behind me, so they might have done it from a distance.

I didn’t sense a damned thing.

I must have collapsed.

But I don’t think I even felt myself hit the pavement.

15

Bad Smells, Finding and Being Found

When I came to, I had a cloth bag over my head.

I could hear people talking somewhere not far from me, but I didn’t feel anyone right next to where I sat. My hip was sore, and off-center on some uneven, jagged piece of metal.
 

I was moving––up and down and forward, definitely the motion of a car.

I was also lying down, stretched out on my side, in what had to be the back seat of an old car. I guessed the last bit from the bumping and the crappy springs under my weight and the way the shocks bounced under the car itself.

I tried to move...carefully.

I found my wrists handcuffed together. They’d been stretched out in front of me, more or less over my head. Those metal cuffs were also looped through and handcuffed with a separate set of cuffs to what had to be the door handle of the car. I figured most of that out by touch, of course, because I couldn’t manage to get the hood off my head. I tried to swing my legs around, but my ankles seemed to be tied in a similar way to what was probably the opposite door.
 

I figured they had me bound that way in part so I couldn’t raise my head above the windows, which made me wonder why they hadn’t just thrown me into the trunk.

Then I realized I might be in the trunk...sort of.

Meaning, that trunk just happened to be a big one, and the car happened to be a big one, too. Like a van or minivan or a Range Rover or some other kind of SUV. I couldn’t see past the bag over my head well enough to tell for sure. My money was on an old SUV. Something about the height of the car from the ground, and the height of the bounces on the crappy shocks every time they hit an uneven spot in the road.

I strained to listen to the guy I could hear in the front seat.

He sounded like he was talking on the phone. There were at least two of them, I realized...since another guy, not on the phone, kept adding things that may or may not have complemented the conversation taking place on the phone itself.

“...Ask them if they still want her to go to the place Southside,” the guy not on the phone was saying now. “Ask them...”

“I already did ask them that,” the other one said.
 

The second one, the one on the phone, had a thick, European accent. The other one sounded more East Coast America to me. Boston, to be precise. The European turned his head, changing the sound of his voice, probably to glare at Bean Town.

“Why the fuck you think I’m getting on the freeway?” he snarled.

“But she was at that old guy’s house,” Boston said, undaunted. “They know that, right? They know she talked to the Chink girl’s father?”

“They know,” the guy with the European accent said. “Shut up so I can talk.”

The European went back to talking on the phone, and that time, I realized he was speaking a different language on the phone, which is probably why the other guy couldn’t seem to stop talking to him in English. The non-English language was definitely Slavic-sounding. I was close enough this time to have zero doubt. It sounded Russian to me, like the guy at the bar, but I didn’t know enough Russian to be absolutely sure about that.

“Are we getting a bonus for pulling her?” Boston said. “There’s money in it, right? Didn’t that jerk-off, Evers, say there was money in it for us?”

I felt myself tense.

Not like I’d been exactly relaxed up until that point.

I mean, I could do the math. Even so, hearing Evers’ name out loud really hit the reality home in a way the handcuffs couldn’t do on their own.

I found myself feeling over the back seat a second time. I stretched as far as I could in every direction that time, yanking on the cuffs. I felt all over the door itself, too, but still came up empty. I was looking for something...anything, I guess. Anything I might use to pick the lock on the cuffs, although I knew how unlikely that was, especially if the cuffs were police issue. Something to use as a weapon. Anything I might use, for anything...well, useful.

But there was nothing. Nothing I could reach.

I tried to decide what to do.

Then I remembered the implant.

“Nik. Nik...can you hear me?”

Silence was my only reply.

“Nik? Are you there? It’s important! Answer me now, okay? Even if you’re still in that bar...I need you...right now.”

More silence.

I tried a few more times, calling his name in different combinations.

I found myself thinking I had to be out of range.

I’d never thought to test the range of the implants before. While we’d been in Nik’s dimension, I’d always assumed it was some kind of civilization-wide wifi system, since everyone there seemed to be wired to one another, no matter what the distance. Here, since it was just me and Nik, I figured the implants themselves had to be sending signals to one another, but it occurred to me suddenly that I really had no idea how they worked.

If we lived through this, I’d have to remember to ask Nik about that.

“Nik...?”
I ventured again, not really expecting an answer at that point, but not sure what else to do. I was startled when I did get an answer, however.

“Dakota?”
he said.
“Where are you? We should talk.”

Nearly overcome by relief to hear his words, I made a sound the guys up front might have heard if they hadn’t been driving so fast with the windows open.

Even as I thought it, I realized we had to be on a freeway. A highway, at least.

“Can we meet?”
Nik was saying.
“Where are you? I think they are getting ready to leave this place...”

I shook my head, again forgetting about the people in the front seat.

“Nik...shut up and listen to me. Is there GPS on this thing? The implant, I mean.”

“GPS?”

I heard his unfamiliarity with the term in his voice.
 

I talked over him before he could ask.

“Location, Nik. Can you tell where I am via the implant?”

“Of course.”

Relief exploded over me, enough to relax my shoulders for real.
“Great, Nik. That’s great,”
I said slumping into the seat with an exhale.
“So where am I right now? Can you see where I am right now, while we talk?”

There was a shorter silence.

“Moving fast,”
he said then.
“Down the road. It looks like you’re leaving the city.”
Nik’s voice turned puzzled.
“Where are you, Dakota? Did you get the Enfield back from Gantry? Or are you with someone?”

“The latter,”
I said, muttering afterwards,
“...Although not by choice.”
Again, though, relief overpowered all of the other emotions I might have felt, given everything.
“Look. I don’t want you to freak out, Nik, okay? Seriously...it’s going to be fine. But someone took me. Off the street. They must have drugged me or something because I went down...hard...and woke up in the back of what’s probably a van, maybe an SUV. They’ve got me handcuffed to the car, so I can’t get out on my own. One has an accent like the guys in the bar, so there’s got to be some connection. They mentioned Evers, so Razmun might be involved. Or maybe Evers hired the mafia guys on his own, had them follow me...”