Devil's Due (23 page)

“Sorry to buzz you so early, Ms. Garza, but there was a special delivery for you. The guy said to tell you that it’s a package from back East. That make any sense? I can’t read the label.”

“No, that’s fine, I’m expecting it. I’ll be down in a minute, thanks.” She turned back to find McCarthy pulling on his briefs, then his jeans. She walked to him without hesitation and stepped into the circle of his arms, her bare skin pressed against his from the waist up. The luxury of it nearly overwhelmed her. His left hand moved lightly up the curve of her arm, and in the morning light she saw a fine lacework of lines around his eyes when he smiled at her. They deepened when she stroked her fingers through the warm mat of hair on his chest.

“No regrets?” he asked her.

“Why in God’s name would I have regrets?”

He traced the line of her cheekbone with his thumb. “I’m old, you know.”

“Older,” she acknowledged. “Didn’t slow you down.”

“Oh, it did,” he said, and dropped a slow, warm kiss on the skin of her collarbone. “But that has compensations. Lets me concentrate on getting the most out of every…single…moment.”

“I noticed.” When had her voice taken on that particular low purr?
You can’t be distracted like this
, some cold part of her brain said.
You’re drunk on him. Sober up. There are things to do
.

She couldn’t stop touching him.

His lips moved across her throat, up to the column of her neck.

“I have to…get…the package,” she murmured.

“Yes, you do.”

“Things to do.”

“Important things.”

Her fingers curled in the waistband of his pants.

“I just got those on,” he murmured against her skin. His hands were wandering, too, down her back, down the smooth curve of her hips. Inward.

“Stop.” She tugged at his pants, pulling him harder against her when he tried to move back for better access. “I have to go downstairs.”

“Like that? They’ll be thrilled.”

“Dressed. I have to get dressed.” She finally found some strength to put behind that statement. “Ben, no. I have to do this.”

He stopped playing, and the smile slowly died. “Do you?” He searched her face intently. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure that I can’t live like this. And neither can you, or Jazz, or for that matter, Simms and Borden. If Simms is right, I could be the only one left standing if I don’t act. So yes. I’m sure.” She read the fear in him. “I’ll be all right.”

“Simms sold out about twenty of his friends, so far as I could tell. Forgive me for not trusting him with your life.”

She stopped him with a kiss, a long one. “I have to go.”

She dressed quickly, just underwear, jeans and T-shirt, feet in a pair of flat shoes. Her hair still looked loose and tumbled, and she could smell McCarthy all over her skin.

She reset the alarm on the way out—native paranoia—and took the stairs to stretch the soreness out of her leg
muscles. Marsh glanced up as she came out the fire door, took in the way she looked, and wisely said nothing beyond a polite, “Good morning, Ms. Garza.” She signed the clipboard and picked up the package. It was, as Gregory had predicted, heavy; not something one could slip easily into a purse. She’d need a duffel bag, or a backpack.

She was thinking about it on the way back up the stairs, but the extra weight in her arms made her slower. She stopped to readjust the weight on the third floor landing, and as she did, she heard the ground floor door open, and hard-soled shoes coming up. Men’s shoes, from the sound of it. Two or three pairs of them.

“—both there. Be ready. She’s a tough little bitch, and McCarthy’s a stone-cold killer. He’ll fight to protect her. I don’t want any shooting if we can help it.”

“If it comes to that—”

“If it comes to that, kill McCarthy, but
don’t
kill her. We need her. Understand?”

Voices carried. Lucia ran almost soundlessly up another flight, eased open the fire door and sprinted for the elevator. There was an intercom button next to the Up and Down; she slapped her palm on it, juggling the package clumsily. “Security! Security, pick up!”

“Security, yes ma’am.”

“Get up to the sixth floor. There are three men on their way to my apartment and—”

“Ms. Garza? This is Marsh, ma’am. Those men are police officers. They came in just after you picked up the package—they had a warrant. Nothing I could do.”

“Shit,” she whispered, and slapped the call button for the elevator. “Marsh, listen to me. Those men are
not
police officers.”

“I checked their badges—”

“Marsh!” She cut him off coldly, furiously. “I need you to go along with me here. Please. You have information that they’re imposters, and you’re just doing your job when you
lock the damn fire door on the sixth floor!
”

“Ma’am…” He debated for a second, then another. “I suppose they could have been fake credentials. We have to take all reasonable precautions.”

They’d be to the fourth floor by now. Maybe the fifth, if they were in a hurry. “Marsh? Are you locking them out?”

No answer.

The elevator arrived. She lunged into it and hit the sixth floor button convulsively, willing it to go faster.

The intercom inside of the elevator came alive. “Ms. Garza?”

“Yes, Marsh!” Dammit, she hadn’t even brought her gun. Hadn’t come prepared at all for trouble.
This is what happiness brings you. Disaster
. She had let herself be comforted, and that was death to caution.

“We appear to have had a circuit fault on the sixth floor fire door. It’s locked down. The cops are making their way up to seven.”

“And that one will be locked when they get there?”

“Probably. Fault in the system, ma’am. But I can’t promise you more than ten minutes, max. That’s the most I can do.”

“That’s good enough.” The doors opened on the sixth floor. “Thank you.”

She made it to her apartment, unlocked the door, and caught McCarthy in the act of putting on his shirt. He looked up, startled, and she saw him take in the expression on her face.

He reached for his shoulder holster and strapped it on. “Trouble?”

“Ken Stewart’s coming with some kind of warrant. No idea what it is, but it doesn’t matter. Eidolan’s nervous. He’s here to slow us down,” she said. “Take this.” She handed him the package and grabbed the first thing she could find in the closet—a black canvas backpack, sturdy enough. The alarm started a shrill warning beep by the time she shoved the EMP device inside and zipped the bag.

“You going to shut the alarm off?”

“No. The more confusion, the better.” She grabbed her gun, holster and purse, and moved past him to the closet at the back. “Come on.” She shouldered the backpack.

“Where?”

“Back door.”

It wasn’t, exactly, but what building engineers didn’t know wouldn’t kill them. Though it might give them a good fit of pique…She shoved aside the coats in the closet and pressed hard on the wall behind, which swung open with a sharp pop of magnets coming loose.

It had been opened before. She saw sets of tracks in the pale dust. Gregory Ivanovich. He’d known that she would have built in an escape hatch. And he’d used it against her.

“What the hell…?” McCarthy marveled.

“Shut it behind you.” She ducked into the crawl space. Short and dusty, it led into wiring tunnels, which dumped into a service shaft for the air handlers, with a long straight ladder down a central column. She started downward.

Somewhere above, in her apartment, she heard the alarm start to wail. Good. That meant confusion, more cops, possibly even a fire truck or two. The building’s clientele this rich, and most of them important. The rich also came with an automatic upgrade of press coverage. With any luck, it would turn into a zoo outside.

She didn’t trust luck. She jumped the last five rungs of the ladder, landed flat-footed in a crouch and had her gun in a two-handed grip as she advanced to the door.

No sound beyond. She eased it open a fraction of an inch, but the basement hallway was empty.

“Right.” She shut the door and turned to look at McCarthy. “We need to make it to the Hummer. They’ll be waiting somewhere along the line. They may even have the garage exits blocked off.”

“They could have towed the truck,” he reminded her.

“No, I don’t think so. Not many towing services could handle it, and they’d have a hard time getting a flatbed truck down where we parked it, or getting the Hummer out if they did. Low ceilings. They’ll just guard it. Less trouble.”

He nodded. “I’m right behind you.”

“I know.”

“Try not to shoot anybody.”

“Funny,” she said grimly, “that’s what they said. They want me alive.”

That sparked something in his eyes that was hot and hungry. “I take it back,” he said. “Shoot somebody. Preferably that rat bastard Stewart, if you see him.”

She took a deep breath and swung open the door, then ran, light-footed, to the end of the hall. The parking lot beyond seemed deserted. No sign of surveillance or ambush. The Hummer loomed huge and black at the far corner, apart from the smaller cars and trucks.

She started to move forward, but McCarthy caught her arm and shook his head. He mimed splitting up, him to the right, her to the left. She shook her own head and fished the keys out of her pocket.

“Together,” she whispered, making barely a sound. He stared at her face, and nodded.

“Together.” It wasn’t more than a movement of his lips, but it was a promise.

They broke from cover and ran for it.

Nobody stopped them. She hit the alarm remote control and unlocked the doors, threw herself into the driver’s side and put the backpack on the floorboard as Ben climbed in the passenger door. The interior looked cool, dark and untouched.

“Too easy,” he said, and immediately began to look for trouble out the windows.

Nothing moved.

“Maybe the alarms upstairs distracted them,” she said, and hit the ignition. The SUV started up with a rumble, and she backed it fast out of the space, not particularly worried about crumpled fenders or damaged quarter panels.

“They’ll have us blocked in,” McCarthy warned. His gun was out.

She nodded and gave him a lupine grin. “Let me worry about that. The army doesn’t use these monsters just because of their pretty paint jobs.”

“Manny’s going to kill you.”

“Better him than Ken Stewart, wouldn’t you say? And if you’re going to shoot, roll down the window.”

He shook his head and watched the parking garage whip by as she accelerated the Hummer up the curving ramp toward escape. “Wild woman.”

Bet your ass
, she thought, and pressed the accelerator to the floor when she saw daylight, and two police cars blocking it. She honked, a loud blare, though they could hardly have missed a huge, black SUV barreling upward, engine roaring. Sure enough, the cops had prudently decided to leave empty cars in her path.

The Hummer hardly even shuddered at the impact. It slewed out into traffic as she whipped the wheel, burned rubber, and it stayed upright only because of the wide wheel base as she steered it down Vine Street.

“You realize that I’ll be going to back to prison,” McCarthy said, almost casually. “Doing crash tests with squad cars, that’s some kind of crime. I know—I used to be a detective.”

“Shut up. You’re a hostage.”

“I’m a what?”

“Hostage. You can truthfully say that I abducted you. I’m driving, after all.”

“You know, my life with you might be short, but damn, it’s going to be memorable.”

She dug one-handed in her purse, came up with her cell phone and flipped it open. Voice-activated a call to Jazz, because she needed most of her attention for keeping the Hummer on the road and watching for any police cars moving to intercept. She had to get this thing off main streets fast, before air surveillance could get to them. Preferably, they needed to change cars. The closest chance would be six blocks away, in a parking garage behind a bank building.

“Yeah?” Jazz sounded sleepy.

“Three detectives showed up at my place this morning, with friends in patrol cars,” Lucia said. She hit the speakerphone button and dropped the phone to the seat. “I can’t come back to Manny’s. We need to move,
now
, or we won’t get another chance.”

“Damn!” Jazz was wide awake now. “Don’t you go without me.”

“I may not have a choice. Jazz, I don’t think it’s safe for you to leave the bunker.”

“Have I ever done what’s safe? I’ll get Manny in motion on the computer stuff.
Wait for me
.”

She hung up. Lucia shook her head and whipped the Hummer into a hard right turn, slowed her speed and then made an immediate left into the parking garage.

“What are we doing?”

“Switching cars.”

Ben sighed. “Car theft. I’m almost
sure
that’s a crime.”

“It’s my own car. I have three of them, parked in central locations around the city, all accessible from mass transportation.”

“Look,” he said slowly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but who hides cars all over the city and has a secret escape hatch in her apartment, just in case?”

She took the ramp up. Second level. The Hummer barely made it—this was an old structure with low ceilings. “I’m a professional, Ben. And that’s really all you need to know until I can get you into a warm bed, serve you some wine and tell you the story of my life.”

“Promise?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “I promise.”

She pulled the Hummer into two spaces—it wouldn’t fit in just one—next to a dull green minivan. “Out. Grab whatever you think we’ll need from the back. Flak vests, definitely. Rocket launchers optional.”

She took her purse and the backpack holding the EMP. She had the minivan started when McCarthy slid inside. He had a Kevlar vest. “FBI issue,” he noted.

“Without the FBI printing. Yes. I think Manny has some friends in federal procurement. Did you get one for me?”

“Basic black,” he said. “Goes with everything. Jazz is meeting us?”