Play Nice (19 page)

At least, not until he knew what he was walking away from.

*   *   *

When Anna finally dragged Lenny back to the SUV, she found Dade at the rear of the car, the back door raised. A laptop, printer and a couple other small black boxes filled the trunk. If pressed, she’d guess at least one was a police scanner.

“Nice toys,” she commented.

Dade shot her a look over his shoulder. “I think so.” He had the laptop on, typing a sequence of numbers onto a black screen.

“What are you doing?”

“I have a sudden shortage of funds. I’m securing more.”

“Stealing?” She craned her neck to get a better look at the screen, but the numbers meant nothing to her.

“Borrowing.”

“From?”

He didn’t respond, eyes intent on the screen, fingers flying over the keyboard, but Anna had her answer soon enough as he opened a Web browser and pulled up the California Lottery homepage.

Anna raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to steal from the lottery?”

“Borrow.”

“So, you’ll be giving it back?”

He nodded. “Eventually.”

She wasn’t sure whether she believed him or not, but let it go. “Won’t they notice the money missing?”

He shook his head. “It’s not going to go missing. It’s going to be paid out to a winner.” He moved to the SuperLotto page, eyes scanning the list of winning numbers for the previous day.

“How?” Anna asked.

“On any given day there are hundreds of winners of small amounts—twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there. Combinations of three or four winning numbers can often result in smaller payouts. For any payout less than six hundred dollars, you can take your ticket directly to the store it was purchased at for payment, bypassing the state lotto offices.”

“And stringent security,” she said, nodding. It was a good plan. There was just one flaw. “But you have to have the actual winning ticket to take in, right?”

Dade nodded. “And I will.”

Even as he said it, Dade switched screens, pulling up a graphics program with a facsimile of a California SuperLotto ticket already loaded. Juggling between his sequence of numbers and the graphic, he quickly imputed a series of numbers onto the ticket.

“You’ve done this before,” Anna said, more a statement than a question.

“It’s not a way to get rich, but there have been times in the past when I’ve needed cash without a traceable trail. These will get run through the state lotto machines. As long as the numbers and the bar code on the ticket match the one in the machine, no one’s going to look too closely. The clerks are working for minimum wage, and the store owners all get compensated by the lotto anyway, so no one really cares. As long as the machine spits it back as a winner, that’s all that matters.”

“Clever,” Anna admitted, wishing she’d thought of it. She watched as Dade’s screen of numbers generated a bar code. He quickly transferred it onto the ticket face.

“They teach you that trick in the military?” Anna asked.

“No,” answered without looking up. “Juvie.”

Anna paused. “You’ve been in jail?”

“Juvie,” he corrected. “Whole different ball game. Record expunged when I was eighteen.”

“So what did you do to end up in juvie?”

He shrugged. “Truancy, vandalism. Usual rebellious teenager stuff, but I had to take it to extremes, you know?”

No, she didn’t. She didn’t know the first thing about “usual teenager” things. But she nodded anyway as she watched him hit a button that whirred the printer to life, spitting out a perfect copy of a winning lotto ticket.

He held it up to the light. “A little on the pale side, but it’ll do.” He turned to her. “Let’s go win the lottery.”

*   *   *

Anna waited in the car, listening to Lenny munch on dog chow in the backseat as she watched through the front window of the convenience store on the corner of 19th and Sanchez. Dade stood in line behind a young guy in droopy jeans, his fake winning ticket in hand. She stuck a fingernail in her mouth and chewed, a nervous habit she hadn’t indulged in in years. She wasn’t sure about this idea. Granted Dade had told her the ticket he’d made up was only worth a hundred dollars, hardly enough to hit anyone’s radar, but it was still stealing. From the government. Putting money back into that system would be trickier than taking it out. That is, if Dade really had any intention of ever paying it back.

She couldn’t get a handle on him. Clearly he was dangerous, well trained, not to be messed with. But he didn’t seem to have a temper or kill indiscriminately. In fact, she could almost understand why he did what he did. A killer with a social conscience, maybe? Yet, here he was stealing. And not for the first time, it sounded like.

So was he a good guy or a bad guy? Friend or foe?

She wasn’t sure. All she knew for certain was that she sorely wished she’d been able to grab ammo for her Glock from her duffel before they’d fled the motel last night. Riding around with a guy like Dade would feel a lot more comfortable if she were armed with more than one bullet.

Anna watched as the guy in the sagging jeans left the store, and Dade stepped up to the counter. He exchanged a few words with the clerk, handing over the forged ticket. The man took it, turned his back to Dade, inserting the ticket into a machine behind the counter.

Anna held her breath, waiting, ears straining for the sound of sirens coming to take him away.

Instead, the clerk stepped away from the machine, opened the cash register, and counted five twenty-dollar bills out into Dade’s hand. She watched Dade flash the guy a smile and thank him before exiting the store.

He jogged up to the car and slid into the drivers’ side.

“Got it?” Anna asked.

Dade nodded. “Piece of cake.”

Anna felt relief flood her system as Dade started the car, pulling back out of the lot and heading north toward Market.

“So where are we going now?” she asked.

Dade stared out the front window as he drove. “Shelli was clearly the leak in your life. The question is, who does she work for?”

Anna nodded. “Unfortunately, she knows we’re looking for her. And she’s probably deep in hiding by now. There’s no way we’re going to find her.”

“I agree. But the postcards in her place,” Dade said. “If the locations were meeting points of some sort, I’d be curious to know who she was meeting.”

“Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Coit Tower,” Anna repeated from memory.

Dade nodded. “I say we visit Coit Tower first. Least busy, most likely someone noticed her. Possibly noticed who she was meeting.”

“Agreed.”

Coit Tower sat atop Telegraph Hill looking over the eastern side of San Francisco. Dade found a spot to park on the street two blocks from the tower and got out of the car, surveying the area slowly. Anna did the same, scanning the street for anything out of the ordinary. No sign of Shelli’s jet black hair, no sign of the Roadster from the night before, no flash of silver muzzles pointed her way. Still, the solid length of her Glock at her side was reassuring.

As they approached the tower, the crowd was nothing like Pier 39 had been, though there were still a fair amount of people filtering in and out of the historical sight. A small circular building sat at the bottom of the architectural marvel, housing a gift shop. Dade approached the man behind the counter, asking if he’d seen anyone matching Shelli’s description lately. Unfortunately, the man only spoke broken English, shaking his head in the negative at Dade’s request. Dade bought tickets from the man for the both of them to ride to the top of the tower. Anna scanned the faces of each person enjoying the wall murals as they waited for the antique elevator ride to the top.

Coit Tower was built in 1933 by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a tomboy who had been saved as a child from a terrible fire by city firefighters. She had then dedicated her life to those same firefighters, often riding along in her petticoats on the engines. When she died, she commissioned the tower as a dedication to those who served in San Francisco.

At least, that was the history that the docent riding the elevator with them recited. It wasn’t until the doors opened and the crowd dispersed onto the viewing areas that Dade got a chance to question the woman alone about having seen Shelli. No, she hadn’t noticed anyone fitting the description—either with long red hair or short black hair. Dade thanked her, moving on to a security guard near the railing.

Anna wandered to one of the tall windows along the tower’s perimeter and stared out at the vast array of buildings before her. The City looked like a doll’s village, the tiny rooftops and miniature trees jutting up from sloping hillsides. She took a moment to take in the scenery, awed by the sheer volume of people packed so densely into one square of earth. The perfect place to hide.

“No one’s seen her,” Dade said, coming up behind her. “If this was a meet point, it must have been quick, because no one remembers Shelli. Let’s try another spot.”

As reluctant as she was to leave the moment of serenity, Anna knew he was right, following his lead as he turned back to the elevators.

Half an hour later they were parked at a garage on Beach, adjacent to Ghirardelli Square. Mingling scents of coffee and chocolate hit Anna’s nostrils as they approached the first gift shop. Again, Anna let Dade do the talking, questioning the woman behind the counter. No, she hadn’t seen Shelli either. Or if she had, Shelli’s face had blended in with the hundreds of visitors the square saw every day.

He did a repeat at the next two shops along the street, coming up with exactly the same answers.

Anna was about to give up hope when they stopped a street vendor selling popcorn. He was an older man, Italian, if Anna had to guess, with a weathered face and unnaturally dark hair from a box.

“Excuse me,” Dade said.

The man looked up. “Popcorn?”

Dade shook his head. “Actually, we were wondering if you’d seen a friend of ours come through here.” He gave the man a quick description of Shelli.

He squinted up at Dade, then shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t remember seeing her here today.”

“What about on a different day? Has she been through here at all recently?”

The man shrugged. “Sorry, I see a lot of faces. They don’t all stick, you know?”

Dade nodded. It had been a long shot anyway. “I understand.”

“Was she here the same day you were?” the man asked.

Dade paused. “Which day would that be?”

“Last week. I remember seeing you here then.”

Dade cocked his head to the side, then slowly said, “I wasn’t here last week.”

The guy shook his head, soft jowls wobbling on either side of his chin. “No, no. Of course not. But you,” he said, pointing at Anna. “You
were
here.”

CHAPTER 13

Dade spun on Anna. “When were you here?”

She could see whatever tentative bond of trust they’d forged rapidly disintegrating.

“No,” she quickly said, shaking her head vehemently from side to side for emphasis. “I’ve never been here before, and certainly not last week.”

The man looked from Dade to Anna. “I don’t wanna get in the middle of anything,” he said, “but I’m sure it was you.”

“When?” Anna asked. “When was I here?”

The man bit his lip. “’Bout three days ago, I’d say.”

“What did I do?”

The guy cocked his head at Anna.

“Humor me, okay?” she said. “When I was here before, what did I do?”

“I don’t know, shopped, ate. What do people do here?”

“Was she with someone else?” Dade asked.

The man shook his head. “Nope. Not as far as I saw.”

“No one met her here?” Dade asked.

Again, the man shook his head. “Not that I saw. She was alone as far as I could tell.”

“Exactly what did she … what did
I
do?” Anna asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “Walked around a bit. Stopped at the souvenir stand over there.” He pointed across the way at a store front filled with
I ♥ SAN FRANCISCO
T-shirts and postcards.

“Did she buy anything?”

He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to see the scene again. “Actually, yeah, she did. I think she bought a magazine. She sat on a bench over there by the coffee shop and read for a few minutes, then she left.”

Anna felt Dade straighten beside her. He caught on the same detail she did. The magazine.

The postcards hadn’t been telling Shelli where to meet someone, but to find something.

It would have been the easiest thing for whoever was controlling her puppet strings to write instructions somewhere in the margins of a magazine, then slip it into the back of the rack, leaving it for Shelli to buy and read later. Clerks were trained to watch for people shoplifting, but no one in the store would have noticed someone leaving a magazine behind.

“Do you still have the postcard?” Anna asked Dade.