Sleight of Hand (46 page)

Chapter 54

We plummeted down the side of the building. At the last minute Victor slowed the fall, converting all that rotor energy into speed and we raced away, close to the ground. He’d flown the best route to get away from anyone firing at us off the roof. Not the best route for my stress levels, but I’d take that over a bullet any day. The parking lot flashed beneath me, followed by an ornamental pond and lawns, before we eased up over some trees, slowed down and then sank towards the command center we had set up.

I let go and fell the last few feet onto soft grass. Victor landed twenty yards away. The scream of the turbine and thudding of the blades changed as the chopper started to windmill down. The adrenaline subsided, leaving me feeling drained. A medic came and knelt by me, but I waved him away as I heard the yelling.

“Amber! Shit! You crazy woman.” Victor hauled me to my feet. “You did it.”

“Right back atcha. We did it, Vic,” I yelled back at him. “You crazy bastard. We did it.”

Well outside the reach of the blades, we came together to jump and bump like a pair of hotshot wide receivers celebrating in the end zone. Given our size difference, there was only one way that was going to end. I ended up sprawled on the grass again, weak from laughter.

“You okay?” he said, suddenly worried as he saw the amount of blood covering me.

“I’m freaking A-okay, man.” I sat up. “Most of it’s not mine. I think.” I ripped the coveralls back and hauled off the Kevlar vest.

“Amber!”

Jen was running towards me. She skidded to a stop, unable to take those last few steps, unsure of my reaction.

Yes, she’d made a mistake and hurt me, but I had behaved like an ass. We both had some talking to do, but I had to be willing to listen. Part of the problem was that I was afraid of that, of where it might lead. And while I hesitated, the look in her eyes was like sandcastles crumbling before the sea.

“You have about a second to fix this,” said Tara inside my head.

I closed the gap and hugged her to me.

“I’m sorry Jen,” I whispered in her ear.

“No. No. It was my fault. I messed it up.”

I closed my eyes. It felt so good to hold her against me, to ease the pain I’d seen in her eyes. And it felt good for all sorts of other reasons. What about Alex? Oh gods, this was complicated.

“We need to talk, even more than before. But not now.”

She nodded jerkily, her face against my neck. Exactly what was I going to say to her? And Alex?

Victor gave me a thump on my shoulder and returned to the chopper to make sure everything was shut down and secured.

Jen leaned back and looked at me. “Please, honey, listen to me a minute. I’m not proud of the game I played with those jackets, but it stopped a long time ago. Believe me, I never thought of you like that. I know I should have said something. It just never seemed to be the right time.” She took a deep breath and visibly forced herself to go on. “I’m sorry. I want to make it like it was.”

“We can make it like it was, Jen.” I sighed.

Morales interrupted us. He came over, stumbling in pain and fighting off the attentions of the medical teams. He had gotten a comms unit from somewhere and was patched in to Edmunds. Troy and Verdoon were already on their way to the hospital, but Morales wasn’t ready to go yet.

I made him sit down at least, which got me some thanks from the medics. Jen and I sat by him while we followed the sounds of Edmunds and his team working their way through the building.

Whoever had closed down the central stairwell doors to trap us had also saved the other people in the building. Tucker’s men were all in the service stairs or on the roof and everyone else had left the building through the main client stairwell. A SWAT chopper was coming in now and the roof would be cleared very soon. The building was surrounded. Everything had been contained.

As the operation finished up, I took the comms from Morales and told Edmunds about Tucker and the two who had been on the fifth floor, the hit man and the guard.

“Correction,” said Edmunds. “Tucker’s COD looks to be self-administered gunshot to the head.” I nodded somberly. Tucker believed,
really
believed, what he’d been told by his fiancée. He must have come around from my attack and thought this was his magic way out. I wondered what forensics might turn up.

As I handed the comms set back, Morales took the opportunity to take my hand and squeeze it gently.

“Thank you, Amber,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to get out of there.” He glanced aside, almost shyly. “I’m sorry, at the last meeting with the colonel, that your news made me so uncomfortable. That was unfair of me. I should have known you better. Trusted you. Thank you again.”

I felt Jen stiffen in interest, but he didn’t elaborate.

“No problem, José.” I smiled a little. I must have been moving up in the world—first name terms with the police captain. “Can you brief us on what Verdoon was telling you?”

“Yeah, of course. Verdoon came to me as soon as he heard what happened on Friday night. He handles all the financial contributions to the police charities from Ms. Kingslund, so we meet regularly, know each other well. He’d been down in New Mexico over the weekend and he hadn’t seen the weekend news until early this morning. He called me as I was on my way in and I went to his house.”

“We can all be on first name terms, José,” Jen said. He nodded.

“I couldn’t understand exactly the hold Tucker had over Verdoon. It was to do with his daughter’s illness and I guess something weird was involved.” José raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded. “Anyway, he’d agreed to tie up all the cash assets of Kingslund Group. But then he caught up with the news about the ball. Well, he knew the position he would be in if Jen had been killed and he was certain it was Tucker behind the attack. That’s where we got to. I put in an urgent request for his daughter to be taken into protective custody. I was calling Jen from his house when Tucker’s men broke in and the rest of that you know.”

He pulled a piece of notepaper out of his pocket and passed it to Jen. “He said he’d kept your options open. The real financial agreements on all the cash assets are in encrypted files on his computer, and the money can be pulled out without penalty. This is the password.”

“That must be why the rates are so odd,” I said. “He put them in long term with an option for early retrieval. But all Tucker would see was Jen’s purchasing power tied up.”

“So Tucker’s been funding Beacon secretly from his criminal organization,” Jen said. “And when Amber broke up their Crate & Freight smuggling operation, that put him in such a bad position his only way out was to kill me and take over my company by making Verdoon sign it over.”

“Kidnapping Troy was just his first attempt to try and get you to sell,” I said. “When the drugs were seized, his options came down to killing you or losing everything to Matlal.”

The comms unit squawked and I could hear Edmunds saying the building was secured.

“Edmunds is good,” I said to José. “He’s seemed more than willing to go the extra distance on trust.”

José smiled. “You wouldn’t have recognized him under the helmet, but he led the SWAT team last year.”

“Emily Schumacher?” I said, and José nodded.

The medics had left us alone for a few minutes, and he leaned over, wincing with pain.

“Look, I’d really appreciate a full report from you, but you probably want to get out of here right now.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve lost sight of you in the confusion. I’d give it another ten minutes and the FBI are going to be all over this place.”

I’d gotten all relaxed in the glow of a successful mission and that woke me up. He was right, I didn’t want to talk to the FBI right now. I had a feeling that when I did, I’d be their guest for a while.

“I’m gone,” I said. “I’ll send you a report.”

Jen walked with me to my car.

“Thanks for the loan of the chopper,” I said awkwardly. “I’m sorry about the bullet holes.”

“I don’t care about the helicopter. I care that you got Troy and José and Bernard back. Most of all, I care that you came back,” she said, blinking. “I realize I have to rebuild. But I mean it when I say your suite at Manassah is there, always.”

“Jen, we’ll work it out.” I opened my arms and she flowed in like she was meant to be there. “I have some stuff to do now. ‘Weird’ stuff. I don’t know exactly when I’ll get back. There are things going on this week, but I promise, I swear, we’ll talk after that. I’ll answer any questions you ask.”
And risk losing you.

We parted and I drove off before the FBI could grab me.

I’d cracked Jen’s case. Tucker was dead, Jen had her company back under control, Troy was safe, the Weres would leave her alone and, between Morales and the FBI, ZK was finished. True, Frank Hoben was still out there and I would sleep easier when he was caught. But he was more my problem than Jen’s and I had no illusions as to who was the bigger threat between him and Matlal.

Somehow, I had to get back to earning money doing everyday investigations. Sigh.

On a personal level, I had to find out what it meant to balance my spirits, what that would make me, and why I was none of the things they would say I was. I had to work out what it meant to be Mistress of my own Athanate House, including getting David through crusis. And, in the long term, I had to figure out how to get Diana in front of the president.

But I knew, long before that, things would come to a head with Matlal at the Athanate Assembly. And it would get bloody.

I wasn’t, yet, what I might become. What I had feared, I no longer fought.

It had been a couple more weeks, and I was still neither dead, nor undead, which I still ranked as an achievement.

I’d be happy if I could say the same in a week’s time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For a supposedly lonely profession, you sure need a lot of help to write a book.

The Totally Barkin crew; for shouting encouragement from the sidelines, and Stella and Shelley for coaching us.

The cover image team; Claire Curtis, Ian Wilson and Maria Askew.

My major feedback readers; Jessica, Gail, Peter and Patricia. Also Sue, Ann and Steve.

My editor; Lauren Sweet, the lady of the samovar and the eagle eyes.

And, without which nothing, my wife and family.

Patricia La Barbera :
www.PatriciaLaBarbera.com
– author, editor

Ian Wilson :
www.WeAreMash.com
– branding, marketing

Lauren Sweet :
www.LaurenSweet.com
– author, editor

Maria Askew :
www.MariaAskew.co.uk
– actor, model

Claire Curtis :
www.ClaireCurtis.co.uk
– cover art

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