Torrent (4 page)

“She’s gorgeous.” Simon sighed and gazed over my shoulder. Temi had opened her car door and sat with her legs crossed as she poked around on her phone.

“Yes, but that shouldn’t influence our business decisions.” I prodded him in the chest to reclaim his attention. “What if she were four feet tall, hunchbacked, and had breath like moose droppings?”

“If she drove a Jag, I’d still want to take her on. She obviously has some resources at her disposal. Maybe she’d finance the purchase of a new Dirt Viper.”

“If she’s desperate enough to want to work for us, I doubt she has funds left to finance anything, but I’m glad you don’t want to simply sleep with her—you’re planning ways to exploit her financially too.”

Simon’s shoulders drooped. “I… it’s not like
that
. I thought that practicality would appeal to
you
.”

“Uh huh. Listen, I have personal reasons for not taking her on.”

“Like what?”

“Like nothing I’m going into here.”

Skid Row’s
Youth Gone Wild
blasted from my pocket. It startled me, both because Simon had changed my ringtone without telling me—again—and because I’d been dreading a call. If those motorcycle riders on the hillside had written down my number and were using it…

“Are you going to answer it?” Simon asked.

“You think I should?”

“It could be a client.”

“It could be a psycho with a tool that can rip people’s heads off.” I glanced toward Temi, hoping she hadn’t heard that. She was politely ignoring our conversation, ostensibly at least.

“Here.” Simon held out his palm.

I dropped the phone into it without hesitation. My brave moments didn’t extend to talking to creeps on the phone.

“Rust and Relics, this is Simon,” he answered. “Yes. Yes. That’s right.”

“Who is it?” I mouthed.

“Let me give you to my assistant.” Simon gave me an arch look. “She’ll get your address and payment information.”

In other circumstances, I would have smacked him for calling me an assistant, but this time the tension flowed out of my body in a wave of release. A client. Clients were good.

Unless… What if it was the motorcycle people
pretending
to be a client?

Simon handed me the phone. I would rather have picked up a snake, but I lifted it gingerly to my ear.

“Hello?” I listened to the request and said, “Yes, we still have the antique coffee grinder. It’s in our warehouse in Phoenix.”

Simon rolled his eyes at the mention of a “warehouse.” What we had was a small, non-climate-controlled storage unit in South Tempe. We paid my old roommate Sarah to pack and ship items when we weren’t near town.

I entered the man’s credit card information into my payment-processing app. He lived in Maine and wanted the big hand-crank grinder to display in his family’s coffee shop. More importantly, he didn’t sound like someone harboring a barely-contained resentment for slashed tires.

As I ended the call and stuffed my phone back into my pocket, a roar from the highway drew my attention. Two black motorcycles came down the road. The riders wore black leather and black helmets, and one head turned in my direction as they passed. I couldn’t do anything more cogent than stare back. When they’d disappeared from sight, I glanced at Zelda, making sure the van wasn’t visible from the highway. Trees and leaves stood between it and the pavement, so I didn’t
think
the riders would have been able to see it, and they
shouldn’t
have been able to recognize me… I didn’t think. Unless more than coincidence had brought them to the same old mine shaft as us. What if they’d been following us since we arrived in town? What if—

A hand clamped onto my arm again. “That was them, wasn’t it?”

Before I could answer, Simon sprinted to the Jag. “You want to work with us?” he asked Temi. “We need a ride in something fast,
right
now.”

Temi shrugged and took out her keys.

“What?” I blurted. “We’re not going after them. What are you thinking?”

Simon had already hopped into the passenger seat. “They have my Dirt Viper!”

“Simon,” I called, running toward them, “it’s not worth getting hurt for.” Or killed. “We can write it off on our taxes and—”

“Go, go,” Simon barked to Temi. His urgency to get his metal detector back had made him forget his shyness.

Temi had started the car, though she looked back at me before putting it into gear. “Are you coming?”

I should have said no, but if the tech half of the business got himself killed, who would update the website? I climbed into the back seat, though not without a few choice insults for Simon’s stupid metal detector.

Like a prize thoroughbred, the car roared into motion. It startled a dog three campsites down, which roused every other dog in White Spar. A serenade of barks accompanied us to the exit. Temi didn’t pause at the stop sign; she merely tore out onto the highway, eliciting an irritated honk from a truck. It wouldn’t have hit us anyway, not at the speed Temi was going. From the back seat, I couldn’t tell if she was grinning, but I had a feeling she’d sped in this car before.

Simon pointed and shouted, “Pass those guys.”

Paying no attention to the solid double yellow line in the center of the road, Temi roared around three cars before veering back into our lane. I clutched the back of her seat, my fingers like talons. We were approaching town, and the speed limit had already dropped to thirty-five, but we were going seventy.

Was there some rule about not getting into a sports car with anyone crazier than oneself? If there wasn’t, there ought to be.

We passed four more cars before slowing for a light. I was half surprised she didn’t run it, but Simon was pointing again. Up ahead, beyond a few other cars, the two motorcycles had come into view. Metal detector thieves or not,
they
were obeying the speed limit.

I leaned forward between the seats. “What are you planning to do when we catch them?”

“I haven’t come up with a plan yet,” Simon admitted.

I groaned, flopped back into the seat, and pulled out my phone again.

“Who are you calling?” Simon asked.

“I’m texting Sarah.”

“About what?”

“Gonna relay that client’s shipping information to her,” I said. “If we get killed, I’d hate for some coffee shop owner in Maine to be forever wondering what happened to his order.”

Simon gave me his Coyote smirk. “Yeah, that’d be my biggest concern related to our deaths too.”

“Just… shut up and come up with your plan.”

CHAPTER 4

O
ur high-speed chase ended with us sitting in front of Cuppers, the Jag parked between a dented Toyota with plastic duct-taped over a missing window and a Volkswagen bug even older than our van. Lots of tourists visited Prescott, and some people from Phoenix had second homes up there, but I felt conspicuous in the fancy car anyway. Of course, that could have to do with the way we had roared around the corner and into the parking space, causing the collective eyebrow raising of numerous people sitting at outdoor tables, sipping their lattes.

The motorcycles were parked farther up the street in front of the Hotel Vendome. We’d arrived in time to watch the owners walk inside—rather Temi had watched them walk inside while Simon and I kept our heads down so they wouldn’t spot us.

“You didn’t see their faces?” I asked. She’d described them as tall, slender, and clad in black leather, but I’d already digested that much when they cruised by the campground. “They took off their helmets, didn’t they?”

“They did, but they were wearing black wool caps that covered most of their hair, and they didn’t turn this way so I could see their faces.”

“Black wool caps?” Simon crinkled his nose.

My reaction was similar. Sure, it got nippy at night there in the fall, but the afternoon sun beating down upon us had passersby wearing T-shirts.

“Yes,” Temi said.

“Both of them?” Simon asked. “That’s a weird fashion statement.”

I almost giggled when Temi gave a head-to-toe consideration of his messy hair, 80s T-shirt, torn jeans, and dust-covered socks and sandals. “Yes,” was all she said. She’d never been one for overt insults.

Simon didn’t notice the slight anyway. He must have been mulling over something, for he soon blurted, “Maybe they’re Vulcans.”

“Pardon?” Temi asked.

I covered my eyes with my hand but explained. “Aliens from
Star Trek
.”

“With pointed ears,” Simon added. “In the episodes where the away team traveled back in time or to a planet that wasn’t familiar with Vulcans, Mr. Spock would always wear hats or wool caps to hide his ears and eyebrows. The best episode was
City on the Edge of Forever
when Spock showed up on old Earth without a hat, and Kirk tried to explain his ears to the police by saying his head had been caught in a mechanical rice picker as a child.” Simon grinned in fond reverence for this memory.

I whispered, “You were closer to impressing Temi when you
weren’t
talking to her.”

Simon seemed to remember he was in the presence of a pretty girl and flushed over his geeky faux pas. Temi merely appeared amused.

“Uhm, were the Vulcans carrying anything?” Simon outlined the precise dimensions of his prized metal detector before I could tell him to stop calling the riders that.

I hadn’t noticed anything big enough to qualify strapped to their saddlebags, and Temi confirmed my suspicion. “They weren’t carrying anything.”

Simon sank back in the seat. “Damn, where is it?”

“Maybe they were done using it so they left it back by that mine,” I said.

“Mine?” Temi asked mildly, reminding me that we hadn’t filled her in on anything. She’d been a good sport to go tearing off after the motorcycles without any information.

“We can give you the details over d—dinner,” Simon said, his deflation from seconds before fading as he smiled hopefully at her.

“Can we figure out what we’re going to do here first? If anything? Because if not, I’m going to spend some of our client’s money on a mocha.” I waved toward the coffee shop.

“We were at the sheriff’s department for a couple of hours,” Simon said. “Maybe our Harley guys already came back to town and dropped off their purloined goods.”

“That’s a lot for them to have done, considering we left them with slashed tires.”

Temi’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t think your mother gave me all the details about this business of yours.”

“That’s a given,” I said. “This is kind of… extracurricular though.”

“As in we’re using our free time to try and get back the $5,000 piece of equipment those people stole,” Simon said.

“Are you sure it was them?”

“We weren’t exactly parked at the head of some popular hiking trail,” Simon said. “There wasn’t anyone else out there.”

Except the dead guy, I thought. “What do you want to do then, Simon? We might have been able to knock on the door and chat with them if you hadn’t stabbed their tires, but as it is, I don’t think it’s wise for us to get anywhere near them.”

“Why don’t we get coffee and sit at the outdoor tables until those two leave again?” Simon waved at the hotel. “They didn’t have any take-out bags with them, so they probably have to go out to get dinner. Once they’re gone, we’ll sneak up and look in their rooms.”

“That place doesn’t
have
many rooms,” I said. “We’d probably get questioned if we sauntered in. Besides, how would we search their rooms without a key? My archaeology classes didn’t even cover how to break into ancient tombs, much less modern hotel rooms.”

“Once it gets dark, we could climb up to the balcony and start looking in windows.”

Temi was following all of this, her elbow on the back of her seat, her thumb and forefinger making an L-shape to cup her jaw.

“This is
why
I don’t give my mother the details,” I told her.

“Do you regularly do illegal things?” she asked.

“No,” Simon said. “
We’re
not the villains here. We’re upright citizens.”

“For upright citizens, we have a lot of condiments in the van that we didn’t pay for.”

“How many times are you going to bring up that pepper shaker?” Simon asked.

“There’s mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup too.”

Since the conversation wasn’t going anywhere—and nobody was getting out so I could use either of the doors—I climbed over the side and headed for the coffee shop. Now that I’d been thinking of chocolate, I wanted a mocha whether we were staking out the hotel or not. A moment later, Temi and Simon followed me. We ordered our drinks, and I eyed the sandwiches and salads on the menu, but we had peanut butter and jelly and a bag of carrots back at the campsite. Why spend money eating out, when we had such a health mecca at our disposal?

We sat at an outdoor table near the sidewalk and positioned Temi so she could watch the Vendome. I still wasn’t sure if these people would recognize Simon or me, but Temi couldn’t have been anticipated. Every now and then, though, one of the coffee shop patrons would give her a curious look, as if wondering if she might be some familiar celebrity. Temi either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice.

“Someone in a black cap walked past a window,” she said.

“Oh?” I didn’t turn my head, though I was tempted.

“One of them pulled the shade down on the second-floor room at the front.” Temi nodded toward the brick wall on the side of the building.

“Good,” Simon said. “We know which room they’re staying in now.”

“And that they might be doing something they don’t want anyone to see,” I mused. “It won’t be fully dark for a couple of hours. No need to pull down the shades for the night.” Though I supposed they could be dealing with glare on the TV. Still… the sun shouldn’t be shining in that window. Maple trees bright with yellow leaves shaded the building.

“Cuppers closes in a half hour,” Simon said.

I sipped my mocha, determined to enjoy its smooth richness, even if we were on a stake out. “I doubt they’ll kick us off their front patio.”

“No, but it might look suspicious when we’re the only ones lurking here.”