The pain had overwhelmed my system, curling me into a ball of helplessness. All these broken bones, my entire chest felt like it had been placed into a crusher at a junkyard, rendering my ability to save myself almost moot. I couldn't even concentrate–
Breathe.
It hurt to breathe.
Hold on.
I wasn't holding anything except myself.
Concentrate.
Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. Not at this level of agony. Firebeetle nudged me and it felt like a kick. I hadn't even seen him coming, and I didn't notice him again except to see that he'd receded beyond point blank range, my vision narrowed to inches in front of my face.
The blood rushing through my ears was punctuated by distant shouting. Officer McGee was calling for backup, but I couldn't tell how far away he was, if he was requesting urgently because he'd heard what was going on in here, or if something else had prompted it.
I'd lost my knife. Didn't even know when, but it was gone. I had a gun – two guns, in fact – but couldn't reach them because it would require letting go of my body. It occurred to me that all this pain I was feeling was in spite of the Kevlar vest that wrapped my ribs. It had done little to protect me against the devastating attack, and now seemed to be pushing my broken ribs into my very lungs, sparking a feeling of flaming combustion in my chest.
I took a couple of bloody breaths, the coppery liquid spraying out of my lips and sliding down my chin. Firebeetle moved just beyond my vision, like a shadow. He paused, like he was lining up a kick, and I knew he was about to finish me–
Something almost pure white crashed into him, bolting out of the shadows. It sprang at Firebeetle, almost melding into him. There was movement, his pure darkness against the strange, unearthly moon-glow color.
I blinked, trying to ignore the pain. I thought I saw...
The white thing had him in powerful jaws, shaking him, the flaming eyes blurring into motion like a lantern in the distance being shaken by an ungainly walk.
There was a moment's pause, then Firebeetle was flung through the wall, and the thing – the giant, white thing – turned and stared at me with pale blue eyes.
It...
It was...
It only looked at me for a moment, then sprang through the hole that Firebeetle had left in the wall. I wanted to get up and give chase, but there was roughly no chance in hell I could catch it or Firebeetle. Not now. Not in this state.
“You all right?” someone shouted from behind me. I looked up, and McGee's face blurred in, eyes deep with concern, pistol in his hand and pointed at the giant hole in the wall.
“No,” I said, grunting out my answer. Hobbs was just behind him. “Did you see...?”
“We didn't see anything,” Hobbs said, taking up station covering the hole, and the door behind him, as McGee dropped to a knee to administer first aid to me. “But we did hear what sounded like a bulldozer rolling through here. Came as quick as we could.” He took one look at me, then quickly averted his eyes back to his watch. “Paramedics are on the way. Backup, too. You want us to stay or–”
“Do not go after that thing,” I said as McGee gently pried my hands from my side so he could lift my shirt and assess the wound. The horrified look on his face told me everything about what he saw. “I don't think bullets would do much against it.” I took a pained breath. “Against either of them.”
“You find the perp?” Hobbs asked as McGee just sat there, looking at my rib cage, clearly unsure what the hell to do.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I found him.” I thought about the thing I'd seen. “And...something else.” The thing that saved me.
The thing that no one would believe me about if I told them. Because hell, as beat up as I was, I half-believed I'd just seen a damned impossible ghost.
But...I did see it.
A white tiger. In the middle of a Baltimore slum.
And it had saved my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“You're concussed, you've got at least four broken ribs, maybe up to seven,” the paramedic, an excessively tall lady with a copper nameplate that read Stegenga, was telling me. “That's not counting whatever's wrong with your shoulder.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, flat on my back on a stretcher. “Just...park me here and give me a sec.”
They'd rolled me outside of the row house, which was now at least thirty percent more trashed than when I'd walked in the door of the place. I was unsure how that could decrease the property values. Maybe it didn't. Maybe my impromptu demo work would actually raise the valuation.
“You need to go to the hospital,” Stegenga said, parking me on the sidewalk. “You need–”
“There's nothing a hospital is going to do for me that my body won't do on its own in the next few hours,” I said, waving her off. I could tell by the sullen, resentful-bordering-on-furious look she was giving me that I was stepping on a big mood.
I didn't care. There was no point in me going to a hospital to roll around in agony in one of their beds when I could go home and do the same in my own.
Bilson edged up to the stretcher. “Ouch,” he said, looking me over, his tie loosened as his lone concession to hanging out in the worst part of Baltimore. Otherwise he looked like he'd just stepped out of a board meeting downtown. “I was beginning to worry. You're going to be okay, right? You can heal from this?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow morning I'll be right as rain.” I gave him a look, tasting the blood that now infused every drop of my saliva. “Still think I should smile more?” I forced a mirthless grin.
Bilson paled, almost stumbling away from me. I could imagine how I looked; crimson was coating my front teeth, seeping between each of them. “Maybe not...right now.” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got a thing that popped up that I need to deal with back in Washington. You got this?” He started to back away.
“Yeah, I'm good,” I said, dismissing him with a wave of the hand. I settled back on the stretcher like it was a Barcalounger poolside in the Caribbean. “You go deal with your thing. Whatever it is.”
“Great, see you tomorrow,” he said, “also, if you're not going to the hospital, you should probably go back inside. Or get out of sight. Because this is not a good look, and the press is starting to show up.”
“What?” I lifted my head up, but he was already gone by the time I'd fully processed what he said. “Oh.”
Very slowly, I rolled to my least injured side. My right shoulder did feel like hell, but a lower-grade hell, like maybe the second or third circle of Dante's Inferno.
The ribs, though...whew, boy. Those felt like absolute crap put in a bag, smashed with a broom handle, then lit on fire. If I keep describing them in comparison to fire, it's because the pain was the burning type that felt like it would never go out, no matter how much water I poured on it. Though a hot shower did sound like a great idea.
“So you just going to sit here on my stretcher all night?” Stegenga asked.
“Oh, don't be so sore about me not wanting to ride with you to the hospital,” I said, bracing myself on my side, trying not to bump the shoulder. “It's nothing personal, I just don't see the point.”
“The point is you're wounded,” she said with steadily rising outrage. “This is what we do with wounded people: they call us, we treat them, then we take them to the hospital where doctors fix them.”
“I have no interest in arguing with your outdated paradigm,” I said. “I'll heal on my own, like I always do. No doctor necessary. Give me a second and I'll get off your gurney and you can go on about your night.”
“Fantastic,” she said acidly, and wandered off out of my field of vision. “Stubborn ass,” I heard her mutter, not too far behind me. Clearly still watching in case I crashed.
I didn't bother to point out that I could hear her. All my energy was into getting upright, which I succeeded in doing on the third or fourth try, and after about ten minutes of steady effort. Another ten and I was able to drop to the ground. I even ma
naged to stay on my feet at that point, in spite of the excruciating agony.
Picking up my vest from where they'd put it beneath my head on the gurney, I hung it over my chest and then pulled my jacket back on over it. They'd cut my shirt off to check my ribs and chest, but arranging myself thus at least made me look...I don't know. Tactical chic, presumably, with my black vest acting like a tank top and my jacket covering the shoulders and my sides.
McGee had found my knife in the rubble and returned it to me. I hadn't lost either gun, fortunately, which meant that tonight's casualties were limited to my blouse and my pride, since I'd gotten my ass kicked and had to be wheeled out on a stretcher in full view of the Baltimore PD, the forensic FBI agents on the scene, and–
“Sienna!” someone shouted as a flash popped in my peripheral vision. I turned to look and sure enough, Bilson was right. The press had arrived, albeit in limited fashion. I counted two local TV stations complete with their cameras, as well as two photographers and a couple guys with cell phones filming. One of them was doing the shouting. “What are you up to, Sienna?” he shouted to me when he realized he had gotten my attention.
“Back on my usual bullshit,” I called back to him, heading in the opposite direction of the press. The street was cordoned off on either side, and they'd all filtered in on this one. Looking in the opposite direction, I saw a few gawkers but no cameras, which made it infinitely better for my egress.
Then I remembered, about thirty feet from the cordon: Bilson had been my ride to Baltimore.
I was stuck here.
“Shit,” I mumbled, fishing in the pocket of my jacket. It was covered in white plaster dust, and as I reached in with my fingers, which were slightly numb at the tips, I felt my stray hopes vanish as I brushed against two major pieces of plastic that were perpendicular to each other in the pocket.
Yeah, Firebeetle had smashed my phone in two when he'd collided with me. Examining the fragments as I stood in the middle of the darkened street, I groaned. No ride, no way to get one. I was going to have to prevail on one of the local FBI agents to give me a ride back to DC–
“Hey, Sienna!” Another shout, this one from the direction I'd been going before I'd stopped to find my phone had been annihilated. So there was press in that direction, too. And me stuck without a ride. “Remember me?” the voice asked.
I turned my head to look, and caught a glimpse of a woman standing there, dark hair and yoga pants the only things standing out as I stared at her. A closer look revealed a small smirk on her lips, and as I hobbled closer I realized that yeah, I did remember her, even down to her voice.
“If it isn't Michelle Cheong,” I said as I limped my way over to her. “My favorite yoga-pants-wearing Triad boss.”
“Pfft,” she said, tossing her jet hair over her shoulder with excessive theatricality. “Like you know a lot of those.”
“Only you, actually,” I said, limping a little closer. “What the hell are you doing in DC?”
“Isn't it obvious?” Her playful smile vanished in an instant, and she glanced around. There were only a couple other spectators – a homeless guy pushing a cart filled with crap, and a dude who looked like he'd stopped off while walking his dog, judging by the pretty little Labrador on a leash next to him. Once she was satisfied none of the professional press was listening in, she leaned closer to me, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I'm here looking for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“How'd you find me in Baltimore?” I asked, leaning against the seat of Michelle's rental car. She'd offered to give me a ride and, being more a beggar and less a chooser, I'd rolled with it. Ordering a rideshare without a phone, or asking the agents on scene to give me a lift was more humiliating, somehow, than taking one from New Orleans's premiere Triad boss.
She lifted her phone and wagged it. “Police scanner app. My flight got in this afternoon, but I didn't have a lead on where you were until I started getting the traffic out of Baltimore an hour or so ago. Anything about you tends to stand out.”
“Lucky me, being all notable,” I said, trying not to get blood on the seats of her rental car. “Well, now you've found me. Want to tell me why you came all this way?”
She looked me over. “Not right now. You look terrible. I don't imagine you'd absorb much of what I had to say.”
“Having my looks insulted by a lady whose fashion sense extends no higher than athleisure wear seems like it would really hurt,” I said. “Too bad for you I'm already laboring under several broken ribs and a busted-up shoulder. Your insult just fades into the background noise of that particular agony. Whoosh.”
“Yeah, anyway,” Michelle said. “Doesn't look like you've changed much since last we crossed paths.”
“I'm a slow learner on the whole changing thing,” I said. “Usually takes me a few months, maybe a year to really add or subtract something from my character.”
“And a lot of pain to speed the process along, I'd wager.” She seemed totally calm, neatly riposting anything I threw at her.
“Well, you're not wrong,” I said. “So...any chance you want to discuss the tiger in the room?”
Michelle's eyes moved back and forth, and her lips split slightly as she frowned. “I think the expression is 'elephant in the room.'”
“Yes,” I said, “that is the expression. But I am referring to the enormous white tiger that just saved my ass from getting pounded into jelly by a Chinese intelligence operative that I am currently referring to by the codename 'Firebeetle'–”
“That's cute.”
“He's not, I assure you,” I said. “Anyway...the tiger. The white tiger.”
She turned her head to look at me, blankly, then shrugged. “I know nothing about this. Sorry.”
“So it's a coincidence this tiger shows up at my crime scene,” I said, trying to marshal my thoughts together to make logical sense, “where no one knows I am, saves me, and then thirty minutes later you arrive? Total coincidence, y'think?”
“Well, it certainly sounds lucky for you about this tiger,” Michelle said, “but no, I don't know anything about it. You might be thinking too little of yourself if you believe I was the only one who could figure out you were at that particular crime scene, though.” Without looking down, she unlocked her phone and thumbed an app, then thrust it at me.
I took it and looked it over. It was a transcribed readout of police radio. I scrolled down through a patter of traffic that was familiar to me from my time in law enforcement. Countless calls for traffic stops, requests for backup, all the usual stuff that came through in the course of police doing their jobs on an average night.
It didn't take long to figure out, yep, my name was all over this thing. Spelled wrong in some cases by whatever autotranscription process had been applied, but there I was, “See in a kneel on,” which would be hard to deny was me, in spite of the autocorrect-on-meth nature of the spelling.
“All right, so maybe my movement wasn't so secret,” I said. “That's very disappointing to me and my mystique.”
“You're wearing a bulletproof vest and a bra under your jacket and that's it,” Michelle said, “Your mystique is long gone.”
“All right, so, question, possibly unrelated,” I said, “but is it a coincidence that you, Triad boss–”
“Former Triad boss.”
“Oh, well, excuse me, former Triad boss, which is, to my understanding, Chinese mafia–”
“That's an oversimplification.”
“Whatever, okay? Chinese organized crime. You were of them, yes?”
“Allegedly,” Michelle said. “Yes.”
“And you come looking for me on the day a big case with Chinese ties lands on my desk,” I said, watching her carefully. She wasn't much for showing reactions. I doubted you could be at the top of the New Orleans Triad and do so, especially as a woman in a historically dude-dominated field. “I'm not a believer in coincidence, even leaving aside the white tiger thing.”
Michelle kept a
tight grip on the wheel, but finally nodded, slowly. “I don't know about the tiger, but as to the other...no, it's not a coincidence.” She looked right at me, and here, I did see a very slight reaction, unmistakable, and shining through under the glint of the freeway lights passing overhead.
Pain.
“Because I heard about your case on the news, and I'm here to talk to you about other missing persons,” Michelle said, and she paused to bite her bottom lip. “And like your case, mine has the fingerprints of the Chinese government all over it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
No matter how much I prodded and pressed, Michelle shut me down after that little revelation, promising, “We'll talk about it tomorrow, when you're not looking quite as much like you just got scraped off the freeway.” I argued with her about this (not the fact that I looked like I'd been scraped off the freeway; that much was inarguable).
She left me at my apartment building, a five-story hipster and yuppie infested block in a refurbished part of town. There was no doorman, and I left a little blood on the elevator as I rode up to the top floor. Neither the building, the apartment, nor even this area of town had been my choice. Chalke's minions had found the place and rented it for me, committing me to a yearlong lease and forwarding me the bill. I would have thanked them (or given them a middle finger for the numerous deficiencies in all three of those criteria) but it seemed pointless, so I just started paying rent and unpacking my crap. The place was, to my way of thinking, not much better or worse than my apartment in New York. But at least it had the virtue of being bigger than that broom closet, though not by much.
Fortunately, my clash with Firebeetle hadn't destroyed my keys. I unlocked the door and hobbled in, trying not to stretch my injured side in the process. Locking the door, I dropped my keys on the table in the entryway, along with my wallet and knife, then started shedding shoes and clothes.
Blood had seeped into my boots, and not for the first time. They'd need to be laundered, and fortunately, I favored a brand that did well in the washing machine. There was not a chance in hell I was going to bend over in my current condition, though, so I just lifted each foot up behind me and untied them before kicking them loose in front of my laundry closet to deal with tomorrow.
Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37) Page 11
