by Nico Rosso
She sneered, “Awesome,” and stood on the accelerator. Her passenger tugged his seat belt on and braced himself against the door frame. They zipped through the flat streets of the Dogpatch neighborhood, but she couldn’t shake the pursuers. “What’s your name?” she asked through a clenched jaw.
“Arash.” He continued to turn, tracking the other cars.
“Okay, Arash, in the side pocket of my bag at your feet is a transponder.” If this man was skilled enough to steal something from Eddie Shun, then he should be able to figure it out. Though he wasn’t so masterful that he got out of the warehouse undetected.
He pulled the bag into his lap and dived into the side. “Got it.” Holding the device up, he said, impressed, “These things are expensive.”
“Who says I bought it?” In fact, she had, from a third-party contact she had in the black market.
“Slick.” His gaze scanned her for a moment and she thought she detected a quick heat of attraction. It inspired an unexpected bloom of warmth across her chest. The two of them raced over the San Francisco streets and for the first time in a long time, she felt a little reckless. She shut it down immediately and focused on the road. Arash cooled, as well. He turned to the device in his hands. “You used this to get the Mercedes?” His thick fingers traced up the lead wire with the metal clip. “Picked up the key code from the CAN bus in the main computer.”
“Can you operate it?” There was no time to walk him through. The other cars were gaining, and she was going to run out of streets and wind up in the bay within a few blocks.
“Get me close.” He clicked over the device, and her quick glance told her he was setting it up to give the oncoming sedan a false key code. Like he’d read her mind.
“Ready?” She eased off the gas enough to allow the oncoming cars to close the gap.
“One second.” He continued to adjust the transponder.
Her composure threatened to crack. The cars were too close. Sweat chilled her arms. If any of those guards saw her, they’d know who she was. And if she screwed up this job, her chance to infiltrate Olesk’s crew would be ruined. “Time’s up.”
“I’m good.” Arash held up the device and looked out the back window. “Closer. We have to be within—”
“Three feet,” she finished for him. “I know.”
“Then put us in the sweet spot,” he clipped. One of the sports cars broke off from the formation to flank her. The other held tight to the closing sedan. She slowed, her heart racing, until the sedan nearly brushed her back bumper.
“Not yet!” she called out. Before Arash could question her, she yanked the steering wheel to the right and commanded, “Now!”
Arash hit the button as the sedan was swerving to adjust to her sudden move. The riding lights flashed on the sedan, then the car went dead. The sports car that had been next to it couldn’t get out of the way in time and jammed into the side of the sedan. Both the cars ground to a stop. Arash barked a harsh laugh of victory. “I have to get one of these.”
“Don’t steal mine.” She shared a glance with him, again shocked by the heat in the brief look. Was she turned on? No. Not by a criminal.
“Broadcasted key codes won’t work on the tuner.” He jammed the transceiver back into her bag. “Totally different security system.” One car remained on their trail. Her action with the sedan had slowed her down enough for it to keep a steady pace now. And it was gaining.
She sped through the streets, hugging corners and scanning ahead for anything she could use to stop the other car. Arash reached into his jacket and pulled out a dark metal object. Ice spiked through her nerves. “We don’t need a gun,” she growled. Whoever was chasing them was an employee of her father. While his businesses weren’t 100 percent legal, they also didn’t involve the kinds of crimes that hurt people. Like human trafficking.
To prove what she said, she navigated quickly into an alley and gained ground on the last car. Arash answered, “I’m not packing on this run.” He displayed the object in his hand, a heavy-duty flashlight. “But I can still punch back.” The passenger window glided down, blasting cold, briny air into the car. He leaned out the window and extended the flashlight back. Suddenly the alley behind her was filled with bright white strobing light.
The next street arrived and she steered hard to the left. The driver behind must’ve been dazzled by the strobe, because the sports car turned early and jammed its nose into the side of a building. Metal and plastic crunched. The last car was out of the race.
But she didn’t let off the speed until they’d slipped completely out of the neighborhood. Easing into the flow of the few cars on the road, she started to drive like a civilian. Arash rolled up the window and gave her an approving nod. “Nice wheel work.”
“Nice work riding shotgun.” It was way too easy to flirt with this man. This criminal.
Arash’s crooked smile disappeared into a thin line when he pulled out his buzzing phone. “Text from Olesk.” Her awareness sharpened. Nerves prickled. The first test was a success. What was next? Arash continued, “It’s the address where we’re to meet him.” His dark gaze stared ahead. His voice was low and serious. “We have two hours to get to Sacramento.”
The gravity of the message shook deep into her bones. The mission for Frontier Justice had started, and the only way to go was forward. Olesk and his crew were out there waiting, and she was headed right toward them with one of their own riding next to her.
She steered the car toward a highway, already past the point of no return.
Chapter Two
Arash’s hands itched without a steering wheel in them. His foot pressed against the floor of the Mercedes, even though there was no gas pedal beneath it. He always drove. Not that the woman in the driver’s seat couldn’t. She’d handled the machine like she was part of it.
His pulse was still racing, even though they’d long lost their pursuers and were on the dark highway to Sacramento. Damn, but it had been sexy to see her pretty lips curled into a sneer as she bared her teeth during the chase. Her dark eyes had somehow remained cool while she’d assessed the road ahead and the cars coming after them. The sleek angles of her black bob haircut fit her perfectly.
He hadn’t been thinking about any of this while Eddie Shun’s men were bearing down on them. But once they were in the clear, he’d been hit by the charged thrill of watching her drive and how they’d worked very well together. Too well.
“I didn’t get your name.” He couldn’t find many personal details looking at the Asian woman who seemed to be around his age. No jewelry. Her manicure was neutral. Even her black, military-style jacket was lacking any logos or brands.
“Stephanie.” She kept both her hands on the steering wheel, not offering one to shake.
“Good to be riding with you.” He leaned back in the seat but couldn’t get any calm to sink into his muscles. The car rocketed through the night, toward a fight he couldn’t wait to start, but he didn’t know how or when. He wasn’t driving. This badass woman was, he kept reminding himself, part of the gang he was going to destroy. It took some effort to keep his voice casual. “Been rolling with Olesk long?”
“First gig.” Her cautious gaze pierced Arash for a split second, then returned to the black highway.
The information resonated like a gunshot. He tried to use it to shape more of what he knew of Stephanie, but he couldn’t find enough pieces to bolt together. She could’ve been lying, but that would be found out as soon as they arrived at Olesk’s place. He examined the angles of telling her his own truth and couldn’t find any reason not to reveal just a little. “Mine, too.”
“Have you met Olesk?” This time when she assessed him there was a little surprise in her eyes.
“Nothing face-to-face.” Tension hummed in his spine, not knowing what he was going to do when he was finally in the same room with the man responsible for Marco
s’s death.
“So we’re both on the trial run.” She looked him over again, and he felt like she might have X-ray vision the way she took him apart. “What did they send you into the warehouse for?”
He took the piece of paper from his coat and unfolded it. “Shipping orders for today. From Eddie Shun, no less.”
She clicked her tongue, nodding, impressed. “You managed to do it.”
“And you got me out of there.” He put the paper away.
“We passed this test.”
So she was heading into the unknown, too. Her face was unreadable in the dash lights. “Olesk will be lucky to have you on the crew. Where’d you learn to push a V8 biturbo like that?”
“I went to private school with a bunch of rich kids.” A sly smile crossed her lips. “There were a lot of expensive cars to wreck.” She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “But their parents still never paid attention.” When she finally turned to him, it was to blink slowly with that smile still on her face. He saw the truth of her words within her nonchalant attitude. And something else, deeper in her look. What she’d seen, and lived, still dwelled in her. He found himself drawn to that depth, wanting to discover what it was she’d learned from her side of life.
“You picked a winner.” Before he stared at her too long, he snapped himself back to the moment and ran his hand over the dashboard.
“I’d cased it for a couple days and it hadn’t moved out of its parking spot.” She patted the steering wheel. “Machine like this needs to run.”
And Stephanie seemed like the perfect person to own the streets with the sleek beast. “And clean.” He opened the glove compartment and found only the normal paperwork. There wasn’t a fast-food napkin in sight. The floor mats in the back seat looked like they’d never been touched by the sole of a shoe. “Whoever’s car this is, she was...meticulous.”
“How do you know it was a woman?” she challenged.
“Perfume.” The dark spiced aroma had hit him once he’d been able to breathe easily after the chase. “It’s different from yours.”
“I’m not wearing any.”
“Your soap, then.” The cabin of the car suddenly seemed especially small. Intimate. Like he’d had his face close to the skin of her neck.
She rubbed her thumb along the side of her finger in a slow meditation, then abruptly stopped to grip the steering wheel. Her gaze remained forward. “Breaking and entering, theft, perfuming. What else can you do?”
“I can drive anything with wheels. Tear it down and build it back up again.” Was he bragging or flirting? “If it has a motor, I can make it sing.” Stick to bragging, he scolded himself. There was no room for a hookup with this woman in his plans for Olesk and Olesk’s crew.
“Bet you didn’t learn all that in private school.”
“I’ve been seriously in the grease since I was fifteen.” Marcos had been right next to him. Until addiction and the need for easy cash pulled Marcos away, leading him ultimately to Olesk. And his death.
“When I can afford one of these—” she tapped the gearshift “—I’ll call you to work on it.”
He laughed, again the car feeling smaller than before. The early-morning hour seemed to dress a heavy curtain around these moments with the mysterious Stephanie. “A ride this fine never comes into the shop where I wrench. Only mechanics with white coveralls and stainless-steel calipers are qualified to tune these machines.”
“So if we break down out here in the middle of nowhere, you couldn’t fix it?”
“Hell, yeah, I could.” As long as it wasn’t the computer brain. “I’ll bet you could, too.” He pulled the transceiver out of the side pocket of her bag. He’d only heard of these multithousand-dollar devices used to break into the most tech-heavy cars, and had never handled one. It was clearly made on someone’s bench, but it was solid and had already proven itself.
“I know my way around combustion.” Stephanie shrugged and ran a fingernail down the edge of her bob, straightening it along the side of her cheek.
Now he wanted to see her wiping her greasy hands on a rag while standing over a purring engine. His own heart started thumping at the rate of the fantasy pistons until he shoved the transceiver back into the bag and tried to erase the image from his head. “What other gear is in here? Police radio scrambler? Attack drone?” He hauled the bag into his lap.
“Changes of clothes.” She grabbed the bag and slid it into the back seat. “Private changes of clothes.”
The tenuous intimacy cooled. “So you knew we’d be road-tripping?” She’d said this was her first gig for Olesk, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t tighter with the man and his crew than Arash was.
She shook her head. “I prepared for a few possibilities.” Her eyes assessed him with some disappointment. “You didn’t.”
He straightened his jacket and crossed his arms. Flashlight, knife, multi-tool, the cell phone he’d set up specifically for contacting Olesk. Not much else. “I’ve been focused on other things.” Like how to get into the gang without anyone knowing he was really there to destroy it.
“Plan ahead.” Stephanie settled in her seat, still alert, but not driving like they were being chased.
He’d always sucked at chess. His father had tried to teach him a couple of times, but he’d always been better at the backgammon games with his mother. More chance. Thinking on the fly. But Stephanie was right. Olesk had to be smart to operate a crew for this long without getting caught. Arash had to be smarter. He gave her a small salute. “Eight moves ahead.” One hour until Sacramento. Two hours until sunrise. He had to be ready for Olesk and anything else. That meant not getting twisted up in an attraction with a woman getaway driver. It didn’t matter that they’d handled the trouble in San Francisco perfectly, like dancing to the same rhythm. Stephanie was still the enemy.
* * *
TWO HOURS DRIVING through the early morning in a “stolen” car with Arash had stripped the insulation from her defenses. The chase through San Francisco hadn’t rattled her as much as the cautious conversations they’d used to learn about each other. Not that either was revealing all their truths. She knew he was hiding as much of himself as she was, though he probably wasn’t working secretly for an underground vigilante group. But she kept having to remind herself that this man, who listened with interest when she spoke, was part of the evil she was tasked with defeating.
“The next right.” Arash’s low, gravelly voice was more suited to the bedroom. He’d navigated them off the highway and toward a generic Sacramento suburb. The light from his phone revealed weary eyes. He took a long breath and sat up straighter, rallying. More life shined in his expression as he scanned the area.
She reset her focus. A new day was about to begin. She was about to meet Olesk. Any mistakes she made now would be deadly.
The workday around them had started before the sun, with cars and trucks and vans already on the road. The neighborhood she turned into seemed like it was still sleeping. Lights off. Cars cold. She tried to predict which house was her target but couldn’t make any of them seem more criminal than another. Olesk was slick.
But not perfect. “I see it.” She aimed for a two-story house covered in taupe stucco. A pickup truck parked on the street in front of it had a wider stance than what rolled off the factory floor.
Arash chuckled. “You’re good.” He put his phone away. “Someone threw some spacers on their pickup wheels.”
“The only nonstock car on the block.” She slowed the Mercedes and turned into the driveway. As soon as they crossed the sidewalk, the garage door opened. A line of white light widened ahead, until the space inside the two-car garage was completely exposed. A sport-tuned compact import car took up one spot.
“I hope they have a real shop to work in.” Arash cocked his head with a disapproving frown.
She pulled in next to the cluttered workbenc
h, with only basic tools and a scattering of bottles of motor oil and detailing supplies. If Olesk and his crew were breaking down cars, they were doing it somewhere else. Nothing in the garage seemed illegal. Stacks of boxes, a rolling rack hanging with clothes covered in plastic. All perfectly normal to anyone who might be driving or walking past when the door was open.
The Mercedes purred to a stop and she shut it down. She didn’t have a moment to take a breath with the resting car before the garage door started closing behind her and Arash. He swung out of the car and faced a door at the back of the garage. She could see that the car ride hadn’t locked him up too much. His body was balanced, ready.
She took her time, collecting her bag from the back seat before getting out of her Mercedes one last time.
The door at the back of the garage opened. A tall white man in his thirties with shaggy blond hair filled the frame. His head was cocked to one side confidently, like he was looking at a piece of art he already understood. While his smile was friendly enough, if a little aloof, his eyes were hard. When he stepped down into the garage, Stephanie saw that a woman stood behind him. Blunt bangs dyed dark blue and a high black ponytail. This white woman in her late twenties didn’t move into the garage, but stared long, her mouth a thin line.
“Arash, Stephanie.” The man moved closer, hand extended. “Ronald Olesk.” Arash stepped to him and shook his hand. Stephanie did the same, happy it was just a brusque gesture, without a lingering touch. Olesk checked his watch. “Right on time.” His smile cooled. “Heard there was a little extra rubber laid on the ground.”
“We handled it.” Arash shrugged it off.
Stephanie tipped her chin up, not backing down from Olesk. “Just a little something to get the blood flowing.” The first step of her mission was in play. Now that she knew this location, she could start to put a target on Olesk’s back. But taking him down wouldn’t give her what she ultimately wanted. This deadly game wasn’t going to end quickly.
