“I know.” Quincy’s quick agreement was gratifying. Could she trust it? Who knew? Not for the first time in her life, Bianca was glad she didn’t have kids. “This isn’t me, it’s Sage. I’m smarter than that.”
“Good.” Her response felt anticlimactic. Giving up on the teachable moment concept, she followed up with the question she’d hoped it wasn’t going to be necessary to ask. “Who’s Francisca?”
“Sage’s girlfriend.”
“You said she was here illegally?”
Quincy nodded. “She came here from Mexico when she was ten with her mom and sister. Her mom works for a day care center. Her sister’s a year younger than me.”
“How old is Francisca?”
“Sixteen. She’s real pretty.” Quincy shot Bianca a look. “You think Snake and them’ll hurt her?”
“I hope not.” From her previous encounter with Snake, who’d called her a crazy bitch and ordered her to get out of his face before she’d surprised the hell out of him by putting him on the ground, Bianca wasn’t so sure.
“There’s Sage’s car!” Quincy leaned forward, gripping the dashboard and pointing out into the darkness blanketing the street. “Look! And there’s Sage!”
Sage’s car, a junker Chevy Malibu, was haphazardly shoehorned into a half-space in front of a fire hydrant, its back end jutting out of the line of vehicles parked along the street. Sage himself was pounding down the sidewalk past the last of the apartment buildings toward a section of shoebox-size one-story houses in tiny, weed-choked lots.
Brandishing a gun.
“Sage! Stop!” Quincy yelled to his brother. Since he yelled before he got the window rolled down, the shout’s impact was mostly limited to inside the car.
Wincing at the sudden explosion of sound practically in her ear, Bianca said, “Shh! You want to let the whole street know he’s here?”
Then she did Quincy one better: she stomped the gas so that the Acura shot past Sage, jerked the wheel as car and kid reached the driveway of the first house almost simultaneously, barreled in front of him and slammed on the brakes.
Thump. Sage hit the side of the car and bounced off. He windmilled backward before crashing onto the sidewalk on his ass.
“Sage!” Quincy had the window down now. “It’s me!”
“Stay inside the car and keep quiet,” Bianca barked at him as she slammed the car into park and jumped out. Forget not getting out in the open: she was going to do what she needed to do. Anyway, if somebody was following her around meaning to shoot her, it would have happened by now. She was almost sure. Sage took one look at her as she ran around the hood toward him and went scrambling after the gun, which had bounced from his grasp and lay some six feet away in the ankle-high grass.
“Oh, no. Not happening.” Bianca pounced on the gun just as Sage dived for it. It was close, but she came up with it.
“Give it back! It’s mine.” He grabbed at the weapon as she snatched it out of his reach. It was an old Colt .45 revolver, she saw at a glance. Revolvers in general and this model in particular were about as accurate as an elephant shooting spitballs. Which was to say, it might hit the broadside of a barn. Or it might not.
“You mean, it’s your mom’s.” She shoved it into her waistband at the small of her back. The twin beams of the Acura’s headlights speared up through the open carport attached to the house at the top of the yard they were in. All the windows were dark. Bianca devoutly hoped that the residents were sound sleepers. “Believe me, it’s the last thing you need.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sage sprang to his feet. Facing her, he went into a half crouch with what appeared to be the clear intention of tackling her for the gun. Like Quincy, he was wearing jeans and a hoodie, although his hoodie was black. Also like Quincy, he was skinny with a face that was all bony angles and dark eyes topped with buzzed black hair. Unlike Quincy, he was five-eight or so, and what meat there was on his bones looked like solid muscle. His expression said he’d sized her up, realized he was bigger than she was and was confident in his ability to physically wrest the gun away from her.
Nice that he was confident. Too bad that confidence was sadly misplaced.
“Somebody who’s trying to keep you from getting your idiot self killed,” Bianca said, at the same time as Quincy, now hanging head and shoulders out of the window, stage-whispered urgently, “It’s Miz Guardian. From the building. She’s gonna help us! She’s the pussy!”
Bianca did a mental face-palm.
“What?” Sage’s head swiveled toward Quincy, who nodded with so much enthusiasm that he almost fell out of the window. Sage gave her a quick once-over, his expression skeptical.
“No fucking way.”
“Way, I swear,” Quincy said.
“Get in the car,” Bianca said to Sage. She wasn’t quite talking through her teeth, but it was close. She was tired, she was on edge and she was not in the mood to put up with crap. Or with being saddled with a handle like the pussy. “Now. Or else I call the cops and your mother and call it a day.”
“Bloods got my girl,” Sage protested.
“She knows,” Quincy said.
“You told her?” The look Sage shot his little brother boded ill for his future well-being. “What’d you tell her?”
“Everything,” Bianca said before Quincy could reply. “And that would be because he’s the smart Pack brother. You’re in luck: I’m going to get your girlfriend back for you. Now get in the car before I decide I’ve got better things to do with my night.”
“Give me back my gun and I’ll get her myself,” Sage said.
“You don’t want to get in the car? Fine. No skin off my teeth. But I’m making the phone calls. And I’m keeping the gun.” Bianca started to walk back toward the driver’s door.
“You can’t keep it.” He followed her.
“Watch me.”
She sensed rather than saw him leap toward her. His obvious intent was to jerk the gun free of its place in her waistband. She whirled before he could reach her, caught his wrist while he was still in midair, gave a twist and sent him cartwheeling through space.
He landed on his back in the grass with a thud and a pained oomph, then lay there blinking bemusedly up at the night sky.
Quincy winced. “Oh man. I told you she’s the puss—”
He faltered under the force of Bianca’s basilisk stare.
“I mean g-g-guardian,” Quincy finished, wide-eyed. “Miz Guardian.”
“There you go,” Bianca said approvingly. To Sage she said, “You want my help, get in the car. You don’t, I’d be thinking up a good story for your mom and the cops.”
She walked around the hood and got back behind the wheel. The gun dug into her spine. Removing the revolver, she tucked it into the pocket on her door where it would be out of sight—and reach—of a hotheaded kid.
“Sage, come on,” Quincy urged as Bianca shifted into reverse.
“This is some bullshit,” Sage replied, but a moment later he slid into the backseat.
“Good call.” Bianca looked at him through the rearview mirror as the car rolled down the drive.
The look he gave her back was the opposite of warm and fuzzy.
Quincy said, “See? She can handle herself. And Snake.”
“With a gun, anybody can handle anybody,” Sage said.
“Guns are for show, brains are for pros,” Bianca said as the Acura backed out into the street.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means using a gun’s dumb. Guns get people killed. People like you and your girlfriend.” She shifted gears and drove in the direction Sage had been running. “Also, guns attract attention. You go in there and start shooting, they’re going to shoot back. The cops are going to come. If your girlfriend’s still in there and still alive at that point, which she probably won’t be, the cops will re
scue her, but they’ll also take her into custody and find out that she’s illegal, which is what you don’t want to have happen. If you’re still alive at that point, which you probably won’t be, and still on the premises, they’ll arrest you. If you run, they might not arrest you then, but they’ll be looking for you. You’ll be on their radar, which you don’t want to be, especially if you’re selling weed, which, by the way, is going to get you busted sooner or later. And if Snake or any of the other guys you shoot at in there are still alive, they’ll be looking for you, too. Believe me, there’s no good way this ends if you go in there with a gun.”
“How you think you’re gonna get Francisca out then? Them guys that got her are strapped up,” Sage said.
That meant heavily armed, Bianca knew.
“In a situation like this, you use your brain. First, you set your goals. Your goals are, you want your girlfriend out safely and you want Snake and his buddies to leave you and her alone in the future. So you ask yourself, how do I accomplish that? Then you make a plan.”
“So what’s the plan?”
Bianca shrugged.
Sage scoffed. “You don’t have one.”
“She has one,” Quincy said. “Don’t you?”
Actually, no. But she would come up with one. Easy peasy. Probably.
“Like I said, Quincy’s the smart one,” she said. Always tell the truth unless you can’t: it was one of the rules.
Quincy grinned. Sage made an inarticulate sound of disgust, then said, “You know what? I don’t have time for this shit. They told me I had one hour to bring them the dope I have left and the money I made selling it and the name of the guy who sold it to me. They said if I didn’t show, nobody’d ever see Francisca again. But I already spent the money, and I can’t give them the name of my dealer ’cause he’ll kill me and my whole family if I do, and even if I gave them everything they asked for I don’t trust them to keep their promise to let her go. So give me back my gun and let me do what I gotta do. I—”
“Hold it,” Bianca interrupted. “How much time is left before the hour they gave you is up?”
“About fifteen minutes. Look, if I can get the drop on them I might can get Francisca—”
Bianca stopped listening. She was too busy casing the area. Maybe two dozen houses were crammed together in a space that should have held half that number before another row of apartment buildings took over. The sickly glow of a porch light at one house and a couple of lighted windows at another provided the only illumination. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper all along the street. The headlights caught the gleaming eyes of a cat slinking toward a trio of garbage cans at the curb. Except for that, nothing stirred. It was, Bianca thought, a safe bet that most of the people inside the houses were asleep. It was an equally safe bet than any assassin that might be out looking for her wouldn’t be looking here.
She felt some of the tension knotting her muscles ease.
Sage was still talking. She interrupted again: time to cut to the chase. “Which house is your girlfriend in?”
“That one there.” Sage pointed to the one with the lighted windows, which made sense, because it was the only one that showed any indication that someone was awake inside. The one-story house was identical to all the others except for the maroon color of the vinyl siding. A small concrete slab leading to the front door served as a porch. Light shone through closed curtains covering the big, fifties-era plate-glass window that marked the living room. Light also showed through a second window, a small double-hung at the far end of the house closest to the apartment building next door. That window was covered by a pull-down shade and appeared to belong to a bedroom. The house was at the very end of the row, which was a good thing as far as ease of access was concerned.
Sage said, “See that Impala? That’s Snake’s car.” He pressed his face close to the window as they approached, looking out at the house. A newer-model Impala was parked in the driveway behind a battered-looking ice-cream truck, of all things. A moment later his tone changed, went high-pitched with incredulity. “Hey! You just gonna drive on past?”
That was said, obviously, as Bianca drove on past.
“Sit tight.” Just to be on the safe side she depressed the button that locked all the doors. The last thing she needed was for Sage to decide that now was the moment to try to be a hero, leap from the car and make some big commotion that would alert everyone in the vicinity, to say nothing of Snake and his gang, to their presence. “First thing to do is get the lay of the land.”
“You locked my door!”
Equally indignant, Quincy said, “She locked mine, too!”
“Live with it,” Bianca told them, and ignored the resultant curse from the backseat as she focused on the oddity of the ice-cream truck. “The Bloods are selling ice cream now?”
Sage snorted. “Yeah. Soft serve. Along with weed, hashish, blow, percs, whatever you want. That thing’s a rolling drug store. I guarantee you it’s kitted up, probably got machinery and everything.”
Bianca understood that to mean that it probably had all kinds of drug paraphernalia and equipment inside.
“Oh, yeah?” She momentarily entertained the idea of stealing the truck and trading it back for Francisca. There were problems with that solution, however: (1) arranging and making the trade would take time, and time was not on their side; (2) Snake et al would know who did it, meaning she would draw unwanted notice to herself; and (3) it did nothing to get the thugs who’d kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl off the street. Still, that truck might be something she could use—
“So you gonna do something or what?” Sage demanded, looking back as the house receded behind them.
“Depends. How many were in the car with Snake?” Bianca pulled into the parking lot of the apartment building next door, turned around and emerged onto the street again, heading back the way they had come. The good news was, in a neighborhood like this any security cameras that had ever been installed anywhere in the vicinity would have been destroyed long since, so nobody was taking her picture. The bad news was, short of Armageddon, the police weren’t rushing down here. And if the plan that was beginning to take shape in her mind was going to work, she was going to need the police.
After all, she was just one lonely super soldier. And, keeping the now-urgent need to maintain a low profile in mind, she really didn’t want people laying Snake et al’s takedown at her door.
Sage said, “Two.”
“Two plus Snake?”
“Yeah. Probably more in the house. That’s their trap house. A lot of people coming and going most of the time. You can bet they don’t leave it empty.”
A trap house was one that nobody really lived in; it was primarily used to sell and store large quantities of drugs. Armed guards could be expected to be present.
Her night just kept getting more and more fun.
Sage finished up with a suspicious, “What’d you mean, depends?”
Bianca scrutinized the house as they passed it again. “On you doing what I tell you.”
4
“What you tell—” Sage broke off to address a more immediate concern. “You’re not stopping this time either? Francisca’s in there, remember? I got—”
A glance in her rearview mirror told Bianca that he was looking at the dashboard clock.
“—twelve minutes to get her out,” he said.
“I hear you.”
“So do something.” Sage rolled onto his knees on the back seat to stare out the rear windshield as the house was left behind once again.
“She’s going to,” Quincy said, defending her. He looked at Bianca. “Right?”
Sage’s car was coming up on the left.
Bianca said, “Yes, I am, but both of you have to do something for me first.”
“What?” Sage whipped around to scowl at her as Bianca braked beside his car
.
“Go home,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t want the Bloods to think you had anything to do with what’s about to go down. Plus, I can’t do what I need to do if I’m worried about you two getting caught in the middle of it. Either you go home, right now, or I take you home and call the police and let them deal with rescuing your girlfriend. Your choice.”
“No!”
Quincy turned around in his seat to look at his brother. “We gotta do what she says.”
“You stay out of this! What’d you go running to her for anyway? How’d you even know who she is?”
“I’m the reason she beat up Snake in the first place. She was helping me. You know if you go back there by yourself Snake and them are gonna kill you, right? Mom’ll cry. And—I don’t want you to get killed.”
Bianca looked back to catch Sage’s reaction to Quincy’s words. Despite the glare he was directing at his little brother, she thought she could read a hint of uncertainty in the tension at the corners of his eyes and the thinning of his lips.
“I’ll get your girlfriend out of there in one piece, I promise,” she told Sage, her tone gentler than it had been until that moment. Call her a sucker for the whole sibling-bond thing, but their interaction touched her. “All you’re doing here is eating up time. Go home, wait for me in the parking garage, and I’ll bring her to you in twenty minutes tops. Okay?”
Sage looked at her with clear indecision.
“Ticktock,” Bianca said.
Quincy said, “Sage, please let’s go home. Please.”
Bianca said, “You can trust me.”
Sage’s eyes held hers. He let out a breath. “Shit. Okay.”
Quincy fist-pumped. “Yes!”
“You can just shut up,” Sage told him. “This is all your fault.”
“It is not! I’m saving the day!”
“You better hope so, you little—”
Bianca unlocked the doors. Sage and Quincy got out.
The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 4
