by Sandra Moore
Jess had simply said, “I believe in you,” and dropped into the terrible, horrifying abyss Nikki had been too afraid to enter.
Nikki heard Jess’s voice now, echoing back to her over the years and miles as if the words had just been spoken.
Nikki never knew what demons, if any, might have haunted her best friend at the moment she descended. There’d just been that calm acceptance of Nikki’s words—her gift—and the decision to risk her life for them.
And less than an hour later, Jess had brought the girl, injured and dehydrated, out of the mine.
The girls. Mingxia and Yanmei.
As she lay flat, her face turned to the wall, Nikki slowly came to realize that her heart was beating more normally. Her breath no longer dragged at her throat like a desperate swimmer. Arms, legs, shoulders, neck: all relaxed.
Thank you, Jess, wherever you are. Stay safe.
Nikki reached forward, testing the walls and floor. Given the work done in this warehouse, it stood to reason that the ventilation system would connect all of the various areas of the building. Even an interior storeroom, where dangerous men might keep child slaves.
And if she could wriggle through the venting system, so could a ten-year-old and her little sister.
Nikki’s right hand abruptly went down. She slinked forward. Slightly fresher air brushed her cheek. The penlight clapped against her teeth, then she had it in her fist. Covering the penlight’s face with her free hand, she flicked the switch.
Her shading hand glowed red and thin streams of light escaped through her fingers. The vent shaft angled straight down, into the ceiling of a room below.
At least twelve feet beneath her, a bundle of old blankets lay rolled up on the floor. A tuft of black hair peeped out. No sound. No movement.
Nikki sniffed.
The burnt coffee still surrounded her, but was it the remnants of her own fear, or the echo of the girls’?
A bang below, and light crashed into the darkness. Nikki flicked off the flashlight. A man’s voice barked orders. The bundle shifted, and two, no, three little girls tumbled out of the ratty blankets. From the sounds of the crying that suddenly started, there were more. Maybe six or seven.
Nikki reached for the Smith & Wesson, twisted, tried not to bang the aluminum walls with her knees and elbows. By the time she’d contorted herself enough to draw it, the room was nearly empty. She couldn’t drop headfirst, and getting situated for a feet-first jump would waste precious time.
Outside, shots fired.
Johnny!
Had he seen the girls? Had he been seen?
Nikki clamped the penlight between her teeth. She shimmied backward a few inches, then paused when the vent creaked loud enough to be heard over the humming machinery at the warehouse’s far end. The voices came back into the room below her, sounding anxious, excited.
Screw it.
She hightailed it backward in a crashing rush, ignoring the pain in her knees and the banging of her elbows. Her heart pounded and her breath became short, sporadic, gasping. When her knees pounded the aluminum, the pong was so deafening it nearly brought tears to her eyes.
Then her feet fell into air and she didn’t care whether Johnny was still around to catch her or not—she needed out, now, to get her breath even if it was her last.
Strong hands grabbed her calves, then guided her thighs, caught her butt. She hit the ground hard, then scrambled to get up, pebbles grinding into her palms. Suddenly she had an iron band of a forearm around her waist and her back crushed to a hard chest where a gun butt gouged her.
“Be quiet,” Johnny said gruffly into her hair. “You sound like an elephant.”
“They were shooting!” she whispered back.
“At you?”
“They had some girls there.”
“Ours?”
“I couldn’t tell. Does it matter? Who are they shooting at out here?”
“I don’t know. Be still.”
Nikki leaned against him and tried to breathe. Cars roared to life from somewhere in front of the warehouse. Men, with guns drawn, ran past the shadows where Nikki and Johnny stood riveted together in a patch of shadow. Tires screamed as two Mercedeses made the corner and sped out the fence gate and through the parking lot.
“They’re all gathering to the northwest,” Johnny said as he released her. “It’s probably why you’re still alive.”
“They were taking the girls out.”
Cursing under his breath, Johnny pulled his gun from his shoulder holster. “Where were they headed?”
“I wasn’t watching the door and they didn’t throw that information out there for me in English, either.”
“Shit.”
“Come on.”
Nikki crept swiftly down the warehouse’s side shadows toward its forward bay doors. The fighting had circled out into the containers. Bullets pinged metal, ricocheted from concrete.
In the distance, Nikki recognized the deep rumble of a boat’s diesel engines.
“Oh, no. No.”
She ducked from shadow to fuel tank to barrel, weaving her way toward the sound of the boat. Each time she paused, she took precious seconds to smell the air.
Vanilla.
Mingxia . And if there was Mingxia, there was Yanmei.
Nikki broke from cover in a sprint. Shouts carried deep in the forest of containers; the Sun Yee On were still preoccupied.
She made for a small industrial crane standing awkwardly, like a one-legged heron, at the concrete bulkhead fronting the water. In seconds, she had flattened against its steel frame, unseen. Down the shoreline another hundred yards bobbed a huge speedboat, sleek and gleaming in a red-and-yellow flame pattern under the port’s lights. Two men were handing cargo down to other men in the boat. Three men stood guard, rifles ready in case the skirmish wandered too close.
A child in a green, filmy top squirmed in her captor’s arms.
Nikki reached for the 9 mm. Her hand flailed at the empty holster for a second before she realized she didn’t have the gun. Where had she lost it?
Forget the gun.
When Nikki started forward, Johnny’s arm caught her around the waist again.
“Don’t.”
“It’s Mingxia!”
“They’ll kill you. You won’t have a chance.”
She knew he was right. Even if they could charge in, guns blazing, she and Johnny would be running headlong to their deaths.
Still, she allowed herself the luxury of anger as the men on shore tossed the boat’s lines from the cleats. Johnny withdrew, pulling Nikki back with him to the safety of the crane’s immense shadows. The Sun Yee On soldiers turned and loped toward the action, whatever it was, faces alive and alight with eagerness for the fight.
When they’d passed, Nikki tugged herself from Johnny’s embrace to watch the wake left by the hell-painted speedboat carrying the girls—and her heart—far out of reach.
Chapter 14
N ikki, one arm clamped around Johnny’s waist, wished he’d drive faster. Not because they were pursuing the boat taking Mingxia and Yanmei away—that was impossible—but because she wanted to be away from the busyness and throngs and crush of the city.
The Ducati sport bike hummed along the wide, clean highway that led from Kowloon into a tunnel beneath Victoria Harbor. When they’d snuck back through the parking lot at the terminal and climbed aboard Johnny’s bike, he hadn’t had to tell her they weren’t going back to his flat. She could smell his anger in a flashflood of wet pennies, and she knew from his shadowed face that he needed space and silence. Like she did.
She placed her palm flat against Johnny’s abdomen. His T-shirt was as soft as Yanmei’s pink sweat-suit. Yanmei’s ribbon fluttered on her wrist.
The girls were gone.
Nikki gritted her teeth to stop her eyes from tearing. Johnny had contacts all over the place, she reminded herself. He’d figure out where the Sun Yee On had taken Mingxia and Yanmei. Maybe Inspector Lam would be will
ing to bend a rule for one of Master Wong’s charges, and go after the bastards who’d kidnapped the children.
Johnny slipstreamed past a line of double-decker buses as they emerged from beneath the harbor and into downtown. Nikki chanced a look behind and saw a single motorcyclist, with rider, pull around a colorfully painted tram. She wanted to ask Johnny if it was the Sun Yee On tail he expected, but didn’t want to disrupt his concentration. The wind from oncoming buses buffeted the bike. Johnny held it steady and Nikki let out the breath she was holding.
They kept riding, well past the area where Johnny’s tiny flat was located. The concrete, steel and glass buildings, relentless and towering, quickly gave way to shorter structures, and then they’d slipped out of the city into the cool, green lushness of countryside. On the bike, the temperature drop registered in chill bumps and a slight dampness on the skin.
Nikki thrust her face into the wind and inhaled.
Johnny’s anger over the girls’ loss was gone. Swept away by the crisp grass and dark earth, or simply faded from his mind and heart? All she could smell now was the woods surrounding them, and an occasional flash of oil and metal. And there—Johnny’s own scent.
She shivered and hunkered closer to his warm back. One of his hands came off the handlebars to clasp lightly over hers where it lay on his waist. His belt ground into her hip bone. She ignored the discomfort. Being close to a warm, strong human being—to Johnny—was worth it.
The bike chased after the few yards of road its headlamp illuminated. That’s what this mission to find Diviner had felt like from the start, Nikki thought. Only able to see this far in front of her and no more, with no hope of seeing anything more while a half-moon, satisfied with itself, cast a pale light over her shoulder. She wanted to see the end of the road, to read the book’s last page, to fast-forward to the credits.
But she was going to have to get used to waiting for the road to unfold. They’d get there, wherever they were going, with that single headlamp. Diviner’s container was on a slow boat to Singapore, and in a couple of days, she and Johnny would meet him at the port, take him into custody and contact Delphi.
And when Diviner was off their hands, she’d go after Mingxia and Yanmei.
She took a deep breath, this time to hold back a sob, and pressed her cheek into Johnny’s solid, comforting back.
They rode up, over darkly green hills, and then Johnny had to use both hands to guide the bike along a twisting ribbon of single-lane road. Nikki leaned with him on the tight turns. She spotted the glittering sea passing in and out of sight as the road wound up and around the hills that separated downtown from the destination Johnny sought.
Then they were slipping down the other side of the range, and ahead the lights of a small town gleamed against the water that surrounded it.
Johnny slowed the bike, then abruptly switched off the headlamp. He turned the Ducati into the woods and Nikki realized he was following a narrow walking path away from the road. Then he killed the engine and, turning, put his finger to his lips.
Nikki remained silent, only twisted so she could see the road. Johnny had brought them several yards into a dense forest, and in the dark she couldn’t see the road at all. Then light shuddered through the black and a motorcycle sped past.
When she started to move, Johnny shook his head.
A second motorcycle hummed by, then yet another high-whine sport bike. Three? The Sun Yee On had put three men on them?
Johnny motioned her off the bike. She quickly dismounted, as did he, and then he pushed the Ducati a little farther down the walking path. He turned the bike around to face the road and leaned it against a boulder. When he removed his helmet, she followed suit.
“Now we walk,” he said, and his voice sounded muffled and lost amid the stubby trees and hardy scrub.
He took her hand and they trekked silently along the dirt path. Nikki felt a fleeting fear—nice place to kill a woman because they’d never find the body—but it passed the moment the forest gave way to a stony outcropping.
Wind whistled up the long, steep slope. Beyond the cliff’s lip, the sea glistened, and Nikki could barely hear waves hushing themselves on the beach far below. Along a narrow spit of land, buildings outlined by their lights gleamed in the dark.
“It’s Stanley Village,” Johnny said. “Where the beautiful people live.”
His faintly disgusted tone made her smile despite herself. “Why did you want to come here?”
“It’s peaceful.”
She accepted that because it was true. The ever-present traffic noise was muffled by the trees and hills, and drowned out by the wind. Nikki closed her eyes. Here, she could easily do what Master Wong had wanted her to do in his dojo: be present. Thoughts that had cascaded through her mind back at the terminal—Where are the girls being taken? Who are the Sun Yee On fighting now? Is the fight about Diviner or just a turf war?—faded, leaving her mind and heart open to simply being, to listening.
She became aware of Johnny’s pain and loss spiraling around his body. The breeze shifted the fine hairs on her forearm. If she listened, she could hear small rustlings in the underbrush, as if chipmunks skittered.
“My father lived down there.”
Nikki’s eyes opened, but what she saw in her mind were the stripes and scars on Johnny’s back. The ones she’d leaned her cheek against minutes before.
“He was an ambitious man,” Johnny continued. “He hated waste and bad decisions. He told me often that he made a mistake marrying my mother when she got pregnant.”
“Pregnant with you.”
“Come, sit down.”
He gestured to a squarish boulder set back from the cliff’s edge. Nikki levered herself onto a roughly level spot. Johnny leaned back against the rock next to her. His face, profiled against the town’s lights, seemed chiseled from the cliff.
“When my father was about twelve, he went to work for the Fourteen-K, a triad based at that time out of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong.”
“What did he do for them?”
“Courier work, mostly, though he used to brag to me about being involved in human smuggling.”
Nikki instantly saw the dying Cuban girl, skin parched, her neck and chest crushed from being packed into the shrimper’s hold. “He did that as a boy?”
“Only until he moved into bigger and better things. By the time I was born, he was working in a foreign exchange service downtown.”
“Money laundering?”
“Partly. The business was as legitimate as a few bribed inspectors could make it. He climbed the corporate ladder quickly, which meant he had a great deal of influence in the underworld. Money and power were all he thought of.” Johnny was quiet for a moment, then added, “We shamed him, so he never told his employers about us.”
“Because your mother was a civilian? Not involved in a triad?”
Johnny shook his head. “It’s complicated.”
“You can explain it to me.”
“Look, the point is that my father wished he didn’t have a family. Sometimes such a wish is strong enough to be heard by the universe.”
He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, shoulders hunched as if against the wind swirling up against his back. “The Fourteen-K didn’t know about his family, but the Wo Shing Wo did. My father was very good at his job. When he took control of a heroin shipping route the Wo had been trying to secure, the Wo sent an assassin after his family.”
Nikki closed her eyes. The lights, so far away, were beginning to hurt.
“My mother was a good fighter. She had to be to live with my father. But the Wo killed her.” He paused. “They didn’t know they were doing my father a favor.”
“What did you do?”
Johnny’s head fell back to lean against the rock. His throat seemed somehow both strong and vulnerable. “I was thirteen. Old enough to kill a man.”
Nikki was suddenly awash, drowning, in parchment and tattered leather binding. Beneath the regr
et lay a dim shadow of pennies, as if the years between then and now had helped him accept what had happened to him, but not his own actions.
She wanted to touch his shoulder, to put her arms around him, but sensed that to do so was wrong. It would be trying to fix something that could never be fixed. What comfort could he take from her? Why would she think he would respond to anything she might give?
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she managed to say, and felt her own tears slip over her cheeks.
“It’s an old story.” He shoved away from the boulder where she sat. “You told me about your gift. It seemed fair to tell you about this.”
“Fat lot of good my nose did us tonight.”
“The circumstances were—”
“It shouldn’t have mattered.”
“You did what could be done. You didn’t fail.”
“The girls were right there!” Nikki clenched her teeth against the pain creeping into her throat. “I should have been able to tell they were there.”
“You should cut yourself some slack.”
“Why?”
Johnny’s hands lay heavy on her shoulders. “Because it does no good.” He shook her gently, his face close to hers. “Because whatever you think is wrong with you doesn’t define you.”
Nikki leaned her forehead against his and inhaled. Pine from the trees. His skin. Brine from the sea. She was tired. Physically, mentally. Tired of not being able to know him the way she knew other people, by the signposts of their scents.
“I can’t tell what you’re feeling,” she said in a small voice.
“Not ever?”
“A few things here and there. Regret when you talk about Regina Woo.”
Johnny raised his head so they no longer touched. “What does that smell like?”
“Like being in a library full of old books.”
He nodded slowly, as if considering what connection regret might have with moldy books.
Nikki could think of several: lost knowledge, the follies of humanity recorded long ago, forgotten love stories.
