by Jami Alden
A couple of months ago, Harold Van Weldt, the Chairman of Van Weldt jewelers, had hired Gemini to keep an eye on his black sheep niece, Alyssa Miles. Alyssa just happened to be one of the most popular tabloid targets of the last decade, so when Derek, who had been assigned to the job, discovered a plot to kill Alyssa and a blood diamond scandal that brought down the company, Gemini’s name had ended up all over the news.
Danny nodded. “That was mostly my brother Derek though.”
“And you were involved in the Kramer kidnapping case weren’t you?” Again, Danny nodded.
“I would have killed to get Jerry Kramer as a client, but he went with Morton and Foster,” Rachael sighed. “I know I could have gotten him a better deal.”
The way Danny saw it, Jerry got off pretty fuckin’ easy with the plea bargain he’d struck. Instead of spending the rest of his life in prison without parole, he would most likely be out in ten, maybe sooner with good behavior.
“We’re going to Postrio,” Rachael said as she turned right and headed up the block. “They serve a delightful steamed halibut. Quite a body count you’ve amassed in your latest cases,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Danny as he and Caroline followed her up the block.
Danny was getting whiplash from the rapid changes in subject. “Nothing like when I was in the Special Forces, ma’am,” he deadpanned.
Rachael gave a little sniff. “You better watch it with him, Caroline. This one’s dangerous.”
“You have no idea,” Caroline muttered.
Danny didn’t know what it was that made the hairs stiffen on the back of his neck and raise every sense to high alert. All he knew was that one second he was striding down the street to keep up with Rachael’s fast clip, and the next the air was charged with a current, everything in him screaming that something bad was about to go down.
The last time he’d had this feeling was in his last tour in Iraq, when he’d narrowly avoided getting blown in half with an IED. Paying attention then had saved his life. He wasn’t about to ignore it now.
The roar of an engine. Screaming pedestrians as a mammoth black SUV blew through the crosswalk.
He grabbed Caroline, ignoring her startled cry. “Get down, now!”
Heavy bass music boomed. Danny pushed Caroline into an open doorway, shoved her to the floor and covered her body with his own. Screams, gunshots, shattering glass. The squeal of tires followed by the engine’s fading roar.
Danny was aware of gasps, cries, panicked calls of “are you all right?” But they were drowned out by his keen focus on the woman under him. He could feel Caroline shaking, every sinew vibrating with fear. He pushed away and gripped her by the shoulders, frantic to make sure she was okay. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” he murmured over and over, running his hands over her, lifting her arms, straightening out her legs as he reassured himself that was true.
Her face was a mask of fear, her skin leached of color, lips blue and shaking. The only spot of color on her face was a bead of blood on her cheekbone. A shard of glass had hit her when the front window was shot out. He reached out to brush it away with his thumb and noticed his hand was shaking.
That single drop of blood shook him to his core and nausea rose in his throat, his reaction as bad as when he’d seen his friends shot in front of him.
Still acting on instinct, he pulled her to him, trying to infuse her with his warmth. She wound her arms around him and buried her face against his chest. He cupped the back of her head and buried his face against her hair, trying to slow his heartbeat as he felt hers pounding against his chest. He pulled her to her feet, his sole focus on getting her out of there, getting her someplace safe.
He shoved the emotion back. He needed to keep a clear head, keep his focus on the mission at hand.
“Call 911,” someone shouted. “People have been shot!”
Sirens were already sounding in the distance. Caroline pulled slightly away. “Where’s Rachael?” she asked, then uttered a sharp cry when she spotted the small blond figure crumpled on the sidewalk, lying in a rapidly growing pool of blood.
Danny uttered a curse and kept his arm tightly around Caroline’s shoulder as they hurried to where Rachael lay.
Caroline fell to her knees and called her name. Danny stayed her hand when she went to touch her. “Don’t.” Rachael had taken several shots to the chest. Her eyes were wide in shock, her face chalk white as a trickle of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth. He reached out, felt the faint flutter of a pulse. She was alive, but barely. He’d be surprised if she made it to the hospital.
“Oh my God,” Caroline looked up at him, her dark eyes frantic. “This was for me. I know it.”
Rachael Weller had made a lot of enemies in her career, defending everyone from mob types to drug dealers with close ties to international crime syndicates. The rapper she’d gotten off the day before was known to have gang ties, and his alleged victim was part of a rival group.
Still, he couldn’t brush off Caroline’s fears. James had been murdered and she’d received a threatening note just two days ago. Maybe someone was trying to silence Caroline before she found out the truth. An ambulance careened to a stop next to the curb, followed almost immediately by two police cars.
Danny’s arm tightened around Caroline. Any lingering indecision he had about helping her disappeared in an instant. If someone was out to get Caroline, Danny wasn’t stopping until he found out who. And why.
Kaylee flinched as the needle sank into the vein in the crook of her elbow. After spending a third day locked in the bedroom with her roommate, early this morning she was pulled out of bed by a short Mexican woman and led downstairs to a room off the kitchen. It looked like it used to be a pantry, but it was set up with a desk and chairs, and a metal filing cabinet. On the floor was a big blue cooler.
Kaylee was shoved into a chair, her arm pulled out to lay across the desk in front of her. Another woman held her arm down while the Mexican woman plunged the needle into her arm.
“What the fuck?” Kaylee yelled as two, then three vials were filled with crimson liquid.
“Hold still,” the first woman snapped in heavily accented English, “or we drug you again.”
Kaylee sat still for the moment, not wanting to risk being knocked out again. She needed all of her wits if she was going to find a way out of there.
“Okay you answer some questions now, okay?” The second woman said as she capped the vials of Kaylee’s blood and labeled them, just like you would if you were sending them off to a lab.
“What are you doing with those?” Kaylee asked, the creep factor ratcheting up another hundred notches as she watched the woman stash the vials in a cooler already filled with similar looking tubes.
The woman scowled, didn’t answer, and pulled out a clipboard. “When you have your last period?”
Kaylee wasn’t sure she heard right. “My what?”
“Period!” the woman shouted. “When you bleed last?”
Kaylee’s face flooded with heat. “A week ago.”
“You regular?” the woman asked.
Kaylee frowned in confusion.
The woman muttered and shook her head impatiently. “You bleed same time all the time. Regular?”
“Yeah.”
The woman marked something down on her clipboard and conversed with the other in rapid Spanish. Kaylee had only taken a couple years in high school, but she recognized at least one phrase. Una semana. One week.
One week till what?
“You ever be pregnant? Have abortion?”
“No.” She didn’t think her scare last spring, when she’d sweated her period a full two weeks before it came, really mattered. “Why do you care?”
No answer. The first woman slipped her paper off the clipboard and filed it in a big metal cabinet in the corner of the room, while the other motioned for Kaylee to get up. She stood from the table and did a quick look around, wondering if there was a way she could get past them. They were older,
heavyset, probably couldn’t move very fast. If Kaylee made a run for it she doubted they could catch her.
She was just about to make a break for it when the creepy yellow eyed guy who’d paid Ericka for her appeared in the doorway, flanked by two guys.
He gripped a short brunette girl by the arm. Around the same age as Kaylee, the girl would have been cute if she hadn’t looked like she was about to shit her pants in fear. He said something to one of the nurses, the Spanish too rapid for Kaylee to understand.
“Si, Senor Gates,” the woman replied, and went to retrieve another syringe.
“What’s going on?” the girl cried, her dark eyes beseeching Kaylee, as though she could help her. “What did they do to you? Do you—” her words cut off with a cry, the sharp smack of a hand on flesh filling the small room.
“You shut the fuck up,” the yellow eyed man said through clenched teeth. “You talk when I tell you to talk. Otherwise keep your mouth shut. That goes for you too,” he said, turning to Kaylee. She took an instinctive step back, her arms folding in front of her as he raked her with a cold, snakelike stare. He spoke to the women again in Spanish.
Una Semana, the women said again. One week.
Kaylee swallowed back the nausea bubbling in her throat. Something was going down in a week. But Kaylee didn’t plan to be there when it happened.
There were many ways to make money off a woman’s body, and in the course of his career, Gates had found every one.
His real name was Esteban Lucero, but he’d earned the nickname Gates because he was the gatekeeper to the West Coast. Drugs, girls, weapons—in the course of his career he’d risen in power until he controlled some aspect of the distribution channels. He kept his base in California’s capital city of Sacramento, where he’d emigrated from Venezuela when he was eight. From that central point he controlled access as far east as Vegas, as far south as San Diego, as far north as Seattle, and every major city in between.
The blonde was perfect for their purposes, he reflected as he watched a guard drag her back down the hall. Lately they’d been coming up short on the Caucasian girls. Too many girls in varying shades of brown and yellow coming over the borders and into the ports. The best were the Eastern European girls, as beautiful as they were desperate to escape their countries in hopes of a better situation in the states. But his last shipment had gotten fucked when that fucking Serb in Chicago had double-crossed him.
Gates would take care of him soon enough, but in the meantime they needed more white girls to fill the backlog of interest they already had. Taking American runaways wasn’t his favorite thing. They were more likely to have people looking for them, and there was always the risk of them spilling out their sob story to a John once they were turned out. Luckily most men who visited Gates’s girls in their various locations weren’t likely to risk their own necks going to the police on behalf of some whore. But just in case, Gates had those girls watched extra closely.
The blonde was a little young, with her long skinny legs and narrow hips, but she looked healthy enough to survive pregnancy and childbirth. Then once she’d crapped out a couple of babies, Gates would turn her out with the others. He’d get another five years out of her, easy.
He hadn’t set out to get into the adoption business. Rivers of money poured in from his existing businesses, and he hadn’t been looking to expand. Then one of his girls, a particularly beautiful Czech girl named Nadia had ended up knocked up. Gates’s girlfriend at the time, Rochelle, said she knew of a lawyer, some rich white guy in San Francisco, who had helped her friend find an adoptive family for her baby. Her friend had received thirty thousand dollars for her healthy, blue eyed baby boy.
Gates had contacted the lawyer, James Medford, and a new business venture was born. Gates had lots of girls, beautiful, young, healthy girls, with different types of looks. There were thousands of infertile couples willing to go to any lengths to get a child. Why make them endure a risky adoption process with some random woman who might pull out of the deal at the last minute? Or worse, deliver an unhealthy baby?
Medford could guarantee to his clients that not only would they receive the baby they so ardently desired, the baby would be healthy, and as an added bonus, he would make every effort to find a birth mother who resembled the adoptive parents.
Gates had put up the capital to build a facility to house the girls, and provide the kinds of medical equipment and capabilities they would need to monitor the girls’ health and fertility. It was a low volume, extremely high margin line of business, and had proven to be extremely lucrative to all parties involved. That slick weasel, Marshall, had gotten involved in the last year. Gates hadn’t been sure about him at first, the way he’d blackmailed his way into the business by threatening to expose Medford.
But Marshall was no problem—his greed and lack of morals made him easy to control. James was the one who grew a conscience and became a problem in the last year. When he’d threatened to expose the entire operation, Gates had had no choice but to have him killed. As for his widow, Gates wasn’t particularly worried about her, but his partners were determined to take her out. Gates was happy to help, in return for a price, of course.
Marshall had come up with a genius idea of how to take care of her and make it look like collateral damage.
His phone rang. Speak of the devil, it had to be his man confirming the hit was done.
“Bad news,” Reuben said.
Gates clenched his fist as he heard the wince in the man’s voice. “How bad.”
“We fucked up,” Reuben said bluntly. No use padding the truth. He knew as well as anyone that if he fucked up he better own up to it. The only thing Gates hated worse than a fuckup was a bullshitter. “We took out the lawyer, but we missed the target.”
Gates swore, ignoring Reuben’s hurried excuses and apologies. He despised incompetence. He’d have to think of an appropriate consequence for Reuben’s failure.
In the meantime, they would have to wait for another opportunity to take care of Caroline Medford. His partners were going to have to be patient a little longer.
CHAPTER 6
Gang related revenge shooting. That’s the motive the police ascribed to Rachael Weller’s murder. “I understand your concerns, Ms. Medford,” and by concerns, Detective Benson meant paranoia, Caroline knew, “but it seems very clear this is some kind of payback for her client’s acquittal earlier this week.”
No matter what she said, she couldn’t convince the police that those bullets had been meant for her, not Rachael. Caroline tried to block out the image of Rachael’s bloody, crumpled body. She’d never call Rachael a friend, and had occasionally raised an eyebrow at Rachael’s tactics and seeming lack of any sort of moral compass. But Rachael had been a force of nature, a woman whose presence and vibrancy smacked you in the face whether you liked it or not. To see that cut off so fast, so violently, shook Caroline to her core. And Rachael had been an ally, albeit a paid one, but as her circle of supporters rapidly dwindled Caroline had to take whatever she could get.
Even Caroline was forced to admit, if she stood back and looked at the evidence objectively, it stood to reason Rachael had been the victim of a gang-style hit. The drive-by in the black SUV was the same MO used by other members of the gang in previous hits.
As recently as the day before, Furious D’s alleged victim’s brother had all but threatened Rachael on the front page of The San Francisco Tribune.
Yet with all that evidence Caroline knew, knew down to her core that she was the one who was supposed to be dead on that sidewalk. Knew it like she knew James was into something deep, something bad enough to get them both killed, even though Caroline would be damned if she could figure out exactly what.
And no one believed her.
Except maybe Danny. After his initial response at the memorial service, even his attitude earlier that day, she would have never pegged him as one of her remaining allies. But without his almost supernatural sense that danger was c
oming and his superhuman reflexes, Caroline would be lying dead on that sidewalk next to Rachael.
Never in a million years did she imagine she’d be riding next to him, grateful for his presence as he navigated her car through the streets of her neighborhood. Despite any old bitterness, any bad blood between them, he hadn’t left her side for a second. And when she told the detective about the note she’d received—and thrown away—Danny looked at her with his steady gray gaze and promised he’d help her find out who was behind it.
“I can’t believe I threw away that goddamned note,” she said for the hundredth time.
“Maybe it’s still in your garbage,” Danny said.
“No, they collected yesterday. It’s in some landfill somewhere.”
“Have you kept the other notes?” he asked.
“Some,” she said. “I gave the first few to the police, for all the good that did. After that I stopped handing them over.” She slumped against the seat, exhausted after the skyrocketing adrenaline of fear followed by the grueling process of giving her statement to the police.
Not to mention the press, which had descended like a swarm of locusts. Danny turned the car down her street and she swallowed back a surge of nausea when she saw three different news vans blocking access to her driveway.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you past them.”
Danny parked her car around the corner, got out, and came around to open her door. He tucked her against his side and moved through the throng like a battering ram, using his bulk to move people aside as he barked, “No comment,” over and over. Caroline kept her head down and charged through the gauntlet, hiding her face against Danny’s chest as he propelled her up the front walkway, reporters dogging their every step.
Caroline hurriedly punched in the alarm code and they ducked inside. A local newswoman with a chin length helmet of brown hair tried to muscle her way inside. Danny planted a big hand in the center of her chest and pushed her back onto the steps. “No fucking comment.” The woman barely managed to get her hand out of the way before he slammed the door.
