by Rachel Caine
“Maybe he doesn’t want to be seen,” Lucia said. Which was logical, and Jazz wished she hadn’t opened her mouth. She sucked on diet cola and glanced at the side mirrors again. Nothing sinister going on anywhere that she could see.
Pink Cardigan went back for the third box. Click. “Watch out for lens flash,” Jazz said.
Lucia threw her an irritated look. “I’m not a novice,” she said. “Relax.”
That really wasn’t possible, because this was feeling really wrong. Not that there was anything obviously strange going on…another bright shiny day in suburbia…but Jazz felt tension creeping up her spine and into her shoulders.
Pink Cardigan was getting red in the face, hauling boxes. She was working on the fifth one now, looking harassed. If what she was doing was illegal, she was pretty unconcerned about it. Of course, that was the secret to getting away with it, not being furtive. Still, this was a little too blatant, wasn’t it? Out in the open, at her own house, personally loading up the shiny black obvious van?
Didn’t make sense.
Click. Lucia ran off another photo. Jazz was willing to bet they all looked pretty much the same.
“What are we looking at?” Jazz asked.
“Good question,” Lucia answered. “I have no idea. She’s a neat person, conservative dresser—I’d put the outfit she’s got on at high-end department store—and there aren’t any markings on the boxes. Plain brown cardboard and tape. Everything sealed up, like for shipping. I don’t know.”
“Drugs?”
“Not like any drug shipment I’ve ever seen. Way too obvious. And look at the number of boxes stacked in there. She’d be a Colombian drug lord, with that inventory. And the lack of security…”
Jazz’s cell phone rang, caller unknown. When she answered, it was Manny.
“Jazz,” he blurted before she could say a word. “That picture? Her name’s Sally Collins. She’s a single mother, one daughter, Julia, fourteen. No criminal record, not even a speeding ticket in the last ten years. Normal debts. She co-owns a ceramics shop.”
“Thanks, Manny….” He’d already hung up.
She relayed the information to Lucia.
“Ceramics,” Lucia said. “Could be what’s in the boxes.”
“Ceramics with drugs?”
“It’s a stretch,” Lucia admitted.
“Yeah.” Jazz chewed her lip. “So what do we do?”
“Take pictures,” Lucia answered. “Until it’s done.”
Pragmatic, but not satisfying. Jazz sipped cola and scanned the mirrors again. Still, all quiet on the neighborhood front. It was positively Mayberry out there.
Pink Cardigan carried a total of ten boxes out. When she had the tenth one stacked in the van to her satisfaction, she closed the rear doors and walked around to the driver’s side again. A short conversation ensued.
“Parabolic mike,” Lucia said softly.
“On the shopping list,” Jazz agreed. “We definitely need more toys.”
The black van reversed out onto the street. Lucia leaned over, angling for a driver’s side shot, but the windows were tinted and rolled up tight.
It pulled away and made a left turn out of sight.
Jazz turned back to the house. Pink Cardigan was standing there, arms folded, staring down at her shoes. Frowning.
Lucia took another picture.
In between one breath and another, everything changed.
An engine growled behind them, and Jazz’s eyes flew to the side mirror. An electric blue car was turning the corner—a big thing, probably dating back to the seventies, square and solid and shining with chrome.
Pink Cardigan looked up, alarmed, saw the car and backed up.
Lucia swore, and dropped the camera to reach for her gun. Jazz was already going for hers, as well. The car glided nearly silently down the street, casual as a shark heading for a plump baby seal.
The car slowed even more. The kids in the yard played on, oblivious…and then, suddenly, it lurched into motion with a squeal of tires. Accelerating fast.
“Down!” Lucia yelled at Jazz and aimed across her. Jazz grabbed the handle that controlled the car seat and yanked it up, gasping as her seat slammed into full recline and she dropped hard with it. Gut-shot abdominal muscles complained with a hot, dizzying flash. She was staring up at Lucia, who was leaning over her, gun extended in firing position and braced with her left hand. Steady as a rock.
She didn’t fire. The muzzle of the gun tracked smoothly in an arc.
Jazz heard a world-shaking rumble, saw a shadow flash over Lucia’s face, and then the blue car was past them and still accelerating. No gunfire.
Jazz grabbed the dashboard and pulled herself back upright, ratcheting the seat to a straight position. Lucia slowly relaxed, both hands still on the gun, staring at Pink Cardigan.
The blue car swerved left at the corner, taking the same route as the black van.
“What the hell was that?” Jazz blurted, and turned to look at Pink Cardigan, who was staring at the car intently, but not as if she recognized it. She turned and went back into her house, slamming the door shut behind her with such violence that it echoed like the gunshots that hadn’t been fired. After a few minutes, the garage door cranked down, as well, and rattled shut with a hollow boom.
“I don’t know,” Lucia admitted. She still looked pale, breathing fast. Jazz related. She was about to pass out from the rush of adrenaline. “I thought they were going to kill her.”
“What stopped them?”
“Us,” Lucia said. “They saw us and kept driving. I think we just saved her life.”
“Without firing a shot? Excellent. I really don’t want to talk to Stewart twice in one day.” Jazz sounded steady and cheerful; she didn’t feel that way. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck, soaked her shirt. She needed to pee. Badly. Straight-up fighting she could take. This battle-of-nerves thing, not so much. “Man. That was…”
“Weird?” Lucia supplied. “Yeah.” She finally realized she was still holding the gun and put it away. “Sorry. I should have gotten the plate number.”
“One-six-four HCX,” Jazz said automatically. “That’s not the weird thing.”
She had Lucia’s full attention.
“The weird thing is that the license plate was black with yellow letters,” she continued. “Missouri plates, all right, but Missouri hasn’t issued that style since 1978.”
Lucia was outright staring at her. Big eyed. “You know the state license-plate colors by year?”
“Yeah.” Jazz shrugged. “Useful knowledge.”
“Just for Missouri, right?”
“If I say no, will you think I’m weird?”
That got an outright blink. Lucia, the calm and unsurprised, was finally thrown for a loop.
Jazz smiled, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a steno pad. She wrote down the plate number and details about the plate itself.
“So what does that mean? About the plate?” Lucia asked finally.
“Means they probably pulled it off a junker at an auto graveyard,” she said. “Although it fits the age of that car.”
She flipped open her cell phone and hit the fourth speed dial on the list. She got an answer on the second ring, as always.
“Hey, Gaz,” she said. “Run a plate for an old friend?”
“Don’t think so,” he replied. Gary Gailbraith was an old friend, and he’d never answered that way before. He sounded guarded. “Things are kind of busy right now. Can’t really talk.”
Oh, crap. “Has Stewart been on your ass?”
“Positively up it,” Gaz said. He was an older cop, white haired, with a broad face and a whiskey-drinker’s blush across his nose and cheeks. He always seemed vacant to most of the other detectives, but that was a deliberate cultivation on his part. He was sharp as a tack, was Gaz, just not in any obvious ways. He never competed. And he didn’t play politics, more than he had to in order to get the job done. “I think I need a pro
ctologist.”
She grinned. “Okay. Call me when the heat’s off, right?”
“Right,” he replied. “Take care.”
“You, too.” She hung up. Lucia raised eyebrows at her. “You got any local contacts to do a plate check?”
“Local? No. The sources I have work at, ah, higher levels. And using them might raise a red flag.”
“Kind of what I figured,” Jazz nodded. “Okay, we do it the hard way.”
“Meaning?”
Lucia started the car. She reached down, retrieved the fallen digital camera and handed it to Jazz, who thumbed quickly through the pictures. Too bad they hadn’t gotten a shot of the blue car, but Jazz had a pretty vivid mental image, and she was sure Lucia did, too.
“Meaning,” Jazz said, staring at Pink Cardigan’s picture, “we go see Manny again.”
Lucia groaned softly, and put the car in gear.
Convincing Manny to track a plate for her was just about the toughest thing Jazz had ever done, considering she was doing it with a leaking bullet wound in her side, a massive throbbing headache, and an adrenaline-rush aftermath that made her feel like roadkill. Manny eventually figured out that she wasn’t operating at her usual levels and decided to take it easy on her, having exacted only a few dozen promises that he wouldn’t be put on any hit lists or have shape-changing aliens showing up at his door.
“I swear,” Jazz groaned as she flipped the cell phone closed, “I’m personally going over there to set up parental controls to keep him from ever watching The X-Files again.”
“Probably wouldn’t do any good,” Lucia said, pokerfaced. “I think I spotted DVD collections.”
“Crap.”
Lucia pulled the car into a space near the apartment stairs, killed the low beams, and reached up to flip the overhead dome light off. When Jazz reached for the door handle, Lucia stopped her. “Wait,” she said.
“For?”
“My eyes to adjust,” Lucia said calmly. “I want to be able to see the shadows before you decide to present another target.”
“You know, I think you and Manny might be a match made in heaven.”
“Another crack like that, and I catch the next puddle jumper out of here.”
Still, Lucia was right; Jazz would have thought of it herself, been more cautious if she hadn’t been so tired and hurting. She sat in silence, watching the shadows as her eyes adjusted; nothing she could see waiting out there. Parked cars were always a worry, but there wasn’t much she could do about them.
“Okay.” Lucia finally nodded. “No deviations. Straight up the stairs, fast as you can. I’ll be behind you.”
Jazz didn’t waste breath on agreeing, just ducked out, kept her head down and took the steps as quickly as possible. Which was agonizingly slowly, actually, given the crappy state of her body. She was gasping and feeling a little sick by the time she achieved the top landing. Behind her, Lucia, lingering down at the bottom, watching the parking lot, turned and soundlessly came up, three steps at a bound.
Jazz felt tired just watching her.
She slipped her key into the first dead bolt, then the second, and reached for the doorknob.
It didn’t turn in her hands.
Jazz backed up, fast, breath short again. She planted her back squarely against the wall, eyes wide, and nodded Lucia silently back to the far side, out of the line of fire.
What? Lucia mouthed. Her gun was out, fast as a magic trick. Jazz fumbled her own out, but didn’t like the way her hand was shaking. I’ll probably shoot myself. Again.
Jazz pointed at the doorknob. Locked, she mouthed. Shouldn’t be.
Lucia nodded in understanding. Jazz habitually shot dead bolts, but never bothered with the relatively nuisance-value lock on the knob. They could be overcome by a bright ten-year-old with a hairpin, much less anybody serious about breaking and entering. Lucia held out her free hand. Jazz tossed the keys underhand to her, watched as she neatly—and nearly silently—fielded them, and then stepped up to slot the key neatly into the last lock.
No hail of gunfire. Jazz held her breath as the door swung wider onto darkness. Something moved inside, and her heart lurched, but it was only a bushy gray ghost of a cat stepping cautiously over the threshold. Mooch. She resisted the urge to dive over and grab him, and let him prance his slow way past her and down the stairs. He gave her a curious look and a rumble of a purr as he passed, but he was embarked on serious business.
Lucia moved fast and low, and entered the apartment. Jazz waited. She’d be crap as backup right now, and she knew it. Plus, crouching was pretty much out of the question.
Silent moments passed, and then lights blazed on in the hallway and spilled out in a golden syrupy glow over the concrete and Jazz’s shoes. Lucia appeared at the door as she reholstered her gun at her back.
“Come on,” she said, and checked the outside again one more time before she locked the door. “You’ve had company, all right, but they’re gone now.”
“Crap,” Jazz sighed. She stared mournfully at the mess left behind. Mounds of crumpled papers. Drawers pulled open and contents strewn all over the place. Pictures askew on the wall, although truthfully none of that would matter even if they’d slashed every one of them to bits.
The boxes of files, the ones she’d wanted Lucia to look through…they were gone.
She froze, staring at the empty corner. There was an impression in the cheap, ugly carpet where the weight of the stack had rested, but unless the damn boxes had turned invisible, they were gone.
She kicked disconsolately at the papers on the floor, trying to see if they’d left anything behind, but what was abandoned looked like her regular household stuff, correspondence, bills, nothing important.
“What?” Lucia asked, and followed her stare to the empty corner. “Oh, God. They took your case files, right?”
“Right,” Jazz murmured. “All the work I did since Ben’s arrest. All the notes, all the leads. Everything.”
“Anyone in particular come to mind?”
“Besides that asshole Stewart?” She shook her head. Too sick, too tired, too numbed. She sank into a chair and heard papers crackle under her ass, but she didn’t care. “I don’t know. Ask me in the morning.”
Lucia stared at her for a few seconds, then turned and walked into the kitchen. Whatever disaster was there, she returned with a glass of water and a handful of pills. “Take them,” she said. “I mean it.”
And for once, Jasmine Callender did as she was told. She meekly swallowed the pills and sat watching Lucia straighten up papers, making stacks, clearing the floor. Then straightening up fallen chairs, putting drawers back in place, closing open cabinet doors.
Rehanging those god-awful pictures.
Jazz’s eyelids got heavy without warning. She woke up with a start when she felt a hand on her shoulder, and somehow made it on numbed feet back to the bedroom.
Lights out.
She didn’t even have time to worry about why somebody who’d broken in and trashed her house had taken the trouble to lock all of her dead bolts.
Or how.
She’d had better mornings after four-day benders.
Jazz woke up sick, aching, slightly feverish, and wishing she were dead for the first full minute before remembering that it was good to be alive. Mostly. Part of the reason that kicked in was the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafting through the apartment. Unless Mooch had learned how to program the coffeemaker, she still had company.
Jazz groaned, tried to sit up and stayed flat for a few more minutes, gathering strength. Yep, it hurt. A lot. It hurt like the morning after indulging in some insane exercise orgy and doing a thousand sit-ups. Only worse. She wasn’t sure she could force her abdominal muscles to do even the simple work of getting her out of bed.
Suck it up, Callender, she ordered herself, and somehow managed to get up. After she’d swung her legs over the bed, she discovered that Lucia had taken off her shoes but left her wearing the loose sweatpan
ts and T-shirt. Beneath, the bandages felt stiff. She tried not to think of what that might mean.
Getting to her feet was an adventure, but she managed. She ran fingers through her hair, felt unruly tangles and shuffled, on athletic-sock feet, into the living room.
Which looked like someone else’s apartment.
She blinked, cocked her head and tried to remember if she’d suffered a head injury, in and around the general insanity of yesterday. No, she was pretty sure not.
Maybe it was the same room, it just looked…better. Cleaner, at least. And neater. Weirdly not her home.
Everything was neat, squared up, polished. The carpet had been vacuumed to the point that it looked as if it might have been new, if anyone was unwise enough to make carpet that color in this day and age.
No sign of the chaos of the night before.
Lucia came out of the kitchen, looking glossily perfect, as usual. Sleek and shining. Her hair was still back in the action ponytail, and she had on some tight spandex-type workout pants and a jogging bra.
“Morning,” she said, and looked Jazz comprehensively up and down. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks. Very comforting.” Jazz found the coffeemaker and a mug and poured. She tasted bitter oily heaven, swallowed, and kept going until the cup was empty. Then refilled. Lucia watched her, leaning against the door frame and frowning.
“Wow,” she finally said. “That’s…frightening. Do you always drink that much caffeine?”
“Any messages?” Jazz asked. Her brain fog was starting to clear, at least a little.
“Borden called. He wanted to check on you. I don’t think he was very happy to hear you weren’t in bed.”
“I was in bed.”
“I mean, were planning on staying there. As in, recovering.”
“Borden’s not the boss of me,” Jazz said, and then wondered. Maybe he was. Not a pretty thought. “Did you tell him about yesterday? The assignment?”
“Yes, I told him. I typed up reports and faxed them in. I included the plate number and description of the car, too. I’d have waited for you, but…”
