by Cindy Dees
She’d never really stopped before to think about how secretive her family had been. It had always just been that way, and she had accepted it blindly. She’d assumed that all families were the same. But apparently not.
She took a leisurely shower, extending it as long as possible in hopes that Ashe might join her. He had yet to show her what magic he could perform in one. And she had faith that, with his physical strength and sexual prowess, it would be epic.
He never joined her, however, and she eventually climbed out, disappointed, to dry her hair and dress.
Ashe closed a laptop computer when she stepped into the kitchen and said matter-of-factly, “Bastien’s asleep. There are waffles on the counter if you want to reheat one in the microwave.”
She frowned a little. He was all business this morning. She supposed she shouldn’t take it personally, though. Ashe’s boss was probably breathing down his neck to resolve this mess and quit wasting government resources on it.
She drowned the reheated waffle in syrup and ate it without enthusiasm as Ashe announced, “Jennie found your brother’s apartment and the storage unit he rented to store your mom’s personal effects. I thought we’d swing by both and check them out. Then we need to get you fitted for a wire.”
“A wire, as in a hidden microphone?” she blurted.
“No way am I letting you go back into the Voodoo without having some sort of monitoring device on you. I don’t trust your boss further than I can throw him.”
She smiled gratefully at Ashe. It was really sweet of him to be so concerned for her safety. She washed down the remains of the waffle with a big glass of milk, rinsed her plate, and declared herself ready to go.
Ashe led her to a pickup truck parked behind the garage. “Bastien lent me wheels. It may not look like much, but if I know him, this puppy will outrun just about anything street legal in all of Orleans Parish.”
She hopped in the truck’s cab and grinned as the engine did indeed rumble to life like a race car. “It’s a beast.”
Ashe just shook his head and backed the beast out of the driveway. They drove into the French Quarter and pulled up in front of a traditional building with a tall locked gate to what must be a courtyard. Beautiful wrought-iron balconies overhead looked down on the street. The building might not be much to admire from the street, but the courtyard was magnificently landscaped with fountains, brick-paved walkways and raised flowerbeds. Although, on closer inspection, she noted that the fountain needed cleaning and the beds could have used a weeding.
She followed Ashe as he let them into Max’s home using some sort of a lock-picking gun. Why hadn’t she known this place existed? Was it just more of her family’s over-the-top secrecy, or had she just been so self-absorbed through her college days that she’d never bothered to stop and think about where Max had lived? About what he did on a day-to-day basis with his life? Man, she’d been a crappy little sister.
The two of them had never been close. Their ages—they were almost seven years apart—had precluded that when they were kids. But he’d always looked out for her. She’d known in the recesses of her mind that he had her back.
Which was part of why his disappearance had been so disturbing. Her last safety net had been ripped away with his departure from her life. She’d been so focused on her need to have him back, to assuage her own selfish loneliness, she’d completely missed the fact that he’d had his own life to live.
A life that had been horribly interrupted.
Her brother’s apartment looked about like what she expected a successful art and antiques dealer’s home would look like. It was stunningly furnished, chic and elegant. A blend of Old World and New. Which was a bit hard to reconcile with the messy kid she’d grown up with. He couldn’t keep his bedroom neat to save his life.
But then they stepped into Max’s office.
It was smashed to smithereens. Not one piece of furniture was left intact, and the average size of the remains hovered at about the dimensions of a pencil. She gasped, appalled at the violence it took to create this level of destruction. Her fear for her brother’s safety spiraled even higher.
Ashe was silent, picking his way through the destruction thoughtfully. “Can you tell what kind of furniture this stuff was?”
She leaned down to pick up a few slivers of wood. “Walnut. Old. Hand-joined. Eighteenth century, maybe. This inlay is exquisite. Italian if I had to venture a guess.” She caught Ashe’s startled look and rolled her eyes. “I did grow up around the antiques business.” She looked at the cove-paneled ceiling and leather-covered walls now shredded into ribbons. “Knowing Max, he’d have gone for a traditional secretary desk. Lots of drawers and compartments.”
“Okay. A desk. What else got busted up?” Ashe picked up a metal strip. “Drawer roller from a filing cabinet.”
She moved over to look at the wall outlets. “There’s a cable outlet over here. A computer or a television was over here. Some sort of stand or cabinet for that must have been here.”
“Do you see any chair remains?” Ashe asked.
She looked around the debris in dismay. “I don’t see anything that looks like chair legs or wheels. But I’m not sure that means anything.”
“I don’t see any upholstery or stuffing. Was he a padded butt kind of guy?”
Hank smiled reluctantly at him, grateful for his attempt to lighten the mood. “He liked his creature comforts well enough. So, yes, I’d take him for a padded chair man.”
“Strange that there was no sofa in here,” Ashe observed. “It’s a big room. There’d have been plenty of space for a couple of armchairs in front of a desk, or a sofa in front of those bookshelves.”
The same bookshelves that were completely emptied. “There aren’t any wrecked books in here. Max loves books. Collects them rabidly. Where did they all go?”
Ashe frowned and shrugged tightly.
They picked through the remains of the office for a few more minutes but didn’t learn much more about what an intruder might have been looking for or whether the guy had found it or not. The thoroughness of the destruction was impressive, however. Someone had to have taken a good, long time to destroy Max’s office. And yet, not one other part of the apartment looked as if it had been touched. What was so special about the office?
A search of the rest of the apartment didn’t reveal much besides the fact that her brother had become fastidiously neat sometime in the past few years, and that it was impossible to tell if any of his clothes were missing from the crowded closet. Who knew Max was such a clotheshorse? A toothbrush was waiting in a holder by the sink, a razor inside the medicine cabinet, but it would be easy enough for a man who traveled a lot to have duplicates of those items permanently in his luggage.
The more Hank saw of this place, the less she knew of her brother. She didn’t recognize anything about the man who lived here. It was an appalling disconnect to realize what she was guilty of.
Ashe surprised her by handing her a key ring as they walked back down to the car. “Found these in the kitchen. Spare keys. That brass one works on the front door. I guess the place is yours until we can find your brother. Jen says it’s paid off and the deed is in your brother’s name.”
Where in the hell had Max come up with the kind of money it took to own a place like this? Prime real estate in New Orleans was not cheap. Hank blinked down at the keys lying in her hand. “He’ll be back. I’ll look after it until then, but that’s it.” He had to come back. She needed to get to know this man her brother had become.
Ashe shrugged. “Sell it if you need the cash. This place should fetch a pretty penny.”
As if she’d given a moment’s thought to her financial future since this whole mess had begun. When her mother had died, the regular monthly payments to her mother’s checking account had mysteriously started showing up in hers. It wasn’t a fortune, but Hank had plenty of ready cash to deal with life.
In hindsight, she probably ought to have investigated where
that money came from. She’d always assumed it came from some sort of trust fund or bank account her father had set up. Apparently she’d been so conditioned not to ask questions as a child that the mental prohibition from being curious had extended to the deposits in her checking account.
They climbed into the truck, and Ashe headed for the other side of town. Familiar streets and businesses passed by. This was the neighborhood where she’d grown up. It had changed a lot in the past few years, though. It was home and not home. Or maybe she just saw it with different eyes now. Older. More judgmental. Heck, more cynical.
What didn’t she know about this place? Was she as clueless about it as she’d been about Max?
Thankfully, their route didn’t take them past the house where she’d grown up. She would probably have cried if she’d seen it again. Too many painful memories were associated with the sprawling clapboard bungalow and its wide porch.
Ashe spoke up reflectively, jarring her from her thoughts. “And you had no idea your brother owned that place?”
“Nope. None.”
“Is it possible, then, that there are other things you don’t know about him and his life?”
“Of course it’s possible. It’s probable. I don’t know everything about him any more than he knows everything about me.”
“I’m talking about important stuff, Hank. Like who he works for. What he really does for a living.”
The topic was already upsetting enough without Ashe poking at it. She stared across the truck cab at him,not wanting to continue this line of discussion, but asking anyway, “What are you trying to say, Ashe?”
“Are you entirely sure he wasn’t involved in something...questionable?”
“Like what?” she asked a little more defensively.
“Like maybe he’s tangled up in the Russian mob. Or doing something else criminal. I think you have to consider that possibility seriously. A fair bit of evidence points in that direction.”
“You’re telling me my brother is a mobster?” And she’d had zero clue? God. It was the last straw. She sucked as a sister.
Ashe shrugged.
Max? She tried unsuccessfully to picture her goofy brother as a suave, smart, dangerous criminal. Nope. “That’s crazy.”
“Actually, it’s a lot less crazy than you might think.”
It was too much. All these things he was saying about her brother simply couldn’t be true. “No. I reject the idea.”
“Hank, my boss and I think it’s probable your brother is engaging in some sort of criminal activity.”
She stared at him, completely stunned. “You can’t just say random stuff that will turn my world on its head as if it’s nothing.”
“The truth is the truth.”
“How would you feel if I told you your father was a great guy? That he had a big heart and a generous nature before he went off to war, and that’s why your mother stayed with him for all those years after he got back, a broken man.” A pause. “But you were always such a jerk around him that you never got to see that softer side of him. That you provoked his hard-ass side and that he was only trying to teach you some manners by being so tough on you.”
Ashe looked over at her in shock. As if he’d never thought of his father in that way before. Ever. If she wasn’t mistaken, the color slowly drained from his face. He stared at her long enough that she finally yelped, “Eyes on the road!”
The truck jerked and re-centered in the lane of traffic. Ashe looked ahead now, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and the muscles in his jaw ridged tightly. Hah. The truth was not so easy to deal with when the shoe was on the other foot.
He turned onto a side street that ended in a storage facility. The gate was open, and they drove into a long alley lined by garage-door-style lockers. “What number is yours?” Ashe bit out.
As if she remembered off the top of her head. The last time she’d been here, her mother had been gone a few weeks and her life had been in a shambles. “You’ll have to go to the office and ask—”
A squeal of tires behind them made her lurch in her seat and look around in alarm.
Ashe swore under his breath. “Hang on.” He gunned the engine, and the truck leaped forward and screeched around the corner into another long alley. The row of orange garage doors flew by only inches from her side of the truck as it roared down the narrow drive.
They were maybe fifty feet from the end of the row when a black late-model muscle car pulled across the end of the alley, blocking their escape.
She heard a screech behind them. She looked out the back window and cried out, “There’s another car blocking the end of the alley behind us!”
Ashe all but stood on the accelerator. “Brace yourself!” he yelled.
Chapter 10
Hank slammed herself back in her seat, feet pushing against the floorboards with all her might as Ashe reached over to punch off the airbags.
The impact was tremendous. Their truck slammed into the front corner of the car, spinning it to one side and lurching in a ninety-degree right turn of its own. The vehicles were crunched together like they’d been welded into one. She stared in horror through the windshield at a driver and front-seat occupant staring back at her. The bastards had the good grace to look shocked.
As Ashe threw the truck into Reverse, she frantically took mental notes on their assailants. Two men. Dark sunglasses. Baseball hats. Both white. A crunching sound of metal tearing apart accompanied a backward jerk as the truck separated from the car. It looked as if they’d left the truck’s fender behind, mangled into the car’s bumper.
Ashe yanked the steering wheel, throwing the truck into a Y-turn and flinging it down another alley that loomed beside them. He stomped on the gas and the truck lurched forward.
In front of them, the wrought-iron gate enclosing the facility began to slide shut.
“Bastards,” Ashe ground out, flooring the truck.
She held her breath as the truck shot the gap with perhaps six inches to spare on each side. A squeal of brakes and screeching tires announced that their pursuers hadn’t made it out before the heavy gate blocked their way.
“Who was that?” she gasped as they burst out onto a main street.
Ashe slowed to a saner pace as he gritted out, “Did you see anyone in the car?”
She relayed what little she’d seen of the two men, aware that it wouldn’t be much help. He swore under his breath.
“But I did get the license plate,” she added. “It’s from Texas.”
“That’s my girl.” He reached in his back pocket and tossed her his cell phone. “Hit speed dial number three and pass whoever answers the phone that license plate number.”
A male voice rumbled in her ear, “What’s up, Hollywood?”
“Umm, this is Hank Smith. I’m with Asher Konig—Hollywood—and he gave me this phone. Told me to call you. He wants you to run a license plate.”
“Why can’t he talk to me?”
“He’s got his hands full driving right now. Our truck is kind of smashed up, and the guys we just hit may be following us.”
The voice on the other end went terse. All business. “Say the tag number and state.”
She relayed the information.
“Do you and Konig need backup?”
She pulled the phone away from her ear. “Umm, Ashe? The man wants to know if we need backup.”
“Nah, I got this. Easy-peasy. Those guys were just testing me. It’s no big deal.”
“Are you kidding me?” she exclaimed.
“If those guys had actually been out to hurt us, they’d have shot at us. And they’d have disabled that gate before they jumped us.”
“Did you catch all that?” she asked the guy on the phone.
“Roger. Tell Ashe the vehicle in question was reported stolen last month in Houston, Texas. Probably a burner car.”
“Like a burner phone?” she asked in shock. An entire car that was a throwaway tool?
“
Yes, ma’am.”
“Umm, okay. I’ll tell him.”
She ended the call and passed along the information to Ashe. His response to the news was merely, “Garden variety thugs don’t sit on burner cars. This is a high-end crew we’re messing with, apparently. Big dogs. Plenty of resources.”
“Like the Russian mob?” She would rather believe Max was involved with that gang than that he was an outright criminal in his own right. If he was involved with the mob, she could at least pretend he’d been sucked in against his volition and was still a decent guy at heart. Redeemable.
Ashe shrugged. “I don’t know if your brother’s in the mob or not. But it’s obvious that you and I have kicked a hornet’s nest. Clearly it is time to find out who Vitaly’s bosses are.” Sighing, he flicked a quick glance her way. “We’ve moved up the food chain of response from these jokers, and I want to know exactly what species of hornet we’re messing with.”
“How do you plan to do that?” she asked, curious.
“Identify the manager of the brothel.”
“Are we going to do a stakeout?”
“I think it’s time for more direct action. I’ll ask Bastien if he wants to go in. I’m known around the Voodoo, so I can’t make a visit upstairs. I’d hate to give them the impression that you’re no good in the sack by my going upstairs.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s what you’re worried about? Someone just tried to run us down, and that’s what comes to your mind? My reputation in the sack?”
He grinned over at her. “It’s how I roll, baby.”
“You’re certifiable.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
They drove in silence for several minutes. “Where are we going now?” she asked.
“Back to Bastien’s place. He’s not going to be happy that I crashed his truck.”
“At least we’re alive for him to yell at us.”
It turned out, however, that Bastien was much more interested in who had tried to screw with them than the damage to his truck. He mumbled something about having wanted to install some sort of reinforced winch assembly, anyway, and didn’t seem overly concerned by an absent front bumper. Truth was, he seemed most bummed to have missed out on a good car chase.
