by Cindy Dees
“Yeah, I think so. Crap. I gotta pee.”
Inspiration struck Hank. “Me, too. Let’s sneak into the lap dance lounge and use the restroom back there while this mess clears up.”
The girl nodded and started moving toward the back of the bar. Hank followed, letting the other waitress run across the long, open space between the end of the bar and the door to the lap dance lounge. The girl waved at Hank to join her, and she darted over to her. Perfect. If Vitaly happened to see the two of them, he would think Hank had been behind the bar the whole time.
She followed the other waitress through the lounge, moving fast. “You use the bathroom first,” Hank offered. “I’ll wait.”
“’Kay. Thanks.”
While the other girl hurried into the tiny single restroom, Hank took a quick look around the lounge. No one was in sight. Perfect.
She ducked out of the lounge’s rear exit and came up short as the broad back of a bouncer loomed in front of her. The guy wasn’t one she recognized. She’d had no idea Vitaly posted a man back here. Damn. Was he some sort of guard to prevent girls from escaping out here? The plan had not included avoiding this guy. Now what? Did she go back into the club? Abort her escape? Or should she take her chances and try to distract the guy? Maybe get him to go inside? Either way, he would be able to tell Vitaly he’d seen her back here.
She improvised fast. “There’s a huge fight in the bar. I’m scared that the other girls and I are gonna get hurt. Vitaly could use your help out front to break it up.”
The guy swore in Russian, ending with an imprecation about damned Americans who couldn’t hold their booze. Hank backed into the club and prayed the other waitress wouldn’t emerge from the bathroom before the bouncer disappeared from sight.
The toilet flushed as the bouncer made his ponderous way across the lap dance lounge. C’mon, c’mon. Please God, let the girl wash her hands. Just a few more seconds. A few more steps from the big Russian...
There. He was gone.
Hank slipped outside fast. Just as the exit door closed behind her, she heard the bathroom lock turn. Man, that had been close.
She raced down the dark alley as fast as her high heels would allow her to go. Ashe and the van should be just around the corner. Sure enough, the rusty white van was parked only a dozen feet beyond the mouth of the alley.
She leaped into the passenger seat. Ashe reached for the ignition, but she gasped, “I’ve got to put his phone back.”
He looked up sharply. “There’s no time. Bastien says the fight’s winding down.”
“You said you had the gear in here to copy the data off his phone.”
“I do. But we’re out of time.”
“If I don’t put his phone back, he’ll know he’s compromised. By dawn tomorrow, all the girls will be moved out of here, and any evidence of his operation will be erased.”
Ashe made a sound of disgust but did not disagree with her assessment.
“Copy the stuff off his phone,” she urged him. “I’m telling you, it’ll have everything you need to bust open Vitaly’s operation.” Ashe stared at her doubtfully and she added, “Trust me. I’ve been watching the guy for a long time.”
A moment’s more hesitation, then a terse nod. Ashe swore low and hard as he slipped out of the driver’s seat and headed for the bowels of the van. He took the cell phone she held out to him as he passed by. He dug around in a gym bag in the back and came up with some sort of device that he plugged into the bottom of the cell phone. It looked like a credit card swiper on steroids.
Meanwhile, she upended her purse on the floor of the van beside him.
“Jeez! You didn’t say you’d robbed a flipping bank!” Ashe exclaimed.
She grinned. “Apparently Vitaly kept a private stash of cash for himself. And I’m betting his bosses don’t know about it. He’s always complaining about how they leave him no money of his own. What do you want to bet he’s been skimming this cash and holding it on the side?”
“That’s a bet you’d win,” Ashe muttered, concentrating on doing something to Vitaly’s phone.
“Are you getting the data?”
“That’ll take only a few seconds to copy. Right now, I’m trying to get past his security code and get into the damned phone.”
The little device plugged into the phone must have done its job, though, because in a moment, Ashe made a sound of triumph. He pulled out a second gadget that looked a lot like a thumb drive and plugged it into the phone.
She stared down at the pile of money speculatively. “I’m guessing there’s more than four hundred thousand dollars here. I figured I’d better take it all so he can’t cover this week’s receipts out of his personal money. Besides, what self-respecting thief would leave any money behind?”
“Who in the hell is this guy? Small-time thugs don’t have that kind of dough just lying around.”
“It wasn’t exactly lying around—” she started.
The new gadget flashed a green light, and she broke off as Ashe quickly unplugged the external drive. She held out her hand for the phone, but he said roughly, “I’ll take it back in.”
“You can’t. We don’t want him to suspect you of the theft. You can’t be seen anywhere near the club tonight. I’ll take it back inside.”
“No. It’s too dangerous.”
“Bastien is still in there to keep an eye on me. And Vitaly will be less suspicious of me than you. Besides, I’m the one who took it.”
“I don’t—”
She snatched the phone out of his hand. “There’s no time to argue about this. You know I’m right. Oh, and there’s a guard at the back door. Don’t try to come in after me.”
She jumped out of the van before her courage could fail her. This was insanity. She should let Ashe drive her away from here and never look back. The thing was, if Vitaly lost both his phone and his money, he would know he’d been found out and flee. By daybreak tomorrow, he and all those poor trafficked girls would disappear. She’d been crazy to steal his phone. But it would be crazier not to put the stupid thing back.
Hank paused at the mouth of the alley and peeked around the corner. Dammit. The beefy guard was back at his post. No way could she stroll past him back into the club. Even if she could come up with a decent excuse for having been outside, Vitaly would know for sure that she’d carried his cash out of the club and passed it off to someone.
She would have to go around to the club’s front door. It would cost her precious time, but she had no choice. Running as best she could in her tottery high heels, she made her way around the block.
On the assumption that Vitaly’s hypothetical sniper would be watching the entrance, she slowed to a walk as she turned the corner to approach the club. There was no help for Vitaly’s gunman spotting her. She could always claim that she’d run out of the club to avoid the fighting, she supposed. But it was a flimsy excuse, and Vitaly would still suspect her of having been the thief.
The bouncer was not back at his post outside the front door, which she took to mean that the mess inside was still getting sorted out. Patrons were starting to emerge from the club and standing around in clusters, recounting their part in the fight.
She slipped through the patrons unobtrusively and made her way inside the club. She moved as unassumingly as she could around the edge of the main room toward the bar. She slipped behind the near end of it, dropped to her knees and crawled her way down the length of it toward Vitaly’s office.
Just as she reached the end of the bar nearest his office, though, her boss materialized in front of her. Or at least his knees did.
She stopped in chagrin.
“What are you doing down there?”
“Picking up broken glass,” she lied
“That’s what brooms are for. Get out there and help put the place back together. What a damned mess,” he growled.
Hank nodded, his cell phone all but burning a hole in her skirt pocket. She stood up, slid around Vitaly and went out
into the club. It was destroyed. With a sigh, she picked up the nearest intact chair and set it upright. How was she going to get Vitaly’s phone back onto his desk? He was hovering near his office door, glowering at the staff scuttling around picking up broken pieces of chairs and tables, and he didn’t look inclined to move away from that spot for a good long time.
If only the phone had fallen out of his pocket. Then she could “find” it...
Wait. That could work.
She cleaned her way over toward where Vitaly stood. She would have to find a spot he couldn’t see from where he was standing to stash the phone. Someplace it might have slid to...there. Half-under a shelf unit at the back of the bar used for storing extra glasses. It was just to the left of his office door. He would be standing no more than three feet from her if she tried planting it there.
It was wildly risky. But she didn’t see that she had any other choice.
Heart racing, she bent down to pick up an imaginary piece of trash, the cell phone palmed in her hand. A quick drop, a nudge with her toe, and the phone was tucked almost entirely out of sight. She moved away slowly, cleaning as she went.
When nobody was near, she muttered toward her chest, “Phone’s planted.”
Ashe’s reply was instant. “Then get the hell out of there.”
“Can’t.” Moving a few feet away from the bartender, who was righting a table, she mumbled, “It would look weird.”
“You can’t stick around till the end of your shift, Hank. He’s going to figure out the money was stolen and go crazy. You have to be out of there before then.”
“I can’t just walk out now. He’s watching.”
“I’m giving it a half hour, and then I’m coming in to get you,” Ashe warned.
She crawled under a table to pick up some broken glass and to give herself privacy to mutter, “Call him. Tell him to send me to your place because you need me for something.”
Ashe made an exasperated sound. “And if he says no?”
“You okay under there, Hank? Be careful you don’t cut your knees. There’s a lot of broken glass on the floor.”
She looked up at the bartender. “I noticed. I was just picking up some of the big pieces.”
“Don’t worry about that stuff. I’ll sweep it all up once we’ve got the tables upright.”
“Okay,” she replied, pasting on a fake smile.
The fight had chased out all of the patrons, and the place was deserted as she and the other staff finished the worst of the cleanup. Vitaly griped at length about the lost business and how much money the fight had cost him. Hah. He had no idea how much he had really lost.
Hank got an unpleasant bit of news in her ear when Ashe murmured, “Had to move the van. Some guy took a hard a look at it just now. I’m about ten blocks away, but I’ll come back and pick you up when you leave the bar. Hank, can you give me an estimate of how much longer you’ll be in there?”
“Gimme ten,” she replied.
“Huh?” one of the waitresses asked her.
Hank looked up quickly. “Oh. Nothing. I was just thinking out loud that Vitaly’s gonna have to buy a bunch of new chairs. I figure at least ten.”
Ashe snorted in her ear. “Good recovery.”
She sent him a mental eye roll and carried a sack of trash toward the back of the club, where the bags were being collected and hauled out to the back alley by the bouncer.
The bartender waited until a pause in Vitaly’s ongoing tirade and asked, “Any chance you’ll close early tonight? I don’t mind giving up a couple hours’ pay. And the place is empty.”
A couple of the waitresses chimed in, offering to forego their last two hours’ worth of pay for an early night off. None of them would make a dime in tips with the club deserted and trashed, and their actual pay was pitiful. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice on anyone’s part.
“Okay, fine,” Vitaly bit out. “All of you. Get out. Go. Before I change my mind.”
Wow. The Russian accent was thick tonight. A little stressed out, was he? Hank smiled to herself as she and the other girls hurried out of the club before he could change his mind about shutting down early.
Thank God. She peeled away from the other girls like she usually did to head toward her apartment. “You caught that, Ashe? I’m out.”
Ashe let out an audible sigh of relief. “Bastien’s three blocks north and two blocks east of your position. Make your way to him on foot. He’s driving a red Chevelle. I want to keep the van well away from the club. That guy who cruised past to look at it worried me.”
“Okay.”
Maybe it was because she was so relieved to have gotten rid of Vitaly’s phone and to have made it out of the club that she let down her guard. But the man had jumped out of the shadows and had his arm around her neck almost before she registered his presence. Something wet slapped over her face, and her last thought was that this was not good. Not good at all.
Chapter 13
Ashe jolted when Hank’s cry of surprise in his earbud cut off sharply. “Hank. Talk to me!”
Nothing. All he heard were some rustles as if Hank’s clothes were moving around against the microphone.
“You need to say something right now, Hank. Anything. Just make a noise.”
Nothing at all.
Ashe’s pulse spiked even harder than it already had. “Something’s wrong, Catfish. Go get her. And hurry, for God’s sake.”
The gunning of a huge engine and a squeal of tires across Bastien’s throat microphone announced that he’d followed Ashe’s order to the letter.
Into his own microphone, Ashe said urgently, “Talk to me, baby. What’s happening? Where are you?”
If she could hear him, she didn’t answer. Perhaps her earbud had been knocked out. Her microphone continued to work, though, and a noise similar to something heavy being dragged across pavement transmitted. Ashe heard a grunt.
Dammit. A male grunt. The kind a guy made when he hoisted up something heavy. Like a body. Hank’s body. Horrible certainty ripped through him. Someone had snatched Hank. It had to be one of Vitaly’s men. With all the drunks recently exiting the Voodoo, no common street thug would be hanging around the area. Too many people had been milling around too recently for petty crime to be safe.
“A man has grabbed Hank,” he reported to Bastien. “She was about one block from the club, headed in your direction. Look in an alley. It sounded like he dragged her somewhere. There’s been no talking between accomplices, so I’m pretty sure it’s just one guy. But the takedown was fast as hell.”
“A pro, then,” Bastien replied tersely. “Say your ETA.”
“Estimated time of arrival...three minutes,” Ashe snapped. But he and Bastien knew that was a lifetime in special operations terms. A man could be killed in three seconds. Quietly and efficiently.
“Hurry, Hollywood.”
No kidding. He already had the van floored and was squealing around corners like a drag-racing lunatic. It was madness to take the van back to the vicinity of the club so soon after robbing the joint, but it wasn’t like he had any choice. Screw busting up Vitaly’s operation. If anything bad happened to Hank, Ashe would never forgive himself.
Hang on, kitten. I’m coming.
God, he hated this helpless feeling. By the time he could get back to her, whatever was happening to Hank would be long over. “Hurry, Bastien.”
“I’m on it,” his friend bit out. The engine noise stopped and Ashe heard a car door open.
Ashe cursed silently in a steady mental stream when he wasn’t concentrating on driving at breakneck speed or on hearing something—anything—to help Bastien find her. Hank’s mike had since gone silent. Either her assailant had found it and disabled it, or she was stationary at the moment.
Why would the bastard knock her out, drag her someplace and then just leave her? It didn’t make sense. Not that he was wishing any further attack on her, but still. It was strange.
Unless Vitaly’s spotter had grabbed
her. Ashe and Bastien never had proven that Vitaly actually had a man watching the Who Do Voodoo from another vantage point along the street, but Ashe was convinced the guy was lurking out there somewhere. What if the spotter had seen something that made him suspicious of Hank? Would he snatch her off the street?
More to the point, would the guy have reported in to Vitaly and gotten orders to snatch Hank first, or would the guy have just taken the initiative and done it himself?
If Vitaly was wise to Hank, would he give the order to kill her immediately, or would her boss want to question her? Find out who she was working for?
Ashe gripped the steering wheel tighter, his mind reeling, when the street the Voodoo was on finally came into sight ahead. He slowed to a sane speed to take the corner. No sense bringing Vitaly himself out into the street to check out a giant squeal of rubber on concrete. The guy had to be jumpy as hell after the events so far this evening. And as far as Ashe could tell, Vitaly hadn’t even realized he’d been robbed of four hundred thousand bucks. The guy was going to go crazy when that happened.
He reported tersely to Bastien, “Something metallic just banged close to Hank. It sounded big. Hollow. A Dumpster, maybe. Or a garage door.”
“I’m moving in,” Bastien breathed. “Second alley on the left, east of the club. I spotted a pair of sharp tracks, like those stupid high heels she wears being dragged.”
“I’ll be there in sixty seconds.”
“Come in quiet. I’m going dark.”
Which meant Bastien was going to stop talking. “Roger.” Ashe pulled the van over to a curb just behind Bastien’s red muscle car. He jumped out of the van and was careful to lock the door and set the van’s special alarm system behind himself. No point in making it easy for Vitaly to get his money back.
As Ashe slunk toward the alley in full stealth mode, he surprised himself when a prayer drifted through his mind. He was not a religious man by nature, and most of the time on missions he was too busy staying alive to invoke higher powers. But tonight, a prayer emerged from the dark recesses of his subconscious. She had to be okay.
