Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents Book 2)
Page 39
It would be very easy to miss her cue, and plunge between the slats into the gray and icy water of Puget Sound ... but Jen was no dummy, and she'd done this particular maneuver before. Still, her gecko heart beat faster with anticipation.
Avery paused and took out his cell phone, holding it up to his ear and bringing Jen close to his face. He wasn't actually using the phone, just using it as a pretext to talk to her, which probably meant a last-minute admonition to be careful or some other overprotective Avery thing.
"Remember," he murmured, "if there are shifters on that boat, they'll be able to sense you, and you have no idea what kind of shifters they are. Something that eats geckos, for example. You're there to observe, and report, and not to do anything unreasonable while backup can't get to you."
Jen poked out her tongue and jerked it back in.
"I'll take that as 'Yes, Avery'," he said dryly, and put the cell phone away before clumping casually down the dock. His pace was slow: just a man looking at the boats, for reasons of his own. The angle allowed Jen glimpses of the boat they knew to be a floating casino, though from the outside it appeared to be nothing more than a medium-sized luxury yacht, with the name Fair Lady on the bow. Jen glimpsed a security guard at the bottom of the gangplank, and another at the top, checking people for weapons as they boarded.
Avery gave the guard a wide berth, but his path took him past one of the passengers waiting to board, an elderly, heavyset man in a black wool coat. Avery did not quite come close enough for their sleeves to brush—but his hand swung out especially wide as he missed a step with the cane, and Jen gauged the distance and leaped. A quick flash of dock and cold air—sticky feet on wool—and down she went into the depths of his coat pocket.
She could see nothing now, but she heard Avery's uneven footsteps receding. The pocket smelled overwhelmingly of wool and pipe tobacco. Jen tried not to cough. In fact, she tried not to do much of anything, because her ride was now in motion. As Jen lay still in the bottom of the pocket, the coat swayed slowly with each rolling footstep. She was nestled beside an envelope with the flap folded over. It smelled of paper and a sharp-tangy ink scent. Oh, she thought, there's money in there—just as a hand plunged into the pocket and felt around for it.
Jen flattened herself in the bottom of the pocket as the envelope was removed and, she assumed, handed over to the guard at the bottom of the gangplank. Her ride lurched into motion again, tromping up the gangplank. Jen wished she could see. A pause, the coat shifted—arms being raised—and brisk hands patted down both coat and owner. Jen lay stiff as a dried bit of jerky, stretched out in the bottom of the pocket in the company of a tissue and a packet of pipe tobacco. Expert fingers prodded the pocket, and moved on.
And then the danger was past. The footsteps beneath her clumped onward.
Jen unbent from her rigid posture and grasped the lining of the pocket with tiny gecko feet. One careful step at a time, she climbed until she could poke her head over the edge. The faster she got out of here, the better, but she needed a good spot where she wouldn't be stepped on. Indoors would be best; the cold was already making her faintly lethargic. She hated the Pacific Northwest climate with a passion; her gecko soul cried out for warmer, sunnier shores.
The world looked different through gecko eyes, and her distance vision was not the best, but she thought she could pick out Avery's dark coat from the smattering of other people on the dock, and the pale splash of her coat tucked under his arm. He would stand there and watch until the boat cast off, she knew.
Worrywolf.
For Jen was in her element now. She didn't work with a partner, and she was never so alive as when she was undercover, away from backup, relying only on her own wits and skills.
Jen Cho loved her friends ... but of all the people in her life that she knew, in theory, she could count on, she trusted no one but herself.
And she liked it that way.
Chapter Two
"You gonna call or raise, kid?"
Lucky glanced at his cards, a nervous tic that he knew would scream I'm a rookie to the other players at the table. With this group of middle-aged card sharks, he'd chosen to play "nervous newcomer", making his wins look like flukes as much as possible. On his own turn at the deal, he'd dealt himself a middling hand, and he planned to lose. Nothing screamed I'm cheating like winning on your own deals. He'd been doing this much too long, and too successfully, to be stupid about it.
"Call," he said pleasantly, and shoved a handful of chips into the pot. He considered raising, but there was no need to be vulgar about it. He'd let the next hand fall as it would, he thought, and then perhaps win one; or, if ordinary luck brought him victory on the next, then it might be a good idea to lose a couple more.
There was nothing visible to indicate they were on a boat rather than onshore—no windows, and no tells in the dark wallpaper or the baize of the table—but the lamps swayed gently, and the amber liquid in the drink glasses in front of the gamblers rolled slowly back and forth. Lucky averted his eyes from the slowly rotating shadows. It wasn't that he got seasick, precisely. Not ... as such. But he was all too aware of the vast depth of the cold dark Pacific under their feet, and he didn't quite want to stare too long at his cards, or at the table, or at any one particular spot without raising his eyes to rest them a bit, and give his stomach time to settle.
It wasn't just the motion of the boat making him queasy. That nagging sense of another had never quite gone away. He had carefully examined every person in the card room, but none of them put off the particular cold tingle that Lucky associated with others of his kind. Maybe it was someone who had shifted and then made themselves small, but he couldn't go around staring into every one of the deep shadows clustered along the baseboards ...
And now cards were turning up around the table. Lucky flipped his, keeping his face still; he certainly didn't want to display relief when his pair of eights were trumped by three jacks across the table. Instead he watched the chips gathered in, the cards gathered up, and he made an effort not to want, or push, or do whatever that little mental twist was that made luck—or something he liked to believe was luck—fall his way.
There was a reason they called him Lucky.
But he was also a good card player. And a good cheater. For a moment, like a faint echo from the past, he felt the ghostly sting of the peeled stick across his knuckles, every time he'd failed to palm a card deftly enough that his old man couldn't catch him at it.
You get caught cheating at cards, boy, it won't be a foot-long stick of maplewood they'll hit you with. It'll be lead bullets.
And:
Luck won't help the stupid, boy, and it won't help anybody who won't help himself.
But damn it, he could still feel that presence in the room, as if another shape-changer was crouched at his shoulder and breathing down his neck.
It made him distracted. It made him stupid. He lost the next hand, and he wasn't entirely sure he'd meant to lose it. Then he lost the one after that, on a turn of the cards that was nothing other than blatant stupidity. If he'd been paying attention, he would've noticed that two of the players already had a pair showing, and all four aces were still in play—but he missed it, and he lost a pile of chips he hadn't intended to lose.
Sting of maplewood across the knuckles.
No supper tonight, and perhaps a beating.
But that was only the boy he'd been, and on this night, Lucky played for much higher stakes than his own comfort.
***
He has nice hands, Jen Cho thought.
She liked to think she wouldn't have paid quite so much attention to Lucky Lucado's hands if there'd been anything else interesting to look at. But he did, damn it. Long fingers, neatly manicured nails. Dexterous hands, deft and strong, working the cards. Pickpocket's hands; magician's hands.
She'd just bet he could work magic with those hands, all right ...
Jen drew her eyes away from Lucado's hands and the gleam of lamplight on h
is black hair. Whoever had outfitted the card room seemed to be drawing on a Mississippi gaming-boat theme, even if they were thousands of miles and a hundred and fifty years from the Deep South decadence the rich wallpaper and dim golden light appeared to be aping.
Yes, and we've invented electric lights in the intervening century, so we don't have to strain our eyes anymore. Get with the times, boys.
The darkness was useful for her purposes, though. She was crouched near the base of a lighting fixture. The hanging dark-green shade, sweeping slowly back and forth with the rolling of the yacht's hull, shielded the light so it wouldn't hurt her eyes, but anyone looking up would have to look into the lamp's glare. She could see without being seen.
All around the card room, gamblers were dropping out of the game as they used up all their chips. Discreet but well-muscled guards with suspicious bulges under their jackets escorted them out of the card room, into the lounge next door. There were about a third as many people in the room as there had been when Jen's initial exploration of the boat had led her here.
Everyone was on the boat for a mob-sponsored poker tournament. Word on the street was that the winner would be paid in a supply of the drug, which might give her a chance to figure out where it was coming from.
And therefore she got to spend the night watching Lucado gamble—that is, watching the gamblers at work.
The yacht had no passenger manifest, so beyond the name of the owner—one Roxy Molina, with ties to organized crime—they didn't know the names of anyone on board. She'd picked up some names by now from listening to the gamblers talk to each other, but Lucky was obviously not his real first name. At least she hoped not. What she wouldn't give right now for a phone and a connection to the SCB's databases. Her sticky gecko fingers itched to pull up some files and find his birth certificate, his real first name, his criminal record, and his shifter type, if known.
Most shifters reflected their animal type in some way. He wasn't anything bulky or large, she thought; he had a sinuous grace that made her think of ... well, herself, and her relatives. It seemed likely that he was a reptile of some kind. Maybe something like a ferret or otter. Some people might look at him and think "cat", but she knew a few cat shifters, and he didn't have their predatory alertness. His lazy grace was pure lizard.
Maybe he's a dragon, she thought whimsically. I just need to get close enough to smell him ...
Truth be told, she'd love to be close enough to smell him. It was going to be a real shame if she had to arrest him.
Dragon’s Luck – Shifter Agents #3
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Also by Lauren Esker
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