In Rides Trouble: Black Knights Inc.

by Julie Ann Walker

  He needed to go score some blow, anyway. A little angel dust to keep his cock hard and his mind bright so he could enjoy every last minute of Beck Reichert’s delicious misery. And while he was out doing that, he’d swing by the petrol station and find something he could use to cut away her clothes.

  Glancing one last time at his pretty little hostage, he smiled.

  This was going to be such splendid fun.

  ***

  “What do you mean you’ve lost her!” Frank’s heart jumped into the back of his throat and pounded there like a bad toothache. His roar filled the small interior of his sister’s Hyundai Elantra. After Shell realized trying to keep him in the hospital bed was about as futile as pissing in the wind, she did the smart thing—she’d always been a smart girl—and tossed him her car keys.

  The doctors had been a bit more difficult to convince, shouting how they’d have security come strap him down if he didn’t return to his room.

  He wasn’t sure, but it might’ve been his murderous face, along with his thunderous description of just how the CPD would find their dismembered bodies at the bottom of Lake Michigan should they attempt any such maneuver, that eventually managed to overcome their objections.

  “They exited off I-94 onto South Vincennes Avenue about six minutes ago, but I’ve lost them on the side streets,” Zoelner replied, and Frank would worry later about what the ex-CIA agent was doing hanging around Chicago and more specifically Red Delilah’s. For right now, he was grateful as hell the guy had been on the scene—even if he had lost sight of the vehicle in which Becky was being held hostage.

  “Keep looking,” he barked, cussing and slamming a fist into the little car’s roof when Bill, who was doing his best impression of Mario Andretti over in the driver’s seat, hit a particularly vicious bump that caused Frank’s injured arm—kept stabilized in a diabolically awkward position by his bright blue spica cast—to knock against the front windshield.

  “I’m going to sign off and call Ozzie,” he told Zoelner after he could unclench his teeth against the pain eating at his shoulder and the base of his skull like a starving sewer rat. “I’ll see if he can ping her cell phone. In the meantime, if you spot that vehicle, you call me on the double. Our ETA is fifteen minutes from your last position at the Vincennes Avenue exit.”

  “Roger that.”

  Sweet Jesus, honey, just hold on. Stay tough. Stay strong. Stay smart. Don’t let—

  “I can’t believe that goddamn pirate had the cojones to come take her right out from under our noses!” Bill slammed a palm against the steering wheel, even as he whipped around a slow-moving Comcast van, garnering him a single-finger salute from the pissed-off driver. “Where the hell was Interpol when that bastard was going through immigration? And what the hell does he want, anyway? He has to know he can’t hold her for ransom here in the U.S. without us finding—”

  “Come on now,” Rock interrupted from the small back seat. “He probably got through immigration with a fake passport, and I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s not ransom he’s after. The only thing that would bring ’im here is revenge.”

  “Yeah, I know. Shit,” Bill hissed, taking one hand off the wheel to reach into his jacket pocket. Snagging a little bottle of Pepto, he unscrewed the cap with his teeth and knocked back half the bottle as Frank punched number nine on his speed dial.

  Yeah, Bill’s stomach wasn’t the only one giving him fits. Frank’s was doing loopty loops like he was on a goddamned roller coaster, and despite the coolness of the Chicago day, he was pouring sweat. His jeans were chockablock full of nut soup. He wished he could blame it on the meds, but he was pretty sure he’d be experiencing these same symptoms stone-cold sober because the woman he loved, the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with was, according to Zoelner’s reports, drunk, unconscious and stuffed in a filthy pirate’s trunk and—

  “Ozzie,” he wheezed a breath of relief when the kid answered the landline back at the shop, “I need you to ping Becky’s cell. Zoelner’s no longer got eyes-on and we’re going to—”

  “Already on it, Boss,” Ozzie said. Frank could hear the kid’s fingers flying over a keyboard. “But it’s going to take five to ten to get a lock.”

  “Make it five,” he clicked off without waiting for Ozzie’s reply.

  Make it five, kid, he prayed, because every second counts.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Oh, man, why do I ever drink?

  Becky didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to see the room spinning, didn’t want to lift her pounding head for fear it might just fall right off her neck, didn’t want to shift her thousand-pound legs off the mattress because it was really, really iffy whether or not they’d support her weight.

  Basically, she didn’t want to move one teeny-tiny muscle.

  Of course, she needed to do all these things, in short order too, because her tongue felt like it was wearing a wool sock, and she had to get a drink of water. Now. Or she might just shrivel up into a Becky raisin.

  “Ugh,” she kept her eyes screwed tightly closed, “worst hangover in the history of the world.” On a scale of one to ten, this hangover was a solid eleven.

  Do the crime, and you do the time, sis. That’d been Billy’s sage advice on her twenty-first birthday, the first time she’d ever tied on anything more than a cozy little buzz. She’d barely resisted the urge to kill him then. Now she figured she’d do better to kill herself. Just end the misery. Of course, if she didn’t get some water in her system pretty soon, her body might do the job for her and call it a day.

  “Yowza, how Dan manages to handle this on a daily basis is beyond me,” she told the room, then grimaced when the sound of her own voice made the little demons pounding inside her head exchange their hammers for pickaxes.

  Water! her body cried out again, and she could no longer ignore the painful thirst making her throat ache like she’d swallowed all the sand on North Avenue Beach.

  “Okay, okay,” she grumbled and sat up—

  Uh, no she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  Her eyes flipped open, and the first thing to meet her blurry vision was a giant water stain on a filthy popcorn ceiling. Where in the world…?

  And then it came rushing back to her, a tidal wave of memory surging through her bleary mind.

  She’d been at Delilah’s and had just come out of ladies’ room when a familiar smell cut through the clouds of stale beer, strong whiskey, and sawdust. It was a man’s cologne, overwhelming and unusual and for some reason the scent made her skin crawl and…

  It took her all of a half second to remember where she smelled that particular cologne before, and that was obviously a half second too long, because then she’d gone supernova. Like a dying star, every particle of her being was squeezed down to a single point of intense pain before exploding outward in the next instant. Blam!

  Then…lights out. Nothing.

  And now she was in some filthy motel room if the queen bed, window unit, and cheap plywood furniture were anything to go by, not to mention the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke and the underlying aroma of sweaty bodies and…yuck, that was definitely sex lingering in the air along with the tang of urine.

  Oh yeah, and the really big float in this Macy’s Day Parade of Disastrous Hits was the fact that she was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Sharif, you asshole!

  She’d have screamed it into his butt-ugly face if he’d been in the room. But he was noticeably absent.

  Not that she was complaining. Heck, no.

  If he’d somehow managed to, oh, let’s say, get himself run over by a CTA bus or gunned down by a gang of Southside Latin Kings, she’d be really hard pressed to shed a single tear. Of course, that would just be way too easy, and her luck, of late, certainly wasn’t running in any direction that could be considere
d even remotely easy.

  So…yep, he was likely somewhere gathering God only knew what kind of paraphernalia, and she should be scared. She knew she should be. Two seconds after meeting the guy she knew there was something really wrong with him. Something missing in his fathomless black eyes.

  Had it been the spark of human kindness? That elusive kernel of light that despite race, color, creed, or religious affiliation all humans harbor within the depths of their souls?

  Whatever it was, Sharif lacked it. And she suffered under no delusions then that he was a psychopath, capable of taking her life without batting a lash. Now she suffered under no delusions that not only was he capable of taking her life, but he was going to enjoy doing it. A guy didn’t tie a woman, spread eagle, to a bed unless he had very specific, very obscene plans in mind.

  Which just brought her back around to the fact that she should be scared to death. Shaking in her boots. Ready to—

  Hold the phone…

  Shaking in her…boots!

  “Oh, you wonderfully incompetent moron!” she choked on a dry laugh.

  The dumbass had tied her ankles, but he’d done so without removing her heavy biker boots.

  What a bonehead. Still, she couldn’t help but send a small prayer skyward that Sharif had been graced with a questionable IQ.

  Wiggling her right leg, she was able to slowly, inch by excruciating inch, shuffle her foot out from inside her boot. When her heel finally popped free, she wanted nothing more than to pant and rest like a dog in the summer sun. Her head was doing its best impression of an open wound, but time was working against her, so she immediately hooked her toe into the top of her left boot and pried her remaining foot free. Then she toed off her socks and plunged barefoot back into her left boot, feeling around for the one thing that just might save her life.

  Frank, you big wonderful dill-hole, you may love another woman, but I’m gonna kiss you smack on the lips next time I see you.

  She’d been totally kerflummoxed two years ago when he presented her with a deadly looking knife with all the pomp and circumstance she was used to seeing when a guy presented her with dozen red roses.

  “Ya never know when you’re going to need it,” he’d said after insisting she store it in her boot.

  She hadn’t been able to conceive at the time, especially given her propensity to surround herself with highly trained operators, just what horrific course of events could possibly culminate in her needing a USMC “Bulldog” Tactical Combat Knife with a hollow ground 440C high chromium martensitic stainless steel blade.

  Well, now she knew. It was the scenario where she was kidnapped and hogtied by a fancy-talking Somali pirate.

  Wrestling the knife from its hidden sheath, she hooked the Madagascar rosewood handle between her toes. Folding at the waist, she lifted her feet above her head. Thank God she’d been keeping up with her Pilates, or this little maneuver would’ve been impossible. Still, she needed to start buying bigger jeans if she planned to make a habit of turning herself into a human taco…

  Gripping the blade tightly between her toes, she sawed at the rope securing her right hand.

  Monkey toes. That’s what Billy called them. Given her short stature, it’d be natural to assume she’d have small, stubby toes, but hers were long and thin. Well, now she thanked the good Lord for blessing her with monkey toes. Because along with Sharif’s bumbling incompetence and Frank’s insistence she always be armed, her toes might just be the key to her making it out of this situation alive and—

  Bingo!

  The thin rope frayed and snapped under the razor sharp edge of her blade, and she wasted no time palming the knife and putting it to work on the restraints around her bruised left wrist. The rope gave way almost instantly and, blessedly free, she raced to the window, carefully pushing aside the edge of one dusty, smoke-stained curtain. She stumbled back in shocked horror when she saw Sharif’s ugly face through the dirty window.

  He was right there. Right at the door. In the process of pulling out an old-fashioned room key.

  Time warped and slowed.

  She reeled toward the bathroom, her limbs moving as if they were submerged in water.

  An out-of-body experience. That’s what she was having. Because she was watching herself from a distance.

  She saw herself fling open the bathroom door. Saw herself catalog the moldy shower curtain, stained floor tiles, and chipped toilet. Saw herself dispassionately scan the dripping faucet and used-to-be-white-but-now-sickly-yellow motel towels stacked on the shelf under the sink.

  And then she was shot back into her body like an arrow from a bow, her heart plummeting to the bottom of her stomach, because the one thing she wished to see, the one thing that would’ve given her a chance of escape was glaringly absent.

  The bathroom had no window.

  She refrained from screaming her disappointment only because she didn’t have time for the breakdown she so richly deserved after this hellacious, surely-it-can’t-get-any-worse, oh-wait-it-can day. She didn’t have time because the doorknob rattled as it turned.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh—

  Sharif stepped over the threshold and blinked in confusion at the empty bed. Then his dark face contorted into a mask of such horrible rage, she knew she’d see that vicious look on the backs of her eyelids for years to come.

  If she lived that long.

  And she was determined to live that long.

  Just as it slowed to a snail’s pace, time suddenly reversed directions. The next few moments passed in the blink of an eye.

  Sharif noticed her standing by the bathroom door and instantly dropped the plastic grocery bag in his hand, fumbling for the matte-black handgun shoved in the waistband of his pants.

  She took a loose grip on the rosewood handle of her knife, steadied her breath, and let her USMC “Bulldog” blade fly—just like Frank’d taught her.

  ***

  “Ozzie’s got a lock on her,” Frank said after thumbing off his cell phone and taking a steadying breath lest he pass out. Wild Bill finished screeching around a corner, causing his injured arm to slam against the passenger side door. “Her cell is located on the corner of 109th and South Wentworth,” he managed through clenched teeth.

  “That’s only five blocks away. Hang on.”

  Yeah, hang on. Easy for Bill to say.

  Frank squeezed tight the ol’ peepers and just let the pain wash over him when Bill took another corner on two wheels—Shell’s Elantra was never going to be the same—and his newly repaired arm once more made jarring contact with the car door.

  Fuck-fuck-fuckety-fuck!

  When he dared to reopen his eyes, the smell of burning rubber wafted in from the vents and added to the prescription soup of narcotics, mind-numbing agony, and gut-twisting fear to have blackness closing in on the edge of his vision. His skin prickled like he was covered in bugs, his whole body flashed hot and cold. Just when he thought he was going to sink into Zzz-Town whether he wanted to or not, just when the blackness began to completely take over, the vibrating of his phone dragged him back from the edge.

  “Go,” he barked, listening intently as Zoelner quickly relayed his location and the fact that he’d found the black BMW.

  “It’s parked in front of room six at the Lazy Suzanne Motorway Motel,” he repeated Zoelner’s words to Bill, “Corner of 108th and Wentworth.”

  “One block closer. That’s even better,” Bill muttered, flying through a red light and narrowly missing being sideswiped by a rusted out jalopy that looked like perhaps it’d been an El Camino in a previous life.

  The last block and the dilapidated buildings on either side of the street whizzed by in a blur of sagging stoops, drooping roofs, and dusty yards. Frank registered the rundown gas station with its requisite South Side gangbangers hanging out on
the corner just before Bill whipped into the parking lot of the Lazy Suzanne. The three of them poured out of the vehicle at the same time Zoelner leapt from a silver SUV. All four men palmed their weapons, holding them out and at the ready.

  Bill, Rock, and Zoelner ran low across the lot, each quartering the area, scanning for threats.

  Frank just ran.

  ***

  “You bitch!” Sharif screeched as the knife she’d sent flying lodged in the meaty part of his shoulder. He dropped his weapon and it hit the orange shag carpeting with a muted thud.

  Becky saw her chance. It was now!

  She lunged for the weapon at the same time Sharif charged like an enraged bull in her direction. She narrowly missed the swipe of his arms by ducking and launching herself at the handgun like a Major League base runner diving toward home plate. With a skid and a grab, she was able to snatch the Glock, roll, and leap to her feet. Aiming the Glock at Sharif’s head, she curled her finger around the trigger.

  “You so much as twitch, and I swear to God I’ll squeeze this trigger until the clip’s empty,” she warned, panting, trying to quiet her racing heart in the same instant she tried to still her shaking hands.

  She’d never met the devil, never really believed in demonic possession, but the absolute hatred on Sharif’s face made her realize she must be looking at Satan’s close cousin. There was no other word but evil to describe the dark light glinting in Sharif’s hard eyes.

  She tried to swallow past the lump of fear and dread that had taken up permanent residence in her throat.

  “Don’t make me do it,” she pleaded when he reached up and grabbed the handle of the tactical knife protruding from his shoulder.

  Please don’t make me do it.

  All the marksmanship lessons Ghost had taught her, all the coaching she received about separating herself from the target, had sounded really good in theory. But now that she was there, looking into the face of a man—albeit an evil man—it was hard to dismiss the fact that his heart was pumping blood through his veins, his lungs sucking in oxygen, his brain synapses firing. It was hard to dismiss the fact that he was alive, and it was within her power to take that life away, snuff it out in an instant with nothing more than a series of muscle contractions in her pointer finger.