Diamond In The Rough (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 2)

by Isobella Crowley

  “One,” Gilmore said. Something like an electrical cloud seemed to rise from her teammates—the tightly coiled adrenaline seeking release.

  On the viewer, no guards were in sight patrolling the ground floor. The guy at the desk could be pinned down by one of them while the others focused on the statuette.

  “Two.” The exterior guard passed out of sight to check behind the museum.

  Everyone fingered their weapons. They were loaded with rubber bullets, but things could still go wrong. There could be no mistakes.

  “Stop,” Agent Mgaywa hissed through their earbuds. “Someone’s coming.”

  Gilmore froze and echoed her subordinate. “Stop—wait!”

  The five members of the main team stilled as they looked around for whoever it was their teammate had seen. Mortensen checked his mini-viewer furiously and paid special attention to the micro-cam on the outside wall of the building with a view of the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 89th Street.

  Their overwatch spoke again. “Someone all in black is moving really fast toward the front door.”

  Kendra glanced at her second-in-command, who licked his lips in his concentration and added his own commentary.

  “Yeah. I see them. Holy shit, Mgaywa ain’t kidding.”

  Now, they all caught a glimpse of the mysterious intruder. A lithe, petite black silhouette moved across the pavement. It instinctively avoided the pools and columns of light that fell on the streets from the plethora of city lamps overhead and it seemed logical that it made almost no noise either, although they had no sound to confirm it.

  At first, Kendra almost thought it was an animal—an oversized cat or a coyote or something. The way it moved did not, in all honesty, look human.

  However, it ran on two legs, albeit close to the ground. She drew in a sharp breath. Cold pinpricks ran down the back of her neck and all along her spine to trigger shockwaves of ice through her whole body.

  She hesitated. They might be able to accomplish a last-minute change of plans—spring a trap on this infiltrator, wring information from them, and justify their own presence by saying they expected an attempted theft and were there to stop it.

  It was a good strategy but there was no guarantee that this person was their real target. And even if they were, it would leave the Black Cat Idol still in the hands of its current owners. The bastards who wanted to steal it would simply try again—only next time, they’d be more careful.

  “Stand down,” she whispered into her microphone. “Watch and wait.”

  Kendra sensed a ripple of tension go through the men around her and some of them sighed faintly in frustration. They had been on the verge of action after a great deal of intense preparation to perpetrate this heist.

  And a heist was exactly what it was. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could not exactly take credit for the extra-judicial theft of a precious object. Hence the operation being off the books.

  Accordingly, their hands were tied if anything threatened to toss a monkey wrench into the proverbial gears.

  The dark figure finished its indirect and evasive yet fleeting passage across the street. At one point, it moved past only about fifty feet from the van.

  Gilmore could not be certain, but she suspected this cat-burglar, or whatever they were, was a woman. There was something about the shape of the silhouette and the way it moved that suggested a female. It could, however, be a particularly small and nimble man but moved too rapidly for her to get a good look.

  The entire team watched, alert and breathless, as the newcomer stopped momentarily at the museum’s main entrance. A couple of gentle footsteps became audible as the exterior security guard appeared at the building’s far corner.

  She blinked in disbelief. The instant the guard had appeared, the dark figure had vaulted upward, seemingly without even a need to crouch or otherwise prepare for the motion.

  She—it had to be a woman—simply became airborne. One moment, both feet were on the ground and in the next, she somersaulted through the shadows and somehow avoided the lights as she tumbled upwards. The security guard strolled forward without missing a step, none the wiser that she’d even been there, to begin with.

  Mortensen gasped. “Did you see that? Who the hell is this character?”

  Kendra had one or two ideas, but she only shook her head as if in total ignorance. Now, however, this began to make a modicum of sense. The rumors weren’t total bullshit, after all.

  The shadowy figure landed—apparently soundlessly as the guard wasn’t alerted—on the flat ledge that overhung the entrance area to place her level with the second-floor part of the atrium. Kendra stared, curious whether their guest would try to leap down once the guard passed and go through the front or use a more unconventional form of entry.

  The black-clad figure remained on the ledge. Slowly, she crept over to the curved surface of the museum’s cylindrical main body and hid in a narrow slat of darkness.

  Down on the ground, the guard sauntered on, his attention on this area already waning as he navigated the corner to patrol the side and rear of the building.

  One of the guys in the van exhaled sharply from his nose. “What is she doing?”

  He received his answer almost immediately. The cat burglar’s dark shape began to scuttle up the exterior of the atrium. She moved like a lizard and far too quickly for them to believe what they saw. It was almost surreal.

  Kendra raised her pair of field binoculars to her eyes and briefly caught a glimpse of the figure during her ascent.

  There was no climbing gear that she could see. Unless the party-crasher had some kind of specialized grip embedded within her gloves, she simply pulled herself along the vertical surface as though gravity meant nothing to her.

  “Well,” she said quietly, “it would appear she’s going in through the goddamn skylight.” She lowered the binoculars and shook her head.

  Mortensen checked the cams again. “I have a camera on the top floor that has a partial view of the skylight. We should be able to see what she does if she goes that route. She might also go over the top and try to get in through the back, you know.”

  Kendra nodded. “That’s possible…”

  Someone in the back, whom she recognized as Agent Villareal, finished her thought for her. “Yeah, except this is already some Batman-type shit. I half-expect her to crash through the glass on a cable.”

  They huddled around Mortensen’s viewer and watched as the slender black silhouette darkened part of the skylight and stopped there. She took a moment to do something to one of the panes of glass.

  The interior guard patrolling the highest level of the atrium strolled past and suddenly, the infiltrator was gone.

  “Shit,” Mortensen said. “Did anyone actually see her move? It looks like she simply blinked right out of existence.”

  Gilmore did not like the almost superstitious vibe she now felt from her men. “I think I saw her jump. Listen, we may have some powerful steroids and prototype technology at work here, but she’s not a ghost or a gremlin. Whoever she is, she’s still a part of the normal world that we’re trained to deal with.”

  That seemed to calm them a little.

  On the screen, the guard continued his slow walk and the dark figure returned to work. She abruptly removed an entire pane from the skylight, crawled through the opening, and moved upside-down along the interior of the glass before she dropped silently to the floor.

  Horror gnawed at Gilmore’s gut as the intruder advanced behind the top-floor guard and seemed to move directly toward him.

  Jesus. She’s not going to kill that guy, is she? We can’t let her—

  The dark figure pounced and immediately caught the man in a triangle choke. He struggled and flailed for a moment or two before he lost consciousness. His assailant dragged him behind a dividing wall as if he weighed about five pounds.

  “Damn.” Villareal snickered. “I’m almost starting to like this bitch. This is like, poetry in motion.”

>   Another odd fact soon became apparent. The black-clad figure moved constantly in such a way that her face was never directly caught by any of the museum’s security cameras.

  She must not have known about micro-cams planted by Kendra’s ally, though, since her face did pass directly in front of the one focused on the top and skylight. The intruder wore a black veil or balaclava of sorts. All they could see was a pair of smoldering black eyes.

  The team stared, rapt, at the screen as the lady worked her way down to the ground floor. There, she neutralized the other patrolling guard the same way she’d disabled the first. The man seated at his desk up front was not even aware of her presence yet.

  “Mortensen,” Gilmore said. “Pull up and maximize the cam watching the area where the statuette is. That has to be what she’s after.”

  Her right-hand man did as instructed. The viewer was filled by the feed in question, which looked out on the Peter B. Lewis Theater, current home of the Occult Objects display. The Black Cat itself rested on a stand at the far rear of the chamber.

  Faintly, in the dim security lighting, they could see the latticework of lasers that protected the entire room from intrusion.

  The agents held their breath as their rival slipped into the theater. She paused and examined the impossible net of luminous tripwires before her.

  “All right,” Kendra said, “if she crashes and burns here, which she probably will, we may have to go in ourselves in case she panics at the alarm and tries to kill the desk guard.”

  Instead, the stranger executed what looked partly like a gymnastics routine and partly like ballet.

  “No way.” Villareal gasped as the woman leapt and slipped and danced between the faint beams. “No fucking way.”

  Their gaze could barely follow the speed and grace of her movements before suddenly, she stood before the idol.

  She plucked it calmly from its stand and slipped it into a small padded satchel at her waist. Nothing happened. The museum’s security personnel must have assumed that the laser alarms were already sufficient as a last line of defense.

  The thief pranced and wheeled through the beams once again and at times, her body appeared almost to float between them.

  Mortensen shook his head. “My God. Ma’am, are we going to intercept her when she comes out?” He’d returned the viewer to split-screen. “It looks like she’ll simply waltz out the normal way, at this point.”

  Kendra bit her lip. “No.”

  The mysterious figure emerged from the theater and, to their surprise, lobbed a small object back into the room she’d just left. It crossed one of the lasers and tripped the apparently silent alarm. Lights blazed on all throughout the building.

  The last guard bolted up from his chair, his face slack with surprise, and he ran in the direction of the empty theater. Despite the lights, the thief had somehow located the one corner near the side of the atrium which still lay swathed in black shadows. She vanished into it and the guard ran past her.

  When he’d moved on, she stepped out, moved at a trot, and walked out the front door.

  Kendra shook her head in amazement. A perfect heist had been accomplished with inhuman precision.

  Their guest had one more surprise for them. As the burglar emerged into the darkened street, she stopped, turned toward the van, and pulled her black facemask off. When she waved cheerfully at them, it looked like she was smiling.

  She knew we were here all along, the agent raged. She brought up her field camera and made her hands work as quickly and efficiently as she could to snap a couple of photos in rapid succession.

  The mysterious woman had stood in the beam of a streetlamp, so they’d likely be able to get good resolution on her features once the photos were processed.

  What in God’s name does she think she’s doing? Kendra knew the others wondered the same thing. They’d somehow stumbled directly into a game whose rules turned out to be way more complex than they’d anticipated.

  Villareal laughed and put his face in his hands. “Oh, man. That was something else. What do you think, ma’am?”

  Kendra folded her arms over her chest. “Right now, I don’t know what to think. I’m impressed, I’ll say that much. And I still intend to get that statuette.”

  She rolled her tongue around her teeth. “I do think, though, that we need to do our homework on the Black Cat’s new owner.”

  Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York

  Alexander Thomas crouched on a ledge, hidden in the deep nighttime shadows of Manhattan’s tall, ziggurat-like buildings. Below him, the strange, circular mass of the Guggenheim brooded.

  He’d arrived there too late and had seen everything.

  With his senses heightened and his perceptions sharpened by the power which Moswen had imparted, he’d known instantly that the street corner was being watched by someone. He identified four or five people in a van opposite the museum, as well as a guy with binoculars in a nearby high window.

  There was also some derelict-looking prick lounging in an alley out of sight. At first, he had assumed he was simply another street person, but when he’d heard the soft report of headsets, he realized the man was wearing an earbud. He, too, was one of them.

  They were probably agents of the US government. Alex suspected he might be able to destroy them himself but it would be risky. All that needed to happen for him to fail was for one of them to scream and summon the cops.

  Or, for that matter, to bring his comrades to the battle, toting automatic weapons and probably in a really shitty mood.

  He had augmented strength and speed and perception but he was no more resilient to bodily trauma than any other human being.

  Given that, he’d paused to gather his thoughts and re-plan his strategy, and simply waited. Then, Taylor herself had arrived. The Feds seemed as shocked as he was. They’d done nothing to stop her.

  If Alex didn’t try, no one would. And he didn’t think he’d have another chance.

  “Damn,” he panted under his breath, almost mouthing the word rather than saying it. Nothing went right for him lately.

  But he knew—he was certain—that all these setbacks combined would be insignificant compared to what would happen to him the next time Moswen called and he had to report that he’d failed her. Again.

  There was, however, one thing that finally worked to his advantage. He recognized the single aspect of this debacle in which, finally, the universe gave him the small break he so richly deserved after all his hard work and needless suffering.

  Taylor made her exit down Fifth Avenue. That placed her on a trajectory toward him.

  Okay, his brain said as he forced himself to not speak out loud. She was a vampire, and her hearing might be able to pick up even the faintest of sounds. He tried to avoid even breathing. We know she’s killer-bad. But she also doesn’t know I’m here. I’m as strong and fast as she is. And she has no fucking idea what a terrible week I’ve had.

  It was now or never. He could either get the statue and neutralize Moswen’s most obvious rival in one fell swoop, or wait for the brand on his chest to finally cause his whole body to burst into flames and be done with it.

  Taylor trotted down the sidewalk almost directly below him. A gargoyle-like griffin statue was mounted on the ledge at his side. Those two facts struck him as a good combination.

  Do it.

  The vampire paused for a fraction of a second and seemed to tilt her head up toward his position. By then, he’d already sprung his hasty ambush.

  The stone griffin’s base shattered beneath his fist and the bulk of it, along with other shards and fragments of material, hurtled down toward his target. In the same motion, he launched himself toward the pavement in front of her.

  He was terrified. Wind hissed past his ears and the ground surged toward him. But his heart sang with gleeful joy when he realized that his feint had worked. She’d dashed forward reflexively to avoid the toppling statue and now, his feet would land on her head and shoulders.
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  Only about a meter of air separated them when her gaze flickered up and saw him. Then, somehow, she was already out of the way.

  Fuck!

  Alex pounded into the pavement a half-second after the shattered gargoyle did. The concrete collapsed inward in a spiderweb of cracks under the impact of his feet.

  Taylor had barely avoided his first move, however, and he needed to make the most of the slight advantage. He used his landing as a launch to spin toward her, his arms out and teeth bared.

  “Give me that—”

  She lashed out and struck him in the face. While she hadn’t had time to pull back far enough for a full-strength blow, it was still powerful enough to detonate thunderclaps of pain through his head and drive him back two steps, even empowered as he was by Moswen.

  He stumbled and tried to turn the motion into a clumsy roundhouse kick directed at her knee. She merely caught his leg in her small, steel-hard hands and shoved. He catapulted into a lamppost and buckled the metal.

  “So,” a soft female voice said, “you must be the second party involved in the infamous Times Square Brawl.”

  Alex sprang to his feet and tried to mask the growing pain with rage and desperation but did not answer. He also tried to ignore the fact that the woman’s voice betrayed no hint of fear whatsoever.

  He pounced.

  Moswen’s loaned power enabled him to continue—for almost a minute—a fight that would have been over in seconds for an average human. His speed and power were the equal of his foe’s. But, as he learned almost immediately, these gifts meant little when he barely knew how to use them.

  If Taylor was taken aback by his raw physical power, she overcame it quickly enough. His lunging, undisciplined strikes failed to connect. She was ahead of his every move, anticipated all he did, and countered it with ease.

  Blows battered him. The glancing strikes of her hands and feet and elbows and knees still carried enough force to drive him back, stun him, and leave him gasping in pain.