Then he stepped back and she sighed.
“Right. Later,” she said, and followed him down the stairs toward the light.
* * *
Nolan left her in the first row of shelves nearest the door, just steps away from the lighted part of the warehouse and the way out. “Watch until their backs are turned,” he said. “Then run like hell.”
She nodded, and he disappeared down the row again as her heart pounded.
He would be okay. Nobody killed over toys, even Major MacGuffins. They wouldn’t do anything to him. She was almost sure. She bit her lip and waited, and then her cell phone rang and she grabbed it and answered it before it could ring again.
“Don’t do that,” she whispered into the phone.
“You didn’t call me,” Courtney said. “You’re fifteen minutes late.”
“Yeah, well there are guys after us,” Trudy whispered.
“What guys?” Courtney said. “What us?”
“Nolan and me. Reese’s got a ring of toy thieves here—”
“Toy thieves? What are you talking about?”
“Call nine-one-one,” Trudy said, and then realized Courtney didn’t know where they were. “We’re—”
Somebody took her cell phone out of her hand, and she screamed and turned.
“Let’s talk,” Reese said, and shut off her phone.
“I’m not giving you the Mac,” Trudy said, holding her bags behind her.
Reese sighed. “Trudy, I don’t know what Nolan’s told you, but I’m positive it’s not the truth.”
“He’s a cop.” Trudy took a step back. “And boy, are you in trouble.”
“He’s a double agent for the Chinese government,” Reese said.
Trudy tightened her grip on her bags. “Whoa. You’ve got a better imagination than he does. He said you were a toy thief.”
Reese looked taken aback. “A toy thief? Who the hell steals toys?”
“The Grinch,” Trudy said. “I don’t know. It sounded plausible when he said it. It still sounds plausible compared to the Chinese-double-agent bit.”
“I am not a toy thief,” Reese said.
“But you don’t have a nephew, either. Because we’re in this warehouse and there are no Mac Twos, which means you had to get me here for some reason.”
“The Chinese spy codes.” Reese nodded toward her bags. “They’re in that MacGuffin box. I’m with the CIA and I need them.”
“Fat chance.” Trudy stepped back again. “I don’t care what alphabet you flash at me, you are not taking this Mac from me.”
“Look on the box, Trudy,” Reese said patiently. “In the lower right-hand corner, there should be a black X.”
“There isn’t,” Trudy said, holding the bag tighter.
“It’s small,” Reese said. “Look for it.”
Trudy hesitated, but he met her eyes without flinching. He’s telling the truth, she thought, and put her bags down. She took the Mac box out of the bag and stepped into the light to look at it.
Sure enough, in the lower right-hand corner on the back was a small black X.
“You put it there,” Trudy said, not wanting to believe Nolan was the bad guy.
“When?” Reese said. “You haven’t let that box out of your hands since you got it.”
“Oh, hell.” Trudy swallowed. “I need this doll, Reese.”
“It’s okay,” Reese said. “I don’t need the doll. I just need the instruction sheet. That’s where the codes are. Deal?”
Trudy bit her lip. Leroy didn’t need the instructions; he probably knew more about the toy by now than the designers did. Toy hijackers and Chinese double agents were both ridiculous; Leroy was real. “Okay.”
Reese held out his hand for the box, and she tightened her grip.
“Just the instructions.” She opened the lid and felt down the back of the box for the paper, but there was nothing there. “Damn.” She held the box into the pool of light cast by the fixture far above her and looked in. “It must have fallen under the doll.” She carefully pulled the doll out, still wired into the cardboard backing that showed explosions, and shook the box upside down.
“Trudy,” Reese said, his voice grim.
“I’m looking.” Trudy dropped the empty box to unwire the MacGuffin to see if the instructions had lodged behind it.
Reese picked up the box and began to dissemble it, checking in all the folds. “It’s not here.”
“It’s not here, either.” Trudy pulled the cardboard background away from the doll and handed it over, holding on to the Mac tightly. “And it was earlier.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Nolan checked—” She stopped, appalled.
“Nolan opened the box and took out the instructions,” Reese said, sounding grim.
“But he put them back, I saw him,” Trudy said. “He slipped them behind the cardboard and closed up the box.”
“He palmed them, Trudy. He got the codes.”
Trudy thought back. “He couldn’t have. I was watching him, right up to…”
Reese looked at her patiently.
“Right up to when you called to me in the checkout line,” Trudy said, clutching the Mac closer and feeling miserable. “I looked away to talk to you. Did you see him take them?”
“No,” Reese said. “I was looking at you.”
Trudy felt ill. “Can I have the box back? At least I can give the doll to Leroy for Christmas.” She bent, keeping the doll in one hand, and picked up the shopping bags with the cow and the Twinkletoes in them.
“Look,” Reese said. “I need your help. Nolan’s a bad guy, and he’s somewhere in this warehouse with those codes, and he trusts you. You call to him, get him to come out to us, and we’ll take it from there.”
Trudy stepped back. “You’ll hurt him.”
Reese shook his head, moving closer. “You watch too many movies. Spies don’t hurt people, they just swap information. And that’s all we’re going to do. Take back the codes.” He smiled at her, his baby face reassuring. “Just call out for him, Trudy. He’ll come to you. He likes you. Then you can take the doll and go home, and you’ll have done a good thing for your country, too.” She hesitated and he said, “Of course, I’ll have to check the doll before you go to make sure there’s nothing else there.” He held out his hand for the MacGuffin.
Of course you will, Trudy thought, and looked around him at the door. Could she shove him out of the way and get out?
“Come on,” Reese said. “Who are you going to trust, me or the guy who lied to you and stole the instruction sheet?”
Good question.
She stuck the Mac under her arm, looped the two remaining shopping bags over her wrist, and opened her purse.
“Trudy?” Reese said.
“I’m gonna go with the guy who lied,” Trudy said, and Maced him.
* * *
Reese had stopped screaming by the time Trudy found the staircase again, which comforted her some. If he was really a CIA agent, she’d just Maced a good guy, but on the other hand …
Actually, there wasn’t an other hand. She’d just Maced a good guy.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Nolan whispered, and she jerked back, almost dropping her last two bags.
The Mac she kept her grip on.
“I Maced him. How’d you know I’d be here?”
“I figured this is where you’d run to once the other guys blocked the door. You were supposed to get out.”
“Yeah, well, you were supposed to be the good guy,” Trudy whispered back. “You took the instructions, you bastard.”
“Yeah,” Nolan said. “So?”
“So you’re not a cop,” Trudy said. “You’re a double agent for the Chinese, you rat—”
“He told you that?”
Trudy stopped. “That is pretty far-fetched.”
“Trudy, he’s the double agent for the Chinese.”
Trudy glared at where she thought he was in the darkness. “Do
you guys just make this stuff up as you go?”
“MacGuffins are made in China,” Nolan whispered. “They marked one box last year and sent it over to that toy store. We just found out that it went missing and never got picked up, which is why we had the toy store staked out.”
“We who?” Trudy whispered back. “No, wait, I know this part. You’re the CIA. And I’m pissed off. Do you really think I’m going to believe this crap? That the Chinese secret service puts codes in dolls? Why don’t they just e-mail them?”
“Computers can be hacked.”
“And Major MacGuffins can’t?” Trudy looked at the doll in her arms.
“One sheet of paper, all the codes,” Nolan said. “On microdot. Very efficient. Except they lost them last year.”
“So this is about last year’s codes?” Trudy shook her head. “Why would you want last year’s codes? This story needs work.”
“Because with last year’s codes we can decipher all of last year’s transmissions that we intercepted. Which is what’s going on right now.”
“Right now.”
“I took them out of the box and passed them on,” Nolan said. “If you’ll give the doll to Reese, he’ll realize it’s over and hit the road.”
“Evidently not,” Trudy said. “He knows you’ve got the instruction sheet and he doesn’t seem to be leaving. I’m not buying any of this, you know. But I also don’t care about any of it. As long as Leroy—”
“I know, I know, he gets the doll.” Nolan sighed. “I can’t believe I promised you that. I’m going to end up getting shot for some stupid doll.”
“Yes, but you’re saving a little boy’s Christmas,” Trudy said. “That’s very heroic.”
“I’m still gonna get shot,” Nolan said. “So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take your Mace—”
“I dropped it,” Trudy said.
“Great,” Nolan said.
“Well, I never Maced anybody before. He scared the hell out of me when he screamed. But I’ll be better now. And I don’t need the Mace. I’ve seen Miss Congeniality twenty times, it’s Courtney’s favorite movie.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That SING thing. Solar plexus, Instep, Nose, Groin.”
“No.” Nolan’s whisper was flat in the darkness. “Do not think you’re Rambo. Just run for the damn door.”
“Okay.” Trudy shifted the Mac to her other arm as she tried to remember what other weapons she might have in her purse. No Mace. No knife. No gun. She clearly hadn’t come out prepared for Christmas Eve. Not even a nail file.… “Wait a minute.” She reached in one of the bags, pulled out Courtney’s Twinkletoes box, and pried the top open.
“What are you doing?” Nolan whispered.
“Arming myself.” Trudy opened the manicure set wired next to Twink’s feet. There was a nail file in there, just as she’d remembered. “Got it.”
“Do not fight with anybody,” Nolan whispered, the order clear. “Just run for the damn door.”
“Okay.” Trudy put the nail file in her coat pocket.
“We need something to create a disturbance. Too bad that grenade in the Mac doesn’t work. I could use a grenade.”
“There’s a gun,” Trudy brought up the Mac’s hand so she could look down the barrel of the Mac’s revolver. “What’s this thing stuck on the end?”
“A silencer,” Nolan whispered. “If only I had one for you.”
“So is the gun louder with it off?”
“Don’t fire that thing, we don’t know what it’ll do.” Nolan peered over the edge of the stairs.
Trudy leaned back against the staircase and looked at the gun. It was a horrible thing to give a kid. What were people thinking? Evil Nemesis Brandon’s mother must have had a politically correct meltdown when she realized what was in the box, but she got it for him anyway. Well, good for ENB’s mom. Trudy resisted the urge to pull the trigger and pulled on the silencer instead, which popped right off. “Whoops.”
“Shhhh.”
The silencer felt a little heavy for something that was basically a plastic cap. Trudy stuck her hand in her purse and found her miniflash. Hunching over to shield the light from the warehouse, she looked inside the cylinder. There was something rectangular stuck in there, about half an inch wide, with a slice of something white in it.
“Oh, hell,” Trudy said out loud.
“Shhhh.” Nolan turned on her. “You—”
“It’s a thumb drive,” Trudy whispered.
“What?”
“The silencer. It’s a USB key, a thumb drive, you know, a mini hard drive. It wasn’t just the code in the instructions—”
Nolan leaned in to look, and Trudy felt him press warm against her as he took the silencer, his weight a comfort, especially since she knew she was holding something that Reese probably would shoot her for.
“This is not good,” she whispered.
“Oh, honey, this is great,” Nolan said in her ear. “Oh, babe, do you have any idea what you just found?”
“The thing Reese is going to kill me for?” Trudy said.
“He’s not going to kill you,” Nolan said, but he didn’t sound as though he were giving the thought his full attention. “Give me that doll.”
“No,” Trudy said. “You can have the silencer, but you can’t have—”
She heard something and shut up as Nolan froze.
Then he leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “I need your tape.”
She frowned at him, and he began to go silently through her bags until he held up the Scotch tape she’d bought to wrap Leroy’s Mac a million years ago. Then he put the gray plastic silencer on the underside of the gray railing along the wall and began to wrap tape around it.
Good thing I got the invisible kind, she thought, and wondered if she was ever going to get home.
“Okay,” Nolan whispered when he was done. “We’re going out there again. And I will distract them and this time you will run for the door even if your phone rings.”
“How are you going to distract them?”
“Give me that cow.”
“The cow?” Trudy handed over the bag with the cow and hugged the Mac to her.
“You pull the string and it talks, right?”
“It says, ‘Eat chicken.’”
“Right. Come on.”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye again?”
“No. I’m going with you this time.”
“That’s good, I like that better,” Trudy said, and followed him down the stairs again, clutching the Mac and the Twinkletoes bag.
When they were back at the end of the row by the door, Nolan pulled the string and wrapped it around the cow’s body. “Door’s there,” he whispered, nodding toward it.
She nodded back and gripped the nail file in her pocket while he drew his arm back.
“With your shield or on it, cow,” he said, and tossed it over the shelves.
The string unwound itself before the cow cleared the top, and it mooed, “Eat chicken” as a fusillade rang out. Nolan shoved her toward the door, and she ran for it, hitting Reese, who was running around the end of the shelves, his eyes still red and streaming from the Mace as he raised his gun. He grabbed for her, and she stabbed him in the gun arm, dropping her Twinkletoes bag but still clutching the Mac as he screamed, and then she kicked him in the knee and ran like hell for the door, wrenching it open as Reese fired, hearing the bullet ping on the metal as she dove for the darkness.
* * *
Trudy ran for the edge of the parking lot, clutching the Mac, adrenaline pumping, not stopping when she heard, “Hold it!”
Somebody grabbed Trudy’s arm and swung her around and she saw it was the cabdriver. “Give me that doll,” he said.
“No.” She smacked him with the bag and as he raised one hand to protect his head, she saw the gun in the shoulder holster under his leather jacket.
“Damn it,” she said, and swung her elbow sharply
into his solar plexus, stamped down on his instep, punched him in the nose, and then tried to kick him in the groin and missed and got his thigh instead, collapsing him onto the pavement.
Good enough, she thought, and took off for the street, only to have somebody else grab her arm just as she reached the chain-link fence.
“No,” she said, and tried to turn, but whoever it was wrapped his other arm around her waist and pulled her back against him.
“Stop it!” Nolan said. “It’s me. Give me the Mac.”
“No,” Trudy said, furious, and smacked her head back into his nose. She heard him swear and knew she’d gotten him, but he didn’t let go, so she tried for his instep, but he jerked her off her feet.
“Trudy, stop it.”
She swung her elbow back again and missed, and he kicked her feet out from under her and dumped her onto the grimy, wet pavement, yanking her arms behind her.
“You couldn’t make this easy, could you?” he said as her cheek scraped on the ground. “You had to be a hard-ass.”
“You bastard, you promised me I’d keep the doll,” she said, and then she felt him yank her wrists together as he slapped handcuffs on her and took the Mac away from her.
“Trudy Maxwell. You’ve been taken into custody for criminal obstinacy.”
“Fuck you,” Trudy said into the pavement. “And you have to be an actual cop to take me into custody, which you are not, so don’t think I’m not going to sue your ass for kidnapping.”
He put his arm under her and lifted her gently back onto her feet. “I’m not kidnapping you.”
“Yeah?” Her hair fell in her eyes and she couldn’t brush it out, which made her madder. “You and Reese, this was all a setup. He didn’t even shoot at you back there, he shot at me. You were working together.”
Nolan swung her around and gave her a gentle push back toward the warehouse. There were more cars there now and a van, and while she watched, somebody shoved Reese into the back of one of the cars. He was handcuffed.
“Not working with Reese,” Nolan said.
“I don’t see any police department insignia on these cars,” Trudy said, shrugging off his hand as he prodded her forward. “In fact, I don’t see any insignia at all.”
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