by Eva Chase
As we started along the road again, my heart sank. “Do you think we’ll need to call the operation off?” I’d picked up a blowtorch this morning, and excitement had flickered through me when I’d pictured applying it to the display case. To snatch that statue right from under Richter’s nose… “Richter needs to be caught at something. He’s gotten away with too much already. We can’t let him slip through our fingers when we’re so close.”
Sherlock’s eyes gleamed behind the dark panes of his sunglasses. “We won’t. One way or another, I intend to see him behind bars. The exhibit is scheduled to stay open until the end of next week. We have room to ensure our plans cover every possibility.”
He was as eager to carry off this heist as I was, and damn if that enthusiasm didn’t bring out everything that was most attractive in his face. I’d always loved seeing him caught up in a case. When had that enjoyment become more than friendly?
I honestly had no idea.
Sherlock waved the walking stick toward the buildings farther away from the gallery. “Hmm. What’s that fellow over there up to?”
A man in a maintenance worker uniform, his neon yellow vest catching all of the midday light, was perched near the top of a utility pole down the road. Beside him, a dark cable dangled toward the sidewalk. He adjusted something on the metal outcroppings and then reeled that cable up slowly. It swayed back and forth against the pole as he formed it into a thick loop.
When I looked at Sherlock again, his lips had curled into a satisfied smile I recognized at once. My pulse beat faster. “What?”
“You never know where you’ll find inspiration,” he murmured. “What if we don’t cut the power, John? What if we set up the police to do it for us?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jemma
The hotel lobby had the perfect little nook near the front windows where a stand of fake ferns hid me from the room, and the tint on the glass made me invisible to those outside. I’d been sitting there for a few hours, catching up on business through my tablet and setting new contracts into motion as if I could be sure of being around when they were fulfilled. Finally, John’s silver Ford pulled up to the parking garage entrance.
Bash had texted to let me know that the doctor and Sherlock had left the gallery area a while back. They must have gotten started on whatever new strategies they’d thought up right away. I slung my purse over my shoulder and slipped across the room to one of the columns near the lobby elevators.
The savory buttery smell of shepherd’s pie was already drifting from the dining room where the dinner buffet was about to open. Chances were good they’d come by this way.
I positioned myself where I couldn’t see the elevator doors and no one coming off could see me, but I could hear just fine. The doors rasped open to Sherlock’s voice in mid-sentence. “…should be quick enough to assemble,” he was saying.
“It’s good that it gets dark early at this time of year,” John said. “At least we have a decent window in which to set things up.”
They passed my column on the way to the dining room, their voices fading away alongside the tap of John’s walking stick. I counted to ten in my head and then pushed off to follow them.
I’d nearly made it to the dining room doorway when the lobby door squeaked. I glanced over my shoulder out of habit and froze.
The man who strode in had a face so distinctive I recognized it in an instant. His rounded jaw jutted forward like that of an anglerfish, his ruddy skin gone leathery with too much sun over too much time. He’d combed and parted his white-blond hair neatly, and he’d decked out his bulky frame in a button-up shirt and dark jeans that didn’t look totally out of place in this establishment, but I’d have marked him as a predator at a glance even if I hadn’t tangled with him briefly before.
Anglerfish was one of the thugs Stefan Richter kept on his payroll. He’d come after me when the heist in Munich had gone sour. After a brief scuffle, I’d gotten away easily enough, and I’d been wearing a black wig and a lot more make-up, but he might still recognize me.
I crept back to the line of columns until I was close enough to the front desk to listen in. Anglerfish waited stiffly as the clerk helped the woman who’d already been in line. Then he marched over.
“I need to leave a message for John Watson—he’s staying here.”
“Just a second.” The clerk tapped at her computer keyboard. “Yes, of course. What’s the message you’d like to leave?”
“Let’s see… Oh, hold on, I see him right over there. I’ll go talk to him myself. Sorry for the trouble.”
“Not at all,” the clerk said blandly.
Anglerfish hustled away. As soon as the clerk was occupied with someone else, he headed out the door.
I darted across the lobby and ducked into my hidden nook. On the street outside, the thug crossed the road and got into the passenger seat of a car parked farther down the block. I watched for a few minutes, but the lights didn’t come on.
Whoever else was in there, they were just sitting, watching the hotel like I was watching them. They must have followed Sherlock and John back here but only suspected who they were trailing. Now they’d gotten confirmation.
All the intimidated witnesses, all the destroyed evidence that stopped Richter’s cases from going to trial—guys like these carried out that work. Richter wouldn’t like a prominent detective and his partner hanging around his precious exhibit, whether or not he had any idea they were working with me. I wasn’t sure if his thugs would dare take on Sherlock himself, but I wouldn’t put it past them to try to put a whole lot of fear into John.
My throat tightened. I had practical reasons to want to keep all of my trio safe—the heist plan might fall apart if John was too injured to participate. But the thought of him being battered and bruised made me tense for other reasons as well.
He was only doing his job, and I could admit I was starting to believe he was a lot more earnest about it than most of the crime-fighters I’d encountered, even if he got off on the thrill too. There were a whole lot of people who deserved to be roughed up more than John Watson did.
My phone pinged with an incoming text. Garrett was asking whether I was coming to have dinner or at least dessert. I hesitated over the screen for a minute before answering.
Got some information from a friend back home that I’m following up on. Will check in with you all if it leads somewhere.
If Richter’s men were planning on making a move, I wanted to know about it immediately.
I didn’t see anyone stir inside or around the car for close to an hour. The sky darkened outside, the streetlamps glowing more starkly. I was debating alternate tactics when an all too familiar tapping reached my ears.
John was heading toward the front door, not in any great hurry but with a purposeful stride. Where the hell was he going on his own and on foot? Didn’t he know there could be paid mercenaries waiting around to corner him in some dark alley?
No, that possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him.
I had only a couple seconds to grapple with my options. I could have reached out to Bash, but in the absence of other instructions from me, he’d have gone back to his hotel room. Even at his fastest, he couldn’t make it here in time to follow John.
That left me. Fuck. Maybe if John had company, the thugs wouldn’t hassle him in the first place, and Anglerfish wouldn’t get close enough to have a chance at connecting me to the woman he’d chased through München Hauptbahnhof station.
I slipped between the ferns. “John!” I said as I caught up. “Are you heading out too? Good timing.”
John blinked at me and then smiled. He held the door open. “Is your lead taking you anywhere useful?”
I made a face. “No, it ended up being a dead end, at least for now. Richter owns a large property in the councilor’s district, so I’m thinking the blackmail might have been to pressure him into some decision regarding that, but I haven’t found a clear link between the two of them
there either.”
“Well, it would give us a motive. Where are you off to, then?”
“I ran out of sugar cubes. Again. I figured I should buy my own stock before depleting the hotel’s supply any more. What about you?”
John chuckled as we fell into step together on our way down the street, but he hesitated for a beat. “Just picking up some more tobacco for Sherlock.”
Had he felt awkward admitting that? I raised an eyebrow at him as we passed Anglerfish’s car and crossed the street. “Do you normally run his personal errands for him?”
“Only when it benefits me as well as him,” John said, still smiling. “I noticed the tin is getting low, and Sherlock’s too deep in planning mode to pay much attention. Halfway through the night, I expect he’ll finish it off and then be irritable that more didn’t magically appear. You really don’t want to see him irritable. So, I’m making the magic happen.” He waggled his fingers.
Car doors thumped softly behind us—two of them. From the sound, I guessed both Anglerfish and whoever had been in the driver’s seat had gotten out. Their footsteps rasped against the sidewalk after us, no faster than we were walking. For now, they were just seeing where we went.
Waiting for a chance to attack.
My heart thumped, but I didn’t let anxiety color my voice. “You really take care of him—Sherlock—don’t you?”
“Oh, well, it’s mutual, so I don’t think it’s so bad. Sometimes he notices when I’ve pushed myself too hard before I do and gets me to rest. He’ll even play actual classical pieces on his violin to help me relax instead of insisting on his rather experimental compositions. There was one time he shot a guy who would have killed me. Little things like that.”
His tone was light, but I caught just a hint of hesitation in it again. He looked at me with unusual intentness. A tingling of suspicion ran down my spine.
He’d spent a lot of time alone with Sherlock this afternoon. It was possible they’d compared notes about their experiences since meeting me and noticed something that had made them wary. Not incredibly so, or I didn’t think we’d be having this conversation at all, but John wasn’t quite as easy with me as he had been.
Maybe I should have intervened to reduce that alone time. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt whatever schemes they were laying down. Well, I couldn’t do anything about the past, but I could keep him distracted from speculating about me right now.
“I should be able to grab my sweet stuff in here,” I said, pointing to a convenience shop up ahead, and then, as John followed me in under the bright lights, “Did you talk to Sherlock about last night?”
A faint flush crept over John’s face. “No,” he said. “You must have seen how he was this morning. He’d rather set it aside and move forward. I don’t think there’s any way I can bring it up without seeming ‘dramatic’ about it, and there’s not much he hates more than unnecessary dramatics.”
One man came into the shop behind us and sauntered down the aisle next to ours. I caught a glimpse of him between the shelves: not Anglerfish but of similar stock, built like a truck with a forehead nearly as square as a windshield. A really friendly-looking guy. No doubt they only wanted to chat.
I grabbed a box of sugar cubes off the shelf and headed to the counter. “I have trouble picturing you being all that dramatic about it. But I’ve learned my lesson about meddling in whatever’s going on between you two.”
John was quiet while I paid. I scanned the street surreptitiously on our way out and spotted Anglerfish mostly obscured by cars on the other side of the street, a few down from us. The bell over the shop door sounded when we were several paces on our way—our other tail rejoining the chase.
“How did you do it?” John said, his gaze fixed on the street ahead. “Get him to… open up to that kind of experience?”
Ah, so he’d figured out that much. I suspected that had been deduction on his part more so than Sherlock admitting it. And now he wanted me to act as couples therapist? Dear lord.
I might as well be honest. “It was just sex. Purely physical, like a very enjoyable workout. I don’t think I could give you any tips you could use. He can’t be the same with you because he likes you.”
John snorted. “And you’re trying to tell me he doesn’t like you?”
“He hardly knows me,” I said. “He finds me intriguing. It’s not the same thing. Your lives are entwined—you have a deep, life-saving, tobacco-fetching kind of loyalty. I doubt that kind of caring about another human being comes very easily to Sherlock in the first place, from what I’ve seen of him. It’d probably be even harder for him to detach those feelings from physical intimacy than it is for most people.”
All the more reason why I’d been right to avoid that kind of complication between me and Bash, come to think of it.
“The intimacy wouldn’t necessarily have to be detached.” John paused. “But that’s why your approach wouldn’t work.”
“I don’t know. You could just talk to him about it and see what he says, dramatics or not.”
“Yeah.” He let out a sigh. “I should probably figure out exactly what I’d want out of that conversation first. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to actually date the guy. He’s too… Sherlock. But maybe, if we stayed the way we are and just added in kissing and… whatever else, now and then—I don’t know.”
His befuddlement over the situation was kind of adorable. “Well, I don’t get the impression he’s going anywhere, so I’d imagine you have plenty of time to figure it out.”
“Very true.”
He led the way around the corner to a tobacco shop a couple blocks down. Truck-guy followed us in again. John poked through the offerings with practiced speed and made his purchase. We were partway back to the corner when he leaned close to my ear.
“As you may have already realized, we have extra company on our errand.”
All his time in Sherlock’s presence had clearly honed his own instincts. I nodded without glancing back.
John gave his walking stick a little twirl. “In situations like this I generally prefer to set up the ambush myself and turn the tables rather than waiting to see how my opponent would like to play things.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked. I couldn’t say I’d complain about giving our followers some incentive to back off.
“Oh, maybe a shortcut down a darkened alley.” He shot me a grin and caught my elbow to draw me with him down an alley that had presented itself. “The two of us against one—I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
Against one? “John,” I started with a lurch of my stomach. Before I could correct him in warning, the thugs charged into the narrow shadowed space after us.
They both barreled right at John. He was their real target, after all. I tossed myself into Anglerfish’s path with a faked stumble, letting a gasp of surprise slip from my lips. Then I jammed my elbow as hard as I could into his gut.
You might think that it’d be easier to fight a massive dude from a distance, but I’d found with my particular skillset of speed and focused strength, I worked best when I was close enough to land my blows with maximum impact—especially in a space like this where there wasn’t much room to maneuver anyway.
I slipped Anglerfish’s attempt to catch me in a hold and socked him in the throat while kneeing him in the balls. He grunted but kept swinging.
He was going to regret that. I dodged to the left, and he grabbed my hair, yanking hard enough to send pain splintering through my scalp. For a second, he snapped my head around to face him. Our gazes locked, and then I was stabbing my fingers into his eyes.
With a choked sound, his grip loosened. I pulled free and slammed his legs out from under him with a sweep of my foot, adding a blow to his spine as he toppled. His head smacked the pavement, and he sprawled there in a half-conscious daze.
I spun around. John had been doing a decent job of holding his own against Truck-guy. The beefier man was favoring one foot, and a
walking-stick shaped welt decorated his cheek. Apparently deciding he needed an extra advantage, the thug whipped out a knife.
That was hardly playing fair.
Before I could jump in, John lashed out with his stick and knocked the blade right out of the guy’s hand. I snatched it up before it even hit the ground. Truck-guy glanced from John with his stick to me brandishing the knife and appeared to decide he’d had enough. He shoved past me on his way out of the alley.
John caught my arm to steady me. “Are you all right?” he asked.
He clearly was. His eyes were sparkling, elation emanating from every inch of his body. He’d enjoyed that fight for his life.
John Watson was an adorable sick fuck, and I liked it.
“I’m fine,” I said, and nodded to Anglerfish, who’d found the wherewithal to roll onto his back. “Let’s get out of here before they decide to make another go of it.” As much as John might have enjoyed that, I wanted to get him back to the hotel in one piece.
John walked the rest of the way back at an energized pace. He burst into the lounge room, where apparently he and the rest of the trio had planned to meet. The moment Sherlock and Garrett ambled in several minutes later, he launched into an account of our adventure. I hung back by the door, watching the other two watch him.
“I don’t know if we can even be sure they’re Richter’s people,” he finished. “It’s not as if we haven’t pissed off plenty of other criminals and their associates.”
“But most likely Richter,” Sherlock said grimly. “They might have noticed us by the gallery today. I should have been more careful.”
John waved his concern off. “If it is him, it’ll be my own fault for that stunt trying to shake the display case.”
Sherlock’s gaze slid to me, and there was definitely a cooler edge to his penetrating stare than I’d felt before. “You’re lucky Jemma happened to be with you.”