by Sandra Moore
She stared at him. “You know that and haven’t arrested them?”
“Knowing the facts and bringing a triad to justice are two different things,” he said gravely. “In the late eighties, the Sun Yee On Dragon Head—the ‘big cheese’ you called him—was arrested. The police found a list of nine hundred names that were the Assistant Mountain Master, deputies and Red Poles.”
“Nice haul.” She reached for a pair of jeans.
“The Dragon Head was convicted based on eyewitness testimony, but was released from prison after only two years.”
“What?”
“His appeal went to a judge called Sir Ti-liang. He’d been knighted by the English queen, and was tough enough that his court was nicknamed the Court of No Appeal.”
Nikki could see this one coming a mile away. “But he let the Dragon Head off. Insufficient evidence?”
“Almost. A reversal of his previous opinions about allowable evidence.”
Nikki laid the jeans in a new pile, then grabbed another shirt. “I hope he was well paid.”
“He was. He renounced his knighthood and was given a seat in the Hong Kong cabinet.” Johnny’s half grin looked more like a grimace. “So you can see that being a police officer can feel…pointless.”
Nikki thought that was a bit harsh, but then, for the most part, she saw justice done as part of her work. Drug smugglers thrown in jail or deported, the occasional murderer she came across serving a life sentence. How many criminals—triad members—had Johnny seen walk free?
“Is that why you’re not working undercover right now?” She stopped folding to study the broad planes of his face, the hollow look in his deep brown eyes. “Because it’s pointless?”
Johnny glanced away. “The OCTB does what it can.”
“It sounds like the bureau’s hands are tied.”
“From within as well as without.”
Nikki let that sink in for a moment. “It’s corrupt?”
“Not all of it.”
“Just the parts that matter.”
He didn’t have to say anything to that.
So the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau was a buey—a castrated bull. No wonder Johnny had seemed weary about stemming the triads’ influence and businesses. A thought occurred to her.
“Is Inspector Lam on our side?”
“He upholds the law, yes.”
But the faint odor of scorched sheets told her Johnny derided the inspector. “But what?” she asked. “What’s wrong with him?”
Johnny frowned at her. “Nothing.”
“Look, I know you’re not telling me everything. He upholds the law but what? He’s weak? He plays both sides?”
“He follows the law,” Johnny repeated stubbornly.
“I bet he’s ineffectual.” When Johnny’s deep brown eyes snapped to hers, she knew she was right. “And you’re not working undercover because…”
“I bent a rule to arrest a Red Pole. Nothing serious, but Lam let the Red Pole go. He didn’t think the charges would stand up in court.”
Talk about having your hands tied. Nikki nodded. “I can understand that. Why you bent the rule, I mean. So you’ve been suspended?”
“For two weeks.” He shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
“Okay, now that I know the lay of things, what do we do about Mingxia and Yanmei?”
Johnny pulled a map of the Kwai Chung Container Terminal out of the desk wedged in the room’s corner, then spread it out on the low-slung coffee table next to where she sat. “The warehouse sits here.” He pointed to the northeast edge of the terminal. “They load up passengers in midday, but we think they use the warehouse as a staging area.”
“You think the girls are there?”
“Probably, waiting for tomorrow.”
Her fingers worried the pink ribbon she wore around her left wrist. “The Sun Yee On are that methodical?”
“They run a business. They have a regular schedule.”
Nikki ignored the shudder that twitched her spine. “What kind of boat do they use?”
“An offshore fishing boat sometimes. Sometimes a ferry.”
“That won’t get them far, will it?”
Johnny shook his head. “They’re usually taken to another staging area, away from the city. Then they’re loaded up on a larger vessel for their final destination.”
Yanmei’s perky pigtails flashed in Nikki’s mind. Goddamn slavers. She irritably slapped the folded shirt she held onto a leaning stack.
“We’ll get the girls back,” Johnny said. “If not tonight, then another time.”
“Are we still being followed?”
“Yes, but we can lose them.”
She popped an oversize T-shirt out like a sheet. Its mustiness filled her throat and she had to concentrate not to let the scent fill her head as well.
“What are you doing when you do that?” he asked.
“Snapping the wrinkles out.”
“No, not that. Frown. Like you’re thinking very hard about something very unpleasant.” He reached into the clothing pile and pulled out a pair of jeans. “You do it a lot. It’s pretty intense.”
Your face will stay that way. Nikki intentionally relaxed her forehead. “We should get to the terminal.”
“Give me five minutes and talk to me.”
One look at his face told her he wasn’t going to budge until he had an answer. “I have a physical condition. The concentration helps me control it.”
Johnny stared at her for a long moment. “Are you talking about your nose? Your sense of smell?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because it’s my business.”
“It became my business at the club. And a few moments ago when you knew how I felt about Lam.”
Nikki suppressed a sigh and couldn’t believe what she was about to say. Then she said it. “You’re right.”
He merely waited.
“It’s a long story I don’t want to go into, but the bottom line is…” Nikki stopped pretending to fold the T-shirt she held and looked Johnny in the eye. “I have a gift. Sort of. It’s hard to explain, but I can tell what people feel from the odors they give off.”
Johnny’s expression didn’t change. Nor did his scent. “You explained that very well.”
“Thanks.”
He took the T-shirt she held and spread it on the floor facedown. Then in three quick movements he folded it with almost military precision.
“Did you work in retail?” she asked.
He ignored her question. “How does your nose work?”
“It’s this hypersensitive thing. I get a whiff of something like coffee, and that translates into fear. Rotting fruit is usually resignation. That kind of thing.”
“A smell for every emotion?”
“As far as I know.”
“So you know how I feel right now.”
“Not exactly—”
“But you said that you can tell what people feel.”
“Most people, yeah.”
“Then what am I feeling?”
“Right now I don’t know.”
“I’m feeling something, so what is it?”
“I’m not a performing dog.”
“But if you can smell it—”
“I don’t know!” Nikki stood and paced to the window. The lights of Hong Kong glared in her face like so many interrogation lights. “Stop being melodramatic,” she told herself under her breath. She turned and leaned her butt on the narrow sill, faced his unwavering dark eyes. “You don’t give off much of a scent,” she admitted. “A whiff here and there.”
“Of what?”
“Not much of anything. And very rarely.”
“It doesn’t seem much good then.”
“It’s just you,” she said. “I spotted the Sun Yee On warriors before they showed up.” She thought back for a moment and added, “Your grandfather’s worse than you. I can barely read him at all.”
&n
bsp; “I see.”
“I doubt it,” she retorted. How could he possibly see? “It’s annoying as hell.”
“Especially if your gift is unpredictable.”
“It’s not unpredictable.”
“What about when you were tracking Mingxia and Yanmei?”
“That’s different. I got confused by the physical smell of coffee.”
“It’s still an error.”
Nikki folded her arms over her chest. “What do you want? For me to say my gift isn’t worth using?”
Johnny stood and came to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m trying to understand its limitations. If we know where it goes wrong, we can use it more effectively. That’s all I mean. Do you understand?”
Under his gently kneading fingers, Nikki felt her shoulders relax, dammit. His touch was too calming, too…peaceful. She wanted to shrug him off but there was no backing away; her butt was firmly planted on the sill. His face had smoothed away its frown, so she was left with his sharp brows poised over large, dark eyes, and a broad nose that looked somehow regal in its flare. And sensual lips that had quirked up into a mischievous smile. His spicy scent of soap and skin filled her mind. Every cell in her body suddenly electrified.
He leaned close to say, “You are not very patient, are you?”
Her throat felt a little tight from the caress his thumbs were giving her neck, so she just shook her head. That movement seemed to draw him closer until his thigh brushed hers. She forgot to breathe.
“Then we should get going.” He abruptly released her.
Nikki’s next breath hit her hard, because there was nothing—simply nothing—to suggest Johnny had felt anything at all.
Chapter 13
T he container terminal sprawled over a good chunk of the northern Victoria Harbor shoreline, and every inch of it was crawling with armed guards.
Nikki, crouched beside Johnny in the Sun Yee On warehouse’s shadows, touched the little SW-99 he’d given her. Tucked in a spare shoulder holster, it snugged her rib cage. Nice feeling in a bad place.
The ass-end of the warehouse ran just inside the ten-foot-tall chain-link fence they’d cut into between guard patrols. The warehouse’s interior sounded like a construction zone. Hammering, banging and heavy machinery vibrated the metal wall Nikki leaned one palm against. The metal was still warm from the daytime heat. The temperature had dropped enough that she was glad she’d worn a lightweight long-sleeved black top.
“Wait here,” Johnny mouthed in her ear.
Before she could argue, he was gone, moving through shadows with feline grace. He slipped between the warehouse and the fence and disappeared. How he managed to walk silently in motorcycle boots, she had no idea.
And if slinking away without her got to be a habit of his, she was going to end up pissed.
It’s his town, she reminded herself irritably. Yes, he knew what he was doing and how to do it. Yes, she was a newbie to all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Hell, the only thing she knew for certain was how sweet the Smith & Wesson 9 mm felt in her hand.
But she still didn’t like being left.
She kind of needed him.
She slipped to the warehouse’s back corner and looked down its long side. The warehouse’s front faced an empty expanse of concrete. Another fifty yards beyond that, containers sat in orderly rows, stacked three high. Into the emptiness, three guards walked casually, rifles slung over their shoulders and gleaming in the light cast down from lamps mounted on the building’s eaves. Just as she was thinking about creeping up to the front for a look, the three turned and headed back across the lot.
Fifteen minutes later, the same guards were still pacing, sometimes in a group, sometimes separately. The front entrance was out of the question.
She smelled Johnny, his own spicy scent of soap and skin and something else she couldn’t name, before she saw him. Then a tap on her elbow and he whispered, “Come with me.”
“What is it?”
“The room where we think they keep the children is inside. Too many guards to get to it from the bay doors or windows. But there’s a ventilation shaft from outside. I think it runs over the top of the room where the girls are.”
“How far into the warehouse? The room’s how far?”
“About a hundred feet.”
Nikki suppressed a curse. No matter where she went, she ended up crawling around in the muck and nastiness, rat droppings and dead cockroaches. And worse.
She hated doing that.
“Show me,” she said.
He led the way deep into the shadows behind the building, crouching low. Good thing he wasn’t a big guy; there was barely room between the building and the fence to accommodate his shoulders. Nikki concentrated on not grinding broken glass beneath her soft shoes, her senses hyperaware of the guards, of their flashlights arcing through the dark, of the scent of machine oil and hot metal and diesel.
“What do they do here?” she asked.
“Fuel tank repair.”
She caught a whiff of ginger and raised her hand, silencing his next words.
Not twenty feet away on the fence’s other side, a patrol wandered across the parking lot. She and Johnny, hunkered down in the tall weeds lining the fence, froze. Low voices, a laugh, the glint of light on a revolver.
“I thought you couldn’t carry a gun in Hong Kong,” she whispered when the patrol had passed.
“You can’t.”
But of course, the bad guys did, especially when they were in bed with law enforcement. Heck, she couldn’t legally carry one, either.
Johnny pulled a wicked knife from his boot.
Nikki looked at the vent cover—the tiny vent cover—poised just over her head. “You’re kidding.”
He grinned, then got to work unscrewing the fasteners that held the cover. “I’m not worried. You can do this.”
She doubted it. There was no way she could get her shoulders, much less her hips, through an opening that small. She was still debating how to say no when he popped the cover off.
“Up you go.”
“Flashlight first.”
Johnny plucked a penlight from his belt and laid it inside the shaft. “Only if you really need it,” he warned. “They might see it inside.”
“Right.”
He cupped his hands. Ignoring memories of those Athena Academy horses—smelly brutes, every one of them—she shoved her foot into his makeshift stirrup and reached for the ventilation shaft. When they both straightened, she got her head into the opening.
She took a long, slow sniff. No rats. No rat droppings. No dead cockroaches. Just a light steam of oil and metal, like you’d expect in a ventilation shaft. She started to feel hope for the first time since they’d arrived.
The sharp aluminum edge nipped at her hands as she levered her head inside. The shaft was surprisingly large, considering. She shoved the penlight forward to give herself room to clamber in. One shoulder wedged in. Her feet started to wander and she resisted the urge to shout at Johnny to hold still.
Then he was shoving hard.
“What the hell?” she stage-whispered, with no hope he could hear her.
“Guards!”
Her internal clock had said they had another ten minutes before the next patrol, dammit. She anchored her elbows as best she could on the floor and dragged herself forward. Her head banged the ceiling. The shaft’s opening bit into her hip bones. She stifled a cry. Another hoist, and she’d moved forward enough to get her thighs in. She tried crawling, but her knee struck the shaft side, setting off an echoing pong.
Shit.
She felt Johnny’s hands on her feet shove hard one last time, and then nothing. She drew her legs up as far as she could. With any luck, the guards wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a covered ventilation shaft and an uncovered one.
With any luck, Johnny would be lying flat on the ground, looking like a discarded pile of overalls.
She couldn’t hear anything outside
anymore. All that filled her ears was her own breathing echoed back to her, shushing against the aluminum, rasping in her throat. She wiggled. Close quarters. When she’d fleetingly thought the shaft was wider than this, she must have lost her mind.
Her left breast found the penlight boring painfully toward her rib cage. It, plus the shoulder holster she’d neglected to strip off, made the squeeze tighter. She worked the penlight out and held it between her teeth. The holster she’d just have to live with. There was no way she could take it off in here.
Using her elbows, she methodically inched into the warehouse’s depths. Pausing every foot to feel the walls, she made good progress. The air oozing toward her, noxious as it was, told her she wasn’t headed toward a dead end. The aluminum creaked ominously and she wondered how long it would bear her weight, how long her movements would go unnoticed or ignored.
Her neck started to ache. She couldn’t raise her head; it’d bump the top again and alert the Sun soldiers inside to her presence. The sides brushed her shoulders, and if she bent her back just right, she could wedge herself, hips and knees, against the top and bottom. As she eased forward, the shaft seemed to narrow, barely giving her room to do what little shifting and crabbing she needed to move.
Her mind flashed on a news report she’d heard just before boarding her flight to Hong Kong—high school cafeteria workers got to work early in the morning and smelled a dead cat in the walls, but it turned out to be a thief trapped in a vent. He’d been there for days.
She stopped, closed her eyes, and tried to breathe. Burnt coffee surrounded her.
After all the boat holds she’d climbed through, she chastised herself.
Yes, but you had your friends with you.
Johnny’s just outside.
Are you sure?
He knows I’m here, she thought, but less certain.
What if he gets killed? No one will know if you get stuck.
Nikki’s heart suddenly thundered. The shaft pressed on her skin. Her teeth tightened on the metal penlight. Her eardrums hammered with her pulse.
This is what it was like for Jess, she thought, and remembered the Arizona sunlight shining on her best friend’s gorgeous black hair as Jess hooked up her rappelling gear. Nikki had told Jess that a schoolmate was lost, fallen, crying at the bottom of an abandoned silver mine shaft. The scent of bitter coffee had burned in Nikki’s nostrils and she’d lain retching in the sand and scrub.