“It was just pizza,” Maryam said, a trifle breathlessly as they hit the stairs.
“Your phone may have had a bug in it like mine,” Julie told her. “You couldn’t know. This is all so very vrot. Bad, wrong,” she corrected.
They didn’t waste time arguing once they reached the bottom of the stairwell. Zander peered cautiously into the lobby. “People aren’t going outside. They’re just standing around looking puzzled.”
“Staff should escort them out,” Lucas said in disapproval.
Sirens screamed in the distance. The fire alarm still clamored. Peering from her side of the stairs, Julie didn’t see anyone looking particularly concerned. Surely gunmen wouldn’t open fire in a crowded lobby.
“Bakgat, I see Nick.”
“Awesome,” Julie translated for him, relieved to know she wasn’t the only one who reverted to slang when shaken.
Zander held the door for Maryam and Julie. Lucas checked behind them and in front of them and stayed between Julie, Maryam, and the crowd, guarding them with his greater height. Julie couldn’t decide if this was charming or sexist.
“This way.” Nick arrived to block all of them from the lobby view. He pointed toward the rear of the hotel. “There’s always a rear exit. I couldn’t find the shooter in this mob, but he’s probably lurking out front, waiting for you to come out.”
“Or he ran like the rat he was,” Lucas said. “There are too many people for him to strike again.”
“I like the way you think.” Nick led the way down a dark corridor to a door that opened onto an alley. “This isn’t exactly the Plaza. I told Sam to meet us down the block. This alley is a trap otherwise.”
Lucas had struggled into his bulky coat so his towel bandage wasn’t visible. Julie hoped they looked like tourists fleeing a fire alarm as they ran down the alley past office buildings and hit the sidewalk half a block from the hotel entrance. The limo was already waiting for them.
No one said a word until they were all inside and the car was rolling again. Julie glanced down the street in front of the hotel as the limo cruised by. Fire engines and police cars blocked traffic. Very few people from the hotel had bothered going into the cold. They didn’t seem too concerned by the threat of fire. “Do fire alarms usually go off in the middle of the night here?”
“All the time. Drunks, smokers, kids, people like us with ulterior motives—be glad we only had three flights,” Nick said from the front seat. “Jules, you might want to introduce all of us before our guests panic and leap out the doors.”
“Juliana,” she told him, “Or Julie. Jules is rude.”
He flashed her a provocative grin. “There’s the Magda in you. Julie it is.”
“I’m Alexander Kruger, Juliana’s brother,” Zander said stiffly, preventing Julie from responding to the taunt about their mother. “We are still learning about our new family, but the annoyance in the front seat is our half brother, Nicholas Maximillian, a British diplomat.”
Nick performed a rolling salute as if greeting a pasha.
“And this is Maryam Rathore, my roommate.” Julie continued the introductions as best as she could. “Lucas, I don’t know your last name.”
“Lucas Schmidt, criminal justice drop-out, second-year at JACAD, aiming for a degree as a professional student.” He held his arm as if in pain.
“Just like Julie,” Zander said with brotherly disrespect.
Julie punched her brother’s arm before gesturing at Lucas. “Take off the jacket and let me see your wound. Nicholas, may we stop somewhere to buy bandages and antiseptic? One of the many studies my brother scorns included first aid.”
“The bullet just ricocheted through the shoddy door. It’s nothing,” Lucas protested.
A police siren blasted behind them, and they all jumped.
I shooed EG off to bed after admiring her interestingly painted camel, complete with tattoos of bats and crowns. My phone rang as I made my way up to the attic to kick Tudor out of Graham’s lair.
“I have them,” Nick reported. “We had a minor incident. They called in a pizza order from a bugged phone, and we interrupted a gunman shooting down their door. I thought it best to pull them out rather than call the cops.”
Graham had already sent me the dispatch call of a fire at the hotel. I’d been holding my breath for the past half hour. “I take it you used the fire alarm ploy to escape.”
“Exactly. It seems rather evident the bad guys are after our pair. There are cops as well as the fire department, so someone may have called in the gunshots. Lucas’s name is Schmidt, if you want to look him up. Maryam is a Rathore. I’ll give you more after we’ve all finished sizing each other up. Jules and Zander are hoots, and by the way, don’t call her Jules.”
I laughed as he hung up. I ought to be more worried, but my babes were in good hands. Nick knew all the tricks I did, and Graham’s safe house should be just exactly that—safe.
I continued up the stairs to find Tudor glaring in disgust at a blob of plastic that might have been a tortured Jedi warrior. Or a pig.
“I want that one,” I told him. “The first piece of art by world-renowned Leonardo de Bullfinch. But it needs glittery gold stars.”
“It’s rubbish.”
He started to throw it at a trash can but I caught it. “Mine, I told you. You can work on a better sketch in your room. Superhuman over there has a planet to save or worlds to blow up, and he can’t do it with you watching. No phone booth.”
He shot me a teenage look of disgust and stalked off.
“You have a way with words,” Graham said from his Star Trek console where he manipulated keyboards and monitors better than any spaceship.
“If that means I lie well, thank you. Julie told me I must be honest with family and friends, but honesty isn’t easily defined. Nick has our witnesses and is on the way to your Bat Cave. Someone shot at them.” I came over to stand beside him and watch the flickering screens. I easily identified the hotel with fire engines. “Did you see anyone?”
He brought up the interior lobby view in real time. It was pretty grainy.
He zoomed in on two men in leather jackets slouching in a corner, studying the crowd. “They were some of the first to come down the stairs.”
“Two? That can’t be good. Assassins aren’t cheap. They must be on the clock to hang around this long.” I studied their pale complexions and shaved heads, committing them to memory. “Can we run facial recognition software?”
“I can run it against police files, if they have priors. The software is only as good as the database.” He already had one monitor flipping through a motley collection of mugshots.
“What about against Julie’s videos? Would it help to know if either of these two have been lurking in the good reverend’s park?”
“It won’t identify them, but we can check.” He scrambled a few more screens while I studied the hotel situation.
As the lobby continued to fill with men in uniform, the skinheads displayed increasing nervousness, shifting from foot to foot and edging further into a shadowy corner. DC no longer banned handguns, but concealed carry was still pretty much a no-no. I’d lay wagers they had no permits at all, if these were our shooters.
They muttered to each other, then one drifted toward the front door.
“No way of getting the cops to stop them?” I asked.
“Working on it.” He had blue tooth earphones plugged in as he punched at his keyboards.
I adored watching a geek at work, but I kept my eyes on the clowns in the lobby. “I’m taking a wild guess here to say they’re not pros.”
He was murmuring into his microphone and didn’t answer.
On the screen, the hotel night clerk stopped one of the police officers and pointed out our leather-clad pair. Graham called the night clerk? Enterprising.
The thug edging for the front door increased his speed. The other began to move as well—in the opposite direction.
The cop intercepted Thug Number
One, who reached in his jacket, probably for a gun. Always an extremely bad move. He was lucky he only got Tasered in the groin for his efforts. Ow. That would teach him to wear a longer jacket.
Panicking, thug Number Two shoved through the milling crowd. Another man in blue pushed after him.
“Gonna be hard to hold them when there are no witnesses to the shooting,” I commented as a blue-haired lady in a bathrobe screamed in outrage when Thug Two shoved her into a wall.
“Weapon violations, possible probation violation.” He nodded at one of the screens that now showed mugshots for our skinheads. Score! That would take them off the streets for a few days.
A balding old man with a dashing goatee stuck his cane between Two’s legs. Down he went—grabbing at the plastic Christmas tree to catch himself. I winced as silver and gold balls scattered across the tile floor. Cop boots smashed the ornaments into pretty pieces of glass while Thug Two got cuffed.
“The hotel should charge an entertainment fee,” I said as the old man with the cane handed his handkerchief to the weeping blue-haired lady.
Our witnesses were safe for now.
Graham turned off his microphone and removed his headset. “If they don’t, I will.” He yanked me down on his lap, and I went more than willingly.
Finally, we had the place to ourselves and no interruptions anticipated.
Thrilled, I reached for his belt. “Entertainment, am I?”
“The price I have to pay,” he muttered, shoving my skirt higher.
Chapter 18
In the safe house living room, Julie finished wrapping a bandage around Lucas’s rather. . . muscular. . . bicep. “You probably should take some acetaminophen. This isn’t likely to feel better soon.”
“I’ve jabbed nails into my foot and had concussions worse than this. I’m good.” He shifted on the black leather chair and leaned into the cushion. “Thank you.”
Nicholas was studying his phone, but he looked up once she started putting away the first aid supplies. “The cops may have the shooters. Let’s have some answers so maybe we can keep them in custody.”
Maryam sat huddled on the matching leather sofa, her hands curled around a cup of tea Zander had made for her. Since we’d not had time to fetch their clothes, she was still wearing the pretty white Punjabi gown she’d worn when they’d fled. “We really know nothing,” she protested. “We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Why were you out at that hour anyway?” Julie asked in exasperation.
“You weren’t home to talk to. I was lonely. I went out to look at the stars and think of home. I don’t think I belong here.” She said this last defiantly, glaring at her.
Julie thought she understood. Maryam had been quiet since that humiliating episode at the concert hall. She sat beside her and squeezed her hand. “I think there are bad things happening at the park that have nothing to do with the reasons why we are here or with us personally.”
“If there are bad things happening, then we should try to stop them.” Zander paced behind the couch. “Tell us what you saw.”
“I saw Lucas,” Maryam said. “He was walking toward the back of the park. We are working on a project together, and I thought we could talk a little until Julie came home.”
“I’d just walked Julie home,” Lucas explained when Nick raised a questioning eyebrow. “Reverend Arden had asked me to do so. I’ve talked to him a few times about security concerns, and he’d asked me to start a student security committee. I knew he often walked the park after hours, and after I left Julie, I followed his usual path hoping to catch up with him.”
Julie sipped her own tea to fight a sudden chill. Lucas and Maryam describing a perfectly normal evening seemed out of synch with the aftermath. She sent up a prayer for the reverend’s health as Maryam took up the tale.
“I was on that big hill by the Ferris wheel, where there are no trees, looking up at the sky when I heard Reverend Arden coming down the gravel path. His head was bowed, as if in prayer. I didn’t disturb his peace. But then I saw Lucas and he saw me.”
Lucas rubbed the shoulder above his bandage. “She looked like a ghost in that white wispy thing she has on. It was too cold to be out there like that.”
“I wore a shawl,” Maryam protested.
“And she wears long underwear under those wispy gowns,” Julie added with a smirk. “She’s too vain to mar her pretty gowns with ugly overcoats.”
Maryam glared at her.
Nick and Lucas looked amused. Zander colored and stared at his hands. Domkop. He’d spent all of university studying and not enough time partying if a discussion of underwear embarrassed him.
“Continue the tale, please,” Nick ordered.
“I told Maryam I would walk her home,” Lucas explained. “She said she didn’t want to go. So I gave her my jacket, and we followed Arden. He always heads for the maintenance shed to pick up one of those big construction flashlights so he can examine what’s been done during the day. I thought we’d catch up with him when he returned to the main path, and then I’d take Maryam back to the trailer.”
“Only if I was ready to go,” Maryam said mutinously. “You are not the boss of me.”
“He is that kind of man, Maryam,” Julie pointed out. “He can’t help himself. Let it go.” She rather liked the way Lucas narrowed his eyes at her when she sized him up as a bossy, over-protective leader, but she didn’t like what had brought them here. She needed to be out of this cold place and back where she felt safe so she could puzzle all this out. The world was much simpler through the lens of a camera. “What did you see?”
Maryam’s shoulders slumped, and she didn’t respond.
Lucas ran his hand over his shaggy brown curls. “Arden had gone past the bushes around the shed where we couldn’t see him from the road. We heard shots. Maryam screamed, and I pushed her down to the ground. I watched as two men ran out of the bushes in our direction. There was a lot of noise, so there may have been others, but I only saw this pair.”
“Lucas knocked me down and rolled me under the bushes!” Maryam said indignantly, shaking the silver-threaded fabric to show the dirt smears.
It said something about Julie’s state of mind that she hadn’t even noticed the mud stains on Maryam’s delicate skirt. Appalled at how close they had come to being shot, she merely hugged her friend.
Lucas ignored them and completed his report. “They were cursing each other. One wanted to run back to be certain the ‘job got finished right.’ The other was intent on looking for witnesses—they must have heard Maryam. But they didn’t look hard. One of the motion detector security lights kicked on, and they ran in the direction of the rear construction gate. I heard a car engine not long after.”
Julie thought he might have made a good policeman. She wondered why he hadn’t finished the college course.
“Did you see their faces when the light came on?” Nick asked. “Can you describe them?”
Lucas rubbed his hair harder. “That’s the problem. They both had shaved heads, but I’m pretty sure one of them was a bodyguard for Mr. Jeffrey, one of the park’s sponsors.”
Nicholas uttered a profane expletive, and Julie hugged Maryam tighter.
They would have to call the police.
“I needed that,” I murmured into the musky scent of Graham’s bare shoulder. I’d opened his shirt at some point. I licked his sweaty skin, and he tightened his grip.
We’d not made it out of his chair. My skirt was hiked to my waist. His jeans were unfastened. We were hot and messy, and his powerful arms still held me in place, even though we’d just blown our minds on desperately insane sex.
Like any drug, sex wore off eventually, but the temporary high was worth it.
“Don’t make anything more of it than that,” he warned, while he caressed my buttocks. Or groped them—fine line there.
Since I was doing my best to avoid any thought at all, I nibbled his ear in retaliation, then ran my hand over his
massive chest, and tweaked his nipple. “You’re such a predictable clod.” I was in too much of a blissful haze to argue in this rare moment of time out of the hectic pace of our lives.
One of his gadgets buzzed urgently. His very clever hands stopped their seductive massage. I understood his hesitation. With a reluctant sigh, I swung off his lap, pulling down my skirt. “Answer it. Maybe it’s the president offering you a medal for saving Outer Turkistan.”
“It would more likely be a warning that Outer Turkistan has just been blown to smithereens,” he muttered, reaching for one of his phones.
“You are the company you keep,” I admonished, hunting around on the floor for my panties and shoes. That he didn’t deny the president could be calling proved nothing. Graham was as tightlipped as any good robot.
“It’s your brother.” He held up the text for me to see. “The company I keep seems to be deteriorating.”
I swatted his kneecap and took the phone. Kids identified Arden’s shooters in your hotel photo. jeffrey’s bodyguard one of them.
“Jeffrey, as in CEO of GenDef?” I asked in despair. “This will not turn out well. Couldn’t I just put all these Top Asshat one-percenters in a room and blow them up?”
He took back the phone and returned the text. “Get some sleep. Jeffrey will still be around in the morning.”
I glanced up at the mugshots still on the screen. “If one of those creeps is the bodyguard, and we apply the company-you-keep rule, the CEO of GenDef has some serious social problems.”
“Go to bed, Ana,” he said in that stern voice he’d probably learned from my grandfather. It had once irritated me.
These days, his voice shivered my spine with pleasure. Yeah, I’m perverse. Defying authority is what I do best. I stood up, panties and shoes in hand, and bent over to plant a kiss right on his smackers. He responded with amazing speed, giving me what I wanted, then pushed me away.
I hit his thick head of hair with my sandal and marched off. It gave me a gut-deep thrill knowing I had my own super-human watching me. So, call me shallow.
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