by Paula Graves
"Got it. We'll circle around, head up the parallel street. Keep on his ass!"
Jack hung up and banged his palm against the steering wheel. The red light lingered forever. He looked around, trying to see if he could maneuver around the traffic and take a chance at running the light. But he was hemmed in.
"Come on, come on—" The blinking light on the tracking map continued north for another block and then took a right. East up Duvalier, like they expected. Blevins should be getting close to the warehouses.
The light ahead turned green, and Jack maneuvered around the bottlenecked traffic, listening for anything new from Maggie. She shot a few more insults at Blevins, picking her words for maximum impact. Having been on the receiving end of a Marguerite Cole harangue himself, Jack had never thought he'd find her sharp tongue comforting. But every word she said was a sweet affirmation that she was still alive.
She delivered another stinging assessment of Blevins' manhood, making Jack grin.
Give him hell, Marguerite.
"Where are we?" Maggie's voice in Jack's ear sounded suddenly tense. While she'd been taunting Blevins, she'd come across as confident, even cocky, over the radio. Not now.
Jack glanced at the Palm Pilot. The blinking light was fixed in one position. Just past the intersection of Duvalier and Robinette. Jack waited for the tracker light to move, but it didn't. The Crown Vic had reached its destination.
Blevins' only response to Maggie's question was to cut the engine. He opened the driver's door and got out of the car.
Maggie took advantage of the moment to herself. "Jack, we're parked near a construction trailer—on Duvalier, just north of Robinette, I think. Lots of warehouses, some active, most not—" Blevins reached for her door handle and she shut up quickly, forcing herself to concentrate on what she planned to do next.
She didn't know if they'd stopped because this was where Blevins intended to kill her or if this was where he kept his files and he wanted to check on them before he killed her. Either way, she didn't plan to go out without a fight.
Blevins reached in to pull her from the back seat. She considered putting up a fight right then, but discarded the idea. He was expecting trouble from her, so he'd be prepared.
Pick your moment. Jack's voice rang in her mind. Find your opponent's weakness and exploit it.
She let him bring her out, trying not to play her hand too soon. Blevins released her with one hand to shut the back door of the Crown Victoria. For a moment, her muscles bunched, her instinct to run almost overcoming rational thought, but his fingers tightened, perhaps in response to the tension in her arms, and she let the moment pass.
Jack was behind her somewhere. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. If the tracker wasn't working, if the radio connection had broken—no matter. He was there. She could feel him with her, his strength filling her with renewed confidence.
Blevins gave her arm a sharp tug, pulling her toward the shabby-looking construction trailer.
"What is this place, anyway?" Maggie asked, stumbling on the cinderblock steps up to the trailer door in hopes of catching Blevins off guard.
He merely tightened his grip on her arm. "Get inside."
"I'm not going into that stinky trailer," she protested, holding back. She hoped Jack was hearing her; she'd given him a good clue that time. There was only one trailer in the area.
Blevins jerked her arm, propelling her up to the top cinderblock. He pushed open the trailer's front door and shoved her inside.
She stumbled for real, nearly slamming into the narrow desk against the wall opposite the door. She caught herself with her cuffed hands, preventing a fall, and whirled around to glare at Blevins. "If you think I'm just going to let you kill me without a fight, you're crazy."
Blevins closed the door behind him with one hand, pulling his gun from his shoulder holster with the other. He motioned toward the middle of the trailer with the barrel of the gun. "Move."
She did as he said, moving deeper into the trailer. As luck would have it, she hadn't been wrong about the smell of the trailer. It was musty, ill-used, faintly smelling of stale cigarette smoke and moist rot. She looked around her carefully, trying to figure out what kind of business Blevins might be doing in a place like this. Were the files here? She'd told him she had some of his files. She'd better figure out quickly if this was his repository, because he was going to want to know whether or not she was telling the truth.
"Stop right there."
Maggie stopped, the hair rising on the back of her neck. She sensed Blevins' approach, despite the noise-masking softness of the carpet beneath their feet. It was as if she felt the coldness of him, the empty blackness at his core. Chill bumps rose on her arms and neck. She barely controlled a shudder.
Blevins circled around her and motioned with his gun. "Pull it up."
Maggie followed his gaze, trying not to betray her confusion. He was looking at the floor. She looked down as well and saw a faint square shape barely visible in the expanse of mottled blue carpet covering the trailer floor. A trap door?
She bent and ran her finger along the faint line nearest her. The carpet moved, and she felt something hard and cool beneath. Metal—aluminum, from the feel of it. She pulled the carpet back to expose a square metal door in the bottom of the trailer. A small metal loop in one end served as a handle. She gave the loop a tug and the door opened, revealing the concrete-covered ground beneath the trailer. In the middle of the concrete, directly below the trap door, was a rusted manhole cover.
"Going down, I presume?" she murmured, lowering her chin so that she was speaking almost directly into the hidden mike.
"Stay right here. If you make a run for it, I'm within my rights to stop you with lethal force if necessary." Blevins moved through the trap door and dropped to the concrete, keeping his gun trained on her.
Maggie considered the odds of being able to get out of the trailer before Blevins rolled out from underneath and gunned her down where she stood.
Not good enough.
Blevins crouched down, his head clearing the bottom of the trailer. His gaze never left her face as he reached down and pulled at the manhole cover. It moved with stunning ease, sliding easily away from the opening. Plastic painted to look like metal, Maggie realized as Blevins flipped the cover onto its face, revealing a pale white underbelly.
It wasn't a real manhole, she realized. It was the mouth of an underground tunnel, no doubt leading to one of the four surrounding warehouses. But which one?
Only one way to find out, she realized as Blevins motioned for her to climb down through the trap door.
She followed him down into the tunnel.
Chapter 17
Jack paused at the stop sign, his pulse thundering. Thick silence had followed Blevins' threat, punctuated by the scrape of metal on metal. After that, nothing. No breath sounds, no footsteps, nothing to connect him to Maggie.
She couldn't be far ahead. A block distant, four warehouses flanked Duvalier like sentries. One of them hid Blevins' secret files, he was sure of it. But which one?
He parked just past the intersection. Grabbing the Palm Pilot, his cell phone and his Glock, Jack set out on foot toward the warehouses, looking for the trailer he'd heard Maggie mention over the radio. As he reached the corner of the first building on the right, he spotted a construction trailer parked between the two warehouses. It was the only one in sight.
In Jack's ear, the receiver remained silent.
Jack approached the trailer cautiously, looking signs of occupation. The door was closed and Jack could see no movement in or around the metal structure. He crept closer, alert to anything that might betray their location or any sign of ambush. For a moment, there was only the hum of distant traffic, the white noise of urban living.
Then he heard it. Breathing, soft and rapid.
It took a moment to realize the sound was coming from the receiver in his ear. He heard a door click shut, then Maggie's voice, low and bemuse
d. "Throw me somethin', Mister."
Jack pressed his back against the trailer, puzzling through her comment. He heard tapping sounds, footsteps on cement, echoing in a cavernous chamber. They were inside one of the warehouses. And Maggie had given him a clue.
The largest of the four warehouses was as wide as it was tall, with industrial doors spanning nearly the width of the building. The faded paint on the facade showed a laughing harlequin in time-worn green, gold and purple. No words to identify the place, but none were needed. Not in New Orleans.
"'Throw me somethin', Mister,'" Jack murmured.
Maggie and Blevins were inside a Mardi Gras float den.
The false manhole beneath the construction trailer had led six feet down to a tunnel under the street. The pitch-black passageway closed in around Maggie as she'd stumbled along behind Blevins, dragged by her cuffs. He walked with the confidence of a man who'd navigated the tunnel many times before, reinforcing Maggie's growing certainty that he was taking her to the place where his secret files were hidden.
Blevins opened a door. Dim light spilled into the tunnel, illuminating the damp concrete walls of the narrow passageway. He pushed Maggie through the door in front of him.
The first thing she was a giant dragon's head, covered with glittery green scales rimmed with gold. Long white fangs and a blood-red tongue projected from its gaping mouth. "Throw me somethin', Mister," she murmured, moving closer to the float. It lay in pieces atop several wooden pallets.
She gazed into the dragon's red maw. "Fire shoots from its mouth. I wonder how they do that. It should be a fire hazard."
Blevins pressed something hard between her shoulder blades. The barrel of his gun, she realized, trying not to betray her fear. He gave her a push past the dragon toward a half-built float that looked like Cleopatra's barge. "Half the Knights of Prometheus are firemen."
Maggie took in as much of the warehouse as she could, trying to figure out where Blevins kept his files. Not in the dragon; the Knights of Prometheus had been part of the Mardi Gras schedule that year. Blevins wouldn't want to move his files every time the bacchanal rolled around. Not Cleopatra's barge, either. She'd seen that float this year as well.
"Time's up, Ms. Stone."
She turned to face him. "Are you going to kill me now? Quite a risk. If anything happens to me—"
"A letter will go to the New York Times, detailing my crimes? Please. Come clean-you don't have my files, do you? It was a bluff." He brushed her jaw with the barrel of his gun.
She looked away, her gaze settling on a third dismembered float gathering dust across the warehouse floor. A gladiator in full armor, his dark hair flowing like sea waves down his back beneath the shiny silver helmet.
She remembered that float, she realized, though the memory wasn't recent. She'd been seventeen. Her father had accepted the state party chairman's invitation to take in a parades, bringing along the kids so nobody forgot he was a family man. Maggie had hated the noise, the crowds, the garish grotesqueries that had characterized Mardi Gras for her that day.
And the most garish and grotesque of all had been the gladiator float, with its defiantly bare-assed icon and its rowdy krewe members, a vivid mockery of her teenage misery.
The Krewe of Tiberius, she finally remembered. An older krewes, full of traditions and secret rituals. They were one of the last old krewes still holding out against the city's anti-discrimination laws. They hadn't paraded in years.
And Blevins would know that.
She met his impatient glare. "They're in the gladiator."
He went from flushed to pallid in the span of a second, his lips trembling as he reached for her. She darted away, heading for a side door she'd spotted earlier. Veering around a primitive work bench, she grabbed its corner and upended it, paint cans and pieces of float decorations skittering across the warehouse floor to slow Blevins' pursuit.
She reached the door ahead of him, sparing only a quick glance back to see him picking his way through the debris she'd left in her wake. She turned the door handle and tugged.
Nothing happened.
She put her weight into it. The door didn't budge.
Blevins' arm whipped around her neck. He pressed barrel of his gun to her temple. "Padlocked from the outside," he growled. "All of them."
His words zapped the energy from her. She fought the tide of despair, reminding herself Jack was nearby. Once she came up with a way to give him an opening, he'd find a way to complete the mission and get everyone home safely.
She trusted him. The thought rang in her mind, bell-clear. She trusted him. No doubts or fears. And not just with her life. Jack had broken through the walls she'd built around her heart, exposing her vulnerable core, then did what he'd always done, as long as she'd known him. He'd put himself in charge of keeping her heart safe, ready to take a bullet if necessary.
She could trust him with her heart, too.
Blevins dragged her back to the gladiator float. Holstering his gun, he pulled her by the cuffs to a cast iron pipe running up to the ceiling to join a spider web of similar pipes spanning the warehouse from wall to wall.
He was going to check his files, she realized. Once he figured out she'd lied, he wouldn't hesitate to kill her.
And cuffed to the pipe, she'd be a sitting duck.
No way. If she was going down, she was going down swinging. A calm strength flowed into her, as if she felt Jack's back pressed against her own, guarding her rear and trusting her to take care of the danger in front of her.
Blevins tried to pull her arm up to the pipe. She resisted, dragging him off balance. It was the opening she was looking for. She rammed her knee up, catching Blevins between the legs. He gasped, his body hunching from the blow. Twisting free, she ran toward the hidden opening to the tunnel.
A loud crack sounded behind her, and something slammed into the metal wall just ahead. A point of light spilled in through the hole left in the wall.
He was shooting at her.
The gunshot came from inside the warehouse, muted but unmistakable. It rang even louder in Jack's ear, amplified by the microphone on Maggie's shirt. He jerked, nearly toppling from the rusty ladder on which he stood, trying to see through the dirty exterior windows of the den.
Inside, the warehouse was something out of a child's nightmare, giant, garish body parts littering every available surface. A table lay on its side, its former contents now scattered across the cement floor. Movement drew his attention to the far side of the warehouse, where a dismembered gladiator gazed toward the ceiling with a baleful glare.
There. Black top, charcoal slacks, hair shining burgundy in a shaft of light shining through a hole in the far wall.
Maggie.
She raced toward the far wall, where the giant body of an Egyptian queen lay scattered in pieces. Another gunshot roared and Maggie dived behind the Egyptian Queen.
Jack's heart clutched. Had she been hit?
He shrugged off his over-shirt and wrapped it around the Glock and his wrist. With two hard blows of the makeshift bludgeon, the window shattered, glass raining to the floor below. He whacked the surrounding glass free, making an opening to crawl through, then tucked the Glock back in his waistband.
The falling glass drew Blevins' attention. He swung his weapon to acquire the new target. Jack shifted to put the metal window frame between himself and Blevins, but the movement was too much for the ladder. The rusty metal crumpled with a groan.
Jack thrust the upper part of his body through the window to keep from going down with the ladder. Fragments of glass on the edges of the window frame cut into his belly as he dangled half in, half out of the window. But that the least of his problems, he discovered as another shot rang out and the window next to him exploded.
Maggie peeked from her hiding place inside Cleopatra's head, the mesh-covered eye openings providing a hazy view of the rest of the warehouse. At first she'd thought the sound of breaking glass had come from Blevins, but when Blevins' gu
n barked again and another window shattered, she realized something else was happening. She had to get a better look.
Slipping out of the shelter of the parade float head, she darted past Cleopatra's torso and hid behind one of her arms. She spotted Blevins first, ten yards away, peering toward the bank of windows lining the far side of the warehouse. Two of the windows had been broken, light pouring through to reveal a man's torso hanging inside one of the openings.
Jack.
Her heart jerked to a halt, then restarted at rocket pace. Dangling there, he was an easy target. She had to do something.
Maggie darted from behind the float.
"Don't move, Maggie!" Jack called out.
She froze, gazing at the window. Another gunshot rang out, impossibly loud, reverberating around the warehouse. Two feet from Blevins, Cleopatra's foot gave a jerk, shards of fiberglass spraying the crooked cop.
That shot had come from Jack, Maggie realized.
Blevins darted toward Maggie's hiding place. Ignoring the instinct to run, she realized she had the advantage of surprise. Distracted, with no idea where she was, he'd be off guard. She just had to time it right . . .
Blevins slipped through a space between the torso and the arm behind which Maggie crouched, ready to spring. The moment he passed her, she shot up, looped her arms around his neck from the back and pulled the cuff chain hard against his throat.
He clutched at the cuffs with his free hand, grunting in pain. Maggie didn't loosen her grip, putting her whole weight behind the attack. Blevins tried to turn his gun on her, but Maggie jammed her knee up between his legs from behind. He howled with pain, his hand dropping back to his side.
Maggie fell back, pulling hard to bring him down with her. Blevins crashed back, half on top of her, his gun hand slamming into the floor. He lost his grip, the gun bouncing once on the concrete floor and skittering several feet away.