by Kara Lennox
Rex didn’t have a reply for that. Hell, they were sexist. Bounty hunting was a dangerous business requiring stamina and physical strength, not to mention the intimidation factor. Rex didn’t think his sister should be involved. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but he felt that men should be the ones protecting women, not the other way around.
He decided not to voice his opinion.
“Let’s just go,” Nadia said. “We’re wasting time.”
Craig followed Rex and Nadia to the First Strike office. Inside they found only Beau—running the vacuum cleaner. He looked slightly embarrassed to be caught at the domestic chore.
“Blame it on those women,” he said right away.
“Lori?” Craig asked, almost eagerly. Oh, man, Rex thought. The attraction was obviously two-way. But Craig would be swimming upstream trying to turn Lori into a girlfriend. She was much more comfortable pretending to be a buddy, even if her hormones were running amok—as if getting romantic would make her weak, or something.
Beau laughed. “Not Lori. She has an uncanny ability to tune out the mess. I’m talking about Aubrey and Shelby. They’re meeting us here for lunch, and they both get freaked if they have to wade through trash.”
Rex shook his head, not really understanding the hold certain women had on certain men. Beau had gotten married last year to Aubrey Schuyler, Gavin’s sister. Gavin was getting married next month to Shelby, his former parole officer. Though neither woman spent much time here, they kicked up such a fuss over the mess that all the bounty hunters had started keeping the place cleaner.
“You are so whipped,” Rex said.
Beau grinned. “It’s not a bad thing.” Then he sobered. “Any progress?”
Rex quickly filled Beau in, then asked where Lori was.
“She went out, didn’t say where.”
“And you let her?” Rex demanded.
“Like I could stop her?”
“Ace hired her to do the paperwork and the computer hacking.”
“Not anymore. She’s started hustling up her own cases, making the rounds at the bail bond offices. You better watch out, too. She’s in danger of making more money than you this month.”
“Yeah, thanks to the fact she collected a bounty on Jethro Banner’s bodyguard. She was supposed to stay in the car.”
“Better face it, Rex,” Beau said. “You’re not going to contain her.”
“Our dad is probably spinning in his grave. Uh, speak of the devil.”
A loud, rumbling engine announced the arrival of the Peepmobile. Rex looked out the window and saw Lori hop out. She was wearing all black, trying to look like some Special Forces commando.
As soon as she entered the office, Rex saw she had a huge bruise on her cheek. “What the hell happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“That bruise on your face.” She reached up on the wrong side first, then found the sore spot. “Oh. I guess it was the guy I just took down to the police station. He wasn’t that happy to see me.” She froze when she spotted Craig. “Oh, hi, Craig.”
“Hi. Maybe you should have that looked at. It’s pretty bad.”
Lori looked at her reflection in a window and obviously didn’t see anything that alarmed her, because she shrugged.
“Lori, I have a job for you,” Rex said. “I need you to bodyguard Nadia. We have a lead on Peter’s whereabouts. Also, can we use the Peepmobile?”
“Sure.” She tossed the keys to Rex. “But I want your car in return.”
“Beau,” Rex said, “think you’ll have time to help out with the surveillance? Maybe relieve me later tonight if we haven’t caught him by then?”
“No problem.”
“Hmm,” Lori said. “Is it only a coincidence he asked the girl to baby-sit and the guy to go do macho things? I don’t think so.” But she didn’t push it. A bounty hunter’s freedom to run his operation his way was sacrosanct around here. No one questioned how anyone did his job, not even Ace.
“I have another job for you,” Rex said to Lori. “Use the Criss-Cross Directory and find out who lives on the forty-two, forty-three and forty-four hundred blocks of Dupree Street. Even number addresses only. Give the phone numbers to Nadia and have her call each of them, see who answers, see if she recognizes either Peter’s voice or the rat-faced woman’s.” He handed a cell phone to Nadia. “Use this to make the calls—it’s untraceable.”
“Where do you get an untraceable phone?” Nadia asked.
“It’s best not to ask Rex too many questions,” Lori said.
“Keep a list of the addresses that correspond to Russian-sounding names,” Rex continued, “or where the person who answers sounds foreign. Then call me and tell me. The information might come in useful.”
Rex turned to Nadia. “Keep your personal cell phone on. Check your messages at home frequently. Call me if you hear anything from Peter.”
“You, too. Please, be careful. I’ve said it before, but don’t underestimate Peter just because he’s not as big or muscular as you.”
“I know better.” Rex liked it that Nadia worried about him. He wanted to touch her, kiss her goodbye. Turning off the intimacy was nearly impossible. But he didn’t think she would welcome any overt physical affection, especially while others were watching, so he forced himself to turn and leave with Craig.
Chapter Nine
Lori drove Nadia to a place called Dudley’s, which she said was a safe place to hang out because it was filled with cops. Nadia was expecting some dark, dingy, smoky bar, but it was actually very nice, all brass and polished wood and hanging baskets of plants everywhere. They got a booth in the back and ordered pasta for lunch. Though yesterday Nadia had struggled to choke down any food at all, today she was ravenous. She ate and tried not to think about the fact that Lily might be hungry or thirsty.
“Do they drive you crazy, those macho men?” Nadia asked.
“Oh, sure, but I’m used to it. As the only girl in my family and no mom, I was already used to being patronized.”
“So what made you go into bounty hunting? Did you want to follow in your father’s footsteps? Make First Strike a family business?”
“First Strike was actually all my idea,” Lori said proudly. “Dad was a judge, and he was always complaining about the revolving door of the justice system. He would sentence bad guys to hard time and they’d be out in six months and back in front of him within a year. He felt like he wasn’t doing anything. He envied his friend Ace, who was pulling bad guys off the streets right and left.”
“But if the justice system is that lenient, the guys Ace pulled in probably didn’t stay long behind bars, either.”
“Most of the time, no. But the image of the bounty hunter, going mano a mano with the criminals, appealed to him. He wanted to face down felons when they didn’t have their smirking lawyers standing next to them. He wanted to see their faces when justice caught up with them. He wanted more control.”
“So he and Ace partnered up?”
“Ace didn’t even have an office back then. I suggested they go corporate, print up business cards, get a Yellow Pages ad. Since Dad was a judge, his name lent some legitimacy and authority to the company. And I came up with the name, the cobra logo and the motto ‘Strike first, ask questions later.’”
“And you thought you’d be a part of it from the beginning, I bet.”
“Of course! I was a natural. I already had the martial arts and weapons training. I was really mad when Dad shut me out. So I signed up with the police, got halfway through the police academy when I realized they were totally sexist, too, not to mention corrupt.”
“What did you do?” Nadia was fascinated.
“I tried working on my own, but that was harder than I thought. No one would hire me. I just wasn’t scary enough. I went after some felons with prices on their heads, but I didn’t have the resources to travel or live for weeks with no paycheck while I tracked someone. Plus, I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.” She laugh
ed easily at herself, and Nadia liked that about her.
“So then what happened?”
“My dad was murdered. And the police botched the investigation so badly, and I just felt so powerless. So I went to Ace and I pleaded my case. He was ex-military police and an ex-con, and I said I wanted to find whoever killed my father and I wanted him to help me. And if he wouldn’t, I would find someone who would. So he agreed to train me.”
“And did you then go after your father’s murderer?”
“I realized pretty quickly, after I got over the shock of losing him, that you can’t chase someone who’s not there. The police had no clues, no leads—or if they did, they weren’t telling me. There was nothing to hunt.”
Nadia sensed the story wasn’t over. She continued to eat her fettuccine and, with her expectant silence, encouraged Lori to continue. It was a trick her grandmother had taught her. People abhor a conversational vacuum.
It worked. “I recently stumbled on something that might be connected, but I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s a ledger book that was hidden away—something obviously important to my Dad. It’s got lists of names and dollar amounts. Some of the names belong to guys who are in prison. Some of the names are dead guys.”
“But not all?”
“No, not all. I’ve tracked down a couple of names, but the guys they belong to claim not to know my father or anything about him. Then, some of the names don’t seem to exist anywhere. They’re not in any phone book or database.”
Nadia had to admit, the puzzle intrigued her. She’d always been good at puzzles and brainteasers, and her grandmother had taught her a lot about codes and ciphers. “I’d like to look at this ledger book some time.” It would be something to occupy the left side of her brain while she waited on news of Lily.
“I have it at home,” Lori said. “I’d love for a fresh pair of eyes to have a look. Are you going to eat that?”
Nadia shook her head. Although she’d been eating the rich pasta dish steadily, there was still a lot left. Lori got a to-go box for it, and soon they were in Beau’s souped-up black Mustang—on loan in exchange for the Peepmobile—and headed for Lori’s apartment.
Lori lived in an unremarkable one-bedroom unit in a seminew complex. Her upstairs apartment was average size, with white walls and beige carpet. The furniture was spare and utilitarian. The only thing remarkable about the living space was its lack of clutter. Lori was very tidy, but she also simply didn’t have a lot of stuff—just a few books, some sports equipment like a bicycle and a punching bag, one small TV. Her kitchen was well equipped and well stocked, however, and it was all healthy food. Nadia found the apartment extremely appealing in its simplicity and lack of pretense. Lori got them each a bottle of water, then went to find the mysterious ledger book.
“If you have some blank paper, that would be good,” Nadia called after her.
Lori appeared a couple of minutes later with a thick artists’ pad of manila paper, a handful of pens and the small, leather-bound book. She opened the book to the first page, which had only one word: “CANELENG.”
“At first I thought it was ‘Canel Engineering,’ like maybe it pertained to a company Dad had an interest in. But there is no such company, and now I’m not even sure if that’s a space between the L and the E.”
Nadia didn’t think it was. She thought it might be a jumble or a cipher, a simple code that would confuse a casual reader. As she flipped through the pages, which were in different-colored inks, she noticed that some names were highlighted in yellow, others in orange.
“The highlighting is mine,” Lori said. “Yellow is for dead. Orange is for located but claims to know nothing.”
The first thing Nadia noticed was that the names without highlighting far outnumbered the highlighted ones. For someone who specialized in tracking down missing persons using the latest technology, Lori had been spectacularly unsuccessful. The second thing she noticed was that there were at least two distinct forms of handwriting in this book. The entries were all printed in block letters, but there were subtle differences. The highlighted names, both yellow and orange, were in one handwriting. Most of the rest were in another.
Which means that, whatever Glenn Bettencourt had been involved in, he had at least one partner.
“There is one other thing I should tell you,” Lori said. “All of the dead guys were sexual predators of one kind or another. One was a rapist. Two were sexually abusing children. My father…” Lori paused, swallowed. “My father really hated sexual predators.”
Nadia immediately thought of Nana Tania, of the horror and shame she’d suffered at the hands of that long-dead soldier. She didn’t have any use for rapists.
She studied the ledger book, chewing on her bottom lip. “This doesn’t look good.” She tapped the leather cover. “On the surface, it looks as if your father was involved in some type of criminal activity. Do you really want to know more?”
“Yes, I do,” Lori answered without hesitation. “Whatever he was doing, he had a good reason for it. He was a loving father. He helped me through a very difficult time in my life. I owe it to him to find his murderer, even if I make some unpleasant discoveries along the way.”
Clearly Lori had given this some thought. So Nadia sat down with the ledger book and her pad and pen. “Give me a few minutes.”
“I’ll need at least that long to dig up the information Rex asked for.” With that, Lori disappeared into her bedroom, where her state-of-the-art computer was set up.
It took Nadia only a few minutes to determine that the highlighted names were not encoded, but the others were. Names like “Halpirr,” “Novurro” and “Bohcbi,” occurring one after another after another on a list, were unnatural. But the cipher was laughably easy to unravel. In less than a half hour, Nadia had the code broken and the entire list translated.
Nadia waited, not wanting to interrupt Lori’s computer work. After she heard what Nadia had to say, she might not feel much like sleuthing. Nadia read a magazine on martial arts, marveling at the cool weapons anyone could buy over the Internet, and waited.
An hour after she’d started, Lori emerged with a pad of paper. “Got it,” she said. “Out of almost thirty houses, only three sounded Russian—Stepanov, Kyznetsov and Ponomarev.”
Nadia winced at Lori’s terrible pronunciation. “And you have phone numbers?”
“Yup. But first, did you have any luck?” She nodded toward Nadia’s scribblings, sitting on the coffee table.
With some trepidation, Nadia showed Lori what she’d done.
“Oh, my gosh, this is amazing!” Lori stared at the list Nadia had compiled, her eyes shining. “Do you know what this means? Look at all these leads I have now. Surely someone on this list will talk. What about that word on the first page? What does it translate to?”
“It turns out ‘Caneleng’ isn’t in code. It’s a simple anagram of your father’s first name and that of his partner.”
“His partner?”
Nadia explained about the two different styles of printing and how she could tell the difference. Then she showed Lori the two names: Glenn and Ace.
REX AND CRAIG SAT in the Peepmobile, parked on a side street with a lot of other cars, from where they had a good view of the entire south side of the 4300 block of Dupree Street. A good view, but not perfect. The small brick houses were jammed together like commuters on a bus during rush hour, and in certain places, trees and overgrown bushes obscured Rex’s view. At least the garages were all detached, so no one could leave their house concealed as Nadia had done this morning.
Earlier they sent Craig, with a squad car and two uniformed patrolmen, to retrieve Rex’s Blazer from the gun club parking lot. Now Beau was driving it. He parked on another side street and kept an eye on the next block down, just in case their main target block was too narrow.
All in all they had almost thirty houses to watch.
Rex had thought this surveillance would be a piece of cake, but thirty ho
uses were too many for one man, and still too many for three. He was grateful for Craig’s and Beau’s assistance, but he still worried that Peter or Lily would slip by them. They had only pictures to go by—none of them had actually seen these people. Lori had gotten a very good look at Peter, and Nadia, of course, could recognize them all including the rat-faced woman. But Nadia and Lori were the two people they’d left back home.
At this time of day, few people were coming and going from the houses. It was a working-class neighborhood, and most of the residents were at their jobs.
“Is there a better way to do this?” Rex asked Craig, feeling the frustration. Maybe Nadia’s plan to go door-to-door would work better after all.
“I thought you were the king of surveillance.”
“I’ve never had to watch such a large target area before. And don’t forget, we have a deadline. Midnight tomorrow.”
“Danilov could stay burrowed in his house for that long, easily.”
Rex pondered that possibility as he watched a kid on a bike coast down the street and turn into one of the driveways. The boy opened the one-car garage, stuck his bike inside and closed it again. The garage was empty of cars. Then the kid went to a side door and used a key around his neck to let himself inside.
“Latchkey kid,” Rex said. “No one else inside that house.” Using a diagram he’d made of the target block, he put an X through the kid’s house. But he’d been able to eliminate very few houses so far.
“We’ll know more later on when people start coming home from work,” Craig speculated. “Any house with no activity might be suspect.”
“We need more eyes and ears,” Rex decided. “But Ace and Gavin are both out of town.” He’d thought Gavin would be available, but he’d nabbed a last-minute job in Dallas.
“There’s Lori.”
Rex really hated to bring his sister into any potentially dangerous situation. Like during the Jethro Banner takedown, Lori tended to act on her own initiative.
“If I bring her over here,” he said, “will you take care of her? Make sure she doesn’t do anything dumb?”