by Toby Minton
“Testing, testing,” she said as she stepped into the ladies room and leaned against the wall to wait on a stall. “Hello, tall, dark, and tempting. You’re probably hearing this the day after you met the hottest girl you’ve ever seen. If you’re in a good mood, then you must have kept doing everything right. If not, oh well. You must have screwed it up something awful. Too bad. But buck up. If you’re as lucky as you are smooth, you just might find me again someday. Oh yeah, if the good mood situation went down, go get me some breakfast before I wake up. I’m probably starving.”
A girl coming out of the stall laughed at Nikki’s message, and Nikki smiled back at her as she slid the disk into her pocket.
An hour later, she was ready to amend her message to let him know he was still doing everything right. Granted, the blurry number of shots in that hour would make most guys’ behavior seem spot on, but Lane (as he’d finally introduced himself a few shots in) was really on his game. So much so that when he slid a hand up her back, trailed his fingers up the back of her neck to cradle her head, and pressed his lips to hers, she was more than ready.
He was as smooth and confident a kisser as he was a dancer and seducer. When he broke the kiss, she answered his crooked smile with a broad one of her own.
“I know another club downtown,” he said, his eyes dropping back to her mouth. “If you’re up for it, we could—”
She saw a familiar face moving straight toward them through the weaving dancers. “Sam!” she squealed, pushing out of Lane’s arms and running toward the smaller man. At least she tried to run. She staggered and veered off course—how many shots have I had again?—but Sam caught her arm to steady her when she got close. Then she jumped into him and wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing hard. The warmth she’d felt slowly building with Lane all night was suddenly burning out of control. “You came! I didn’t think you’d come.”
She let go and pushed back to focus on him. He seemed a little surprised and like he was about to say something but was wrestling with it. Then he looked over her head, his dark eyes harder than she’d ever seen them, and then back at her.
“It’s time for me to take you home,” he said.
Nikki’s heart dropped. “What? But, Sam Sam, it’s amazing here. If you just try it, you’ll love it.”
She tried to step away from him, but Sam held onto her arm.
“We have to go,” he said, quieter this time. But the sinking in Nikki’s chest was even worse. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to keep dancing, keep partying the way Lane liked. Sam just didn’t understand her. Maybe he never would.
Nikki felt Lane push up beside her, saw his hand grab Sam’s arm. “The girl said no, mate,” he said, way too loudly, Nikki thought.
Sam let go of Nikki’s arm, and she staggered back a step. When she righted herself and looked back up, Lane was on his knees in front of Sam, one arm bent in a funny Z up by his head, the other gripping Sam’s jacket in a fist like he was in a lot of pain.
Sam just stood there exerting very little effort to keep the taller man on the ground. Nikki knew that crazy hold he was using. She’d seen Michael practice it and even let him try it on her a few times. He called it Nikki Toes, or something like that.
Nikki snorted at that name, right now finding it funny instead of just confusing. She swallowed her giggle though when she saw the five big bouncers converging on them through the thinning crowd of dancers.
Sam saw them too. He released Lane and held both hands up before the bouncers reached them. “We’re good here,” he said. “Just a little disagreement that’s over now.”
“The hell it is,” Lane said loudly, getting to his feet and backing up toward Nikki. “He put his hands all over the lady and threatened her when we caught him picking pockets.”
“Huh?” Nikki said, looking up at Lane, who stepped beside her to put a protective arm around her shoulder.
Sam didn’t say a word, just narrowed his eyes at Lane and then glanced briefly down toward the pocket Lane had been gripping, his jaw tightening.
“Check him,” Lane said. “I saw him stuffing people’s IDs in his pocket.”
Sam kept his arms up while the bouncers checked his pockets, but his eyes bored into Lane with a look that Nikki wanted to remember the next time she wanted to scare somebody shitless. Then he looked at Nikki. “Nikki, please,” he said. “Think about how your brother is feeling right now.”
He couldn’t have said anything worse to her at that moment. Nothing killed a buzz like Michael’s worrying, except maybe thoughts of Michael and Kate lollygagging around and keeping Nikki cooped up for weeks. They’d had no regard for her feelings. Why should she care about theirs now?
“My night’s not over yet,” she said coldly. “Here.” She fished the key to the skimmer out of her pocket and tossed it at him. Her aim was off, but he snagged it out of the air before it flew past him. “Why don’t you take my ride too, thief. It’s in the garage next door.”
One of the bouncers laughed, no doubt thinking she was just teasing Sam, since the garage was supposed to be locked up tight. Then the guy searching Sam pulled a handful of IDs out of Sam’s pocket. Those she could see belonged to people Nikki had seen on the dance floor throughout the night.
That was all the bouncers needed. Four of them muscled Sam toward the emergency exit—he wasn’t putting up a fight—while the one with the IDs headed for the bar.
“We better split,” Lane whispered. “It won’t take them long to figure out some of those people left before he came in.”
He hustled Nikki toward the front door. She didn’t fight him, but running around wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she’d decided to stick with Lane.
“Why are we in such a hurry?” she said as he guided her outside and started across the street. “And how did you get those IDs? Are you some kind of master thief?”
“Something like that,” he said with a grin, his eyes darting to hers and that wicked smile twisting his mouth. “Let’s just say I’m full of surprises.”
They crossed the street and slipped between two parked cars to the sidewalk.
Nikki giggled as she remembered the recorder. “You mean surprises like this?” She laughed outright at the look of shock on his face. “Now who’s the master thief?”
She didn’t even see his arm move but the disk was suddenly in his hand instead of hers. When he turned it over and looked at the red light behind the button, the blood drained from his face.
“How long ago did you press this?” he said, grabbing her arm and staring at her like she’d done something wrong. Well, something more wrong than picking his pocket. All trace of smooth and sexy was gone. His voice and eyes were all panic now.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. She didn’t have a clue how much time had passed since she’d run into him tonight. Much of that was his fault, really. “Maybe an hour. Maybe longer.”
He muttered a stream of curses under his breath and looked around them. He flung the disk into a nearby alley and then started up the street, jerking her along with him.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Easy on the goods, jackwagon. You’re not that smooth.”
He ignored her and kept pulling her along. He leaned down to stare through the windows of each car they passed, which brought Nikki’s laughter back.
“And I thought I was drunk,” she giggled. “You don’t even remember what your car looks like.”
“I don’t own a car,” he mumbled as they passed two more. He stopped at the third, something he saw inside making him smile. “I don’t own a car yet, that is. This one should do.”
He left her on the sidewalk and went around to the driver door of the sleek and expensive looking hover vehicle. He fiddled with the lock in a way she couldn’t see, keeping his posture relaxed and casual.
“This should be fast enough to get us far enough away before—” He looked over Nikki’s shoulder, his expression hardening. “Price.”
Nikki heard two po
ps, and something stabbed her back in two places. She tried to spin around, but her brain just kept on going after she told her body to stop. She ended up flat on her back staring up at a crowd of people coming out of the alley, and at the spotlight of a heavy dark ship cruising into view over the building beside her.
The crowd was all decked out in tactical gear, most of them with guns trained on Nikki. But a few were aiming theirs in Lane’s general direction as he stepped around the car he’d been about to steal. One guy in the crowd didn’t have his helmet on. He had darting eyes, kind of like Sam, but he was thicker and swarthy, where Sam’s skin had that more appealing almost red darkness to it.
She really liked Sam. He was good people. She’d like to hug him again. Maybe next time he’d come dancing with her. Maybe even tonight, after she took a little nap. Her eyes were suddenly so heavy.
“Corso,” the swarthy guy said, drawing Nikki’s heavy eyes to him. “Savior was beginning to think you wouldn’t be able to find them.” He paused. “I was sure you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just full of surprises,” Lane replied, looking down at Nikki. He didn’t seem happy at all anymore. Nikki could understand that. Nobody liked naps when they could be dancing.
“Your payment. All cash, as requested,” Swarthy said, handing a dark packet to Lane. Then he stepped closer and squatted down next to Nikki. “My boss is anxious to see you, girl. Let’s hope you’re worth all this trouble.” He looked up at the crowd. “Bring her.”
Alone
Chapter 27
Michael
“Michael,” Padre’s soft voice cut through the fog of fear and anger that was holding Michael motionless. He’d been staring at the two tiny crushed tranquilizer darts and the small spots of blood under them on the sidewalk for who knows how long. “There’s more over here,” Padre said.
Michael pulled his gaze from the darts and stood, pushing back the fog as best he could to focus. A dozen paces up the sidewalk, Padre was crouched at the edge of an alley under a pale and flickering old security light mounted on the brick wall above him. Farther up the street, Michael could see Elias and Mos talking to a couple of hooded teenagers at the intersection at the top of the hill. Ace and Coop were out of sight somewhere behind him, scouring the buildings closer to the waterfront. Back at the transport on top of the abandoned parking garage, Kate was scanning police and military channels for anything useful. Everyone was out here. In the middle of the night, without a word of complaint, Elias’s entire team was here doing everything they could to find Nikki. That should have made Michael feel better. It didn’t.
Michael reminded himself to breathe as he walked to Padre. Long deep breaths seemed to help, a little.
The “more” Padre had found turned out to be more blood, a curving spatter with two jagged white specks in the middle. Teeth, Michael realized as he crouched to get a better look.
Padre moved off deeper into the alley, leaving Michael to draw his own conclusions. His imagination was all too happy to oblige, cooking up things that turned his stomach over, forcing him to close his eyes to try to crush the images. When he got his hands on whoever had done this…
“That’s not hers,” a somewhat familiar voice said from behind him.
The face Michael saw as he looked up was all too familiar. Familiar and unexpected.
Michael was a little too paranoid, he would freely admit, to believe in coincidence. He knew Lane Corso’s presence at the scene of Nikki’s disappearance couldn’t be just happenstance. When Padre had described the man Nikki had been with at the club, something had tickled at Michael’s memory, but he’d brushed it off as far too improbable that Corso would be in the right club in the right city at the right time to run into Nikki. Now that he was face to face with the ship thief he’d once hired, Michael’s paranoid mind turned coincidence into malevolent intent.
The thief stood a couple paces away looking at Michael with eyes devoid of the cocky bravado they’d held when Michael had last seen them. “Even sedated, she managed to drop one of them with a headbutt as they carried her away.”
“One of who?” Michael said, rising. “As who carried her away?”
“Savior’s grunts,” Corso replied.
Michael had known. Who else would have taken her? But the words still dug a cold pit in his stomach.
“Look. It was…it was me, mate,” Corso said, looking away from Michael’s eyes. “I put her on a plate for him, just like he asked. Even though I—”
His words choked off as Michael grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him into the alley.
Michael didn’t make a conscious decision to attack the man. His body just acted on its own. He spun Corso and slammed the taller man’s back against the brick wall before he realized what he was doing.
He looked down at his hands on the man’s shirt, surprised at himself. All his training, all his practice, all his self-control, and he had resorted to the most basic of attacks, not to mention the easiest to defend against. Every self-defense class in the world drilled the many ways to stop an attacker who grabbed your shirt from the front. More than once he’d laughed at the amount of time instructors dedicated to such training. It was such an ineffective method of attack, not targeting any pressure points, leaving your own vulnerable areas undefended. Why would anyone use it? But he had, and even though it was so easy to stop or counter, Corso hadn’t tried to do either. That said something about the man that Michael’s anger wouldn’t let him hear.
Michael closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, grateful that for once his anger was holding its own against logic and reason.
“Where’d they take her?” he growled, meeting what had to be feigned remorse in Corso’s eyes with the rage in his own.
“I don’t know, mate. I swear. But I can help you find her.”
Michael grunted and slammed the thief against the wall. “You want to make a deal?” He slammed him back again. “You want my money now on top of Savior’s?” Again. “Then what? You charge Savior for bringing me to him?” Again, harder. “How stupid do you think I am?”
Michael’s logic tried to stop him. It tried to tell him Corso wasn’t fighting back, that Michael was hurting him, but its pleas couldn’t get through. The rage had won the fight inside him, and now that it had control, it wasn’t listening to anything else.
He shoved Corso back against the wall again and let go of him. Then he hit him. The slight pain of his fist connecting with the bigger man’s head only fed his fury. He hit him again. And again.
Corso tried to defend himself at last, but Michael caught his arm and spun him across the alley into the other wall. He batted aside the man’s awkward blocks and hit him again and again, expelling the last of his self-control in a wordless shout.
Strong hands grabbed him and pushed him away. He growled and tried to pull free, but Elias stepped in front of him and pushed him back.
“Easy, son,” the older man said. “We’ve got him. He’s not going anywhere.”
Michael looked over Elias’s shoulder, his breathing ragged, to see Padre holding Corso against the other wall with one hand, two fingers held lightly against the man’s chest, the others loosely cradling a dark knife, the blade resting on his outstretched thumb. With his free hand, Padre started patting Corso down.
“I didn’t turn her over,” Corso said. He spit and then pressed his palm against his split lip, ignoring the two other men, his eyes on Michael alone. “I swear. I’m no angel, mate, but once I take a job, I don’t play both sides. Not my style.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Padre said, shifting the blade to rest against the thief’s exposed chest as he finished his pat-down.
Corso looked at Padre and held up his hands to show he meant no harm, then he slowly fished a dented and scratched metal disk from inside his waistband.
“This is a locator from Savior. If you know a chiphead worth his salt, you could track the signal back to him.”
“Is this how you
called them?” Padre asked, his voice dangerously soft as he took the disk.
“I didn’t call them.” He was answering Padre, but Corso’s words and the plea in his eyes were for Michael. “Nikki did.”
Elias’s hands tightened on Michael’s arms, but Michael didn’t try to break free. The fog clouding his mind was dissipating. As idiotic as Corso’s claim seemed on the surface, he looked to be telling the truth. Whatever had told Michael to trust the thief when he was planning the Sky City job was making itself heard again. Maybe the thief was a skilled manipulator, but Michael didn’t think that was the reason he trusted him. Something in the man’s eyes told Michael he meant what he said, something Michael didn’t think a man could fake.
“It was a stupid mistake,” Corso said. “She didn’t know what it was when she lifted it from me. She turned it on, and…” He trailed off and looked away for a second before meeting Michael’s eyes again. “Don’t get me wrong, mate. Even though I didn’t press that button, it was still my fault. I know that. I came to make it right.”
Padre glanced at Michael and then at Elias, a hint of question in his otherwise hard eyes. Elias looked to Michael, putting the decision in his hands.
“I can help you find Savior,” Corso said when the silence started to stretch. “If we find Savior, we find your sister.”
Nikki
Nikki woke to see a beautiful pair of blue eyes staring into hers, the strong nose and perfect mouth that went with those eyes hovering within kissing distance.
“How do you feel?” the perfect mouth asked gently, its voice strong yet soothing. Yummy.
“Dreamy,” she replied, smiling sleepily until she moved her head. “And hung-over. Oh god. Please tell me last night was epic. It better have been.”
Nikki squeezed her eyes shut to let her head settle. She tried to remember everything that had happened before she’d passed out, but everything after she and Lane left the club was a blur. A big nauseating blur.