by Julie Beard
Two more thugs lumbered down the corridor, brandishing knives and clubs. Whatever possessed these guys to use primitive weapons instead of modern firepower? Hey, I wasn’t complaining, just curious.
Mike and I stood back to back, each poised to take on a Shadowman as the pair split up, approaching from two sides. Mike seized his opponent’s outstretched wrist just as the thug swung his club. Pivoting on his right foot, Mike used the forward momentum of his attacker to slide the thug’s arm over his shoulder and catapult him into the iron bars of the cage six feet away.
I couldn’t pay more attention to their contest because I was occupied dodging the flashing blade of my Shadowman’s knife. He was big but surprisingly quick. I was little and quicker.
“Getting tired, Ace?” I sassed, spitting on the ground in front of him. He let out a guttural growl and tried again. “Don’t any of you creeps know how to talk?”
All I got was a grunted “Huh?” I kept out of reach, waiting for my opening. He was breathing harder. Good. But then another Neanderthal engaged Mike just as he put the finishing touches to the one he’d been fighting. Damn. No help for me now.
I’d have to handle this one myself. He slashed just low enough so I could reach his knife arm from above. One of my hands was too small to reach around his wrist, but I knew the pressure point I needed to hit. It would take two hands to do it. Dangerous. Like I had a choice! I wrapped my hands around his wrist while his knife inched too close for comfort.
Fingers busy, I used every ounce of my strength to press on the inside of his wrist. He dropped the knife with a squeal of surprise, his good right hand numbed. But there was nothing wrong with his left. He tried to grab hold of my hair. There’s a good reason I keep it short. His hand came away empty. Just as he made a fist and swung at me, I whirled away and sent my leg flying under the blow. My foot connected with his groin and he folded like a circus tent on traveling day.
Then the sound of a theatrical voice echoed around the macabre vault of horrors. “A horse. My kingdom for a horse!”
Seeing Cyclops up close and personal hadn’t been on the agenda, but here the creep was, lurching toward us. Since Cyclops had been your average mole until he’d been horribly burned in an underground fire, I guess it was only natural that he would identify with the king Shakespeare had portrayed as deformed. How inventive of Cyclops. It was a little grandiose, but admirably literate of him.
Cyclops moved in the odd way someone who had suffered crippling burns would, shambling to favor ruined muscles and skin twisted into knotted scars. Briefly, I felt sorry for him. In the torchlight I could see that searching, hideous eye—the one I had seen in my mother’s crystal ball. And it was fixed directly on me.
“Okay, so maybe telepathy really exists,” I muttered to myself.
He charged toward us, flanked by two more of his minions. Mike quickly tossed the first of them like a ragdoll, stacked on top of his pals in the corner. He engaged the second and they commenced to spar while the deranged Richard III paused and studied me with that ghastly, single bloodshot eye.
“You,” he rasped from beneath his black, hooded cape. “I know you…glorious sun of York,” he rasped.
His voice was hoarse from smoke and fire damage but his body was squat and powerful in spite of his scars. There was something eerily hypnotic about him as he advanced on me with arms outstretched as if greeting a long-lost sister.
Ugh! What a thought. Lola might have been a little off-kilter but she hadn’t given birth to any lunatics…that I knew of. I backed away, forgetting the brute lying curled in a fetal position behind me until I tripped over him and fell backward. My thespian adversary followed me down, pinning me. I felt as if I were living a nightmare and longed for insomnia.
Just as I started to twist my body so my knee could do some serious damage to Cyclops’s gonads, a high-pitched screech filled the air. Lola, armed with what looked like a broomstick, was pummeling “the usurper.” He turned to swat her away like a bothersome fly, but when he raised his head toward her, instead of backing away, she surprised me—and probably herself.
Lola jabbed the end of the stick into his good eye with a yowl of fierce pleasure that froze even Mike in his tracks. Luckily, he’d finished off the last of the Shadowmen. Cyclops emitted a horrible moan and grabbed at what had been his good eye, rolling away from me to writhe on the floor.
“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man ain’t king anymore,” Lola said with gusto, tossing her wild red hair back with a triumphant twist of her head.
“You all right, my brave baby?” she asked me as her face transformed from Boadicea to Earth Mother.
I simply stared at her in amazement.
“Quickly,” Mike said, motioning frantically. “We must go before others come.”
I jumped to my feet. I could hear what sounded like a legion of Shadowmen rumbling down the stone corridors. “Let’s move,” I said, grabbing my mother, the unlikely lioness, by one withered arm while Mike took hold of the other.
As we raced away from the hellish version of a Medieval Times performance with Cyclops’s knights in hot pursuit, I wondered if I’d ever get the vision of that hypnotic single eye out of my mind again.
Chapter 16
Hot and Bothered
When we finally climbed out of the hellhole—scraped, bruised and shaken—we found Marco and Detective Hoskins standing by with a retinue of police officers and emergency technicians. While I wanted the cops to go after Cyclops, I knew they wouldn’t. The moles had negotiated treaties with the City of Chicago, giving them limited sovereignty over their territory. A few undercover officers, like the one we met, kept surveillance but couldn’t legally interfere with what went on below.
In a parking lot on the north side of the crumbling stadium, we were debriefed while the police peppered us with questions, filled out reports, fed Lola burgers and told us we were lucky to be alive.
Lola cried when she heard about her cleaning lady’s murder. When Hoskins advised her to stay away from her apartment, she showed surprising good judgment by promptly agreeing. So did I, though I dreaded the fact that this would mean Lola had to move in with me for a while.
After extensive questioning, it became clear that one of the scenarios Henry and I had batted around was right on. Lola said she was kidnapped by R.M.O. thugs shortly after she did a reading with Vladimir Gorky. She said she’d been advising him for years. During their last reading, Lola mentioned a lost fortune. When she made a reference to an eagle, the symbol of Russia, Gorky had turned white and pressed her for more details. It seemed Lola had hit on an unresolved mystery.
Gorky had been searching the past ten years for a fortune that someone in his organization had stolen and hidden. Thinking that Lola actually knew the location, he became angry when she wouldn’t provide more details. He was convinced she was holding out on him and imprisoned her for future questioning. I broke out in a cold sweat when I realized how easily Lola could have become a forgotten skeleton in Cyclops’s prison. What if I hadn’t come through for her?
Even though Hoskins questioned Lola, it was clear that Marco had been the driving force in the search for her. He walked us out to the squad car that was going to take us home. Mike stayed behind to tell them about our encounter with Officer Roper. Like the gentleman he was, Marco opened the back door for Lola and helped her in. He then came around to my side and leaned against the door before I could open it.
“You look like hell,” he said, crossing his arms and eyeing me closely.
I laughed and ran a hand through my hair. “Thanks. Bad hair day. Remind me to curl it next time I go underground.”
“I hope there won’t be a next time.”
“But you never know.”
“Nope. Not with a stubborn broad like you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment whether it was meant as one or not.”
He smiled openly. God, what a spectacular smile he had—white teeth, bright eyes framed b
y ruggedly handsome crow’s-feet marking healthy, tanned skin. He was all man. Confident. Stubborn, too. I smiled back.
“I like you, Baker. I really do. Too bad things can’t be different.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t have everything.” I added in a tight voice, “I suppose you want me to say thank-you.”
“What for?”
I put my hands on my hips and eyed him with exasperation. “As if you don’t know. For one, risking your reputation for helping a CRS in a covert rescue mission that wasn’t authorized by police assigned to the case. For another, planting that tracker on me. I’m not sure we would have made it without Officer Roper’s help. I thought he was a Shadowman. Poor guy, I think I broke his nose.”
“It’s happened before.”
“That’s what he said. Talk about tough.”
“Yeah, you are,” he said, willfully misinterpreting my comment, and I thought I heard a note of admiration in the wry statement.
“Flattery will get you nowhere, Detective.”
He pulled a grimace. “Damn. It’s always worked before.”
“I have no doubt. But don’t forget that while you were busy saving my ass, you also lied to me. You told me that tracker would be dead until I activated it.”
“Lucky for you I lied. And to think you accused me of being a Boy Scout.” I really hated the ambiguous lines between truth and lies, right and wrong, love and hate. As Hank had said, those lines grew blurrier by the day. It made self-righteousness damned near impossible. At this rate I was going to have to adopt an entirely new modus operandi.
“I’m going home now, Detective, and I’m going to sleep for a very, very long time. But tomorrow night I’m going to celebrate our success with a little soiree. I think Lola deserves a party. You should have seen how brave she was. Want to come?”
“Sure. What time?”
“I’ll call you. Don’t keep Mike too long.”
“I’ll drop him off myself in ten minutes. See you tomorrow.”
He shut the door and waved at the officer behind the wheel. As the car pulled out of the lot, Lola’s curiosity blasted me from the other side of the seat like a wood-burning oven. I turned to her and instantly recognized her meddling smirk for what it was.
“Forget it, Lola. I can’t believe you’d even think about something like this after you barely escaped with your life.”
“O-oh, but honey, he’s handsome.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t trust handsome men.”
“Who’s talking about trust? Just one night with a man like that—”
I stopped her with a vicious glare. “Do you want to stay at my place or not?”
She went pale. “Yeah, honey, I got nowhere else to go.”
“Then don’t ever talk to me about Detective Marco again. He’s not my type. Got it?” I said it harsher than I’d intended, but there was never going to be anything between me and Marco. Period.
She nodded obediently. “Yeah, honey. Yeah, I got it. Not your type. Yeah, that makes sense.” Then she muttered to herself, “O-oh, but is he ever a hunk.”
When we got home I cooked an omelette, which Mike and I inhaled. Lola had already stuffed herself with the burgers and fries she’d gobbled down in the back of a squad car. The three of us rehashed the night’s surreal events over cups of oolong tea, still buzzing will adrenaline, until exhaustion finally set in. We congratulated ourselves once more, said good-night, showered and prepared for bed.
I set Lola up in the studio downstairs. That way she could sleep until noon if she wanted without being disturbed. I made sure the futon in the corner had sheets, and when she climbed under the covers, she looked like the subject of a modern art painting—a Raggedy Ann doll, with a head of tousled red yarn and doleful dark eyes, tossed on a white bed in a black room. Before I went upstairs, I sat on the edge of the futon and smoothed away a lock of hair from her forehead. “We’ve been through a lot today, Lola.”
Her eyes puddled and she squeezed my hand. “I couldn’t have done it without you, honey. You saved my life. I knew you would.”
“Sure, Ma. We’re family. That’s what family does.”
Lola’s face lit with joy, then she sat up and yanked me into a bear hug. Her strength surprised me. It always had. I let her hug me as long as I could, then pulled gently away. It would be a long time, if ever, before I overcame my natural instinct to keep her at arm’s length.
She sank back onto her pillow and gazed at me with blatant admiration. “How did you do it, Angel? How on earth did you find me?”
I swallowed hard. “Uh, well, it’s like this. I—I had a vision.” I stopped and listened to the pounding of my heart, but knew I couldn’t stop there. “It seems I have a special ability to…to see things. I’m…you know…psychic. I guess.”
I gave her a quick look. She wasn’t gloating, as I’d half expected. Incredibly, her eyes were soft with compassion.
“I’m so sorry, baby.”
I tilted my head. “Why?”
“I know how you hate that psychic crap.”
I bit my lower lip and took her right hand in both of mine. Age spots speckled her pale skin. “But it’s not crap, is it, Lola?”
She shook her head. “No.”
I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, God, I was so unfair to you.”
“No, baby, you weren’t.”
“Yes, I was! All these years I thought you were a fake. I never imagined it could possibly be real. I don’t know how you can ever forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” She laughed. “Oh, sweetie, there’s nothing to forgive. You were just a kid, and I was a lousy mother. You had to hate me for something. Being a psychic was just as good as anything. I’m just sorry you have to have the gift, too.”
I shrugged. “I simply have to use it for a good purpose and everything will be okay.”
She huffed doubtfully. “It ain’t always that easy, kiddo.”
I studied the layers of dark circles under her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not like turning on a faucet. That’s why Vlad was so mad at me. He thought I knew where to find his lost fortune, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t come up with enough information.”
“Don’t worry about it, Lola.”
“I got to, honey. As soon as Vlad is done dealing with those Chinese girls, he’ll start worrying about his fortune again and he’ll come looking for me.”
“I’ll ask Detective Marco to make sure the police keep an eye on this place,” I said. Then I realized what she’d just said. “Wait a minute. Did you say Chinese girls?”
“Yup.”
“So Vladimir Gorky has something to do with those missing girls I’ve been reading about in the newspaper?”
She sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I felt sorry for them. But there was nothing I could do to help.”
“You mean you saw them?” I practically shouted.
“They were at the Gorky mansion on the north side. Vlad’s thugs took me there for one last reading before they handed me over to that one-eyed lunatic in Emerald City.” She shivered at the memory. “Can we talk about this tomorrow, honey? I need a good night’s sleep.”
“Sure.” I nodded, my mind reeling. We knew where the girls were. They would have to be rescued.
The police would never interfere without proof positive that Gorky had them, and they certainly wouldn’t take Lola’s word for it. Somebody had to help those girls. They needed a real home before they were scarred for life. I knew that better than anyone.
But I was too tired to solve all the world’s problems…tonight.
I slept until noon, then made arrangements for the small party.
By nine o’clock the next evening everyone had arrived and mingled in the garden. Soft jazz music floated through the hibiscus-scented air, mingling with the animated conversations and heightened laughter. I wasn’t typically big on social events, but after a close brush with death, we all felt immortal and needed to celebrate our vict
ory.
I’d ordered from a Chinese restaurant that delivered, and there were plenty of dishes for vegetarians and carnivores alike. The small gathering split nearly down the middle on that score.
My foster brother, Lola and Marco were unabashed meat eaters. Hank’s girlfriend Soji and Mike were vegans, which is what I call vegetarians with an attitude. They don’t even eat eggs and cheese because they come from animals. I split somewhere down the middle. I preferred lighter vegetable dishes, but I wasn’t above using my incisors on occasion.
After we ate and I brought the dishes back up to the kitchen, Soji cornered me at the bottom of the stairs on my return.
“Hey there, hero,” she said.
I laughed and gave her a one-armed hug. “I’m just glad Lola made it out alive.”
I motioned to two Adirondack chairs positioned in front of a semicircle of flowers and foot-high Chinese lanterns. She’d brought me a glass of white wine, and we sat side by side. I could finally relax.
Soji was a cool woman. Hank had been dating her for a year and I really liked her. I didn’t want to jinx anything by telling him I hoped they’d get married, but I think he had that in mind, as well. She would be a hard one to lasso, though.
Soji, which was short for Sojourner, was a gorgeous television reporter who hailed from Mozambique. With an exotic accent, a luscious caramel complexion, a svelte supermodel figure and cheekbones to die for, she was destined for network stardom. Right now she was one of the Chicago market’s hot commodities. I’d given Hank a hard time, asking him how a guy with freckles and baby fat could snag a woman like Soji Wilson. He’d taken the ribbing in good humor, flushing with pride over his apparent victory. I suspected Soji was attracted to Hank’s intelligence and his great news instincts, not to mention his journalism pedigree. And while he wasn’t particularly tall or dashing, Hank was like a young Spencer Tracy—rock-solid and dependable.
“So may I have the first interview?” Soji asked me with a conspiratorial smile.