In Rides Trouble: Black Knights Inc.

by Julie Ann Walker

  And she couldn’t wait to get inside.

  “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Edens,” she whispered quietly so as not to wake Eve. “Tell Eve I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  Patrick nodded regally, and she took that as her cue to depart.

  Fine by her. Eve’s father had a way of sneering at her down the length of his patrician nose that tended to make her fingers itch to close themselves in a fist and plant one right in his puss.

  Eve always claimed she was imagining things, but Becky knew the score. Patrick Edens didn’t think she was good enough to lick the bottom of his daughter’s couture pumps, much less be her best friend.

  Asshole.

  But right now even the slightly condescending tilt to his chin couldn’t bank her enthusiasm. Because she was home.

  Finally.

  Hastily, she pushed open the limousine door before the driver had a chance to do it for her. Stepping onto the curb, she watched the long, black car pull onto Cherry Street and disappear around the corner.

  She took a deep breath, dragging in the damp, fishy odor of the Chicago River mingled with the sweet smell of cocoa drifting on the wind from Blommer Chocolate Company. The tension inside her ebbed like the retreating tide.

  She knew exactly how Dorothy felt, because no truer words had ever been spoken than “there’s no place like home.”

  Grinning, she turned toward the gatehouse and the big, red-headed beast of a man working inside.

  “Hey there, Rebel!” he called, hauling himself out of his chair and ducking under the door frame as he exited the little building. He’d been seriously wounded in the same incident that resulted in Patti’s death, but, by the looks of him, he was making a full recovery.

  The sight did her heart good.

  “Manus!” she squealed, running and stopping herself from jumping into his burly arms at the last second. Gingerly, she wrapped her arms as far around his barrel chest as they would stretch and hugged him softly.

  “Well now, that’s no kind of hello.” He pulled back, his round, freckled face wreathed in smiles below his shock of unruly Irish hair. “Since when do you handle me like a piece of Venetian glass?”

  “Since you had a bullet cut out of your chest a couple of months ago.”

  “Bah,” he waved a baseball-glove-sized hand through the air. “I’m fit as a fiddle.” To prove it, he tilted his head back, beat his heavy chest, and did a pretty terrible Tarzan impression.

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure, but I think you just insulted every self-respecting ape on the planet.”

  He chuckled and caught her up in a bear hug that lifted her completely off the sidewalk and had her ribs protesting.

  She didn’t care. She hugged him back with equal fervor.

  “I’m sure glad you’re back in one piece,” he told her gruffly. “You had us all scared half to death.”

  “I’m glad to be back,” she managed to wheeze.

  “Yo, Tarzan,” Rock’s cheerful drawl sounded behind her. “Let go of Jane before you squeeze the life outta her.”

  “Rock!” she whooped and ran through the gates once Manus set her back on her feet. This time she didn’t refrain from jumping into the set of strong arms stretched toward her.

  “Oomph,” Rock staggered exaggeratedly, the heels of his alligator cowboy boots clacking against the sidewalk. “What did those pirates feedya? Cheeseburgers and apple pie?”

  “Can it, you big Cajun,” she growled even as she planted a smacking kiss on his ear.

  “You know, ma petite, I’m used to comin’ home to find you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, but this last episode beats all. Pirates? Really, Becky?”

  “It’s not like I do it on purpose. Trouble just seems to find me.”

  “Hmm,” he murmured noncommittally, turning his sweat-stained John Deere baseball cap around backward so he could get a good look at her. A frown had the corners of his dark goatee drooping.

  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there, chère.” He softly touched her injured cheek. “I couldn’t get back in time to make the transport outta here.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Frank, Billy, and Angel pulled off the rescue without a hitch.” She took his arm and started pulling him toward the shop. She just wanted to get inside.

  Funny, when she left to go on vacation almost a month before, after Patti’s death and Frank’s promise to do everything in his power to impede her becoming an operator, she thought she couldn’t escape this place fast enough.

  Now? Well, now all she wanted to do was lock herself inside the old factory’s thick, warm walls until the memory of Sharif’s brutal pistol carving a place into her temple and her flying over the Patton’s railing didn’t leave her weak and shaky.

  “So I heard and saw,” Rock said. “Ya looked very brave, très vaillant, givin’ your story to the reporters.” He used his key to unlock the shop’s big double doors. They popped open with a muted hiss as the airlock released. He gestured for her to precede him, and she gratefully stepped over the threshold and into her safe, welcoming, ofttimes chaotic world. “Very tragic and heroic at the same time what with your cheek and tremblin’ lips. The newspapers and networks are eatin’ it up.”

  Ugh. She hadn’t realized her lips trembled. Her knees? Yepper, they’d been knocking together like wind chimes in a hurricane, but she thought she’d managed to keep her lips under control.

  Apparently not.

  Great. Just…frickin’ great.

  She and Eve had arrived at O’Hare International Airport only to be hustled by airport staff into a tight, windowless room packed to the brim with reporters shoving microphones in their faces. The flash of camera bulbs had been blinding and disorienting but, together with Eve, she’d recounted the tale of their capture, captivity, and eventual liberation by a heroic and mysterious team of men.

  They’d stuck to the script and Becky, with her knocking knees and dripping palms, envied Eve’s ability to remain cool and unruffled—of course, she comforted herself with the thought that Eve had had a lot more practice dealing with the press.

  And she especially wished she’d had just an ounce of Eve’s unflappable poise when Samantha Tate, one of the Chicago Tribune’s newest and most ambitious young investigative reporters, called out, “Miss Reichert, do you think your life is jinxed given that this most recent incident is coming so soon on the heels of the supposedly gang-related shooting outside the front gates of your business, which resulted in the brutal death of one of your employees?”

  There were so many offensive things in the question, that she’d opened her mouth only to have nothing come out but an insulted sputter.

  First of all, her life wasn’t jinxed. It was just that trouble tended to run hand-in-hand with danger, and she happened to pal around with a very dangerous crowd. Second, Miss Tate’s emphasis on the word supposedly in reference to the drive-by shooting slipped under her skin until the image of wrapping her hands around the woman’s thin white neck burned very bright in her mind’s eye. They’d all worked incredibly hard to make sure that story was fed to the press, and General Fuller had had to pull—er, yank—a lot of strings to ensure the truth of that incident stayed buried in the bottom of some file in some safe room in some forgotten, bombproof basement at the Pentagon.

  Not to be all Jack Nicholson-y, but the world couldn’t handle the truth of what’d really happened that day. The truth that one of their own senators had hired a group of thugs out of Las Vegas to end the lives of a sanctioned government operator and the woman with him who happened to be holding the evidence that proved the senator’s culpability in treason.

  And lastly, yes, she thought it was beyond tragic that the whole world thought Patti Currington had died in gang crossfire when the truth of the matter was she’d been taken down by a careless assassin who didn’t gi
ve a good goddamn which innocent people he caught with one of his stray bullets, but that’s just how it was in their business. And the fact that some nosy reporter smelled something bigger and was trying like hell to force a few jumbled pieces into some sort of order scared the life right of her, but she’d finally managed to find her voice.

  “No, I don’t think my life is jinxed. Perhaps plagued by a string of bad luck recently, but that’s only one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is I’m extremely lucky. I’m alive and well, aren’t I?”

  Miss Tate had smiled knowingly, the look in her eye enough to curdle Becky’s innards, but the woman thankfully refrained from asking any more probing questions.

  “Well, if the press is eating it up,” she told Rock now, “I can only hope that means they’ll soon be full. I just want it to all go away.” She dragged in a deep breath and smiled at the familiar scents of motor oil, bad coffee, and the slightly minty, alcohol aroma that lingered in the brick walls from the building’s previous life as a menthol cigarette factory. “Oh, it’s good to be home.”

  Rock smiled as they made their way down the long hall that ended with an entrance to the huge expanse of the shop. “It’s good to have ya home, chère.”

  “Where are the others?” she asked as they pushed into the strange silence of the shop. She craned her head back to scan the open second floor where the offices and conference room were located, frowning when she found everything to be ghostly quiet.

  Then a muted thump, thump, thump had her gaze focusing on the metal stairway, and she clapped her delight. “Peanut!” she squealed at the giant, gray cat lumbering down the staircase. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, you fat, mangy furball?”

  The tomcat landed with a hard thud on the shop floor and meowed a loud welcome before winding his substantial self around and between her legs. He gazed up at her with soulful, yellow eyes in a scarred face only a mother could love.

  Bending, she hefted him into her arms and chuckled with happiness when he fired up his motor, purring so loudly it felt like a jet engine rumbled inside his chest.

  “He’s missed ya somethin’ fierce,” Rock said, crossing his arms and cocking his head to the side, eyes twinkling at the sight of the two of them.

  “Oh, I’ve missed him.” She buried her nose in the cat’s patchy fur and grimaced when he afforded her the rather dubious honor of his kneading nails.

  “From what I hear, he walked around here for two days after you left, meowin’ incessantly and refusin’ to eat.”

  She joggled Peanut, testing his rather ample weight. “It doesn’t appear to have had much of an impact.”

  “Oh, I think he quickly realized extra helpings of Fancy Feast worked wonders on his depression.”

  She chuckled, scratching Peanut under his furry chin until his yellow eyes rolled back in ecstasy. “So where is everybody?”

  “Steady, Mac, and Christian are all still on assignment. Ozzie’s at some hacker-fest or geek-fest or somethin’. Ghost just got back from a mission, and when he learned you were safe and sound, he headed down to North Carolina to play househusband—if you can imagine that. Vanessa’s in DC finishin’ up a consulting job for the Agency. God only knows what dingy, disgustin’ rock Dan Man is hidin’ under. And your three heroes aren’t on site yet. They had a delay and landed at Great Lakes about an hour after you touched down at O’Hare. Their ETA is approximately…” He looked at his watch and smiled when a muffled whistle pierced the thick brick of the shop’s west wall, “right now.”

  He ambled over to the large, red button mounted high up between her Craftsman ten-drawer rolling tool chest and the metal staircase leading to the second floor. After smashing it with his palm, an alarm briefly sounded, and the west wall began its laborious slide to the right.

  No matter how long she worked at Black Knights Inc., she doubted she’d ever get accustomed to the eerie sight. Shades of the House of Usher.

  “Why’d they come via the Bat Tunnel?” she asked, referring to the secret bolt-hole that extended from the chopper shop down under the Chicago River. It terminated in a parking garage two blocks away.

  “After I saw Miss Tate grill you, I figured it best if our guys didn’t arrive home right after you’d told the story of a group of mysterious men racin’ to your rescue. Ya know, just in case the lovely Miss Tate is keepin’ her eagle eye on things, waitin’ for a juicy story to land in her lap.”

  Becky shuddered. “She’s a shark. We’re gonna have to watch out for her.”

  “Indeed,” Rock agreed, walking over to the lathe in order to snag the sandwich lying atop the expensive tool’s flat surface. He took a mammoth bite.

  “What’ve I told you about keeping your dang sandwiches off my equipment?” she demanded, lowering Peanut to the floor so she could plant her hands on her hips.

  Rock shot her a wide-eyed, innocent look that didn’t fool her for a second. She was just about lay into him for the one-hundred-and-first time concerning that particular offense when the west wall opened just enough to admit Frank’s extra-wide shoulders. She swallowed her words as she watched the Black Knights’ fearless leader slowly shuffle into the shop.

  Wonderful and terrible. That’s how he looked.

  Wonderful because…come on…he was Frank. Terrible because the bandage across his forehead was smudged with dirt, his hastily wrapped shoulder and sling were all askew and looked more like a Rube Goldberg machine than a medical device, his hair was a mess, his beard was coming in thick and black, not to mention the fact that he was pasty pale and carrying enough luggage beneath his eyes for a European vacation.

  “Goddamn, mon frere, just look at you.” Rock grimaced and then grinned from ear to ear. Wait for it…“You look like warmed-over, day-old dogshit.”

  Aaaannnddd, there it was. The first salvo. Some things just never changed.

  Nor would she want them to.

  “I feel worse,” Frank grumbled, shaking the hand Rock extended to him. “So what have you heard about Sharif? Have they found him?”

  Just the sound of the man’s name sent a chill streaking down her spine, and she had to remind herself she was safe. She was home.

  “Negative,” Rock shook his head. “The ships in the area have reported no sign of the Serendipity, nor have they picked up anything on radar. Surveillance drones are doin’ fly-overs, but it’s a little ship out in the middle of a big ocean. It was just plain ol’ luck we were able to locate it the first time around.”

  “What about Interpol?” Frank asked.

  “They’ve put out an APB and sent a description of the Serendipity to all major ports up and down Africa’s western seaboard. Of course, if he makes it to Somalia…”

  Rock didn’t need to go any further. If Sharif made the Somali coast, it was game over. They’d probably never find him. She swallowed the hard lump of fear that lodged in her throat at the thought of that man being out there…somewhere.

  It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself. You’re home, now. You’re safe. And the Knights’ compound was more secure than most nuclear missile sites.

  Then all thought of Sharif vanished when Frank focused his exhausted but still fierce attention on her.

  “So how’d it go with the reporters?” he asked.

  And that was Frank. Always on the job.

  Just once she wished he’d ask her something benign, like, oh say, “Hi, Becky. How was your flight?”

  But then he wouldn’t be Frank…

  “It went fine,” she said, finding it incredibly difficult to hold his gaze when images of the two of them down in the Patton’s sick bay kept flashing before her eyes. She still thought maybe she could taste him, feel him, and she so longed to throw her arms around his neck and repeat the entire sordid experience. But the shuttered expression he wore all but screamed he wasn’t of a simi
lar mind. Like Eve said, he looked less like he wanted a peek at Becky Reichert, Girl On Top Part Deux, and more like he wanted to kill her.

  Could she really blame him? She’d taken advantage of him when he was hopped-up on happy pills. What kind of person did that?

  Her apparently.

  God, she was such an asshole, and she needed to apologize; but she couldn’t rightly do it there, in front of her colleagues and her older brother…

  “Now don’t you be humble.” Rock hooked an arm around her neck and knuckled her head until she turned to glare at him. “She did great, Boss. Stuck to the script and didn’t bat a lash, despite some rather probin’ questions from Samantha Tate, I might add. We’ll make an operator outta our little Rebel yet.”

  “Rock,” Frank warned, his left eye twitching, “I’m not in the mood to get into that with you right now.”

  “You’re not?” Rock did a pretty convincing impression of being crushed. “And after I sat up, night after night, longin’ for the sight of your boyish puss so we could continue the discussion? Well, of all the ungrateful…”

  Rock harrumphed, Frank growled, and Becky marked shot number two on the invisible scoreboard of quips she liked to keep in her head.

  “Gentlemen, not that I haven’t missed your lively repartee, but I’m in desperate need of a cherry Dum Dum.” She’d run out of the suckers on the transatlantic flight, and her blood sugar had to be dropping to near critical levels. “And a long, hot shower.”

  She ducked out from under Rock’s arm to stretch on tiptoe and lay a kiss on her brother’s cheek. “Thank you for coming for me,” she whispered, squeezing his shoulder and flashing him the same smile she’d flashed the day he punched that lying snake Curtis Mitchell for telling the whole school she’d gone down on him in the back of his Ford pickup truck.

  “Oh sister mine,” Billy grinned, “like there was really any other option?”

  No, she supposed there wasn’t. They’d been coming to each other’s rescue in one way or another their whole lives.