Читать книгу Undercover Justice - Nico Rosso - Страница 11

Arash’s hands itched without a steering wheel in them. His foot pressed against the floor of the Mercedes, even though there was no gas pedal beneath it. He always drove. Not that the woman in the driver’s seat couldn’t. She’d handled the machine like she was part of it.

His pulse was still racing, even though they’d long lost their pursuers and were on the dark highway to Sacramento. Damn, but it had been sexy to see her pretty lips curled into a sneer as she bared her teeth during the chase. Her dark eyes had somehow remained cool while she’d assessed the road ahead and the cars coming after them. The sleek angles of her black bob haircut fit her perfectly.

He hadn’t been thinking about any of this while Eddie Shun’s men were bearing down on them. But once they were in the clear, he’d been hit by the charged thrill of watching her drive and how they’d worked very well together. Too well.

“I didn’t get your name.” He couldn’t find many personal details looking at the Asian woman who seemed to be around his age. No jewelry. Her manicure was neutral. Even her black, military-style jacket was lacking any logos or brands.

“Stephanie.” She kept both her hands on the steering wheel, not offering one to shake.

“Good to be riding with you.” He leaned back in the seat but couldn’t get any calm to sink into his muscles. The car rocketed through the night, toward a fight he couldn’t wait to start, but he didn’t know how or when. He wasn’t driving. This badass woman was, he kept reminding himself, part of the gang he was going to destroy. It took some effort to keep his voice casual. “Been rolling with Olesk long?”

“First gig.” Her cautious gaze pierced Arash for a split second, then returned to the black highway.

The information resonated like a gunshot. He tried to use it to shape more of what he knew of Stephanie, but he couldn’t find enough pieces to bolt together. She could’ve been lying, but that would be found out as soon as they arrived at Olesk’s place. He examined the angles of telling her his own truth and couldn’t find any reason not to reveal just a little. “Mine, too.”

“Have you met Olesk?” This time when she assessed him there was a little surprise in her eyes.

“Nothing face-to-face.” Tension hummed in his spine, not knowing what he was going to do when he was finally in the same room with the man responsible for Marcos’s death.

“So we’re both on the trial run.” She looked him over again, and he felt like she might have X-ray vision the way she took him apart. “What did they send you into the warehouse for?”

He took the piece of paper from his coat and unfolded it. “Shipping orders for today. From Eddie Shun, no less.”

She clicked her tongue, nodding, impressed. “You managed to do it.”

“And you got me out of there.” He put the paper away.

“We passed this test.”

So she was heading into the unknown, too. Her face was unreadable in the dash lights. “Olesk will be lucky to have you on the crew. Where’d you learn to push a V8 biturbo like that?”

“I went to private school with a bunch of rich kids.” A sly smile crossed her lips. “There were a lot of expensive cars to wreck.” She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “But their parents still never paid attention.” When she finally turned to him, it was to blink slowly with that smile still on her face. He saw the truth of her words within her nonchalant attitude. And something else, deeper in her look. What she’d seen, and lived, still dwelled in her. He found himself drawn to that depth, wanting to discover what it was she’d learned from her side of life.

“You picked a winner.” Before he stared at her too long, he snapped himself back to the moment and ran his hand over the dashboard.

“I’d cased it for a couple days and it hadn’t moved out of its parking spot.” She patted the steering wheel. “Machine like this needs to run.”

And Stephanie seemed like the perfect person to own the streets with the sleek beast. “And clean.” He opened the glove compartment and found only the normal paperwork. There wasn’t a fast-food napkin in sight. The floor mats in the back seat looked like they’d never been touched by the sole of a shoe. “Whoever’s car this is, she was...meticulous.”

“How do you know it was a woman?” she challenged.

“Perfume.” The dark spiced aroma had hit him once he’d been able to breathe easily after the chase. “It’s different from yours.”

“I’m not wearing any.”

“Your soap, then.” The cabin of the car suddenly seemed especially small. Intimate. Like he’d had his face close to the skin of her neck.

She rubbed her thumb along the side of her finger in a slow meditation, then abruptly stopped to grip the steering wheel. Her gaze remained forward. “Breaking and entering, theft, perfuming. What else can you do?”

“I can drive anything with wheels. Tear it down and build it back up again.” Was he bragging or flirting? “If it has a motor, I can make it sing.” Stick to bragging, he scolded himself. There was no room for a hookup with this woman in his plans for Olesk and Olesk’s crew.

“Bet you didn’t learn all that in private school.”

“I’ve been seriously in the grease since I was fifteen.” Marcos had been right next to him. Until addiction and the need for easy cash pulled Marcos away, leading him ultimately to Olesk. And his death.

“When I can afford one of these—” she tapped the gearshift “—I’ll call you to work on it.”

He laughed, again the car feeling smaller than before. The early-morning hour seemed to dress a heavy curtain around these moments with the mysterious Stephanie. “A ride this fine never comes into the shop where I wrench. Only mechanics with white coveralls and stainless-steel calipers are qualified to tune these machines.”

“So if we break down out here in the middle of nowhere, you couldn’t fix it?”

“Hell, yeah, I could.” As long as it wasn’t the computer brain. “I’ll bet you could, too.” He pulled the transceiver out of the side pocket of her bag. He’d only heard of these multithousand-dollar devices used to break into the most tech-heavy cars, and had never handled one. It was clearly made on someone’s bench, but it was solid and had already proven itself.

“I know my way around combustion.” Stephanie shrugged and ran a fingernail down the edge of her bob, straightening it along the side of her cheek.

Now he wanted to see her wiping her greasy hands on a rag while standing over a purring engine. His own heart started thumping at the rate of the fantasy pistons until he shoved the transceiver back into the bag and tried to erase the image from his head. “What other gear is in here? Police radio scrambler? Attack drone?” He hauled the bag into his lap.

“Changes of clothes.” She grabbed the bag and slid it into the back seat. “Private changes of clothes.”

The tenuous intimacy cooled. “So you knew we’d be road-tripping?” She’d said this was her first gig for Olesk, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t tighter with the man and his crew than Arash was.

She shook her head. “I prepared for a few possibilities.” Her eyes assessed him with some disappointment. “You didn’t.”

He straightened his jacket and crossed his arms. Flashlight, knife, multi-tool, the cell phone he’d set up specifically for contacting Olesk. Not much else. “I’ve been focused on other things.” Like how to get into the gang without anyone knowing he was really there to destroy it.

“Plan ahead.” Stephanie settled in her seat, still alert, but not driving like they were being chased.

He’d always sucked at chess. His father had tried to teach him a couple of times, but he’d always been better at the backgammon games with his mother. More chance. Thinking on the fly. But Stephanie was right. Olesk had to be smart to operate a crew for this long without getting caught. Arash had to be smarter. He gave her a small salute. “Eight moves ahead.” One hour until Sacramento. Two hours until sunrise. He had to be ready for Olesk and anything else. That meant not getting twisted up in an attraction with a woman getaway driver. It didn’t matter that they’d handled the trouble in San Francisco perfectly, like dancing to the same rhythm. Stephanie was still the enemy.

* * *

TWO HOURS DRIVING through the early morning in a “stolen” car with Arash had stripped the insulation from her defenses. The chase through San Francisco hadn’t rattled her as much as the cautious conversations they’d used to learn about each other. Not that either was revealing all their truths. She knew he was hiding as much of himself as she was, though he probably wasn’t working secretly for an underground vigilante group. But she kept having to remind herself that this man, who listened with interest when she spoke, was part of the evil she was tasked with defeating.

“The next right.” Arash’s low, gravelly voice was more suited to the bedroom. He’d navigated them off the highway and toward a generic Sacramento suburb. The light from his phone revealed weary eyes. He took a long breath and sat up straighter, rallying. More life shined in his expression as he scanned the area.

She reset her focus. A new day was about to begin. She was about to meet Olesk. Any mistakes she made now would be deadly.

The workday around them had started before the sun, with cars and trucks and vans already on the road. The neighborhood she turned into seemed like it was still sleeping. Lights off. Cars cold. She tried to predict which house was her target but couldn’t make any of them seem more criminal than another. Olesk was slick.

But not perfect. “I see it.” She aimed for a two-story house covered in taupe stucco. A pickup truck parked on the street in front of it had a wider stance than what rolled off the factory floor.

Arash chuckled. “You’re good.” He put his phone away. “Someone threw some spacers on their pickup wheels.”

“The only nonstock car on the block.” She slowed the Mercedes and turned into the driveway. As soon as they crossed the sidewalk, the garage door opened. A line of white light widened ahead, until the space inside the two-car garage was completely exposed. A sport-tuned compact import car took up one spot.

“I hope they have a real shop to work in.” Arash cocked his head with a disapproving frown.

She pulled in next to the cluttered workbench, with only basic tools and a scattering of bottles of motor oil and detailing supplies. If Olesk and his crew were breaking down cars, they were doing it somewhere else. Nothing in the garage seemed illegal. Stacks of boxes, a rolling rack hanging with clothes covered in plastic. All perfectly normal to anyone who might be driving or walking past when the door was open.

The Mercedes purred to a stop and she shut it down. She didn’t have a moment to take a breath with the resting car before the garage door started closing behind her and Arash. He swung out of the car and faced a door at the back of the garage. She could see that the car ride hadn’t locked him up too much. His body was balanced, ready.

She took her time, collecting her bag from the back seat before getting out of her Mercedes one last time.

The door at the back of the garage opened. A tall white man in his thirties with shaggy blond hair filled the frame. His head was cocked to one side confidently, like he was looking at a piece of art he already understood. While his smile was friendly enough, if a little aloof, his eyes were hard. When he stepped down into the garage, Stephanie saw that a woman stood behind him. Blunt bangs dyed dark blue and a high black ponytail. This white woman in her late twenties didn’t move into the garage, but stared long, her mouth a thin line.

“Arash, Stephanie.” The man moved closer, hand extended. “Ronald Olesk.” Arash stepped to him and shook his hand. Stephanie did the same, happy it was just a brusque gesture, without a lingering touch. Olesk checked his watch. “Right on time.” His smile cooled. “Heard there was a little extra rubber laid on the ground.”

“We handled it.” Arash shrugged it off.

Stephanie tipped her chin up, not backing down from Olesk. “Just a little something to get the blood flowing.” The first step of her mission was in play. Now that she knew this location, she could start to put a target on Olesk’s back. But taking him down wouldn’t give her what she ultimately wanted. This deadly game wasn’t going to end quickly.

“You have good taste.” Olesk put his hands on his hips and assessed the Mercedes.

“I do.” She nudged the car with her hip, sorry to see it go.

The woman in the doorway craned her neck to look in. “Did you nick the fob off of someone?” She had an English accent and a judgmental sneer.

Stephanie answered as dryly as she could. “I pulled the factory key code off the CAN bus.”

“She’s got the tech.” Arash hooked a thumb toward Stephanie with a grin. “Thing of beauty.” His energy was so different than the other two. Comfortable and loose, he didn’t have to posture to prove he was tough.

The woman in the doorway narrowed her eyes on Stephanie, ignoring Arash. Olesk chuckled and said to Stephanie, “You’ll have to show Ellie that trick.”

“After some sleep.” It might be Olesk’s crew, but she didn’t have to act like a minion.

“Of course.” Olesk waved his hand toward the doorway. Ellie slipped away into the house. Stephanie stepped first to the door. As Arash passed Olesk, the blond man put his hand out. “You have my paperwork?”

Arash pulled the folded page from his jacket and slapped it into Olesk’s palm. It might’ve just been early-morning frayed nerves, but the move seemed somewhat aggressive to Stephanie, though Arash kept the smile in his eyes. If Olesk felt it the way she did, he didn’t show it.

Olesk unfolded the paper and looked it over, nodding. “You guys deliver good stuff.”

Arash picked up one of the empty bottles of motor oil from the workbench as he passed it. “I hope you didn’t bring me here just to do oil changes.” He tossed the bottle back; it clunked against the others, knocking them over in a noise too loud for this hour of the morning.

Olesk stopped walking and both Stephanie and Arash turned to him. Warning tension prickled up her spine. Her back was to the open doorway where Ellie had disappeared. Olesk ran his hand through his hair in what appeared to be a practiced move. “We’re the Slick Track Racers,” he explained. “Anyone mentions STR and you know that we’re the best at stealing cars, breaking down cars, fixing them up, moving them without being caught.” He took a dramatic pause. “Sometimes we do oil changes. Sometimes we get paid a lot of money to get someone’s merchandise from one place to another without a scratch, and without anyone knowing anything about it.”

She forced a casual look on her face while her blood boiled. The merchandise he was talking about were human beings, people trafficked by the Seventh Syndicate.

“I’m here for all that.” Arash nodded with approval, lowering her opinion of him.

“Good.” Olesk waved them toward the doorway again and they all moved into a featureless mudroom. “Because we need reliable people for a very important gig.” They passed a laundry room, then emerged into the kitchen. Empty packages of convenience food were stacked on the counters. There was no aroma of fresh cooking. “We had a problem with a conscience.” Olesk drew a horizontal line in the air with a long finger, as if demarking a border. “And we don’t want those.”

Ellie emerged from the other side of the kitchen with two white envelopes. She handed them to Stephanie and Arash, eyes still wary.

Olesk pointed at their envelopes. “Work solid, get paid.” Stephanie sneaked a peek into the envelope and riffled across eighty hundred-dollar bills. Anger continued to simmer beneath her skin. Blood money. The big gig he was talking about was what she really wanted. Then the STR and the Seventh Syndicate could go down in flames. Olesk walked them farther into the house. Few pieces of furniture littered the tan carpet, just enough to crash comfortably for a few hours. “Thom and Hector are sleeping. You’ll meet them tomorrow after they finish their assignments.” He stopped at an open doorway in an undecorated hallway. “This is you.” He pointed at Stephanie. “Bathroom’s down here. And on the other side’s Arash.” Wrapping his arm around Ellie’s hip, he ambled toward a flight of carpeted stairs. “We’re upstairs. Get your rest, take the morning off, get outfitted. Expect to move.” He sent Stephanie and Arash a wave as he ascended the stairs. Ellie didn’t look in their direction.

Arash stood outside his room for a second and turned to Stephanie. “Good night.”

“Good morning,” she answered wryly and stepped into her room. The door closed securely and luckily had a lock. Still, she wedged the back of a small chair under the handle. Arash’s last word wrapped around her like a thick blanket, muting sound and making her think about a possibility of meeting this man who seemed to balance easily with her somewhere where they weren’t surrounded by a criminal gang. Meeting him in a different life, when he wasn’t part of that same gang.

She sat on the bed and took out her phone. There were no details of her real self anywhere in the device. It would be so easy to send a text to Ty, Mariana and Vincent, the other members of Frontier Justice, to let them know where she was and that she’d made the first move into Olesk’s gang. Any kind of lifeline or reminder that she wasn’t alone. But if anyone in this house caught sight of that contact, she’d be dead.

The narrow mattress creaked as she stretched out, shoes still on. She dug her phone charger out of her bag and plugged it in. It rested on the small nightstand, next to the slim automatic pistol she laid within reach.

Thick curtains covered the one north-facing window. They should be enough to block the coming day. Still, she knew there was only time for a couple hours of sleep. This house wasn’t set up for long breaks, and Olesk’s energy revealed there were plans in the works.

Her heavy bones sank her deeper into the bed. She convinced herself not to worry about the sleep she was going to miss, and just to concentrate on the rest she felt in that moment. For now, she was alone. Despite the ease with which she and Arash worked together, he couldn’t be trusted. Frontier Justice was miles away, and she couldn’t call them in until she was much closer to her ultimate target. Her life was on the line to help others, just like her nineteenth-century ancestor on her mother’s side. Li Jie had emigrated from China to the American West, worked in the mines, lived through the collapses and dynamite and the racism. Many people had seen him as less than human, and legally he couldn’t testify against a white man in court, yet still he had the strength to help form the first Frontier Justice and fight for others who suffered under that same oppression.

He’d survived. Now she must do the same, to save countless people from Olesk and the Seventh Syndicate.

* * *

ARASH NEEDED TO SLEEP, but all he wanted to do was tear down the walls of the house around him. A man snored steadily in the next room. Arash would never feel that calm, that safe, until he knew that Olesk and the STR were wiped off the face of the earth.

Had Marcos been in this room? Lying on the mattress on the floor, resting between gigs for the gang? Olesk said he’d had a problem with a conscience. Arash knew who he’d been talking about. Marcos had been found dead in a car wreck on the highway south of Livermore. Arash hadn’t seen the body, but he’d found the twisted car in the scrap yard. And he’d tracked down the spot where it had happened. It wasn’t an accident. It was murder. Another car’s paint scraped into the side of Marcos’s vehicle. Tire tracks revealed the moment of impact, perfectly timed to send Marcos into the concrete pillar of an overpass.

Recounting all this wasn’t the way to get to sleep. Arash’s heart thundered with anger, thinking about his friend’s last race toward freedom. He’d texted Arash that night and asked for help. Marcos was finally looking for a way out of the spiral he’d gotten into. But forever after that text, that last contact, was...silence.

Arash took a long breath and focused his memory on Stephanie’s hands. Her fine fingers were so sure as she steered the Mercedes through the chase. Remembering her movements helped bring a bit of a hypnotic calm. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking of her this way. She couldn’t be trusted. But something about her ethic didn’t fit with Olesk and his crew. She wasn’t ruthless. She’d been against using a gun in San Francisco. He couldn’t hold Marcos’s death against her because she was new. But he didn’t know what side she’d be on when he decided to destroy Olesk and his drivers.