Читать книгу Undercover Encounter - Rebecca York - Страница 11

“Hey, buddy, hurry up with that damn beer,” a sharp voice cut through the babble of voices and music blaring through Bourbon Street Libations.

“Coming right up,” Alex McMullin answered as he pulled back on the tap and filled a glass, then delivered the brew to an impatient tourist. Next, he wiped up a spill on the polished bar and pocketed a generous tip from a customer. Working undercover as a bartender had its advantages, although he sure hadn’t thought he’d end up dispensing booze when he’d joined New Orleans Confidential.

But this was the bar, Bourbon Street Libations, where Wiley Longbottom had been drugged. Which was why Alex was presently making a Singapore Sling for another boozy tourist—while keeping the small, wiry figure of the other bartender, Jack Smith, in his peripheral vision.

A noise coming from the direction of the door made Alex’s head jerk up. A big, muscular guy named Tony was supposed to be at the entrance, politely turning away anyone who was too plastered to whistle “Dixie.” But he’d gone on his break a few minutes ago, leaving the belligerent drunk who’d just staggered into the bar free to take a swing at another patron.

Alex looked at Jack, who shrugged and bent his balding head toward the drink he was mixing. Alex also glanced at Mason Bartley, the most unlikely member of the Confidential team, a forty-year-old loser with short brown hair and shifty blue eyes. At the moment he was acting true to form, looking down into his rum and Coke.

With no one else prepared to keep order, Alex rounded the bar and headed for the drunk, who immediately tried to pop him one.

“No, you don’t,” he growled. Spinning the guy around, he propelled him toward the door.

Instead of going quietly, the guy made a furtive motion toward his boot, and a knife that could gut a pig materialized in his hand. Only, he wasn’t after pork this evening. With a curse, he made a vicious slash at Alex’s midsection.

Acting instinctively, Alex aimed a kick at the guy’s arm, sending him sprawling on the barroom floor and the knife flying.

The jerk was stupid enough to lunge for the weapon again. Alex kicked it out of the way, wondering if he was going to have to do some serious damage.

Someone in the back must have alerted Tony because he came rushing into the fray and scooped up the pork sticker. Of course, by this time, the little altercation was attracting a crowd, from both inside and outside the bar. Tony must have figured Alex could take care of the intruder, because he turned his own attention to settling down the rest of the patrons.

As a former police detective, Alex’s instinct was to call the boys in blue and let them haul this guy’s ass away. But Bourbon Street Libations had a pretty strict no-cops policy. Unless somebody got killed, you kept the law out of it.

So he frog-marched the drunk onto the street where they were instantly enveloped by the heat and humidity of the night.

“Need some help?” a voice from the crowd asked. Alex looked up to see Rich Stewart—dressed in a nicely authentic biker outfit—ambling toward him. A former navy SEAL who still kept his dark blond hair in a short military cut, he was another of the Confidential agents. With a grin, he helped Alex propel the inebriated jerk several paces down the block.

When Alex turned, he saw Tony stepping onto the street. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Sorry, I was in the can when the excitement broke loose.”

“No problem,” Alex answered. Actually he’d been enjoying the action. Standing behind a bar didn’t give him much opportunity for aerobic activity—unless you counted wielding a cocktail shaker.

Now that he was away from his post, he allowed himself a few minutes of relaxation. Dragging in a breath of the humid air, he watch the boisterous crowd parading up and down the most famous street in the French Quarter, past bars, strip joints, boutiques selling cheap souvenirs and voodoo hexes, and, of course, the all-essential condom shop up the way.

Music blared from the bars and jazz clubs, mingling with the raunchy conversation of the crowd. Bourbon Street at night was a party animal’s playground. Or a trap for the unwary.

The doctor had told Conrad that the hospital had seen several older men come in under circumstances similar to Wiley Longbottom’s. They’d all ingested an unidentified drug that stimulated the libido but had the dangerous side effect of elevating the heart rate to the extreme. Demanding answers, Conrad had contacted Police Chief Henri Courville, who’d immediately gone into defensive mode, claiming that his department was putting all the resources it could spare into tracking the source of the new designer drug.

After some initial finger-pointing, Conrad and the police chief had calmed down enough to play ball with each other. Which was why New Orleans Confidential was now running a joint operation with the P.D.

The arrangement didn’t exactly thrill Alex.

His last couple of years as a police detective had been marred by red tape and departmental screwups. The final straw had come after he’d busted his butt to get the evidence for a capital murder case—and the conviction had been thrown out due to a legal loophole.

After that, the job simply hadn’t been the same. He’d taken a leave of absence from the force, done some freelance investigative work and spent a lot of time fixing up the house he’d bought, wondering if he could support himself as a private eye. Then Conrad Burke had tracked him down and made him an offer, and he’d jumped at the chance to work for a man he respected.

Unfortunately now he was stuck having to make both Conrad Burke and Henri Courville happy.

Down the street, a man was leaning over one of the wrought-iron balconies and tossing newly minted faux “doubloons” and cheap necklaces to a rowdy crowd. Once such activity had been strictly a feature of Mardi Gras. Now you saw it all the time down here. He eyed some of the girls down below, wondering if one of them would take off her T-shirt and bra to get some loot thrown her way. When all the ladies kept their shirts on, he went back into the bar.

Jack gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Nice of you to join us. We’re pretty busy in here.”

Alex shrugged. He and Jack had a pretty prickly relationship. “The next time we get a guy with a knife, you can take care of him.”

“Not my job.”

Alex didn’t bother to answer. He already knew that Jack was pretty busy—mixing drinks and pushing drugs. A dangerous combination. It was only a matter of time before the little squirt got himself into serious trouble.

They stayed out of each other’s way for the next half hour. Then a group of five overdressed older businessmen, looking like they were out slumming, came into the bar and took a table on the right. After the scantily clad cocktail waitress wrote down their drink requests, she headed for Alex. But Jack signaled her to come to him instead.

“I owe you one,” he said to Alex as he scanned the order, then began making Hurricanes. Alex gave him a thumbs-up and went back to work on a batch of Margaritas for some wet-behind-the-ears college kids. But he kept tabs on Jack. The guy bent down below the level of the bar. When he came back up, it looked like the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt was bulging just a little. As he mixed one of the Hurricanes, a fine mist of white powder fell from underneath the cuff into the drink. Not powdered sugar, Alex thought as he watched the bartender stir the stuff into the drink.

He’d bet his nonexistent New Orleans P.D. pension that it was Category Five.

The prime targets for this deadly designer drug were older affluent men. It aroused them sexually—allowing prostitutes to prey on them—but if too much was contained they could die of heart attacks. The cop in him wanted to warn the businessmen. But, since Wiley’s heart attack, nobody else had ended up in the hospital. And giving out warnings would jeopardize the joint undercover NOC-PD operation.

So he watched the waitress swish her hips over to the table and chat with the guys while she distributed the drinks. He kept an eye on the men, seeing the symptoms develop in one of them, the same signs he’d seen in Wiley. The guy with the spiked drink got red in the face, shifted in his seat and began talking pretty loudly.

Obviously embarrassed, the others in his group tried to calm him down, but he wasn’t willing to be restrained. Over the next twenty minutes, he became increasingly obnoxious.

When a little working girl at a nearby table caught his eye, he left his friends and went over to sit with her. Probably they were glad to get rid of him.

Mentally taking notes, Alex watched the guy indiscreetly paw at her in public before they headed for the front door.

Alex wanted to find out where they were going. Since the crowd in the bar had thinned, he tossed an “I’ll be right back” in Jack’s direction.

Before the other bartender could object, he hurried down the hall toward the men’s room, then made for the back exit where he ducked into the alley, gagging at the smell of garbage bags waiting to be picked up in the morning. The couple had gone out the front door. He charged down the alley and through a passageway that led from a private garden back to the street. There he scanned the crowd. But his quarry had disappeared. He couldn’t take a chance on passing Tony at the door. His only option was to search in the opposite direction—toward the far end of Bourbon Street where the lights were lower and the crowds were thinner.

He thought he’d lost the pair. But his luck held and he caught a glimpse of the happy couple just turning the corner.

Probably the guy wouldn’t realize he was being followed. But the woman might catch on. Playing safe, Alex hung back, watching them make for a sprawling stucco building with Ionic columns holding up a small portico in front. When they disappeared inside, he hugged the shadows across the street and strolled past, looking at the name above the door. The McDonough Club.

He blinked, thinking he’d read it wrong. But the words stayed the same.

He’d heard of the place. It was an old and distinguished men’s club, named after one of the city’s benefactors. Could the working girl really be planning to take her date here?

Well, they’d gone inside. He’d report that at the morning meeting and check out the vital statistics on the club.

Meanwhile he’d better get back before he lost his job.

By sprinting all the way, he arrived at the alley door of the bar about ten minutes after he’d left. Ducking into the men’s room, he took a couple of deep breaths and washed his hands. When he glanced at his watch he saw that it was half past midnight. In a couple of hours he could go home and catch a little sleep. Then it was on to his other assignment—playing truck driver.

Jack gave him a dirty look when he returned. But he pretended to be oblivious.

He was hoping that the rest of the evening would be less eventful. But no such luck. Twenty minutes later, as he drew another draft of beer, his attention zinged to the front door when three dark Latino men swaggered into the bar. All of them were large and muscular, with slicked-down black hair, new jeans and dark T-shirts. Actually, Alex was surprised when Tony stepped aside and let them in, since they looked like trouble.

They took a table in the back, speaking Spanish and acting as though they owned the place. As he glanced at them from time to time, Alex began making connections. They looked as if they could be some of the Nilia rebels due to arrive in town.

The rebels were the reason the Department of Public Safety had opened this new branch of Confidential in New Orleans in the first place. Their leader, Ricardo Gonzalez, aka “Black Death,” was bent on overthrowing the government of a country that reminded Alex a lot of Venezuela. Gonzalez wanted to squelch the peaceful democracy that existed there and grab the considerable oil resources. And he was willing to use any means at his disposal, including wiping out whole villages to make an example of them.

CIA agents who had been in-country following his movements had discovered that a group of Gonzalez’s men was headed toward New Orleans.

Alex watched them without being obvious. He’d heard that everyone who worked for Gonzalez had a scorpion tattooed on his upper body. If he tore the shirt off one of them, would he find the mark?

He was pretty sure there wasn’t much chance of undressing any of them in here. He saw that Rich Stewart had drifted into the bar and was glad the other agent was keeping tabs on the action, since the newcomers’ behavior was definitely something to worry about. Looking up, he saw one of them deliberately bump his chair into that of another patron, apparently for the sheer pleasure of seeing if he could start a fight.

The other guy moved out of the way, and the group went back to their drinks—until one of them made eye contact with a blond coed. When she smiled at him, he made a spontaneous decision that he was going to separate her from her boyfriend.

Clearing a path through the bar, he moved in on the kids, leaning over the girl with his big hand on her shoulder and his fingers coming down over her breast.

Rich and Alex exchanged glances. Rich edged a little closer to the group, but stayed out of their way.

With the noise level in the room, it was impossible for Alex to hear anything that was being said. Still, it was obvious that the college boy was mad as hell—but also afraid to tangle with the hulking Hispanic.

Alex clenched his fist around the spout of the soda and soft drink dispenser, wishing that he could help the kid out. But he’d already called enough attention to himself for one night.

The other members of the macho group sat back, enjoying the fun, laughing among themselves. But just as their amigo was about to chew the kid up and spit him out, the others mercifully stepped in to drag their cohort out of the bar. And Alex breathed out a little sigh. Disaster averted, and he hadn’t even stuck his nose into it.

He glanced up, seeing Rich give a small nod before following them into the street. Mason stayed where he was. Over the past few days Alex was getting the impression that his specialty was avoiding trouble.

Alex spent the next half hour tending bar and feeling almost like he was on break.

But his antenna went up when another prostitute walked through the door. She’d picked a slow time, which immediately made him think she was one of the police recruits getting some training when there wouldn’t be too much chance of fending off propositions.

She was wearing a lot of makeup, but as she stood inside the door scanning the room, Alex got a good look at her face.

His heart clunked inside his chest, then started up a rapid beat that made it hard to breathe.

The prostitute was Gillian Seymour. He’d know that fiery redhead anywhere, even dressed in a low-cut blouse, a miniskirt that barely covered her crotch, fishnet stockings and little black boots.

While he’d still been with the N.O.P.D., he and Gillian had dated. Well, that was a pretty mild word for the torrid affair that had rocketed to life between them.

Truthfully, she’d been the best thing in his life at the time. But even as the two of them had driven each other to ecstasy in bed, he’d known that he was no good for her. So he’d broken it off.

For a painful second he allowed himself to envy his boss. Conrad Burke was married to a wonderful woman named Marilyn whom he’d met on one of his previous assignments. They were raising a set of twins—a boy and a girl. That was the way life was supposed to be. A man and a woman fell in love, settled down and raised a family.

Unfortunately it hadn’t been that way with his own parents. Mom and Dad had each been married five times. Alex was their oldest kid. The one who’d been born while they weren’t hitched to anyone. And he couldn’t even keep up with all the stepsisters and brothers from the various unions—the shortest of which had lasted four months.

As a kid, he’d been shuffled from one parent to the next and back again—often feeling like he’d gotten lost in the cracks of his parents’ new relationships.

And he’d vowed never to do that to a child of his own. He knew he wasn’t a suitable candidate for marriage. It just wasn’t in his genes. So he’d always kept his dealings with the fair sex superficial.

Which was what had scared him about Gillian. He’d wanted her on a level that he wasn’t prepared to accept—which had finally sent him running in the other direction.

But in the two years since breaking off the affair he’d thought of her often. And when he’d heard she’d entered the police academy, he’d wondered if her idealism would last once she started patrolling the city’s mean streets.

How long had she been in uniform? She’d have started out as a beat cop. But if she was already doing undercover work, then someone had noticed her potential and put her on the department fast track.

Which was too damn bad. She’d burn out as fast as he had if they kept pushing her into the “choice” assignments. And one thing he knew from the way she clasped her hands together in front of her; she was nervous. Which proved she was too green to be playing the tricky undercover part of a prostitute.

He studied her for half a minute. Lord, that red hair looked like it could set the place on fire. Or burn a man’s fingers. And the skimpy outfit displayed the nicely curved figure he remembered very well.

Under the makeup that she’d applied with a trowel, he could see that her features were still striking.

He kept his gaze on her, willing her to look in his direction. He knew the exact moment when she spotted him standing rigidly behind the bar. Her jaw didn’t exactly drop open. But she froze, standing near the doorway for a couple of electric seconds, then tilted her chin up and looked deliberately away.

It was all he could do to keep from charging around the bar and demanding to know if she’d lost her mind.

But he stayed where he was, his eyes narrowing as he watched her survey the room, then head for a table where two guys were sitting. Both were wearing short-sleeved, button-down shirts. Both looked like they’d had about three drinks too many. The French Quarter had that effect on civilians, Alex mused. There were too many bars, too many strip joints, too many places to score a cheap drink or your drug of choice. Hell, you could even buy liquor in a plastic cup from bars right on the street and walk around with the booze in your fist.

With a saucy smile Gillian started up a conversation with the woozy duo. It didn’t take long before she’d struck up a deal with one of them. As Alex watched in horror, she strolled out of the bar with the guy.

He cursed under his breath. He’d already taken one unauthorized break that evening. He should stay at his post until closing time. But he was damned if he was just going to stand here worrying about Gillian.

Daring Jack to stop him now, he walked to the back again, then hurried around to the street, thinking that he’d like to throttle Gillian Seymour.