reached forward to play it again, just so I could hear that cool, clear voice, but the beep sounded, and then
“Hey, Benny. I’m just calling to chat, no great emergency or anything. Uh, but I guess you’re not there. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Saturday. I hope you’re hungry. Call me later, all right? ’Bye.”
I glared at the machine like it was a mortal enemy. “Benny?” I said bitingly. My heart was pumping, my hands shaking as I pushed replay to hear the message again, but first I had to wait through another.
“Yo, B. The stakeout’s been moved to L Street and it’s an hour later. Bring a cup to pee in, it’s an all-nighter. And munchies, dude. I’m hungry. Later.”
“So that’s where he is,” I said. Well, he’d said he still helped out the department on an auxiliary basis. He was probably just acting as an extra pair of eyes on this stakeout. Even so, with that phone call my plans to seduce Ben in his home blew up in my face. So I strode to the kitchen and tossed my beer as Rose’s voice sounded again through the house.
“I hope you’re hungry,” I mimicked, and relieved Ben of one phone call to return.
What? Hunter had said to cut Rose off at the pass, but now that I knew where Ben was for the night-and now that the voice, that message, had made her real to me-I was going to do more than that. I was going to cut her off at the knees.
“Benny, my ass.” And I slammed the door shut behind me.
27
I was winging along L and Stone Street, trying to decide where to ditch my ride, when I spotted the first undercover cop. He was slouched in a nondescript Taurus, and I drove past him, circled the block, and came to a stop two streets south of where he was parked. Being an intelligent girl, I’d left the Porsche back at the condo and pulled out the old Vic instead. We were on the cusp of one of Vegas’s seedier projects, and while the Porsche would’ve screamed,
Or hopefully something a little more gangsta than that.
Through the violet tint of my new worldview, I checked out my reflection again, and satisfied with my dark hair, dark clothing, and dark eyes, pushed the car door shut with a slam that ricocheted through the weed-choked lot and into the concrete buildings beyond. I doubted anyone in this neighborhood even flinched.
It was one very nervous cop in that lone unmarked car. His anxiety was as sharp as week-old sweat as he sat, hardly moving, one hand clenched around a walkie-talkie, head turned toward the building across the street on his left. There was a portable receiver in the passenger seat, which meant whatever room in that building he was trying to maintain visual on was already tapped and live. I crouched in the gutter next to the passenger side door, praying he didn’t have a partner who would be returning soon. The pocked and ill-lit street was silent and unmoving.
“Where you think you goin’?”
I jumped before I realized the voice had come over the receiver. Fortunately the young cop inside had jolted too.
“None of yo damn,” a male voice returned, followed by a door slamming. The walkie-talkie immediately came to life.
“Suspect on the move. Stairwell. I’m on him.”
The young cop’s anxiety spiked, and the car jostled as he lowered himself further, giving me ample opportunity to raise my head and survey my surroundings. I was only using visual as a secondary sense, having already located the other four undercovers-including Ben-by scent. Visual confirmed they were all in the same locations; the first man two blocks down in a beat-up Eldorado; a second, female, standing in full view beneath the lone working streetlight a hundred yards away; another seated and seemingly dozing in a sagging lawn chair kitty-corner to the first complex, and Ben, lying beside a stack of overflowing trash cans, dressed in the same guise Warren liked to use, a street bum playing with less than a full stack.
“Suspect leaving through front entrance,” I heard, and then a pop as the front door flew open. It bounced off its hinges, ricocheting back, but by that time a man the size of a small vehicle-the suspect, I presumed-had already cleared out, and the door slammed shut behind him. He began to walk, slouched, hands tucked in his oversized pockets, heading in the direction of the Eldorado.
His head was down, a black bandana wrapped around his bald skull, but every once in a while he’d lift his chin like he was looking for someone, in almost a syncopated beat, before lowering it again.
“Headed your way, Collins,” my cop said.
“I see him.”
The man stopped next to Collins’s car, no more than a second, then bobbed his head again in that off-beat, and continued on.
Probably looking to score, I thought, watching as he crossed the intersection, past the lone streetlight and the female cop without so much as a glance at her long, exposed legs. When he’d disappeared around the chain-link fence, she began to follow. “I’m shadowing him.”
“Be careful.” This was from Ben.
A gnawing feeling began to grow at the base of my neck, and I couldn’t have agreed more. I scented fresh blood. I pushed myself forward again, careful not to jostle the car, and peered past the front tire to the Eldorado, which lay silent and dark, Collins unmoving inside. I glanced over at the man in the lawn chair, and realized he was already dead. I wanted to jump up, tell the rookie next to me to radio Ben, but I couldn’t risk spooking him so that he shot me, injuring Jasmine’s aura, and I didn’t want to blow his cover if he hadn’t already been made. Unfortunately, the suspect returned just then, strolling down this side of the street as coolly as if it were midday, whistling under drug-soaked breath. He brought the scent of more blood with him.
If I’d had only myself to worry about, I’d have rushed him…stakeout be damned. But mindful of Jasmine’s frail shell, pale and inanimate, waiting back home, I rolled under the chassis of the car instead, and remained silent. What happened next would haunt my dreams.
“He’s heading back your way, Brown.” Ben again.
My officer answered, the sweat now pouring off him in sheets. “I see him.”
Brown stayed where he was. The man drew closer. I shut my eyes and fixed my mind on Jasmine’s trusting face.
He was quick. That was how he’d gotten by Collins, killing him without missing one step of his psychotic beat. I smelled the steel of his gun, and that pop sounded again…the same I’d heard over the radio minutes earlier in the stairwell. I flinched as the bullet plowed through the floor, but held my breath. I hadn’t felt this vulnerable in a long time…not only in the months I’d been a superhero, but years.
I swallowed as the hard toe combat boots turned from me, and a walkie-talkie clattered to the pavement. It had to belong to the guy in the lawn chair. That’s how the suspect knew where everyone was located. Then the whistling began again, and trapped beneath a car with a dead cop in it, wrapped in a little girl’s fragile skin, I could only watch as the killer headed straight for the trash-strewn lot and Ben.
Ben wasn’t stupid. He knew their cover had been blown, so he didn’t try to radio, and he was no longer slumped next to the pile of trash. Instead he’d fled to the back of the gated lot, a narrow, weed-choked strip of iron fencing separating two project houses from each other, but by the lazy gait of his pursuer, and that meandering song he was whistling-which I now recognized as some sort of sadistic death march-I knew there was no way out. So I waited until the killer’s shadow had lengthened into giantlike proportions on the street, and let it snap and disappear before grabbing the radio he’d abandoned, and followed.
My choices were limited. I might be a superhero, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I couldn’t be behind the killer and still stop a bullet from entering my lover. I couldn’t protect both Jasmine and Ben at the same time. “Hang on, Jasmine,” I whispered.
I ran along the outside of the fence, crouched low as I leaped over bottles and cans and anything else that would give up my presence and location. I slowed fifteen feet behind my target, who stood an equal distance to the end of the fencing, and saw I was right. The fence there was high, barbed, and there was no way out.
