All Jacked Up (5 page)

Before she could say Neanderthal, he had the window open and the screen out. When he reached for her, Aubrey sidestepped him and boosted herself onto the windowsill, but she was glad to feel his hands steady her as she slipped out onto the porch roof that skirted that side of the house.

Jack eased out next to her and pulled the window shut behind him. To keep the gas in, she figured. He sure as heck wasn’t worried about her possessions, since he planned on scattering them all over the neighborhood in a matter of minutes.

The roof wasn’t pitched very steeply, but no matter how hard Aubrey tried to stay quiet, her sneakers scrunched on the asbestos shingles. She could have been alone for all the noise Jack made. She’d have thought she was alone if he hadn’t wrapped his meaty paws around her waist as she got to the edge of the roof.

“He’s on the porch,” Jack whispered with his lips against her ear. Aubrey shivered, hunching her shoulders so he would back off, and when he did, she shivered again, partly because of the early spring chill in the air, mostly because there was a cold-blooded murderer a few feet below, the old boards of the porch steps creaking under his feet as he crept toward the front door.

While she was still coming to terms with that, Jack took hold of her wrists and swung her out over the porch roof. Aubrey stifled a yelp, managing to catch herself as he dropped her the last little way to the ground. She got to her feet, flailing out before she realized the person beside her was Jack.

He made a sound, somewhere between junkyard dog and annoyed bear, grabbed her by the arm and towed her toward the overgrown lilac bushes along the fence line, which was fine with her, until he made a right turn and headed for the street. She tried to pull him in the opposite direction and learned an important lesson. Tug of war with Jack Mitchell was a bad idea, especially when her arm was the rope.

She slung her arms around his neck, threw all her weight into dragging his head down to hers so she could whisper, “This way,” and pulled him toward the back of the yard while he was still reacting to what must have seemed like an embrace. For a secret agent he let himself get distracted an awful lot, Aubrey thought with a frown. Kind of brought down her odds of survival.

Jack did his irritated bear impression again and snatched her off her feet, tucking her under his arm like cordwood. Aubrey made a grab for the lilac bushes, winding up with hands full of fading blossoms and branch burn on her palms as Jack toted her street-ward again.

“They’ll expect us to head for the street,” she hissed at him.

“They won’t have time to expect anything . . .” He stopped and looked down at her.

She couldn’t see his expression, but she could make a good guess at what it was. “I turned the gas off in the basement,” she admitted, cringing.

“Shit!” That was all he said, just “shit.” He didn’t raise his voice above a whisper but he got his point across. He was adding it to the list and there’d be a reckoning later—which made Aubrey wonder if she wanted there to be a later for all of ten seconds before she heard the sound of footsteps running along her porch, and someone shouted.

Suddenly she wanted to survive, even if it meant finding out what kind of retribution Jack had in mind for her, and who knew, maybe he’d forget all about it. Sure, and maybe the two guys who’d just come out of her house were there to tell her she was being punked and this whole thing had been a big joke—not as far-fetched as it sounded, considering the hit men were doing a pretty good vaudeville routine.

“They’re gone,” one of them said, followed by a sound engineer’s idea of what a good openhanded shot to the head sounded like. “Ow, hey, what’d you do that for?” the same voice said, which was followed by another smack and a different, older man’s voice saying, “Shut up, would ya?”

Great, this just got better and better. Corona the Butcher, the most feared and powerful drug lord in the world, wanted her dead. She was being dragged around by a guy whose motives were unclear at best, and now she got Laurel and Hardy for hit men? It should’ve made her feel better knowing the guys who wanted to bump her off were anything but cold-blooded killing machines. It didn’t. Laurel and Hardy might have been screwups, but they’d always managed to bumble their way to a happy ending, and a good ending for them meant a bad ending for her.

At least Jack had stopped moving, which meant they weren’t going in the wrong direction, but he’d put her down, which meant she had to run for herself. She latched onto his shirt and pulled him toward the back of the yard, the itch between her shoulder blades disappearing with the nice solid bulk of him between her and any possible gunfire. Hey, she thought, silencing her grumbling conscience, he’d wanted to protect her, right? So she was letting him.

“I think I seen something back there, Uncle Danny,” Laurel, the younger-sounding hit man, said, which earned him another smack.

“No names, stupid.”

“Okay, but—”

“C’mon. And shut up already.”

“They’re coming across the yard,” Jack whispered in her ear. “I hope you have a plan.”

She had a plan, all right. Run like hell.

“Look, there’s flowers all over the ground,” Laurel said from behind them.

The section of lilac bushes where Aubrey had grabbed hold to stop Jack from dragging her into the street began to rustle, Laurel and Hardy thinking she and Jack had gone through there. Jack gave her a light shove from behind and she ran the last few feet to the corner of the yard. Long ago someone had built a stile over the old picket fence surrounding Aubrey’s yard, just a couple of posts with board steps between them on either side so the kids who’d once lived there could go from yard to yard more easily.

Aubrey was just scrambling over when Uncle Danny’s voice floated back to her.

“Stop thrashing around,” he said in a whisper that carried on the darkness like it had come from a megaphone. The bushes stopped moving, Jack froze on the wrong side of the fence, and Uncle Danny said, “They went this way. See, the grass is trampled here.”

Great, Laurel and Hardy meet Daniel Boone. Aubrey reached over the fence to tug on Jack’s arm. He didn’t need any more urging, but the steps that had held Aubrey’s weight just seconds before crumbled beneath his. He ended up with one leg on either side of the fence, the only saving grace that the pointed pickets were as rotted as the stile and he’d twisted around in wide-eyed panic, managing to land where a couple of them were missing.

Aubrey seized his wrist and threw her weight back, pulling him, hopping on one leg over the fence, scraping some strategic body parts in the process. She fielded a look from him in the glow from the anemic lightbulb over the back stoop of her neighbor’s house. Still adding to that list.

“You just going to stand there and let them shoot you?” he rasped at her.

There were pluses to that plan, Aubrey thought, but she swung her backpack over her shoulders and took off after him, racing across her next-door neighbor’s backyard. Laurel and Hardy broke through the lilac bushes and caught sight of them with a yell that had lights popping on and dogs barking up and down the street.

“Good,” Jack grunted as he boosted her over the next fence then vaulted it himself. “They won’t shoot unless they have to, not with half the neighborhood looking out their windows to see what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Aubrey panted, “good,” wondering how she’d gotten so out of shape. She ate right, took her vitamins. And spent all her spare time sitting on her butt reading. Great exercise for the mind, flab-inducing for the rest of her. Not that Jack gave it a second thought.

He zigzagged from yard to yard with no pattern, over fences, through old fishponds, not going around obstacles, but over or through them. Somehow Aubrey managed to keep up. Death was a heck of a motivator. Unfortunately Laurel and Hardy were always within a backyard of them. Money was a pretty good motivator, too.

Every time Aubrey thought they’d slipped free, there’d be a shout or a light would go on in a yard behind them. She looked over her shoulder and saw the silhouette of two men backlit by someone’s floodlight, one tall and lanky, the other shorter and chunky around the middle, light shining off his bald pate. They were headed right for her.

“What are you stopping for?” Jack cut across her field of vision, snagged her by the wrist, and yanked her into motion.

“Description,” Aubrey broke into a stumbling run, self-defense so she didn’t wind up on her butt getting dragged, “for the police.”

He snorted, picking her up and boosting her over the next fence. “Don’t waste your time,” he said, jumping over to land beside her, just as a low, guttural growl sounded in the darkness. A big, mean, teeth-baring dog stalked toward them, one menacing step at a time.

Jack froze, Aubrey scooted behind him. Okay, so she was letting him rescue her again. She’d always had a thing about dogs. They looked at her like they wanted to carry her off somewhere and gnaw on her awhile. Probably had something to do with being bony. This dog was different, though. This dog just wanted to inflict death, and as if things weren’t bad enough, he’d decided to invite a friend. Another homicidal canine coalesced out of the darkness beside the first, growling in a nice harmony.

“Don’t move,” Jack whispered, then did exactly that, easing back until Aubrey was pressed between him and the chain link fence behind them.

The good thing was the dogs had stopped growling. The bad thing was Laurel and Hardy were about a hundred yards away, creeping closer.

“Don’t you have a gun or something?” Aubrey whispered, barely hearing herself over the pounding of her heart.

Jack patted his side, the bulge of a shoulder holster Aubrey hadn’t noticed before now clearly obvious beneath his jacket. “Who do you think I should shoot first?”

Aubrey looked behind them, then at the dogs. “I see what you mean,” she said. If he shot at the bad guys they’d shoot back, and she was right in the line of fire. The dogs wouldn’t shoot back, but focusing on them gave the bad guys time to get in knife range. They had to divert one of the two groups, and Corona’s guys might be bumbling idiots but they weren’t going to be distracted at this point. The dogs, on the other hand . . .

She shoved at Jack’s shoulder and tried to pull her backpack free at the same time, but it caught on the chain-link fence. She managed to get it partially unzipped and tear out her change of clothing before Jack moved back and she couldn’t get her hand in the backpack anymore.

“I said don’t move.”

“But—”

“I know dogs,” he said on a feral rumble of sound.

“Sounds like you’re related to them.”

“Yeah, these are my cousins, Doberman and Rottweiler. Be a good little girl or I’ll feed you to them.”

“Yeah, right,” Aubrey said, still fighting to get into her backpack.

“You don’t think I’d throw you to them to save my ass?”

“No, because you’re saving mine in order to save yours.” If he could be believed.

She ducked under his arm, coming face-to-face with one of the dogs, which would have been comical if it hadn’t been exoneration an inch away from those razor-sharp fangs.

“Nice puppy,” she crooned, offering it something on the palm of her hand. The dog’s upper lip curled back over pointy yellow teeth and the hair along its spine stood up—because of the way she talked to it would be Jack’s guess. She yelped, dropping what she held to clutch at his shirt.

Jack braced himself, but the dogs dove for something on the ground, snarling and snapping at each other. He looked down at Aubrey, she looked up at him, both of them coming to the same conclusion. She ducked back behind him, rummaged some more, and came up with a granola bar. Jack grabbed it from her, ripped it open and crumbled it, tossing the pieces over the dog’s heads. They bounded off in pursuit and Jack swept her up, unceremoniously dumping her over the nearest fence and shoving her back into the depths of an old ivy-draped wooden arbor.

This time, all he was focused on were the dogs, which were still bickering doggy-fashion over the granola bar until a light went on behind them and they realized there were two people in their territory. Two different people, but what did they care? They were dogs, and dogs were a live-in-the-moment kind of animal.

“Who’s there?” someone shouted in a voice that could have come from Redd Foxx. There was some more growling and snarling and then, “Damned punks need to learn a lesson.” A gun that sounded roughly the size of a cannon discharged and somebody gave a high-pitched shriek.

“Shotgun,” Jack said.

Aubrey came up behind him, her hands light at his waist as she leaned around him to look into the still-lit backyard. “A couple of the old guys in the neighborhood keep shotguns loaded with rock salt to chase off the gangs who are breaking into the garages around here. My money says it was Laurel yelling.”

“Laurel?”

“Corona’s guys remind me of Laurel and Hardy.”

“You mean Laurel and Uncle Danny?”

Aubrey laughed, looking up at him, her eyes shining and her breath coming in tight little bursts that told him her adrenaline was pumping as hard as his. It gave him a surge of we’re-still-alive lust that had him putting her up against the vine-covered trellis, pressing close, feeling her body soften for just a split second before she shoved at him, hard, and said, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

He backed off, giving his brain a minute to kick in so he could tell her—except he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to admit to himself that both their lives were on the line and what was on his mind was sex. With a woman who drove him crazy, no less.

He snagged her wrist and eased out to look around the edge of the arbor. When all else failed, pretend it didn’t happen. It was a philosophy that other people seemed to find irritating, but it worked pretty well for him.

“We have to get out of these yards before somebody or their dogs do Corona’s dirty work,” he said, towing her across the narrow backyard, between two houses built right on top of one another. They snuck along the cars parked bumper-to-bumper in the street, Jack checking door handles. Before he found one unlocked, the bad guys came around the corner and headed down the sidewalk in their direction, one of them limping.

Jack froze, huddling there for a second while Laurel and Uncle Danny walked slowly toward them, searching the darkness. “Shit,” Jack said under his breath, fisting his hand in Aubrey’s jean jacket and yanking her between two parked cars just as a couple of shots rang out. “It’s that backpack.” He towed her, hunched over, along the row of cars, ducking back and forth as their pursuers chased them. “That damn neon pink picks up what little light there is.” He tore it off her shoulders but before he could toss it into the bushes, she grabbed it and his jacket, and he let go of both, hissing as his shoulder wound stretched and popped beneath its bandage.

Aubrey wrapped her backpack in his jacket and followed him as he squeezed between two cars and slipped behind a boxwood hedge. The hit men searched around for a few minutes, doing their Laurel and Hardy imitation. Uncle Danny blamed the kid for the fact that they’d lost their quarry, the kid whined about being shot. Eventually they moved off up the street, still sniping at one another.

“It’s torn,” Aubrey moaned, which had Jack twisting around, hit men instantly forgotten, only to find her studying a two-sided rip in her backpack.

He rolled his eyes, not disappointed in the least, he assured himself, and got to his feet. He wasn’t giving her any more time to bitch about the situation. “C’mon,” he said, reaching down to haul her up by the waistband of her jeans, curling a finger into the back belt loop while he was at it, so he was already prepared when she headed off instead of waiting for him to decide what they were doing. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Home.”

He snorted, dragging her back in the other direction, trying car door handles along the way. He avoided the ones that looked new enough to have factory alarms and the ones that looked like they were worth after-market protection, sticking to the beaters and older models.

“What are you doing?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“Don’t have my tools with me so I can’t pop the door locks, and breaking a window will make too much noise.” Not to mention it hurt like hell and it didn’t always work, despite how easy it looked on the big screen when one of those action heroes drove an elbow through a car window. And the last thing he needed was to fall short again. It had nothing to do with looking good in front of the annoying little librarian. That would be ego and this was more along the lines of self-preservation. Every time Aubrey saved the day she also revised her estimate of his abilities downward, which meant the next time they were in trouble she wouldn’t listen to him, and every time she didn’t listen to him he nearly got killed. “I need to find one that’s already unlocked.”

“You’re not going to steal a car,” she whispered, all righteous indignation and no appreciation for their predicament.

“You ever hear of Charles Darwin?”

“I’m surprised you have.”

“Well, you’re living proof of his theory. You don’t see wolves apologizing to each other when food’s in short supply. They just kill what they find and let the other wolf fend for itself.”

“Actually wolves are pack animals so they hunt together and share the kill according to pack heirarchy . . .” She fielded the look he sent over his shoulder, saying, with no respect whatsoever, “Was there a moral in there somewhere?”

“There’s no room for conscience when your life’s on the line. You do what you have to do or you don’t survive.”

“We seem to be safe for the moment. I’m sure we can find some other way to get out of the city so that someone doesn’t have to get up in the morning and find their car gone.”

“They’re insured.”

“But most of these people can’t afford to lose a day’s work because they don’t have transportation, not to mention the hassle of going down to the police station and filing a report.”

“Being dead is more of a hassle.”

“Jack Mitchell, King of the Understatement.”

“At least I know when to shut up.” And then he proceeded to prove it, walking around her so he could get on with saving her life. Despite his better judgment.

“Why can’t we just take your car?”

“Stolen. Had to ditch it. Cops’ll be looking for it by now,” Jack said, finally finding a car unlocked.

“Wait.” She stepped in front of him, leaning against the car door. “I have an idea. Let’s go to my house and take my car.”

Jack thought about that for a minute, looking for a reason to shoot the possibility down if only because she’d thought of it. But it made sense. Corona’s thugs would figure her house was the last place they’d go, so they wouldn’t be watching it, and her closest relative was a cousin in Idaho, so no one would report her car stolen. As long as Jack could keep her from doing it. She might be cooperating at the moment but she still didn’t trust him, so there was no telling what her egghead mentality would prompt her to do.

“Might work,” he said. Corona would know her license number, but if they stayed off the busier roads, there’d be fewer squad cars, and if they obeyed the traffic laws and weren’t pulled over, Corona would have no way to track them. “It’ll probably give us a couple of days before we need new transportation.”

She looked pleased, so he added, “We’ll get out of here, brainiac, and then we’re going to talk about who’s in charge.”

“We can talk about it—”

“When I said talk, I meant me. You’re just going to listen.”

She fumed for a minute, arms crossed over her skinny chest, breath clouding on the cool night air. “You could thank me for saving you from the dogs.”

“You could thank me for saving you from the hit men.”

“I saved myself,” she said.

They were back at the house and she started up the front steps, like it was a regular night and there weren’t two guys out there trying to kill her.

Jack shook his head, swiping her behind him with one arm and cat-footing it up the flower-lined front walk, just in case. “If you’d let me do it my way,” he grumbled at her, “we wouldn’t have to worry about them being on our tail right now.”

She didn’t have a comeback for that, but then, what could she say except, “You’re right, Jack,” and she wasn’t about to admit that.

They snuck through the open front door, Aubrey making a noise and shooting him a look when she saw the scorch marks on the floor. She pushed by him, Jack staying where he was as she went into the kitchen and shut and locked the back door. If the bad guys had been in the house, they’d have been dead as soon as they set foot inside.

“Car keys?” he asked when she came back.

She unzipped one of the hundred little zipper compartments in her backpack and pulled them out, catching the look on his face. “You didn’t think I was going to leave my house wide open?”

Jack shook his head and gestured that he’d follow her, thinking, Yeah, stupid me, I thought you were more worried about escape than a bunch of stupid books.

Just like he’d made the mistake of thinking she was more worried about saving her own life than her house. Even when she’d shown that sudden concern for his safety, it had never occurred to him that she was dragging him up the stairs before he had time to figure out that there wasn’t enough gas in the pipes to blow up her house. Just enough to fool him. And he’d fallen for it. “I thought I had everything under control,” he muttered, more to himself than her.

“Didn’t sound like it,” she said. “It sounded like we were the only ones in danger. I told you I could take care of myself. If I hadn’t had those granola bars in my backpack—”

“Your neon-pink backpack—”

“Without which you’d be dog meat right now.”

“Without which,” he said, talking right over her because she never shut up, “we’d have given them the slip a helluva lot sooner.”

“Not by going from my house straight out to the street.”

“Which wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t sabotaged my plan.”

“We’re safe, aren’t we?”

“Through sheer, dumb luck,” Jack pointed out. “Dumb being the operative word.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you lack people skills?”

“I’ll tell you what, the next time Laurel and Uncle Danny catch up to us—and with you in charge they will—you trot out your people skills and see how long you can keep them from killing you.”

She crossed her arms, but Jack turned his back on her before she could unleash the librarian look on him. “You got lucky with the dogs,” he said, heading for the unattached garage. “Not to mention the old guy with the shotgun. Otherwise we’d be dead right now because you did everything but stand out on your front porch with that glow-in-the-dark bull’s-eye hanging on your back.”

“I park on the street,” she said, her voice trailing behind him as he changed directions, “and it wasn’t luck, it was preparation. And it wasn’t like you were doing anything about it. Unless you count squashing me and the granola bars between you and the fence so that I barely got to them in time.”

“I’d’ve thought of something.”

“Experience versus book learning?”

“How is a granola bar book learning?”

“Boy Scout motto. Always be prepared. I read it somewhere.”

He could hear the smile in her voice, knew she was only giving him a hard time, feeling the camaraderie of the situation—which pissed him off more. “You put down my skills and experience, second-guess every decision I make, and undermine my attempts to get us some breathing room so we can have time to think and plan instead of reacting,” he said, hitting the street and pacing back and forth, forgetting he was looking for her car. “You think it’s so simple to deal with someone trying to kill you just because you’ve managed to survive for all of twelve hours? Wait until you’ve had death breathing down your neck for a few days, or a few years for that matter. See if you can snap your fingers then and whistle up a little good luck to get you out of a jam, or if you’ll be wishing you had some training and experience that might save your hide.” Silence, which would have been enough for him before he’d met Aubrey Sullivan, the Caped Librarian, whose superpower was words. “And we’re not pals, we’re complete strangers with a mutual goal. To stay alive.”