Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) (22 page)

My brief stint as Cherry Kane had been enough to put me off wearing makeup forever, but I ducked into a Sephora and bought some cosmetics, a scrunchie, and a pack of bobby pins. I pulled my hair back into a pony tail and pinned the loose strands out of the way. With my hair back, my face looked more angular. I exaggerated the effect with some contouring, trying to imitate what Michael had done when he'd given me that makeover.

The end result was not unpleasant. At the very least, I was no longer the mess I'd been when I'd first entered the store. My old clothes were still crumpled up in a heap in that dressing room, where I'd left them. I felt bad about that, but part of me hoped that Chauntelle would have to pick them up since she had made my job so much more difficult.

I really hoped she hadn't drawn too much attention to me by calling security. I didn't want mall cops breathing down our backs as we walked around the store. What if one of them recognized Michael? Or me? That was the last thing we needed right now.

“Excuse me.”

I sneaked a look through the screen of my hair, annoyed. A man in a coat had sidled up and was looking at me with an intently predatory expression that put all my senses on guard. He smiled, and when he smiled he was not unattractive, but something in the gesture told me that this was a calculated effect intended to consciously mitigate his odiousness.

Stupid makeup.

I'd forgotten that looking nice could make entitled men feel like you owed them the price of admission.

I ignored him. In my experience it was rarely a good thing when strange men came up to talk to you. They tend to shoot at you, or threaten you, or make inappropriate suggestions, makeup or no.

God, my life is so fucked up
.

“Miss?”

Why wouldn't he go away?

I turned my back on him, reaching instinctively towards my pocket for a phone I didn't have. Pretend texting usually made these kinds of people leave.

I heard a soft click. “I suggest you lower your hands right now. Turn around — slowly. Slowly.”

I froze for a heartbeat, then did as he said, looking up into the eyes of the man pointing a gun at me through his coat. I didn't recognize him but that meant nothing, because he clearly recognized me. His face was interchangeable with hundreds of other seasoned killers — perfectly ordinary, except for the eyes, which they could never get quite right.

The eyes of a killer are flat, emotionless. They lack laugh lines, because their smiles are never genuine. There is no joy in death, only a grim, quiet sense of satisfaction that permeates the soul like poison. Adrian's eyes were like that. And so, I realized, with a sinking heart, were Michael's.

I swallowed. I had to play this exactly right.

“What do you want?” I didn't bother to hide my fear. It would come in handy, and mask any slip-ups I made. “Money? I don't have much.”

He'd know that was a lie if he'd followed me out of the store, but that would be telling in and of itself. It would let me know how long I'd been followed.

I started to reach into my pocket, breathing through my nose only, and the man stopped me again. “Enough. Stop that. I don't want your money. I want to know where Michael Boutilier went.”

Oh no.
“I don't know who that is.”

The man sighed in impatience. “If you don't, you are a waste of my time and therefore a loose end and I'd be better off killing you. Luckily for you, I know that's not the case. However, there are a number of places I can hurt you that aren't lethal and I will introduce you to each one of them if you don't tell me where he is, Christina Parker.”

He had to be desperate if he was willing to resort to threats like these in a public place.

I clenched my hands.
He knows my name
.

“I don't know,” I said. “I was supposed to meet him here.”

And if he had any sense at all, he'd see that something was wrong and — what? Run for help? Call the police? I mocked myself. We were alone here. There was no one who could extricate us from this situation…no one who wouldn't slap a pair of handcuffs on us just the same.

The man sighed again. “Then we'll just have to wait, won't we?”

I didn't dignify that we with a response. I had no illusions about what he really wanted.
Who
he really wanted. I was just a means to an end.

When he came, I spotted him immediately — a tall, well-built man in a fitted shirt, and ripped and faded jeans. He looked surprisingly young, almost vulnerable. Maybe it was the clothing, cheaper and more juvenile than what he would typically deign to wear. Maybe it was the dark hair.

But I knew that wasn't the reason. Deep down, I knew it was because he
was
young. He was only twenty-seven. Something I kept forgetting.

He seemed so much older.

Michael frowned as he looked at me. He could tell something was wrong. He wasn't sure what it was yet, but he knew…something.

I sucked in a breath, repressing the urge to scream and get us both killed, my mind working frantically to try and come up with a way to warn him, to keep him out of the IMA's wicked clutches.

“Michael,” I said. “I — I thought you were going to get a cab like before.” I emphasized the word cab, giving him with a pleading, desperate look.

When the yakuza had waited for us, they had taken us off-guard, too. I was hoping —
praying —
that he would make the connection between the word “cab” and the driver's cowardly-laid trap.

Please,
I thought.
Please
.

But it was such a long-shot.

Michael stared at me for several seconds, and then I saw his eyes light up, and narrow. My heart sank. He figured it out, but he wasn't going to run; he was going to fight. For me. Always for me.

“Don't — ” was as far as I got before the man jabbed his gun painfully into my side with more force than strictly necessary. And as I backed away, wincing, Michael started forward, but the man held up his hand, halting him dead in his tracks — only I wished I hadn't thought the word
dead
.

“Mr. Boutilier,” he said. “You're late.”

Michael

Christina was near the fountain where I'd told her to meet me. She was standing beside a young businessman checking his phone. “Michael,” she said. “I thought you were going to get a cab like before.”

Something's wrong
.

The businessman looked up and smiled at me, and I realized I could only see one of his hands. The other was out of sight, and when Christina winced I knew he was stabbing her with something — a knife or a gun — and rage surged up within me at the thought that these dickheads were using her to get to me again.

“Mr. Boutilier. You're late.”

“Lines were a bitch. Should I bother asking how you managed to find us?”

“Twenty-first century technology is amazing, isn't it?”

He's not going to answer
.
Fucking figures
.

Couldn't have been GPS — I'd have noticed if we were bugged. I'd been going through our bags at the hotel on the sly, sweeping everything with a rare earth magnet just in case.

The driver might have talked. They might have fitted him with a communication device.

They must have been following us since San Francisco, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Which meant pumping that Albanian crime lord for information had been totally unnecessary.

I wondered what kind of gun this man was packing. I wondered if I would be able to draw mine before he could. I wondered why I even bothered entertaining such notions. We both knew I wasn't going to risk it.

“This way,” the man said, turning, taking Christina with him.

She looked at me, and I nodded tightly.

We left the mall. In front was a courtyard surrounded by ivy-covered trellises. To the right was the parking lot, and to the left was an undeveloped field. The man turned left, where a car was stalling in the shoulder of the road.

“One moment.”

He slammed me into the car and something locked around my wrist. I grunted as he cuffed my wrists behind me and then frisked me quickly, removing all the money, my gun, and the keys.

“Don't even think about it,” he said. But not to me. Christina was stalking towards him with a rock in one hand and a determined look on her face.

“Put it down, darlin,” I said.

“That's sweet,” the man said dryly.

“Fuck you, pencil-dick.”

He slammed me face-first into the glass and Christina yelped. “Both of you, shut up.” He shoved me into the backseat of the car. I rolled, trapped between the front seats and the back. The driver's seat squeezed my ribs uncomfortably and one of my shoulders was hitched higher than the other. He'd done that on purpose, I was sure. Bastard.

I craned my neck, and caught a glimpse of the man searching Christina before cuffing her as well. Hands in front, instead of behind. He buckled her into the seat and tossed a coat over her lap to hide the handcuffs. Only the back windows were shaded.

There was a long silence as he pulled the car off the shoulder and back onto the main road. I could hear Christina breathing, and knew from the rigid set of her shoulders that she was terrified.

“Where are you taking us?”

Her voice was stable. Impressively so.

The man glanced at her. I saw his eyes flick over her in a way I really didn't like.

“How cliché,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be above such predictable banalities.”

“Maybe that's how we got this far,” she said, with stinging sweetness. “People underestimating us for our
predictable banalities
because they relied on stereotypes instead of their own good sense.”

“Well, the buck stops here, I'm afraid.”

Christina looked at him for a long time.

“We'll see.”

A fierce pride filled me.

“I wouldn't be too confident. Mr. Callaghan has put out a bounty on you two. Together, and alive, you're worth well over a million.”

That explained why the yakuza had gotten involved. Callaghan had undoubtedly put out that bounty to everyone he knew with a Michael-shaped chip on their shoulder.

“Corporate greed rears its ugly head.”

I'd missed this fierce side to her without quite realizing it. She never talked back to me this way.

Not anymore.

Had I crushed her spirit?

“This goes beyond greed. I'll be able to retire before I'm forty.” His sideways glance was less subtle. “Anyone would find that appealing.”

“Money can't buy you everything.”

The man laughed. “Name one thing.”

“Money can't bring you back from the dead.”

He stopped talking, then. She'd spooked him. I could tell, I knew the signs. Working for Callaghan wasn't as sweet as he claimed, not if the thought of death loomed over him as closely as that.

Money can't bring you back from the dead.

How right she was.

I'd once thought she led a charmed life, a pretty bird in a gilded cage who was too blinded by the shining gold to see the bars.

I'd been wrong. She saw more than anyone had ever given her credit for her. It was in her blood to see mathematical patterns and rearrange them to make sense of a virtual world. It was when that ability translated over to the real world that she'd gotten in trouble. She'd seen too much.

Hope is the worst evil of all.

He drove for a while, and I watched the sky grow dark, watched the sun's light turn from pale yellow to a faded brownish orange.

I was well familiar with that haze. It meant we weren't far from Los Angeles.

The car stopped, and I got a mouthful of seat.

While I was struggling to right myself, I heard one of the car doors open. Christina made a sound, and there was what sounded like a slap, followed by a “don't
touch
me, you bastard!”

“Drink it.” The man's voice was sharp.

Had he hit her?

“If I don't?” Christina's voice held traces of that youthful defiance that had driven me half-mad when she'd been in my charge.

This man appeared to feel the same way. “I'll inject you with something stronger. Something that will last a while. Codeine, maybe. Or morphine.”

“She's
allergic
to opiates.”

“What a shame,” the man said. “That's all I've got. Better drink,
darlin
. Because I don't have time for any pit stops, and that includes trips to the ER.”

She drank it, and part of me went red with fury at seeing that brave little spark extinguished.

“As for you — ”

I waited for the door to open, but he was smarter than that. He reached around the driver's side instead, yanking my head back against the seat while arching my back into an unnatural angle that put far too much pressure on my aching shoulders. “You
cowardly
piece of shit.”