Hell on Wheels (13 page)

He took no comfort in the fact.

“Can you access our location—we’re on I-65 just past Lexington, Kentucky—and find me a place to lie low for the next few hours?”

“No luck with the shell game, huh? That sucks.”

Yep, and then some.

“Okay, I’m mapping your location via Phantom’s tracking device,” Becky said, all business, “but in order to view your company I’m gonna need….” Nate heard the rapid clicking of a keyboard. “Yepper,” Rebel came back. “Hold please while I access Eyes in the Sky.”

Eyes in the Sky, huh? Ozzie had obviously schooled Rebel on temporarily hijacking a few key military surveillance satellites.

Handy.

Not to mention
very
difficult.

“Okay, Ghost, I’ve got you on my screen,” Becky quickly related. “Looking for viable escape routes and cover.”

Wow, that was fast.

He couldn’t help but think,
way
to
go,
chica. The girl was obviously gettin’ good and not just at the techie stuff. She could also handle a bolt-action rifle better than most seasoned soldiers.

Boss was going to blow a gasket when he realized just how hard baby girl was trying to turn herself into a full-blown operator. Nate could only hope he was out on assignment when the shit hit the fan…

“Our tail is drivin’ a silver Escalade,” he told her. “I can’t see him now, but at last visual he was ’bout half a klick back.”

“Got him on my screen, too,” Becky quickly confirmed. “He’s still trailing, back farther now, a little over a klick. All right, Ghost, local real estate listing has an empty house in Winchester. Old one. Been on the market a long time, so no real danger of some enthusiastic realtor barging in on you. Its detached garage doesn’t have a garage door opener, so you won’t have any trouble accessing. In two klicks, you’re gonna see your exit.”

Nate didn’t slow as he zoomed down the exit ramp. Ali squeaked and he wished to God he didn’t have to do this. She’d been frightened enough recently without entertaining the very repulsive thought of acquiring a terminal case of road rash.

“First right.” Becky’s voice was steady in his headset. “End of the block, head left until you hit Magnolia Street.”

The little wood-sided houses flying past them had basketball hoops in their driveways. There was a forgotten blue tricycle in the yard on the corner, and across the street a red Radio Flyer was abandoned with its cargo of stuffed animals.

Thank goodness it was lunchtime and most of the kiddies in the neighborhood were inside eating bologna sandwiches, or this little maneuver would’ve been much trickier.

“Silver Escalade just exited. He’s slowing,” Becky informed him.

“Yep, probably trying to listen for us,” Nate said through clenched teeth. One of Phantom’s little drawbacks.

“Turn left on Magnolia. Tenth house down on the right. Off-white siding, crimson front porch railing—”

“I see it.”

“Garage is in the back. If there’s a lock—”

“I got my bolt cutters,” he interrupted her.

But when he cut his engine and coasted up to the old, rickety, one-car garage, he quickly noted its lack of even an attempt at security.

Small towns. Geez, you just gotta love ’em.

“Hop off, sugar, and…” Shit. He winced. There he went with the whole
sugar
thing again, “lift that door for us, would ya?”

“Well I would,
honey
,” Becky drawled through his headset, “but I’m a little busy right now. Not to mention three hundred miles away.”

Nate ignored Rebel as he watched Ali stagger toward the garage door. Uh-huh, over four hours on the back of a bike tended to bowleg anyone not used to it. She bent to grab the bottom of the door and—

Jesus. No one should look that good in worn jeans and a pair of leather chaps. A brief image of her wearing nothing but those leather chaps flashed hotly through his degenerate mind.

Oh…great. Talk about one piss-poor time to spring an erection. Here they were, hundreds of miles from the nearest trustworthy help, with a mysterious operator on their trail and God-only-knew-what waiting for them in Jacksonville, and what do you suppose he was doing? He was reaching down to inconspicuously rearrange himself because his pecker had decided now was a dandy time to snap to attention.

Obviously, he was in need of some serious psychological analysis, because the possibility of imminent death coupled with the sight of Ali in those jeans and chaps shouldn’t cause this intense physical reaction. That it did only solidified the fact that there was something really wrong with him. Of course, if growing wood in the middle of battle was any indication of mental deficiencies, then every guy he knew needed to go in for some head-shrinking. Something about the punch of adrenaline tended to work on the male anatomy the same way a Playboy centerfold usually did—and that was one strange evolutionary phenomenon he would never understand.

Once the door slid up with a cranky screech, he quickly walked Phantom into the cool, dusty interior of the garage. Old paint cans rusted on the back shelves, and the place smelled like mildew and mothballs. Dust motes hung heavy in the stale air.

It certainly wasn’t the local Hilton, but it’d do in a pinch.

“Close ’er up,” he instructed Ali, and she reached up to pull the garage door down. Her shirt lifted above her navel, and that goddamned red jewel in her belly button ring caught the light and taunted him.

Super, now his balls ached in time with his dick. Could this day get any more perfect?

“Silver Escalade is searching the neighborhood,” Becky informed him.

Yep, and there you had it. He should know better by now than to ask rhetorical questions.

“Let him search,” he replied as he swung himself off the bike and performed the typical squat and shuffle every guy on the planet perfected in order to better situate dangly bits that were no longer so dangly. “He won’t like what he finds. Switching to handset,” he informed Rebel as he pulled off his helmet and attached a Bluetooth device to his ear. “Mic check. Mic check.”

“You’re coming through loud and clear, Ghost Man,” Rebel chirped happily. This was her first time to man command central, and the position obviously suited her just fine.

Boss was gonna have a conniption.

“Good.” Nate lifted a case from his saddlebags and quickly began assembling his long-range weapon. “I need you to monitor the local police bands. We made an almighty ruckus the likes of which they’re probably not used to around here. I wouldn’t want the local five-oh getting nosy. They’d give away our position in a heartbeat.”

“Will do,” Becky replied, and he heard more keyboard rattling.

“Ali,” he turned to find her standing beside him, golden eyes getting wider and wider by the minute, growing right along with the assembly of his sniper rifle. “I’m going into the house to observe and secure our position. I need you to stay here and keep quiet, okay? No matter what you hear, you do not come out of this garage.”

She swallowed and nodded. He could see her rapid pulse hammering away in her neck, and she looked like she wanted to faint.

Once again, he acknowledged the ball-twisting truth that she just wasn’t cut out for this shit.

“I’ll need a weapon,” she said, her voice steadier than he would’ve guessed.

Whoa. Or maybe she
was
cut out for this shit. Nothing she could’ve said would’ve surprised him more.

“Way to go, sista,” Becky barked her approval of Ali in his ear.

He hesitated only a second before bending to pull his reserve from the top of his left boot. He handed her the Colt .45 and watched in growing admiration as she press-checked the chamber to make sure the first round was loaded.

So, Becky was right. Grigg
had
taught baby sister a thing or two. Nate wasn’t much for man-on-man action, but if Grigg had still been alive, he would’ve kissed the sonofabitch smack on the mouth right at that moment. Whatever Grigg had intentionally or unintentionally involved Ali in—and Nate would bet his left nut it was
un
intentional—at least Grigg’d tried to prepare her to handle it.

“Don’t open that door for anyone,” Nate told her as he shouldered his rifle. “I’ll announce myself before comin’ in.”

He turned to head out the side door then stopped and swung back to face her. His conscience was eating away at him, and he cursed himself for the hundredth time for letting her come along, despite her obvious familiarity with a handgun. What had he been thinking? Oh yeah, he’d been thinking how wonderful and torturous it was going to be to have her pressed all along his back for fifteen straight hours.

He’d underestimated both.

It was far more wonderful than he could have guessed and far,
far
more torturous. “It could be awhile,” he told her, searching her frightened face. “You gonna be all right in here?”

She nodded her head so bravely he just couldn’t help himself. Sighing in defeat and resignation, he stomped back over to her, looped an arm around her slim waist, and dragged her toward him until she was crushed all along the length of him, and her eyes were flying wider than ever.

Then he kissed the bejeezus out of her.

Kissed her until he could no longer ignore what is was he was supposed to be doing. He stormed out of the garage’s little side door, trying not to think about the way her eyes had gone all dreamy and glassy, or the way she’d lifted a hand to her chest as if to hold her heart in check.

The woman was going to be the death of him.

“About time you did that,” Becky chimed smugly in his ear.

“Can it,” he told her.

“I’m just sayin’—”

“Don’t just say anything!”

Geez, he was
so
losing it.

***

“Yo.”

Senator Aldus grimaced at the salutation.

Johnny Vitiglioni had about as much class as a music festival Port-o-potty, but Aldus figured a guy whose specialty was Colombian Necktie executions didn’t really spend much time polishing his social skills.

“I’ve got another job for you and the boys,” he said without introducing himself. There was no need. Johnny knew exactly who he was talking to.

“I’m listening.”

Of course the fool was listening. Aldus paid Johnny a ridiculous rate to make sure the guy was always ready to listen.

“Yes well, let’s hope you do better with this one than the last one.”

“Hey, dude, I told you Rocco—”

“I don’t care,” Aldus growled. “Besides, what’s done is done. Hopefully, this next assignment is a little more to Rocco’s taste.”

“Wha’ didja have in mind?”

What did he have in mind? Death, that’s what. And an end to this pain-in-the-ass situation.

“There’s a man traveling with the woman I hired you guys to mug.” Thinking of Zoelner quitting when his target was out on a motorcycle—a statistically dangerous device—where it could’ve been so
easy
for the ex-CIA agent to simply wait for a barren strip of road to careen into the guy, made Aldus’s blood pressure boil. Of course, clean-up would’ve been a problem, but that was a moot point. Zoelner was far too high-minded to engage in such nefarious tactics.

Thankfully, Johnny and his boys had no such hang-ups.

“And?” Johnny prodded when Aldus had been silent for too long.

“And they’re on some big, loud Harley. Probably on the road between Chicago and Jacksonville. They need not to be.”

“That’s a pretty big swath of country, dude,” Johnny drawled.

Good God.

Aldus abso-fucking-lutely hated being called “dude.”

He wasn’t a
dude
. He didn’t ride a pony, wear a Stetson, or yell, “Git along li’l doggie!” Nor did he bum around some beach smoking pot and waiting lazily for the next big wave while drawing unemployment.

He was a goddamned senator of the United goddamned States of America, and if he ever made it to the big office, he planned to make it a little harder for the
dudes
of the nation to skate by so easily.

“That’s why I’m sending two additional addresses to your secured email account,” he told Johnny, trying to hold on to his patience. It was never an easy task, and this…
situation
only made his already volatile temper worse.

And the fact that he’d had to stop in to buy a brand new prepaid phone only illustrated that point. “One of those addresses is the man’s residence in Chicago,” he went on to explain. “The other one is the woman’s parents’ house. You still have her home and work addresses?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now, they will most likely end up at one or the other of these locations within the next twenty-four hours. When they do, I want you to take them out.”

“An accident like the last job?” Johnny asked.

Aldus wished it could be that easy, but he was finished taking chances. This had to end now.

“No. It’s imperative their bodies are never discovered.” He needed assurance that if Alisa was somehow carrying the files on her person, they’d never reach the light of day. “I mean
never.
Encasing them in lead and dropping them into the Mariana trench still isn’t going to cut it.”

“The what?”

Oh, for crying out loud.
Johnny was a walking, talking, stupid Italian mobster cliché. Francis Ford Coppola would absolutely love the little prick. “Just make sure you dispose of the bodies in such a way that no trace of them will ever surface. Is that clear?”

“As fuckin’ lead crystal, dude.”

Aldus felt the vein in his forehead bulge.

“Hey,” Johnny said, “I’ve got two pictures of dudes on my screen here. I thought you said it was a man and that Alisa woman we were taking out. Neither of these is her.”

Wow, this just gets better and better. Someone sign Johnny up for Mensa.
Sometimes it was so depressing to know the world was populated by idiots.

Lucky for Aldus, idiots were easily manipulated. Just look at his constituency…

“That second man,” he said slowly so Johnny the Dimwit could follow, “means a bonus for you and the boys. I want you to make sure he receives your specialty.”