Reckless (15 page)

“How could I have been such an idiot?” She
turned from the door, and her gaze darted around the empty room,
not really seeing anything. “My God, I almost told him...” She bit
her lip, unwilling to complete the thought aloud. Hadn't he just
warned her about listening devices that might be in the house? Who
was to say he hadn't planted a few of his own right here? She'd
come perilously close to admitting her alter ego tonight. She'd
almost told him she was Toni Rio. If he truly worked for Taranto,
that would be suicide.

She grimaced when she realized she'd mentally
injected an
if
into the thought. Was she still determined to
think he was some kind of a saint? Her eyes burned and a stabbing
sense of betrayal twisted inside, even deeper than the humiliation.
It made no sense, that feeling. He'd never claimed to be anything
but what he was. Yet she'd told him her most painful secrets. She'd
bared her heart's deepest wounds to him.

He'd seemed to care, she thought miserably.
The way he held her and spoke softly....

So what? Even a morally bankrupt bastard was
entitled to noble impulses now and then.

What about all the other things that don't
fit? What about all the surveillance equipment, and his fear of
being monitored by Taranto? Why the hidden apartment
—
the
traveling telephone
—
the late-night meetings with
Carl?

More than that, her mind whispered. There was
his brother, who'd died of a drug overdose. Just the mention of his
brother brought Nick extreme pain. How could he be working for
Taranto?

Angry with herself for trying to make a case
for her own wishful thinking, she wondered if her theory that he
was a cop might still be valid. She was too close to this to be
sure. It was like a work in progress at the moment, like the jigsaw
puzzle on the floor. She wouldn't be able to look at things
objectively until she was able to distance herself.

The fact was, she'd allowed herself to begin
to care about Nick. The lines between realistic theory and
whimsical fantasy had blurred until she couldn’t distinguish one
from the other. She had to get the hell out of here. Tonight.

Before she let herself forget his cruel words
and started seeing him as a character from one of her books.

She paused as she realized that was exactly
what she'd been doing. Nick was exactly the type Katrina would go
for. Built like Atlas, arrogant and dangerous—that air of mystery
about him.

But she was not Katrina Chekov, she reminded
herself. The things she'd seen in him had been different. His
inability to hurt her or even let her go hungry. That well-hidden
gentleness that wasn't nearly as well hidden as he thought. And
while she'd exposed her secret pain to him, she remembered that
she'd seen his, as well. The pain of being abandoned by his parents
and of losing his brother, the pain he pretended didn't hurt at
all.

Toni shook her head slowly. No, she couldn't
stay here another night. She had to leave before she did something
she might regret for the rest of her life.

An hour later, on an elevated loading dock
outside the warehouse with a handful of Taranto’s lower level
thugs, Nick was still replaying that encounter in his head. He’d
only glimpsed the hurt in Toni’s eyes briefly before he'd looked
away. If he faced her, he was sure she'd see right through his act.
He wanted to tell her the truth so bad it was eating him up from
the inside out. But he couldn't. Taranto was an expert at getting
the truth out of people. He was damn good, too, at sensing when a
person had something to tell or when they honestly knew nothing. If
he ever got his filthy hands on Toni, it would be far better for
her if she fell into the latter category.

Damn, the effect that woman had on him was
like wildfire on a tinder-dry forest. He could still taste her on
his lips, feel her small body straining against him. Every move she
made, every breath that mingled with his had been a plea.
Tell
me. Trust me.

Trust her. He couldn't do that, dammit.
Trusting other people had never brought him anything but
disappointment. He'd be stupid to trust her when he knew she was
hiding something. She had her own agenda. Who was to say she
wouldn't get whatever information she could from him and then just
walk away? And why the hell shouldn't she? Everyone he'd ever cared
for had. He'd learned to depend on no one but himself. Leaning on
others brought nothing but pain. It made you weak, vulnerable.

Since Danny's death, the grand finale in a
series of desertions, Nick had existed in a virtual vacuum. No one
got close to him. When he needed sexual release, he found it with
strangers. He rarely even asked their names. His encounters with
women were always cold, preplanned exchanges. He was consistently
sober, consistently protected and never really satisfied.

The only one to breach his self-imposed
seclusion was Carl. But Carl had been close to him before his
mother had walked out, before his father had been caught running
from that liquor store with a six-pack, a wad of money and a loaded
gun, and before Danny had died. In all that time, Carl had never
broken faith. He'd always been there. But even with that, Nick
lived with the constant certainty that Carl, too, would disappear
one day. He tried not to need his best friend. People never
abandoned you when you were aloof. As long as you could take them
or leave them, they tended to hang around. The minute you needed
them, they vanished like a magician's trick.
Poof! You're on
your own again, pal.

“Here it is.” Carl's voice shook him out of
his brooding thoughts.

Nick watched the red taillights come closer
as the semi backed up to the loading dock. The only other light was
from a single bulb overhead, just enough so they could see what
they were doing inside the warehouse. Besides Nick and Carl, three
others waited to help unload the shipment.

Rosco, an old faithful employee of Lou's
who'd never had the ambition to move up through the ranks, stood a
few feet away, an automatic rifle gripped in a two-handed,
ready-to-fire, hold. He was the lookout. The other two were
younger, barely out of their teens, but already loyal lackeys to
Lou's machine. One called himself Sly, the other, Jake. Nick
figured their real names were something like Howard and Irving.

When the truck came to a halt, Nick went
outside and lifted the lever to release the trailer’s rear doors.
He swung them open and glanced inside. The crates looked for all
the world like an innocent cargo of coffee. The heroin was buried
in the fragrant beans, whose aroma would usually throw
drug-sniffing dogs off the scent.

The two kids rushed past him into the
trailer, grabbed a crate each and moved them onto a waiting pallet.
Carl pulled out onto the loading dock with a forklift. When the
pallet was filled, he would pick it up on the tines and take it
inside the warehouse. Nick glanced out into the darkness. Somewhere
out there police officers must be waiting. Any second the night
could explode with muzzle flashes and lethal bullets. Still his
mind kept wandering into the zone he'd deemed forbidden. He was
thinking of Toni, wondering if his cruel words had caused her any
tears. She'd had enough pain in her life. Damn woman was
systematically chipping away at the walls he'd so painstakingly
erected...and that scared him.

When a spotlight blinded him, Nick jerked in
surprise, even though he'd known it would come sooner or later. A
bullhorn-enhanced voice drilled through the white glare. “This is
the police. Step away from the truck, keeping your hands—”

And then Taranto's men started shooting. The
kids dove for cover, dropping crates and pulling their guns. Coffee
beans spilled all over the place. Rosco squeezed off a rapid burst
of fire. The cops shot back without missing a beat, and Nick knew
that the men on the dock, himself included, were sitting ducks. He
glanced around for decent cover, saw Jake and Sly crouching behind
an upturned crate, which was no cover at all. The spotlight moved,
bathed them.

Nick charged across the dock, slamming into
the two kids and knocking them to the ground five feet below. He
almost went over the edge himself, but managed not to. Looking
behind him, he saw Rosco lying on the platform. He wasn’t moving.
He must've been hit in the first volley. Nick lunged toward him and
grabbed the AK rifle he'd dropped, pointed it, squeezed the trigger
and held, straining to keep the barrel from lifting skyward with
the force of the recoil until he’d put the spotlight out.

Carl, where the hell was Carl?

Nick found him, crouching behind the
forklift. Before he could move closer, Carl pulled his handgun and
shot the light bulb that was dangling over his head, plunging them
into total darkness. Nick made his way toward him, bullets flying
around him like a rainstorm. At least they had the benefit of
darkness now. He and Carl crouched low, ran to the edge and jumped
over it, joining the two younger guys on the gravel-covered
ground.

A searing pain in his left thigh drew Nick's
hand to it. It came away warm and moist. With the adrenaline
pumping, he hadn't even felt the bullet rip into him, but he sure
as hell felt it now. The two kids were still firing back at the
cops, but Nick knew they couldn't see enough to hit any of them.
“Knock it off, guys, you’re just showing ‘em where we are.” He
clasped Carl’s shoulder. “We’ve got to try for the car. They won't
wait long to move in.” The unspoken conclusion to the sentence was
in his friend’s eyes.
And then one of these crazy punks might
kill some of them.

Carl nodded, nudged the other two, and the
four of them ran for the nearest vehicle. Nick had left his car
close and behind a steel storage pod for this very reason. They had
a precarious three-second start before the police realized what had
happened. Nick slid into the passenger seat, and Carl took the
wheel as the two kids dove into the backseat. Carl slammed the
shift into Drive and the pedal to the floor, sending a shower of
loose stones behind them. Seconds later, screaming sirens came to
life.

Nick glanced over his shoulder at the two in
the back seat. “You two all right?”

“Yeah,” Sly replied. “Damn, I thought we were
all goners! I could feel the freakin' bullets flyin’ past me. I
could
feel
'em. Damn!”

Jake said nothing. He sat still, his eyes
dilated and his skin pale in the dim interior of the car. Nick had
a feeling he'd think twice before he decided to devote his
remaining years to working for Lou Taranto.

Carl's stream of fluent cursing brought
Nick's head around. “You're bleeding, Nick. You're hit.”

“Just drive,” Nick told him. “It's nothing.”
He looked down now and saw that his pant leg was soaked in blood.
The warm trickle along his outer thigh told him it was still
flowing. He slipped the belt from his waist, wrapped it around the
wounded thigh, just above the injury, and pulled it tight.

Carl rounded a corner, tires squealing, and
came to a rubber-burning stop. “Out, you two,” he ordered the boys
in the back. “Stay out of sight for an hour, then get your butts
home.” The two tumbled out the same door and vanished into a vacant
building just as Carl pulled away from the curb.

“I'm taking you to a hospital Nick. You're
bleeding like—”

“Forget it!” Nick yanked the belt tighter and
held it mercilessly. “It's stopping. They catch up with us, and
we'll be tied up for God knows how long. I can't leave Toni to her
own devices for more than a few of hours. You don't know what kind
of hell she'd raise.”

“What damage can she do? She's under lock and
key.”

“You don't know her.”

Toni’s plan was simple. Nick would open the
door, she would give him a healthy dose of hair spray in the face
and run like hell. She'd wrapped a change of clothes and her
notebook in one of his spare blankets, since there was no telling
how long it would take her to find help. The bundle rested close
enough so she could grab it as she fled. She watched for his car on
the monitor, sighing her relief when it finally pulled up at the
gate. Thank God. She’d started to think something might really have
happened to him. Flicking off the TV, she tossed the remote over
the row of books on the shelf. In case her escape attempt failed,
no point letting on that she knew about the monitor. She positioned
herself near the door, lifted the hair-spray can and waited.