LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

watch. “Right on time.” His smile cooled. “Heard there was a little extra rubber laid on the ground.”

      “We handled it.” Arash shrugged it off.

      Stephanie tipped her chin up, not backing down from Olesk. “Just a little something to get the blood flowing.” The first step of her mission was in play. Now that she knew this location, she could start to put a target on Olesk’s back. But taking him down wouldn’t give her what she ultimately wanted. This deadly game wasn’t going to end quickly.

      “You have good taste.” Olesk put his hands on his hips and assessed the Mercedes.

      “I do.” She nudged the car with her hip, sorry to see it go.

      The woman in the doorway craned her neck to look in. “Did you nick the fob off of someone?” She had an English accent and a judgmental sneer.

      Stephanie answered as dryly as she could. “I pulled the factory key code off the CAN bus.”

      “She’s got the tech.” Arash hooked a thumb toward Stephanie with a grin. “Thing of beauty.” His energy was so different than the other two. Comfortable and loose, he didn’t have to posture to prove he was tough.

      The woman in the doorway narrowed her eyes on Stephanie, ignoring Arash. Olesk chuckled and said to Stephanie, “You’ll have to show Ellie that trick.”

      “After some sleep.” It might be Olesk’s crew, but she didn’t have to act like a minion.

      “Of course.” Olesk waved his hand toward the doorway. Ellie slipped away into the house. Stephanie stepped first to the door. As Arash passed Olesk, the blond man put his hand out. “You have my paperwork?”

      Arash pulled the folded page from his jacket and slapped it into Olesk’s palm. It might’ve just been early-morning frayed nerves, but the move seemed somewhat aggressive to Stephanie, though Arash kept the smile in his eyes. If Olesk felt it the way she did, he didn’t show it.

      Olesk unfolded the paper and looked it over, nodding. “You guys deliver good stuff.”

      Arash picked up one of the empty bottles of motor oil from the workbench as he passed it. “I hope you didn’t bring me here just to do oil changes.” He tossed the bottle back; it clunked against the others, knocking them over in a noise too loud for this hour of the morning.

      Olesk stopped walking and both Stephanie and Arash turned to him. Warning tension prickled up her spine. Her back was to the open doorway where Ellie had disappeared. Olesk ran his hand through his hair in what appeared to be a practiced move. “We’re the Slick Track Racers,” he explained. “Anyone mentions STR and you know that we’re the best at stealing cars, breaking down cars, fixing them up, moving them without being caught.” He took a dramatic pause. “Sometimes we do oil changes. Sometimes we get paid a lot of money to get someone’s merchandise from one place to another without a scratch, and without anyone knowing anything about it.”

      She forced a casual look on her face while her blood boiled. The merchandise he was talking about were human beings, people trafficked by the Seventh Syndicate.

      “I’m here for all that.” Arash nodded with approval, lowering her opinion of him.

      “Good.” Olesk waved them toward the doorway again and they all moved into a featureless mudroom. “Because we need reliable people for a very important gig.” They passed a laundry room, then emerged into the kitchen. Empty packages of convenience food were stacked on the counters. There was no aroma of fresh cooking. “We had a problem with a conscience.” Olesk drew a horizontal line in the air with a long finger, as if demarking a border. “And we don’t want those.”

      Ellie emerged from the other side of the kitchen with two white envelopes. She handed them to Stephanie and Arash, eyes still wary.

      Olesk pointed at their envelopes. “Work solid, get paid.” Stephanie sneaked a peek into the envelope and riffled across eighty hundred-dollar bills. Anger continued to simmer beneath her skin. Blood money. The big gig he was talking about was what she really wanted. Then the STR and the Seventh Syndicate could go down in flames. Olesk walked them farther into the house. Few pieces of furniture littered the tan carpet, just enough to crash comfortably for a few hours. “Thom and Hector are sleeping. You’ll meet them tomorrow after they finish their assignments.” He stopped at an open doorway in an undecorated hallway. “This is you.” He pointed at Stephanie. “Bathroom’s down here. And on the other side’s Arash.” Wrapping his arm around Ellie’s hip, he ambled toward a flight of carpeted stairs. “We’re upstairs. Get your rest, take the morning off, get outfitted. Expect to move.” He sent Stephanie and Arash a wave as he ascended the stairs. Ellie didn’t look in their direction.

      Arash stood outside his room for a second and turned to Stephanie. “Good night.”

      “Good morning,” she answered wryly and stepped into her room. The door closed securely and luckily had a lock. Still, she wedged the back of a small chair under the handle. Arash’s last word wrapped around her like a thick blanket, muting sound and making her think about a possibility of meeting this man who seemed to balance easily with her somewhere where they weren’t surrounded by a criminal gang. Meeting him in a different life, when he wasn’t part of that same gang.

      She sat on the bed and took out her phone. There were no details of her real self anywhere in the device. It would be so easy to send a text to Ty, Mariana and Vincent, the other members of Frontier Justice, to let them know where she was and that she’d made the first move into Olesk’s gang. Any kind of lifeline or reminder that she wasn’t alone. But if anyone in this house caught sight of that contact, she’d be dead.

      The narrow mattress creaked as she stretched out, shoes still on. She dug her phone charger out of her bag and plugged it in. It rested on the small nightstand, next to the slim automatic pistol she laid within reach.

      Thick curtains covered the one north-facing window. They should be enough to block the coming day. Still, she knew there was only time for a couple hours of sleep. This house wasn’t set up for long breaks, and Olesk’s energy revealed there were plans in the works.

      Her heavy bones sank her deeper into the bed. She convinced herself not to worry about the sleep she was going to miss, and just to concentrate on the rest she felt in that moment. For now, she was alone. Despite the ease with which she and Arash worked together, he couldn’t be trusted. Frontier Justice was miles away, and she couldn’t call them in until she was much closer to her ultimate target. Her life was on the line to help others, just like her nineteenth-century ancestor on her mother’s side. Li Jie had emigrated from China to the American West, worked in the mines, lived through the collapses and dynamite and the racism. Many people had seen him as less than human, and legally he couldn’t testify against a white man in court, yet still he had the strength to help form the first Frontier Justice and fight for others who suffered under that same oppression.

      He’d survived. Now she must do the same, to save countless people from Olesk and the Seventh Syndicate.

      * * *

      ARASH NEEDED TO SLEEP, but all he wanted to do was tear down the walls of the house around him. A man snored steadily in the next room. Arash would never feel that calm, that safe, until he knew that Olesk and the STR were wiped off the face of the earth.

      Had Marcos been in this room? Lying on the mattress on the floor, resting between gigs for the gang? Olesk said he’d had a problem with a conscience. Arash knew who he’d been talking about. Marcos had been found dead in a car wreck on the highway south of Livermore. Arash hadn’t seen the body, but he’d found the twisted car in the scrap yard. And he’d tracked down the spot where it had happened. It wasn’t an accident. It was murder. Another car’s paint scraped into the side of Marcos’s vehicle. Tire tracks revealed the moment of impact, perfectly timed to send Marcos into the concrete pillar of an overpass.

      Recounting all this wasn’t the way to get to sleep. Arash’s heart thundered with anger, thinking about his friend’s last race toward freedom. He’d texted Arash that night and

Скачать книгу