30. Ivy
THIRTY
IVY
To say I wasn’t scared was a bald-faced lie. Sure, I was freaking out on the inside, but if there was one thing I could accurately predict, it was men and their behavior when they thought they knew everything. With my torn stockings, lack of shoes, and disheveled appearance, it was easy to mistake me for a common hooker, one who’d wandered just a tad too far off the beaten path. I could draw their attention while the guys?—
Well, if they couldn’t figure out how to use this opportunity to their benefit, there was no helping them. Or me, for that matter.
I was putting an awful lot of faith in the idea that they wanted to complete the contract more than they wanted to let me die in a trap of my own making.
Now that I thought about it, this was pretty high up on my list of stupid shit I should never do again.
Right after fucking the enemy.
The first one to spot me was a guard in the joining party’s envoy, his gun falling just slightly before he raised it and took aim at my face.
I didn’t let it bother me. Stumble again, take a few steps, shake your head, bring a palm up to smear that lipstick a little more.
As long as I didn’t look like a threat, they had no reason to shoot me and draw attention to their meeting area.
“Hey! Stop right there!” The first man’s shout drew the attention of every man in the group, and now there were four guns trained on me and two men who watched with a wary air, even as their lips curled at the sight of my ass when I bent over and grabbed my knees. I pretended to gag for a moment, working up crocodile tears to really sell the whole look.
“You there!” he tried again, inching closer, his three other armed buddies also abandoning their targets. All I had to do was get them a little further apart?—
“Stupid fucking useless man, couldn’t even get it up. Not my fault he’s impotent.” I perked up as if only just now realizing I wasn’t alone. “Where . . . who . . . who the fuck are you?”
My words sounded slurred, my movements were jerky with just the right amount of imbalance. As long as they didn’t get close enough to realize I didn’t have alcohol on my breath, they’d never know the difference.
“You shouldn’t be here,” one of the backups said, lowering his gun to reach a hand out.
“Fuck you, Tony,” I spat, windmilling my hand wildly in an effort to warn his touch away. “I told you I’m done drinking with you.” I lurched forward, letting my foot catch on an imaginary crack in the concrete. As I expected, the man in the front dropped his gun completely to catch me, his brows drawn together in frustration. “Let me go, Tony. Plenty of other men here who want me. Maybe I’ll . . . maybe I’ll go home with one of them.”
“This lady’s batshit,” a third said, shaking his head as if he were done with me. “We’ll take care of her, boss. You should continue with your meeting.”
From behind him, his boss chuckled darkly.
“She looks pretty nice for a used-up hooker. Why don’t you put her in the back of the car to keep warm, and when we’re done here, I’ll show her how a real man rises to the occasion.”
Bingo.
As long as the idiots I came with didn’t fuck this up, I could isolate this fucker in the back of his car, get his belt off, and choke him out with it. Then, all they’d have to do is incapacitate the fuckwits that came with him, and we’d be good to go.
Problem solved, compromised situation recovered.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
I struggled a little bit with the guy leading me to the car, just enough to make him wonder if this was a really good idea, but still want to be rid of me at the first opportunity. When I was securely in the backseat, he shut the door and put his back against it, his gun all but forgotten.
So I decided to have some fun.
My finger pressed down the window button, and I spent the next two minutes pissing off the guard by raising and lowering it, distracting everyone when he finally turned around and shouted at me in another language. I didn’t know what he said, but I’d put money on Slavic origins with how he pronounced his consonants.
His partners sighed and looked to their bosses, who nodded for them to go help him corral me.
So I rolled the windows back up and locked the doors, giggling to myself.
Pretending to be a drunken hooker was actually quite fun if you knew where to toe the line.
“This bitch is really annoying,” he growled on the other side of the window, sticking his hand up against it to peer inside. I waited until his nose was against the glass and dragged it down an inch, startling him. His cohorts laughed, but he’d had enough of me. The tip of his gun slid in between the crack I’d left in the window, and I heard the distinct sound of the safety switching off and a bullet lodging into place.
Time to back off the line, Ivy.
“If you don’t knock it off, bitch, I’ll put a bullet through your brain for your trouble.”
I opened my mouth to agree, but someone beat me to it.
“You pull that trigger, buddy, and it’ll be the last thing you do with that finger.”
Jackal stood behind him, a bat slung over each shoulder, like some sort of deranged ballplayer. His mask glowed neon red, and though I couldn’t see the smile he wore behind it, I knew it must be every bit as frightening as the false one of plastic he hid behind .
Dingo and Coyote had taken out the other three guards, and were now holding both the target, and his associate, hostage.
On the other side of the glass, the guard pulled his barrel from the window and lowered it, his hands moving upward as Jackal watched. He couldn’t see that they didn’t have guns, but appearance was everything. And even without a gun in his hand, Jackal looked like someone you didn’t wanna fuck with.
I wondered if the man between us had enough brains not to try something stupid.
When it became evident he wasn’t about to let all the way go of his rifle, I had my answer.
Why were criminals so fucking stupid?
I tugged a thin wire bracelet off my wrist and inched the window down behind him while his attention was solely on the Neon Dog before him and unwound the sturdy metal until it would serve as a garrote. With little trouble, I slipped my upper body out of the window and threw myself at his back, wrapping the wire around his throat and rearing back with all my weight.
His gun hit the ground, and Jackal swooped in to kick it out of the way as the behemoth angrily flailed and struggled against me. His body slammed backward into the side of the nearby shipping container, and I coughed as the wind was knocked out of me.
But I didn’t let go.
Letting go meant I lost the upper hand I’d gained. And I was no quitter.
“Just fucking die already!” I wheezed, my voice rough and foreign between shallow breaths. “Fuck!”
When he slammed me into the metal wall again, I decided if he was going to play dirty, then so the hell was I. With a little muted snarl, still winded and struggling, I hooked a leg around his front and slammed my heel into his balls, taking him down to his knees. He gasped, whining through his teeth, but once he was down, it was game over. I tightened my grip on the makeshift garrote and threw all my weight into him, shoving him face-first on the ground. While he moaned through his groin pain, I stuck a foot between his shoulder blades and pinned him down, rearing back again with the garrote wrapped around my hands so tight it was cutting through the skin.
He finally stopped struggling as my breathing returned to normal, and with a whoop of celebration that was more like a muted cough, I released the metal wire and winced as I stood, sore all over from the force of his backward body slams.
“That was fun,” I rasped, dusting my palms on the side of my hips to return some of the feeling to them. “Who’s next?”
Jackal stepped forward and grabbed my hands, turning them over to study my palms. “You’re bleeding,” he said quietly, a brow quirked but no judgment in his tone.
“I’ll live,” I said flippantly, a half-grin on my lips as I tugged free of his grasp and turned my back on him. He’d seemed to care for a minute there, and I didn’t want his pity. I did what I did out of sheer survival instinct, and I didn’t need any of them feeling sorry for the damage I’d caused myself. “Knock the one we came for out and put him in the back of the car. Throw the other one in his own trunk and see how long it takes his men to wake up and find him.”
Dingo was already wrapping a rope around the wrists of the man we’d come for, tossing him unceremoniously into the backseat I’d just vacated. With a slam of the door, he moved around to the trunk and popped the thing open, whistling low at what he found.
“Looks like their merchandise tonight wasn’t what we thought.”
Okay, so he had my attention.
“What is it?” Jackal asked, strolling over with my bat still slung over his shoulder, right alongside his. “Money? Jewels?”
“Skeletons,” Coyote murmured, his eyes wide, eyebrows currently trying to climb into his hairline .
“Were they getting together to decorate for Halloween or something?” I frowned at my bare feet, wishing one of the guys had thought to bring along my shoes?—”
“Here.” Coyote was suddenly in front of me, on his fucking knees, my shoes in his hands as he reached for one of my feet.
Wordlessly, I lifted a foot and let him slip my shoe back on for me, neither of our gazes meeting for a second. His fingers grazed my calf, and a shudder ran through me at the shocking erotic feelings it stirred within me.
Oh, here we fucking go.
“Give me that,” I snapped, reaching out to snatch the other shoe from his hand. “I can do it myself.”
“Will you two stop playing around and get a move on?” Dingo stared in my direction pointedly, his eyes darting between me and Coyote, who’d already risen and was halfway to the trunk. “We do still have business to attend to.”
“Speaking of,” Jackal grunted, slamming the trunk on the other vehicle after dumping the unconscious man inside, “what exactly do you mean by skeletons, Dingo?”
I rounded the corner at the same time as he did, and both our sets of eyes bugged out of our heads.
Sure enough, there were legitimate skeletons, whole, intact skeletons wrapped up in a nondescript blue tarp in the car's trunk. I counted five skulls, but I didn’t exactly pay much attention in anatomy, so determining how many bodies, exactly, were in that car was beyond my capabilities.
But why were they transporting skeletons?
“There’s definitely something fishy going on here,” Dingo muttered, his brows furrowed as he closed the second trunk. “Skeletons don’t warrant that number of armed guards. What are we missing?”
The contract had specified high-value merchandise was being exchanged today. And unless those skeletons were made of gold?—
“Open it back up.”
The three men stared at me like I’d grown a horn in the center of my face. So I just took the set of keys out of Dingo’s hands and did it myself, rolling my eyes as they stepped back and let me have my way.
“The only reason bones would be this white is if they were painted,” I said slowly, “or bleached.” My fingers grasped a femur and yanked it up, twisting it this way and that. The single bone was heavier than it should have been, that much I did know, and I inspected for sun bleaching marks. But there was no variation. All sides of the bone were the same, uniform off-white. A dead giveaway that they’d either been artificially lightened, or . . .
I snapped it in half like it was nothing but paper, staring down at the tiny gemstones that fell out of the hollow fake as I tipped it upside down in my hand.
“They’re fake?”
Dingo peered over my shoulder, and his frown deepened. I handed him the cracked bone and reached in to shake a few more, each one making a satisfying rattling sound against my ear. “They’re transporting gems in fake bones. But isn’t that tricky? Why not just hide them in something mundane?”
“Because the person transporting them wasn’t supposed to know,” Jackal said simply, like he’d done this a million and one times. “Would be my guess, at least. If someone thinks they’re moving bones, they’re not going to think to pick them up and check them for hidden riches, are they?”
He had a point.
But how had our client known? And why were these so important?
I didn’t realize I’d spoken the last part aloud until Dingo’s hands came down on my shoulders and led me to the front of the car. “It doesn’t matter why or how. Only thing that matters is we kill him and dump him in the river, and we leave the car where the client specified. ”
Which meant one of us would need to drive the car. And since they all had bikes?—
“Here,” Dingo said suddenly, slipping my mask back over my head. “You take my bike and follow me. I’ll drive the car, then ride back with you.”
“Oh, okay,” I murmured in agreement. “I wanted to see how it handled, anyhow. You know, for when you guys get me mine.”
“As if,” Jackal sneered, already headed back up the alley where they’d stashed their rides. “I ain’t buying you shit.”
He and Coyote didn’t wait for me; once they were on their bikes, they were off like rockets in the sky, the only sign of them a set of taillights quickly fading in the distance.
“Fine then. I didn’t want to stick together, anyhow.”
I rammed my foot against the kickstand and revved the engine, following Dingo and the stranger’s car in the opposite direction.