Chapter 9 - Ghost
GHOST
I watched as she clicked her way through the parking garage. I sat off in the darkness, but to be fair, parking garages at night weren’t all that hard in terms of concealment. With my bike idling so that the striking up of my engine didn’t spook her, I watched as her hips swayed.
As her hair fluttered.
As her curves jiggled beneath the tightly harnessed outfit she had on.
I didn’t like the way her attention was elsewhere. Didn’t she understand the kind of creeps that lurked in the middle of the night? It was two in the morning. High time for her to be back at her place and safe.
She walked for damn near thirty feet before she looked back up again.
“Didn’t anyone teach you how to be safe?” I muttered to myself.
I watched her take out a key and shove it into the car door in order to unlock it.
Who in the fuck used actual keys any longer?
How old was that fucking car in the first place?
I didn’t like the condition of it. It couldn’t have been safe.
Hell, it didn’t even come with a key fob, what the hell kind of safety features did it have if the damned thing didn’t even have enough electronics in it for a motherfucking key fob?
She needed a better one.
A safer one.
I watched her yank at the door just to get it open. She stumbled backward, showing me exactly how much force it took for her to open that goddamn door in the first place. Probably rusted on the inside, I thought to myself.
I could fix that.
I shook the thought from my head just as the car she stumbled backwards into started going off with its alarm. She jumped a bit, whipping around, her wavy brown hair fluttering all about, despite the way she tried piling it high on top of her head.
I resisted the urge to emerge and ask if she needed help.
Eventually the car alarm went off, and I saw her heave a heavy sigh of relief. It moved that pronounced chest of hers, and I had to clear my throat just to keep my cock at bay. My nostrils flared. I wanted to smell her. I wondered if she had a smell.
A signature smell.
One I could memorize.
Quit being a goddamn creep. You have to get close enough to clone her fucking phone.
She finally sat down into her car, and it moved. A lot. Her suspension was probably about to go out.
I didn’t like that, either.
I listened to her crank her car. Once. Twice. Three fucking times before it struck up. Most likely a dead battery. Or weak battery connections. With the age of her vehicle, it could mean literally anything. Her alternator could be fucking up, for fuck’s sake.
I could fix that stuff, though.
I watched as she pulled out of the parking lot.
I steadied myself on my bike, kicking my feet off the handlebars and kicking up the kickstand.
I kept my attention on her as she slithered through the parking garage toward the exit.
However, before I managed to slink out of the shadows to follow her, someone beat me to the punch.
In a blacked-out town car with no headlights on.
“Oh, absolutely fucking not,” I growled.
Despite the fact that I wanted to rev my engine in an attempt to catch her attention, I stayed silent. Well, as silent as I could stay with a damn motorcycle. I had to wait until both her and the blacked-out vehicle following her were out of the garage before I made my assent from the garage.
But luckily, my girl had a shit vehicle.
Which meant she drove it carefully.
She’s not your girl, you freak.
I really wanted to shoot the voice in my head sometimes.
I kept a good distance behind the blacked-out car.
Every single shred of my military training kicked in, especially with regard to tracking enemies.
I kept four car lengths behind. I didn’t do anything that would pull attention to me.
I didn’t speed. I didn’t blast my music.
It was easy to spot Jasmine’s brake lights, mostly because they were this odd purple-ish red color.
I wasn’t sure what caused the discoloration, but every time she had to put on the brakes for something, I knew where she was in traffic.
So I turned off into an alleyway to give the blacked-out car a break.
I couldn’t let anyone clock the fact that I was following them.
Or let onto whoever was driving the vehicle that they were being followed as well.
Most civilians didn’t pay enough attention on the road to ping whether or not they were being followed, though I knew some women liked to check simply because it was the world we lived in.
Jasmine apparently had no such desire.
Or someone had never loved her enough to teach her that she needed to do that shit.
I could fix that.
“Shut up,” I grumbled to myself.
Like I said, fuck the voice in my head.
The thing about cities is that they were always laid out the same.
Blocks worked in one-way squares, so it didn’t take long before I was back at a stoplight with Jasmine sitting to the left of the light with that blacked-out car right behind her.
The motherfucker didn’t even have his headlights on.
He didn’t even bother to keep distance behind her or anything.
Just bumper to bumper, like there was fucking traffic in the middle of the night.
Didn’t she realize that?
What was happening behind her?
And where the fuck were the police? Motherfucker was just riding around in the goddamn dark in the middle of the night without headlights. What kind of city was this?
I turned my attention elsewhere. The hairs on the nape of my neck prickled as Jasmine went straight at the light, passing right in front of me.
That car followed her and thank fuck I already had my turn signal on to the right.
Which meant it didn’t look suspicious when I fell right in line behind that car without its headlights on.
I wondered if me being behind the bastard would make them flip those damned lights on, but it didn’t.
I rode behind those fuckers for damn near two miles before I turned off again, because I saw a police cruiser perched in the parking lot of a drive-thru.
Fucking Taco Bell in the middle of the night, of all places.
I pulled off to the left, crossing the street and wrapping myself back around in an alleyway, where I perched and waited.
I perched and waited for Jasmine to crawl through the drive-thru.
I perched and waited for that black car that had parked in the parking lot to get dinged by the police officer.
I watched as Jasmine pulled back out onto the road, slurping down a brightly-colored drink that looked damn near radioactive.
I also watched as that car without its lights on pulled right back out into the road with her.
And I watched as the police officer in his fucking cruiser did nothing.
“Oh boy,” I muttered as I kicked off.
This changed things.
I whipped around and went down a couple more blocks before emerging at another light.
Alarm bells kicked off in my head at a rate that damn near made me dizzy.
Something was very wrong with all of this.
I didn’t like the fact that the police cruiser didn’t clock the car without their headlights on in the middle of the night, either.
Break or not, infractions like that were always supposed to be clocked, even when an officer was on break.
That made me wonder if the law firm had the police in this area in their pockets.
It would give us more context to this situation, that much was for certain.
I continued my pursuit of them, keeping to the shadows and back alleys, until Jasmine turned into the parking lot of the building where she lived.
I watched as the blacked-out car cruised on past, and only after it was past the goddamn building did the driver finally turn on their fucking headlights.
Oh, yeah.
Jasmine was followed intentionally.
I whipped out my phone and quickly snapped some pictures.
I took a bit of video as the car drove away, making sure to get the license plate, but I wasn’t sure if Ranger would be able to do anything with it.
If they had the police in their pockets, there was no telling what other kinds of connections this firm had around town.
Who the fuck were these people?
I had to set my sights on bigger things than that, however. I had a woman being followed. A woman who worked for one of the big-wigs with their names slapped onto that gaudy-ass building.
Which meant I chose the right target.
“When I’m good, I’m good,” I muttered as I slid my burner phone back into my pants pocket.
I watched from the darkness across the street as Jasmine got out of her car.
She dipped back in and reached for her purse, that juicy ass of hers just jutted out into the air in that impossibly tight pencil skirt.
Did the woman not understand a damn bit of how to keep herself safe in the middle of the night?
It was like she was raised by someone who didn’t fucking give a damn about her.
The thought made me snarl beneath my mask.
She finally dug her bag out before slamming her car door closed. But then I watched her open it and slam it closed again.
Only for it to bounce back at her.
She hung her head, and her shoulders moved in what I could only assume was a deep sigh. I tilted my head as I watched her lean her body weight against the door, and then she shoved her key into it to lock it.
I officially hated that car.
I wanted to approach her and see if she even knew that she had been followed.
But then, an interesting sight caught my eye.
A set of headlights that came at me from my left turned my head, and its light span barely missed me in the shadows of the alleyway across the street from Jasmine’s parking lot.
I watched that motherfucking black car with blacked out windows cruise right on past again, like it was patrolling the outside of her apartment building.
And there was that fucking logo again. Emblazoned right on the side. The same logo as the car that chased that terrified woman straight to us.
Except instead of it being a massive logo emblazoned on the side of the car, it was a smaller logo emblazoned onto the gas cap.
I’d never whipped my phone out and taken pictures so quickly in all my fucking life. Fuck that cloned phone. We needed to protect this woman with all we fucking had.
She needed to be with us.