Hidden Steel (22 page)

After that he seemed to relax a little; he made only a few more comments, promised to come back as soon as he could, and hung up. When he turned to Mickey he looked as though he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight.

“You’re not running,” she observed. “You’re ducking and dodging so you can find the right opening to strike back.”

“I don’t think that would have made much of an argument.”

“Everything’s okay, though? Hey, guess what—I speak Russian.”

“Among other things, I imagine.” Steve took her arm, a gentle guidance that she allowed. “Dawnisha doesn’t think they’ve been there since you pulled me out of my loft. I think I convinced her that no one should screw with them.” He rubbed his lower lip, a disgruntled gesture. “She didn’t believe me about Anthony. Not at first.”

“Surely someone found him—and we left the gym wide open.”

“
We
did,” Steve pointed out. “They were still there.”

Of course. She felt foolish, walking out into the late morning sunshine without a clue in the world. “They cleaned up,” she said, voicing his unspoken conclusion. And then, “It’s just as well. The cops won’t be looking for
us
, either. They won’t know I stabbed … I shot …”

She’d been so busy with everything else … she’d thought more about that old man’s expression than she had about the two men she’d been willing to kill.
Might
have killed, for all of that. And she found herself surprisingly able to put them aside. They’d come after
her
; they’d made their own troubles. The old man … he’d deserved none of it. So she cleared her throat and said, “It’s just as well.”

“Anthony deserves better.”

“He does,” she agreed, following him down the sidewalk to the bike. “We’ll make sure he gets better, too. Before this is over.”

It seemed to reassure him and bring him back to the moment at the same time. He looked at his bike, the one he’d strode to with such purpose, and he said somewhat sheepishly, “So, um, where are we going?”

“I want to give your email more time to stir things up before I go looking, and that leaves us with a block of free time.” She checked her nails, an affected gesture. Even when she’d arrived at Steve’s, they’d been without color.

Unlike her toenails.

Her concentration somewhat fractured but a whisper of memory concerning a struggle over foam toe separators and the cat, she added, “I considered a manicure but I think we should go big box shopping instead. Maybe there’s a grocery store closer to the underpass than the one I used the first time—I don’t think we’re going to fit the half of it in your saddlebags.”

He brightened considerably as he regarded her. “I like it.”

She shrugged, not quite comfortable with that gaze. “It’s part of the deal. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. Some of it, at least. Same as last time.”

“Did you?” he asked. “Is Mosquito still there?”

She shook her head, smiling. “Don’t remember much from that night, do you?”

“I’ll take that to mean yes,” he told her with some dignity. He handed her the extra helmet, strapped on his own, and waited for her climb on behind him.

She gave in to the impulse to spread her fingers wide over his chest and stomach, touching as much of him as possible—when, with the sedate pace they traveled, there wasn’t all that much excuse to touch any of him at all.

* * * * *

Once at the store, Mickey also gave in to the impulse to buy some items not strictly practical. Toaster pastries, some pretty hair clips. She crammed her cart full and stuffed a few last things into the bike saddlebags. “Meet you there,” she said, and pushed the cart on out of the lot, looking forward to the big downhill section.

Steve had gathered an audience by the time she got there. The place seemed almost familiar to her by now—the vast lines of concrete, the sound of traffic far overhead, the haphazard signs of humanity here below. The underpass was cool, the air slightly dampened there; the acrid smell of smoke from someone’s nighttime fire still hung in the air.

With some reluctance, they broke away from Steve to greet Mickey, pulling her cart into the shadow of the bridge. “Hey,” she said. “Looks better than he did the other night, doesn’t he?”

“It was dark,” said an older woman, quite practically. “Who knows?”

“Where’s Mosquito?” Steve asked, joining the group from the other side.

The older woman gave Mickey a sideways glance. “It’s not a good day. He’s inside.”

Inside
what?
One of the refrigerator box homes dug into the sloping sides of the underpass culvert? One of the metal corrugated storm pipes sticking out of either side of the underpass area? Some hidden spot by the riverside?

Maybe just inside his own head.

Mickey pushed the cart forward, and that turned out to be the signal; the assembled denizens of the underpass dove in.

When Meth Woman approached just a tad on the late side, Mickey pulled out some of the hair clips she’d saved aside. Meth Woman tore into the package and clipped her hair away from her face with much relief as she gestured Steve over.

“What’s up, Missy?” Steve said, familiar enough with this place, with its people, to be easy with such questions.

Missy looked around, making sure the others were engrossed with the cart. “I’m worried about Anthony. There were people here yesterday. Wanted to know if we’d seen someone who didn’t belong. We didn’t say nothin’, ‘course. None of us talks to people who have that look in their eye. You know, the one that says they want to make the way the world is run? And like we don’t fit in it anywhere?”

“I’ve seen it,” Steve said.

“So then they started waving around money. But we know that trick. You put it together with those expressions? Never turns out right.”

“But … Anthony talked to them?”

She nodded. “Not at first. But they started making threats. So Anthony said he’d get them off our backs. I don’t know what he told them. He took their money and that was it.” But she looked troubled, and she looked away, and she said, “That
shoulda
been it. But he couldn’t just leave it. He said he was going to warn you, Steve. He said he ought to have lied about that part.”

“That part,” Steve repeated blankly.

“Oh,
you
know,” Missy said, and smirked a little at Mickey. “How she’s sweet on you.”

Steve looked over at Mickey, eyebrows raised. She shrugged, very
hey, watcha gonna do?
“Later,” he told her.

“I thought we’d already established that,” she responded sweetly.

Missy waved a hand between them. “Hey, Anthony?”

Right. Anthony. Mickey glanced at Steve in a grim, tacit game of
you’re it.
And Steve said simply, “Anthony was trying to do the right thing, Missy. But it looks like they found him first.”

Missy’s lips thinned; her eyes shone and she blinked fast a few times and looked away. She muttered something; a curse, Mickey thought, at Anthony’s stupidity. When she turned back, her face was hard. Street hard. “I guess we’d best be moving on from this place for a while, then.”

“That might be best,” Steve said. “Not for long.”

Damned well better not be. Mickey didn’t have patience for much more of it. “Can you describe the men?”

Missy made a face that indicated she hadn’t really cared. “Foreign, like I said. They had funny little caps—not like a Jewish thing, but not a whole lot more. One had a big fat mustache, one had a big fat nose. They were big. They were dressed too nice. Didn’t see guns, but I bet they had ‘em.”

“Who doesn’t,” Steve grumbled, grumpy in a way that made Missy nudge Mickey and grin. But even as Mickey grinned in response, the other woman lost her smile, lost all her animation. She froze, except for her eyes. First they darted around, a little wild thing in search of escape, and then they got stuck, staring. Dreading.

Mickey had a good idea what Missy was looking at. Her spine prickled … someone might as well have been drawing a target on it. Steve had only to turn his head slightly, and his widened eyes pretty much confirmed Mickey’s suspicions.

They’d returned. They’d failed to nail Mickey the night before and they’d come back to their little treasure trove of information.

But they were only looking at her back. They had no way of knowing who she was. So she eyed the distance between Steve and his bike parked back under the bridge, and she eyed the distance to the various cover opportunities—the bridge support structures, the galvanized pipe tunnels, the trees planted out and beyond the underpass.

The bike had the disassembled bow. She wondered how fast she could put it together. How fast
Steve
could put it together ... and put it to use.

And she made sure he saw her wondering—that he followed her gaze toward the bike. And then she drew a deep breath and, because it pleased her sense of dark irony, chose a song from
Cats.
“
Mem’rieeeees!
” she belted out, startling Missy as she drew the woman in for a few dramatic, swaying dance steps—and then shoved her away, toward one of those drain tunnels. “Lala la la la
lalaaaaahhh!
” Missy didn’t quite get it, but she didn’t hesitate to retreat, either. Dancing, swooping, Mickey bumped into Steve just long enough to shove him, muttering, “Get the bow!” A grand swoopy gesture let her pluck a knife from the harness still hidden beneath her oversized t-shirt; she palmed it, twirled around, and faltered in assumed confusion when she faced the two men.

They weren’t the men she’d seen at the CapAd.Com. These men were more outwardly foreign, from the cut of their baggy suits to the headgear Missy had described. They were less suave … and more purposeful. They may have been at the gym the night before … she’d never gotten a good look in the darkness. She drew herself up to regard them with great dignity. “Oh,” she said. “Were you invited? This is opening night, you know.”

They spared each other only a glance. They showed no concern for those who had scattered before them—and no doubt that they’d found their target. They came on.

Boy, she hoped Steve was fast with that bow.

Chapter 17

“Tickets,” Mickey said, gesturing grandly to the Irhaddan intruders with the hand that didn’t hold the knife. “You must have tickets.”

They didn’t so much as blink. No curiosity, no interest, no concern. One said to the other, “Don’t play games with her, just get her. I don’t know why Hisami had so much trouble.” And he spoke in Irhaddanian, which Mickey hadn’t expected to understand.

But she did.

And because she knew better than to think too hard about it, she instantly replied in kind. “They had trouble because they thought just like you do, you jerks! What makes you think you can get away with this kind of blundering, goonish behavior on U.S. soil?”

Behind her came the muffled noises of flight, the cry of someone falling, the scuffle as that person scrambled up again. “C’mon, c’mon!” voices urged, and Mickey knew the underpass people weren’t all safe yet—couldn’t believe Steve had had the time to put his bow together, grab his quiver, and take cover behind the nearest corrugated storm pipe, the only place that offered him both angle and range.

When the men exchanged a glance and moved for her, she stepped into it—still buying time. She would have walked right between them if they hadn’t grabbed her upper arms, leaving them with the awkward necessity of turning around as a single unit in order to escort her backwards from the underpass.

And that’s all they figured they had to do, she realized, and was insulted all over again. Just walk in, grab her arms, and walk right out again. “Am I supposed to make little squeally, frightened girly noises while you’re at it?” she demanded in English, not concerned that they might have trouble with her slang and her sarcasm or even her train of thought.

In fact, they did no more than exchange another glance, very much
what did you expect
? They’d probably known about her bad reaction to the super cocktail; they’d certainly gotten an eyeful of her
Cats
performance. And now, meaty fingers closed hard on her biceps, they thought they had her.

Steve’s voice, strained or not, was music to her ears. “Hey, fellas.”

Mickey’s words under her breath came in a sing-songy rhythm. “You’re gonna be sor-ry.” One of them gave her a quick series of jerks, as though she were nothing more than a doll. But Steve’s words meant that everyone was under cover—that he was ready to go. She tensed—

“Let her go, now,” Steve said. He should have just unloaded a couple of arrows into them. Too much of a nice guy, dammit. Mickey … probably not so much of a nice girl. Under these circumstances, she would have—

The guy on her right grunted … staggered. Mickey jerked her head around and got a glimpse of fletching jutting into the air from the other side of the man.
Whoop! Go Steve!

The guy on her left went for his gun, reaching inside his loose suit jacket. Mickey wrenched her arm loose from the wounded man—he, too, groped for a gun, and the two shouted at one another in quick, hard phrases that Mickey couldn’t follow. And loud. Way too loud.

And they weren’t paying nearly enough attention to her.

She slammed her heel behind the wounded man’s knee—already off balance, he went down hard, screaming as he landed on the arrow. The second man turned to her in annoyance, ready to slap her down with a gun-filled hand.
Shoot him too!
she thought at Steve, but knew they were too close now, too unpredictable.

She shifted the knife in her hand so it protruded out beyond her palm, and she slashed backwards, taking him on with the same arm he’d thought immobilized.
Speed is everything …
She scored him across the ribs, the blade so sharp he probably wasn’t even sure what she’d done. But it threw him off anyway, and the pistol landed across her shoulder instead of on her head.

Mickey staggered under it—but didn’t back off, not for an instant. Using his own grip on her as a fulcrum, she went for his ribs again—biting more deeply this time, metal skidding off bone and then jamming between ribs. This time he felt it—he roared at the insult and tossed her away as though she were weightless. She felt like human skeet, expecting to hear the report of his gun, feel the impact of a bullet—