Stolen Vengeance: Slye Temp book 6 (27 page)

Dingo’s entire demeanor shifted from his earlier adversarial one to a tone used to talk someone down who was hysterical after a catastrophic accident. “Finding him requires information. Everything you can give us from that note, to anything else he told you and his cell phone number is a good start.”

Henri still panted in panic but he started nodding. “Yes, yes. I will get everything. The note is in the back.”

Valene still had a grip on Henri’s shoulder that she used to hold him in place so she could look him in the eye. “Look at me. We’re going to bring Geoffrey back.”

Henri’s eyes floated in tears. “Please. You have to. He is everything.”

She hugged him. “I know what it is to lose that one person. I won’t come back without him.”  Then she let him rush off to gather what Dingo needed.

She hadn’t made an empty promise.

Dingo had connections with people capable of stopping a national disaster. Surely all Dingo had to do was call the secret bat cave phone and Arthur would locate Geoffrey.

Chapter 31

Dingo thumbed keys on his cell phone as he led Valene from Henri’s business, across the parking lot toward the car he’d have to swap tags on soon. He had two more in the trunk of the GTO.

Valene’s footsteps tapped close behind. “You can find Geoffrey, right?”

“Maybe.”  He sent the text and crossed his fingers that this was one of those times Nick being an unorthodox black ops player would work in Dingo’s favor. With Nick, you might have to dive through the jaws of a whale to rescue the key to a mission, knowing the only way out depended on getting shot out of the whale’s blowhole.

“What do you mean maybe?” she snapped. “Don’t you have people you can call?”

“I’m not on good terms with my people right now. I’ll do what I can, but there’s no guarantee that I can find him.” Dingo reached the car and unlocked both doors from the driver’s side.

She argued with him over the roof of the car. “That’s bullshit. You work with some agency that can track GPS and crap like that, right?”

“I did and it’s not something I want announced to the world. Can we discuss this in the car?”

She had the decency to look chagrined and glance around, then dropped into the car.

He slammed the door. “I’m trying to get some help, but this situation might not have happened if you would just trust me enough to tell me what you’re involved in.”

That buttoned her up.

What the hell did Rikker want with the scroll? Or did the scroll even have anything to do with Rikker? Dingo thought back over the meeting right before he took off from Sabrina and the team. Nick had gotten intel that the Orion Hunters were looking for an artifact. An important one.

A scroll and something to do with Galileo maybe?

History had not been Dingo’s strong suit in school. He’d majored in getting into trouble and the only school record he’d ever set had been for the most suspensions.

But he did not forget details when it came to a mission.

He said,  “I know you’re hunting for a scroll.”  Then he made a wild guess based on the way Henri had described why Geoffrey was at this meeting. “A rare one from Galileo.”

Still she said nothing.

This was his chance to convince her to tell him what was going on and break through to get her on his side. He hated to go after her weak point, but Valene had few and one was clearly her relationship with Henri, as a friend.

She didn’t explain the wrong reason she got married, but Dingo could pursue that later. First he had to figure out the connection between the scroll and Rikker.

He asked her, “Why are we going after Geoffrey?”

She looked at him like he was delusional. “He’s in danger. Why are we still sitting here?”

“I’m waiting on someone to contact me with a fix on Geoffrey’s location,
if
my friend can do it,” Dingo explained, then went right back on point. “Why is Geoffrey in danger?”

Here came Tornado Valene. She leaned forward and he was pretty sure she was straining to keep from lunging at him. She shouted, “Didn’t you hear Henri? Because the man Geoffrey’s meeting said he got the referral from Aram and Aram is dead.
D.E.A.D!
Navarro killed Aram so Navarro might be the person meeting Geoffrey.”

“And why does Navarro care about this scroll?”

She opened her mouth and clamped it tight.

“
Godammit, Valene!
I’m trying to find Geoffrey and keep you alive!” Dingo had his arm pressing so hard on the console that it should have cracked when he shoved up close to her. “Now is the time to be straight with me.”

“Why are you interested in all this? You wouldn’t even have known about the scroll if not for Navarro and Henri.”

Because Rikker was in the middle of this whole fiasco, but Dingo couldn’t breathe Rikker’s name or tell Valene that he knew about their meeting in the restaurant. “The bottom line is that I’m here right now and I’m–”

His phone buzzed.

The energy inside the car stilled with a mutual truce as Dingo read the text that had Geoffrey’s location as of six minutes ago. He shoved the phone into his lap and put the car in gear, peeling out of the lot.

“Did you find him?” Valene asked, voice coming back down to earth and riddled with anxiety.

“Maybe.”

“Enough with the maybe already!”

“Look, Val. I’m trying to tell you the truth. I need you to trust me to do my job. I have a location from six minutes ago, but his phone is moving. We’re headed west. I’ll get updates as long as the signal is moving. That’s all I’m telling you until you meet me halfway on this.”

She flopped back against the seat, elbow propped on the door and her head against her hand. “I have everything on the line with this deal. I need this, Dingo. You have no idea how much.”

Because her dad was sick. “Then tell me.”

“Why? And before you get cranky, I’m asking why because you don’t want the messy part of being involved with someone. You want to come and go. I get that, but you can’t expect me to share everything that’s going on in my world just because you decide to drop in out of thin air and you need the information. You want to know why I married Henri?”

Talk about a switch in topics, but Dingo couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Yeah, I do.”

“Because the week you disappeared, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, stage four. He’s living with one lung right now. Henri and I have been best friends since high school, but you didn’t know that because you didn’t want to know that. Henri’s closest family member was a cousin he loved dearly who died of a drug overdose the day after I heard about my dad. We were both hurting and had nobody except each other.”

Her words cut over and over, slicing deeper each time.

Dingo had always been there for Sabrina and Josh.

He’d never stuck around any female long enough to learn her last name, much less meet anyone in her life. But in fairness to him, those women hadn’t wanted anything else from him. They wanted someone who made them feel like they were playing with fire and forgot about him before the door hit him in the ass. If he’d stuck around, those women would have left first.

He was not being shoved away again. Ever.

But then he met Valene and she screwed up his wiring.

Or maybe she untangled it and he didn’t know how to be with someone who acted as though she wanted him to stay.

His cell phone buzzed. He pushed the button to hear the text from Nick.
“Your target is still heading in the same direction and you better have something to tell me after you find him. Sabrina’s turning into Attila the Hun and Josh looks like the Grim Reaper. My next text is going to be coordinates for saving my ass after I go off on one of them.”

Dingo put the phone down and drove from memory of the area, but he had at least another seventeen or eighteen minutes to get close to Geoffrey. He had to say something. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when that happened. If I could have been here, I would.”

“How can you say that when all I’ve ever had were temporary numbers for you? I called your number back then. A lot. Your phone should have exploded from the texts blowing up on it.”

“I told you I–”

“I know. You went undercover with Garcia. There were no phones undercover, right? Because you were off on another mission and you couldn’t risk contacting me.”

There was a lot of truth to that. “There was more going on than I can tell you, Valene.”

“Exactly. And that’s why I ended up marrying Henri. I was terrified of losing my dad who has been the only constant in my life besides Henri. But more than that, you became a part of my life and I wanted you there. Even though you couldn’t give me anything back that I wanted to give you. I still wanted you there.”

“Why want someone who isn’t worth keeping?”

“Is that what you think, Dingo?” she asked with soft sincerity.

“Think about it. You just said I couldn’t be depended upon and I wasn’t there when you needed me.” Now he was getting jacked up.

“But you care about me. Whether you can admit it or not, you do. I just don’t understand why you came back and never told me.”

He slowed to get off the interstate and make a right into a busy flow of traffic. “I saw you two walk out of your apartment. You were smiling and laughing. He had his arm around you.” It hurt all over just seeing that in his mind. “I was trying to figure out when would be a good time to drop into your apartment when your finger flashed. Left hand. The only ring you used to wear on that hand was a black onyx carved with hieroglyphs or something.”

“From my dad,” she whispered.

Right. Another thing he hadn’t known. “Once I knew for sure you were married, I saw no point in interfering.”  He’d figured one of them might as well be happy.

“We were hardly together. My dad required a lot of time. Henri was busy keeping up with my clients and trying to develop his rare map business. He told me today that I was never in love with him and he was right. I love Henri as a close friend, but I didn’t hurt as bad when he packed up to leave as I did when I realized you were never coming back.”

Dingo’s heart pounded like a boxing match going on in his chest.

Was she saying what he thought she was saying?

His phone buzzed and he fumbled it, lifting the phone to hear the text from Nick telling him the signal was stationary and giving him information on the mall where the phone was parked. Dingo dropped the phone and wheeled hard to cut left against traffic and lurch into the mall parking area that spread out forever.

Horns blared.

Valene shouted, “What’s wrong?”

“Found him. We go in together only if you will do exactly what I say. If I tell you to get out of sight or to hide somewhere specific, it’s to stop you from taking a bullet.”

He waited on the argument, but she surprised him by saying, “I’ll do it. I don’t want to make any mistakes with getting Geoffrey back safe and sound.”

Dingo parked the car and climbed out, shoving his 9mm inside the back waistband of his jeans where it was hidden by his loose shirttail.

Valene came around to his side, but kept her voice down. “Why would he be at a mall?”

“Either Geoffrey or the client set the meeting location. Whoever picked this spot wants to be in the open and around a lot of people.”

Could be Rikker.

Could be Navarro and his merry band of Satan’s Garden Club.

Could be someone with the FBI or Gage’s people looking to nail Dingo’s hide to a wall.

Nothing good could come of any of those possibilities, especially with this guy Geoffrey playing at being an undercover agent. He did not want to take her in with him, but the only way to prevent that would be by putting her in the trunk. That would certainly smooth things out between them.

Wouldn’t that make it easier to cut this off clean with her later?

No. He had to stop thinking about the future, because he didn’t do future, and he had to deal with right now if he wanted to keep her out of harm’s way.

He shed his hoodie. “Come here. You got your Walther?” 

“In my purse.”

“Good.” He pulled the hoodie over her head to hide her face and all that glowing blond hair. Then he reached into his go bag and pulled out a Dodger baseball cap he yanked down over his ears. He gave her a pair of sunglasses too big for her face and put on his cheap pair.

She adjusted the glasses. “They’ll think we’re celebrities incognito.”

Only in LA. He tugged on the hoodie, hiding her as deep in it as he could and she licked her lips.
Don’t do that.

“What?”

Had he really spoken the words? At a loss for what to say, he gave her a brief kiss and covered by saying, “Don’t fiddle with the strings on the hoodie. Makes you look nervous.”

“I was not fiddl–”

“You’re at a mall. Just act like you’re happy to be here.”

“I will be happy if we find Geoffrey. This is a good location, right?” she sounded as if she was trying to convince herself more than Dingo. “He’ll be around all these people until we get to him.”

Dingo hated to destroy her comfort, but he wanted her to know the score. “No. Being in a busy area only means innocent bystanders might die if this gets ugly.”