Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Lianne nodded.
“The one I bought?” he demanded.
“Yes. That’s why I wanted to buy it. I was nearly certain it was Wen’s. Now I
am
certain. I’ve seen the drawer in the vault where the blade was kept. Another blade was in its place.”
“An inferior one,” Kyle said.
It was a statement, not a question. Any blade he had ever seen would have been inferior to the one he now owned.
But he wouldn’t own it for long. By law, stolen goods were returned to the owner upon discovery. The buyer, however innocent, lost out.
“It will be interesting to see if that blade turns up on the list of stolen jades,” he muttered.
“I can’t imagine it not turning up.”
Kyle accelerated quickly away from the light. The Ford caught up again halfway down the block.
“What about the other piece of jade?” he asked. “You mentioned two that you were sure of.”
“A recumbent camel from the Tang dynasty. The one that was substituted lacks the very subtle toe pads on the undersides of the feet. But Wen’s hands and eyes are too bad for him to notice the substitution.”
“How much were the replacement pieces worth, the blade and the camel?”
“It would depend on the collector. At a guess, I’d say perhaps one-third to one-half what Wen’s original jades were.”
“A thousand each for the substitutes, maybe more?”
“Probably a lot more. I can’t be certain. I didn’t examine them for sale.”
“The Feds didn’t mention substitution, did they?”
“They dropped some hints. I ignored them.”
“So a million in jade is missing and a third to a half million in jade has been substituted?”
Though Kyle’s voice was carefully neutral, Lianne sensed his skepticism. Why would a thief bother to spend money leaving decent substitutes? “I don’t know about the rest of the missing pieces,” she said, “whatever they are. I only know about two.”
“The camel and the blade?”
“Yes.”
“We’d damn well better find out about the rest, hadn’t we?”
The word
we
went through her like a shot of neat whiskey, making her light-headed. Until that moment, she hadn’t admitted to herself how much she didn’t want to be alone in this tangle of family, lies, jail, and jade.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Because until we find out, we won’t have the faintest idea what’s going on with the Tang jades.”
“No, not that. Why are you helping me when you don’t really trust me?”
“Good question. I’ll let you know when I have a good answer.”
It was less than Lianne wanted and more than she had any right to expect. It was much more than she should take from a man who had nothing in common with her but jade and great sex, a man she liked, respected, and could too easily love.
That would be stupid of her and unfair to him. If she truly cared about Kyle, she would keep him as far away from this mess as possible. He had done nothing to deserve the grief that was coming her way.
She took a slow breath and put away the temptation to lean on Kyle, and in doing so, drag him down into the mud with her.
“This is the corner,” Lianne said quietly.
Kyle turned and waited for a bus to get out of his way.
He was frowning, because he was looking at Lianne’s neighborhood with new eyes. What he saw wasn’t good.
Despite the rich, slanting sunlight and pigeons cooing and crapping everywhere, it wasn’t the kind of place where a good-looking single woman—or man, for that matter—should live. Pioneer Square might be a tourist attraction, but it was also smack in the middle of an area that could most charitably be described as colorful. Panhandlers, the homeless, and the not-so-gently insane lay in wait for marks who believed that a handful of change could turn someone’s life around, or at least make the mark feel like he had done penance for the sin of not being poor.
“I hope you have good locks,” Kyle said.
“The rent is cheap, the space is large, and you can’t beat the commute to work. But yes, I have very good locks.”
“And pepper spray. Don’t forget that.”
“I left it at home. It’s illegal in Canada.”
“Ah, yes. The Canadian motto: good government and plenty of it.”
Lianne surprised both of them by smiling. “Turn into that alley,” she said, pointing. “There’s a cramped little parking area just after the first building.”
Kyle turned in and parked in the last miserable slot, ignoring the signs that guaranteed towing by the first truck to arrive with a hook. The Ford Taurus stuck with him like a license plate. There was no place to park, so the tail simply backed out and parked across the street, where he could watch Kyle’s car.
“Why were you carrying your passport with you to Canada?” Kyle asked as Lianne reached for the door handle. Which was a roundabout way of asking her if she had been planning to go overseas from Vancouver, taking the jades with her to one of the best jade markets on earth: Hong Kong.
“Even with the Pace stickers,” Lianne said, opening her car door, “sometimes I’m stopped by U.S. Immigration officials on the way back into the States.”
Kyle got out of the car and quickly caught up with her. “Why? Do you have a past violation of some kind?”
She unlocked a scarred, grubby alley door that led to a gloomy hallway. Curling linoleum and dirt fought for ownership of the floor. She was so accustomed to the uninviting entrance that she no longer noticed it.
Kyle did.
“A lot of Asians came to Canada on British passports when Hong Kong changed governments,” Lianne said, turning back to Kyle. “Free access among colonial countries is a perk of the former British Empire. Sometimes the Asians who come to Canada decide to live in the U.S., but don’t want to go through all the tedious immigration formalities.”
“So they just drive south and stay?”
“Yes.”
“And immigration types who can’t tell the difference between Amerasians, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Koreans hassle you.”
“At first, yes. Now most of them know me, but every time a new one comes on, I get a chance to chat while they check out my accent.”
“And your eyes,” Kyle said.
Lianne looked at him. “My eyes?”
“Yeah. Agents are trained to look for signs of nervousness. A big one is refusal to meet the agent’s eyes.”
“Is that why one of them asked me to take off my sunglasses?”
“Probably.”
“Would you take off yours?”
“Now?” Kyle asked, surprised.
She nodded.
He pulled off his sunglasses and looked curiously at her. “Why?”
“It makes you less…distant.” Lianne smiled oddly. She stood on tiptoe, bushed a swift kiss along his jaw, and quickly stepped back out of reach. “Thanks for being
my knight, Kyle Donovan. I’ll let Ms. Mercer know if I think of anything that might be useful.”
Kyle realized that Lianne was planning to walk into the dingy hallway and out of his life. “Wait,” he said, grabbing her arm. “I’m not through with you.”
She looked at him out of eyes that were very dark in the dim interior light. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
Kyle muttered something under his breath and forced an easy smile onto his lips. “What I meant was, I’d like to take you to dinner. We could put our heads together and see if we come up with a way out of this mess.”
“That’s very kind, but your way out is simple. Drive away and stay away.”
“And leave you alone?”
“I’m used to it.”
“But—”
“No. You’ve helped me more than enough. Now help yourself. Get out before your reputation is as ruined as mine.”
“Screw my—”
“Good-bye, Kyle,” she said, talking over him and the siren that was wailing closer to Pioneer Square with every second. “And thank you. Nobody else cared.”
The weathered door shut hard behind Lianne. It locked automatically.
Kyle fought an impulse to kick the door off its hinges.
Then he heard Lianne scream.
T
he heel of Kyle’s foot crashed into the door before his mind even registered what he was doing. It took four solid kicks to make the wood splinter away from the old lock. He shoved through the door, ignoring the sound of yelling that came from behind him. All he cared about was the chilling silence that had followed Lianne’s single scream.
The switch from sunlight to gloom forced him to stop inside the doorway for an instant. It was long enough for him to see two shadows struggling in the hallway. There were pants and grunts and the scrape of shoes on the floor, a hissed word in Chinese as a heel connected with flesh.
A knife shone in the dim light.
Lunging forward, Kyle grabbed the attacker’s hair in one hand and the fingers holding the knife in the other. Spinning the wiry Asian man away from Lianne, Kyle slammed the attacker face-first into the brick-lined hall. An instant before his nose hit the wall, the man kicked backward, trying to break Kyle’s knee.
At the last second Kyle turned to take the karate kick on his thigh instead of his knee. The movement threw him off-balance, preventing him from breaking the attacker’s wrist on the first try. Kyle yanked the Asian’s knife hand up between his shoulder blades and slammed him headfirst against the wall again. This time the man’s wrist broke and the knife fell to the floor.
Despite being disarmed, the assailant was far from harmless. Or beaten. He fought back in every way he could, twisting and kicking in unexpected directions, yelling in Chinese.
For Kyle, it was like wrestling with a basket of muscular steel snakes. Ducking heels and elbows every inch of the way, he hung on grimly and body-slammed the Asian into the hallway wall hard enough to echo.
“Give it up, asshole,” Kyle panted, launching him into the wall one more time. Hard. “I don’t want to kill you, but you’re pissing me off.”
The Asian twisted sharply. Blood made Kyle’s hands slippery. The attacker managed to get his good wrist free. The edge of his hand started toward Kyle’s throat with blurring speed.
Lianne lashed out in a high kick that smashed into the man’s forearm, knocking it off target. An instant later the edge of Kyle’s hand thudded against the attacker’s neck. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
Kyle let him land like a sack of wet cement, kicked the knife out of reach, and watched the man like the deadly little snake he was. The Asian didn’t move.
“Nice kick,” Kyle said, breathing hard, watching the wiry man. “You okay?”
Lianne was fighting for breath, too. “Yes. I guess.”
“First the kitchen knives and now karate. Hell of a combination. Thank God I haven’t pissed you off yet.”
She laughed a little wildly. “Same goes for you.”
“I’m big, sweetheart, but that son of a bitch is a lot better than I am in the clinch.” Kyle let out a long breath and rubbed his thigh where he had been kicked. “Hope I didn’t kill him. I tried to pull my punch, but I was getting tired of wrestling.”
“I hope you didn’t kill him, too,” a voice said from the doorway. “The paperwork is a bitch kitty.”
Kyle and Lianne both spun around, adrenaline pumping, ready to fight again if they had to. A man in a dark suit
stood silhouetted against the doorway. His hands were empty.
“You drive a tan Ford?” Kyle asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you have a radio. Why don’t you do something useful for a change? Call the cops.”
“I am one.”
“You’re a Fed. We need a city uniform.”
“I’ll call a medic while I’m at it.”
“Yeah, I suppose the little shit needs one,” Kyle said.
“I was thinking of you.”
Kyle looked down at his right arm where the knife had somehow managed to cut him during the brief, vicious fight. His forearm burned like hell and blood had made his hand slippery at an inconvenient moment, but everything still worked. “I’ll be okay.”
“Just a scratch?” the agent said dryly.
“It’s a long way from my heart.”
Laughing, the agent turned around and went to call in the assault.
Kyle waited until the agent was out of sight before he knelt down, grabbed a handful of the Asian’s T-shirt, and methodically began slapping his face.
“What are you doing?” Lianne asked.
“Delivering a wake-up call. Did he say anything before he attacked you?”
“No. One second I was alone in the hall, the next instant a door opened and he came at me.”
“Was that his knife or yours?”
“His.”
Kyle’s big hand smacked against the man’s cheek with a sound like a gunshot. “What happened next?”
Distantly, Lianne knew she was running on an adrenaline high that would eventually drop her off a very tall cliff. But for the moment, she could leap skyscrapers and catch bullets in her teeth.
If only she could stop shivering.
“Lianne? Don’t fold up on me now.”
Smack
went Kyle’s hand on the attacker’s reddened cheeks.
“I screamed and kicked him,” Lianne said. “He turned so that I missed his crotch, but I got a piece of his midriff. It slowed him down a little. I got an elbow into his kidneys before he got set again. After that, things went to hell real quick. He’s a lot better trained than I am. He was just getting ready to use the knife on me when you grabbed him and started hammering him into the wall.”
Smack.
The attacker groaned.
Kyle slapped again. Hard. The thought of what would have happened if Lianne had been truly alone was eating at him. So was the gut certainty that there was more to this assault than a spot of daytime mugging.
When the Asian didn’t come around after a few more slaps, Kyle stripped off the man’s leather jacket and searched for ID. There wasn’t any, unless you counted the tattoos marching up and down his muscular arms.
Feeling more uneasy than before, Kyle returned to his first method of getting information: slapping the man into consciousness. The attacker groaned, tried to raise his hand to protect himself, and cried out in pain at his broken wrist.
Fist bunched in the Asian’s black T-shirt, Kyle dragged the man into a sitting position. His head lolled forward. Thick black hair slithered over his forehead and ears. There was a lot of blood on his face, compliments of Kyle and the rough brick wall.
“Did he say anything while you fought?” Kyle asked Lianne.
“Do Chinese curses count?”
“What flavor is he—mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwanese?”
“Mainland. He’s been over here long enough to dress Western, but the haircut is mainland.”
“How can you tell?”
Lianne ignored the shivers of adrenaline spurting
through her blood and tried to concentrate. “You ever stay overseas longer than a vacation?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Kaliningrad, among other places.”
“If you saw someone from there on the street here, would you notice differences?”
“Okay,” Kyle said. “He’s mainland Chinese. Nice tattoos.”
“Triad or tong, I would guess.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. Did he try to rob you? Rape you?”
“I don’t know what he wanted. He never said a word. He just jumped out and grabbed for me.”
Kyle’s hand landed heavily on the man’s cheek. The attacker’s eyes quivered open. They were black and glazed.
“Ask him who sent him,” Kyle snapped.
“But—”
“Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
Lianne asked something in rapid Chinese. The man simply stared through her.
“Ask him again,” Kyle said, smacking him sharply.
Lianne repeated her question. The man continued his silence.
“Close your eyes,” Kyle said to her.
“What?”
“
Close your eyes.
”
She did.
Kyle reached for the assailant’s broken wrist.
Lianne heard a groan and some broken phrases in Chinese.
“What did he say?” Kyle demanded.
“No one sent him.”
“Yeah. Right. He got all that body paint at Pike Place Market, too, along with fresh veggies.” Jaw clenched against the queasy flip of his stomach, Kyle reached for the man’s wrist again. He had learned in Kaliningrad that
the price of civilized ignorance was death. “Ask him the name of his triad or tong or whatever he calls his tattoo buddies.”
The man answered just as Kyle’s fingers closed around his wrist.
“Red Phoenix,” Lianne translated. “Can I open my eyes now?”
“You’d rather not. Trust me.”
An instant after she looked, she decided that Kyle was right. She would rather not have known what he was doing. But she did. She drew a deep breath and reminded herself that the assault hadn’t been her idea. The man had been looking for trouble.
He certainly had found it.
“Ask him why he was trying to kill you,” Kyle said without looking away from the Asian.
Lianne was speaking in Chinese before Kyle had finished with his question. The answer was longer in coming.
“What did he say?” Kyle asked.
“The Chinese equivalent of ‘Fuck you and your ancestors, too.’”
“Not real useful.” Kyle’s finger’s tightened on the sinewy, rapidly swelling wrist. “Ask him why he was told to kill you.”
“I already did.”
“He might be feeling more talkative now. Ask him.”
The attacker jerked.
Lianne’s breath came in with a ripping sound and went out in a rapid stream of Chinese.
Cold sweat stood on the assailant’s face.
Cold sweat ran down Kyle’s spine. Nausea clenched viciously. Silently he cursed his weak stomach and the Asian’s grim ability to endure pain.
Abruptly the man went slack.
“Shit,” muttered Kyle. He thumbed back one of the attacker’s eyelids. Only white showed. “He’s not faking it.”
Sirens cried in the distance. A different siren screamed a lot closer, then shut off. The city cops had arrived.
“Don’t mention the man in the tan Ford unless the cops do,” Kyle said, standing up. “Ditto for being out on bail. It will just confuse things.”
The cop who strode through the door was a middle-aged heavyweight whose uniform collar cut into the slack flesh of his neck. There was nothing slack about his eyes. After a fast, comprehensive glance at the sprawled, unconscious suspect, the cop took in everything at the scene, from the blood on Kyle’s arm to the pallor on Lianne’s face to the knife kicked halfway down the dirty hall.
“Let’s start with names,” the cop said, pulling out a notebook. “Ladies first.”
Lianne gave her name, handed over her driver’s license for ID even though the law didn’t require it, and generally tried to be a good citizen while not mentioning that she was out on a half-million-dollar bail and had a permanent, unwanted federal tail.
Two paramedics rushed in, one male, one female. With cool efficiency and latex exam gloves, they checked the unconscious man’s vital signs and determined that he was in good shape, all things considered. They trussed him to a backboard just in case and carted him off on a gurney for the best medical care the free world and the taxpayers of Seattle could provide.
While the male medic began attaching tubes and sensors in the back of the ambulance, the female medic returned. Saying little, she began working on Kyle.
When it was Kyle’s turn to field questions from the cop, he did the same as Lianne had, answering whatever was asked and offering nothing that wasn’t. The questioning was a little more awkward in Kyle’s case because the medic was peeling him down to the waist, taking his blood pressure and pulse, listening to his heart, and swabbing his cut arm with stuff that left a yellow-brown stain.
The cop scribbled, asked questions, scribbled, and asked more questions.
“So you kicked in the door, not the perp,” the cop said to Kyle.
Lianne blinked. “Perp?”
“Perpetrator,” Kyle explained. “You should watch more television. Yeah, I kicked it in. She was screaming and I didn’t have a key.”
The medic looked up. “How does your foot feel?”
“Like I kicked in a door.”
“Better have it X-rayed.”
“I’m standing on it, so it’s not broken.”
The cop looked at his watch and decided he had better call his ex-wife on the way back to the station and tell her he would be late picking up the kids for the weekend. Filling out paperwork on this one would take hours, especially with a wounded citizen and a perp who didn’t speak English and whose only ID was tattooed all over his skinny, rope-muscled body.
Kyle glanced at the doorway, wondering where the federal tail was. He couldn’t see much of the small alley from the hall. The city cop’s partner had leaned the door upright to keep out the street people. Idly Kyle wondered if the drunks would see the door as hanging straight or if it would look even more drunkenly askew than it did to the sober citizens.
“Your pulse was pretty high, ma’am,” the young paramedic said to Lianne.
“My heartbeat still is,” she retorted. “I’m not used to being attacked in dark hallways.”
The med-tech nodded slightly. “All the more reason to come in with me and get checked out thoroughly.”
“No, thanks.”
“What about you, sir?” the medic asked, turning to Kyle.
“Ditto.”
The medic duly noted on a form that both citizens had
refused to go to the hospital against the advice of the medic at the scene.
“Sign here,” she said, holding out a form and a pen to Lianne. “It just says that you refused further medical aid. Something to keep the legal types happy.”
Lianne signed. So did Kyle.
By the time the cop had finished asking questions and filling in all the necessary bureaucratic blanks, Kyle was bandaged, dressed, and more than a little impatient to wrap things up. The longer they stood around in the drafty hall, the better the chance that whoever had sent the triad thug would find out that things hadn’t gone according to plan.
Whatever the plan had been.
Kyle had a feeling he knew. It wasn’t a comforting sensation. His gut was in overdrive.
Finally the cop put away his notebook, gave the hallway another look, and left to call his ex-wife.
“How long will it take you to pack?” Kyle asked Lianne.
“Pack what?”