Up ahead, the supplier stepped out from under the fire escape.
And he was the size not so much of a football player, but an entire defensive line.
Zipping up her jacket, she pushed one hand through her short hair as the other burrowed in and locked on the grip of her hidden gun. Good thing she was wearing Kevlar under her fleece.
Rio strode forward, knowing she had to get her shit together. Everybody involved in the trade was rat smart and always reading any room they walked into or up to. She needed to get her affect strapped tight and her energy projection right. There was no way her undercover status had been compromised. There were only two people in the Caldwell Police Department who knew what she was doing, and her fake background was ironclad because she’d come over from the FBI—which had erased everything about her.
She was a ghost, floating through the streets at night, stringing together a case so that Mozart’s stranglehold on the Caldie drug scene could be severed with a lifetime set of iron bars.
“You Luke?” she said crisply.
The man’s golden eyes seemed to glow like candle flames, and as another bolt of lightning skipped above them, his face was briefly highlighted. Well . . . hello, sailor. He had the high cheekbones of a model, the mouth of an Italian lover, the jaw of a fighter, and the streaked hair of a nineties-era John Frieda ad.
Also, a strange scar that ran around his throat.
That last one was probably the only thing about him that made sense. There were all kinds of reasons people in the big-money sectors of the drug business ended up with things that lingered in their skin, a road map of brutal, bloody sin.
She thought of Spaz and his stab wound. And knew that was true for the underlings, too.
“Rio,” came the man’s low response.
Okay, that voice was smooth as bourbon in the gut, warming, relaxing—in spite of the fact that she was in the middle of a drug zone, with no backup. As usual.
And . . . was that cologne? He smelled really good.
“Yeah, that’s me.” She lifted her chin. “You want to talk terms.”
“Not here.”
“I’m not alone.” Rio nodded up to the darkened windows of the building across the alley and lied through her teeth. “And I’m not leaving my friends in there.”
“Don’t trust me?”
“Not as far as I can throw you. So do you want to talk terms or not?”
The man stayed where he was—for a split second.
The next thing she knew he’d grabbed hold of her, spun her around, and slammed her up against the damp cold bricks of the nightclub. As his huge body pressed into her back, she was very aware of that smell of him—which, considering things were going bad, bad, bad, she should not have noticed, much less approved of.
“Get off me,” she snarled.
With a yank against the hold on her arms, she tried to get her gun out. Or at the knife at her waist. Or to the pepper spray in her back pocket. Worse came to worst, she was going to bite the back of his hand and then take a course of PEP in case he was HIV-positive.
Baring her teeth, she went for—
The bullet sizzled past the top of her head, somehow charting a course that avoided both her skull and his jawline. And then there was a pinging sound as the slug hit something metal—and immediately, there was another pop! Pop! Poppoppoppoppop—
“I swear to God,” the deep voice in her ear muttered, “if you bite me, I’m going to toss you back out there and you can get plugged full of holes.”
Rio twisted her head and looked down the narrow chute between the walk-ups across the way and the club they were up against.
One of the shooters was using the blacked-out Charger he was parked in as cover. Not the worst idea given the size of its big block engine—and the fact that liquid gasoline didn’t actually explode. But he’d better keep his noggin down.
That safety glass was no better than a paper napkin—
The shattering of the windshield was spectacular, the spidering cracks virus’ing out from a pinpoint hole in the glass.
The immediate blaring horn suggested that someone was taking a little nap in the driver’s seat. But she didn’t have time to figure out who had done the job.
Her body moved without her giving any commands to her arms and legs.
Then again, luggage didn’t animate itself.
It was carried.
She was a human female, Lucan thought as he picked up the woman he’d been told to meet and carted her farther away from the shooting.
When the appointment had been made, he’d assumed that Rio was a male, and the fact that the “he” was actually a “she” was a goddamned inconvenience. In an exchange of bullets, he’d have let a male die, but it seemed, well, rude, or at the least ungentlemanly, not to save the fairer sex—