Kiss Of The Blue Dragon

Where could we go? The inside door that opened to the tenants’ mailboxes had already closed and locked behind us. Marco didn’t have a key. The only place for us to go was outside this ten-by-ten-foot outer foyer.

“What’s the matter?” he said impatiently. “You have nothing to worry about. There’s a patrolman waiting for us outside.”

“He’s gone. He left.” I propped an arm on the door and leaned heavily against it. I had to think.

“You’re not a suspect in this murder case. You don’t have to create a scene here to impress me, or throw me off the scent.”

“Pardon me for saying so, but I don’t think you have a scent. And this isn’t about you or me. Someone is out there. If you’re so sure I’m wrong, then go ahead. When they run out of bullets, I’ll follow. Gentlemen first.”

He narrowed his eyelids as he studied me with a curious mix of amazement and amusement. “I can’t believe you’re serious. Fine, I’ll call ahead.” He pulled his cell radio clip off his belt and called to the car. Silence. “Crappy equipment,” he muttered, staring at the black device in his hand.

I nodded and gave him a gloating smile. “Your line has been jammed. Typical R.M.O. tactic.”

He glared at me, for a moment considering my case. Then he shook his head. “No, this thing has been on the fritz all day. Department budget cuts.”

Nevertheless, he reached into his suit coat, tucked away the radio and pulled out a Mortal Taser, setting it to Kill.

“Now we’re talking the same language,” I said, glad that he was armed. I’d left my Glock at home.

“That’s a first,” he muttered.

In spite of the danger I was sure awaited us, I couldn’t help but notice how gracefully his hands cradled the weapon.

“Hey, Baker.”

I looked up and almost gave a start when I saw how penetratingly he was staring at me. “Yes?”

“When we get outside and you see you were wrong, you’ll have to buy me a beer.”

I grinned. “And if I’m right, you’re buying.”

He moved toward the door, then halted, letting out a breath of relief. “Look. I told you.”

I followed his gaze, which focused on a pulsing red light that throbbed through the cloudy etched glass embedded in the upper half of the old-style oak door.

“So what?”

“Those are called lights,” he replied, sarcasm fully restored. “They put them on squad cars. My backup is there. You’re good, Baker. Very good. You almost had me convinced.”

He walked out of the door like Gary Cooper in High Noon. What a jerk, I thought. Then irritation turned to absolute panic. The vague danger I’d sensed turned into a sharp, sizzling sound in my head that made me nauseous. I saw bricks just inches from my face. They looked like they were burning. I didn’t know what it all meant but I just knew something very bad was about to happen.

“Don’t!” I shouted, but he was already outside. Like a tornado, I flew out the door and smashed into his legs, tackling him. He crashed into the cracked concrete sidewalk. His taser flew from his hand, skittered into a street drain and vanished down through the iron slats.

“Damn it, Baker,” Marco cursed.

At the same time a company of bullets sprayed the glass and brick wall where Marco had been a second before. By the sizzling that followed in the eerie silence, I knew the bullets were acid eaters—a favorite of the Mafiya. It wasn’t enough to roto rooter your insides with SMART bullets. The R.M.O. wanted to burn away your internal organs with chemicals, just to make sure you were really dead. With a chill, I realized I’d heard the same sound a moment before in my mind. I looked up from the ground and saw acid fumes curling up from the bullet holes in the redbrick wall. That must have been the smoke I’d envisioned.

“What the—?” Marco growled as he yanked his legs from my embrace and twisted up from the trash-littered sidewalk. He stopped as soon as he saw the bullet holes. In unison we glanced hopefully to the flashing red light.

Unfortunately it topped a street cleaner parked across the street, not a squad car. I had been right. The patrolman was long gone. The street looked like a ghost town.

“Let’s go!” He reached for my hand and together we scrabbled to safety around the side of the building. Panting, we both stood and flattened ourselves against the wall. “My taser—”

“Forget it,” I rasped, still clutching his hand. “It’s gone. Useless anyway.” From my experience, the hard-core mobs would outgun you every time. Hand-to-hand combat was the only useful weapon against mobsters, if you were lucky enough to get close. Sgarristas didn’t usually train in martial arts. They didn’t need to. So it was the only weapon that worked against them when your back was up against a wall, so to speak.

“Guess I’m not buying that drink,” I said. I pulled my hand from his tight grip and clutched the rough wall. “Don’t worry, Marco, I’ll handle this.”

“Like hell you will. I’m not going to let you get killed.”

I gave him an incredulous look. “For your information, Marco, you’re not letting me do squat. I’m going to save my butt and yours in the process.”

“Do you always have to be in control, Baker?”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Marco. You should have stuck to head-shrinking back at headquarters. You’d be dead by now if I hadn’t—”

I heard a rustling noise and the squeak of a rusty wheel, and fell silent. We both looked at ourselves mirrored in the plate-glass windows of the storefront across the alley. In a distorted reflection created by a bright rainbow-colored billboard on the brick wall over our heads, we saw a stooped figure pushing a rickety grocery cart.

“A free-ranger,” he whispered, his face visibly relaxing. “An old lady.”

Free-ranger. I hated that term. It was a euphemism for any homeless person who hadn’t gone underground to live in Emerald City, which was a euphemism for the abandoned subway tunnels that had become a city for the poor.

A number of homeless Chicagoans who preferred to brave the elements in order to enjoy the light of day remained above ground. Calling them “free-rangers” sounded like something happy, like free-range chickens.

The reflection of the homeless lady approaching with her rusty grocery cart full of bags, empty cans and trash became clearer. Her dirty gray hair looked like a Brillo pad, her nose looked borrowed from the Wicked Witch of the East from the classic The Wizard of Oz, and her teeth were MIA. Maybe a methop junkie whose brain had turned to mush. They were usually harmless.

She pushed her cart past the edge of the building and smiled at us as she passed. I was just about to relax when I saw something round and hard poking out of the many tattered layers of her clothing.

No time to curse. I shot my leg out at a ninety-degree arc, ramming the toe of my boot into the soft part of her temple with a sickening thud. The free ranger-who-was-not flew backward and landed in an awkward, still heap. Knocked out cold. Mike would be proud.

“Damn I’m good.” I straightened my collar and glanced at Marco, who looked down at the unconscious body in horror.

“I ought to book you for that.” He ground the words through clenched teeth and bent to help the prone figure, until I grabbed his upper arm.

“Don’t be such a patsy,” I whispered. “This is a setup.”

He glanced around and saw what I had—an ominously deserted street. It was as if someone had shut down traffic for a parade. The Sgarristas probably had. But for just one assassination? They must have really wanted us dead.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I don’t know why the R.M.O. sent this guy to kill us, but this isn’t the place to debate the issue.”

I quickly squatted and pulled out the weapon I’d seen, which was still hidden in the assassin’s clothes, and held it up for him to see.

His face sobered. “You were right. I didn’t see the gun.”

“Hell, yes, I was right. Don’t worry about it. You have to spend some time on the streets before you notice these things.” I handed him the Uzi-size weapon and felt for a pulse in the assassin’s neck, which was partially covered with his latex mask. “This guy will be coming to soon.”

“How do you know it’s a guy?”

I grinned at him over my shoulder. “There’s only one sure way to find out.”

I tucked my fingers under the edge of the latex and pulled the mask off, revealing the sweating, unconscious face of a dark-haired, twenty-something guy whose ancestors definitely once vacationed on the Baltic Sea.

“You were right again,” Marco acknowledged.

“I usually am. Don’t ask me why.”

“How did you know this guy was waiting for us?”

“I really don’t know. I’ve always had great intuition but this was…this was too weird.”

He nodded, but hardly looked convinced. He turned his professional scrutiny to the contraption in his hands. “What do you think this is?”

“I don’t know, but I feel a lot safer knowing it’s in our hands and not his.”

I stood and he handed it over for my examination. It was surprisingly light. There was a trigger, but that was the only conventional technology on the foot-and-a-half-long contraption. The nose ballooned like a flamethrower, but I was sure it shot out something far more subtle and dangerous. Something inside of it glowed unnaturally. All ruminations came to a screeching halt when Marco stiffened and pointed down the empty street.

“Baker.”

“I see her.” A figure stood staring at us five hundred yards down the road. This time it really was a woman. I could tell by the natural flow of her long black hair, the knockout body in black tights, the cocky, somehow sexy stance. “If this is Tweedle Dee, there’s Tweedle Dumb. Though I have a feeling she’s anything but.”

My supposition proved all too true. While she distracted us, the Sgarrista on the ground grabbed a knife and lunged toward me. Damn. I had been so entranced with the first weapon I hadn’t searched for another. Marco turned and socked the guy hard in the jaw. I was impressed. But the Sgarrista barely moved. Oh, great! Jaws of steel.

The assassin kicked his leg out and rammed me against the brick wall. I groaned, half expecting to hear the crack of bones. He grabbed Marco by the collar and had the knife to his throat so fast I couldn’t react in any other way. I aimed the mysterious weapon and pulled the trigger. I didn’t even hesitate.

What happened next was amazing. I’ve never killed anyone, but in this case, I had no choice but to use the assassin’s own weapon against him.

Some sort of glowing laser beam soundlessly emitted from the snout. The Sgarrista watched with intense horror as it apparently penetrated his bulletproof vest. He scrambled backward as if it were a giant, creepy spider crawling up his chest. Then he dropped his knife and his shoulders slumped in complete defeat. I turned the weapon to the James Bond chick who watched the whole thing from down the street. She took one look at it, turned and ran.

The assassin then got up from the sidewalk. He wasn’t hurt. But somehow his face already looked dead. Despair welled in his black eyes. Even though there was no visible penetration of his flesh, he looked as if I’d just dealt him a mortal blow. He held out his hands. “Arrest me.”

Marco and I exchanged looks. What did he know about this weapon that we didn’t? As Marco pulled a pair of cuffs out of his back pocket, he said, “Why are you making this so easy?”

The sweating, bruised young man replied, “Because I’m dead already. You have a gun? Shoot me, please. It will be faster.”

“I’d shoot if I had my weapon,” Marco muttered out of the side of his mouth. Then he marched forward, spun the assassin around and cuffed him. “Killing you would be too compassionate. You’re going to have to endure overnight lodging courtesy of the county of Cook.”

“Govno,” the gunman cursed in Russian.

“Just think of the jail as a bed-and-breakfast on a budget.”

I chuckled in spite of the circumstances. Marco shot me a smile, which I returned, then I frowned. It was time to start figuring out why the R.M.O. had tried to kill us. More important, I needed to know when the next attempt on our lives would be since they weren’t easily discouraged.

Chapter 7

The Long, Hot Night

Marco called into headquarters on his lapel phone. He got no answers as to why his backup had disappeared, but a squad car arrived quickly and took the R.M.O. assassin downtown. The APB on Lola had turned up nothing. And DNA results indicated the headless body was a Polish cleaning lady who took care of Lola’s apartment in exchange for future predictions. By the looks of the apartment, Lola and her cleaning lady had ripped each other off.

When Marco offered to give me a lift home, I made no attempt to decline. Granted, a niggling voice inside my head warned me that his insidious masculinity and good looks were a lethal combination. Therefore, I definitely should have returned the way I’d arrived, via public transportation. But I was dog-tired and didn’t want to fight a crowd. Besides, when you almost bite the bullet with someone, you want to talk about it over a couple of beers.

Marco took me back to my place in his old hydrogen-powered SUV. Because my back was sore from our scuffle outside Lola’s apartment, he took Lake Shore Drive. The land lanes on LSD were well paved, unlike the grid of neglected city streets. Just before we arrived in front of my two-flat, Marco received bad news. The backup he’d been counting on had gone missing under suspicious circumstances.

In the brooding silence, as cars whizzed by on the curved ribbons of pavement, I felt his sense of betrayal in my own gut. Not good. I could not afford to empathize with this man. I glanced at his profile—the strong, straight nose, the rugged jaw, the lush yet firm-set lips. My mouth almost watered.

Nope, there would be no beers tonight. We could commiserate about our brush with death another time. Right now I needed distance from him. When he pulled up in front of my two-flat and turned off his engine, I reached for the car door.

“Hey.” He grabbed my left arm. “I owe you a beer, remember? I can run to a store and come back.”

“No.” I was quick to answer and forced a bright smile. “No, it’s okay. I won’t hold you to that. I have to go.”

“But I want to.”

He still held my arm. His strong fingers felt like kindling catching fire on my skin. Amazed, I looked at his hand, then into his eyes, not even pretending to be tough. “Detective, I know that when you face danger with someone, there is a sense of…closeness. But it’s a false sense of comfort. You don’t like me, remember? Besides, I’m bad luck. Someone wants to kill me and they almost took you down in the attempt. So let’s just call it a night.”

I whisked out of the car and shut the door before he could protest. I waved through the passenger window and almost changed my mind when he simply stared back, disappointment unabashedly simmering beneath his thick, dark lashes. Turn and walk away, Angel, I ordered myself. You know the routine. Yes, I certainly did. So I did just that.

I took a long, soothing bath and stretched out on my couch. It was too hot in my bedroom to sleep. Like Marco’s radio, my air conditioning was an off-and-on proposition at best. Right now it was off. So I opted for the ceiling fan in the living room.

Though I was exhausted, sleep eluded me. I watched the fan rotate around and around, my head spinning with the crazy turn of events. I kept thinking about that poor woman in Lola’s apartment. And when I finally succeeded in pushing aside those gruesome images, I thought about my visions of Lola in the crystal ball.

Is that really what they were? Please, God, let it be anything but that. Perhaps I just had a wild imagination. That would explain everything. But the lame notion died before I could even begin to convince myself. Marco was right. I’d known exactly what was going to happen tonight.

Had this ability, or curse, always existed? I thought back to the many times I’d escaped danger—always dodging bullets at the last minute, always changing plans when my instincts told me I was in too deep. Was intuition the same as psychic ability? I refused to even think of myself in those terms. I was not a quack or a fraud like Lola. I was just lucky.

Yeah, right.

I rolled to my other side and tried to think of something else. Someone wanted me dead. But who and why? Who in the R.M.O. syndicate could benefit from my death? Maybe somebody wanted to kidnap Lola without having to worry that a pesky daughter might come in search of her. I could think of no other explanation. But why kidnap Lola in the first place?

And then there was Marco. He really believed he could change the world. It had to be killing him that he was wrong. One of Chicago’s finest, a member of his own force, had betrayed him tonight. It almost made me sorry I was right. Almost.

I rolled onto my back and sweat pooled between my breasts. Tonight, just before I got out of his car, he wasn’t looking at me like a professional. For a moment, under his dark gaze, I felt like a real woman in the presence of a real man. And for a brief moment, it had been exciting. Just before excitement had turned to panic. Circle the wagons, Angel. Don’t let him in.

I sat up, tired of pretending things were normal. Tired of pretending I was satisfied with this cleverly crafted life of mine. I rose up on my knees, leaned against the back of the couch and craned my head out the window for a breath of fresh air.

I saw a couple walking by after a night at Rick’s Café Americain. Perfect timing. They giggled and smooched, obviously in love. Then my gaze wandered until I found something that floored me—Marco’s SUV. He was still here?

It looked like he was sleeping in his car. He was leaning his head against the headrest and his forearm hung out the window.

I listened to distant traffic noise, and the sound of someone’s music blaring from an apartment a block away, and wondered why. Why the hell had he stayed?

As if he heard my silent question, Marco raised his head and caught me staring. He got out of his car, and crossed the deserted street, heading toward my door. I walked down the stairs ready to tell him I could take care of myself. I reached the ground level entrance and paused when my hand grasped the doorknob. I pushed back the short sprigs of hair that clung to my moist forehead, then smoothed over my loose, long cotton pajama pants and spaghetti-string top. How silly to worry about how I looked.

I opened the door and found Marco standing in midnight’s shadow. He exuded masculinity like an aura, and I wondered how taught his muscles were beneath his crisp and fashionable linen shirt. I could reach out and find out myself, if I had the guts.

He thrust his hands into his pants’ pockets and squinted at me through a sliver of moonlight. “You change your mind about that beer?”

“No, I need you to get the hell—”

He closed the distance and the words died in my throat as one of his strong, tanned hands moved around my narrow waist, massaging the tight muscles in my back. He pressed me against him.

“Marco,” I whispered, stunned by his gentleness, “you’re very good at this.”

“Shut up, Baker, and try to relax for two seconds.” He pulled me closer against him in a bear hug. For one pure second I felt at peace.

And just like that, the moment passed. We slowly parted. At least he had the decency to look as disturbed as I felt. It was time for that beer.

We sat out on my second-floor garden balcony, silent for a long time. The embrace notwithstanding, I felt amazingly comfortable in his presence and began to relax. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I trusted Marco. Besides, we’d almost died together.

Part of the multilayered wooden deck nestled like a big tree house in the giant elm shooting up past my roof. Now and then the leaves around us rustled in a desultory breeze. Marco rested against the railing and drank from the bottle of beer gripped in his big fist. I sat in a wicker chair, occasionally pressing my cold, brown-glass bottle to my temples, occasionally sipping. When you’re really wiped out, nothing beats a beer in an old-style glass bottle.

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