Hot Pursuit Read online

  Except that the crew is falling apart and the woman’s not totally mine yet and she needs to find a new job.

  When we reach the club there’s a car and a bike in the parking lot and the club door is ajar. I don’t recognize the car but the bike belongs to Stallion, the President of the Category Five Knights. What the hell is he doing here? Better yet, who is he meeting with?

  Prince parks between the car and the bike and I roll a little closer to the building. While I help Sally remove her helmet, Prince enters the club.

  “I’ll be a minute. Since we’re here, I’ll take all my stuff back. I’m pretty sure I have a bag I can throw everything in,” she says following him in.

  “Good, I won’t be long either.”

  I’m tying two helmets to the handle bar when I hear two gunshots and Sally screaming. I run after her but someone’s shut the door behind her. I lose precious seconds getting my keys out and opening the door.

  I slide in and noticing my shadow on the floor, I shut it close behind me. No use letting the outside neon light make an easy target out of me.

  With the door closed, the room is mainly dark, just the three bright spotlights over the bar are on. In the back of the room I make out two struggling shapes. One of them is Sally.

  “You stop moving bitch or I’m going to slaughter you like a pig,” says a man’s voice I don’t recognize.

  Sally whimpers and stops moving. As my vision adjusts to the darkness, I think I see the shine of a blade against her neck. Okay, so the man has a gun and a knife.

  I take a deep breath and check the impulse to ram myself into the guy. It’s probably what Prince did. Where the fuck is he anyway? I place myself in the light by the bar and hold up my hands to show I’m unarmed.

  “What is it you want? There’s very little cash in the house but whatever we have is in the first drawer under the cash register behind the bar. I will get it for you if you want.”

  I pray it’s a robbery gone bad and that the man who’s holding Sally will settle for the few hundred dollars of change I keep and if not I have a gun, just for that purpose, in the second drawer under the cash register.

  “Where’s the safe?” the man snarls.

  Taking a slow step further in his direction, I answer, “What safe? This is small joint. We don’t have a safe. We wouldn’t know what to do with one.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. Zach gave me the keys to this place and asked me to take the load of cash he has in the safe before the Feds close you down.”

  I try to make sense of the information he’s just given me. Clearly it’s not a hit and miss robbery. He’s a member of the Wizards acting upon the request of Ezachia Smith, the corrupt politician who was their leader and who still manages to get good intel from his jail cell.

  “Listen, I don’t care what Zach told you but I can assure you there’s no safe in this place,” I say hoping I sound as sincere as I am. “Unless you’re talking about a tiny box that I would have not spotted, there is no safe.”

  “I have no fucking idea what size the box is!”

  “Well did Zach tell you anything else?”

  “Yeah but it didn’t make much sense, I think it was the pain killers talking and not him.”

  “Zach doesn’t do drugs,” I protest.

  “You mean he’s no junky. You’re right but somehow he got cornered by four niggers and the bastards did a number on him so he was drugged out of his skull when I saw him.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He said get to the safe under the bed and there’s no fucking bed in this place!”

  “Yes there is, upstairs. Zach had a bedroom.”

  A set of keys fly by my feet.

  “Go, get me the money. You have three minutes, don’t waste time otherwise I’ll bleed the girl like I bled your friend here.”

  I bend over to pick up the keys and see Stallion. Right outside of the circle of light I’m standing in, the President of the Knights is lying in a pool of blood, perfectly immobile. Unlike Prince whose hissing breath I hear intermittently, Stallion doesn’t make any noise.

  “Make it five minutes,” I say. “The room is small and a mess. I’ll have to push furniture around to get under the bed.”

  “Four and move, the clock is ticking,” he growls.

  I step over the corpse of the president of the Knights and doing so I am suddenly aware that I am now acting president. Fuck, the irony of life will never cease to amaze me.

  I rush to the first floor and into Zach’s play room. I turn on the light and tilt the bed sideways and, what do you know, hidden under hundreds of dust bunnies, there’s an obvious trap in the wooden floor. I pull my knife from my boot and slide it between two disjointed planks to lift the trap door.

  There’s a metal box inside. I try to pull it out of the hole but it must be screwed in. I look at the key set to identify the right one while screaming, “I got it. It’s riveted to the floor, I need to open it.”

  “You have less than two minutes,” is the answer I get.

  There will be no reasoning with the man.

  Forcing myself to remain calm I insert the key in the lock and pry the box open. I grab the bundles of cash and run downstairs after hiding my knife back in my boot.

  The man is now standing by the door. He has one arm wrapped around Sally’s waist and another around her throat. I barely notice the gun flat on her belly. The only thing I see is the knife under her chin and the blood oozing from a cut on her neck. Shit, he’s nicked her without any voluntary pressure, this means the knife is sharp enough to do real damage.

  “What do you want me to do with the money?” I ask.

  “In her bag,” he says and he presses the knife a little higher on Sally’s throat creating a new curtain of blood on her neck as she opens her bag and holds it out to me. Her hands and the sleeves of her jacket are soaked with blood but it doesn’t seem to be hers. I can see she’s trying really hard not to shake but in her wide-open eyes I can read terror.

  I step forward to drop the money in the handbag and the bastard slides the blade across Sally neck a little more to draw a deeper bloody necklace.

  “If you let her go I will forget that I ever saw your face,” I say. “But if you harm her, I will take care of you and I promise that I will make you wish you were locked up in a cell with a bunch of niggers and spicks.”

  “I hear you,” he answers. “And I kinda respect a man who protects what’s his so here’s the deal. You don’t even try to follow me and I’ll set her free tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sally

  The man is still pressing his knife on my neck as we walk out of the club. I feel warm liquid sliding down my throat. The bastard cut me. Now I really regret abandoning the high heel shoes I wore during the ceremony, trading them for my flat boots. With the pointy killer heels I probably could have done some serious damage to his feet and escaped. Or does that only happen in the movies?

  At some point he’s going to have to let me go to get us settled in the car unless … oh no! I send a silent prayer that he doesn’t lock me up in the trunk of the car. I hate small enclosed places. Please, please, please, no trunk.

  “You’re going to drive” he says, but opens the passenger door and motions for me to get in, taking my handbag from me and throwing on the back seat. “Move slowly into the driver’s seat.”

  Okay that’s one way to make sure I don’t run while he walks to the other side of the car.

  I’m having an out of body experience. It’s me but it’s not me. I’m watching myself slide over the front seat of the man’s car all the way to the driver’s seat. I’m still terrified but it’s as if I’ve taken a step back and allowed my brain to engage again. I’m on my own from now on. I have to think.

  I consider opening the door and escaping this way but before I even have a chance to look for the door handle he’s snapped one handcuff on my wrist and the other on the wheel. So that’s out too. The only thing left for me
to do is to butter him up.

  “You didn’t need to do that you know,” I say with the sweetest tone I can muster. “You gave your word to Slider. If it’s good enough for him not to come after you, it has to be good enough for me.”

  He looks at me strangely as if trying to figure out if I’m as dumb as I pretend to be or not. I don’t bat my eyes but I do lower them in a submissive way and look at him through my lashes.

  “Shut up and drive,” he says putting the key in the ignition.

  “Where are we going?” I ask while adjusting the front seat. My right hand doesn’t reach all the way to the rearview mirror so I don’t bother trying. The gear shift is by the wheel so I guess I’ll be able to drive with the cuff on.

  “You’ll see it when we get there,” he barks and since I’m still not moving he asks “What the fuck are you waiting for?”

  “You turning the engine on,” I say lifting my right hand as much as I can to remind me he’s cuffed me to the wheel.

  “Oh right, sorry, my bad,” he says surprising me.

  His mother did one thing right, being polite is second nature. He starts the engine and I shift to reverse and slowly ease out of the parking spot when he presses his feet over mine to step on the gas while turning the wheel. The damage is instant not only to my wrist but also to Prince’s bike and to the one that was parked next to it. Only when the car has rolled over the back wheel of both motorcycles does he release his grip.

  Ignoring my tears and my cursing, he says, “Now we know he won’t follow, Turn right.”

  Well the good news is that it’s not Slider’s bike but the bad news is that looking in the rearview mirror I don’t see him rushing out to save me. Does he trust this man to let me go like he said he would? Or maybe he’s holding Prince’s hand so he won’t die alone.

  I try to ignore all the blood on my hands and on the sleeves of my jacket. If the man lets me live I’m burning that leather. I won’t be walking around with a constant reminder of this day. I’m not even sure that what I did helped at all. There’s no doubt the guy on the floor when we arrived is dead. I think it’s Stallion, the president of the Knights. Even if Slider doesn’t come after him to get me back, my kidnapper is as good as dead. No one kills an MC Prez and gets away with it.

  Maybe there’s still a chance for Prince. Maybe Slider can get an ambulance in time for him.

  “Where are we going?” I ask again looking at him.

  “If you want to live stop looking at me,” he says.

  I avert my eyes right away.

  “No offense meant but you don’t have to worry about me trying to remember you,” I protest. “Because there’s nothing I would like more than to erase the past hour from my memory.”

  “Good, then don’t look at me again and you’ll be fine. Now turn right at the next light and pull in the second driveway.”

  I follow his instructions and pull in the back entrance of a commercial lot. The man opens the glove compartment and pulls out a beeper that opens an electrical door.

  Even though I concentrate on not looking in his direction, before he closes the compartment I can’t help but notice from the corner of my eye that there’s another gun in there and what looks like a shield. I’ve gotta be dreaming, it can’t be a shield. Police officers don’t go around slicing people’s throats like that man did with Stallion.

  I drive in the open space that looks like a storage facility for a store that must have gone out of business because there’s nothing but cardboard boxes and other wrapping trash. I switch to park and he shuts off the engine and takes the key. He walks out of the car, switches the light on, clicks the gate down and looks around the place before opening my door and unchaining me from the wheel. I follow him to three concrete steps that lead to an inside door. Probably the door to the adjacent store.

  As he extends his arm to tie me to the metal handrail of those steps, I protest.

  “Wait. Are you going to leave me here for a while?”

  “Yeah, that’s the plan, that or killing you.”

  “See, I’m totally on board with your plan but please, can I go to the bathroom first? I really, really need to go.” I keep my eyes on his shoes, nice black polished loafers, waiting for him to make his decision. What is it they say? The shoes tell a lot about the man. What does perfectly polish mean?

  “Please, please, please, it will only take a minute,” I beg.

  “Okay,” he says and drags me to the other corner of the warehouse. “Just leave the door open.”

  The toilets are disgustingly filthy but who cares. When I gotta go, I gotta go. As I do, I hear him mumble about those bloody women and their miniature bladders. I try to see if there’s anything in here that I could use later on and it’s only when I reach out for the paper that it hits me. Inside the central thingy that holds the roll there’s usually a metal spring.

  In the movies the hero always manage to escape using a hairpin to unlock the cuffs, that thingy is way sturdier than a hairpin so maybe I could use it to pick the lock.

  I walk out of the toilet with the roll of toilet paper in my hand and the plastic tube in my left back pocket. If he drives away and leaves me here by myself I will have something to keep me occupied.

  “What the hell?” he says.

  The temptation is strong to glare at him but instead I keep my eyes to the floor.

  “Just in case I need to stay a while,” I explain. “May I ask how long I’ll be tied up here?”

  “Until they find you.”

  “I see.”

  He cuffs me up to the handrail, the support at each end allowing me to move up or down the steps, but not far off them.

  “Could I ask you for another favor?”

  I watch his shoes stop and turn around to face me.

  “I should have shot you at the club. You’re a real pain in my but,” he says and I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious. “What do you want now?”

  “My handbag?” I whisper.

  “No.”

  I don’t hide my disappointment. I need to work on letting go of things. ‘Specially when I think my request is reasonable. “Sorry, never mind.”

  The loafers start to move and then come back in place.

  “What’s so special about that bag anyway?” he asks.

  “It’s not the bag. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the bag. It’s my wallet with the credit cards. You know, all that stuff is a pain to replace. Same goes for my keys. I live alone and I’m not sure anyone has a double.”

  He turns around and walks to the car, bends over to grab my bag from the back seat, opens my wallet, looks at the content, studies my driver’s license and tosses it on the floor with my car keys.

  “Anything else milady?” I don’t look up but I can hear a smile in his voice. I want to say that I didn’t mean my car keys that I have a double for, but my house keys that I don’t but I think I’ve pushed my luck far enough for the night.

  He may be acting like a gentleman right now, I can’t forget he’s a ruthless killers first. So I just say, “No, sir, thank you, sir.”

  He drives away and the only thing I can think about is how grateful I am that he’s left the light on.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Slider

  As I watch the man walk out of the club with Sally, I know I’ve seen him before but I can’t put a name on the face. Who ever he is, he’s a dead man. I’ve never felt such rage in my life. I step out the door and watch him shove her into the passenger side of the car. I hope that she has the reflex to bolt out when he walks around the vehicle but no, he pushes her on to the driver seat… and now the bastard cuffs her to the wheel.

  There’s nothing I can do for her at that point so I turn on the main switch which our visitor had obviously been unable to find. A quick glance at Stallion confirms that he’s been dead for a while. Where is Prince? I find him lying on his back behind the bar. His breathing is labored. He took one in the arm. It’s bleeding but not the end of the worl
d. The problem seems to be that he took another bullet in the lower abdomen, but I can’t tell where because someone packed the wound with clean dish towels.

  While looking I pick up the phone and dial 911 to call in an ambulance and I introduce myself giving my real name and my badge number.

  I go crouch next to Prince, he’s glassy eyed. I can’t tell if he’s conscious or not but, just in case, I squeeze his hand and say, “Hold on brother, you’re gonna pull out of this one. Remember there’s this crazy hot Tornado chick that’s sweet on you.”

  A corner of his mouth twitches showing me that he’s still conscious.

  “Anything in your locker you wouldn’t want the cops to find?” I ask. He squeezes my hand slightly. “Okay, I’ll go look.”

  I start with the dancer’s dressing room. The picture Sally wanted is taped to her locker door with a few others. I take them all and put them back to back in my inside pocket. I look through the rest and it’s nothing but her costumes which I abandon.

  Next I go to the guy’s room. Wow, surprise! Prince’s locker it’s impeccable. Clean t-shirts piled with military precision. I mess it up a little looking for what he doesn’t want found. I see a folding razor with a mother of pearl handle, I slide it in the back pocket of my jeans and continue my search to find, at the bottom of a toiletry bag, an old fashioned revolver. I tuck it in the back of my belt and close the locker.

  From the bottom of my shoe polish box, I retrieve my shield in my own locker and tuck it prominently on my belt. I return to the main room and hear sirens getting close. From under the bar, I take out my holster and my service weapon.

  This feels really strange. I’m a regular detective again. Maybe it’s for the best since now I have to find my girl. At the door of the bar two cops in uniform appear with their guns out. I identify myself and tell them the place is secure.

  The two EMTs arrive, one man, one woman. I walk them to the bar and the woman tries to kneel beside Prince.

  “I can’t work behind the bar,” the woman says. “We need to pull him out.”