After locking the door behind us, his hand in mine, Magnus stepped silently down the hall toward the stairs. The woman still slept in Arnaud’s bed, perhaps drugged to the max. I hated leaving her, but I had no choice.He has the keys. Maybe we can come back, snatch her.
“Who the fuck’re you?”
Chapter Seventeen
Magnus
Jade didn’t hesitate.
Her baton whipped out. She instantly cracked it across Arnaud’s head, dropping him flat to the carpeted hallway. The arm I’d crunched under him, he lay on his face, blood seeping from his thin hair trickling down his cheek. His eyelids and finger twitched madly, making me think she’d really knocked his brains loose.
“Good job,” I muttered. “Let’s go before the cook wonders if something’s amiss.”
“Gawd,” Jade breathed, retracting her baton. “I didn’t even think. Did I kill him?”
Bending, I briefly held my fingers to his face, feeling the light warmth of breath on my skin. “He’s alive. C’mon. Quick and quiet.”
Her hand in mine, we slipped down the stairs, as silent as phantoms, and crossed the house to the back door. Through the closed kitchen door, I heard the cook preparing Arnaud’s lunch, odors of fried onions wafting to my nose. Once outside, I made sure to relock the door, hopefully creating a mess of confusion as to who the intruders were and how they got in.
Without revving the engine, I drove the Jeep down his drive to the street. I glanced back, half-expecting to see Arnaud yelling, waving, running in pursuit of us. If he regainedconsciousness soon, no doubt he’d call his thugs to find the invaders.
“He didn’t recognize us,” Jade commented.
“He would have had you not dropped him,” I replied, watching for trouble and traffic. “I think, from his viewpoint, he caught sight of blondes with spectacles, but he hadn’t the time to look past them to the faces.”
“He’ll put it together, though,” Jade mused. “He’ll figure out it was us.”
“And put blondes in his goons’ watch list?”
“Bingo.”
My head itched horribly under the wig, making me crave to rip it off, but I kept it on. Despite the speed of today’s information spread, it would be a while before all of Arnaud’s allies would know of the change in our appearance. “We may have to get different wigs.”
“Yeah, I figured as much.”
We returned to our hideaway, the heat from last night’s fire still permeating the place. Still, as Jade loaded the pictures we took into the computer, I built a new blaze on the hearth. Ginger, purring and rubbing her cheek against my leg, begged for an ear scratch. Her yet unnamed brother watched stoically from Jade’s sleeping bag.
“Lunch?” I asked.
“Not yet. I’m still full from breakfast.”
Moving the protesting cat, I sat beside Jade to watch the laptop’s screen. The hundreds of photos took time to load, and she hadn’t finished with the first camera yet. When that finished, she plugged in the second, and began the procedure again.
“I think I can call up from this file while that loads,” she murmured, using the mouse pad to open the folder.
Photo icons filled the screen. “Here we go.”
The first pictures she called up were the porn. Clicking slowly through them, she paused on a photo of a man, bare assed naked, standing while a nude woman knelt at his feet, her mouth filled with his erect cock. The photo, clear, concise, showed his face.
“I don’t think that’s his wife giving him a blow job,” I murmured. “And the girl is barely over the legal age of consent.”
“She looks Asian or Filipino,” Jade agreed. “His wife is in her sixties with blue hair.”
“So, we have my old man taking pictures of high government officials with his sex trafficked girls. Keep going. Who else did he nail?”
Jade scrolled through the photos. “That guy looks familiar.”
“He should. He brings you the news every night on the national broadcast. Damn, he’s really small.”
