Simon hunched his shoulder up to hold his phone, shrugged into his jacket, and grabbed his keys. “Where are you?”
Jacob gave a frustrated-sounding snort. “Fuck if I know. I’m in the parking lot of some La Fiesta.”
“Use the GPS on your phone.”
“No offense, Si, but if Ihadmy phone, I wouldn’t be calling you,” Jacob said. “I’d be on with Uber. Hold on.”
There was the click of the phone being set down, and Simon let himself out of the hall and headed to the elevator. He hesitated with his finger on the call button and wondered bleakly if Jacob was playing him for a fool again.
“Si? You still there?”
“Where are you?”
“Castroville. Thanks, Si.”
The smart thing to do was play along, tap into their old connection—however unreal and shabby it had been. Simon hung up and stabbed the button to take him down to the parking garage. The expensively nondescript company car sat in his space, looking bland and gray.
He’d always known Jacob was trouble. Finding out he was a thief had just upped the ante.
The Castroville La Fiesta was locked up when Simon got there, the shutters dragged down over the doors. There was no sign of Jacob. Simon pulled up on the other side of the street and idled the engine as he scanned the parking lot through the smoked glass window.
There was a phone booth mounted on the wall next to the padlocked Reddy Ice freezer, and the handset dangled on the wire cord. The wind set it swinging back and forth.
He pulled his phone out and checked the messages. Jacob had said he didn’t have his phone, but Jacob said a lot of things, and hewasa thief. Not this time, though. The only notification he had was from one of his security team. No sign of Jacob at his favorite club.
Yeah, well, tell me something I don’t know.
Simon swiped the phone shut and took a last glance up and down the street. He clocked the homeless guy at the end of the street, squatting in the doorway of a shop under a Mylar blanket, and a light in the window of a run-down house with a boarded-up window and a For Sale sign in the dead square outside. There was an overflowing bin on the pavement, stuffed with plastic bags and balls of grease-stained paper.
Habitual paranoia twitched at the back of his brain and dripped sour adrenaline down his spine. That wasn’t unusual. Eventually he got used to it and it was just gibbering background suspicion. Then Simon got out of the car, gave his jacket a hitch over his holster, and strode across the road and the cracked concrete to the dangling phone.
He picked it up and put the handset back on the hook. The plastic was wet. Simon pulled his hand back, took a quick glance at the dark stains, and then grimaced and wiped his hand on his leg.
Maybe this time Jacob had lied to the wrong person.
Simon really didn’t want to care. He crouched down, pulled a slim, finger-long flashlight out of a pocket, and flicked it on to examine the ground. It was hard to tell, and concrete wasn’t the most forgiving surface for tracking, but he could see scuff marks.
“Damn it,” he growled as he stood up.
Maybe he was going to kill Jacob, but he wasn’t okay with someone else doing it. He glanced around and assessed the approacheshe’dhave used. There was no way that Jacob wouldn’t have seen them coming—and he wasn’t a fighter. He’d have run.
The nearest corner was to the left. Simon went that way, and with difficulty, controlled the urge to run. He looked out of place enough without drawing any more attention to himself, so he walked briskly and with purpose, as though he knew where he was going.
He saw the car first. An idling SUV parked on the other side of the road with tinted windows and no plates. Simon knew security-modded cars well enough to recognize one when he saw it. He slowed down, and the hit of real adrenaline, not just PTSD habit, punched his heart rate up.
Two men in jeans and unremarkable brown leather bomber jackets hustled out of the back of the supermarket. They were so wide they looked short, but they were easily hauling the long body of a blond man across the car park.
Jacob. He wasn’t unconscious—or dead. Simon had seen enough people he cared about dragged out of firefights to knowexactlyhow that looked. He was hurt, though. His sneakers dragged, and his ankles turned awkwardly every time he tried to cooperate with the walking. One of the two men—hair a ginger blush cut close to his scalp—twisted Jacob’s arm viciously when he stumbled.
Anger hit Simon in the gut—acid hot. Maybe he couldn’t feel just one thing about Jacob, but those two he could get a nice, clean hate on for.
“Hey. Hey, is he okay?” he yelled and stretched his legs into a ground-eating stride. He pulled his phone with his off hand and waved it. “I got a call there’d been some trouble.”
The two men traded looks over the top of Jacob’s head. The ginger man shrugged Jacob’s weight off onto his partner and walked toward Simon with his hands out and a smile on his face.
“Our friend just had a few,” he said. The fake grin that stretched his mouth didn’t reach his dead predator’s eyes. “We’ll get him home safe. No worries.”
Ginger moved like he knew how to fight. Put that with the quick professional communication with his teammate, and it pointed to someone spending a lot of money at some point to train this guy.
