The Nightmare Thief. Meg Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ smirked. Ran. How apropos of Sabine to employ a Norse goddess as a cover name, one that meant theft. “Masks on. Hold position.”

      “Roger,” she said.

      He had to wear the mask. He was fair, tall, well built, and so handsome that a Hollywood producer had once told him that he could have opened feature films. The word chiseled, he had decided, fit him best. And his presence was magnetic—almost bewitching to women. He saw himself as a classic figure, perhaps Spartan. Nobody who saw him could forget him. He was too striking.

      He raised his binoculars from the strap that hung around his neck. At Candlestick Point, the trees bent beneath the wind. The park’s sad picnic tables were empty. On the muddy beach, a group of young people jogged into sight.

      “It’s them.”

      Von slipped the pistol from the small of his back and chambered a round. Behind the ski mask, his watery blue eyes were eager.

      “Clear the round,” Haugen said.

      Von glanced sharply at him.

      “Do it now,” Haugen said. “We will not damage the merchandise.”

      “But if they run—”

      Haugen clipped him in the side of the head with the walkie-talkie. Von lurched and grabbed his ear. “Christ, you—”

      “Clear the chamber, and safety your weapon. Now. Before I dump you overboard.”

      Struggling to hold himself steady against the chop, Von cleared the chamber and safetied the pistol. He wouldn’t look at Haugen.

      “If they run?” Haugen said. “Of course they’re going to run. They’re young and fit and pumped up, and they think this is a game. We want them to think it’s a game. Our plan depends on them thinking so.”

      He shouted over the roar of the engine, enunciating each word carefully, as if lecturing a cognitively challenged janitor. Von stared at the prow of the boat. His lips were pressed white, his nostrils flaring beneath the ski mask, but he kept his mouth shut this time.

      Haugen aimed the speedboat directly at the beach. The boat was a fine piece of machinery. And the drug runner’s vehicle of choice. Credit Terry Coates—the ex-cop knew his stuff. Too bad for Edge Adventures that the boat had been so easy to steal.

      Haugen breathed in the sharp salt air. So far, so perfect. His team had taken control of the Edge game runners without a fight. Coates had thought briefly about resisting, but the sight of Von’s Glock had stopped him in his tracks. Coates didn’t want to die over a bunch of spoiled college kids.

      No, the Edge game runners had gone down on their knees with their hands behind their heads. Von and Sabine had needed mere seconds to cuff their hands with zip ties and march them to their SUV. Then Haugen and Von took the boat and headed for the rendezvous. Sabine and the other men on her team had driven away with the Edge game runners, transporting them to the leased big rig parked in the middle of the huge truck depot near Candlestick Park.

      The fact that Sabine was now on scene, and in position at the recreation area, meant she and her team had stuffed the game runners inside the big rig—gagged and zip tied in a circle with their feet chained to a ring in the center of the trailer. The game runners couldn’t lie down, couldn’t turn around, couldn’t even kiss one another, much less scream for help or kick the walls to draw attention. And the walls of the trailer were draped with heavy padding, the kind used by moving companies to protect grand pianos in shipment. The padding would deaden any noise. Nobody was going to miss the game runners for at least forty-eight hours. Just like nobody was going to miss Autumn and her friends.

      And that was all the time Haugen needed.

      He finally glanced at Von. “Do you think there’s the slightest chance I’ll risk shooting Autumn Reiniger here, at a public park?”

      Von stared at the beach. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

      Haugen smiled thinly. “Is that wit? A bon mot?” Intellectual gymnastics from the man—Von had just earned back a point or two. “You’re right. I was using a rhetorical device. We will not, I repeat, not risk damaging our investment by injuring Ms. Reiniger.”

      “I think I got it now, boss.” Von looked at the beach. “Just one question.”

      “Yes?”

      “Six people in her party, right?”

      “Correct.”

      “So why are there seven of them there on the sand?”

       Chapter 6

      Jo paused at the crest of the ridge. The sun was a gold needle in a deep blue sky. She leaned back against a boulder spackled red with lichen. A moment later, Gabe joined her.

      She swept back curls that had escaped her ponytail. “Thirty seconds. Gotta catch my breath.”

      Gabe shrugged off his backpack and got out a canteen. He took a swig and handed it to her.

      “Thanks.” She drank and wiped her lips. “You have an altimeter?”

      He shook his head. But the rise and fall of his chest told her they were at significant altitude.

      Her truck was parked two miles back and probably a thousand feet below them on a narrow logging road. She and Gabe had been hiking for ninety minutes. According to her Stanislaus National Forest trail guide and the map Evan Delaney had given her, they were still a mile from the abandoned gold mine where Phelps Wylie had been found dead.

      Gabe scanned the crown of the forest. All around, covering the mountainside, were lodgepole pine, white fir, and dogwoods turning crimson. He pointed at a soaring conifer whose dusty green boughs spread above them.

      “That’s Jeffrey pine. It only grows above six thousand feet.” He smiled at her, a challenge. “Still way too low to worry about supplemental oxygen.”

      “Yeah, sure—you could have HALO jumped and beaten me here. No need to brag.”

      “Nah. The government gets annoyed when a PJ uses Air National Guard resources to meet his girlfriend for a date.”

      He set his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. He looked like he was in fighting trim, and he was talking like it too, as a deflective mechanism. But he couldn’t keep Jo from surreptitiously doing a visual sweep of his vital signs.

      His skin tone was good: bronze, with a ruddy glow from the hike. Respirations were rapid, but that could be expected because of the altitude. His pulse was strong. She could see it beating in his neck, where it met the line of his jaw. His eyes were clear, dark, and focused. On her.

      She slid her arms around him and kissed that beating pulse point. Wordlessly he pulled her tight against him and held her. She felt him breathing. He kissed the top of her head and then she tilted her face up and he kissed her right, on the lips. Twice.

      Then he smiled, patted her backside, and picked up his pack again. “Wasting daylight, campers.”

      Jo СКАЧАТЬ