Hidden Steel Read online

  “It might.” But he didn’t meet her gaze.

  “Be just as well,” she said. “Been 5-0 hanging around here all day, I hear.”

  “Cops?” That surprised him. Nothing he’d seen so far indicated that the cops were in on Mickey’s little adventure.

  She shook her head, brisk and disapproving. “Someone’s muscle, trying too hard to look like they aren’t watching the place.”

  Steve rubbed a careful hand across the back of his neck—very careful. “Maybe I should stay here, then. Give them something to look at.” Keep them from looking in Mickey’s new direction.

  “Scared,” she said, picking up on their previous conversation and letting scorn put an edge to it.

  He didn’t respond, and she dismissed him with a wave, leaving the gym with an I-own-the-world walk. But of course she was right. Scared. Of what would happen if he found Mickey again; of what would happen if he didn’t.

  Just because she didn’t want help didn’t mean she didn’t need it.

  And Steve …

  Didn’t even really understand what was at stake. He just knew it had quickly become far too important to him that she come out on top—alive and kicking and singing some old pop tune while she was at it.

  Except she had a right to make her own decisions … to make her own way.

  Maybe that shower would help. Maybe it would clear his mind, make everything clear. What to do next, how to get her to that happy ending.

  But he didn’t think he was headed for easy answers.

  * * * * *

  Mickey stood in the cool evening shadow of a dun brick building, but her shivers didn’t come from the shade at all. Here. This is the place.

  Where she’d woken, a mystery to herself. In handcuffs. Facing down the cold expression of a woman who was used to getting what she wanted.

  At the time Mickey had been frightened … confused … more than a little sick.

  Now she was suddenly just mad.

  It didn’t matter who she was … what she might have done. How dare they play around with experimental drugs? How dare they leave her fumbling to figure out who she was, who she could trust, and who she needed to find? And dammit, what if no one was feeding that cat?

  … silver tabby, pretending not to see the twitching, dangling toy just out of reach, braided rug beneath tucked paws …

  The building across the street loomed sleek and new … and yet somehow also looked abandoned. The small, neat name and logo combination on the corner of the structure created an air of snooty arrogance. If you don’t already know who we are, we don’t care if you notice us or not.

  CapAd.Com. A dot-com building, busted right down to emptiness.

  Mickey circled the building, always staying across the street, sometimes ducking into those buildings—a bank, a bakery—sometimes circling the block before lingering to watch CapAd.Com.

  No one went in; no one came out. Eventually, she discovered that all the doors were locked. Eventually, as night fell, as the business area shut down, she discovered that no one turned on any lights.

  Gone? Or just really, really good at hiding?

  Hard to find rocks of any substance in this manicured neighborhood. Mickey settled for a heavy pot of pansies, acquired from outside the bank. Heavy, no doubt, to discourage people from picking it up and hefting it through someone’s glass front door.

  Which is exactly what she did.

  The resulting crash—glass raining down, pot smashed inside the door, pansies scattered everywhere—was eminently satisfying, but it brought no one running. It brought no one walking, or sauntering, or otherwise into evidence at all.

  So whatever else she was, Mickey was also now a vandal. “Sorry, pansies,” she muttered at them, watching from behind the big blue mail drop on the corner. And to herself, “Sorry, Janie A. Looks like there aren’t any answers waiting here.” No people … no one to interrogate.

  But she couldn’t help herself; when no one responded to the broken door—no police, no curious onlookers—she slipped across the street and through the jagged hole she’d created. Glass crunched beneath her feet, grinding into the carpet.

  Familiar pattern, that carpet.

  She found the stairs; she wished for a flashlight. But by the time she’d climbed those three unlit floors and emerged into the hallway, her eyes were so accustomed to the darkness that the city light through the bank of windows seemed a luxury.

  And standing there at the end of the hallway, unable to suppress another bout of shivering, she thought the dim light was probably also a mercy. It softened the details … blurred them. There was the bathroom, where she’d taken down the doctor. There … that room halfway down the hall, with the door ajar …

  That had been her room. Her prison.

  She made her way there, sneakers silent on the carpet, and pushed the door open.

  They hadn’t cared enough to clean up after themselves. The bed was just as she remembered it, and the medical trash still created vague visual lumps on the typing table turned bedside table. She supposed there had been no real point in cleaning up beyond this; anyone who stumbled across the room wouldn’t have the faintest idea what had happened here, and anyone who knew it was significant also already knew it was here. These people knew how to get while the getting was good.

  She surprised herself with her own reaction to the room—the flush of prickly heat across her face, the faint feeling of disassociation with her body. As if she’d float right on out of it while her body slumped to the ground. Get a grip, Mickey Finn.

  She forced herself to enter the room … to walk around it. To look at the spot where the woman had sat, smiling coldly, offering threats as though they were perfectly reasonable options. She found herself humming, quavery at first, but soon enough it grew to real words, real notes, determined but low. A certain rainbow song, sung by a certain green frog puppet.

  The darkness soaked up the words, leaving a profound silence as she trailed off, running the backs of her fingers down the bed. She wondered if they’d even left the handcuffs in the bathroom. She murmured optimistic lyrics into the room, not much more in tune than the original Muppet version.

  Optimistic or not … there was nothing here to offer her hints about her situation. The other rooms offered no more, not even the clothes she’d arrived in. No conveniently discarded purse, no file on the woman named Naia, no stray driver’s license. She supposed she could search the whole building, but she thought this floor held the best potential—why would they have spread themselves out? And it wouldn’t leave her stuck here all night, vulnerable to discovery and imprisonment from either the cops or her mystery enemies.

  But when she turned for the stairs, she found she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk away. Humming about rainbows didn’t help; the notes went wobbly and then stuck in her throat as she turned her back to the wall and slowly slid down until her bottom hit the carpet. There she stuck, her knees bent, her hands wrapped around her shins.

  How the hell had she ended up here? Who the hell had she been before she’d gotten here? She let her head tip back against the wall and then let her mind wander. By now she knew better than to actively hunt answers and memories. She could make room for them, but if she went chasing after glimpses they could run farther and faster into the deepest corners of her mind than she could ever follow them.

  Images surfaced, and smells. Emotions, unbidden and uncontrollable, gripping her, wringing her until her breath caught. Frightened faces, splattered blood, anger so thick it might smother her—

  But no answers. Only more questions.

  She pulled herself from the reverie, refocusing on the dim carpet patterns in diffuse city light, becoming aware of just how tightly she’d wrapped her fingers around her shins. Ow-worthy, that was. She forced them to relax, pushing up to her feet and shaking out her hands. “Some day we’ll find it …” she whispered to that empty hallway, and turned to the stairs.

  * * * * *

  The
whole city might have been asleep to judge by the empty streets to which Mickey emerged, but she knew better. She might not have a watch, but she discovered she trusted her sense of time. Late evening, that was all. Plenty of time to return to her little closet of a hotel room for a full night’s sleep. And tomorrow …

  She wasn’t sure about tomorrow. She’d hoped to learn something here, and she’d only come away with more questions—and though she could now dress herself nicely enough to hit the public library without gathering attention, she didn’t think she’d find anything in their newspaper archives that she hadn’t found online. But she preferred hardcopy, so—

  “See there?” she told herself, voice low in the darkness as she crossed the street and pondered taking the cross street against the light. “You did learn something.” I prefer hardcopy.

  One had to start somewhere.

  But she wasn’t so distracted by her situation and her options that she didn’t notice a shadow detach itself from a building and head her way. “Dammit,” she said out loud—quite loudly at that. “And I don’t even have my superhero costume.”

  That made the shadow hesitate. It gave her time to spot the second shadow, a husky woman, as she approached from the other side. And Mickey didn’t play any games. “I see you both,” she said, “And I’m armed. So let’s just chat from a distance.” She had the knives, the harness wrapped awkwardly around her waist and under her shirt. She had the sling shot, and she took it from her back pocket, unfolding it—keeping it close to her body. Hidden, in this darkness.

  “We’d prefer to talk in privacy,” the man said.

  “And I’d prefer to talk in strong daylight in the middle of a crowd, but I don’t think either of us is getting what we want.” Mickey considered that a moment. “Okay, you’re actually pretty close to yours. So you start. Can I help you with something that doesn’t involve pain or injury for me? Because if not, we’re already done talking.”

  “We want to bring you in,” the woman said. She’d managed to inch closer in the darkness.

  Mickey casually loaded up the slingshot, loosing a desultory ball bearing without moving the slingshot away from her body—a side shot, just to let the woman know she’d been seen. To keep her wondering about the silent weapon that had bounced steel off the parking meter beside her. “I don’t want to come. Next topic of conversation?”

  “Look,” the man said, holding up a hand to cut off the stronger response of his partner. “You’ve been compromised, but nobody’s judging you. The problem is, you didn’t come back in once you got away. You’ve got to see how that creates concerns. We know they’re looking for you, so it just doesn’t make any sense—”

  “—Why the hell you didn’t come in,” the woman snapped. “We’ve kept this within the agency so far, but Irhaddan hasn’t been so quiet that we can expect that to hold. Is that what you want? The FBI to get in on this? Homeland Security?”

  Whoa.

  Apparently this wasn’t just about her. It wasn’t just about her Mystery Naia. And her recent captors and their mad scientist doctors weren’t the only ones she had to worry about. Irhaddan? “What I want,” she said into their silence, “is to be left alone.”

  The woman made a rude noise. The man had somehow contrived to move closer. Mickey wasn’t about to move back; she had the slingshot loaded. If they wanted to hurt her, they’d have their weapons out, but they didn’t. Not yet. Though she thought, in the darkness, that the woman’s hand hovered near her waistband. The man gave his partner another hard look and turned his good cop act on Mickey. “You’ve got to know that won’t happen. Things aren’t going to get better … they’re going to get worse. I know you—you probably think you can handle this, whatever it is. But you can’t.”

  Mickey said, “I didn’t ask you to come any closer. And I won’t warn you again.” That stopped him, enough for her to switch right back into casual voice and ask, “How’d you find me?” And who are you? What agency?

  But she wasn’t about to ask that one.

  Still, the woman made her rude noise again. “As if we haven’t had them tagged since they got here. It’s been rather amusing, watching their frantic attempts to track you down. How they missed you at that gym—”

  “Until now, you haven’t had any better luck,” Mickey pointed out. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

  The man did, clearly willing to be more direct than the woman. “We’ve been watching this place. Not for you … you’re just a bonus. Why did you come back here? We thought you were taken against your will, but this casts some doubt on that scenario.”

  “Oh, I was taken against my will, all right.” She had no qualms about revealing that much—and no intentions of going anywhere with these people. They could well be from those who’d taken her in the first place—they knew she had no memory, wouldn’t be able to put this encounter in context. She’d be an idiot to believe the tale this pair spun. “And what do they know about the gym?”

  “Spaneas checked with some places the day they lost you,” the man said. “Left a nice trail. We would have been all over it if we’d known you were loose—that it was you he was checking on.” His voice held an honest grimace. “We were a little slow on that one. Only figured it out after they started looking so noisily.”

  Spaneas? Steve’s last name? Steve had checked around without telling her?

  Of course. It was probably SOP for him when someone new came staggering into the gym. Especially if they fainted.

  “Maybe,” the woman said, not nearly as casual as her partner, “we didn’t realize it was her because we expected her to come to us if she shook them off.”

  “Maybe,” Mickey said, sensing the end to their little detente, “I have my reasons.” And she was right about the changing nature of things. The woman took a step, a bold one—one that dared Mickey to prove she had the weapons she’d claimed. And if the man seemed to know and respect her, the woman—if she knew Mickey at all—held no such opinion.

  Her tough luck. Mickey let fly with a ball bearing, genuine slingshot ammo stolen from Steve. She didn’t aim for the parking meter. She put some zing into it.

  The woman yelped; she blistered the air, and if she’d been about to go for her gun, she forgot about it now. “Sonuva—you shot—”

  “Oh, I did not,” Mickey said. Already she had the slingshot reloaded. They might not have any idea what she was using, but now they knew for sure that she had it. “I bruised you. And I told you not to come any closer.”

  “You should have let me handle this,” the man told her, stepping back with some disgust.

  “Because you know her?” the woman spat, one hand clapped to her bruised thigh. “She sure as hell doesn’t seem to know you. Or maybe she just doesn’t like you.”

  “Or maybe I just need to do this my own way.” Now Micky backed up, ready to put more distance between them. Right out into the road she went, stepping off the curb, easing between the bumpers of two parked cars. Someone was working late. “You don’t have to like that. I don’t like it, if you really want to know. But it’s the only way to work this one.” She rather liked that last bit. Almost as if she had the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  “They’re not going to allow that, Jane. You’re only leaving you and your new asset vulnerable to the Irhaddanians—”

  “Oh, let her,” the woman snapped, nearly falling as she tested her leg.

  For the first time, the man became intense. He turned to his partner, his voice low but still hard to miss. “We’ve got to know what she told them,” he said. “We’ve got to find out if we’re compromised!”

  Mickey could have answered that … but she didn’t think they’d listen. Not here on the street, with Mickey the one in control and her loyalty apparently already in question. Now, she thought, as they conferred with an intensity that she suspected to be a trick. The old pretend to argue and suddenly leap on your quarry trick.

  Unless your quarry had already left.


  She took a step back. Another. She cleared the cars; she waited until the argument rose to the kind of fevered pitch that, if she were correct, would lead to the moment of pouncing—and she silently dropped, putting herself behind the car.

  The argument stuttered to a stop.

  “Where—” the woman said.

  “Did you see—?” the man asked.

  “Note to self,” the woman muttered. “That trick works a lot better in the daylight. And damn, my leg hurts. What the hell did she do to me?”

  “There’s no telling.” The man’s voice moved, pacing down the street a few steps. “I told you she’s deceptive, all that sweetness and light. The singing, for God’s sake—all those damned oldies. Why do you think she’s so good at what she does? She wouldn’t be placed in prime territory if she weren’t.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” the woman snapped. “You think you can stop singing her praises long enough to find her? I don’t know if I can walk on this leg.”

  That sounded like a cue. Time to get them away from here. This wasn’t exactly secure, as hiding places went. Wouldn’t even score in a child’s game of hide and seek. Mickey stuck the ball bearing in her cheek and silently felt around for road gravel, choosing the largest piece. She loaded the slingshot, aimed for a high fly ball trajectory, and sent the gravel at the nearest cross street.

  … And the kids scattered, leaving behind one tearful little girl. Leaving Mickey to emerge from her hiding place in the roadside bushes, having already learned that the mystery assault was much more frightening than any tough face she could have put on. No one believed her tough faces. She was sweet … responsible … bearing up so well under her mother’s death—

  She was gonna get nailed if she didn’t hold it together, that’s what.

  She sent out another piece of gravel, letting this one skitter across the distant pavement.

  “Probably a rat,” the woman muttered. Sour grapes from someone who should have respected the directive to back off and stay back. But she was already hop-running after the man.