Stripped

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“You want to follow him?” she said.

He frowned. “I thought you lost your psychic ability.”

She rolled her eyes impatiently. “A girl doesn’t have to be psychic to figure out what you want to do, Mac. I mean, if I were you…”

He slid into the passenger seat. “You’d make a great cop.”

She turned the key in the ignition. “I’d suck as a cop and you know it. No matter how I try—and, frankly, I don’t try, very hard or very often—I can’t manage to follow rules.”

With a quick glance over her shoulder, Lilith eased out of the parking space, then maneuvered down the row just as the tail end of Boothe Thompson’s car dipped down the ramp.

“I’ve followed rules my entire life,” Mac lamented, “and look where it’s gotten me.”

Lilith didn’t reply, concentrating instead on pursuing their quarry at a stealthy distance, reinforcing Mac’s suggestion that she’d make a decent police officer. Psychic or not, Lilith was a street-smart woman, and if she possessed even a modicum of fear, she kept the emotion skillfully hidden. He wouldn’t take this risk with any other civilian in the car, much less driving. Besides, they were just following someone. He didn’t anticipate any danger to anyone but himself, since stalking charges didn’t look good on the chief of detectives job evaluation. If Thompson made him and complained to the mayor, his suspension would become permanent.

Unaffected by the potential consequences, Lilith clucked her tongue but continued to pursue the Roadster at a safe but tight distance. “I’m corrupting you,” she said without the least bit of remorse.

“Maybe it’s about time.”

The light at the corner changed to red, trapping Thompson’s car at the intersection. Lilith used the delay to turn toward him completely.

“Damn, Mancusi. Just when I thought I was over you, you go and do something that’s got me melting inside. Putting your job on the line. Disobeying orders. Breaking laws.”

Even with the rumbling of the engine and the vibration of the overstressed metal beneath the stripped leather seats, Mac heard her breath switch from normal aspiration to tiny little pants. The green rings of her irises tightened into strips of intense color.

“Bad boys turn you on?” he asked, realizing for the first time that he knew little, if anything, about her sexual past. Beyond him, of course. Beyond assurances of safe-sex practices, neither one of them had shared many details about previous lovers. Their relationship, such that it was, had left little time for conversation.

“On occasion,” she confessed haughtily. “But if you want to really get me wet, it’s the good guys gone bad who do the trick.”

Before he could stop himself, Mac grabbed the back of her head, yanked her close and kissed her hard. The jolt of electricity that shot through his body nearly sent his heart into cardiac arrest. She tasted like honey and tea and woman. She smelled of melted candle wax and fragrant herbs. Her tongue battled with his, fighting for dominance, yielding only after he slipped his fingers into her hair and teased the tips of her earlobes with his thumbs. She whimpered, acquiesced, then retaliated by splaying her palms over his chest and pressing hard against his beating heart. His muscles bunched and ached as he fought from pulling her out of the driver’s seat and onto his lap.

But no matter how much he wanted to make love to Lilith and lose himself in the hot, familiar sex they’d once shared so freely, the honk from the car behind them reminded them that they had a more pressing goal.

With a look that promised more at the soonest opportunity, Lilith jumped back behind the wheel and threw the car into gear. They’d lost some ground on Thompson, but thanks to rush-hour Chicago traffic, they hadn’t fallen too far behind.

The rest of the trip transpired in relative silence, with Mac breaking the thick quiet with quick instructions that Lilith deftly followed. They arrived at the South Side neighborhood unseen. Surrounded by the common props of industrial blight—overturned garbage cans, one shuttered door or window for every visible pane of glass, loiterers on the street who ranged in age from about fourteen to eighty but who all shared a common distaste for hygiene—Mac’s battered car blended in.

Lilith slid the Mustang into a space in front of a Laundromat, while Boothe double-parked across the street in front of a dingy bar whose only glitter came from a score of flickering neon signs.

The Lamborghini gleamed amid all the dust and grime, yet none of the people on the street seemed to stare or ogle the vehicle. A few, however, stepped quickly away.

Boothe got out of the car, his step springy as he engaged the security alarm, which Mac figured had to be the type that shut down the engine at unauthorized entrance or else Thompson would never park in this neighborhood. Of course, a shut-off switch wasn’t going to stop someone from relieving him of his state-of-the-art car stereo or any other sellable items stored in the vehicle.

In contrast to the attorney, who acted as if he walked these mean streets every day, Goins had his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his head buried in his upturned collar despite the late-summer heat.

“Hmm, if you drove a pimped ride like his, would you leave it alone, illegally parked, in this neighborhood?” Lilith asked.

Mac’s mind whizzed with a dozen scenarios, each as unlikely as the next, as to why Boothe Thompson would drive Pogo Goins home, much less join him in some dive bar for a drink. The same dive bar that was the last known location of Goins’s stolen car.

“Seems to me that Thompson knows his ride is safe here, where Goins’s wasn’t. And do you notice anything about the locals?”

Lilith took her time, leaning forward and then back. “They don’t seem to think that a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car on their street is anything unusual. Which means…?”

“Mr. Thompson is a fixture.”

“He is a defense attorney. I’d venture to guess that there are a lot of people around here who need defending.”

“Yeah, by fee-free public defenders, not attorneys who import their cars, their suits, their shoes and their jewelry from Italy.”

“How do you know that ring is from Italy?” she asked, curious.

He tapped his temple with his finger. “Logic, deduction and intense police work.”

She smirked. “He bragged about it, didn’t he?”

Mac matched her sardonic grin with one of his own. “Maybe. Once. Boothe Thompson isn’t the kind of guy who wants to blend into the woodwork.”

“Hence his sharing a brew with a guy whose entire net worth is less than the cost of Thompson’s haircut.”

“Precisely.”

Mac unbuckled his seat belt and opened the car door. Lilith moved to do the same, but he stopped her. “Whoa, there, hot stuff. I broke enough rules letting you tail the guy. As a civilian, you stay in the car.”

She skewed him with a bored expression, then proceeded to do what she wanted to anyway. “If that’s the case, you need to get that fine ass of yours back in the car, too. Remember? You’re among mortals now, too.”

The irony struck Lilith powerfully, but she fought her reaction and instead concentrated on scoping out her surroundings, something she’d never really had to do before her psychic abilities had been stripped away. Like Mac, she’d lost the one thing she’d depended on her entire life to define who she was. For her, it was her magic. In his case, his position of authority. In her many forays into his mind, she’d witnessed scenes of six-year-old Mac lecturing his two-year-old brother and three-year-old cousin on the proper way to engage their G.I.Joes in action. She’d seen glimpses of him captaining his football team with strictness that rivaled the hard-assed coach. His service in the military had struck her most deeply. He’d had the lives of his men in his hands, and instead of fearing his responsibilities, the authority had empowered him.

Too bad she had to defy him now. She couldn’t prove a thing to the Council about her ability to sacrifice for others and act selflessly if she sat in the car, now could she?

Luckily he didn’t argue. She locked the car door and tossed him the keys. Mac popped the trunk, dug out a crappy old jacket from underneath his box and shrugged into it, lifting the hood over his head in a way that made him look like a stalker or the Unabomber—and also ensured that he fit right in with the locals. He grabbed a moldy, holey sweater and held it toward her.

She sneered. “Not in this lifetime, Mancusi.”

“You want everyone noticing you?”

“They’ll notice me no matter what bag lady costume you try to put on me,” she said, smoothing her hand over her hip.

“It’s a curse.”

He chuckled. “Tell me about it.”

Abandoning the trunk, he went into the backseat and pulled out his own bomber-style leather jacket. One thing about Chicagoites—they never went far without a collection of outerwear, even if the weather, like today’s, bordered on balmy.

She shrugged into his jacket and inhaled the intoxicating scents of tanned animal skin and male musk. Only a few days ago, such sensory overload would have jolted her with a flash of premonition. Instead she experienced a dizzying infiltration of memory—her own—of wearing this jacket and nothing else after Mac had spent the night on a stakeout. They’d made love in the courtyard of his apartment building, then again on the stairs. The mating had been much like the jacket itself—carefully made, warm and hinting of age and experience.

The recollection made her shiver.

“You okay?” he asked, his eyes glinting as if he knew precisely what she was thinking about.

She quirked a grin. “I’d be better if we were crushing the hibiscus again rather than following two creeps into a crappy bar.”

He bit his lip and, if she wasn’t mistaken, blushed before he turned back toward the street. “So would I.”

They waited for a delivery truck to squeeze around the Lamborghini, then used the massive vehicle as cover to cross the street unseen. For all they knew, Boothe had positioned himself next to one of the blackened windows. Wouldn’t the defense attorney have a field day reporting back to the mayor that a detective who had lost his badge and a civilian with a questionable reputation were tailing him?

They slipped into an alley next to the bar, nearly tripping over a guy napping in a cardboard box.

“How do we play this?” she asked as they picked their way through the garbage cans to the side-door entrance to the bar. “Boothe Thompson isn’t stupid.”

Mac tested the doorknob, rolling his eyes when it opened without protest. “I’m counting on this joint being anything but a clean, well-lighted place. Add to it the clouds of cigarette smoke and we should be fine.”

Though Lilith doubted the bar served more than peanuts or stale chips with their well drinks and less-than-premium beers, the kitchen smelled like rotted cabbage and rancid grease. Just beyond the door, a stereo blared, unbalanced to favor the bass, with hard-metal riffs that would effectively drown out any conversations transpiring within. Lilith held her nose as they scurried through the kitchen like the rats that clearly lived among the torn cardboard boxes and grimy crates. Mac opened the swinging door into the bar a few inches, spotted Boothe Thompson sitting near the back, then grabbed Lilith’s hand and hauled her inside.

She nearly choked from the stench of tobacco and unwashed bodies, suddenly craving the sweet celery and woodsy cedar that dominated her altar in her quest for healing. Mac dragged her into a booth, gestured to the bartender for two beers and pulled the hood of his jacket closer to his face.