Without A Trace

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She leaned on the gun, pressed its muzzle into his cheek. “Don’t move!” she shouted.

The man started shouting back, spittle flying from his lips. What was he saying? His arms flailed, hitting her randomly and hard. She struggled to get her knee on his elbow, then had to defend against a sudden strike toward her neck.

“Help me out here, Zhao!”

A black-booted foot pinned the man’s windmilling arm to the floor and a flood of lilting, diving words spilled from Zhao’s mouth. The man beneath her abruptly quit fighting.

Nikki, breathing hard, warily leaned back, though she kept the gun on her assailant. “What the hell did you say to him?”

“That you are a crazy American woman and I cannot control you, so he should be still before you lose your mind and kill him.”

“Great.”

“What?” he asked as he retrieved the man’s gun from the floor. “It worked.”

Nikki caught the scent of freshly cut grass. Zhao was teasing her.

She let her smile freeze into a grimace and leaned again toward the man she sat on. He turned his face away, clearly afraid now.

“You’re right,” she admitted. “What does he know?”

Zhao spoke at length with him. During the exchange, she heard Wo Shing Wo mentioned several times, then the conversation seemed to get darker. Wet pennies emanated from Zhao and the man seemed to be trying to make himself smaller, as if afraid of being struck.

“What’s going on?” she asked after Zhao stopped speaking.

He turned toward her then and she saw beneath the black gauze the hard planes of his face. “This man manages one of the Wo’s operations. He’s the Chou Hai—a liaison officer.”

“Yeah. And?”

Zhao’s tone was stiff. “He is to prepare this boat to go to Vladivostok with its cargo.”

“Of what?” And why do I have to keep prompting you? she thought. Cooperate with me.

Angry copper surrounded her, nearly stealing her breath.

“Children. For sex slaves.”

“Damn pervert,” Nikki snarled. She grabbed the front of the man’s coveralls in her fist. “Full cargo? How many children is that?” Her voice rose. “Dozens? Hundreds? How many? Tell me!” She shook him hard, then shoved him back against the floor, away from her as if he stank.

In fact, he did. Mostly of fear. But not of shame or remorse.

Johnny’s hand covered her shoulder. “It’s a large operation. The mainland has plenty of unwanted girls to sell to the highest bidder.” His voice was hard and low. “We’ll shut these bastards down right now.” He then said something to the man, who covered his face with his hands.

Nikki guessed Johnny didn’t have to flash his badge for this guy to know he was in deep trouble.

“What about the passenger?” she asked, pulling herself back to the task at hand.

Another long conversation, and then Johnny said, “He doesn’t know anything about who was coming in on this boat.”

“But the signal’s here. My mark is aboard somewhere.”

Johnny shook his head. “A few passengers came aboard, but they left en route. He’s very clear about that. The rest is just the loaded containers and the crew to sail.”

So was Diviner a crew member? And if he or she was aboard, where?

Frustrated, she yanked open a window hatch, stuck her PDA outside and hit the search button.

The PDA blinked blankly at her.

Diviner was gone.

Chapter 5

The Electric Dragon boomed and throbbed in a city that boomed and throbbed, flashed, chattered, clanged, blared, crashed, hammered, screamed, glittered and whooped.

Nikki had been surreptitiously breathing through her mouth, just to be safe, as she and Johnny walked to the club. The last thing she needed was a migraine from scent overload.

She couldn’t complain, though. The Electric Dragon was a Wo Shing Wo lair, and it’d been her idea to leverage the information they’d pulled from the liaison aboard the SHA vessel to get into the club and find out who or what exactly that vessel was carrying. The slave manager—and Nikki shuddered with disgust when she thought about it—hadn’t known what the incoming cargo was, no matter how threatening she’d looked. But Johnny’s connection to the Hong Kong police meant the law now had a bargaining chip. If they could squeeze that information about Diviner from a Wo putz, they would.

And the slave manager—along with the Sun Yee On soldiers who’d attacked his ship—would just have to sit in the Kowloon holding cell run by one of Johnny’s HK police buddies in the meantime.

The club entrance’s dragon blew red neon flames against a backdrop of more neon. Nikki wished she’d had her sunglasses. Even now, at nearly two o’clock in the morning, she could have used them against all the light beating on her retinas as she and Johnny walked along the streets of Sai Ying Pun, one of the seedier-looking parts of west central Hong Kong.

When the never-ending crowds pressed against her, she was grateful for Johnny’s calming presence. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when to reach for her hand to keep her from being swallowed up and carried away in the throngs still crowding the sidewalks.

Now, he stood before the club’s beefy bouncer, one hip cocked in a careless stance, his black leather jacket’s lapel kicked up against his neck.

He looked, Nikki thought with a spark of awareness, like a young Chow Yun-Fat—beautiful and masculine, sensitive and tough all at once. Nikki closed her eyes briefly against a vision of the actor sprawled bare-chested on a bed in The Killer, and gave herself a mental shake. You can take him home, she heard Jess’s voice tease her, but you can’t keep him.

She wasn’t sure she dared try to take him home.

Nevertheless, he was definitely the right guy in the right place, she thought as he hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her in close. The bouncer was giving her what Jess used to call the Skanky Eye and saying something to Johnny.

She resisted the urge to glance down at the getup Johnny had given her at his place, where they’d stopped to change clothes and lose the camouflage face paint. She’d wanted to go back to her hotel to pick up her own clothing, but he’d insisted on gearing her out.

All his girlfriends must have been tiny because, even as small as she was, the black leather bustier and black skirt he’d grabbed for her out of a closet came close to being obscene. Good thing he’d had a lightweight wrap to put over her shoulders. She’d felt a passing wave of shame—she was actually more demure than most women her age.

But given the bouncer’s admiring glance down the shirt’s opening, not to mention the strong scent of sandalwood coming off him, the saucy clothes were a good idea, morals be damned. She looked like someone who might be a prostitute, not someone who could, or would, break his kneecaps. That made for a decent element of surprise.

“Let’s go,” Johnny said after a few words with the bouncer. He jerked his head at the much larger man and grinned, leering a little at her.

“Great,” she said as she strode through the door. “Meat market, eh, mal parido?”

Johnny shrugged, still nonchalant.

Nikki gave up wondering if he knew he’d been insulted and squeezed through the ever-present crowd into the club. This time it was her keeping a tight hold on his hand as they threaded their way to the bar. Once there, Johnny nodded to several angry-looking toughs that Nikki pegged immediately as the kind of guys you didn’t hang around with unless you were armed.

She was pretty sure Johnny was armed, but where he kept his guns, she was afraid to wonder. His black leather pants didn’t leave room for imagination, much less firearms.

She hoisted herself onto a just-vacated bar stool and tried to ignore the man pressing between her and the guy on the next stool. It was more togetherness than she was used to, or ever wanted to experience, but for the most part her new good friend seemed harmless, more interested in getting his drink and getting back on the dance floor than anything else.

While Johnny spoke with a bartender, she cased the joint.

The Electric Dragon was a happening place, packed to the gills with young men and women writhing to the pulsing beat of a techno pop band whose lead singer’s voice could strip paint off walls. The band was cloistered behind a cage, though it was hard to tell whether that was part of the band’s aesthetic sensibilities or for their protection.