Without limits ssion and.., p.121
Without Limits: A BWWM Collection of Passion and Desire, page 121
“Who?”
I smiled. “My dead guy.”
Chapter Six
Considering the fact that I’d be committing a crime shortly, I dressed for efficiency: soft, knee-high boots with hard soles, comfortable dark wash jeans, a plain black V-neck t-shirt, and a lightweight jacket. I would have gone for a leather jacket, but it was way too hot outside for that. I piled on the makeup as per usual and thought about tucking a knife into one of the boots, but I had a hunch that they were going to pat me down and I didn’t want it to get confiscated. I also tugged my hair up into a ponytail and let it naturally curl on its own instead of using the flat-iron. I’d found that bad guys didn’t play fair, and they loved to grip a big handful of my hair during a fistfight if possible. The ponytail prevented them from getting as much if they reached for it. I didn’t want bald spots after a tussle.
This time, I let the cab drop me off in front of the bar and strode straight through the double doors, giving a passing nod to the bartender as I headed towards Maurice’s office. The same bodyguard from last night was there and he motioned for me to turn around. I obliged and he did a quick, professional pat-down before letting me in.
Maurice sat at his desk with a pair of rimless reading glasses on his nose, shifting through papers. Dustin lazed about in one of the chairs opposite, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Both glanced up as I walked in. Maurice still looked unimpressed, contrasting how Dustin was shooting heart-lasers out of his eyes at the mere sight of me. Boy, had I done a number on him. I wasn’t going to miss the attention after I blew him to smithereens.
“Welcome back,” Dustin said, rising enough to give me a kiss. I kept my stride so he couldn’t pull me into a French one and took the seat next to him.
“Alright, where am I headed?”
“You’re going to be delivering some crates over to the Columbian restaurant a few blocks away,” Maurice said, switching his gaze back to the paperwork. “Once you arrive, you will give them the crates and they will pay you. That’s it.”
“Sounds easy enough. How much money should I be expecting?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
I whistled. “Makes me wish I worked off of commission.”
Maurice’s lips twitched upward. “Do your job well and someday you might.”
“Am I meeting with anyone specifically?”
“No. Just tell them it’s from Maurice at the Kiln and you shouldn’t have any problems. Get changed into that—” He pointed to the navy coveralls folded on the corner of his desk. “—leave your cell phone, and Dustin will show you to the truck and give you the address.”
I saluted him, scooped up the coveralls, and placed the burner cell on his desk. “Leave it to me.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Fly straight, lil bird. Or I’ll clip your wings.”
I smiled, and made a concerted effort not to make it vindictive. “Will do.”
The bodyguard let us out after we knocked and Dustin led me back out front where there was a large white transport van waiting by the front curb. I wrestled into the coveralls and followed him around to the rear of the van.
“Hand truck’s there,” he said. “Exactly four crates. Easy as pie.”
“Is there some sort of manifest in case anyone asks?”
“Yep, it’s upfront on the passenger’s side.”
“Directions?”
“Left out of the parking lot. Six lights down, then turn right and it’s on your left at the corner.”
I eyed him. “This isn’t some sort of weird test, is it?”
“You think too much, Jess. Sometimes it’s just that easy.” He leaned in and kissed me again, waggling his eyebrows. “Drive safe, gorgeous.”
I climbed into the van. It coughed to life, rumbled mutinously, and then allowed me to maneuver it away from the front of the bar. I squeezed the wheel between my fingers and took slow, even breaths, resisting the urge to mutter sarcastic comments to myself. There was a good chance this van was bugged, either by the demons or by whomever was watching them. It had occurred to me that their usual courier might have died during one of these “deliveries” and that was why I got the job so quickly. The thought hung over me like a fat, grey storm cloud. I was just racking up the bad karma this week.
So, of course, two lights away from the restaurant, a police car pulled up next to me.
Cold sweat instantly popped up along my spine. I kept staring forward at the stoplight. There were two cops in the vehicle, both wearing sunglasses. The one closest to me glanced over casually and I briefly panicked, wondering if I should wave or if that made me even more suspicious. Guilty? Who? Me?
Screw it. I waved. The dark-haired plain-clothes cop waved back. The light changed and they drove off. I let out a hissing breath of relief and kept going. Maybe Dustin had been right. Sometimes it was just that easy.
Ha. Yeah, right.
The restaurant had a gorgeous storefront—pale yellow with dark red trim and beautiful hand-painted murals over the sign. I shifted into Park and climbed out with the manifest. There was a key clipped to it that unlocked the back. I stacked the four crates onto the hand-truck and lowered it with the lift before rolling inside.
It was cool and dark inside, a blessed reprieve from the sticky Texas heat. The maître’d was tall and had a handlebar mustache.
“How can I help you?”
“Delivery from Maurice at the Kiln,” I said. “Where should I drop it off?”
He pointed directly behind him to the swinging doors down the hall. “The kitchen is through there. Someone will sign for them and then pay you.”
“Thanks.” I rolled the crates down the hall and into the bustling kitchen. Among the various cooks and servers, there was a short Hispanic man with a clipboard in his hand shouting orders in Spanish to different scurrying employees.
“Hi there,” I said brightly, not sure what to expect. “I’ve got a delivery from the Kiln. Maurice sent me.”
The man eyed me. “And you are?”
“Jessica. I’m new.”
“Clearly,” he said, raking his brown eyes over me. “Follow me, morena.”
He led the way through the kitchen counters until we reached an office on the right hand side of the hallway. He opened the door for me. I took a quick stock of where I was and where the nearest exit was—two doors down on the right—and wheeled the crates inside.
There were two other men already inside the office, laughing and chatting with each other. Cigarillo smoke clouded the ceiling. I was pretty sure staying in here for more than ten minutes would result in lung cancer.
The first man sitting in a cushioned chair was tall, but had to weight upwards of three hundred pounds and had glasses sitting on the edge of his nose. The second man was the most handsome of the group, with thick hair carefully brushed back from his face, an infectious smile, and a muscular frame. He and the seated man were in business casual clothing—button up shirts, jeans, and boots. Both had .9mm handguns tucked at their sides. Great.
The short man shut the door. The second he did, all the noise from the kitchen went silent. Sound-proofed office. That didn’t bode well for me.
He stepped in front of me, telling the other men, “¿Esperaba un envío?”
I kept my face blank, but I spoke both Mexican and Castilian Spanish. He’d asked the handsome man if they were expecting a shipment.
“No,” Handsome Guy replied. “Que es?”
“Cerveza,” Short Guy said, and then squinted at one of the crates on top. “Y heroína.”
Maurice and his low-life gang were heroin dealers. Good thing they had it coming.
Fat Guy nodded to me. “Y la chica?”
“Ella es nueva.”
“Hermosa,” Handsome Guy said, smirking. He pushed off from the wall and offered his hand to me. “What’s your name, morena?”
“Jess,” I said, shaking it. I half-expected for my hand to come back covered in slime. All three of them gave me a bad vibe, drug-dealers or not. The hairs on my nape stood up just looking at them. Things had happened in this room—bad things, things no one should ever have to go through. I didn’t need spiritual energy to sense it. The notion practically dripped from its very walls. I needed to get out of here, and soon.
The short man reached into his pocket and withdrew a stiletto blade. I fought the urge to flinch, but he just pried one of the crates open, removed a few beers, and then pulled up a small panel on the lining of the box. His hand came away with a black plastic square about the size and weight of an ice cream bar. He tossed it to the Fat Guy, who glanced it over and nodded wordlessly. Handsome Guy started unloading the boxes and stacking them against the adjacent wall, pulling the heroin packets out of them one by one.
“I assume you want payment?” Short Guy said, walking over to the desk and unlocking it with a key ring from his pocket.
“That’s what they told me,” I said, trying to sound carefree.
Short Guy set a large grey metal box on the desk and opened it with a different key. He brought out stacks of bills that would take an eternity to count by hand, but thankfully they were rubber-banded and marked with amounts. I added them up in my head when he was done and sighed internally as I realized the total was incorrect.
“There you go,” he said, pointing to the bundle.
“I was told to collect two hundred thousand,” I said in as mild a voice as I could manage. “That’s only one hundred thousand.”
Short Guy’s thick eyebrows rose. “Were you, now? Is that what your boss told you?”
“Yes.”
Short Guy crossed his arms. “Well, maybe you should tell Maurice that his last shipment was short twenty ounces and if he wants to collect, he’d better send what he owes us.”
He leaned forward and made a point to leer at me. “Unless you want to pay us back yourself, eh, chica?”
Dustin had been lying. This was a test.
I could take the money he offered and return, but Maurice would boot me out. The setback wasn’t entirely the worst. After all, assuming that they didn’t kill me, I could still weasel my way back into the bar for the staff meeting. However, if they did make an attempt on my life, my cover would be blown and we’d have done all of this undercover work for nothing.
Conversely, I could make a stand here to these three and try to get the money Maurice had sent me to collect. My odds were awful. I didn’t have a gun, and based on their behavior, all three of them were demons. If I was going to play this hand, I’d have to do it perfectly. Zero room for error.
Leave. Fight. Negotiate. My only three options.
God, it was so great being me.
I let my gaze rove from demon to demon, analyzing them one by one. Well, here goes nothing.
“Gentlemen,” I said calmly. “Why don’t we end this debate like civilized individuals?”
“Oh?” Short Guy snorted. “How do you suggest we resolve this issue, morena?”
“By being truthful with each other,” I said, unzipping my coveralls halfway. “I’ll go first. My name isn’t Jessica. It’s Jordan.”
I tugged the hem of my V-neck down over the upper part of my chest. “Jordan Amador.”
Short Guy and Fat Guy didn’t flinch, but Handsome Guy did a double take. He stepped closer, examining the scar, and his face went slack with shock.
“No shit,” he said. “The Commander’s Wife?”
I didn’t quite wince. “Sure, if you feel the need to use my title.”
“No way,” Fat Guy said. “I heard she died the night she iced Belial.”
“Does this scar look fake to you, tubby?”
He scowled at me. “If you’re the genuine article, what the hell are you doing working for Maurice?”
“Long story,” I said, letting the hem snap back up over my ruined skin. “The short version is that I want him and his gang out of the way. That means we have a common enemy. I think you three are smart enough to know what to do.”
Handsome Guy nodded. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“Exactly. So if you give me the money, I can continue with my plan to royally screw Maurice and his demons’ nest over.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe you’re gonna let us walk away alive?” Fat Guy said. “I’ve heard the stories, Seer. You’re like a tiny African-American plague.”
“Afro-Latina plague, thank you very much,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Fat Guy set his glasses aside, shoved his chair back, and stood, towering over me. “Look, puta, why don’t you take your ass back to wherever it belongs before I send you back in pieces?”
I cast a cool glance over him and then looked at the other two. “Am I to assume he speaks for both of you?”
Handsome Guy touched Fat Guy’s shoulder and pulled him back. “Chill out, Ortega. Think this over. With Maurice gone, we can inherit the rest of the product lines in town. By the time he got topside again—if he even does—we’d be running the show. This is a business opportunity.”
“We shouldn’t deal with her kind, Alejandro,” Ortega spat. “She works both sides. Once she’s done screwing them over, she’ll come for us.”
“Not if you cut a deal with me right now. It expires as soon as I walk out that door.”
“Oh yeah?” Short Guy said. “What if we just kill you?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead. But keep in mind that Gabriel knows I’m in town and it won’t take him very long to retrace my steps. Would you like God’s personal messenger knocking on your door and asking what happened to his little sister?”
Short Guy’s expression didn’t change, but I saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed. Sure, I wasn’t that intimidating, but every demon on the planet had seen Gabriel in action. He was sweet and wholesome as apple pie, until you crossed him. I’d seen him smite demons firsthand. It was awe-inspiring. Also, shit-spewingly terrifying.
“And that’s assuming he gets to you first,” I continued, a slow smile crawling over my lips. “What do you think will happen if Michael finds out?”
I’d gambled on that last threat. Some demons knew he and I had called it quits, but word hadn’t quite spread through the entire supernatural community just yet. I crossed my arms so that they couldn’t see that I wasn’t wearing my wedding band.
“She’s right, Manolo,” Alejandro said. “I think it’s worth the risk. Maurice has been shorting us for months. We were already talking about taking him out anyway. Let her do the job for us.”
Manolo frowned. “And when she betrays us?”
Alejandro laughed. “We’re demons, pendejo. We’ll just add her to the list.”
Ooh, there was a list. I was just racking up the popularity points with the demonic community. Lucky me.
“So,” I said. “Do we have a deal?”
Manolo and Alejandro met eyes. The latter heaved a sigh and nodded. “Fine.”
“Screw this,” Ortega snarled. Then he grabbed me by the throat and slammed me into the wall behind us.
The office pinwheeled before my eyes. My skull and shoulder blades throbbed sharply with pain. Full-blown panic crept up through my chest like a scalding wave, but I shoved it down. My entire persona snapped back to what it had been before my undercover ruse: survival, above all.
I didn’t give him the chance to crush my windpipe. I reached inside my bra, pulled out Gabriel’s golden feather, and plunged it straight into Ortega’s left eye.
The huge demon screamed bloody murder and dropped me, clutching his face. Acrid smoke and the stench of burnt flesh filled my nostrils as I staggered up to my feet, my eyes locked on the injured demon.
“You little bitch!” he roared, and charged me, his blackened eye clamped shut. He swung a meaty fist at my head. I ducked at the last second. His fist smashed into the wall above me and punched a hole through it. I swung up with the feather’s tip and hit him dead in the groin.
Ortega screamed again and batted me away. I smacked the far wall, gasping for air as the impact had driven it out of me. I was still seeing double, but it looked like Manolo and Alejandro were letting us sort it out on our own; both of them were standing by the desk, as if waiting to see who would emerge the victor. Bastards.
“I’m gonna blow your goddamn head off!” Ortega bellowed, reaching for his gun…only to find it gone.
I drew my hand out from behind my back, brandished his .9mm, and smiled sweetly. “Made ya look.”
I shot him in the head twice.
He collapsed back to the floor, dead as a doornail.
I watched his corpse twitch a few times and then used the wall to push myself all the way up until I was standing straight. I let all the emotion drain out of my features as I turned to face the remaining demons in the office.
“Anyone else want a go?”
After dropping the cash back off to the begrudgingly impressed Maurice, I instructed the driver to take me to a little ice cream parlor a few blocks from the Columbian restaurant and stepped onto the sidewalk as I spotted Myra sitting outside sipping a milkshake from beneath a hilariously enormous sunhat. Her version of undercover was at least slightly more subtle than mine—she wore a white sundress with a black belt across the middle, which drew attention to her impressive bustline, and had cat-eye sunglasses.
If the ghost sitting next to her had been visible to normal people, they would have looked like they were on a date, as he wore a tailored blue suit and burgundy tie. It was hard to explain how he was sitting on a chair considering he was incorporeal, but the gist of it was that ghosts could concentrate and be able to still obey the laws of physics somewhat. When a person died with unfinished business, it left them tied to the earth, almost like a weight around their ankles. However, they weren’t completely whole, so all ghosts had no visible feet since they walked between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
I’d found Domingo about an hour after I met Jon at the park. He looked to be in his late thirties and he was soft-spoken and polite. I’d told him what I was and that I would help him find his inner peace so he could crossover into the afterlife, but that I needed his help with an important case before that time. He agreed to help and I’d sent him into the Kiln to spy on the demons and to tell Myra where they’d sent me without having to use my cell phone.
