Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(77)
Why hadn’t Abby done the same?
“Seriously.” She ran a hand under her nose. “Don’t mind me. It’s just been a really long day, and I’m feeling—”
“There it is!” Yonus called back to them. He pointed up the road. And though the jungle did its best to obscure their view, faint red taillight covers and the silver glint of a back bumper were visible.
“If that isn’t a sight for sore eyes”—Steady slung an arm around Abby’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze—“I don’t know what is. Can I get an amen?”
“A-frickin’-men,” she replied, forcing a smile to her lips, and lengthening her stride. She seemed content to drop their conversation, and he didn’t dare push her to finish whatever it was she’d been about to say.
They joined Yonus and were barely thirty yards from the truck when the familiar crack of igniting gunpowder sounded a second before a round bit into the ground near their feet. The hairs on Steady’s scalp lifted so fast and high it was a wonder they didn’t jettison off his head. He reached for his Beretta as another loud, malicious crack echoed through the jungle at the same time a bullet nicked his upper arm. Pain bit into him with sharp, jagged teeth, but he gave it barely a fleeting thought.
“Get down!” he yelled to Yonus who was standing beside the road, eyes wide, face slack in shock. “Stay low and make for the tree line!”
And then, wrapping both arms around Abby, keeping her in front of him so that his body was between her and the shooter, he heeded his own advice. Two bounding steps brought them to the relative safety of the jungle’s edge. After securing her behind the huge trunk of a tree—and after a quick look assured him she was unharmed—he thumbed off his safety and prepared to let the bullets fly…
*
“Okay, so this should be the place.” Penni leaned against the front bumper of one of the big, black SUVs the Secret Service had rented to use as transport to and from the airport. Dan was propped beside her, arms crossed, watching as she glanced down at the piece of paper on which the hotel manager had scrawled the security director’s address. When she looked over at him, she pulled a face. “I mean, this has to be the place.”
“You sure?” he asked as she folded the slip and tucked it into the front pocket of her austere black slacks before pushing away from the vehicle to stand on the side of the street. Until today, until seeing how the material draped around her long, slim legs while delicately cupping her heart-shaped derriere, he would’ve sworn there was no way a pair of pants like that could ever be made to look sexy. But, man, he did not mind in the least that Penelope DePaul had proved him wrong. Ozzie called her a tall drink of Secret Service agent, and he couldn’t disagree.
“Considering I thought the other two houses we checked were the right ones,” she frowned, “the answer to your question is no. I’m not sure. But if your friend Vanessa translated what that lady at the last place said, the address we’re looking for is the blue house at the end of Jalan Putra. This should be Jalan Putra and that is definitely a blue house.”
She pointed to a bright-azure structure built atop a crumbling gray slab. The tiny house had a rusting tin roof and three poured cement steps leading up to a scratched wooden door. Bright-green curtains fluttered in its two open windows and a clothesline with an array of apparel flapping in the gentle breeze was strung from the side of the structure to a nearby light pole. A multi-hued rooster strutted his stuff in the front yard, shaking his tail feathers at the drab-colored hen who ignored him as she pecked in the dirt. Typical.
All in all, to call the place decidedly low-tech would be an understatement. Which was why it was weird to glance over the roofline and see the incredibly high-tech, almost futuristic-looking Petronas Towers looming in the near distance.
“But seeing as how there aren’t any house numbers anywhere and half the street signs are missing,” she continued, rubbing an impatient finger down the bridge of her nose, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we find ourselves zero for three.”
Her frustration was palpable, and Dan couldn’t blame her. They’d driven around in circles through this neighborhood only to knock on two wrong doors. And since no one spoke English, he’d had to call back to HQ to elicit Vanessa’s help in translating their questions to the locals so that they could try to figure out where the hell they were and where the hell they should be.
It had eaten up a lot of time. And every minute that ticked by was one more minute the hotel’s security director could use to make his escape. Even so, it was good to see Penni focused on something other than simply trying her damndest to keep from falling apart. Because, quite honestly, watching her struggle to do that had been…well…awful. And then when she had finally broken, when she pulled him into the bathroom and went up on tiptoe to claim his mouth, when she asked him to make love to her despite the fact he didn’t have a condom, when she—
“Hey.” Penni grabbed his elbow, pulling him from his thoughts. “Isn’t that the guy we’re looking for?”
He followed the line of her extended finger to see a man with a plastic grocery bag in each hand meandering down the road toward them. The guy’s eyes were focused on his footing on the uneven pavement, and Dan agreed. He looked remarkably similar the employee photo the hotel manager had showed them earlier.