In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(77)

“Ozzie,” he wheezed a breath of relief when the kid answered the landline back at the shop, “I need you to ping Becky’s cell. Zoelner’s no longer got eyes-on and we’re going to—”

“Already on it, Boss,” Ozzie said. Frank could hear the kid’s fingers flying over a keyboard. “But it’s going to take five to ten to get a lock.”

“Make it five,” he clicked off without waiting for Ozzie’s reply.

Make it five, kid, he prayed, because every second counts.





Chapter Eighteen


Oh, man, why do I ever drink?

Becky didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to see the room spinning, didn’t want to lift her pounding head for fear it might just fall right off her neck, didn’t want to shift her thousand-pound legs off the mattress because it was really, really iffy whether or not they’d support her weight.

Basically, she didn’t want to move one teeny-tiny muscle.

Of course, she needed to do all these things, in short order too, because her tongue felt like it was wearing a wool sock, and she had to get a drink of water. Now. Or she might just shrivel up into a Becky raisin.

“Ugh,” she kept her eyes screwed tightly closed, “worst hangover in the history of the world.” On a scale of one to ten, this hangover was a solid eleven.

Do the crime, and you do the time, sis. That’d been Billy’s sage advice on her twenty-first birthday, the first time she’d ever tied on anything more than a cozy little buzz. She’d barely resisted the urge to kill him then. Now she figured she’d do better to kill herself. Just end the misery. Of course, if she didn’t get some water in her system pretty soon, her body might do the job for her and call it a day.

“Yowza, how Dan manages to handle this on a daily basis is beyond me,” she told the room, then grimaced when the sound of her own voice made the little demons pounding inside her head exchange their hammers for pickaxes.

Water! her body cried out again, and she could no longer ignore the painful thirst making her throat ache like she’d swallowed all the sand on North Avenue Beach.

“Okay, okay,” she grumbled and sat up—

Uh, no she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Her eyes flipped open, and the first thing to meet her blurry vision was a giant water stain on a filthy popcorn ceiling. Where in the world…?

And then it came rushing back to her, a tidal wave of memory surging through her bleary mind.

She’d been at Delilah’s and had just come out of ladies’ room when a familiar smell cut through the clouds of stale beer, strong whiskey, and sawdust. It was a man’s cologne, overwhelming and unusual and for some reason the scent made her skin crawl and…

It took her all of a half second to remember where she smelled that particular cologne before, and that was obviously a half second too long, because then she’d gone supernova. Like a dying star, every particle of her being was squeezed down to a single point of intense pain before exploding outward in the next instant. Blam!

Then…lights out. Nothing.

And now she was in some filthy motel room if the queen bed, window unit, and cheap plywood furniture were anything to go by, not to mention the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke and the underlying aroma of sweaty bodies and…yuck, that was definitely sex lingering in the air along with the tang of urine.

Oh yeah, and the really big float in this Macy’s Day Parade of Disastrous Hits was the fact that she was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Sharif, you *!

She’d have screamed it into his butt-ugly face if he’d been in the room. But he was noticeably absent.

Not that she was complaining. Heck, no.

If he’d somehow managed to, oh, let’s say, get himself run over by a CTA bus or gunned down by a gang of Southside Latin Kings, she’d be really hard pressed to shed a single tear. Of course, that would just be way too easy, and her luck, of late, certainly wasn’t running in any direction that could be considered even remotely easy.

So…yep, he was likely somewhere gathering God only knew what kind of paraphernalia, and she should be scared. She knew she should be. Two seconds after meeting the guy she knew there was something really wrong with him. Something missing in his fathomless black eyes.

Had it been the spark of human kindness? That elusive kernel of light that despite race, color, creed, or religious affiliation all humans harbor within the depths of their souls?

Whatever it was, Sharif lacked it. And she suffered under no delusions then that he was a psychopath, capable of taking her life without batting a lash. Now she suffered under no delusions that not only was he capable of taking her life, but he was going to enjoy doing it. A guy didn’t tie a woman, spread eagle, to a bed unless he had very specific, very obscene plans in mind.

Which just brought her back around to the fact that she should be scared to death. Shaking in her boots. Ready to—

Hold the phone…

Shaking in her…boots!

“Oh, you wonderfully incompetent moron!” she choked on a dry laugh.

The dumbass had tied her ankles, but he’d done so without removing her heavy biker boots.

What a bonehead. Still, she couldn’t help but send a small prayer skyward that Sharif had been graced with a questionable IQ.

Wiggling her right leg, she was able to slowly, inch by excruciating inch, shuffle her foot out from inside her boot. When her heel finally popped free, she wanted nothing more than to pant and rest like a dog in the summer sun. Her head was doing its best impression of an open wound, but time was working against her, so she immediately hooked her toe into the top of her left boot and pried her remaining foot free. Then she toed off her socks and plunged barefoot back into her left boot, feeling around for the one thing that just might save her life.