Too Hard to Handle (Black Knights Inc. #8)(11)
“I see him,” Dan muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets and glancing away so it didn’t look like all three of them were staring at the guy crossing the square not twenty feet away. “A lot more brawn than brain.”
“More like a blunt-force object,” she added helpfully, “as opposed to a precision instrument.”
“That’s him in a nutshell,” Dan said. “Chelsea? You got an angle on his face?”
So it was Chelsea listening in. Whoever the hell Chelsea was, she was obviously somewhere close with a camera in hand. Instinctively, Penni reached over to her left side where her service weapon was kept in a shoulder holster.
Only…it wasn’t there.
And boy, oh boy, it was one heck of a momentary shock to feel nothing but ribs beneath her fingers. For the first time in a really long time, she felt completely, inexplicably vulnerable. No big surprise she didn’t particularly care for the sensation.
She couldn’t hear what Chelsea said to Dan, but she figured it was a negative on getting a bead on No Neck’s face, because Dan cursed, grabbed what was left of her ice cream, and lobbed it into a nearby trash can.
“What the… Hey!” she complained, her heart breaking as she watched the top scoop smash against the metal side and slide over a huge glob of bubble gum. Before she could say more, he wrapped a hand around her arm and started pulling her after No Neck.
Okay, okay, she felt like griping, hoisting her purse back onto her shoulder when it slipped to dangle from her elbow. I know how to play the game of cat and mouse. No need to manhandle. But she’d always prided herself on being a smart woman, and Dan’s patience seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel today. And since her arrival—surprise!—didn’t appear to be helping matters, she simply asked, “So what’s the plan?”
“We have a drone in the air,” he said. So Chelsea wasn’t close with a camera; she was sitting in a control center at a console or in a room somewhere with her laptop open. “But because of the direction he’s facing and the surrounding mountains, we can’t get a wide enough angle,” he continued, lacing their fingers together so it looked less like he was frog-marching her across the square, and more like they were a happy couple out for a stroll.
A jolt of awareness shot up her arm when his wide, callused palm touched hers.
“We need to snap Skinhead’s photo,” he told her, increasing their pace, “so we can run his mug against the facial recognition software back at BKI and Langley.”
It’ll be fine if you fly to Peru, Becky had said when Penni balked at the thought of hopping on a plane and distracting Dan from whatever he was doing. He’s just twiddling his dick down there, anyway. Has been for nearly three months now.
Twiddling his dick, huh? Well, Penni had five choice words for the woman: “drone,” “facial recognition software,” and “Langley.”
As they hustled across the square, she was tempted to glance into the sky even though she knew the drone was probably flying so high there was no way for her naked eye to see it. Zoelner abandoned them, cutting to the left and picking up his pace in an attempt to outflank No Neck and get ahead of him. It was a classic tailing technique. Put one party in front. Another behind. And trade places if and when necessary.
She and Dan took up the “party behind” position and trailed No Neck onto one of the busy cobbled roads fanning out from the square. The street was lined on both sides by two-story buildings made of plaster and stone. In this part of Cusco, the first floors were occupied by trinket shops, convenience stores, and small eateries. The top floors, with their brightly painted balconies, were where the owners of the shops made their homes.
The air on the little avenue was redolent with the smell of exhaust, cooking meat, and frying pastries. A gang of gnarly-looking street dogs rooted in an overturned trash can. And a taxi screamed around the corner, rattling and beeping at the tourists who had the bad sense to tarry in the street.
No Neck glanced over his shoulder at the woman who squealed when the taxi’s side mirror came within inches of her hip, and Penni sucked in a breath when she saw his eyes. They were ice-blue and completely devoid of emotion. Seriously, looking into those cool, empty pools, she would not have been surprised to learn he was blood brothers with a snake.
Dan squeezed her fingers.
She peeked over at him, and even though he winked, the expression on his face was clearly keep your shit together.
Right. Because even if her head was spinning—you know, having suddenly been sucked into the cyclonic craziness of an operation; she was really going to have to strangle Becky for that dick-twiddling comment—she was a trained agent. Except… Oh, crap. No Neck hooked a right onto an even smaller street.
To be clear, the size of the street wasn’t the problem. The problem was the steep incline of the little thoroughfare and its accompanying sidewalk—which was nothing less than a long flight of stairs. Cusco was built in the valley, but it quickly climbed up the sides of the surrounding mountains. And like the Big Bad Wolf, Penni was instantly huffing and puffing. Unlike the Big Bad Wolf, she’d be hard pressed to blow out a candle, much less blow anyone’s house down.
Dan turned to her. “Y’okay?” Two words smashed into one.
“We’re doing a lot more legwork than I planned when I decided on these boots,” she told him.