Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(22)

“That I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

“Of course I was right,” he snapped as though I had called him a liar. “What do you think, she’s giving them her dry cleaning?”

“Would you like me to stay on her through the weekend?” I was hoping he’d say no. It was the first weekend in October and I was looking forward to seeing Ethan again. I didn’t want to cancel. Not for any reason, but especially not for Gregg Gunn.

He shook his head, wiping sweat away with a gym towel. “No need. We have a company retreat down in Big Sur. She’ll be there the whole time.”

“Okay.” For once, I wanted to say more. I wanted to ask why the woman I was following looked like she was standing three stories up in a burning house, if all she was doing was stealing documents. I wanted to ask why a man using a voice changer would have gone through the trouble of digging up my home number to warn me about unknown danger. I wanted to ask him, again, why he had hired me in the first place instead of picking one of the big, sleek corporate security firms that specialized in handling exactly this kind of case. For that matter, I wanted to know how exactly he had found me, and why he had decided to pay me a retainer far in excess of my normal rates. I wasn’t buying that he’d flipped darts into the Yellow Pages until my name came up, either. I wouldn’t have minded learning a bit more about Gunn or his company. There were plenty of things I wanted to know.

I kept quiet.

Gunn drank from a water bottle, still breathing hard. Under the sheen of physical exertion he looked tired, eyes reddened as though he hadn’t slept well. Together we left the court, closing the glass door behind us. “Are there things about Karen Li you’re not telling me?”

He gave me a sharp look. “What makes you ask that?”

“Maybe I like questions.”

Gunn started to say something, stopped, and shrugged. “I suppose there’s always something we don’t know. I told you what is relevant.”

“Is Karen Li working with anyone else at your company? Do you suspect anyone else?”

Gunn narrowed his eyes. “Not that I’m aware. But if she is, I hope you can find that out.”

“And there’s nothing else I should know? About who she is or what she wants?”

“I told you the salient details,” he replied. “That’s what you should be focused on.”

He stopped by a door leading to the men’s locker room. “We’ll be in touch. Make sure I can reach you.”



* * *



Outside in the parking lot I had just gotten on my motorcycle when there was a double honk behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a little white BMW, one of the boxy hybrid models. I raised my visor, irritated by the constant impatience of Silicon Valley. “You can have the spot,” I said. “Just give me a second.”

The driver looked at me through his open window. He was Gunn’s age, in his late forties, but had the opposite manner of the charismatic CEO. His brown hair withdrew from his forehead in a pronounced widow’s peak and he had prominent eyebrows set above an intelligent, uncertain face. The uncertainty was telegenic. He could have been cast in a commercial as the guy thinking about switching from one phone company to another after his best friend tells him what he’s missing while they’re watching a baseball game. “I don’t want your parking spot,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” His voice was soft and careful.

“If you want to hit on a woman, I think you’re supposed to do it in the gym, not the parking lot. And you’re never supposed to honk. Just a tip for the future.”

He didn’t smile. “I’m not hitting on you, and we can’t stay out here all day. He might see us. He’ll be out any minute.”

I took a closer look at the driver. I’d never seen him before. “You don’t mean—”

“Follow me,” he said. “Hurry.”

I generally wasn’t in the habit of letting strange men pull up in a parking lot and tell me where to go, but this time I nodded. I followed the white car onto the freeway, heading north. It was early afternoon, before the South Bay’s hellish commuter traffic really got bad. In North San Jose, the white car exited and we drove down wide roads crammed with construction cranes and new apartment complexes. Even through my helmet, noise assailed me, clanging and hammering descending from the little troops of orange-vested men on scaffolding and catwalks. I was relieved when the BMW took another, narrow road that spun us out away from the craze of buildings, and then we were weaving between high unkempt grass and, beyond that, marshy water that must have been the southernmost tip of the Bay.

The car pulled over on the side of the road and the driver got out. I pulled up behind him and we faced each other. I wasn’t worried. Nothing about the man in front of me seemed dangerous. He was a little shorter than me and wore high-waisted blue jeans and a tucked-in black T-shirt. Sock-clad feet filled leather sandals. The skin on his hands was soft, fingernails neatly clipped. He had the expression, out here in what passed for wilderness, of someone who seemed far more comfortable indoors.

“Your name is Nikki Griffin,” he said. “You’re a private investigator.”

“I’ve been called worse. And you are…?”

“That doesn’t matter.”