“Not getting stolen by Jack,” she said, the lure to inject herself even stronger after having drafted to escape both WEFT and Detroit’s finest. Forcing a smile, she zipped the satchel closed. As long as she wasn’t accelerated, she could still walk away from this and disappear. Maybe. “LB, where did you get these righteous cars?” she asked as they bounced and lurched over the grass, clods of frozen ground spurting up behind them.
Behind the wheel, LB grinned, turning where he sat to see them. “When everyone left, the cars stayed behind. As long as there’s no computer, my guys can get them running; eBay does the rest.” His eyebrows rose in question. “Dr. Denier? You’re the reason I’m here. I want to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Silas said guardedly. His attention alternated between LB and the front window as they careened over the park lawn, headed for a distant street. “Don’t you think you should be looking where you’re driving?”
But there were no lines to stay within, much less a road, and LB laughed. “Shit, girl, you look like you haven’t slept in days. There’re easier ways to make a pickup than bringing the entire Detroit police force with you.”
Her pulse leapt. “You have the Evocane,” she said, an unreasonable need rising from everywhere, crushing the faint vertigo. “Right now? With you?” With a final bounce, they found the road. Behind them, his guys were taking potshots at the drones that had followed them. Most were going the other way. Jack had bought her a way out. What it might cost her would probably be more than she wanted to pay.
LB turned back to the front, weaving between the slower cars. “Yep.”
“Give it to me. Now,” she demanded, and LB met her eyes in the rearview mirror. With a casual slowness, he took a vial from his shirt pocket and tossed it to her.
It hit her palm, and she spun the warm glass to read the label, a flicker of mistrust dying at the thought he might have put anything in it. If it wasn’t Evocane, she’d bring him down. “Thank you,” she said softly as she dropped it into the satchel and zipped it closed.
“Don’t thank me,” LB said, his expression empty. “Nothing is free.”
Silas stiffened, and she raised her hand, telling him she’d handle it. “Yeah? Be nice, or I’ll shove it down your throat,” she threatened.
“How do you know I haven’t sampled it already?” LB said slyly, and she relaxed.
“Because if you had, you’d die before giving it to me.” Satisfied it was Evocane, she settled back, thinking it was odd that she was safe in the back of a drug lord’s GTO. “You shouldn’t have let Jack run rabbit.” Damn it, she had been hoping LB would hold him for her, and the man just let him walk.
Thoughtful, LB followed the finger of the man riding shotgun to an upcoming exit. “Relax. The cops will get him. And if not, we will.”
“Yeah? Good luck with that,” she said, then went silent, feeling her fatigue all the way to her bones. Despite what LB had said, she knew Jack was gone until he wanted to show. Worse, she didn’t know how she felt about that. She didn’t remember her draft, but she’d seen his eyes afterward. He hadn’t touched her mind—and even with Silas there, it had been the perfect time to scrub her.
He was there for her, not Bill, and that changed everything . . . and nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Packard’s main mall lacked the comfortable, familiar feel the repurposed automotive manufacturing plant usually did. It rankled Jack that it was probably because Peri wasn’t beside him, her slim, attractive figure drawing envious, appreciative glances, a reminder of how good they looked together. He got noticed on his own, but with Peri, the stares were envious.
His attention drifted from the high support beams—repaired or replaced and acid etched to look old—down to his drink. The heavy paper straw he was using to stir his caramel banana smoothie had bent, and he grimaced. His hand ached, strained somewhere on Peri’s mad dash to Roosevelt Park, and he wished he’d gotten a frozen drink instead of the room-temperature fruit blend. Evading the local cops, and then LB’s gang after that, hadn’t been difficult. He’d been lucky that Peri had been knocked on the head and dazed; otherwise she’d never have let him drive off, the gang’s need for a rabbit or not. The only crime he regretted was having to dump the classic muscle car in the river.
The mall was busy, the cinema having just let out its largest theater and sending almost seven hundred pumped-up moviegoers back into the upscale shops that lined the three-block social sink Detroit had created for their new population to spend their money and time.
The Packard plant had been abandoned in the late fifties after having helped supply marine and aircraft engines for WWII. Almost vanishing from neglect, it was revitalized when it was realized that the distance between I-94 and Detroit’s rebuilt center was perfect. The derelict complex had been turned into a shopping experience like no other, where you could do everything from train your dog to publish your self-help video to enjoy a gourmet meal at one of the themed cafeterias or bars, before sleeping it off in one of the tiny hotel rooms affectionately named coffins. The complex was so large and sprawling that self-propelled vintage autos ran an assembly-line track right down the middle and through the more affluent shops: a loving nod to Detroit’s history.
But old cars on tracks were less than useless to Jack, and giving up on his smoothie, he squinted up to the second-story level, where Harmony was burning off some steam in one of the athletic centers. The front of the dojo was glass, and the mixed class sparred over oblivious shoppers, their thumps and shouts muffled but audible over the surrounding chatter and the young-man band from Australia, in town and mixing up their rhythms with old black men who’d never left Detroit and lived the beat their entire rich lives.