Laurel smiled. Then her brow furrowed in concentration, and her image nearly faded out before growing brighter again. Her voice sounded like it came from the other end of a long corridor, hollow and distant. “Hi, hon. No time… talk.”
They both turned as the bedroom door swung open. Nick poked his head in, and his eyes grew wide in surprise. “Well, hello, Ms. Carpenter.”
“Shut up,” Jackie said in a harsh whisper.
Nick stepped in and said nothing. Laurel turned so she could see both of them. “Drake… North Shore,” she said, bring her hands up to her temples. “Sorry… hard. Shelby on the way. Go.”
“On the way?” Nick reached into his pocket for his cell, and it began to ring before he pulled it out. “Shel? What the hell… Yeah, she’s here now. Okay, I’m heading up now. I’ll call in a few.”
Jackie stared in silence at Laurel. Her brain had shut off. No words came to mind. She tried to blink away the tears filling up her eyes. Laurel did not seem the raging spirit some part of her mind had envisioned when Shelby had told her she would show up again. It was just her. Laurel. Jackie’s friend. And working the case while she slept it away in some stranger’s bed.
Laurel turned back to her as Nick pocketed the phone. She smiled. “Go… talk later.” She stepped forward into the bed, reaching out to Jackie, and then faded out completely.
Jackie reached up to grab her hand and found nothing but an icy-cold breath of air in her grasp. She wiped at the tear that had spilled down her cheek. “Shit.”
“I know you’ll shoot me if I leave you here, so let’s go.” Nick stood at the door, standing aside as though waiting for her to go ahead.
She took a deep breath, letting it out in a rush, and swung her legs out of bed. “Give me a sec to throw clothes on.”
He nodded. “I’ll have the car out front.”
A minute later, Jackie stepped out into the cool, misty night air and found herself staring at the open door of a dark purple Porsche 911. The vampire cowboy drove a purple Porsche. She walked over to the driveway and got in, the leather bucket seat snuggling up behind her. “You drive a purple Porsche?”
“It was my wife’s favorite color,” he said.
“Why don’t you drive this thing all the time?”
He shrugged. “Don’t generally need to.”
“So when do you generally need it?”
Nick backed out onto the road and gave her what she thought might actually be a sly look. “When I want to go really fast. Buckle up, Agent Rutledge.”
She just managed to get the strap across her body when her head was forced back into the seat, and the Porsche launched down the road toward North Shore.
Chapter 45
Jackie stared straight ahead in silence while Nick had them weaving in and out of late-night freeway traffic doing about ninety. Gamble had everyone heading up into North Shore, but she knew it would be Shelby and Nick who found Drake. They just needed to be ready to pounce when they did.
Worse, though, was Nick’s silence. It made her unable to focus. What was he thinking about earlier? No big deal? Who the hell is this slut? Why had Shelby not mentioned the side effects of whatever she had done? Unless of course she wanted the result. Presumptuous bitch.
He downshifted onto an off ramp, slowing enough at a stoplight to make sure no traffic was coming, and turned the corner doing fifty. “About earlier,” he said.
Great. Here we go. “Do we have to talk about it now?” Or ever?
“No, but I just wanted to say you shouldn’t worry yourself over it. It was Shelby’s doing.”
She looked over at Nick, his features calm, mood unruffled, weaving them through traffic like it was a Sunday drive in the country. Was he truly so unflappable? He had responded to her, hadn’t he? Sure, he had stopped, but there had been some response. Or was it that he didn’t want to be bothered with the possibilities of what had happened? He was going to let her cop out for him.
“You don’t want to talk about it either, do you?”
The phone rang, and Nick slowed to answer. “Anything? What? Already?” The car picked up speed. “Where? Wellington. Got it. We’re five minutes away.”
“What’s going on?” Jackie grabbed the door handle to keep herself from slamming into Nick as he slid around a corner.
“Drake’s got her already,” Nick replied, mouth set in a grim line.
“What!” Jackie dug up her phone. “Where? I’ll call it in.”
“One-ninety-first and Wellington, heading south on Wellington. Black Cadillac Escalade.”
Jackie called up Gamble, who relayed the information out to everyone on patrol. “Maybe Laurel has him acting sooner than he wanted.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it,” Nick said. “He’s had this planned for a long time, and we aren’t really off his timetable. We just may have lucked out. Laurel might have seen what he was doing from the other side. I don’t know. And no,” he added, “I don’t really want to talk about what happened earlier.”
An unmarked car with a red flashing light on top went flying through an intersection, and Nick just missed clipping the rear bumper. Two lights farther down, he pulled a hard left, sliding onto the shoulder of the road. The Porsche fishtailed a bit getting back in line on the road.
Jackie glared at him. “Not going to help much if we’re dead before we can catch Drake.” After Nick failed to say anything, she added, “Don’t want to talk about it for my sake or because the whack job of a federal agent turned you on?”
He did look at her this time, and Jackie gave him an innocent, wide-eyed stare. “You aren’t a whack job, Jackie.”
At the next intersection, a black SUV went sailing through, easily doing ninety to one hundred miles per hour. Right behind was a now very recognizable BMW motorcycle with a black-clad figure hunched low over its handlebars.
“There they are!” She was going to point but found herself slammed up against Nick when he turned across into oncoming traffic, sliding into the opposite shoulder. For a moment, Jackie figured Nick was going to lose it. They slid a good fifty feet sideways, churning up grass and gravel, before he got it back in line with the road, cutting across the opposing lanes again to join the chase. They were two blocks behind already. “God, somebody is going to get killed at this speed.”
“I imagine that’s his plan,” Nick said. “He’d lose us easily enough if he wanted to.”
“Can you give us a little fucking credit, please? We aren’t amateurs around here, you know.”
Nick gave her a sidelong look. “No, but you aren’t pros at chasing vampires either.”
“Look out!” She cringed as three cars piled into each other at the intersection Drake and Shelby had just passed through.
Nick geared down and turned down the street right before the accident. It was a residential street, and even at the late hour, Jackie could just see someone crossing a street while the Porsche came barreling through at eighty.
“Where’re you going?” she wondered as they cut out to a main street, now six blocks off of where they had been.
“Hitting the freeway on-ramp over here.”
“You think he’s getting on the freeway?”
“He was running out of road going the way he was, and the on-ramp there was six blocks away. I just hope I picked the right direction.”
“Hope? You better know what you’re doing, Nick.”
“Instinct,” he said. “He’s been messing with me long enough that I have a general sense of what he likes to do.”
“And you think he’s going to head toward downtown instead of away?”
He nodded, pulling them onto the on-ramp, building up speed. As they climbed up to the level of the freeway, the black Escalade went by, followed once again by Shelby. Nick was up to speed with them in a couple seconds, and just like that, they were right back on Drake.
Jackie shook her head. “Okay, that was good.”
Nick gave a little half shrug. “The kiss was better.”
Huh? It took a second to register what he had said, and then she felt heat rising to her cheeks. For the moment at least, Nick had gotten the last word in.