Chapter 1
A harsh sound vibrated through Luke’s consciousness. It shook him out of whatever spell he was under. Suddenly he could feel the soft pillows and covers of his own bed. He opened his eyes and looked around. Pitch-black—it was the dead of night.
The three women were gone, though he could still feel his own arousal.
That honey smell...heavenly...
Beside him on the night table, his phone was buzzing and vibrating like an angry bee.
He grabbed for it. “Mars,” he growled into it.
“It’s going down,” he heard a familiar voice whisper on the other end. “They’re unloading a shipment. Pier 94, right now.”
“Wait...” Luke started, but the caller had hung up. His confidential informant, a longshoreman at the port. Luke felt adrenaline spike through his body, a thrill of excitement and anticipation. As a detective with the San Francisco Police Department, he was assigned to the special task force on piracy. He’d been working this case for six months and it was the first real break in the case; they’d been waiting for an actual shipment to arrive.
Luke threw back the bedclothes and stood, then grabbed the phone again and speed-dialed his partner while he scrounged for the clothes he’d discarded last night. Dark ones—they had to be dark.
The phone clicked over to a voice-mail message, and he waited impatiently for it to end so he could speak. “Pepper, it’s Mars. Meet me on Cesar Chavez, above Pier 94. Just got tipped off that there’s a shipment coming in.”
He made the same call to his lieutenant and again got voice mail, so he left the same message.
He pulled black jeans and a T-shirt on over his intricate tattoos: the stylized sun on his biceps, the coiled dragons on his back. Viking symbols, which he supposed would have made his grandmother happy if she’d known about them. She loved to see him embracing anything Old World—anything that referenced his Scandinavian blood.
As he dressed he could almost smell the honey-sweetness of the middle, red-haired woman again, and the dream flickered back into his consciousness.
He remembered it now: three women standing around his bed: blond, dark, and red.
He could feel a tingling that was more than just the lingering eroticism of the dream women, a tingling that always signaled a significant moment.
It was a dream, that’s all.
The trouble was, he’d been having it since he was a child. And he didn’t like the feeling in his gut.
Was it a good omen? Or a warning?
The dream of the three women had sometimes meant powerful good luck: like the day he learned he’d won a football scholarship to Stanford and the day he’d gotten his detective’s shield. But at other times the dream had meant the most powerful bad luck, like when he’d been sidelined junior year by a knee injury and had basically lost out on a pro career. Not to mention he’d had the dream the night before he’d lost his parents in a car accident when he was seven...
After a minute he stepped over to his closet and looked in at the bulletproof vest that hung on a hook just inside.
Although he hated driving in it, he snatched up the vest and shrugged it on over his T-shirt, grimacing at the bulk. But no use in ignoring signs. Call it instinct, call it premonition, call it the dream, but he didn’t feel like taking chances tonight.
He pulled a dark windbreaker on over the vest as he exited his second-floor flat and pounded down the narrow stairs of the Victorian across from Golden Gate Park. Outside the night was eerie with drifting fog.
He hit the sidewalk and sprinted across the narrow strip of park, under the shadows of eucalyptus trees toward the garage that housed his car, and decided to call the dream a good omen. After all, he’d met possibly the most gorgeous woman in San Francisco the night before: Valentina, she’d said in the bar. On a scale of ten, she was a solid twelve. Come to think of it, a little like the dark one in the dream. They’d hit it off, attraction sizzling in the air like lightning, and she’d said she’d be calling him. He knew she would. She was just what he needed: a woman who could match him in curiosity and adventurousness, and who had no expectation of anything like forever. Luke Mars didn’t do “forever.” He was on the fast track; he needed to be able to disappear anytime he needed to for a case, needed to be able to pack up and go to another city if the mission or his restless spirit called for it. He never lied to anyone that he was anything but what he was: independent, free and definitely unattached.
Suddenly, inexplicably, Luke remembered the middle woman from the dream, the redhead, with that fiery red-gold mane cascading down over her shoulders, those sky-blue eyes and the way she had looked at him...as if he were everything...everything he actually wanted to be in his life. She’d said something to him...
I’ll take care of you.
He felt an unexpected pang...quickly forgotten as he recalled the dark one’s assets.
Luke was, above all, a practical man.
* * *
Well, all right, practical didn’t exactly describe his ’99 Chevy Cavalier, souped up with a 350 horsepower engine, but there were limits to practicality.
Luke gunned the car out of the rented garage (no way would he trust this baby to the streets of San Francisco), and raced up Ashbury, enjoying the car’s effortless climb on the nearly vertical hill and the power of the machine, like a fine horse underneath him.
He’d bought the car just for nights like these, when the city was asleep and he could have the streets almost to himself, racing the wind. He sped up over the crest of the hill and started the steep descent down toward the bay.
The buildings around him were enveloped in fog, fog and more fog; Luke could barely see through the windshield. It rolled away from the car as the high beams cut through the murk. The tops of the tallest buildings looked like UFOs, floating disembodied above the streets.
The dream faded away as he focused on the murky road and the task at hand.
The word pirates always seemed like a throwback, strangely stirring Luke’s Viking blood. But in fact, piracy was a burgeoning modern crime. Shipping container theft was rampant on the high seas—a low-risk, high-reward business that criminal elements from every country in the world seemed to be determined to get in on. Anything that could be stolen—electronics, appliances, software—was fair game. And the Port of San Francisco was a natural target.
In the past six months four major shipping lines had had container ships boarded and pillaged en route to the port. Luke’s strongest lead was that the stolen containers were somehow being unloaded and processed at the port as legitimate cargo and immediately scattered to the four winds, shipped out via trucks all over the country. He just had to find out how.
He had a feeling that he was about to crack the case wide open and that it was his ticket to...a lot. His personal plan was to nail the piracy ring to the wall and write that ticket: lieutenant, task force chief. It was time for him to be moving upward and onward; his superiors knew it and he knew it. It was just this propensity he had for...
