was neutral. Even her black, military-style jacket was lacking any logos or brands.
“Stephanie.” She kept both her hands on the steering wheel, not offering one to shake.
“Good to be riding with you.” He leaned back in the seat but couldn’t get any calm to sink into his muscles. The car rocketed through the night, toward a fight he couldn’t wait to start, but he didn’t know how or when. He wasn’t driving. This badass woman was, he kept reminding himself, part of the gang he was going to destroy. It took some effort to keep his voice casual. “Been rolling with Olesk long?”
“First gig.” Her cautious gaze pierced Arash for a split second, then returned to the black highway.
The information resonated like a gunshot. He tried to use it to shape more of what he knew of Stephanie, but he couldn’t find enough pieces to bolt together. She could’ve been lying, but that would be found out as soon as they arrived at Olesk’s place. He examined the angles of telling her his own truth and couldn’t find any reason not to reveal just a little. “Mine, too.”
“Have you met Olesk?” This time when she assessed him there was a little surprise in her eyes.
“Nothing face-to-face.” Tension hummed in his spine, not knowing what he was going to do when he was finally in the same room with the man responsible for Marcos’s death.
“So we’re both on the trial run.” She looked him over again, and he felt like she might have X-ray vision the way she took him apart. “What did they send you into the warehouse for?”
He took the piece of paper from his coat and unfolded it. “Shipping orders for today. From Eddie Shun, no less.”
She clicked her tongue, nodding, impressed. “You managed to do it.”
“And you got me out of there.” He put the paper away.
“We passed this test.”
So she was heading into the unknown, too. Her face was unreadable in the dash lights. “Olesk will be lucky to have you on the crew. Where’d you learn to push a V8 biturbo like that?”
“I went to private school with a bunch of rich kids.” A sly smile crossed her lips. “There were a lot of expensive cars to wreck.” She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “But their parents still never paid attention.” When she finally turned to him, it was to blink slowly with that smile still on her face. He saw the truth of her words within her nonchalant attitude. And something else, deeper in her look. What she’d seen, and lived, still dwelled in her. He found himself drawn to that depth, wanting to discover what it was she’d learned from her side of life.
“You picked a winner.” Before he stared at her too long, he snapped himself back to the moment and ran his hand over the dashboard.
“I’d cased it for a couple days and it hadn’t moved out of its parking spot.” She patted the steering wheel. “Machine like this needs to run.”
And Stephanie seemed like the perfect person to own the streets with the sleek beast. “And clean.” He opened the glove compartment and found only the normal paperwork. There wasn’t a fast-food napkin in sight. The floor mats in the back seat looked like they’d never been touched by the sole of a shoe. “Whoever’s car this is, she was...meticulous.”
“How do you know it was a woman?” she challenged.
“Perfume.” The dark spiced aroma had hit him once he’d been able to breathe easily after the chase. “It’s different from yours.”
“I’m not wearing any.”
“Your soap, then.” The cabin of the car suddenly seemed especially small. Intimate. Like he’d had his face close to the skin of her neck.
She rubbed her thumb along the side of her finger in a slow meditation, then abruptly stopped to grip the steering wheel. Her gaze remained forward. “Breaking and entering, theft, perfuming. What else can you do?”
“I can drive anything with wheels. Tear it down and build it back up again.” Was he bragging or flirting? “If it has a motor, I can make it sing.” Stick to bragging, he scolded himself. There was no room for a hookup with this woman in his plans for Olesk and Olesk’s crew.
“Bet you didn’t learn all that in private school.”
“I’ve been seriously in the grease since I was fifteen.” Marcos had been right next to him. Until addiction and the need for easy cash pulled Marcos away, leading him ultimately to Olesk. And his death.
“When I can afford one of these—” she tapped the gearshift “—I’ll call you to work on it.”
He laughed, again the car feeling smaller than before. The early-morning hour seemed to dress a heavy curtain around these moments with the mysterious Stephanie. “A ride this fine never comes into the shop where I wrench. Only mechanics with white coveralls and stainless-steel calipers are qualified to tune these machines.”
“So if we break down out here in the middle of nowhere, you couldn’t fix it?”
“Hell, yeah, I could.” As long as it wasn’t the computer brain. “I’ll bet you could, too.” He pulled the transceiver out of the side pocket of her bag. He’d only heard of these multithousand-dollar devices used to break into the most tech-heavy cars, and had never handled one. It was clearly made on someone’s bench, but it was solid and had already proven itself.
“I know my way around combustion.” Stephanie shrugged and ran a fingernail down the edge of her bob, straightening it along the side of her cheek.
Now he wanted to see her wiping her greasy hands on a rag while standing over a purring engine. His own heart started thumping at the rate of the fantasy pistons until he shoved the transceiver back into the bag and tried to erase the image from his head. “What other gear is in here? Police radio scrambler? Attack drone?” He hauled the bag into his lap.
“Changes of clothes.” She grabbed the bag and slid it into the back seat. “Private changes of clothes.”
The tenuous intimacy cooled. “So you knew we’d be road-tripping?” She’d said this was her first gig for Olesk, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t tighter with the man and his crew than Arash was.
She shook her head. “I prepared for a few possibilities.” Her eyes assessed him with some disappointment. “You didn’t.”
He straightened his jacket and crossed his arms. Flashlight, knife, multi-tool, the cell phone he’d set up specifically for contacting Olesk. Not much else. “I’ve been focused on other things.” Like how to get into the gang without anyone knowing he was really there to destroy it.
“Plan ahead.” Stephanie settled in her seat, still alert, but not driving like they were being chased.
He’d always sucked at chess. His father had tried to teach him a couple of times, but he’d always been better at the backgammon games with his mother. More chance. Thinking on the fly. But Stephanie was right. Olesk had to be smart to operate a crew for this long without getting caught. Arash had to be smarter. He gave her a small salute. “Eight moves ahead.” One hour until Sacramento. Two hours until sunrise. He had to be ready for Olesk and anything else. That meant not getting twisted up
