Undercover Justice. Nico Rosso

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 in an attraction with a woman getaway driver. It didn’t matter that they’d handled the trouble in San Francisco perfectly, like dancing to the same rhythm. Stephanie was still the enemy.

      * * *

      TWO HOURS DRIVING through the early morning in a “stolen” car with Arash had stripped the insulation from her defenses. The chase through San Francisco hadn’t rattled her as much as the cautious conversations they’d used to learn about each other. Not that either was revealing all their truths. She knew he was hiding as much of himself as she was, though he probably wasn’t working secretly for an underground vigilante group. But she kept having to remind herself that this man, who listened with interest when she spoke, was part of the evil she was tasked with defeating.

      “The next right.” Arash’s low, gravelly voice was more suited to the bedroom. He’d navigated them off the highway and toward a generic Sacramento suburb. The light from his phone revealed weary eyes. He took a long breath and sat up straighter, rallying. More life shined in his expression as he scanned the area.

      She reset her focus. A new day was about to begin. She was about to meet Olesk. Any mistakes she made now would be deadly.

      The workday around them had started before the sun, with cars and trucks and vans already on the road. The neighborhood she turned into seemed like it was still sleeping. Lights off. Cars cold. She tried to predict which house was her target but couldn’t make any of them seem more criminal than another. Olesk was slick.

      But not perfect. “I see it.” She aimed for a two-story house covered in taupe stucco. A pickup truck parked on the street in front of it had a wider stance than what rolled off the factory floor.

      Arash chuckled. “You’re good.” He put his phone away. “Someone threw some spacers on their pickup wheels.”

      “The only nonstock car on the block.” She slowed the Mercedes and turned into the driveway. As soon as they crossed the sidewalk, the garage door opened. A line of white light widened ahead, until the space inside the two-car garage was completely exposed. A sport-tuned compact import car took up one spot.

      “I hope they have a real shop to work in.” Arash cocked his head with a disapproving frown.

      She pulled in next to the cluttered workbench, with only basic tools and a scattering of bottles of motor oil and detailing supplies. If Olesk and his crew were breaking down cars, they were doing it somewhere else. Nothing in the garage seemed illegal. Stacks of boxes, a rolling rack hanging with clothes covered in plastic. All perfectly normal to anyone who might be driving or walking past when the door was open.

      The Mercedes purred to a stop and she shut it down. She didn’t have a moment to take a breath with the resting car before the garage door started closing behind her and Arash. He swung out of the car and faced a door at the back of the garage. She could see that the car ride hadn’t locked him up too much. His body was balanced, ready.

      She took her time, collecting her bag from the back seat before getting out of her Mercedes one last time.

      The door at the back of the garage opened. A tall white man in his thirties with shaggy blond hair filled the frame. His head was cocked to one side confidently, like he was looking at a piece of art he already understood. While his smile was friendly enough, if a little aloof, his eyes were hard. When he stepped down into the garage, Stephanie saw that a woman stood behind him. Blunt bangs dyed dark blue and a high black ponytail. This white woman in her late twenties didn’t move into the garage, but stared long, her mouth a thin line.

      “Arash,