School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,1
for them to be.”
Sonny’s face paled at his first words, and Ace kissed him again.
“No fretting. Jai and me, we’re good at this, remember?”
“But Ace—”
“We’ve got to go,” Ace said, feathering a sort of caress down Sonny’s cheek with his thumb. They were not soft men. That touch was sufficient to silence Sonny and give him pause enough to back off and let Ace go.
“So I’m just fixing the minivan? Seriously?” he said, but he’d already taken that step back.
“You’re what?” Ernie said, coming out of the cashier’s cubicle where he worked for them sometimes.
“It was an RV full of kids,” Ace said shortly as Jai brought Ernie’s little Sentra around the far side of the house. “We need something that can catch up but that nobody will recognize.”
Burton worked covert ops—and Ernie was supposed to be dead. Between them, Ace, Sonny, and Jai kept Ernie in a revolving train of piece-of-shit cars with sketchy VIN numbers. Ace could literally leave this car by the side of the road, and it would disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.
Ernie’s eyes went wide, and then he opened his witchy mouth and said, “Get the children to safety—this blood’s not yours,” just as Jai got up and jogged around the side of the car.
Ace nodded shortly. “That’s really all I needed to know. Keep Sonny calm, willya?”
He didn’t wait for the answer as he slid behind the Sentra’s wheel, grateful Jai hadn’t pushed the seat all the way back. Jai was nearly six foot seven, and that would be damned uncomfortable for Ace.
“You see which way—” Jai began as Ace peeled out.
“East.”
“What is your plan?”
“Hope he doesn’t want to go through the window of that RV,” Ace said shortly.
“Is a shitty plan.”
Jai’s honesty wasn’t always Ace’s favorite thing.
“The question,” he muttered, “is what we’re going to do with the kids once we have them.”
“I’ll ask Ernie for suggestions.” Jai pulled out his phone and started texting.
“Think your nurse friend can help?”
Even with his eyes glued to the road, Ace got a feeling for the pained expression that crossed Jai’s features.
“I dislike dragging him into this,” he admitted.
“Well, I dislike leaving my boyfriend back at home scared to death, but everybody’s got to make sacrifices, Jai. The only way our little operation works is if we keep it under the radar.”
“Da,” Jai said reluctantly. “Let us get rid of the rattlesnake behind the wheel and see if there’s more bad guys. Then we can make plans.”
The RV moved as slow as frozen shit through a pipe. They could see it waddling in the distance, and Ace looked in his rearview mirror and noted at least five miles of nobody behind him and another five miles of nobody in the front. He stood on the accelerator of the little car, and it buzzed its heart out for them, making him feel bad for planning to kill it when this was over.
“You are sure he will stop?” Jai asked, displaying only a mild curiosity.
“You got your seat belt on?” Ace asked. His was on, like it always was, because speed limits were more of a suggestion for the faint of heart than a rule.
“Da,” Jai said.
“Then, sure. He’ll stop.”
And with that, Ace zoomed past the laboring RV, then up the road a quarter mile, where he jammed on the brakes, hit the emergency brake, and allowed the resulting skid to carry the car 180 degrees around in a circle and land on the dividing line between both lanes.
He and Jai had about three heartbeats to regard the oncoming vehicle before the guy at the wheel—eyes looming like boiled eggs, even from the closing distance—swerved off the road and halted, skidding to a stop in a cloud of dust on the side of the road to Ace’s left.
“I’ll talk to him,” Ace said. “You reconnoiter.”
“I don’t even think you know what that word means,” Jai said.
“It means you circle around and bash him on the head,” Ace said.
“Apparently you do,” Jai murmured and slammed the door shut so Ace could pull to the side of the road and out of traffic.
As he was getting out of the car, he noted the driver of the RV had recovered a rifle from somewhere in his nightmare-mobile and had it cocked and ready as Ace stepped out.
“The fuck you doing!” he demanded, his accent thicker than Jai’s and sharper somehow. Provinces, Ace thought. Countries he wasn’t versed in. He’d been enlisted in the military. Nobody’d paid him