Loreth White - The Heart of a Renegade

The Asian quietly signaled another man in a dark doorway down the street. Both were watching Jessica, closing in on her from either end of the alley.

Luke pushed his cart faster toward his principal, head bent low as he mumbled to himself.

The Gastown steam clock shot out a powerful blast and began the hourly Windsor chimes. It was eleven o’clock. Jessica Chan stepped into the booth, picked up the receiver and rapidly began to punch in numbers.

A car drove by, tires crackling on slick cobblestones as tiny flakes of snow began to crystallize in the frigid air. By the time the vehicle had passed, Luke had lost visuals on both men.

His pulse quickened and he unholstered his weapon.

Giles was dead?

Jessica clenched the phone, her mouth turning dry as she tried to absorb what the woman at the CNN bureau in Shanghai was telling her. The one man who could help her was…gone. Confusion clouded her brain.

She’d spoken to him only two days ago, after Stephanie’s murder. She’d told him everything.

Giles had instructed her to lay low in a cheap hotel, use only cash and call him back from this exact same pay phone in forty-eight hours. In the meantime he’d find a way to help her. He had been Jessica’s last resort.

Her only hope.

And now he was dead.

Panic strafed her chest as the implications hit her and she slammed down the receiver. But just as she turned to run, a gunshot shattered a pane of glass near her ear.

She screamed and dropped down, covering her head with both hands and scrunching her eyes tight as a hail of bullets blew out another pane and shards rained down over her.

There was a moment of deathly silence before another exchange of gunfire shattered a store window across the street. Jessica heard glass tinkle to the frozen sidewalk. A security alarm began to wail. A woman screamed. More shouts came from the opposite direction as footsteps rang out on the cobblestones and a man yelled for someone to call 911.

She had to leave before the cops arrived.

Clutching her camera bag, Jessica surged to her feet, but as she tried to bolt from the booth, a man grabbed her, yanking her forcibly backward. Jessica screamed, fighting back with every ounce of strength. But she was no match against his iron grip. He whirled her round to face him and her heart clean stopped.

It was the Dumpster diver, morphed from a bent and fragile shape into something huge, ominous and incredibly powerful. He reeked of old booze, yet his pale gray eyes were sharp as flint against his grease-blackened face.

She opened her mouth in terror, but he pressed a gloved palm over it. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered against her ear. “I’m here to help you.”

He released her mouth slowly, testing her resolve. But Jessica couldn’t have uttered a word if she’d tried.

She couldn’t even breathe.

He took her jaw in powerful fingers, twisting her face quickly toward the light. “Looks okay,” he said, wiping blood from her cheek with a callused thumb. “Just a shallow cut.” His voice was rough gravel, his accent Australian.

Out of the corner of her eye Jessica could see a man’s body splayed inhumanly across the sidewalk, a gun at his side. Another body sprawled to the right of him. Both were Asian. People were gathering around them.

Her eyes shot back to the man holding her. He was holstering a pistol. He’d shot those men. He’d just saved her from the triad. She struggled to absorb the contradicting images he telegraphed. His tattered gloves had no fingertips, his hat was old black wool, his jacket threadbare tweed. He stunk of booze, yet there was no alcohol on his breath. She couldn’t make any sense of him.

The yelling and footsteps grew louder, and police sirens began to wail.

Jessica shot a last desperate look down the road, toward the sound of approaching sirens. Right now she didn’t know which was the worse evil—the police who’d betrayed her, or him.

“You don’t want the cops, Jessica,” he warned, his fingers encircling her arm.

He knew her name! Her eyes whipped back to him.

He drew her body firmly up against his. “Listen to me, Jessica,” he said quietly. “I can tell you what happened to Giles Rehnquist, but right now your life depends on following my orders. Now run.”

He hunkered low, pulling her by the hand at a clip over irregular paving as the sirens grew louder. They ducked into Blood Alley, and he forced her hard up against a rough brick wall as Vancouver Police Department cruisers converged on the scene of the shooting, car doors swinging open, officers barking commands. Cops quickly began to fan out, heading their way with flashlights beaming through the fog.

“This way,” he whispered, pulling her after him. They ran for the alley exit, but a squad car slowed in front of it, barring their escape. He turned and shoved her down between two overflowing Dumpsters that flanked the service entrance of an Irish pub, pinning her down firmly against bags of garbage with his weight. “Don’t move,” he murmured against her hair. The smothering stench of stale sweat and booze permeating the tattered tweed of his jacket made her gag, but the soft sweater against his hard body smelled soapy clean. Masculine.

Jessica closed her eyes, trying to calm herself. She could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart against her chest. It was a strangely comforting sensation. In a foreign city where she’d been cut off from everything including her clothes, apartment, cell phone and colleagues—a city where she was beginning to wonder if she could even trust her own mind—this man felt solid. He felt real. Capable. And he hadn’t betrayed her.

Yet.

The sounds in the distance grew less frenetic, but still her rescuer didn’t move and her legs were going numb. She tried to wiggle feeling back into her toes.

“Keep still,” he hissed. “Someone’s coming.”

Then she heard it: the steady clop, clop, clop, of hooves on cobblestones. She peered out from under his jacket as the silhouettes of two police officers on horses darkened the entrance to Blood Alley, fog swirling behind them.

The mounted police entered the alley slowly, hooves echoing as they panned darkened crevices with flashlights.

Jessica’s throat tightened, but the steady beat of her defender’s heart never faltered. Not even when the hooves drew so near they almost touched his feet. One of the horses snorted, hot breath steaming into the air. She could smell them.

“Hey, you,” one of the cops said, directing his flashlight into their corner. “Can you get to your feet, please? I need to see ID.”

The man lying on top of Jessica groaned, made as if he was trying to sit up, then he flopped back as if too drunk.

The officer dismounted. “Can you stand, buddy?” the cop said, reaching down to pull him up. Her mysterious savior waited until the cop’s center of balance was precisely at the most disadvantageous, then he grabbed the policeman’s arm, yanked him down, cracked his head against his own, and rolled out from under him as the unconscious cop slumped heavily onto Jessica. She stifled a yelp of shock.

The officer on his horse immediately drew his weapon, yelling at him to freeze, but her protector surged forward with such swift and fluid motion it caught the officer by surprise. He fired, his bullet going wild and pinging into the Dumpster over Jessica’s head as her defender grabbed the cop with bare hands and dragged him from his horse.

The horse reared, hooves clawing at air before taking off with a clatter over stone. Jessica stared in awe as her guardian rendered the policeman unconscious with quick, firm pressure of his hand to the man’s neck.

She’d seen people trained in martial arts do that. She’d seen them move like him, too—fast and powerful, balletic. This man was skilled in hand-to-hand combat. He was a walking, talking lethal weapon.