Night Game (GhostWalkers #3)(11)
Author: Christine Feehan

The safe gleamed at her, outrageously shiny in order to provide as many great fingerprints as possible should it be broken into. Flame smiled at it. “Hello, baby. Mama’s come to free your soul.” She peered closer. “You’re a primo model, aren’t you, hon? I’ll just bet you’ve got a few layers of hard plate behind the door, don’t you? I’ll also bet you have a few ball bearings in the hard plate to chew up the drill bits too. That’s just not nice, but then I’m not going to drill into you. That would hurt, wouldn’t it, gorgeous?”

The safe also had a remote relocking device. If she punched out the combination, the remote relocker would engage, but she had no intention of cutting out the lock. She did everything by sound. She closed her eyes as she spun the tumbler, listening for the drop in sound. The first number was six and dropped easily into place. Flame spun the lock and heard the drop at nine. The third number was six. Scowling, she wasn’t surprised when nine came up again. Four more times the numbers repeated.

“Idiot. You’re such a freakin’ cheesy sleazebag,” she said as she swung open the safe’s door. Four briefcases fit snugly into the safe. All four had combination locks. She didn’t bother to ascertain they contained cash. It stood to reason they did. Scooping out all four, she secured them to her belt and carefully, without haste, put everything back exactly as it had been.

The climb hand-over-hand up the rope back to the roof was easy enough, and she kept the high-frequency pattern going in a nice steady beat the whole while. Back outside, she restored the skylight glass, using a high-end glue to replace the cutout, holding it in place until it sealed. They would find out, but it was always fun to make them work a little to figure it out.

Stashing the four briefcases in her bag, she crawled quickly to the hook, retrieved the anchor, and shoved it in her bag with the other tools. She left the line, to provide the illusion of an expected escape route to whomever the Whitney Trust had sent against her. Let him wait for her. If she was really lucky, when the break-in was discovered, he might even get caught.

She slipped the pack on her back and slithered over the roof to the front edge. It was a long drop to the ground, but she had no intention of going down that way. She’d already calculated the jump between the tower roof and the small guesthouse at the back of the property Saunders used for his playtime. During surveillance she’d seen his men bring several different women there. Saunders liked to play rough. The women always came out looking battered and bruised rather than happy with whatever he paid them.

The distance between the tower and the guesthouse was far too great for anyone to believe she could use it as an exit. A sweeping lawn and several flower beds separated the two buildings. Flame straightened up, a momentary risk as she took a running start across the tower roof to leap for the roof of the guesthouse. She landed in a crouch, gaze already probing the darkness for danger.

Best scenario, the theft wouldn’t be discovered until morning and she could leisurely get away, mask the sound of her motorcycle and hope one of Saunders’s really alert guards didn’t spot her. If so, well, that was one of the reasons for having the motorcycle in the first place.

Flame ran along the side of the guesthouse to the back of the property. The guards occasionally gathered to play a game of cards where Saunders never bothered to look for them. She made out two large men sitting in the gazebo housing a hot tub. Saunders went for the intimidation factor in his men, wanting them pumped-up in order to bully people with appearance alone. She could hear the murmur of conversation as they discussed a club in the French Quarter both were particularly fond of.

She moved past them easily, creeping along the hedge until she found the small rock, which she had painted white to make it easy to spot in the dark. Pocketing it, she looked left and right, listened for a minute, and leapt over the fence, landing blind on the other side. She’d dropped the rock hours earlier to mark the only place along the back fence she could go over and land in a clear spot inside the thick foliage surrounding the brick wall. She remained crouched, her heart beginning to accelerate again. Whitney’s man would know she was up to something. She would never stay inside the estate grounds so long. He was probably stalking her.

She sent every psychic and natural sense she had out to the night, searching for information, listening for the sound of footsteps, the whisper of clothing sliding through vegetation. Even the sudden silence of insects would tip her off to the other’s location, but she heard only the regular sounds of the night.

Flame didn’t wait for the alarm to be raised behind her. Staying low in the shadows along the brick wall she moved quickly, keeping to the foliage as much as possible, all the while scanning the area for sound or movement. She shushed several guard dogs as she passed more houses. When she was three blocks from the Saunders’s estate, she halted. She had to cross the street to get to the t where she’d left her motorcycle and the lamps were stilling light brightly across the paved road.

She waited there in the darkness. The feeling that she wasn’t alone crept in. The weight of the four briefcases was heavy on her shoulder, but she could use it as a weapon if necessary-if she got that close.

Soft male laughter reached her from deep within the trees of the park. “You may as well come on over, cher. Aren’t ‘cha getting all hot and bothered standin’ there wonderin’ whether or not I’ve got me a gun?”

CHAPTER 3

The low Cajun drawl was as smooth as molasses and set Flame’s heart pounding. Could he see her? Or, like her, did he just sense her presence?

“You’ve been a very bad girl tonight. I don’ know what was so important to you, cher, but someone should have told you stealin’, it be a bad, bad thing.”

She remained stubbornly silent, trying to get a fix on his voice. Was he throwing it? Projecting it from a false direction in order to trick her? She was fast, incredibly fast. She could streak across the lighted street and make a run for her bike, but he’d know exactly where she was. Damn Whitney and his experiments. She had no choice but to work her way down several more blocks. She cou1d feel the minutes ticking by. Saunders wouldn’t stay too long out of his ivory tower and the theft would be discovered.

When she had gone several blocks down and around the corner from her motorcycle, Flame burst out from the foliage, sprinted across the lighted street, and up three blocks until she gained the relative safety of the park. She slowed immediately, not wanting to give away her exact location by stepping on crisp leaves or dried twigs. She crouched low in the shadows and controlled her breathing. Sounds carried at night, even harsh breathing and more than once she’d slid past guards, knowing exactly where they were only by their ragged breath coming in short gasps after exertion. Flame used her psychic ability to keep any sound she might make from traveling.