“Have something to drink,” Mag said at last, handing Jared a glass. “You probably need it. Running all over the place like an idiot. You know, Kara won’t thank you for butting in.”

Relief made his knees want to buckle; he willed himself to stand straight. Mag had said Kara wouldn’t thank him, which sounded an awful lot like the canny former prostitute had knowledge she was going to share. “I won’t thank you,” he said quietly, “if something happens to her because I’m not there to help.

Especially when you know where she is.”

“I don’t know exactly, I only have a guess. I didn’t have time to warn her about Krystal,” she said, sounding annoyed, “and that’s the only reason I’m telling you anything. If I thought she had the whole story, I wouldn’t say shit and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it, pretty boy.”

“Warn her?” he asked sharply. Definitely don’t like the sound of that, oh no .

“I wasn’t here when Krystal left with her. Kara can take care of herself, but Krystal’s a snake and snakes bite everybody, even snake handlers.”

Mystifying, but interesting. Jared nodded encouragingly.

“I was about a day away from kicking her skinny ass out of here. She was trouble from the start. Not because of what she’s been through, what she’s done. She’s trouble because she likes it. I can’t put up with that. Won’t.”

Well. Any woman a tough cookie like Mag didn’t like definitely bore watching. Suddenly realizing how thirsty he was and realizing he wasn’t going anywhere until Mag had her say, he drained his water glass and gagged on the lemon slice before spitting it back among the ice cubes.

Mag sighed and he had a moment of sympathy for her. The woman was getting ready to do things that went against everything she had ever learned. She was going to trust a stranger, she was going to help that stranger interfere in street business and she was as much as admitting the infamous Avenging Angel needed help. Big-time sins, where she and Kara had come from.

He didn’t care. Concern for Kara drove out consideration for Mag’s moral dilemma. If he had to, he’d throttle the information out of the woman and to hell with anyone who might get in his way.

“I don’t know for sure,” Mag said at last. “But there’s a warehouse Carlotti’s been using lately. Krystal was busted there last week, but the cops only hauled her in, nobody else in the gang. You might want to try there. It’s down by the waterfront. Third and Lancaster. You can’t miss it, it takes up the whole block.”

“Goodbye,” he said, putting down his glass and turning to leave. Mag reached out, flash-quick and snagged his elbow. Jared was astonished at the smaller woman’s strength. He could have broken her hold, but it would have taken effort, as well as precious time.

“Freeze, Doctor Doofus. Do you have a plan? I mean, besides barging through the front door and getting shot in the face?”

“No. That was pretty much my plan. Let go, willya? You’re cutting off the circulation.”

“You in the market for some advice, Citizen?”

“Absolutely.”

“Some of my girls. They get sick a lot. Too many years standing on street corners, you’ll catch everything, you know?”

Jared nodded. He did know. Prostitutes were easy prey for just about any bug that came along. Many of them were afflicted with chronic colds, viruses and the tunnel honeys developed emphysema in a distressingly short time from exposure to car exhaust.

“Well,” Mag was saying, “they don’t like to go to the clinic. The wait’s long, they have to sit through lectures from people who don’t know shit about the life and if you don’t have insurance it’s…”

“A nightmare of paperwork and bureaucratic indifference,” Jared finished. “How about I make some housecalls for you? Maybe two or three times a month?”

“Dara!” Mag yelled, startling him and the same girl who had brought their drinks reappeared. She was actually, Jared noticed, much younger than early teens. He didn’t want to think about the circumstances that had led her to a home for retired prostitutes. “We still got those boxes left over from last night’s supper?”

“In the alley.”

“We also need to borrow one of your birthday presents. The one I got you for a joke.”

Dara almost smiled. The child reminded him of a younger, more solemn Kara. “Be right back,” she said, turning to leave.

“Assuming you don’t get killed, doc—which you probably will—I’ll expect you here a week from today to give some of the girls a checkup.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I don’t think your presence will make a damn bit of difference,” Mag went on ruthlessly, “but you never know. If nothing else, you might make a good distraction. So here’s what I suggest you do…”

CHAPTER NINE

There was another knock on the door.

“Who the hell is that?” Carlotti asked, perplexed.

He was right to be perplexed, Kara thought. This wasn’t a neighborhood where one knocked. Certainly the police wouldn’t bother. And anyone who belonged in this warehouse was here right now. So who was it?

“Girl Scout cookie time already?” she asked brightly.

“Shut the hell up. Joey, go open the door.”

Joey did, first freeing his semi-automatic and holding it loosely in his gun hand. Kara noticed he hadn’t bothered to ratchet a bullet in the chamber, a fact which cheered her immensely. How nice to know that Carlotti, a monumental idiot, still chose to surround himself with fellow morons. She almost laughed aloud and got ready.

Her mood had dramatically shifted and she wondered at it. And in another half-second she was able to put her finger on the reason for her sudden high spirits. For once in her life, she wasn’t acting like a rat in a trap, wasn’t wondering how best to scuttle away and live to thieve another day. Now she was thinking like an assassin. It was unsettling, but nice to be thinking about something besides how to run.

Joey unbolted the door and swung it open. It groaned on heavy hinges which cried out for oil, revealing…

Jared.

“Pizza?” Joey asked.

Kara closed her eyes. The stress had finally gotten to her. All those years of living by her wits, of cheating death—and various arresting officers—had finally caught up with her; in this moment of extreme peril, she was hallucinating.

“Yeah, that’s sixty-nine ninety-five,” Jared was saying. Kara opened her eyes. It was Jared. Dressed in a red jacket, a red cap and jeans. Perhaps most surprising, he was carrying six large pizza boxes.

It wasn’t an actual delivery uniform, she realized, but the bold colors—coupled by the pizza boxes—tricked the average observer into thinking he was a delivery boy.

“We didn’t order no pizzas!” Carlotti shouted, “So get the hell lost!”

“What?” Jared yelled back. “Dude, if you don’t pay, it gets taken outta my paycheck!”

“But we didn’t—”

“So you’re payin’! I gotta pepperoni extra cheese, I gotta meatlover’s special, I gotta vegetarian, I gotta sausage onion mushroom, I gotta cheese…”

“But we didn’t order any pizza,” Joey said, still trying to puzzle this out. Kara could practically read the man’s torturous thought process: we should be beating the crap outta the bimbo, instead we’re talking about pizza? Wha?

“Sixty-nine ninety-five, man, let’s go, I’m double parked.” Suddenly, shockingly, he hurled the pizza boxes at the bad guys, who had loosely clustered around Joey and yelled, “Run, Kara!”

Joey’s elbow came up, blocking, but it did no good…the boxes went everywhere, their tops popping open and spilling their load. To her astonishment—and Kara had thought nothing more would surprise her this day—she saw the boxes were filled with dozens and dozens of marbles.

Pandemonium. Joey was the first to fall, hitting the cement floor so hard his gun was jarred from his grip.

Jared snatched it from the floor, cat-quick, then pointed it at Carlotti with wildly trembling aim, squinched his eyes shut, again yelled, “Kara, dammit, run!” and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened, of course; she doubted Jared knew how to pump a cartridge in the chamber.

Frankly, she was surprised he’d known which end to point at Carlotti. But it didn’t matter; it was his pure hearted effort that counted. He’d risked everything to come here, the moron and had been ready to violate his healer’s oath to save her life.

She had no trouble keeping her balance on the treacherous floor; it took stamina and concentration, both of which she had in spades. She was at Jared’s side in an instant, pulling the gun from his grip and throwing it as hard as she could. She knew more about guns than her lover—almost anyone would—but she had always concentrated on the martial arts, never feeling the need to bring a gun along on her hacks.

Besides, she had noticed before that those who were good with guns often depended on them to the exclusion of everything else.

Three of the goons were scrambling on the floor like dazed crabs. Marbles were still rolling everywhere.

One of thugs had racked his knee as he’d fallen and was not at all interested in getting up and joining the fray. Instead, he rocked back and forth on the floor, his lips skinned back from his teeth, holding his knee with both hands. Kara heard a click and shoved Jared out of the way just as the air exploded with sound.

“The idiots don’t even have silencers,” she muttered, flinging a pizza box at another bad guy’s head.

During his flinch she kicked his legs out from under him and yanked the gun away hard enough to break two of his fingers. The small crackling sounds—and the significantly louder scream of the creep who’d actually shot at Jared —were infinitely satisfying. For a moment, she was sorely tempted to empty the clip into the goon’s head and almost smiled…she hadn’t been nearly so furious at the danger to her own life.