Click.

Box number two. Same drill.

“Why isn’t the driver helping?” Jazz wondered. “They’d be done in half the time. He’s a little obvious sitting there idling the engine.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be seen,” Lucia said. Which was logical, and Jazz wished she hadn’t opened her mouth. She sucked on diet cola and glanced at the side mirrors again. Nothing sinister going on anywhere that she could see.

Pink Cardigan went back for the third box. Click. “Watch out for lens flash,” Jazz said.

Lucia threw her an irritated look. “I’m not a novice,” she said. “Relax.”

That really wasn’t possible, because this was feeling really wrong. Not that there was anything obviously strange going on…another bright shiny day in suburbia…but Jazz felt tension creeping up her spine and into her shoulders.

Pink Cardigan was getting red in the face, hauling boxes. She was working on the fifth one now, looking harassed. If what she was doing was illegal, she was pretty unconcerned about it. Of course, that was the secret to getting away with it, not being furtive. Still, this was a little too blatant, wasn’t it? Out in the open, at her own house, personally loading up the shiny black obvious van?

Didn’t make sense.

Click. Lucia ran off another photo. Jazz was willing to bet they all looked pretty much the same.

“What are we looking at?” Jazz asked.

“Good question,” Lucia answered. “I have no idea. She’s a neat person, conservative dresser—I’d put the outfit she’s got on at high-end department store—and there aren’t any markings on the boxes. Plain brown cardboard and tape. Everything sealed up, like for shipping. I don’t know.”

“Drugs?”

“Not like any drug shipment I’ve ever seen. Way too obvious. And look at the number of boxes stacked in there. She’d be a Colombian drug lord, with that inventory. And the lack of security…”

Jazz’s cell phone rang, caller unknown. When she answered, it was Manny.

“Jazz,” he blurted before she could say a word. “That picture? Her name’s Sally Collins. She’s a single mother, one daughter, Julia, fourteen. No criminal record, not even a speeding ticket in the last ten years. Normal debts. She co-owns a ceramics shop.”

“Thanks, Manny….” He’d already hung up.

She relayed the information to Lucia.

“Ceramics,” Lucia said. “Could be what’s in the boxes.”

“Ceramics with drugs?”

“It’s a stretch,” Lucia admitted.

“Yeah.” Jazz chewed her lip. “So what do we do?”

“Take pictures,” Lucia answered. “Until it’s done.”

Pragmatic, but not satisfying. Jazz sipped cola and scanned the mirrors again. Still, all quiet on the neighborhood front. It was positively Mayberry out there.

Pink Cardigan carried a total of ten boxes out. When she had the tenth one stacked in the van to her satisfaction, she closed the rear doors and walked around to the driver’s side again. A short conversation ensued.

“Parabolic mike,” Lucia said softly.

“On the shopping list,” Jazz agreed. “We definitely need more toys.”

The black van reversed out onto the street. Lucia leaned over, angling for a driver’s side shot, but the windows were tinted and rolled up tight.

It pulled away and made a left turn out of sight.

Jazz turned back to the house. Pink Cardigan was standing there, arms folded, staring down at her shoes. Frowning.

Lucia took another picture.

In between one breath and another, everything changed.

An engine growled behind them, and Jazz’s eyes flew to the side mirror. An electric blue car was turning the corner—a big thing, probably dating back to the seventies, square and solid and shining with chrome.

Pink Cardigan looked up, alarmed, saw the car and backed up.

Lucia swore, and dropped the camera to reach for her gun. Jazz was already going for hers, as well. The car glided nearly silently down the street, casual as a shark heading for a plump baby seal.

The car slowed even more. The kids in the yard played on, oblivious…and then, suddenly, it lurched into motion with a squeal of tires. Accelerating fast.

“Down!” Lucia yelled at Jazz and aimed across her. Jazz grabbed the handle that controlled the car seat and yanked it up, gasping as her seat slammed into full recline and she dropped hard with it. Gut-shot abdominal muscles complained with a hot, dizzying flash. She was staring up at Lucia, who was leaning over her, gun extended in firing position and braced with her left hand. Steady as a rock.

She didn’t fire. The muzzle of the gun tracked smoothly in an arc.

Jazz heard a world-shaking rumble, saw a shadow flash over Lucia’s face, and then the blue car was past them and still accelerating. No gunfire.

Jazz grabbed the dashboard and pulled herself back upright, ratcheting the seat to a straight position. Lucia slowly relaxed, both hands still on the gun, staring at Pink Cardigan.

The blue car swerved left at the corner, taking the same route as the black van.

“What the hell was that?” Jazz blurted, and turned to look at Pink Cardigan, who was staring at the car intently, but not as if she recognized it. She turned and went back into her house, slamming the door shut behind her with such violence that it echoed like the gunshots that hadn’t been fired. After a few minutes, the garage door cranked down, as well, and rattled shut with a hollow boom.

“I don’t know,” Lucia admitted. She still looked pale, breathing fast. Jazz related. She was about to pass out from the rush of adrenaline. “I thought they were going to kill her.”

“What stopped them?”

“Us,” Lucia said. “They saw us and kept driving. I think we just saved her life.”

“Without firing a shot? Excellent. I really don’t want to talk to Stewart twice in one day.” Jazz sounded steady and cheerful; she didn’t feel that way. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck, soaked her shirt. She needed to pee. Badly. Straight-up fighting she could take. This battle-of-nerves thing, not so much. “Man. That was…”

“Weird?” Lucia supplied. “Yeah.” She finally realized she was still holding the gun and put it away. “Sorry. I should have gotten the plate number.”

“One-six-four HCX,” Jazz said automatically. “That’s not the weird thing.”

She had Lucia’s full attention.

“The weird thing is that the license plate was black with yellow letters,” she continued. “Missouri plates, all right, but Missouri hasn’t issued that style since 1978.”

Lucia was outright staring at her. Big eyed. “You know the state license-plate colors by year?”

“Yeah.” Jazz shrugged. “Useful knowledge.”

“Just for Missouri, right?”

“If I say no, will you think I’m weird?”

That got an outright blink. Lucia, the calm and unsurprised, was finally thrown for a loop.

Jazz smiled, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a steno pad. She wrote down the plate number and details about the plate itself.

“So what does that mean? About the plate?” Lucia asked finally.

“Means they probably pulled it off a junker at an auto graveyard,” she said. “Although it fits the age of that car.”

She flipped open her cell phone and hit the fourth speed dial on the list. She got an answer on the second ring, as always.

“Hey, Gaz,” she said. “Run a plate for an old friend?”

“Don’t think so,” he replied. Gary Gailbraith was an old friend, and he’d never answered that way before. He sounded guarded. “Things are kind of busy right now. Can’t really talk.”

Oh, crap. “Has Stewart been on your ass?”

“Positively up it,” Gaz said. He was an older cop, white haired, with a broad face and a whiskey-drinker’s blush across his nose and cheeks. He always seemed vacant to most of the other detectives, but that was a deliberate cultivation on his part. He was sharp as a tack, was Gaz, just not in any obvious ways. He never competed. And he didn’t play politics, more than he had to in order to get the job done. “I think I need a proctologist.”