That possibility sat uneasily in my gut as we hurried down to the street. Blaze’s voice hummed through my headset. “She’s crossed Blantyre Avenue, heading east.”
“Acknowledged.” I picked up my pace, Garrison following close behind. The woman had a substantial head start on us, but we could close the distance quickly. I set my feet carefully even as we hustled toward her location, making only the faintest patter.
Coming up on the next corner, we slowed and peered around the bend. “She’s in our sights,” Garrison whispered into his mic.
The woman we’d spotted had made it to the end of that block, but she’d stopped by a sedan parked by the curb, which had given us more of a chance to catch up. What was she—
She yanked at something by the top of the window and then tugged on the door, which opened. She immediately dove into the driver’s seat.
I muttered a curse under my breath. She’d broken into the damn thing. I headed along the street as quickly as I dared, sticking close to the shadows outside the shops on the opposite side of the road, Garrison right behind me.
If she noticed us, she’d probably bolt, and we weren’t close enough yet that I was sure of chasing her down. If Talon and Blaze could get in place…
“Just coming around Carling St.,” Blaze reported, and in the same moment, the car’s engine revved.
“Fuck,” I snapped under my breath, and broke into a sprint. “She’s broken into a car and she’s already got it running. Get over here now.”
The stolen car’s engine sputtered into silence and then roared back to life. The woman who’d hotwired it in a matter of seconds peeled away from the sidewalk. I’d never seen anyone take over a vehicle that fast. Who the hell was she?
The chances of her being innocent were quickly dwindling.
“She’s getting away,” I hissed into the mic. “Where the hell are you?”
Our car whipped around the corner before Blaze needed to reply. It jerked to a halt beside us, and Garrison and I threw ourselves into the back seat.
The second Garrison had hauled the door shut, Talon hit the gas. The stolen car was just turning a corner up ahead.
“There,” I said with a jab of my finger. “The dark gray sedan. Follow her.”
Talon sped after her and swung around the same turn she’d taken. The sedan came into view a couple of blocks ahead of us, easy to spot in the gleaming streetlamps along this slightly broader road. Even here, traffic was sparse, only a few other pairs of headlights gleaming farther in the distance.
A heavy droplet of rain splashed on the windshield, briefly blurring the view. Another followed, and another, until Talon had to start the wipers going.
“You couldn’t catch her on foot?” he asked over the rhythmic tapping of the drops.
I grimaced. “The bitch is fast. She must have set a record hotwiring that car. I don’t even know how she broke into it to begin with.”
“Not exactly your typical pedestrian out for a stroll,” Garrison said in a wry drawl. “What are the odds that a woman who can hotwire cars in a split-second isn’t involved in this?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question. I narrowed my eyes at the car in front of us. Blaze licked his lips and clicked a few keys on his laptop, leaping from feed to feed. He was following along with the official traffic cams now. There wasn’t a government resource in this city he couldn’t find a way to infiltrate.
“Not very good,” Talon replied for me.
Garrison sank back in his seat. His breath was still a bit ragged from the jog to catch up with the woman—I’d have to remind him to get in more physical training on our days off. It wasn’t his main area, but we all needed to pull our weight in every way possible.
“We should just kill her and get it over with then,” he said. “Whether she has something to do with the job or not, she just committed a crime. So she’s not innocent, so the rule doesn’t apply.”
Blaze swiveled in his seat with another of his heckling looks. “And by ‘we,’ I assume you mean anyone other than you with your weak stomach.”
Garrison kicked the back of Blaze’s seat. “I just know what I’m good at. And I know that every move that woman’s made since the moment we saw her has screamed that she’s up to something.”
He was right, but at the same time, something about the situation still felt off to me. Killing the woman without sorting it out wouldn’t necessarily mean we’d fixed the problem, only that we had no way of telling what else might have gone wrong.
“We catch her and talk to her first,” I said. “Find out who she is and what she knows. Make sure there’s nothing else we missed. It’s no good tying off one loose end if that stops us from following it to a dozen others we didn’t know about.”
Garrison opened his mouth as if to argue but shut it immediately when I caught his gaze. He set his expression in a mask of indifference. Our social chameleon could put on whatever front we needed to get the players in position at the start of a job or ferret out information Blaze couldn’t hack his way to. Even I couldn’t tell which of the emotions that crossed his face were real. Were any of them?
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the security of this crew, and we couldn’t know how the woman might threaten that without confronting her.