so he keeps telling me. Are you going to take them now?” He asked if that would be all right. “Yes. But would it offend you if I flipped him off? I mean, it’s something that we do.”
“No. It will more than likely ease his mind and heart to see that you have your humor still.” He pulled out his phone and took several pictures of her. Blowing him a kiss in the last one took a lot out of her, and she laid back. “Now, you should rest. The nurse that has been caring for you is loyal only to me and will never tell anyone where you are, even under threat of death. If it comes to that.”
When she was alone, Nikki closed her eyes and willed her body not to hurt. She knew that she was lucky to be alive, and was going to take care that she stayed that way. Just knowing that her grandda was going to be all right as well made her rest easier. She wondered how badly he’d been hurt, and thought of Adkins and his gang that had been there when she’d turned up James.
They weren’t expecting her to be where she had been. She knew that now. It hadn’t been their plan to take her out with witnesses, and had they been on her street, just one block over, there wouldn’t have been any. Even now, she’d bet anything that no one had inquired after the woman that had been shot, nor had they said a word to the police. Adkins was going down for this and a great many other things that she knew about him. Nikki looked at her forearm and wondered if anyone had noticed the deep scar there.
Touching the tiny chip that she’d put there several months before the shooting, she thought of her grandda helping her with the minor surgery. He too, had a matching one in his leg with all the same information on it as hers did. Grandda had said that if anything happened to either of them, then someone would know what to do with the chips, provided that they weren’t cut out of them after someone killed them. Nikki doubted anyone that she knew would think to look where they had hidden her files.
Moving as gently as she could to check herself, Nikki felt like she had several broken ribs in addition to the bullets that had not been stopped by her vest. She had been just on the verge of taking the sucker off when she’d talked to Grandda, and was now glad that she’d left it on. Christ, there was little doubt that she would not be alive had she not.
Adkins had been on her radar for months before all this shit had gone down. And the six months that she’d been underground with a small cell of his men had been enlightening, as well as very stressful. Nikki knew that she’d done a good job at slowing down his drugs coming into the city, but not enough to stop the man altogether. That was going to take more. A lot more than what she had right now.
Had she not studied every nuance of the man and the people that worked for him, she was sure that he would have found out long ago where his mole was. It surprised her to no end that her captain, a man that she had figured out was dirty, hadn’t turned her over to him. But then, he wasn’t very smart, and he thought she was working on a prostitution ring, nothing that Adkins ever dealt with. Over ninety shipments, all of them drugs, had been confiscated at the pickup point before it had hit the houses to be broken down and sold off.
Nikki trusted no one but her grandda, and for good reason, she supposed. She was working with a partner, a handler that she gave information to, but nothing more than a few small time dealers and a couple of meth labs that were about to be closed down anyway.
Mostly it was about the cat houses, the places that would bring in men, fuck their brains out, then take them for all they had. Pictures and video were used to blackmail the men, and most of them, more than half, killed themselves rather than dealing with the fallout.
But the busts of drugs and shipments that she’d been responsible for had been given to her grandda, and he’d handed them off to people he knew.