Danger at the Iron Dragon Read online

  “But how did they find out about you ratting on them, anyway?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good theory,” Penny said. “One night I ended up telling this other lowlife I knew—a guy named Kurt—about the whole setup.” She smiled at the memory. “I mean, it’s a great story. Max and Ollie running from the cops on the news—you should have seen their faces! Kurt thought it was funny too, at the time. But then he got thrown in prison a couple weeks ago for pulling some dumb stunt. I’m guessing he ran into those idiots there and told them all about me being the anonymous caller. It must have burned those boys up that I turned on them like that.” Penny shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter much now. I’m out of here tonight with the money and getting as far from River Heights as I can. I’ve had it with this city.”

  I felt my face get hot. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” I said, “but they’ve been terrorizing this academy all week! The whole place almost went up in flames, and Carly is ready to pull out of her big tournament tomorrow if it doesn’t stop! I know you just joined Iron Dragon for the bank robbery, but you’ve been in classes with these people for months now. They’ve treated you as a teammate—a friend! Don’t they matter to you at all?”

  For a moment, Penny’s cool expression slipped, and I saw something like regret cross her face. “Carly didn’t deserve to get mixed up in this… but hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Oh, and speaking of the job—if you don’t mind, it’s time for me to finish it.”

  Penny took another step toward me, and I moved to block her from leaving, lifting the heavy wrench to prove I meant business.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not this time.” I glanced at the cordless telephone on the desk. It was almost within arm’s reach. If I could just get to it and call the police…

  Penny’s eyes followed my gaze and then darted back to the wrench. “You don’t have it in you to fight me, Nancy. Why don’t you just put down that thing before you hurt yourself?”

  This girl certainly has a lot of nerve, I thought angrily. But I couldn’t risk losing my cool now. I needed to stay calm. I took a deep breath and cast my mind back to my first sparring session with Jamie—to the way her face looked as she got ready to fight. She hadn’t smiled, cocky and confident that she’d win, and she hadn’t scowled, trying to frighten me into submission. Her approach was much more effective. Her face had been completely calm, a mask of total self-assurance that whatever was about to happen, she was going to be able to handle it.

  That was the face I put on as I faced Penny. I straightened my back, gripped the wrench, and said evenly, “Try me.”

  Penny pressed her lips into a thin smile, but I could see her balling her hands into fists.

  It was like Coach Ethan said: we were playing human chess, and I had just made an unexpected move. Clearly, Penny didn’t like it.

  I inched toward the phone, holding my weapon steady while backing Penny into the corner. The phone was nearly in my hand when I felt a shadow pass over me. Penny’s eyes flicked to the door, and she smiled.

  I started to turn around, but before I could, something hit me on the back of the head—hard.

  A moan escaped my lips as I collapsed to the floor. Fiery pain bloomed from the base of my skull. I lay with my face against the thin, smoky-smelling carpet, just trying to breathe.

  “It took you long enough,” I heard Penny say over the rushing sound that filled my ears. I felt her move above me, crossing over to kick the wrench away from my hand. “I’ve been stuck in here with her for ten minutes. She almost called the police! What have you been doing?”

  Who was she talking to? It couldn’t be Max or Ollie. They’d been trying to sabotage her all along.…

  “I was working, like you told me to,” a familiar male voice replied. “Filling up all those bags takes time. Do you want me to be fast or good?”

  “I want you to be both,” Penny snapped. “Nancy here has it all figured out. She’s a lot smarter than you gave her credit for. Your little misdirection didn’t keep her off the scent for long.”

  The man sighed heavily. “I don’t understand. It was perfect! Carly being targeted by the Lockdown guys made total sense, and the whole monkey-on-the-jacket thing was inspired, if I say so myself.”

  Penny huffed. “Well, unfortunately for us, it wasn’t good enough to convince her.”

  And then I knew.

  In my excitement at cracking the case, I’d missed one important detail. Who had been the one to encourage Carly to tell me about her past history at Lockdown? And who had given me that crucial clue from the fire, identifying the logo on the back of the attacker’s jacket? I’d never considered even for a moment that he was part of this.

  But if I’d learned anything about Penny’s bank robberies, it was this:

  She never worked alone.

  I rolled over to my back, my head pounding. Penny was standing in the doorway. She passed a white belt to Liam, who was dressed in all black, his red hair loose and coated in fine gray dust. From my vantage point, he looked impossibly tall.

  “Tie her up and bring her with you. I’m not risking her messing with our plans again,” Penny ordered. “I’m going down to make sure you didn’t miss anything, and then we’re out of here. Got it? We’re already running behind schedule.” Then she was gone.

  “Got it,” Liam called after her. He turned to me, looking a little remorseful. “Sorry, Nancy. It’s nothing personal, you know.”

  “Hitting me on the head seems really personal,” I murmured.

  He sighed and knelt down, turning me on my side so he could tie my hands behind my back with the belt. “Look, you don’t understand what it’s like around here. I’ve been training for nine years, and Ethan won’t promote me or give me any authority. He won’t even let me coach the advanced class—only basics. I’ve won the regional championship every year since I got my purple! But Ethan refuses to acknowledge my talent! He doesn’t understand me, or how much I need this. How much I want to make this a career, not just a hobby.” Once he was done, he came around in front of me again. “But after tonight, I can get out of River Heights and use this money to open up an academy of my own. No one gets hurt, and I get everything I ever wanted. You understand, don’t you?”

  I looked up at him. The movement made the room spin. I coughed, feeling sick. “I understand that Coach Ethan made the right choice not to promote you.”

  Liam’s expression turned stormy, and he grabbed me by the arm, pulling me roughly to my feet. “Enough talk,” he growled. “Let’s go.”

  The noise in my head became a roar, and suddenly I felt myself falling into a darkness that swallowed me whole.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Double Leg Takedown

  THE FIRST THING TO COME back was the pain.

  My skull throbbed as I came to, a sharp, searing pain that immediately made me want to be unconscious again. There was also a strange, swinging sensation that I didn’t understand right away.

  Next came the voices. I could hear them as the roaring in my ears began to fade. They were muffled and far away, but as the moments passed, the voices grew louder and clearer.

  “What are we going to do with her?”

  “We’ll put her in the trunk. Drop her somewhere on the edge of town. By the time they find her, we’ll be long gone.”

  Liam and Penny, I thought as full consciousness returned. I opened my eyes and realized I was upside down—thrown over Liam’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes—and being carried across the training room. I watched the mats pass beneath me as I tried to catch what they were saying.

  “But once the police find her, she’ll tell them about me,” Liam said after a pause. “What about my reputation?”

  “I guess you’ll have to get yourself a new identity, like I did,” Penny replied.

  “But I—I can’t do that!” Liam stammered. “People will ask about my martial arts lineage… where I got my belts from. What will I say? What about
the new academy I was going to open?”

  Peeking around Liam’s back, I saw Penny shrug. “Move to Europe. That’s where I’m going. They have Jiu-Jitsu there too, don’t they? They’d probably ask a lot fewer questions, especially if you slip a bit of cash their way.” When Liam didn’t respond, Penny added, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you agreed to help me pull this heist. Like it or not, you’re a criminal now—so you’d better figure it out, and fast.”

  Liam stopped suddenly. The reality of what he’d done must have finally crashed over him like a tidal wave.

  I waited until I heard Penny’s footsteps recede. “Liam,” I said, my voice cracking. My throat was dry and sticky. I tried to clear it before continuing. “There’s still time to do the right thing. Let me go. We can fix this.”

  He didn’t say anything at first, but I could feel his hands shaking. And then he muttered, “I didn’t know about her past, you know. Not at first.”

  “You didn’t?” I asked, hoping to keep him talking. I needed to stall as long as I possibly could.

  “I just thought she was a really attentive student. She seemed to appreciate my talent. I confided in her one day about my problems with Coach Ethan, and pretty soon she came up with this idea to rob the bank. I thought it was crazy at first, but she was so convincing. It wasn’t until that night with you and the dead rat that she told me the truth. She had the idea to convince you Carly was the target, and it all just went from there. It all sort of… happened.”

  I turned my head to try to look at him. “Liam, maybe Coach Ethan hasn’t promoted you yet because you really aren’t ready. No amount of cash, no shiny new academy, and no belt is going to change that. Carly said that Jiu-Jitsu isn’t just about the technique, it’s about character. It’s about who you are. The only way you’re going to succeed is if you face the truth. Because the truth will find you, no matter how far you run.”

  A long silence followed, and I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that my words would make Liam come to his senses.

  But a few moments later, I heard staccato footsteps, loud and getting louder.

  “Liam! What are you waiting for? Get down here!”

  Whatever argument was going on in Liam’s head had been drowned out by Penny’s harsh command. He started walking again—rapidly—toward a dark doorway I hadn’t noticed before. My head bounced painfully against his back. “It’s too late,” he whispered. “It’s much too late.”

  As he slipped through the doorway and down a set of metal stairs, my mind began to race. I was losing hope that my text to Bess and George had been delivered and that they were on the way. For all I knew, I was completely on my own.

  I mentally went through my options. None of them looked particularly good. I could try to stall some more, hold on until someone noticed I was missing and came looking for me, but I couldn’t stand the idea of just waiting around to be rescued. I didn’t have much time left, anyway.

  No, my best bet was to create a diversion and use that as an opportunity to try to escape. Even with my hands tied, I could run and, hopefully, find someone within a couple of blocks to help me. With the decision made, I allowed myself to be carried into the belly of the building without a struggle, waiting for my moment to strike.

  As Liam reached the bottom of the stairs, I craned my head to get a good look at my surroundings. The cellar of the academy was exactly as I would have expected—concrete walls and floor, empty metal shelves, a few bare bulbs lighting the place. The only unusual things about the space were the industrial drill and tunneling auger on the floor, and the four-foot hole in the far wall, leading into darkness.

  The air was thick with gray dust, which billowed up all around me when Liam set me down. “Finally,” Penny said, poking her head out from the tunnel. “Just FYI, it’s not a good time for second thoughts, partner. Things don’t often go well for people who disappoint me on the job.” She tossed a few cloth bags—surely filled with stolen cash—on the floor near my feet. I coughed as more dust went flying into the air.

  “No second thoughts,” Liam said, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He picked up the cloth bags and looked inside. “I don’t think we can fit these last few stacks of cash with the others, so I’ll stick them in here.” He picked up a black gym bag from the floor and quickly dumped the cash from the bags inside it. That done, he grabbed a bucket sitting nearby and began filling up the empty cloth bags with sand. Once they were half full, he sealed them up and brushed off his hands. “That should be it,” he said. “I’ll put these back in the vault now.”

  “Good,” Penny replied with a satisfied smile. “It looks like all the bags are exactly where they’re supposed to be. The bankers shouldn’t notice anything amiss until they get the night deposit on Monday, and by then, we’ll be long gone. An improvement on my last heist, I think.”

  Liam stooped to enter the tunnel. “Hurry up!” Penny shouted after him. “It’s going to be a two-man job getting the cash out of here!” Once he was gone, she brushed a cloud of gray dust from her hair and pulled out her phone. Apparently, she didn’t like what she saw, because she scowled and started to pace.

  “Pretty lucky that Iron Dragon doesn’t use this space for storage,” I said, killing time while I racked my brain to come up with a plan. “Otherwise, this heist of yours would have been hard to pull off.”

  “Oh, it’s one of the first things I found out when I started coming to this place,” she said with satisfaction. “On my first day, after scoping it out, I ‘accidentally’ opened this door and searched the cellar until Ethan came to find me. I played dumb and told him I thought it was the way to the bathroom. Of course he bought it. He explained to me that it was a storage room they never used. A few days later, once I started coming to classes, I made it a point to tell everyone that I saw some rats down here.” She laughed. “After that, I knew no one would even think to come to the storage room.”

  I cringed and suddenly felt a crawling sensation all over my skin. I really hope she was lying about the rats.…

  “The rest was a cinch,” she bragged. “I already had my job at the construction site, which gave me access to all the equipment I needed to dig the tunnel to the bank. Just like I did for the other heists. I already had the experience with other companies, and because these construction-type jobs are temporary, the supervisors are usually just happy to find good help. They don’t tend to ask a lot of questions.”

  “But how come no one realized you were stealing equipment?” I asked, glancing over at the drill and auger. Before Penny could reply, I figured out the answer myself. “You were the one recording the inventory when George and I visited you at the construction yard. You changed the records.”

  “ ‘One drill and auger, out for repairs,’ ” she quoted proudly. “All I had to do was mark it on a piece of paper.”

  “Very clever,” I admitted.

  Penny cocked her head, obviously pleased. “I’m glad you think so, Nancy. I’ve worked very hard to perfect my operation, and it’s so nice to be appreciated.” She peered into the passageway and shouted, “Liam! I’m tired of waiting! We are running twenty-five minutes late and counting!” before going back to impatiently staring at her phone.

  They’re not the only ones running out of time, I thought, pulling at the belt around my wrists with no success. If I didn’t figure out a way to escape soon, I’d find myself in the trunk of a car, headed off to some deserted spot on the River Heights border.

  I looked around for something I could use to help, but there were depressingly few items in the room. Any hope I’d had of setting off an alarm or shorting an electrical fuse was gone. And all this thinking was making my head hurt. After the week I’d had, I was kind of surprised that everything didn’t hurt.

  But then my aching head gave me an idea. With Penny distracted, I took the opportunity to scoot myself a little closer to the stairs. Even a few extra feet could make a difference when it came time to run. Once I’d gotten as close
as I dared, I took a deep breath and started moaning softly, letting my head loll to the side a little before shaking it back and forth and trying to sit up again.

  It was enough to get Penny’s attention. She glanced down at me, one eyebrow raised. “What’s your problem?” she asked.

  I allowed a few seconds to pass before replying. “What do you mean?” I made sure to slur my words slightly.

  Penny squinted. “You’re acting weird.”

  I looked up at her, my head unsteady, eyes unfocused. “Probably a concussion,” I said, still slurring. “I’ve had them before. Liam hit me pretty hard.”

  Now Penny actually looked concerned. “How many have you had before?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t remember. I might have gotten one a few days ago when I got mugged on the street. But, hey, what do you care?” I started to hyperventilate, making my unsteady movements more pronounced.

  “Hey, I’m a bank robber, not a monster.”

  “Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.” I groaned. Then, without warning, I rolled my eyes up into my head, made a gurgling sound in my throat, and collapsed.

  I’d fallen straight back, which was awkward because my hands were tied behind me, but I had to be in the right position if my plan had any chance of working.

  “Ugh,” I heard Penny grumble in frustration. “Great, just great. This is the last thing I need tonight.…” I sensed her approaching my side to investigate. My eyes were closed, so I waited until I felt Penny’s shadow fall over me, and the heat of her breath on my skin before—

  I opened my eyes and kicked her right in the stomach.

  “Oof!” She stumbled backward onto the floor, gasping for breath.

  It wasn’t the best kick in the world, but it gave me a few extra seconds to get myself off the floor and bolt up the stairs.