by RJ Blain
A scenic overlook caught my attention. The parking lot was packed, leaving only a few free spots. I pulled in, squeezed my car between a truck and an SUV, and killed the engine. Hopping out, I joined the crowd peering over the protective railing, which kept people from falling into the gorge.
I stood on my toes and leaned forward, shuddering at how deep the damned thing was. I stood on the precipice of one of my worst nightmares. The fall would smash my body to a pulpy mess before I hit the ground and bounced into the river far, far below.
Choices, choices: face the stalker driver in the sporty silver car or risk falling to my death.
Why couldn’t I have picked a safe, sane job? Next time I had a psychiatric evaluation, I was going to inform the doctor I was off my rocker for even considering a career in the FBI.
Then again, the doctor would likely argue the fact I recognized I was insane for being a willing participant in a high-stress job was a strong indication I was a fully functional, mentally sound adult. Thanks to my height—or lack thereof—I was able to rest my elbows on the middle rail with my chin on the top rail, staring out over the forest.
My heart tried to pound its way out of my chest, and I shook from the stress of trying to stay in place without revealing my fear of falling. I fisted my hands and clenched my teeth.
The only thing that could make my situation any worse was if a slug made an appearance. With my luck, the gorge and its forest were filled with the disgusting, slimy creatures hellbent on sending me to an early grave.
Shuddering, I forced my attention to the case. Would a child run to such a place? While it classified as one of my worst nightmares, the spot had potential. It was, in theory, walking distance from Johnstown. If he had hiked to the gorge and its forest, I imagined he was hungry, tired, and discovering civilization was far more comfortable than the woods this time of year, especially after dark.
The trees were pretty enough I had no problems wasting a few extra minutes staring at them.
My phone rang, and I dug it out of my pocket with shaking hands to look at the display. Daniels again.
It took two tries for me to swipe my thumb over the screen. “Hello?”
My voice trembled, and I hoped Daniels wouldn’t notice.
“Did you loan the Corvette to someone?” Daniels sounded pissed.
The question startled me enough I blinked, looked over my shoulder, and stared at the yellow vehicle parked nice and snug between two far larger vehicles. “Why would I loan my Corvette to someone?”
“Are you seriously telling me you let someone steal the Corvette?”
Confused, I held the phone so I could check the display to confirm I was connected to Daniels’s phone. I was. Returning the phone to my ear, I replied, “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Where are you? Someone who doesn’t match your description was seen driving it. It was just called in.”
I choked back a strained, hysterical laugh and cleared my throat. “Hold on. Can I call you back in a minute? Let me check on the car.”
“One minute,” Daniels snarled before hanging up.
I headed to the Corvette, sat on the hood, leaned back, and took a selfie of myself on the car. Sliding off, I headed back to the rail, hesitating at having to come so close to death again, and sent Daniels the image before calling him back.
“Did you get the picture?”
“Sec.” A moment later, I heard him snort. “What the hell are you wearing?”
“I thought it was sexy in the slutty high school teen sort of way.” I pouted.
“What did you do to your hair? Is that a wig?”
“Extensions. I had my hair done before I left New York. I didn’t want to make it easy on your team, Daniels. Why wouldn’t I would pull out all the stops to get to keep my Corvette? So, who thought I had stolen my car? Is it the driver of the silver two-door that tailed me out of Johnstown?”
“Ah, you noticed him.”
“Does my file have anything about heights in it?”
“Highlighted and underlined notation you shouldn’t be sent on ledges or agent-eating staircases.”
“Whoever wrote the notes in my file was an asshole. This gorge is pretty deep. I came here because there are a lot of people looking around, and I didn’t know who was following me. I was trying to play it safe, just like you wanted. Can I return to my car and get out of here, then? I don’t like this spot. I don’t like it at all. I don’t want to be here.”
“Take a few deep breaths, Agent Johnson. You can step away—carefully—from wherever you’re standing. You have nothing to worry about. The driver of the silver car is your new partner.”
While the railing offered a small sense of security, I felt a lot better backing away a few steps in the direction of the Corvette. “He sucks at tailing.”
“Why don’t you give him a chance to say hello?”
“He’s on the line, isn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re an asshole, Mr. Daniels.” I sighed, turned, and came nose to nose with a very tall someone wearing dark shades, a clean-cut suit, and a smirk I knew all too well. Like me, Jake held a phone to his ear.
“No fucking way.” I lost the ability to form a coherent sentence, trying to figure out how—and why—Jake was standing in front of me. My brain refused to accept what my eyes were telling me.
Lifting his hand, Jake pushed his sunglass up to reveal his dark brown eyes. He straightened, looking me over from head to toe. “Well, well, well. Isn’t this interesting?”
Jake’s voice echoed in my ear, and despite the evidence of his voice coming out of the device and his mouth, I shook my head in denial.
“Interesting is one way to put it,” Daniels replied. “I’ll let you two get reacquainted. Leave your car, Agent Thomas. I’ll have someone come pick it up.”
“Yes, sir,” Jake replied. Hanging up his phone, he slid it in his pocket. Daniels likewise disconnected the call, but I stood frozen in place, still holding my phone to my ear.
“It is customary to put the phone away after you’re finished using it.” Jake took the device out of my hand, looking me over again. “Where the hell do you hide things when wearing that little? Do you even have pockets?”
I somehow managed to force my mouth into motion, although I failed to master the art of speech. Snorting, Jake tugged open my jacket, discovered the interior pocket, and slid the phone into it. “I see you found a place to hide your gun.”
“What? How? Why?” I blurted, pointing at him.
“Why don’t we talk somewhere a little more private?”
When I didn’t move, Jake grabbed my elbow and dragged me to the Corvette, stealing the keys out of my pocket so he could unlock the car and shove me into the passenger seat. Years of habit made me buckle my seatbelt despite the fact I was having trouble stringing two thoughts together.
“Jake?”
“It seems you remember my name. Amazing.”
I opened my mouth, snapped it closed, and did a good impression of one of his huffs.
Shoving the seat back as far as it would go, Jake settled behind the wheel. How the little sports car fit such a big man, I had no idea, but he seemed comfortable enough in the Corvette. While he started the engine, he left the vehicle in park. “At one in the morning, right when I got home after a long shift, I get a call from my boss. He tells me I’m being transferred to a case, drops your name, and says that a car was going to pick me up in ten minutes.”
While I was still stunned Jake had been called in, I fell back on my old habit of staring.
His familiar annoyed huff coaxed a smile out of me.
“At that point, I had no idea what was going on, so I grabbed my emergency bag and a suit from the closet. Sure enough, a car shows up ten minutes later. I’m told there’s a flight waiting for me at a private airstrip and I’m expected in New York. That wasn’t at all comforting, since I knew it had something to do with you, but no one was telling me what. A helicopter dr
opped me off on the roof of your building, where I’m met by three cranky upper management.”
He paused, glaring at me. “Will you quit smiling? This is not funny.”
Lifting my arm, I stared at my skin, picked a fleshy spot, and pinched myself as hard as I could. It hurt like hell, and my nails made a pair of crescent-shaped indentations.
“What are you doing?”
Pain indicated I hadn’t fallen to my death, although I wasn’t quite willing to eliminate it as a possibility. I hadn’t even held the tiniest bit of hope Jake would show up.
Our days as partners were supposed to be over.
“Karma?”
I pinched myself again. “I’m testing a theory.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If I fell in the ravine and died, would I still feel pain? I’m pretty sure the only way you’d show up here right now would be over my dead body.”
Jake had worked hard to get into HRT—as hard as I had worked to get into CARD.
He kept his narrow-eyed stare focused on me. “Maybe that’s what I thought I was dealing with. Did that thought occur to you?”
It hadn’t. I frowned. “That doesn’t change anything. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You’re in HRT. You worked hard to get into HRT.”
“You worked hard to get into CARD. From my understanding, you quit. You. Quit. Not only did you quit, you did so during an assignment.” Jake sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. “Do you care to explain yourself?”
I swallowed, clasped my hands on my lap, and stared at my white knuckles. “I snapped.”
“So it seems.” Jake put the car in reverse, pulled out of the spot, and got onto the road heading back towards Johnstown. “We’re booked in a hotel in Pittsburgh. We are going there to have a very long talk.”
“What about the case?” I whispered.
“We’re going to Pittsburgh, where we’re going to have a long talk. We’ll evaluate the situation then.”
I shut my mouth. There were a thousand things I could have said, but I lacked the courage to utter a single word.
I was shaking by the time we reached Pittsburgh, and Jake knew it. When he thought I wasn’t watching him, he stared at me under the guise of checking his side mirrors.
The hotel was on the outskirts of the city, surrounded on three sides by forest. It was the type of place that put me on edge; would-be shooters had plenty of places to hide. While I understood the chances of someone tailing us, getting ahead of us to get into position, and taking the shot was slim, tension cramped my muscles.
Jake found a spot near one of the hotel’s doors, got out, and circled the vehicle to check the trunk, leaving me alone. It took me a lot longer than I liked to force myself into motion, unbuckle my seatbelt, and slide out of the Corvette.
“Need these albums?”
I nodded and joined him at the back of the car. He already had both of my bags in his possession, leaving me to grab my briefcase and the photo albums. Once he locked the Corvette, he headed for the doors, shuffling his hold on things to swipe a key card to gain access to the building.
Our room was on the second floor, and Jake opted for the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Two months hadn’t been long enough to erase my memories of his habits, and his impatience warned me he wasn’t in the mood for any bullshit from me.
If I was reading his mood right, he was beyond huffing angry, speeding right by it to a whole new level of rage, the kind I had only witnessed from him when I had done something particularly stupid, including getting unnecessarily shot. I carried scars on my leg from early in our partnership, when I hadn’t quite accepted Jake really did have my back. If I had trusted him a little bit more, I wouldn’t have gotten caught in the crossfire. I’d been so busy trying to watch my own back I had missed something right in front of me.
Without Jake, the bullet likely would have lodged in my skull instead.
When the dust had settled, he’d been too angry to huff, opting for silence while his body quivered from tension.
Jake opened the room to our room and growled, “Wait.”
I stared at the carpet while he did a sweep of the room. When he grunted his satisfaction, I stepped inside, eased my way past him, and set my briefcase and albums on the desk, rolling the computer chair out of the way. The room had two double beds, and Jake’s bag was sitting on the one closer to the window. As always, the curtains were closed to prevent anyone from getting a look at us.
Jake secured the door and dropped my bags on the empty bag. “Haven’t you figured out I’m not going to bite your head off?”
“You’re pissed,” I pointed out.
“Damn straight I’m pissed. Still not going to bite your head off. I will, however, refuse to listen to your input for what we order in tonight.”
My stomach still wasn’t entirely happy with me for my adventurous choice of breakfast sandwich. “Good luck with that.”
“Explain.”
“I engaged in a very bad relationship with an egg and sausage sandwich this morning.”
Jake snorted. “You’ve been throwing your guts up all day, haven’t you?”
“Not all day, just until noon.”
“Eat anything else?”
“Coffee.”
“Coffee isn’t food, Karma. You’ve lost weight.”
I hadn’t exactly had a lot of extra weight on me to begin with, and cold pizza couldn’t keep up with my tendency to count my distance doggy paddling in miles rather than laps. “You’re looking good. Nice suit.”
“Maybe you haven’t been kickboxing, but you’ve been doing something with those legs of yours.”
“Would you believe I still can’t do anything other than a very bad doggy paddle?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Three miles.”
“Pardon?”
“My longest lap.”
“You doggy paddled for three miles.” At the incredulity in his tone, I shrugged and remained silent. “Who was spotting you?”
“No one.”
“You swam by yourself.”
“Even went into the deep end and everything.”
Jake sighed. “I can’t tell if you’re stupid, brave, stupidly brave, or completely out of your right mind.”
“Well, I probably wouldn’t pass a psych eval right now,” I admitted ruefully.
“I already had that impression. Daniels briefed me on the situation, but I’d rather hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
I eased my way out of my jacket and tossed it on the back of the computer chair before wiggling out of my holster. “Two months of anchoring. First case we did together, I didn’t push a point hard enough. It got the girl killed.”
“Daniels briefed me about that case, and the rest of the work you’ve been doing with the team. You did your job. It’s not your fault they didn’t do theirs.”
“If I had—”
“Karma.”
I sighed. “Well, it’s true.”
“You knew going in you’d win some and you’d lose some. You knew CARD wasn’t going to be easy.”
Grunting, I dropped onto the chair, grabbed the photo album with the SUVs, and flipped through it without really seeing any of the pictures. “Anchor is a nice word for secretary. I did an entire case from the gym swimming pool several weeks ago. I didn’t even deploy. I had my phone on the ledge, on speaker, while I fucking doggy paddled a mile listening to them chatter. Then I kept on doggy paddling. Three miles later, I figured out I was looking at the rest of my life in the FBI. A doggy paddling secretary. I’ve spent too much time guzzling crap coffee taking up some poor cop’s desk, pretending moving papers and filling out forms actually made a difference.”
“Daniels mentioned something about at least one deployment when you managed to stay in New York without anyone noticing you hadn’t actually left with the rest of the team.”
“They noticed when they went looking for the printouts of some forms, and a cop at the local station handed them the faxes, a week and a half after they had deployed.”
“Ouch.” Jake sat on the foot of my bed, and I felt him staring at me. “If they were trying to force you to quit, that’s a good way to go about it.”
“What has Daniels told you about the case?”
“Not much. He seemed more concerned about how you’re, and I quote, ‘a stick of dynamite with a short fuse that’s been lit on fire.’ You’re more of a risk to yourself than others, according to him. That’s something, right?”
I located the page with Phil’s photograph and set the opened photo album on his lap before retreating to the safety of the computer chair. “Look familiar?”
“A little younger, but yeah. I know who he is. He’s one of the assholes who kidnapped you.”
“Jacob Henry’s aunt took those photos.”
“Jacob Henry’s the boy we’re looking for?”
I nodded.
When I didn’t elaborate, Jake flipped to the first page of the album and started browsing through the pictures, halting when he came to the first image containing a black SUV. “They like black SUVs, don’t they?”
“Seems like it.”
“Daniels told me you quit kickboxing.”
“Yeah. I figured I’d find a studio after moving to New York, but it didn’t work out.”
“You didn’t want to draw attention to yourself, did you?”
“Pretty much.”
“I heard the story about the contacts.”
Grimacing at the reminder of how I had quit, I shrugged and stared at my hands so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“You earned yourself a reputation, you know. Again.”
I spun in the chair to face him and forced myself to look him in the eye. “Do I want to know?”
Jake was the perfect image of neutrality. “Patron Saint of Patience. You have a lot of curious co-workers on your floor. When word spread I had been your partner on violent crime cases, they came to visit me while I was snooping around in your office.”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Beyond the hundred or so receipts for pepperoni pizza?”
