“I assume you saw the story in the paper yesterday?”
The civilian nodded, his face grim. He didn’t look as though he’d spent his leave in restful pursuits. Like Jess, he had dark circles shadowing his eyes. The skin stretched tight over his cheekbones appeared almost a pale gray in contrast to his shock of coal black hair.
“On the advice of my attorney,” Jess said evenly, “I’m not going to discuss the details of the story with you except to say I have information indicating you participated in the reported assault against my mother.”
“On the advice of my attorney,” he got out raggedly, “I have no comment.”
Well, now she knew how he’d occupied his time during the past week.
“To avoid the potential for conflict of interest, I’m detailing you effective today to Colonel Hamilton’s quality assurance team. I’ll work out a permanent arrangement later.”
His throat worked. Above the open collar of his shirt, his Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively. “We’ve got a mess on our hands. I’m… I’m needed here.”
More than she was, he seemed to imply.
“Lieutenant Ourek is placing Sergeant Babcock in charge of recovery operations,” Jess informed him with a dart of savage satisfaction. Her decision to give Babcock a last chance had already paid off in spades.
“Ed’s a good man,” Petrie said gruffly, “but purging those underground pipelines and emptying the storage tank of the polluted fuel is a huge job, something none of us have ever done before.”
Under other circumstances, she might have given him some credit for his concern about the mission. The best Jess could do at the moment was bite back the reminder that he’d authorized the deviation to the sedimentation levels in the first place.
“I appreciate the magnitude of the task,” she said flatly. “We’ll get it done.”
He looked to Al Monroe, whether for assistance or sympathy she neither knew nor cared.
“You’ll report to the LGX office this afternoon. That’s all, Mr. Petrie.”
The polite form of address almost choked her, but she managed to keep her expression blank and her hands still until both Petrie and Al Monroe turned to leave.
“Close the door, please,” she instructed her deputy.
The moment it snicked shut, Jess curled her hands into claws and gave herself up to the fury she’d kept so rigidly in check.
The bastard! He was there, with the other four that night at the Blue Crab. If Jess had harbored the least doubt before, she didn’t now. She’d seen the guilt in his eyes, had heard it in his voice.
She wasn’t done with Billy Jack Petrie. She knew it. He knew it. She’d made sure he’d seen that in her eyes.
Shoving Petrie into a separate compartment in her mind, Jess spent the rest of the day bird-dogging her request to headquarters for additional R-11s and coordinating the emergency contract to haul off the contaminated fuel. The Defense Fuels Center would award the contract, but Ed Babcock, Lieutenant Ourek, and Jess all helped hammer out the requirements.
Her head was pounding by the time she pulled into her driveway just after eight that evening. She lifted a hand, intending to hit the garage opener, when she caught a glimpse of a green and tan police cruiser a dozen or so yards away. Her hand stilled. She needed only a glance to identify the logo on the side panel.
Shifting the Expedition into park, she left it idling and walked the dozen yards. The uniformed deputy sheriff at the wheel climbed out at her approach. Tall and ramrod straight, he greeted her politely.
“Evening, colonel.”
“Good evening. Were you waiting for me?”
“No, ma’am. Just doing a drive-by.”
His glance was guarded under the brim of his gray straw Smoky the Bear hat. He’d recognized her, obviously, or had connected the name on her fatigues to the newspaper stories.
“Do patrols from the Walton County sheriff’s department routinely drive through this development?”
“No, ma’am,” he said again. “Not routinely.”
Letting out a slow breath, Jess nodded. More questions tumbled through her mind as she walked back to her car, but only one man could provide the answers.
Steve arrived at Jess’s condo an hour later. She hadn’t called him. She hadn’t needed to. His deputy had notified him of her arrival…and of their brief exchange.
He read the storm warnings the moment she opened the door, but she waited until he’d set the paper bag he carried on the coffee table in the living room and claimed the easy chair before issuing an icy demand for an explanation.
“Am I under surveillance?”
“Not by my department.”
“Then how do you categorize these ‘drive-bys?’”
“As what they are, periodic drive-bys. They started the night you went off the bridge,” he added in answer to her look of patent disbelief. “I wasn’t satisfied your vehicle was rammed by a drunk driver, Jess. I’m still not satisfied.”
Her eyes widened. While she processed his blunt announcement, Steve kneaded the knotted muscles at back of his neck. Christ, he was tired. He’d had a bitch of a day, and the call from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department hadn’t improved matters. He still had several hours of paperwork waiting for him at his office, but he’d wanted to deliver both his news and the contents of the brown paper bag person.
It didn’t take Jess long to grasp what he’d come to tell her.
“You hinted to the media that it might have been Whittier who shoved my car off the bridge. Have the lab in Tallahassee matched the paint scrapings from my Mustang to Whittier’s Cadillac?”
“No.”
That would have been too easy, Steve thought wearily. Too neat.
“The lab matched them to a Buick Regal, gold dust in color. As it happens, an elderly Panama City couple reported theirs stolen the same day you went into the bay.”
Shagging a hand through her hair, she sorted the implications. “The possibility a stolen vehicle shoved my car through the guard rail doesn’t prove the hit and run was anything but accidental.”
“No, it doesn’t, but I’m betting we’ll find that gold Regal under fifty feet of water one of these days, neatly and very deliberately wiped clean of all prints.”
“’One of these days’ doesn’t exactly do it for me, sheriff.”
“Me, either. That’s why I brought you this.”
Leaning forward, he unfolded the brown paper bag and slid out a padded leather gun case. The zipper snicked open to reveal a gleaming automatic.
“It’s a 9mm Baretta.”
“Standard issue for the U.S. military,” she murmured.
“That’s why I brought it. Are you familiar with it?”
“I carried one for six months in the Balkans.”
“Did you fire it?”
“At something other than a paper target? Yes. Once.”
“Good.”
He extracted a spare clip from the bag, along with a box of bullets. Folding her arms, Jess observed him slide the clip in, chamber a round, and lay the Baretta carefully on the coffee table.
“I wonder what your friend at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would say if he knew I was armed and dangerous again.”
“He knows. He also knows my people are doing periodic drive-bys. Hazlett thinks both are a good idea.”
The implication that she didn’t top the FDLE detective’s top ten list criminals sent a spear of relief through Jess.
Steve caught her sigh. Rising, he skirted the coffee table trailed the back of his hand down her cheek. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“I know.”
“Did you talk to a civilian attorney?”
“Yes. He advised me to notify him of any and all contacts by the police.”
His mouth curved in a wry grin. “You should think about it next time you open your door to a cop.”
“I also talked to Bill Petrie.”
His knuckles stilled their lazy path
. “When?”
“This afternoon. In my office. With my deputy…”
“Dammit, Jess!”
“With my deputy present to act as a witness,” she finished. “I told Petrie I was moving him out of the squadron. He wasn’t happy about it.”
“Oh, great. Nothing like handing out another reason to shove you off a bridge!”
“I had to move him. You know that. Professionally, the situation was untenable for both of us.”
“And personally?”
“He was one of them, Steve.” She tipped her chin, her eyes flashing. “He didn’t brag about it like Whittier did. On the advice of his lawyer, he didn’t say anything at all, but he was one of them. I saw it in his face.”
“So what?”
She reared back. “Excuse me?”
“So what if he was one of them? I can’t change what happened and I can’t charge him with a rape that happened twenty-five years ago, even if there was any evidence to prove it actually occurred.”
“Then why is he running so scared?” she shot back. “Why did he take off a whole week, and go see a lawyer before he came back to work? Why was he shaking in his boots the day I walked into his office and found him staring at McConnell’s picture in the paper? And why the hell did Ron Clark say my name just before he killed himself? What did he think I could do that would drive him to suicide?”
The razor-edged frustration in her voice stabbed into Steve like one of the vicious switchblades he used to take off the punks on Atlanta’s street. More than any impassioned plea of innocence, that angry convinced him Jessica Blackwell had no direct hand in the realtor’s death.
“I don’t know the answers,” he said in response to her barrage of angry questions. “I’m missing something. I’ve been missing it right from the start, but I’m damned if I can figure out how or why. Just keep the .38 handy. And for God’s sake, call 911 if anything – anything! – looks, sounds, or smells wrong to you.”
“I will.”
“Better yet…” He hooked an arm around her waist, wanting to see her reaction, needing to feel the tremor that rippled along her spine. “Call me.”
The frustration went out of her, edged aside by a different need, every bit as sharp and compelling.
“I can’t, Steve. I won’t. I’ve told you before, I don’t want to drag you into this mess any deeper than I already have.”
“Yeah, well, seems I remember telling you that it’s too late. I’m already in over my head, and I’m not looking for a way out.”
She made an inarticulate sound, lost when his mouth covered hers, but he didn’t have any trouble deciphering the urgent fit of her hips against his.
Their joining was hard and swift, with little foreplay and no skilled weaving through layers of sensual pleasure. As if they both sensed the need to take what they could, while they could.
When Jess dragged on her clothes and walked with him to the door a half-hour later, she felt as though he’d left the imprint of his body on every square inch of hers. His scent was on her skin, his stubborn determination to risk his career on her mind. She caught him at the open door and drew him back for another, almost desperate kiss.
“It’s okay,” he told her softly when she couldn’t say the words that went with the kiss. “We’ll figure this all out, Jess.”
He left her standing inside the glass storm door, wondering just what the heck ‘this’ referred to. While moths beat against the porch lamp, she leaned against the doorjam and watched the night swallow the taillights on his cruiser. When the red glow had faded into the distance, her glance drifted to the docks fifty or so yards from her door.
If they worked ‘it’ out, Steve could moor the Gone Fishin’ at the dock. Or Jess could shoehorn some of her belongings into a stateroom the size of a closet and camp out at his private bayou. The realization of how far she’d come since the first night she opened the door to Steve had Jess shaking her head.
She had the door half shut when she caught a movement one the dock. She gave the drifting shadow only a passing glance, would have written it off as the tilt of a mast on a swell if it hadn’t taken shape and definition. Strange that someone would be out on the pier so late.
Squinting at the indistinct figure, Jess saw him raise something to his shoulder and caught the glint of moonlight on steel. The glint transfixed her for a fraction of an instant. That was all she needed to decide the gleam might not look, sound, or smell wrong, but it definitely felt wrong. She jumped to the side, out of the light spilling from inside the condo, and was about to slam the heavy wood panel when the crack of a rifle shot split the night.
The glass storm door shattered. Deadly splinters cut into the wooden door, flew sideways, sliced into Jess’s hand and arm.
Her first reaction was shock. Her second, fury.
No! Not again! She wasn’t letting this unseen bastard have another chance at her.
Whirling, she snatched the Baretta from the coffee table and raced for her bedroom. She was out the back patio door and running for the far end of the building before the echo of the rifle shot had stopped ringing in her ears.
Chapter Eighteen
Bent low, Jess rounded the end of her building and darted through the pool of shadows cast by the live oaks to the bay’s edge. The thick tangle of native palmettos lining the shore had been thinned to give the condos’ residents an unobstructed view, but enough of the shrubbery remained to provide a dark backdrop as she ran for the dock.
Halting just short of the wooden pier, she crouched beside a spiky palmetto. Her heart jackhammered against her ribs. Her breath came in raw gasps. Biting down hard on her lower lip to silence the painful rasps, she searched for the fatal gleam of light on steel, tried to separate the shadows, filter out the faint tinkle of the boats’ rigging hitting the masts, sense movement, any movement.
To her disgust, she heard nothing, saw nothing but porch lights popping on all up and down her row of condos. Cautiously, occupants poked their heads out to investigate the mysterious sounds they’d heard just moments ago.
Jess agonized for a few seconds, reluctant to reveal her position but more afraid the shooter might take aim at her innocent neighbors.
“Stay inside!” she yelled. “Call 911! Someone fired a shot through my storm door. He may still be out here.”
Most of the curious ducked back and slammed their doors. One brave soul shouted to someone inside his place, then made a dash for the utility pole near beside the tennis courts. When he tore open a metal box and flipped a bank of switches, powerful, high-intensity floodlights illuminated the courts, the sand volleyball pit, and the dock.
Jess had no idea how long she squatted beside the palmetto, her pulse hammering and her eyes aching as she scanned the dock, the tennis courts, the buildings all around. It felt like hours, but was probably only minutes before the wail of a siren pierced the night. Minutes more before an unmarked cruiser screamed into the parking lot and fishtailed to a stop. Bubble light flashing a furious red, headlights blazing, the vehicle provided a solid bulkwork between Jess and the pier.
Her heart in her throat, she saw Steve throw himself out of the cruiser and into a defensive crouch, his head low, his weapon high in a two-fisted grip.
“Steve! The shot came from the dock.”
“Get down!”
“I think it was a rifle.”
“Put your face in the dirt, dammit!”
He took off at a run, and Jess didn’t even consider dropping down to the dirt. Someone had tried to kill her. Twice! The first time had scared the hell out of her. This time, it infuriated her.
More to the point, she wasn’t letting Steve charge into harm’s way without someone to cover his back. Her breath hitching, she raced toward the dock, hunched-over, awkward, the slap of her bare feet lost amid the thud of his boots. Every nerve in her body bunched in expectation of another flash of fire, another deadly crack.
Gasping with relief, she almost fell against the tree trunk-si
zed piling at the foot of the dock. “Do you see anything?” she panted to the figure shielded behind the opposite piling.
“No,” he snarled, “but right now you’re in a hell of a lot more danger from me than from your shooter!”
She believed him. He looked so furious she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d turned his gun on her and pumped a bullet into her foot to keep her from following him onto the pier.
“Temper, temper,” she murmured, her eyes on the long plank passageway leading to the end of the dock.
Steve whipped his head around, sure that the blood roaring through his arteries had affected his hearing. He couldn’t detect the slightest echo of fear in her voice, and her face showed only a fierce determination.
“There must be at least twenty boats moored at the dock,” she whispered, seemingly oblivious to the danger she’d put herself in. “He could have taken cover in any one of them. How are we going to do this?”
“We aren’t going to do anything,” he ground out. “We are going stay right here and wait for the back-up I called for.”
“I’ll back you up.”
“The hell you will.”
The scream of sirens cut off further argument.
The drama ended within a half-hour.
A phalanx of deputies peeled into the walled community in response to their boss’s call and spilled out of their squad cars. At Steve’s shouted direction, they cordoned the area around Jess’s building. When a special response team in helmets and thick, bullet-proof vestments moved forward, Steve yanked Jess from her crouch and fell back.
They stood behind his cruiser while the response team searched the dock, boat by boat. She sensed long before they finished that they wouldn’t find the shooter. He must have made his escape while Jess raced around the end of her building. Disgusted, she plopped down on her neighbor’s stoop to keep out of the way while Steve and his deputies went door to door. Only then did she notice the blood streaking down to her wrist. Grimacing, she plucked several long slivers of glass from her forearm before accepting the towel offered by her neighbor.
After Midnight Page 17
