Tears of Blue (Shades of Death Book 2)

by Hoffman McManus, Stephanie

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “This all just seems too complicated.”

  Nora appeared disappointed for a moment, but then wiped the look from her face. “Okay, I understand that, but can I ask you one more thing?”

  “You’re going to anyway, so go ahead.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if what you’re feeling is real and you walk away from it because you’re afraid? Because I think you are and I think all your reasons are really just excuses not to give it a chance.”

  “And what if I do and I get hurt again? I just don’t think I can take anything else Nora.”

  “But what if you don’t? What if this is the thing that makes all the bad shit better like Spencer is for me?”

  What if?

  God, I hated those two words when they were put together.

  Several hours later, I was helping Nora fix dinner and still grappling with her questions.

  This morning, I’d woken up on cloud nine, ready to see where it could take me, but then he made it about more than sex. Reality slowly crept back in and I started thinking about the odds stacked against us, and his job and how I’d felt when he walked out of the house last night and I didn’t know when he’d be back, or if what he had to go do was dangerous.

  Letting myself care was dangerous, and I’d been stupid to think I could leave feelings and emotion out of it.

  The farther we drove away from the sanctuary of his house, the more I convinced myself what a mistake it would be to go any further with this.

  Then Nora and her insight and damn questions.

  Was it all just a bunch of bullshit excuses because I was chicken?

  What the hell did I really want? It was a simple question, but one I still didn’t know how to answer when it came to Camden.

  The one thing that overruled all else was a desire to feel safe. That was what I wanted most, but at some point, you had to take risks or were you really even living?

  So, what risks were worth it?

  By not letting anyone in, what was I protecting myself from? Just two days ago, bullets had been flying all around me, and all my playing it safe had done a fat lot of good about it.

  Camden obviously wasn’t a deranged serial killer. He was one of the good guys. And I didn’t know which was scarier, because there was still that quiet whisper in my head that Camden was way more dangerous than psycho Will/Aaron. He could get to me in ways Will didn’t and that meant he could hurt me in ways that psycho couldn’t.

  God, Emily, when did you turn into such a coward?

  Nora was right. I was afraid. And not just of the dark, and enclosed spaces, and trunks and basements and guys at the gym. I was afraid of letting myself live. Afraid of having anything that I could lose or that could be taken from me. Too much had been taken already.

  So maybe Will had won. Maybe I did die in that dirty, musty basement.

  And maybe it was time to figure out how to start living again so that wasn’t true. Because that bastard did not get to win.

  All those doubts and questions were still dominating my thoughts when I heard a vehicle pull up the drive. I stopped washing the bowl I’d used to mix up the marinade for the chicken and glanced out the window. Camden’s car came to a stop in front of the garage, right beside Spencer’s truck.

  He was just in time for dinner, and the butterflies that had recently taken up residence in my stomach, were oddly excited to see him.

  Get a damn grip Emily.

  Seventeen

  Camden

  Something smelled delicious when I walked in my front door. I found Spencer on the couch in the living room hunched over his laptop with a beer on the coffee table and the ballgame on the TV.

  After the day I’d had, kicking back with a beer and baseball sounded pretty good, but instead of dropping into my easy chair, my feet carried me to the kitchen and closer to the wonderful smells. My stomach rumbled. It had been a while since lunch.

  Nora had her head ducked in the oven, poking at something, and Emily was at the sink, her back to me. Tendrils of blonde hair escaped a messy bun and fell down the back of her neck. I’d like to blame momentary insanity for what I did next, but I knew full well what I was doing, and that I shouldn’t. Unfortunately, That didn’t stop me. Neither did Nora’s presence in the kitchen.

  The meeting with Captain Richards and the team had gone to shit quickly after I shared that Lenkov might have been lurking outside my apartment. Cap pulled me from the case just like that. Said it was time for me to get out after what happened with my mom and then this. I’d done my job and they could handle it from there. So much for his insisting I needed to see this through.

  Didn’t matter that the damn meeting was tonight and that there was no way they could someone else in there. They took my intel and all my hard work and then cut me out of it and said they’d figure it out without me. I wasn’t going to be a part of the bust and I was pissed as hell about it.

  Seeing Emily in my kitchen, softened all that anger. I didn’t even care that things were such a confusing mess between us right now. I just wanted to forget all that shit and go back to last night, or even this morning when we woke up.

  I could tell the instant she felt my presence behind her. Her spine stiffened, but she forced herself not to lift her head and pretended to be intently scrubbing a pan. I pressed in close to her back and set my hands on her hips. Her hands stilled in the soapy water and I was pretty sure she was holding her breath. I curled one arm around her middle and brought the other up to sweep the hair off her neck so I could brush my lips over the skin just below her ear.

  Her shoulders relaxed and her head lolled forward lazily, the pan and the soapy water all but forgotten. I squeezed her tighter and trailed my lips down to the crook of her neck. Her back arched and she lifted her head slightly.

  Closing my eyes, I pressed my head against hers and breathed her in. I heard the pan hit the bottom of the sink and knew she must have released it. I felt each shuddering breath she drew in and let out. For a moment, time was frozen.

  “You make me forget why I was having a shitty day,” I whispered into her hair.

  “Dinner’s done,” Nora’s voice chirped and a dish slammed against the stovetop. Emily stiffened again and wriggled out of my arms. I let her go and turned to lean against the counter. I watched her as she avoided Nora’s gaze and grabbed the large bowl of salad mix from the counter and carried it to the dining table.

  Nora’s gaze shifted to me. She raised her eyebrows in question, a slight smirk playing on her lips. I just shrugged and pushed off the counter, going to the fridge for a beer.

  Spencer came in from the living room and everyone grabbed plates and started piling them with chicken and potatoes and salad. It’d been a while since I had a home cooked meal like this, so I wasted no time in digging in.

  “Who’s ahead?” I managed to get out between shoveling bites into my mouth.

  “Mariners,” Spencer grunted. “Up by two, it’s top of the fifth.”

  “Let’s hope they can keep their lead.” Wasn’t likely. Seattle hadn’t been on a winning streak lately, or really much at all in the last few years, but us Seattle fans were nothing if not loyal.

  After that, we relied on Nora to carry the conversation through dinner, which she did while surreptitiously sneaking glances at Emily and me. She didn’t bring up what had happened in the kitchen. Neither did Emily, at least not until later, when I caught her alone on the front porch.

  After dinner, I took the dogs out to run them a bit around the yard and burn off their dinner as well as some of mine. When I dragged my tired ass back toward the house with Cash and Kota right behind me, Emily was tucked into the swing, nose buried in her Kindle, no doubt lost in a girly romance novel.

  I opened the front door and let the dogs in, but didn’t follow them. Instead, I closed it again and walked over to the swing, dropping into the rocking chair my mother ha
d bought to sit beside it.

  Emily glanced up from her e-reader, contemplating me a moment before she spoke. “Why did you do that? In the kitchen, I mean?”

  “Because I wanted to.” It was the only answer I had on the spot, since I honestly hadn’t expected her to be the one to start this talk. And it was the truth.

  A frown pinched her brow. “Why?”

  “Because I was thinking about you all day, and like I said, it was a shitty day. Seeing you made it less shitty. Touching you again made it even better.”

  “Why was your day so bad?” She softened a little and set the Kindle on the cushioned seat.

  “Can’t really talk about it, but I’ve been pulled off the case.”

  “Why?” she sounded genuinely upset for me.

  “The risk of my cover being blown has gotten higher. Hell, it might already be blown, and the task force I’m working with is moving in for the bust soon. I’ve done what I was supposed to do, and got them almost everything they need to take these guys down. Now my part is done.”

  “Oh.” She seemed to think it over. “But you’re not happy about it?” I could tell she was trying to understand.

  “I wanted to be in on the bust.”

  “I could see why you’d want that, after you put in all the work, but it sounds like it’s safer if you let your team or whatever take it from here.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “So, what now? I mean, what do you do when you’re done with a case?”

  “Take a few days off. Wait for the bust to go down and dust to settle. There will still be hours of paperwork and briefings. But, eventually, I’ll move on to the next case. Because there’s always a next one.” Only for some reason, sitting here on the porch with Emily had me thinking more about Spencer’s offer to join him at Teller Corp. A lot of things would change, but maybe I was more ready for change than I realized.

  “So, just like that, the bad guys think you disappeared? They don’t get suspicious? How does that all work? Will they try to track you down?” It was cute how worried she was, only I didn’t want her worried about me or anything else.

  “There’s always an exit strategy in place. Everyone at the club will be fed some story about how I was skimming money from the club and the owner caught on. Usually we’d stage a fake arrest in front of everyone, but this time the rumors of my arrest will have to suffice. Since Deacon Boyer technically doesn’t exist, once we wipe the records of him, there’s no one for them to find as long as they don’t connect the dots to Detective Camden Shaw.”

  The books had already been made to look like I was stealing from the club, and I had no doubt that one of the times Alexei had been in my office, he’d done his own investigating and knew I was ripping the club off. Everything was already in motion. I just couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that it wasn’t going to go down as planned.

  Tactically, it was all straightforward. There were several plans in place, they just needed to know where the trade, which we suspected was going to be girls for drugs, would go down. The most likely place was the club.

  We, or I guess I should say they now, would know for sure later if they managed to get the club wired in the next hour. Just had to hope Alexei wouldn’t sweep it. Fuck, so much could go wrong, but if everything went right, men from all departments involved would be discreetly positioned around the place when the trade happened.

  We’d try to cover every avenue, but in the event that somehow they got by us with the girls, thanks to my brother’s intel, we now knew the location of a warehouse in Spokane owned by the cartel and would have eyes on it as well.

  Both organizations would go down for human trafficking on top of a long list of other charges. That was if everything went right.

  When the hell did everything ever go right? Especially lately?

  “You look worried.”

  I couldn’t explain to her that my gut was telling me something wasn’t right. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t and shouldn’t be talking to her about this. It was the last thing she needed, but that didn’t mean I was going to ignore my instincts. It meant going against orders, but I had to see this through.

  I rose from the chair. “I need to take care of something tonight, but tomorrow, you and I are going to have another talk.”

  “I’m not sure we have anything to talk about,” she said softly.

  “We do, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  The drive to the club felt like it took longer than usual. I kept going over everything I knew about Alexei and his men and the entire organization, trying to put my finger on whatever it was that left me so uneasy. From the moment I’d heard about this deal with the cartel, something hadn’t felt right, but hell if I knew what it was. I was taking a big risk coming here tonight, but I wasn’t ready to walk away from this case yet.

  As I pulled up to the club, I took the piece from my glovebox and slid it into my waistband. I had my back-up strapped to my ankle, like always, but tonight I wanted the extra reassurance. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I’d texted my bartender and confirmed that Alexei and some of his guys, Oleg included, were already there. Didn’t know yet whether the meeting was already happening.

  One of Alexei’s girls caught my eye on the way in and I quickly steered clear before she could try to put her hooks in. I hated that by the end of the night she’d have some other poor sucker in her clutches and he wouldn’t know what he was getting into until it was too late.

  I couldn’t help but wish we’d moved on the prostitution and drug charges weeks ago. If the prosecution did their job right, they could nail Alexei and everyone else up and down the ladder. And now we had them on gun charges as well.

  I almost stopped short when I reached the top of the stairs. There were two Russian goons standing guard and Alexei was speaking closely with a man I recognized from the file Spencer had given me on the cartel. A handful of his men were positioned around the room as well.

  I quickly wiped my face of any recognition and managed to play it off as if I’d hardly taken notice of them. With a passing nod at Alexei, who’d looked up at me and with a nod, given his men the okay to let me by, I moved toward my office. I felt more than one set of eyes on me as I slipped by. I shifted my gaze around and met Lenkov’s hard stare.

  Since I couldn’t exactly go up to him and beat the shit out of him until he admitted to being outside my place and why, I continued to my office, where I closed the door behind me and worked on a game plan. I pulled up the private feeds from cameras in the lounge on my computer.

  The main feed was experiencing technical issues as requested by Alexei. He didn’t know the footage was all still being recorded, except, I noticed, for the cameras at the back entrance, which actually appeared to be down. Ignoring that for now, I kept an eye on the lounge, but watching a conversation I couldn’t hear was hardly a productive use of my time.

  I had to assume the lounge was bugged, so the task force was probably hearing every word, but that didn’t do me any good. I wanted to know what was being said.

  I’d asked Spencer to have a copy of the cartel file emailed to me since I’d handed over the hard copy. I pulled it up on my phone and started pouring through it. I identified the man out there as Hector Ortega. He was one of Sinaloa’s higher ups. Alexei wouldn’t do business with any lowly grunt.

  My gut still told me that Yuri Egorov wouldn’t do business with the Mexicans period, but there was no way Alexei would go outside orders. Times were changing and I guess the Russians were getting on board.

  They were handing the girls over to the Mexicans, who would then take them back to Mexico and sell them off. They had to be paying the Russians a pretty high price for the girls.

  The Russians had their own shipping operation they used for guns and drugs and bringing their people and their girls in. It didn’t make sense for them to use a middle man to take girls out of the country, even if the cartel already ha
d an extensive trafficking ring up and running. There was no way that the Bratva back in Moscow didn’t already have their fingers in the sex trade as well. This whole damn thing was so shady.

  I watched on the screens as Alexei slid a small stack of what appeared to be photos from an envelope and offered them to Hector. Unfortunately, the images were not visible to the cameras at either angle. Hector flipped through them, his expression blank, but when he was done he nodded approvingly and muttered something. Not for the first time I wished I was tapped into the mics in there.

  Alexei waved Oleg over, who leaned in to hear something meant for only him, and then straightened and sauntered off. A moment later, one of Hector’s guys appeared at his side and they followed in the direction Oleg had gone. Alexei, unhurriedly, rose and disappeared as well. I watched the screens and tracked them through the club as the men made their way downstairs and toward the back exit where I lost them because of the downed cameras

  Not wasting any time to think it through, I slipped from my office and followed. They would have to pass the stock room and it would be easy enough for me to excuse my presence back there.

  Knowing the feds were most definitely tapped into our security monitors, I glanced up at one of the cameras as I passed. I was going to be in so much shit, but I didn’t care. This is why I needed to be here. They didn’t have the whole club mic’d so whatever was going on now, they were in the dark without video feed either.

  The hall led past one set of bathrooms and around a corner where the stockroom was, just before the hall ended and doors led to the alleyway and a small parking lot out back. The door was slightly ajar. It locked automatically to keep people from coming in and out of the back, but they’d propped it open just enough to keep it from locking behind them.

  I glanced back me at the empty hallway and risked moving closer to the door. Two of Alexei’s men were muttering in Russian just on the other side, but it was only a minute before I heard Hector and Alexei coming back.