by Camy Tang
There was movement to his right, in the area darkened by a broken floodlight, and he swung the flashlight toward it. A man froze, temporarily blinded. It was one of the men from the BART platform, the one who had grabbed Joslyn.
“Police!” Detective Carter shouted. “Drop your weapon!”
The man raised his gun at the light, and Clay.
Detective Carter’s gun rang out, and the man flinched and ducked behind a bush.
The detective grunted. “Missed,” he muttered.
Suddenly Joslyn was next to him with another orange searchlight.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
“I’m not a good shot with a rifle,” she said calmly.
“Get back inside.”
“No way.” She flipped on the light and shone it down into the yard.
Another shot from the men in the yard hit one of the slats of the wooden railing around the deck. Joslyn, Clay and Detective Carter ducked as splinters rained on them.
“Get inside!” Clay roared at her.
“Shut up and cover the yard!” she yelled back.
She spotlighted another man who was trying to sneak into the house. It was G. As soon as he was exposed, he leaped away, looking for cover, except there wasn’t any nearby. He raced back toward a row of planters.
Suddenly Clay noticed Patrick, Monica and Geoffrey all on their stomachs on the deck, aiming rifles out at the yard. “Get off my property!” Patrick yelled, and fired.
It seemed they weren’t aiming to kill or injure, but the shots fired into the ground began herding the attackers back and away from the house.
The men were no match for three rifles and one handgun. Two of them suddenly raced away to the far end of the property, out of range of the searchlights.
“Hey!” one of the remaining men shouted to them, but they didn’t pay attention. After a moment, that man turned and ran after them.
“The neighbor’s access road is that way.” Patrick pulled out his cell phone. “I’d better warn them.”
“Tell them to stay in their house,” Detective Carter added.
“I only see three of them,” Clay said.
Detective Carter frowned. “There were four.”
Suddenly, a wailing alarm pierced Clay’s ears. It was followed by a second alarm, pitched slightly higher.
“That’s the house alarm!” Patrick shouted. “And the fire alarm!”
Shots from high-caliber rifles came from the front of the house. Clay leaped to his feet and ran through the glass door into the living room. He started toward the front of the house and began to smell something different from the acrid gunpowder out on the deck. Smoke.
Clay suddenly understood. The attack on the back deck was a diversion.
The front room of the house was on fire.
THIRTEEN
Clay sat on the O’Neills’ back lawn with everyone minus Detective Carter, who was coordinating with the police officers and firemen who had responded to his calls.
“We’re lucky it’s fire season,” Liam said. “The fire truck got here pretty quick.”
According to Liam and Shaun, who’d gone to the front of the house, one of the men had thrown something through one of the front windows, maybe a Molotov cocktail, which had splattered accelerant all over the front living room. The broken window had set off the house alarm, and the burning living room had set off the fire alarm.
Shaun and Liam had battled the blaze with fire extinguishers, but it wasn’t enough. They’d given up and taken Clay with them out the back door. Everyone on the back deck had filed out down the outside stairs and onto the back lawn while Detective Carter had called the fire department.
The four men had taken off.
“I don’t understand,” Joslyn said. “Why attack us that way? They knew we were inside. They could have tried something more stealthy.”
“I think the floodlights surprised them,” Shaun said.
Clay nodded. “There was that pause between when the lights went on and that first shot.”
“I think they didn’t realize how far out the motion sensors were for the yard lights,” Shaun said. He pointed to his left, where there was a ground sensor several hundred yards from the back of the house. “They expected to be able to get closer. When the lights went on, they tried to take them out.”
“They wanted to smoke us out,” Liam said. “Then they could take Clay and Joslyn.”
“Too bad they didn’t know who they were dealing with,” Patrick said grimly.
“I hope there isn’t too much damage,” Joslyn said.
“It looks like they put the fire out quickly,” Monica said.
“I needed new furniture anyway,” Patrick said.
He’d need more than new furniture, Clay was certain. He’d probably need to remodel his front living room. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said to Patrick.
The older man reached out and his large hand wrapped around the side of Clay’s face. “It’s not your fault, son. I just thank God that you were here to help us take out those scumbags.” He smiled at Clay, and dropped his hand.
Clay sat there, unable to move. These people gave acceptance so freely. He hadn’t had to earn it, the way he’d earned his place in the mob family or even the way he’d earned the respect of his sparring partners at his gym back in Illinois. These people made him feel that he belonged.
It almost made him believe that his past didn’t matter.
But that was dumb. His past would always matter.
“Is that an electrical outlet?” Geoffrey pointed in the direction of the motion sensor.
“Yeah,” Shaun said. “We have yard lights we put up out here to play flag football.”
Geoffrey grabbed his medical bag, which he’d remembered to grab out of the living room before following them down the deck stairs. “Then we can take Clay’s cast off.”
“Now? Here?” Joslyn asked.
“You want to wait for them to attack again?” Clay said. “Let’s do it.” He’d brought the orange searchlight with him, and so he flicked it on and handed it to Joslyn to hold in place.
It was strange to be sitting on the grass, Monica holding his arm steady while Geoffrey plugged in something that looked like a power tool from his high school shop class.
“Isn’t that just a regular saw?” Shaun asked. “I’ve got one of those in the garage.”
Monica gave him a sour look and backhanded his shoulder.
Geoffrey, seeing Clay tense, gave him a small smile. “Don’t worry, this is a cast saw. It won’t cut through your skin.” He turned it on and began working, making cuts on both sides of the cast. Then he got a metal tool from his bag and spread the cast pieces open, revealing padding and a stockinette underneath, before lifting the pieces away.
As Geoffrey cut through the softer layers around Clay’s arm, Joslyn picked up one of the pieces and examined it in the light from the flashlight. Her jaw tightened and she pointed to a shadow in the cast. “There it is.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Hand me the cast saw.”
“No way,” Geoffrey said without looking up. “I’ll cut it out as soon as we recast his arm.”
Monica wrapped a new cast on Clay’s arm while Geoffrey used the saw to cut out a small electronic device, attached with a wire to another device like a flat button. “That’s the battery, I think,” Joslyn said.
“Cut the wire,” Liam said to Geoffrey, who did so. “That’ll keep it from transmitting.”
Clay let out a low breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding. “We need to leave.”
“You’re not going anywhere, son,” Patrick, said.
“But those men know we’re with you,” Clay said.
“The GPS is of
f, so they won’t know if you’re still with us or not,” Liam said.
“How’d they even get that in there?” Elisabeth demanded.
“It must have been Met,” Joslyn said. “Not him directly, but he was at the hospital. He must have bribed a nurse or something.”
“Well, they gave him this plaster cast, which means it was only temporary,” Geoffrey said. “He’s probably scheduled to get a fiberglass one in a week or so. That man could have convinced the nurse that it was only a joke. She’d know the cast was coming off in a week, anyway.”
Clay picked up the tiny device, with bits of plaster still stuck to it. He had to control himself to keep from crushing it in his fist. “I didn’t even notice the nurse putting this in there.”
“It was right over the padding,” Geoffrey said. “It would have been easy to slip it in place before wrapping it.”
“We should still get this to Detective Carter,” Liam said. “He can look into the nurse who did it. She might have noticed something about Met or whoever asked her to do this.”
They could use any information they could get, because really, what did they have? Bobby’s cabin had been a bust. They had a box of books and junk that didn’t give any clue about what caused Fiona to leave LA, much less why she was gone.
Clay got to his feet. He couldn’t sit anymore, feeling useless with only one good arm and a bruised body. What had he done in the past few days besides putting Joslyn in danger? Besides putting her friends in danger?
Liam crossed the back lawn toward the house, intent on giving the tracker to Detective Carter. The sun was rising, coloring the horizon gold and pink, interrupted only by evergreen trees breaking the smooth rolling foothills. The light shone warm on the wood of the O’Neill home. From this angle, Clay couldn’t see the gutted front room.
He shouldn’t have stuck with Joslyn. Those men might not have cloned her phone if he hadn’t been with her. They might only have gone after Clay, since he was Fiona’s brother. She wouldn’t have been shot at. Patrick O’Neill’s house wouldn’t have that massive fire damage. He was only lucky no one got hurt.
Lucky. He’d rarely been lucky in his life. His knee twinged, and he reached down to rub it.
“Mixed martial arts injury?” Patrick had come to stand beside him, both of them watching the house and the firemen and police officers swarming around it.
Clay shook his head. “Older. Not one I’m proud of.”
“Oh?”
Clay didn’t often share about his past, but he’d lain on Patrick’s deck and the man had shot a rifle at intruders Clay had brought to his house. He figured he at least owed the man an answer to his idle curiosity. “Back when I worked for a Chicago mob family, I was chasing a guy who owed my boss money. I slipped on some wet stairs and tore my ACL and a mess of other tendons. I don’t remember their names.”
Patrick grunted, then tapped his right thigh. “Not quite the same, but I got a bullet in my kneecap in Nam. Never quite healed right.”
Here was a veteran. Clay was just a low-level mob thug. Why was he here with them all? He didn’t belong.
Patrick continued, “When a man can’t walk, it changes your perspective on things.”
Clay was about to give a noncommittal answer when he realized that for him, it was true. “It made me realize how little I meant to my bosses. I thought I had friends there, but I didn’t, really. I had decided to try to leave the mob when they got busted by the FBI.”
“Did you cut a deal?”
“I didn’t have much the FBI wanted, so there wasn’t much of a deal I could cut. I got two years. But when I got out, the mob family was defunct. I could move on.”
“It’s hard to walk away from your past,” Patrick said. “You try to fit in with the real world again, and you just don’t belong.”
Clay had never compared his time in prison with a war zone, but he supposed that coming out of both could be similar. And he didn’t belong. Not with these people.
Then Patrick touched his head again, like he had before, as if Clay were his son. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad. I’m telling you this because I know that look at the back of your eyes. I felt it when I came home from the war. I saw it in Shaun’s eyes when he quit the border patrol. It’s still in Liam’s eyes when he thinks about the explosion that got him sent home from the army. I’m telling you that with prayer, and the people around you who love you, it’ll go away eventually.”
Love. Who did he have who loved him? His mother was dead. He’d chased away the only person left, his sister. And he’d been trying to keep himself distant from Joslyn, because he somehow knew she was his Kryptonite.
“I know what you’re thinking, son,” Patrick said. “And you’ll just have to forgive an old man for giving advice to a man he doesn’t know very well. One of my favorite Bible verses is First Peter four, verse eight. ‘Love covers over a multitude of sins.’ You think on that.”
Patrick left him to go back to where his son and daughter-in-law were sitting on the grass. Geoffrey had leaned back and seemed to be asleep. Joslyn was talking to Elisabeth.
These people had love. They knew how to receive it and how to give it. Of course they’d feel content, self-assured.
No, Clay realized, Patrick wasn’t talking about their love for each other. He’d quoted a Bible verse. Joslyn mentioned God every so often as if she really knew God, like they had a friendship and a bond.
Love covers over a multitude of sins. God’s love?
But there was no way God could love someone like Clay.
He stood apart from them all, but he felt no desire to join them. And yet a part of him wanted to belong to them. A part of him was afraid to consider that maybe he’d been alone for most of his life, even when he was in the midst of his friends, his posse, his crowd. Maybe he was just meant to be that way.
He was getting morose. It was lack of sleep. When he found Fiona, everything would be better. He could apologize to her. He could make amends for not listening to her. He could reforge that relationship.
He could finally find redemption.
* * *
Joslyn felt a bit like Godzilla, leaving destruction in her wake. Fiona’s house was bombed, so was her own apartment, and now Patrick no longer had a front living room.
Which was why she, Clay, Liam and Elisabeth were at Elisabeth’s apartment, also known as the O’Neill Agency headquarters. Liam was saving up for a custom-built house which they would eventually use as their official office, complete with a top security system in place, but until then, Elisabeth’s computers and servers were ranged all over her dining room, living room and one of the two bedrooms.
Joslyn checked one of the computers, nicknamed Leviathan, a particularly powerful custom-made desktop with the ability to run her facial-recognition program. She’d written the code with the help of Monica’s cousin Jane Lawton, another computer programmer.
“Any matches?” Elisabeth asked.
“Not yet.”
Liam frowned. “It’s been running for over a day, now.”
“It’s crawling through the entire web, looking for a photo that might match the pictures of Met and G that we got,” Joslyn said. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Liam threw up his hands in surrender, although he gave her a smile and a wink.
What was she doing, causing all these problems for her friends? She’d already gotten Liam and Elisabeth involved with her ex-boyfriend and a dangerous drug gang last year. Now she was battling some seriously financed thugs with high tech she would drool over if she weren’t running for her life.
“Anything I can do?” Clay asked. He had his newly casted arm in a sling, but his entire body hummed with energy despite his lack of sleep the night before. They’d caught a couple hours, napping on the back lawn while the police
finished up, then they’d come here to Elisabeth’s apartment to do research. Clay hadn’t wanted to leave Joslyn alone, even though he admitted he barely knew how to log in to his email.
“Can you cook?” Elisabeth asked.
He grinned. “I make a mean breakfast burrito.”
“Then you’re on food duty while we work.”
He saluted her and headed to her kitchen.
Joslyn felt guilty for dragging Clay into this, but strangely, she had the feeling he took all this danger and uncertainty in stride. She didn’t like not knowing, not being able to control anything. But for Clay, nothing seemed to faze him. He did what needed to be done. Period.
That was completely the opposite of how Tomas had been. He’d been emotional, easily upset, always stressed. At first it had made him seem very romantic and exuberant in his attention toward her, but then...
She managed to stop the memory before it found her. Her breath was even, her heartbeat slow and steady. She felt strong, in control. She felt like...Clay. He made her feel confident.
She hardly knew him, and yet she felt that he would be a good person to get to know. He would bring out a better side of her. He could help her heal.
She couldn’t remember what that was like, to be healed. To be whole.
“Joslyn?” Elisabeth’s soft voice invaded her thoughts. She realized she’d said her name a couple times.
“Sorry.”
Elisabeth touched her shoulder and asked in a low voice, “Are you okay?”
She knew about the baby. She’d seen the most dramatic effects of Tomas when Joslyn had first run away. She’d seen her at her worst, and had helped her and cared for her.
Joslyn took her hand and held it for a moment. “I’m getting better.” Her counselor had told her not to dissemble, to be honest but not a complainer. It had felt good to be able to say how she really felt with people who cared about her. It was like sharing a burden.
“Since Leviathan’s running the facial-recognition program,” Elisabeth said, nodding to the desktop she’d made herself, “go use the computer on the table.”
“What about Liam?”
