ON Fire (An Ozzie Novak Thriller, Book 5) (Redemption Thriller Series 17)

by John W. Mefford

  “You know how I am — my butt gets cold because it has the most cushion on it.”

  I snorted out a laugh.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” she said in a playful tone.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense. For starters, every part of your body is a turn-on. But your feet, why do they get so cold, then?”

  She moved her foot up my thigh. It felt as though a block of dry ice had been applied to my leg. I squirmed backward, and she laughed like she’d just pulled off the best prank ever.

  I pulled her close to me, and we just lay there for a moment.

  “I can feel your heart beating against my back,” she said. “I like it. It makes me feel close to you.”

  I kissed her neck. “Same here.”

  “Same here”? That was lame, Oz. Now is the time, dude. Time to be a man—a real man—and open up.

  “Hey.” Nice opening line.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about the future and all…” I took a deep breath. “Mackenzie has really taken to you. It’s been cool to watch. You’re really good with kids.”

  “Thank you.”

  Are you talking to your daycare provider—if you had one—or your wife?

  “So, maybe we want to start looking at places, and maybe move in together.” I heard the echo of my voice, and I instantly clamped my lips shut.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought. I think we’re ready.”

  “But there are steps we have to take first, right?”

  Uh-oh. That’s code for something. I’d mistimed my leap of faith. Or maybe I didn’t say it right.

  “Don’t you think I should spend the night first, and then you ask if we want to move in together?”

  “Uh…” I’d offended her. “Well, I guess you’re—”

  She poked her elbow into my ribs, turned onto her back, and looked me in the eyes, the glow of the lights through the curtains providing just enough light to see that honey-brown twinkle. “I’m just kidding, Ozzie.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Kind of.”

  I was getting it now. “Okay. First, will you spend the night with me?”

  She nodded. “All night. And for breakfast in the morning.”

  “Absolutely, especially if you’re cooking.”

  “If you’re lucky.” She giggled and tickled my ribs. I tickled her back. Hysterical tickling madness ensued for a good minute or so.

  As we both released laughing sighs, I put my arm around her and brought her close. “Nicole, I need to tell you something. Something very important.”

  “What—”

  I put a finger to her lips this time. “I’ve been afraid. Afraid to completely open up and commit to you. I thought I had justification for all that, but in reality, I’ve just been chicken.”

  “Oz, you had every right to wonder if you could trust me. I’ve only tried to show you that I messed up, that I’m sorry, and that—”

  “Don’t say it…not yet.” I swallowed, but I could still feel a swell of emotion moving up my throat. “Nicole, I realize neither one of us is perfect. But the cool thing is, we never gave up. Not completely. Our connection…I know now it’s not something anyone else can replicate. I truly believe I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. With you.”

  She gently laid a hand to the side of my face. I took hold of it and kissed it. “Before you spend the night, before we really start talking about moving in together, before we commit to being a family—a daughter, two dogs and all—you need to know that I, Ozzie Novak, love you with all of my heart. I will always love you. And I will do my best to show you each and every day.”

  “Till death do us part.” She giggled, then took my face and kissed me. “Wow, that took you forever.”

  “Hey, I’m a little slow.”

  “But it was worth it.”

  “So was last night,” I said, arching an eyebrow.

  She pushed me back and got out of bed. “You’re a freaking furnace. How about we take a shower and meet back in bed…wearing cotton.”

  Ten minutes later, we were back in bed, me in my boxers, she in an old T-shirt. We were both staring at the ceiling.

  “Can’t sleep, can you?” she asked.

  “I keep thinking about still being shackled to the scum brothers, Winston and Franklin.”

  “Kind of sucks about Tracy’s bosses at the Statesman putting a lid on the story.”

  “Yep.”

  “We need to talk this out, or neither of us is going to sleep. I’ll start us off. Do you think someone was really trying to kill you at the shop…you know, versus it just being a random sniper getting his jollies? And if so, why? Because of you digging into Franklin’s alibi for murder, or because of the information you received about his involvement in the FDA corruption?”

  “At first, I was convinced the shooter had to be connected, but I just wasn’t sure to what. I mean, look at the people I’m dealing with. But even Porter wondered if it could be some crack-pot who had nothing better to do.”

  “But Porter doesn’t know about you receiving the text messages that show Franklin’s involvement in the corruption.”

  “True.” I draped an arm behind my head. “Who has motive?”

  “Who stands to lose the most?” she countered.

  “Who else received the text messages of Franklin’s notes?” I briefly turned my head in her direction.

  “Ah, good one,” she said, moving the covers up to her waist. “Unless there’s someone at the newspaper who’s gone rogue—maybe an angry newspaper carrier who lost his job and wanted to take it out on you,” she scoffed, flicked her hand against my side.

  I rubbed my palms into my eyes. “I’ve been fooling myself that I could get out of this unscathed. Ever since Tracy and I compared notes and came up with our plan, I thought I’d found my way out. And now, not so much.”

  I ran through all of the questions again, but even I was starting to confuse the litany of crimes Franklin had committed or was accused of. “I don’t know, Nicole. This whole thing…I wish I’d never said yes to any of it. I was lured by money, just like that SOB Franklin.”

  She sat up, grabbed my nipple, and twisted.

  “Ouch! What was that for?” I said.

  “You’re not like Franklin or any of those people, so don’t say that.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said with heavy sarcasm.

  “Besides, you wanted to start your daughter’s college fund. That’s a good thing. And now, you won’t need to worry about money as much, since we’re officially a team again.”

  I growled.

  “What? Are you too archaic to let your wife contribute to the team?”

  “No…” I knew I didn’t sound convincing, which made me feel like an ass. There was no “I” in team, as the saying goes. Besides, Nicole had always been financially independent…and generous. We’ve always shared the burden. Why should that change now? “Let’s not get into money right now. We need to focus on how the hell I can pin this corruption charge on Franklin and, in my spare time, figure out who murdered Pamela Connor.”

  She tapped a finger to her chin as we both let silence reign for a moment.

  “I think you need to talk to Tracy and brainstorm on what they really mean by saying they need another source. Maybe you could be that source but still remain anonymous. Or maybe I can volunteer.”

  “I’m not getting you involved. And I don’t think it works that way.”

  “You’re either being chivalrous or overly protective of me.”

  She reached for my nipple again, but I covered my chest.

  “Because you made the big leap tonight,” she said, “I’ll say you are being chivalrous.”

  “Leap,” I said.

  I explained the acronym for Winston’s law firm: Lockwood, Engle, Adams and Palmer.

  “Obviously, the partners never consulted the marketing department when they came up with tha
t one.”

  “Says the marketing professional. But I agree with you.”

  I huffed out a breath and looked at her. “You want to get a snack?”

  “Do you have any ice cream?”

  “Mackenzie loves combining peanut butter ice cream with chocolate.”

  “Hmm. I’m feeling experimental tonight.” She popped an eyebrow as I began to sit up.

  “Does that mean we’re gearing up for round two?”

  “Mayyy-be. But not until you wash your worry away. So, you’ll talk to Tracy first thing tomorrow.”

  My mind drifted back to what I’d said. “A convergence.”

  “A what?”

  “The merging of the two kinds of ice cream. In my mind, I’ve been trying to separate the murder from the corruption. But what if there is a…”

  “Convergence.” She nodded and looked off into the distance for a moment.

  “Even if Franklin didn’t personally murder Pamela Connor—and that’s still an open question—we’ve talked about how it could be connected to one of his clients, right?”

  “Now you’re talkin’.”

  “And one of Franklin’s clients was also a mistress of his. I think I just figured out my next step. Talk to Riya Patel.”

  “Try Tracy and Riya both, and see who you can reach first,” she suggested.

  I clapped my hands. “Can I serve Mrs. Novak ice cream in bed?”

  “Only if you deliver the goods after you feed me ice cream.”

  That was a challenge I couldn’t resist.

  27

  It wasn’t even eight in the morning, and I’d already made lunch plans with Riya Patel, tried to chase down Tracy—he was tied up in more meetings with his editor and publisher—dropped off Mackenzie at school and then Nicole at work. She was letting me borrow her car for the day since the Cadillac was in the possession of the APD.

  Despite little sleep, I felt energized. Probably had something to do with resolving my trepidation about my relationship with Nicole. In other words, lifting the brick off my head, the one that had been holding me back from moving forward with my life.

  I opened my laptop and logged into the TLO website. As usual, it took a good minute for the home page to load. I felt a little guilty for going down this path, but the nagging feeling wouldn’t leave my head. About Noah. What if the real Noah was more the guy I saw ripping into Charlie last night at the charity function than the one Brook always brags about? She might be one tough cop, but even tough cops can attach themselves to bad guys. Combining Noah’s behavior at the art show with the comments from Elaine and Rhonda, I simply had to at least check his background.

  The home page finally loaded, and I typed in my search criteria and hit enter. The TLO website carried a lot of information about locating vehicles and people, as well as providing background checks and verification on Social Security numbers. It also contained criminal records on a person. That was my focus with this search.

  The results page popped up. As I’d grown accustomed to doing, I had to sift through a lot of block text to find what I was looking for, scrolling through pages and pages of information—the user interface was probably conceived by a blind person forty years ago.

  “There we go,” I said, putting a finger to the heading “Criminal Records.”

  Underneath the title, the page was almost blank. He had one conviction of a Class C Misdemeanor for public intoxication two decades ago, another Class C Misdemeanor for disorderly conduct at a bar in Dallas about ten years ago, and then a couple of years later, two traffic tickets in Austin within a span of about a week.

  That was it. No felony convictions at all, not even a Class A or B Misdemeanor, which would include crimes like petty theft, simple assault, or a first or second offense for driving while intoxicated. He had none of that.

  I checked other information on Noah and learned that he’d never been married. Kind of wished he had been—that would give me someone to talk to about how he treated women.

  Damn, Oz, you’re acting like the overly protective brother. Like no one is good enough to date your sister.

  I rubbed my face, tearing into one of the butterfly bandages. I patted it back down and thought more about what I was trying to accomplish.

  “Following my instinct,” I said with a sigh.

  Instinct or not, there wasn’t much there. Maybe Noah was a jerk, but he didn’t have a hefty criminal record. I felt like the situation was one of those gray areas, where big sis—a.k.a. Brook—couldn’t see the real guy because she was so enamored during this courting stage. Over the course of my stint as an attorney, I’d represented two different women who’d been abused not even six months into their relationships with their boyfriends. It was sad, because they’d actually blamed themselves. Even after the first violent act, they continued thinking it was their fault. And then once the light came on, they felt shame in admitting that their perfect boyfriend was the exact opposite.

  My phone buzzed on the coffee table. It was a text from Tracy saying he had time before lunch. I asked if I could meet in his office. He replied with: I usually don’t have the luxury of sources coming to me. Works for me.

  I grabbed the keys and headed toward the main office of the Austin American-Statesman. I went east on Cesar Chavez. Once I made it to the west side of I-35, I took a long glance at the Four Seasons positioned to my left. Just beyond that sprawling complex, I hit South Congress and went south, crossing Lady Bird Lake. I passed the Hyatt Regency on the right and the Bat Observation Center on the left—yes, Austin was the home to millions of bats under the South Congress Avenue bridge—and I pulled up to the entrance to the newspaper building.

  I took the elevator up to the second floor. When the door opened, Tracy was standing near a cubicle talking to a bearded man, who glared at me through metal-rimmed glasses and then walked off.

  “Is that your welcoming committee?” I asked Tracy as we walked toward a conference room.

  “Yeah, uh…not really.” He got me into the room and shut the door. The wall facing the newsroom was all glass. “That’s Carter. My editor. He’s a bit…edgy. Works crazy hours, carries a lot of pressure. He knows he needs to deliver the big scoops. He’s not a bad guy, but I think he carries the weight of this paper on his shoulders.”

  “Well, we’ve got the scoop of the year for him. Could sell a lot of papers,” I said, settling into an orange vinyl chair.

  “I wish. He had reservations about running this story, but, like I said last night in my text, he was willing to take it to the publisher. Sheila didn’t hesitate with her answer, though—we need another source.”

  I glanced across the newsroom. Not a lot of activity; it was early in the day. “What about me?”

  He turned his palms to the ceiling. “What about you?”

  Tracy was thin—and looked even thinner with his skinny jeans, which were green today. He was wearing a sweater vest, and his hair was gelled in the shape of a triangle. He was somewhat of a preppy millennial, if there was such a thing.

  “Can’t you go with an anonymous source?” I was taking a cue from Nicole’s bag of ideas.

  “Not on this one, I’m afraid.” He leaned back in his chair, stuck a pen in his mouth, and propped his shiny new Nike running shoes on the table.

  “So, where do we go from here, Tracy? Do I need to talk to your publisher, Sheila?” I was taking control, channeling some of my father’s aggressive mindset. I had been adopted just after my birth twenty-eight years ago, but to me, Dad was always Dad, and I still felt his influence, even now, months after he’d died. A positive presence, which hadn’t always been the case when he was living.

  “Dude, we’re fucked unless we can find the person who sent those text messages to us, or a person magically shows up who can validate what we saw in those notes.”

  I took out my phone, found the text messages, and scrolled through two of them.

  “By the way, I talked to an IT guru, and he said that since we know the
phone number that sent us those text messages was a burner phone, the only way we can find out who sent them—and it’s not an absolute—is to triangulate the SMS signal and hopefully get lucky.”

  “But you have to get the cell-phone carrier involved, and they won’t turn over anything unless a judge approves a search warrant.”

  “There you go. So, like I said, we’re kind of fucked.”

  “‘We’ as in me.” I rubbed my temples, trying to stave off a stress headache.

  “I’ve held off for ten minutes now.”

  “Huh?” I looked up. He was moving his hand as though he was clawing at something. “Get in a catfight recently?”

  My face. I explained the sniper shooting, then added, “Captain Porter thinks it could just be a random thing.”

  “So, you’re saying it could be a coincidence.” He smiled as though he knew the mantra I’d learned in law school about never to use the idea of “coincidence” to explain something important to a case.

  “I know it sounds like I’m saying it’s a coincidence, but there’s no reason to believe that I’m anyone’s target.”

  He dropped his feet and touched a finger with his opposite hand. “Ozzie, we’ve got two things in the works here, my man. The murder and the corruption. The murder—we either believe the wife or see who had access to alter the video.”

  “Doesn’t seem like you’re too focused on the murder charge anymore,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Murders, unfortunately, are a part of everyday news. If Franklin is indeed guilty, his high profile will start to gain national attention. But still, it’s like those cheap newsmagazine shows. They would just eat up the salacious part about his affair with a younger, prettier woman, his apparent womanizing habits…you know, appealing to the lowest common denominator of people’s intelligence.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Think about the corruption story, though. There are thousands of lobbyists— the FDA is a government agency. But we know this could be the tip of the iceberg. What if one insider decided to spill the beans on the whole lot?” He chewed on his pen, then continued. “But to be specific about this corruption scandal, think about this: I haven’t been threatened, right?”