Explosive Alliance

by Susan Sleeman

  Her first reaction had been attraction, but her second had been wariness. She’d suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. She knew that not all strong men would hurt her, but she had become extra cautious about making herself vulnerable again.

  Clay rang the doorbell, and they could faintly hear it ding-dong inside the house. He stood with his hands in his jeans pockets, but there was a tension across his wide shoulders that belied his casual pose. He rang the doorbell again. Still no answer.

  Joslyn checked her watch. It was eight o’clock on Monday morning. “Maybe she went to work already.”

  “Do you know where she works?”

  “She’s IT support at a manufacturing company.” It was a rather low-paying job for Fiona, assuming she’d ended up finally getting her degree, but maybe she couldn’t get anything on a higher pay scale, or maybe she preferred the hours there.

  Clay’s eyes narrowed to a stormy gray. “You said you haven’t talked to her in two years. How do you know all this?”

  “It’s my job to find out stuff like this. I’m training to be a skip tracer.”

  “A skip tracer?”

  “I find people. I also help people disappear.” Joslyn had been especially grateful to her friend Elisabeth, who had originally helped her escape her abusive ex, a Filipino gang captain in Los Angeles. Elisabeth had gotten Joslyn a job in the O’Neill Agency while she finished her last few quarters of school. Joslyn found she enjoyed helping people, especially other women who wanted to get away from dangerous relationships. She understood their situations only too well and only hoped that Fiona wasn’t suffering at the hands of a man.

  Clay went to the front window to try to peer through the crack in the curtains. Joslyn noticed an envelope sticking out of the mail box next to the door and opened the lid. It was full of mail. It didn’t look as though Fiona got a lot of junk mail, but some envelopes she did get were postmarked several weeks ago. “I don’t think Fiona’s been home for a while.” A chill crept over her skin.

  Clay frowned. “I don’t like this.”

  “I know where Fiona usually kept a spare key,” Joslyn said. “In the back, under—”

  “The ugliest gnome,” Clay finished for her, flashing a smile. His eyes crinkled and turned a glittering aquamarine, and Joslyn’s heartbeat blipped. While Fiona was beautiful, her brother was incredibly handsome.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “She got that from me. It’s where I hid the spare key at my house back in Chicago, years ago.”

  They headed around the side of the house, through the wooden latch gate, which was unlocked. The shade from the building made the temperature drop a few degrees, but it was still oppressively hot.

  The backyard was small and bricked over, with plant beds along the walls containing a few orange and lemon trees. However, there was also a line of little gnome statues next to the glass back door, and the ugliest one was clearly the largest, a hideous creature with a long nose and a grinning mouth full of grimy teeth. Clay tipped it over and found a key underneath.

  Joslyn tried to peer through the wooden slats of the blinds covering the glass door, but couldn’t see anything in the darkened room beyond except for a glimpse of a television set and a leather couch. The space seemed unusually dark considering the number of windows the house had.

  Clay inserted the key and it turned smoothly. He swung the handle and eased the door open.

  Then suddenly he was grabbing her and leaping aside just as an explosion shattered the morning.

  * * *

  The noise of the blast boomed in Clay’s ears as he rolled with Joslyn, protecting her with his body. The heat from the blast rushed over his back like an ocean wave, and debris pelted them like hail.

  His brain felt like a bottle of soda that had been shaken and popped open, with fizzing bubbles clouding his vision. A ringing roared in his ears, dominating all other sound. He blinked, and his vision cleared to the sight of Joslyn’s dark hair tumbled over the bricks of the yard. He was sprawled on top of her, and he could smell apricot and jasmine, and the scent of walking through a quiet wood.

  “Are you all right?” His voice came from far away. He rolled to the side so he wasn’t crushing her beneath him. “Joslyn?”

  She moved slowly, lifting her head. Her clear, golden-brown eyes were dazed. She didn’t speak, but simply looked at him in confusion.

  “Anything broken?”

  She slowly sat up, checking her slender limbs. She shook her head, then looked behind him at the house.

  There was a gaping hole where the back door had been. Plaster from the exploded wall still rained from the air. The roof lurched drunkenly.

  “Come on, we need to get clear of the house.” He rose to his feet, feeling aches in his joints from the blast and the hard landing on the bricks. Joslyn took the hand he held out to her, and they skirted around the less damaged side of the house to get to the front again.

  Fiona’s next-door neighbor had rushed out to her front yard, an older woman with gray, permed hair, dressed in a tank top and shorts. She gaped at them as they appeared. “Are you all right? What happened? Good gracious, was that a bomb? Fiona’s poor house. What was a bomb doing in her house?”

  What was a bomb doing in Fiona’s house? It had been rigged to explode as soon as the door was breached. Clay had been incredibly lucky to see the tripwire as he opened the door, and his reflexes had taken over, allowing him to grab Joslyn and leap to safety. Luckily, it looked as if it hadn’t been a very large explosion, although it had been enough to blow out a few of the windows in the house. Glass covered the stone garden in the front yard.

  Clay was starting to recover his hearing because he now heard a dog barking from inside the house next door and a car alarm sounding from somewhere nearby. Luckily, there hadn’t been many people home at this time of morning on this street—just the next-door neighbor, and a couple people from houses across the street, including one older woman with two young children.

  “We need to call the police,” Joslyn said to the neighbor.

  Clay’s shoulders knotted. Once the police realized he was an ex-convict at the site of an explosion, things would get interesting. This had nothing to do with his past.

  At least, he hoped it didn’t. The mob family he’d worked for years ago, before he’d gone to prison, was now defunct, and he hadn’t been very high on the totem pole to begin with. He didn’t think he had any enemies left who would want revenge on him, but if he did, then rigging his sister’s house to blow up was a rather melodramatic way to do it. A sniper shot would have been easier.

  “I’m calling them right now,” said a neighbor from across the street who had her cell phone. “I can’t believe this. My great-grandkids are with me today, too.”

  The two kids were standing in the street staring wide-eyed at the house, which didn’t look much different from the front except for some dust and curls of smoke rising from the broken windows. “Can we go see—”

  “No,” their great-grandmother said firmly, then spoke into the phone as the police dispatcher picked up the line. “Yes, I’m here at Braeden Court, and there’s been an explosion!” She gave Clay a suspicious look.

  “Oh, don’t mind her,” Fiona’s next-door neighbor said to Clay. “She thinks the government put microchips in polio vaccines so they could monitor everyone.” The woman waved a finger in a circle around her ear. “Completely cuckoo.”

  “Are you all right?” Joslyn asked her. “Your house is right next door.”

  “Luckily there’s a lot of space in the side yards and the fence is good and thick. My windows rattled but no damage. I’m Mary, by the way.” She held out a gnarled hand.

  Joslyn and Clay introduced themselves, and Mary looked closely at Clay. “You related to Fiona? You look just
like her.”

  “She’s my half sister.”

  “I’m a friend of hers from Los Angeles,” Joslyn said. “We came here to see her.”

  Mary’s steel-gray eyebrows rose. “I’d hoped she’d just gone to visit someone like one of you when she disappeared.”

  “She disappeared?” Clay had to fight the alarm he felt.

  “A few weeks ago, I heard barking from her house and went to see what was going on. She gave me a spare key because sometimes she asks me to take care of her dog, Poochie. Looked like the poor thing had been left alone for a day or two, so I took him.” Mary jabbed a thumb backward toward her house, where the dog was still barking intermittently. “I haven’t seen any sign of Fiona since. I filed a police report, but they haven’t done anything. Do you think her vanishing has something to do with the blast? Thank God it didn’t happen when I got her dog.” Mary shuddered at the close call. “Was it a gas leak or something?”

  “Um...we’re not sure,” Joslyn said carefully. She looked briefly at Clay, but he somehow knew what she was thinking. The less they told the neighbors, the better.

  “We were opening the door when it blew up,” Clay said to Mary.

  “My goodness, are you two all right? You don’t look injured, but...”

  “We’re fine,” Joslyn said.

  “You better make sure you get seen by a doctor,” Mary said.

  “What happened?” People started to arrive from other streets in the area, gaping at the house. Mary was only too happy to tell them a dramatized account of the explosion.

  Clay pulled Joslyn aside. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked her. She was tall but slender, and she seemed so delicate.

  She nodded, although there was worry in her face. “Who rigged Fiona’s house to explode?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. But whoever did it is a ruthless killer.” He sighed and eyed the ruined shell of the house.

  Joslyn shivered, even in the sweltering heat.

  Clay had dealt with men just as ruthless when he’d been a street thug for that mob family in Chicago. He hadn’t killed anyone, but if he’d kept going down that road, who knows what he might have become?

  That thought was like a dark blot on his soul.

  Police sirens blared, and soon a squad car turned the corner and barreled down the street toward them, followed by paramedics. Clay’s shoulders tensed out of habit, and he relaxed them. He wondered if there would ever be a time when his past wouldn’t crop up in his present.

  He answered the officers’ questions evenly, but that only seemed to make them suspicious, if the curious looks they threw at him were any indication. He submitted to the paramedic’s exam, but other than a few minor cuts from flying glass and debris, he was unhurt. Part of the door frame had hit him on the side and a chunk of plaster had glanced off his shoulder, but he shook off the bruises. He’d had worse.

  He knew the exact moment the officers had looked him up and found out about his prison record. They had hard glints in their eyes as they approached him. “So Mr. Ashton, what are you doing here in Arizona? You’re a long ways from Illinois.” The officer’s name badge read Campbell.

  “I came to see my half sister, Fiona Crowley.”

  “And that’s it, huh?” Officer Talbot, the younger man, squinted up at him. “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else,” Clay said through a tight jaw. He might have been tempted to mention the phone call from his sister if it hadn’t been for the suspicion in their tones. Anything he said to them would only make things worse for himself, and he needed to be able to find Fiona and make sure she was safe.

  “So you just opened the door and the house exploded? Kind of odd, don’t you think?”

  “It might have been a gas leak or something like that.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with it?” Officer Talbot gave him a look that said, Yeah, right.

  “I had nothing to do with this.” His voice came out a bit harsher than he intended.

  “And Miss Dima...Dia...” Officer Talbot squinted at his notebook. “What’s your relationship with her?”

  Clay gritted his teeth. “I just met Joslyn when we both arrived at the house at the same time. To see Fiona. Why is it that the police didn’t contact me, her brother, when her neighbor filed a missing persons report?”

  Officer Talbot’s face turned pink and he glanced at his partner. “It’s under investigation,” he snapped.

  Calm down. Clay had to calm down. His temper had gotten him in enough trouble in the past. He couldn’t afford to get in trouble now, when Fiona might be in danger. He wanted to walk away from these two men and the insulting ring to their questions, but he forced himself to stand in a relaxed stance.

  Officer Campbell gave him a hard look, but then he said, “We have your hotel information and phone number. We’ll be in touch.” It was almost like a threat. However, the two men turned and left him. They began addressing the other people gathered on the sidewalk.

  Joslyn came up to him, but paused when she saw his face.

  “They were giving you a hard time?”

  “Nothing unexpected.” Considering his prison time. But it still bothered him.

  Her eyes sparked amber. “But you were visiting your sister.”

  “Look, I don’t know how much Fiona told you—”

  “She knew about your time in prison,” Joslyn said quietly.

  “Well, it’s not something officers of the law can forget about.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  She sighed and looked away. He could almost hear her thoughts. She knew he was right. “Mary was able to give me the exact date she went to collect Poochie. Fiona’s been gone for three weeks, about the time of the stamp on the postcard she sent me.”

  Clay frowned. “I just can’t imagine where she would go. Why did she need to leave? Is she really in trouble?” He wondered if it was even Fiona who’d reached out to him and Joslyn.

  “I was going to drop by her workplace. Since it looks like Fiona doesn’t want to be found, I want to gather as much information as I can about her life here in Phoenix to try to predict where she’d go.” Joslyn eyed the officers. Talbot was flirting with a young woman, while Campbell was speaking to two men in business-casual clothing. “They say, out of sight out of mind, so did you want to come with me?”

  Maybe the less the cops saw of him, the less likely they would be to blame him for the explosion. “Sure.” Right now, it was the only lead they had on where Fiona might be. After that explosion, he had a feeling this wasn’t a case of his sister going on a spontaneous vacation. He’d been worried before, but now his fear for her was like a boiling pot in his gut.

  If there was something dangerous going on, he wanted to make sure he was there to face it head-on.

  Copyright © 2015 by Camy Tang

  ISBN-13: 9781460381564

  Explosive Alliance

  Copyright © 2015 by Susan Sleeman

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