by Barb Han
First he checked the aisles. Behind the counter came next. The front of the shop was clear.
He turned and waved Samantha inside.
She closed the door behind her.
The damn bell tinkled again.
There was no metallic smell in the air, and that was a relief. If anyone had been killed and brought to the stockroom, it would’ve had to have been recent. Bodies wasted no time starting to decay. Clean air was a good thing. In fact, it smelled like the inside of any hardware store. And it was neat. Everything seemed to have a place.
He moved toward the stockroom. Samantha was right behind him. He started to argue, to tell her to wait, but she deserved to know just as much as he did. His protective instincts had him wanting to shield her. Samantha was strong. No matter what happened, she could handle herself and then some. She’d proved it time and time again. He respected her for it.
The door to the stockroom had no lock. It was the kind that swung loosely on its hinges for an easy pass-through.
Samantha squeezed his shoulder, so he stopped.
She disappeared down an aisle and returned with a hammer in her left hand.
He smiled at her and hoped she could see him in the dim light.
As he turned, the door smacked him in the face. His body acted as a doorstop but he held his footing. The person on the other side was weaker, so Dylan braced himself and pushed back.
The battle between them held until Dylan counted to five. Then, picturing his little girl, he grunted and gave a shove so hard the other side buckled. The door swung open and Dylan used the opportunity to rush the guy.
Out of nowhere, Dylan’s right knee buckled and he landed flat on his back. By the time he popped to his feet again—which took all of two seconds—the guy had pushed past Dylan and knocked Samantha down. She recovered a second behind Dylan.
Both ran after the mystery guy, who bolted through the front of the store and outside, Samantha a half step behind. Those powerful legs of hers kept her within spitting distance, even though she had to be in considerable pain, but the guy in front had a couple of seconds’ advantage and could keep pace with both of them.
Dylan kept running, pushing through burning legs until his lungs felt as if they would explode. He had no doubt that if he’d been 100 percent, the guy in front of him with a medium build wearing jeans and sneakers would have been knocked out flat by now. Even a burst of adrenaline couldn’t overcome the gap, because the runner had a rush of his own slamming through him.
He hopped a fence and Dylan was right there on his heels.
For a solid ten minutes, they ran.
After a good five more, Samantha dropped off.
“Keep going,” she said breathlessly.
If Dylan hadn’t been so close, he’d have given up. The guy was just out of reach, and Dylan wanted more than anything to close his fingers around his neck and choke the bastard. He’d talk first, though. This guy would sing as soon as Dylan applied the right...motivation. And Dylan would have an address. Maribel would be home.
He felt torn between catching this guy, the only viable link to Maribel, and stopping to hang back in order to protect Samantha. That momentary hesitation cost him another two seconds between him and his target. Well, hell on a roller coaster.
The runner darted between trash cans, knocking them over. Dylan jumped in time to avoid them. It cost him another second. At this pace, no way could he make up five seconds of delay.
After the guy cut right at the next house, Dylan followed.
The first dog barked, and if Dylan was lucky, that would be the extent of it. He’d lost visual with the runner and that wasn’t good. A couple more dogs sounded off, seeing which one could yap the loudest.
If he woke up the neighborhood, someone would end up calling the police. This whole situation would get even stickier.
More dogs weighed in. Was he on Maple? Wasn’t that where Samantha had said the dogs were?
He kept running for at least another ten minutes, well aware that he was moving farther from Samantha and no closer to his target. She was there at the hardware store, alone.
When Dylan rounded the next house and the guy was nowhere to be seen, Dylan released a string of curse words under his breath that would’ve made his grandmother wash his mouth out with that deodorant soap she’d bought for him as a teenager.
Dylan stopped in the alley and listened.
He’d completely lost the runner, so he circled back and jogged toward the hardware store with a bad feeling. What if there had been another person waiting in there?
That person would have complete access to Samantha and then it would be game over. The guttural cry begging for release inside Dylan was more than just frustration that he’d never find his daughter. It was also for Samantha. And he didn’t want to feel that way about anyone.
Why?
Being a parent made him feel exposed enough already. He didn’t want people to have any additional ways to hurt him, and especially not in the way he’d been hurt when Lyndsey had died. It was immature to feel that she’d abandoned him because she’d died, and yet that was exactly how he’d felt. Abandoned.
Frustrated and defeated, Dylan picked up the pace. If anything had happened to Samantha—and he’d never forgive himself if it had—he needed to know, like, now.
With every forward step, his heart grew heavier in his chest and it was harder to breathe. Ignoring the pain in his calves from bursts of running, he pushed ahead, harder, faster. Getting to Samantha, knowing she was all right, was suddenly more important than air.
The hardware store was two blocks up on the right. It felt like the longest stretch of his entire run even though he ate up the ground in record time. No way could the guy have circled back and beaten Dylan to the store. And yet every possibility started roaring through Dylan’s brain.
Samantha wasn’t out front. Dylan wasn’t sure where he’d expected her to be but maybe he’d hoped that she’d be standing on the sidewalk, waiting, so he could see her first thing.
That would be stupid, though. She’d become pretty darn good at keeping herself alive. Only an idiot would stand out in the open, exposed. Samantha was much smarter than that. It was her intelligence that had first attracted him.
Sweat dripped down his face, his eyelids, his nose by the time his hand closed around the door handle. He turned the knob but it clicked instead. It was locked.
A few light taps on the glass and he caught sight of her silhouette moving toward him in the darkness.
Instantly, his heart filled with warmth and light. His need to hold her hit as swiftly and as piercingly as a lightning bolt straight through him.
The door swung open and she launched into his arms.
“You’re back. I was so worried.” She burrowed her face into the crook of his neck.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere without you.” He didn’t want to admit just how absolutely freaked out he’d been. Not to her. Not to himself. Because needing her opened up a whole new can of worms he wasn’t sure he was ready to deal with. And what he’d felt running toward the hardware store felt a whole helluva lot like need.
He walked her backward into the store and closed the door behind them.
The smell of her lilac shampoo filled his senses as her body pressed hard against him, giving him other ideas he needed to control.
For now, he’d give in to weakness and hold her.
“Did you catch him?” she finally asked, still nestled against him.
His pulse raced. His breathing was ragged. And he noticed the instant he went from heaving air to breathing in her scent. The air in the room thickened and tension coiled low in his gut. This time he needed a different kind of release. Dylan’s feelings for Samantha were getting more difficult to maintain. He had to remind himself they were f
riends. And he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that bond. More than anything, he wanted to be with her. And he appreciated whatever kind of connection was growing between them.
“No. He got away. I couldn’t get to him in time. He was too far ahead.” Dylan took a step back, frustration eating at his stomach lining.
“It’s okay. We can figure out who he is anyway.” Samantha held her left palm out flat, a cell phone sitting on top. “I found it here on the floor when I came back. I stepped on it, actually, and that completely freaked me out because once I realized what it was, I thought I broke it.”
She pushed it toward Dylan. “It’s password protected. I tried but couldn’t get anything. I bet your friend can.”
* * *
THE LOOK OF relief that washed over Dylan created a seismic shift on his hard features. Hard lines softened. His lips, which had been permanently formed into a frown, relaxed. His intense eyes lightened. Giving him the break he so desperately needed sent ripples of warmth and happiness through Samantha.
“We need to get this to Jorge for analysis,” he said. “He’ll be able to give us the name and address of the owner.”
“And hopefully more than that,” she agreed, starting toward the front door. She stopped when Dylan didn’t follow. “I checked the back room. I didn’t find anything. The computer’s been tampered with, though.”
Dylan nodded and they moved to the front door together. “Covering their tracks.”
“I assume so.”
“Where does your friend live?”
“In Garland.”
“That’s almost an hour away.”
“I know.” Dylan walked, glancing up occasionally from the phone. He pressed combinations of numbers. “It’ll lock me out soon. Might have already taken our pictures.”
“Cell phones can do that?” she asked, stopping at the truck.
“Some are set up to snap a shot the first time the password fails.” Dylan opened the door for her.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find pictures of who’s behind all this on that phone.” She climbed into the cab.
“Not with my luck, we won’t,” Dylan said under his breath.
Chapter Fifteen
Dylan knocked softly on the door of the small ranch-style house in the suburban Garland neighborhood. It was dark as pitch outside, but a glow came from inside and the porch light was on.
The door opened quickly.
“Thanks for remembering not to ring the bell. The kids are sleeping.” Jorge wasn’t at all what Samantha had expected based on his voice. He was taller and his skin was too pale for someone who lived in Texas. He had sunken dark eyes. Then she remembered what he did for a living and realized his appearance must be from staying inside so much to work on computers.
“Thanks for seeing us so late,” she said, and introduced herself.
“I’d do just about anything for this guy. What happened to your face?” he asked Dylan.
“Walked into a wall.”
“That was some wall,” Jorge said. He turned to Samantha and stuck his hand out. “Nice to meet you. Come on in.”
He stepped back and opened the door wider for them but then bear-hugged Dylan as he entered.
She followed Dylan inside.
“We need to know who owns this phone.” Dylan handed the device over.
The front room had two sofas facing each other, a fireplace to the right of them. Kids’ toys were scattered around, but everything else had a place. A quilt was folded over the back of one of the couches. Small frames with pictures of little kids lined the mantel.
The place had a warm feeling to it.
“Step into my office and we’ll get to work.” Jorge led them down a hall, practically tiptoeing past rooms with crayon drawings taped to the doors.
He didn’t speak again until they’d gone into the last room on the right and he’d closed the door behind them.
“Welcome to my humble abode.” He spread his arms out. The office, which was really a back bedroom converted, had a desk on which she couldn’t see the top. Papers were stacked a foot high at a minimum, and where there wasn’t paper, there was a manual of some type.
A cream-colored futon was positioned across from the desk.
“Take a seat,” Jorge instructed. “Where’d you get this?” He hesitated, then held up a hand. “No. Don’t answer that. Never mind. What I don’t know, I can’t testify to in court.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing.”
“You know I’d do anything for you, bro.” Jorge popped out the SIM card and stuck it into another device. He plugged that into his computer and then turned the screen around so they could see.
“He most likely had security set up on his phone if he went to the trouble of locking it,” Dylan said.
“Most people do.”
Not Samantha. She’d only scratched the surface of her iPhone’s capabilities.
“Bingo.” Jorge popped back in his chair and looked at Samantha. “That’s a nice pic of you.”
Samantha’s face was right there, as obvious as the nose on his face, staring straight into the camera. Dylan filled the screen next. Jorge put both up side by side on a split screen.
“You two sure make a nice-looking couple.” His gaze immediately bounced between them.
Neither spoke, but Samantha was pretty sure Jorge picked up on the red flush in her cheeks.
Jorge pulled up another pic, loading it onto the screen. He continued, “Does this guy look familiar?”
Dylan shook his head before turning to Samantha. “You know him?”
“Afraid not.”
There were half a dozen other faces, none they recognized.
“No luck there.” Samantha shrugged.
“Yeah, well, luck has never been my thing,” Dylan said quietly. She tried not to notice the hurt in his voice when he spoke. She wondered if he was talking about Maribel’s mother. He seemed to blame himself for everything that had gone wrong in their relationship. Samantha wondered whether, if Lyndsey had given him a chance and told him the truth—if she’d asked him point-blank what he’d intended to do—things would have worked out differently.
Knowing Dylan, he would’ve figured out a way to get his head around the surprise and done his level best to be there for her every step of the way. Being robbed of that chance had taken away so much from him. He’d mentally placed himself in the same boat as the parents who’d abandoned him.
When this was all over, she had every intention of telling him just that. And not because she expected anything to turn out differently between them. She realized he couldn’t give her what she needed. His daughter was his focus, and that was the way it should be anyway.
“I got something here,” Jorge said. “I got a number, which led me to a name. Wait a minute. Here it is. This phone belongs to...Troy Michaels.” He looked up at them expectantly.
Samantha shrugged at the same time as Dylan. She figured they were repeating the same swear word in their heads, too. Neither said it, but they’d both most likely believed this guy would somehow be connected to the game. See his face and everything might finally make sense.
“Okay, we have another route. If you don’t recognize the name of the guy who owns the phone, I can tell you it’s a 214 number.”
“That’s a Dallas area code. That much I know,” Samantha said.
“Okay. And he doesn’t seem familiar to you at all?”
“No. But he messed with my father’s computer equipment in the hardware store that he owns. This guy wanted something in the files.”
“That the same system I’ve been running?”
“Yes,” Dylan said. “You get anything?”
“Just the money connection. Deposits started being made fiftee
n years ago and they haven’t stopped.”
“They started in the summer, right?” Dylan asked.
Jorge confirmed with a nod. “I heard about that crazy stuff that happened in Mason Ridge. This is connected?”
“It would seem so,” Samantha confirmed.
“Okay. Okay.” Jorge rubbed the day-old scruff on his chin. He looked as though he hadn’t had a good night of sleep in weeks. “Let’s see who this guy’s been calling, then.”
He punched keys on the keyboard, then sat back.
A string of numbers showed up on-screen.
One repeated quite often recently.
“Let’s just do a reverse number lookup here on Google.” More keystrokes. “Private number.” He laughed at the screen. “You want to play hardball, then. Okay. Let’s try this.”
His fingers danced across the keyboard again.
“Looks as if this guy has been calling Charles Alcorn.”
Samantha looked from Jorge to Dylan. “We have proof the two are connected. People have to believe us.”
Tension radiated from Dylan. “Beckett played the game with the older boys fifteen year ago, remember? Alcorn must’ve known his son was involved and used it to his advantage. Plus, we already know he’s the only one with enough resources to pull off what he did to us in Austin.”
“That’s right. I didn’t have much contact with Beckett, so I didn’t even think about him being involved.”
“Can I see that phone?” Dylan asked, his back teeth grinding.
Jorge put the SIM card back in and handed it over.
There was a missed call.
The number was Charles Alcorn’s—the end to which all roads led.
“Let’s see what he has to say.” Dylan placed the call.
“He’s probably wondering where his contact is. Maybe our guy from earlier was supposed to take the computer drive to Alcorn or check in,” Samantha said.
Dylan put the phone on speaker and held it out as the line rang. “Guess he’s about to get a surprise, isn’t he?”
