by Paige Tyler
He turned to head for the door, but the Brothers Stupid blocked his way, their faces set like they thought he was full of shit. If they didn’t move, this time he would hurt them.
“Cooper, something’s not right here,” Alex said.
Yeah, no shit. He opened his mouth to say as much when Brooks interrupted him.
“Cooper, we’re about to have company.” And from the tone in his voice, that company wasn’t friendly.
Before Cooper could move, Dennis and his FBI partner, along with three more FBI agents and four DPD uniformed officers burst into his apartment, guns drawn and aimed at him.
Cooper stared. “What the hell, Dennis?” While he was pretty sure they wouldn’t shoot him, he definitely decided he didn’t like the feeling of being on this end of a gun. “Do me a favor and point those fucking guns in another direction, would you?”
“No can do, Cooper,” Dennis said.
Weapon still trained on him, Dennis walked over and pulled Cooper’s gun out of the holster. Then he leaned down and yanked out Cooper’s backup piece as well.
“What’s going on Dennis?” Cooper asked again. He was on the edge of losing his patience. He was wasting valuable seconds with this shit when he needed to be out there looking for Jim. The mere thought that Everly was in danger had him spinning like the Tasmanian Devil on caffeine. “I’m in kind of a rush, so I don’t have time to hang around and chat.”
“That’s too bad Cooper, because I can’t let you leave until I look around your place and ask you a few questions,” Dennis said.
Cooper’s eyes widened. “You’re searching my apartment? What the hell for?”
Dennis regarded him with a look that could only be called disappointed. “Do you own a solid black duffel bag?”
The question took Cooper completely by surprise. “Um, yeah. It’s one of my work bags. It’s in the closet in my bedroom. Why?”
“Wait here,” Dennis ordered as he walked past Cooper to head that way.
“Oh shit,” Alex muttered.
Before Cooper could ask Alex what the hell that was about, Dennis came back out of the bedroom, the duffel bag in one hand and a block of C-4 in the other.
Cooper stared. What the hell?
“And we’re fucked,” Alex said.
“That’s not mine,” Cooper told Dennis.
He realized how incredibly stupid that sounded even as he said the words. How many perps had used that exact same line with him?
But Dennis didn’t seem to be listening anyway. He handed the bag to his partner, then holstered his gun and took out a pair of handcuffs. He read Cooper his rights as he pulled his hands behind his back and snapped the metal around his wrists.
“Dennis, you know this is insane, right?” Cooper asked.
“All I know is that we got an anonymous tip a couple hours ago from someone who said they saw you carrying a black duffel bag possibly filled with explosives into your apartment. And what do you know? The C-4 that I found in there is the same lot used in the bombings.”
“That’s bullshit,” Cooper snapped. “That C-4 isn’t mine.”
But now he knew what Jim was doing in his apartment. One of his best friends in the world was framing him, not only for the bombing, but murdering a fellow DPD officer. Jim must have grabbed Everly because she saw him do it.
Dennis looked for a minute like he wanted to believe him, then his mouth tightened. “Maybe not, and if it isn’t, we’ll get it all straightened out at the FBI office.”
Everly could be dead by then. “I don’t have time to go straighten this shit out. Someone very important to me is in trouble. I need to find her—now!”
“Not going to happen, buddy,” Dennis said, nudging Cooper toward the door.
Cooper tensed, balling his hands into fists so he could break the cuffs. He’d probably end up getting shot a few times, but as long as they didn’t hit him in the head or the heart, he’d be fine.
Tristan locked gazes with Cooper then nudged his oldest brother. “We can’t let them arrest Landry,” he whispered. “He’s the only one who can find Everly.”
Armand looked at Tristan incredulously. “You believe him?”
Since pushing Cooper toward the door wasn’t working, Dennis gripped his arm and tried to drag him. Cooper dug in his heels.
“Yes,” Tristan said softly. “Landry loves Everly as much as we do. More, if that’s possible.”
Armand looked at the cops, then at Cooper. “You’d better be right about this,” he said to Tristan.
Then before the feds or cops could stop him, Armand drew back his fist and punched Dennis.
There was a single second of stunned silence, then it was a free-for-all as Alex, Brooks, and Everly’s other brothers jumped into the fray and started swinging.
The fight would end with her brothers and his pack mates getting arrested for sure, but they were willing to risk it so he could save Everly. He wasn’t going to let their sacrifice go to waste. Cooper just prayed nobody started shooting.
Lifting his shoulders, Cooper snapped the links between the handcuffs, then turned and ran into the bedroom. He leaped for the big window beside the bed, twisting in mid-air so his shoulder hit the glass first. The window shattered, the noise echoing in his ears as he hit the ground two floors below.
He rolled to his feet and hauled ass around the building, heading for his Jeep. But then he skidded to a stop. There were four cop cars right behind his vehicle. He was never getting out of there.
Armand’s minivan, on the other hand, was still sitting in its space all nice and lonely with the engine still running.
Cooper dashed across the parking lot and jumped in, squealed out of the parking lot, and headed for the Triple S-I office and Ryan North, praying Jim didn’t get there first.
* * *
Everly had barely been aware of where they were going when Jim had grabbed her on the stairwell. By the time she’d come out of her impact-induced fog, she’d been taken to some kind of self-storage place and tied to a chair with a thick length of rope. She didn’t know where they were, but the sounds of jets passing over told her that they were close to the airport. Jim was on the far side of the room, leaning over a table, a soldering iron in his hand.
“Don’t bother screaming,” he said quietly. “No one will hear you, and it will only make me jump, which would probably get us both blown into a big pink mist.”
Between the block of explosives Jim had been holding back at Landry’s apartment and the disgusting visual he’d just provided, it wasn’t hard to figure out what her kidnapper was doing—he was making a bomb.
Besides what she’d seen on the news, Everly hadn’t known much of what was going on with the bombing case, except that Landry had been helping the FBI, and that he didn’t like to talk about it. But she never would have dreamed in a million years that Landry’s friend was the bomber.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.
Jim didn’t say anything for so long that Everly thought he was going to ignore her. But finally he put down the soldering iron and turned to look at her.
“Did Cooper ever tell you about how our friends got killed in Iraq?” he asked.
She nodded, trying to remember exactly what Landry had said, and what it had all meant. “He said that a secondary device had blown up in the safe area while you were dealing with the first bomb. He told me that the final report said the deaths were the result of hostile actions.”
“He got some of it right.” Jim snorted and turned to pick up a pair of pliers. “I did go downrange to work on an IED, and a secondary device did kill our friends, but that’s about all the official report got right.”
Jim stopped, his brow furrowing as he leaned closer to the device he was making. Everly wondered if it was wise to keep him talking. She had no idea what he had planned for her—and would prefer if she never found out. Better to keep him talking.
“Then what happened?” she prompted.
Jim let
out a short laugh. “I left four of the unit’s soldiers and our commander—Lieutenant Ryan North—in a good safe area while I headed downrange. But the LT decided to move the safe area to a place with better shade so it would be more comfortable. He moved to the same place that another EOD team had used just a week before, something the insurgents hoped we’d do. It was a trap. An IED was planted there, and that’s how those three guys died. The enemy didn’t kill them—Ryan North killed them.”
Everly could see how he might think that. “Couldn’t it simply have been a stupid mistake on his part?”
Jim threw something down on the table with an oath so loud it made Everly jump, practically knocking over the chair she was tied to. “If that was the case, why’d he tell the investigation team I put them in that location? And why did he pay off the only other survivor of the explosive to say the same thing?”
Everly stared. Landry hadn’t said anything about that—obviously, he hadn’t known. “North paid someone to lie to cover up what really happened?”
Jim’s hands were shaking so badly he had to grip the edge of the table to steady them. “Yeah—Specialist Neal Christian. Of course, I didn’t find that out until a couple months ago when Christian called me and told me what he’d done. At the time, all I knew was that two people I trusted lied about me and destroyed my reputation, my career…my life.”
Maybe it would have helped if she had grown up around a military family and could understand how these people thought, but right then, none of this was making any sense.
“All of that just to cover up a mistake?” she asked. “That’s insane.”
“That’s because it was never about covering up a mistake,” he said bitterly. “It was about making sure Ryan North stayed in Iraq.”
Okay, that was even more insane. “Why would anyone in their right mind want to stay in Iraq?”
Jim started pushing small silver tubes inside lengths of larger steel pipe. “Because North had gotten himself sent to Iraq so he could help some people win service contracts from the army. He never spent any time learning how to be a good EOD tech. He was more interested in working deals with all those contractors over there. He figured that by helping to get bigger contracts and sweeter deals, they’d give him a little something on the side.”
Jim kept working on the bomb, running wires from pipe to pipe as he gestured at a cardboard box full of papers on the floor. “Of course, I didn’t know any of this until Christian brought me that box of stuff there. Turns out Christian couldn’t live with what he’d done any longer, but he was too much of a coward to do anything about it. He drove down to see me, dropped all this shit in my lap, then walked out and hung himself a few days later. That’s when I knew I had to do something. If I didn’t, North would get away with everything.”
Everly frowned. “If you have all that evidence, why didn’t you take it to the police or the army?”
Jim laughed again, and there was a really scary edge to it this time, like he was close to losing it. “Because the police don’t care about why a bunch of soldiers died in a foreign country, and the army only wants to bury crap like this. No one was ever going to do anything about North unless I did. That’s when I decided to get out of the army and kill him. A bomb seemed like the most appropriate way for him to go.”
The cold, emotionless way Jim said it convinced Everly more than all the bomb components scattered about the table that he was flat-out insane.
“Do you have any idea how hard it actually is to kill a particular person with a bomb?” Jim asked almost conversationally. “If you just want to go out and kill anyone who wanders by, it’s easy, but if you’re aiming for a particular person? Well, that’s hard as hell. I showed up in town last week assuming I’d get my explosives, build a simple car bomb, kill North, and then find a new job here in Dallas within a couple days.”
Jim never stopped working on the bomb as he talked. “But then I found out that North lived in a fancy condo apartment, with secure parking, guards on the doors, and cameras everywhere. I had to give up the idea of getting a bomb onto his personal vehicle. There was no way to get into his condo without a hundred people seeing me. And the parking garage where he works is even worse.” He shrugged. “I thought I’d come up with a perfect plan to get him as he drove into the garage near his office, but then that cop showed up out of nowhere and set off my bomb too early.”
Jim started yanking on the wires he was twisting together so hard that Everly flinched every time he moved. This crazy guy was going to kill himself if he wasn’t careful, and he’d end up taking her with him.
“The second bombing attempt was rushed, I admit,” Jim continued. “I couldn’t get close enough to the entrance to his office because of the cameras, so I ended up putting it as close as I could. It wasn’t close enough though.”
Jim leaned over and picked up a piece of black material from the far side of the table. She couldn’t see what it was, but he attached the bigger metal pipes to the material.
“But this time is going to be completely different,” he said softly as he worked. “This time, I won’t have any problems getting close enough.”
Everly shuddered. She definitely didn’t like the flat, dead look Jim got in his eyes as he said that last part.
“Why were you at Landry’s place?” she asked, trying to keep him talking. “Why were you putting those explosives in his closet?”
Jim laughed. “Because Cooper is too damn smart for his own good—always has been. He started getting the idea in his head that I was involved in all this. I got him off my case, but only for a few hours. He wanted me to talk to the FBI today, and I don’t have time for that. North has a reservation in a couple hours at the fancy restaurant in his condo building. It’s one of the rare chances I’m going to have to get close to him, and I couldn’t have Cooper showing up and getting in the way. So I dropped an anonymous tip to the FBI telling them that Cooper is storing explosives in his apartment. He’s probably been arrested by now.”
Everly gasped. The thought of the FBI arresting Landry and treating him like a criminal made her so mad she wanted to scream. “How could you do that to Landry? My God, you saved his life!”
Jim glanced at her. “Don’t worry about your boyfriend. I’m sure the feds will let him go at some point, especially after I kill North. But until then, at least he won’t be in the way.”
He adjusted something on the bomb, then lifted the black material off the table and held it up. Her heart began to race when she realized it was a vest.
She watched in horror as he slipped his arms into it and settled the weight on his shoulders. He must have liked the way it felt because he smiled. Oh God. If he was wearing explosives strapped to his chest, it was because he didn’t plan on living through the next attack on Ryan North.
“Why did you kidnap me?” she asked.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Jim said. “I never would have done it if you hadn’t shown up at Cooper’s place. But now that I have you, it’s sort of serendipitous. I could use your help.”
“How?” she asked, even though she didn’t want to know.
Jim smirked at her. “That restaurant I mentioned? Well, it’s kind of fancy, and a guy walking in there alone might attract attention. But with you on my arm, I’ll be able to waltz right in.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to help you kill anyone.”
He laughed. “Sure you will. Or I’ll go down to the FBI field office and figure out where they’re holding Cooper, then blow him up instead of North.”
Everly’s heart skipped a beat. She didn’t know if a werewolf could be killed by a bomb, and she wasn’t ready to find out. Considering how much Jim hated North, she didn’t think he’d make good on his threat, but she wasn’t sure. Jim had said the one thing that would get her to do anything he wanted.
“If I help you get into that restaurant, you’ll let me go and won’t try to hurt Landry, or anyone else, right?” she asked.
“Of course I’ll let you go,” Jim said. “I have no interest in killing anyone but North.”
If she went along with him, maybe she’d be able to alert someone at the restaurant and stop the bombing before it started. But as she watched him slip a suit jacket over the explosives vest, she wasn’t sure her plan would work. When he buttoned the single button on the front of the jacket, you couldn’t see anything that indicated Jim was wearing a bomb. What was she going to do, shout out that he was a bomber right in the middle of a crowd?
Jim arched a brow in her direction, like he wanted her to tell him how good he looked. Everly only glared at him. He might have been a great EOD tech and Cooper’s friend, but that had been a long time ago. Now, he was nothing more than a cold-blooded killer.
Chapter 18
Cooper pulled Armand’s minivan into the guest parking area of the luxury condo complex on North Pearl and looked up at the tall building. It was ten stories high with lots of glass, immaculate landscaped trees and bushes around the first floor and pool, and a monthly maintenance fee alone that was more than Cooper’s total rent. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but it was in the same neighborhood, and as a management-level drone in a small DOD contracting firm, this place should have been out of Ryan North’s price range. Cooper only hoped Jim was here, and that he had Everly with him. If Cooper struck out, he wasn’t sure where to look next.
Cooper had gone straight from his apartment to Triple S-I, praying there wouldn’t be any cops or feds hanging around. Because he had no doubt there was a BOLO out on him already, and if anyone saw him, he was screwed. But there hadn’t been a cop or fed in sight.
Unfortunately, North wasn’t in his office. Recognizing him from the investigation, Arnold Braun’s secretary had told him that North had gone home already, getting ready for an overseas trip to handle some contractor work. Cooper had left a few minutes later with North’s home address, doubting it was a coincidence that the man was leaving the country at the same time Jim was trying to kill him. The theory that North believed he was no more a target than any of the other senior company officials was starting to look a little bogus. Then again, as Cooper looked at the expensive place where North lived, he started to think there were a lot of bogus things going on with the former EOD officer. Something told Cooper that if North left the country tonight he probably wouldn’t be back.
