“I joined the force in Freeport and made detective grade in five years. Not long after, I was approached by a Chicago deputy district attorney, who had been looking for someone with my qualifications for a while.”
“Qualifications?”
“A cop who could be trusted but had a shady background.” Jack winced a little. “I knew all the wrong people.”
“Undercover,” Sophie said, leaping ahead.
Jack smiled a little. He liked those leaps of logic of hers. “Yeah, they wanted me undercover. A few months after Dempsey contacted me, I publicly resigned from the force and moved to Chicago and looked up a few old friends from Wisconsin.”
“Just like that.”
“Not that easily,” Jack assured her. “I’d already turned my back on them once, so they took a while to thaw. I had to convince them that I’d joined the police to milk the system from the inside and had left because they had been closing in on me. Convincing records were put in places where they would find them. Public records, and IAB reports that a small bribe would get them a look at.”
“False?”
“Absolutely. Even then, it took a year or so to move around, network my way to Callahan. Then I was part of his organization, a trusted member with access to almost everything. A few months after that, he was arrested.”
“Did it stick this time?”
“Dempsey had every intention of making it stick. I had been the longest of long-term plans and that’s what got Callahan in the end. His perspective wasn’t big enough.”
“Did he know it was you?”
“I was pulled in after the arrest. Someone in his organization would have told him I’d disappeared and I have proof that he knew it was me.”
She straightened, gasping. “The plane crash? They were trying to kill you?”
He gave a dry laugh. “My fault.”
“Oh, god, Jack, it’s so obvious, why didn’t I see it?” Then. “Wait, how did they know you were on the plane? Why were you on the plane? You were in Chicago, weren’t you? What were you doing in Vegas?”
“Hiding. They pulled me out of Chicago and figured Vegas would be far enough away for even Callahan’s reach.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t. I was flying back to Chicago for his trial and we used the most unlikely airlines, the most illogical routes, to get me back there. But he found out anyway.”
“How?”
“Someone told him. That’s the only possibility. There were so few people who knew. We kept it that way to reduce the risk. But one of his people was in the group that knew.”
“Who?”
“If I knew that, Sophie, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“I don’t understand.” She seemed almost angry at her own puzzlement.
“There’s a reason no one had been able to get Callahan behind bars. He had someone in authority, someone in a position where all sorts of privileged information came to them, feeding it all back to Callahan. Someone with enough authority to pull strings and dump him back on the street. We even had a name for them—Silent Knight. The anonymous knight charging up and rescuing Callahan in the nick of time. That someone told him where to find me.”
“And you don’t know who it is?”
“No.”
“But…Callahan was jailed, right?”
“Yes. Thirty years, no parole.”
“Then you did get him in the end. So…”
Jack could see the question coming.
“So, why are you on the road? Why are you still running?”
“You know about witness protection, right?”
“Of course. They relocated you?”
“Straight after the trial. Florida. Miami. I could stay lost there. I…” He licked his lips. This was harder than he thought. “I thought of you, figured you were safe, free and living your life and tried to be happy for you. I tried to get on with living my own life. To anyone I knew in Miami, I looked like I was doing just fine too.”
“What happened?”
“About a year after the trial, someone tried to kill me. It was a professional hit, out in public, with a silencer. He was waiting in a car across the road as I was getting into my car in the morning to go to work. The only thing that kept me alive was dropping my car keys and bending to pick them up.” He stopped, let her figure it out for herself.
“Silent Knight,” she breathed. “Callahan couldn’t have begun to track you down but the Silent Knight could.”
Jack nodded. “It took me thirty seconds, lying in the gutter next to my car, to figure I was busted. I got in the car and started driving. I knew the car could be traced so when I got to Georgia three days later, I traded the car in for cash and the cash for food and walking boots. I’ve been walking ever since.”
Her silence was longer this time. “Do you know Silent Knight is still looking for you?”
“Sophie, I’ve been too damn scared to test the water. That hit man was good. It was pure blind luck he didn’t hit his target and I don’t want to slow down and chance him taking another shot because there’s no negotiating with a hit man. They get paid to get the job done. Period.”
“But you know, don’t you.”
“Yeah. I know,” he agreed. “The hit was a year later. A year. It probably took that long to find me in the system—witness protection works well for most people. But if you’ve got legitimate access to the government system, you can find the backdoors. It just takes time. It took Silent Knight a year. In that year he didn’t give up, he didn’t write me off as a lost cause or a risk he could afford to forget about. He kept looking and when he found me he hired the best to get rid of me. He may not be actively looking for me after the nine years I’ve been on the road, but if I pop up on any passive watch systems he’s set up—and I know he’ll have them in place—then he’s going to come looking for me.”
* * * * *
The big, double doors were shut, the Indiana state seal on one of them gleaming in the dull light. Spinetti hesitated a moment before the doors. The governor had stressed that this meeting not be interrupted for anything, but the message in Spinetti’s hand invoked an older, far stronger set of conditions. Yet the very age of the standing orders may mean that they could wait until this meeting was over.
The governor, however, could be ruthless about bad judgment calls of this sort. Spinetti weighed it up. A thirty-second interruption was a minor transgression compared to withholding the message in his hand for what could be hours, yet.
So. He knocked on the door and didn’t wait for an answer. Governor Van Allen could be so engrossed in the conference that the knocking would go unheard. He slipped in the door.
Seven people sat around the large conference table at the far side of the very large office. The table stood near the glass walls that gave such a spectacular view of downtown Indianapolis, twenty stories down. In the corners stood an American flag and the Indiana state flag, on gleaming poles, complete with gold cords and tassels. The governor knew the value of symbols.
They were looking at Spinetti now, his arrival noted. He hurried over to the governor’s chair and handed over the slip of paper.
“What the hell is this?” the governor demanded in an undertone.
“I think you’d better read it,” Spinetti replied, even though fear prickled along his spine.
Governor Van Allen read the note and looked up at the table. “Gentlemen, we’re going to have to adjourn the meeting for today.”
“What the hell!” was the mildest of the protests uttered around the table.
The governor held up a hand. “Mike, Donald, we’ll get back to this, I promise but for now, I have something I must deal with.”
Isobel Van Allen rose to her feet, nodded to the assembled group and hurried from the room.
Chapter Seventeen
Sunday again.
Sophie sat on her rocker, wrapped in the same blanket as last week, reflecting that the world had changed on her again and in the space of five days too.
After three days of snow falling more or less endlessly, it had quit on Thursday night and the clouds had cleared. The cloudless sky had dropped the temperatures to a normal December average.
They’d emerged from the house on Friday morning to find the sun shining steadily on a transformed winter world of dazzling white carpet and the peculiar muffled silence that only came with the first good snowfall for the season.
Sophie had trouble getting Morgan on the school bus after that. He wanted to stay home and get out his toboggan. He was devastated when the radio didn’t announce a snow day and told her he was sick and couldn’t possibly consider going to school, anyway. He’d climbed on the bus with his bottom lip pushed out and ignored her wave goodbye, but she knew she’d be forgiven by the time he got home and had gone about her business with a light heart, because everything seemed to be working out.
Word of the holdup had, naturally, passed around town in record time. Sophie wasn’t sure what the gossips were saying about her role in it but she did notice there was a marked upswing in business the next few days. Were the diehards who considered her a newcomer even after nine years finally relenting? Or were they just checking her out, uncertain what to make of her?
But business showed no sign of slacking off. Even Cal had returned to his perch with a new cut on his nose and a four-day growth but filled with admiration for her. “You showed ’em, Soph. You showed ’em all. Good on you, lass.”
And at night, there was Jack.
She sighed, looking up at the guardian mountains.
How long until it changed again, ’til it ended?
Jack came out of the house, his boots unlaced and carrying two steaming mugs. He bent down to give her a long kiss, then handed her one of the mugs and leaned up against the railing next to her crossed feet.
It was hot chocolate.
She sipped. “Good.”
“Yes,” he said, looking directly at her.
She smiled because she knew his “yes” had nothing to do with hot chocolate. He was grinning back at her. His hand slid under the leg of her jeans, stroking her ankle in little maddening circles.
“Jack. The other night. You said there were things to talk about in daylight.”
His hand stopped. “That’s right.” A tiny crease appeared between his brows.
“It’s daylight.”
Jack looked around, almost like he was checking the levels of light. Then she realized he was looking for eavesdroppers.
“Morgan is at a birthday party and Georgia is in the lounge crying over The Velveteen Rabbit. Jinni has gone for the day.”
He nodded. Then he looked at her with his square gaze that she had come to realize meant he was measuring her ability to handle what he said next. Her heart gave a little thud, then hurried on.
“Sophie, I don’t know how long this will last. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay here.”
She nodded. It was something she had been expecting since Monday. “How long?” she asked.
He considered it. “As long as I can,” he said. “That’s the best answer I can give you.”
She sipped, letting the answer settle in her mind. “Can’t you fight it, Jack? Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Don’t you think if there was something I could do, I wouldn’t have tried it already?” he asked. “All I can do is keep afloat, keep alive, until…”
“Until what? If there’s nothing you can do, then you could end up running the rest of your life.”
He nodded. “That’s right.” He was calm about the possibility but then, he’d probably accepted it years ago. “But there’s always a chance something will happen.”
“What could possibly happen?” Sophie asked. “You’ll never be in one place long enough to know if anything has changed, if anything has happened that you can take advantage of.”
“There’s ways of checking.”
“Have you ever used them?”
“No,” he admitted.
“You’ve just kept running,” she said, her voice dry.
“I liked the freedom.”
“‘Liked’. Past tense.”
He was silent, not rising to her goad.
“Jack, I…” She stopped, frustrated. She felt his warm hand on her ankle squeeze a little in encouragement. She tried again. “I want you to stay. I don’t know how to put it any plainer. I’d go with you but I’ve got Georgia and Morgan to care for and I’d never leave them. So you have to stay. I know you want to. You said it last night. Nesting thoughts, you called them.”
He looked a little startled. “I was looking through the paperbacks. How did you know I was thinking about staying when I said it?”
“Weeks ago, you said the one genuine drawback to life on the road was that you weren’t in one place long enough to get library membership and books were too damn heavy to carry with you. You’ve read just about every book I have here since you arrived and last night you were running your finger along the spines and you shook your head and said ‘nesting thoughts’.” She shrugged. “One plus one.”
He was silent.
“Can’t you make those checks? See if it’s safe?”
He shook his head. “I’ll only do it when I’m far from here. The checks will set off alarm bells and if it’s not safe, I will have to leave. Straight away. Do you really want to force the issue that way? Is having a definitive answer so important you’d blow off what time we might have just to get it?”
She swallowed, her eyes suddenly stinging.
“I’d sell my soul to stay here. You know that,” Jack added softly, his fingertips caressing her calf. “But I’m already uneasy about the length of time I’ve stayed.”
“And now that I know about it all?”
He shook his head a little. “It doesn’t change anything. I had to tell you to explain why it doesn’t change anything. To let you know why I have to go.”
She looked him in the eye. “And us, Jack? What about us?”
He simply looked at her, his hand on her calf moving gently. Three times he opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, then shut it again.
Georgia banged her way through the screen door, taking one step onto the verandah in her socks. “Mom, Mr. Gallenson is here.”
“Peter?”
“The police chief,” Georgia confirmed. “He’s in the lounge.” She shivered and went inside.
Sophie got to her feet. Jack was watching her.
“Peter has the worst timing,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Jack said judiciously. “His timing after the holdup was very interesting.”
She shot him a glance, startled. Now what did that mean?”
* * * * *
Jack watched her walk back inside, the red-gold hair swinging across her shoulder blades. He wasn’t remotely tempted to follow her in and find out what Peter wanted. He knew what Peter wanted. He also knew with utter certainly that Sophie would deal with that with efficient ruthlessness and get him out the house as soon as she could. He didn’t even feel the need to go hover in case she needed his help to do it.
She was a fighter. On her good days, anyway.
This last week had been filled with good days. More of the Sophie of old was emerging and it was like watching the sunrise.
How like her to lay her wants on the table. I want you to stay. I’d go but I can’t, so you must stay. There. The whole knotty problem sliced through in one clean blow.
Again, he tasted the secret despair that had been building in him. It had never been a question of whether he should stay or go. The question was now whether he was capable of making himself leave. Life on the road seemed bleak, indeed.
Liked. Past tense.
He finished his chocolate and went inside. He could hear Peter’s voice—could probably have heard it clearly in the basement, for Peter didn’t understand the concept of volume moderation.
“Not a single damn thing. Nothing. Nada. Do you know how unnatural that is, Sophie? Everyone�
�s got something on record somewhere. You can’t go through this world without leaving a paper trail.”
That was enough to get his attention. Jack found himself sinking down to sit on the bottom steps of the staircase, listening.
“Even the most law-abiding citizen has filed police reports, bought stuff on credit, visited the doctor and had blood tests. But not Martin. Not a goddamn thing.”
Her voice, strident with suppressed fury. “I don’t believe you even went looking for anything. Martin was right. You break the rules when it’s convenient for you—”
“You’re not listening!”
Silence.
“He’s not who he says he is, Sophie. I want to know who he really is. Don’t you? Don’t you want to know who you have in your bed?”
Again, the tense silence.
“I think you’d better leave,” Sophie said, her voice tight.
“Is that how it is, huh?” Peter asked quietly. “Fuck him and you’re his for life? I didn’t think you were one of those women who turned totally stone-blind when they fell in love.”
There was a resounding crack of flesh on flesh and Jack knew she’d slapped him. He couldn’t help his smile but at the same time his grip on the newel post tightened and his body tensed and he realized that he was ready to dive in there and rescue her, after all. Even if she did resent it.
He repressed the urge and kept sitting.
“Peter, it’s none of your business and I’ve already told you once to back off and stay out of my life. How many different ways do I have to say it?”
“I’m just concerned, that’s all.”
“Bullshit—”
The phone rang. It was right next to Jack where he sat on the stairs. He nearly levitated off the step, so startled was he. Sophie hurried into the hall and didn’t seem surprised to see him there. She picked up the phone.
Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller Page 21
