Down Deep_A Station Seventeen Engine Novel

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “Yes.” Chaz nodded, although not one hair on his head moved at the gesture, and yes, yes, yessssss, this was the best of both worlds.

  “Okay. So let’s give the fire department something to really keep them occupied. A warehouse fire ought to do the trick. Something nice and high-profile and dangerous, with tons of protocol and possibilities to run them into corner after corner.”

  Rusty paced the rough pavement beneath his work boots to offset the buzz in his veins, even though he knew it wouldn’t be nearly enough to quell the excitement. So many choices, so many things he could set on fire, then kick back and watch as everyone else helplessly watched them burn…

  “Are you sure that won’t just bring the spotlight closer to us rather than farther away?”

  McCory’s question, and the condescending-as-shit tone he used to ask it, sent a bitter taste to Rusty’s mouth, and he pivoted to face the guy, his hands turning to fists at his sides. “Are you implying that I do sloppy work, Chaz?”

  “I’m saying I’m not going to jail just because you want to go off half-cocked and start some stupid fire that wasn’t part of our original plan.”

  Rusty stepped in, close enough to smell the wave of fear beneath McCory’s expensive cologne. “Let me remind you. You need me in order to get what you want.”

  “And let me remind you, there’s no payday unless I do,” the weasel replied. “Distract the fire department. Send the cops on a wild goose chase. Do…whatever it is that you’re going to do. Just make sure your little side job doesn’t produce any dead bodies or mess with the end game, and be damned sure it doesn’t come back to me.”

  “You got it, Chaz.”

  Oh, this was going to be fun. Rusty could feel it in his fucking bones.

  17

  Gamble had woken up in a lot of places and just as many different situations. Foxholes. All-calls for a four-alarm fire. But the whole arms-full-of-ridiculously-sexy-brunette thing had been new.

  How good it had felt on top of the fact that it had even happened in the first place? That had been fucking groundbreaking.

  Clearing his throat, he looked around his now-empty apartment. While he’d made good on his promise to give Kennedy thigh-quaking orgasms all night long, she’d slipped into her clothes and past his front door at about oh-seven-hundred. She hadn’t made much fanfare over her exit, not that Gamble had expected her to. Hell, he’d been shocked she’d stayed the night, and definitely shocked when she’d rolled over and nestled between his arms just a little before sunrise. But something about the way she’d shown up on his threshold in the first place had made him glad she hadn’t run. Kennedy had come to him because she’d needed something.

  And giving it to her had felt startlingly right.

  Gamble jammed a hand through his hair and found his feet, taking one last survey of his living room before grabbing his keys and getting the hell out of Dodge. Yes, spending time with Kennedy had felt better than he’d expected, and yes again, that wasn’t just because they’d been naked and trading orgasms like baseball cards. But he had a case in front of him, and that case involved catching a dangerous, deadly serial arsonist who—oh, by the way—just happened to be hooked up tight with her brother. And after spending all day reviewing the files from arson investigation and his notes from the case report on the disarmed bomb, nailing Rusty before he set anything else on fire was going to take every ounce of Gamble’s energy and concentration.

  No fucking way was the guy going to walk this time. Not after nearly killing everyone Gamble counted as family.

  Hitting the lobby of his apartment building, then the sunbaked sidewalk beyond, Gamble slid his Ray-Ban aviators over his face and scanned the street in front of him. August had dug in its heels, and even though it was creeping up on seventeen-hundred with the peak of the day’s heat in the past tense, the air around him still made the early evening a poster child for hot and humid. Thankfully, the trip to the Thirty-Third was a straightforward one, and Gamble navigated the route with ease, parking his F-150 Raptor in the public lot next to the building and making his way past the desk sergeant’s station and the metal detectors. He reviewed the facts of the case one more time to gear up, and by the time he got to the top of the steps, his brain was all-systems-go.

  “Hey,” came a quiet voice from a few steps down the main hallway. Xander pushed off the wall where he’d been standing, lifting his chin in greeting, and confusion sent Gamble’s brows upward in reply.

  “Hey. You been in yet?” he asked, gesturing to the doors leading to the intelligence office. Gamble made it a point to be painfully on time for pretty much everything—thank you, Uncle Sam—so he wasn’t used to being the last person to arrive.

  Xander shook his head. “Nah. Not yet. I was…” He trailed off, shoving his hands in the pockets of his well-worn jeans. “I guess I’m just still trying to get my head around all of this. Not in a second-thoughts kind of way,” he added. “It’s just all pretty hard to process.”

  “Makes sense,” Gamble said. After all, not a lot of people were too used to the whole deadly-fires, life-in-danger, redlining-on-adrenaline thing. Guess he was just special in that regard. “If it helps, the intelligence team is the best in the city. And I can promise you, we all want this son of a bitch behind bars.”

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “Well, I guess we should head in and get this over with, huh?”

  “You got it.”

  Letting Xander lead the way, Gamble followed the guy through the doors leading into the main room of the intelligence office. Isabella, Hollister, Garza, and Capelli were already sitting around Capelli’s multi-screened work station, with detectives Addison Hale and Shawn Maxwell at their desks nearby. Maxwell had always been his own brand of badass, a fact that his dark stare and bald-by-choice skull trim showcased. Hale might be the polar opposite of the guy, with her petite frame and heart-shaped face and blond ponytail that would make even a California cheerleader green with envy, but in her case, looks were deceiving. She held black belts in both Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga, and Gamble would no sooner fuck with her than shove his hand in a wood chipper.

  “Oh, hey, you guys made it,” Hollister said, looking up from his laptop screen. “I’ll text Sarge and let him know.”

  While the detective pulled his phone from the back pocket of his jeans and tapped out a quick message, Xander sent a gaze over the group.

  “Thanks for doing this in the evening so I could go to work this morning. It’s, uh. Hard for me to miss more than a day. My landlady isn’t exactly the understanding type.”

  “No worries,” Hale said, her smile wide. “Crimes don’t usually go down on a nine-to-five. We’re used to off hours around here.”

  The concept of a traditional workweek was definitely not in Gamble’s wheelhouse, either. “I’m not on shift at Seventeen until oh-seven-hundred tomorrow. I’m cool with being here tonight.”

  “Okay,” Sinclair said, walking into the main room from the hallway that led to his office. “If we’re all ready to go—”

  “Sorry! Sorry I’m late.”

  Gamble’s heart hit his sternum on a oner at the sound of Kennedy’s voice, then again at the sight of her as she dashed into the office, looking rushed and worried and so damn beautiful, his fucking chest hurt.

  “I had to make sure payroll was done and all the prep for the dinner rush was taken care of before I could leave The Crooked Angel,” she said, her hair swinging over the shoulders of her dark gray tank top as she slid into the empty chair beside Isabella.

  Unable to keep his mouth on lockdown, Gamble asked, “What are you doing here?”

  It was the same question on everyone’s mind except Xander’s, judging by their shocked expressions. Kennedy, however, didn’t skip a beat. “Xander’s my brother and Rusty tried to burn down my bar. What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Impeding an investigation,” Sinclair said. “You’re a civilian.”

  “So is Gamble. God, for that matter, so
is Xander,” Kennedy pointed out, and Gamble had to admit, she had the sergeant on the technicality.

  Not that the guy was going to give. “Lieutenant Gamble and your brother are both necessary to this investigation. An investigation, by the way, that you already lied to the police about once.”

  “I was trying to keep my brother safe!”

  “Yet I could still bring you up on obstruction charges.”

  Kennedy’s eyes flashed, dark green and deadly serious. “I’m not leaving my brother during this investigation. Not when his life is literally on the line. So you do what you’ve got to do, even if that means arresting me.”

  Gamble opened his mouth to launch the wait-just-a-minute that had hotly formed there, but Isabella beat him to the ol’ one-two. “It is possible that Kennedy might be able to help us with this case.”

  The look on Sinclair’s face suggested he felt otherwise, but Isabella had never really been one for backing down. “The Crooked Angel might’ve been a specific target for this dumpster fire,” she said. “If there’s a connection between her bar and the arsonist, she might be able to help.”

  “That’s kind of thin,” Maxwell murmured, lifting his hands in concession a second later as both Kennedy and Isabella served up death glares. “Not impossible, though.”

  Gamble’s gut twisted at the thought of Kennedy being any closer to this case than she already was. “Rusty is dangerous.”

  “You’re not seriously going to go all Cro-Magnon man on me, are you?” She threw her hands in the air. “I grew up in The Hill, for Chrissake.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re made of Kevlar,” Gamble argued. “This asshole planted enough C-4 in my fire house to put a crater in the entire block, and he wants to set fire to buildings across the city. Whatever’s going on here is way bigger than the test-fire that went down outside The Crooked Angel.” For fuck’s sake, with how sophisticated that bomb had been, God alone knew how much collateral damage Rusty could do with a strategically planned building fire. Let alone a bunch of them.

  “This whole thing did start at The Crooked Angel, though. It may not be a bad jumping off point,” Hollister offered, and Xander nodded in agreement.

  “Rusty had definitely scoped the place out. He never said why he picked it. Hell, I didn’t even know where we’d be testing the ignition device until we got there. But he didn’t choose The Crooked Angel randomly, that’s for sure.”

  “Look,” Isabella said, completely matter-of-fact. “No one is suggesting that if Kennedy helps, she’ll be in danger, and yes”—she swung a don’t-you-dare-argue stare in Kennedy’s direction—“she screwed up by not coming directly to us from the start. But if we want to catch Rusty before he sets these fires, we’re going to have to look at this case from every angle. All I’m saying is, she might be able to help, Sarge. And we could sure use all we can get.”

  Xander looked at Kennedy and shook his head. “You might as well let her stay. She’s not going to take no for an answer. Unless you arrest her, but even then, she’ll be back after she makes bail.”

  Funny, Gamble was certain the guy wasn’t even close to kidding. A fact that Sinclair seemed to have come to terms with, because he exhaled slowly before sending an uncompromising stare across the office at Kennedy.

  “Fine. But you’re strictly on the sidelines, no exceptions.” He didn’t give Kennedy a chance to add a verbal agreement to her nod before continuing with, “And if you fail to disclose so much as a scrap of information directly to me as soon as you uncover it again—”

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  “I’m going to anyway. You keep anything from this team again, and I’ll toss your ass in the cage on as many obstruction charges as I can make stick. Are we clear?” Sinclair asked. Gamble knew—oh, how he knew—that Sinclair had every right and reason to come at Kennedy with what he had. Hell, Gamble had argued the same exact full-disclosure point with her only days ago.

  So it was definitely fucked up that his hands had clenched into fists and his molars were cranked down nice and tight as she said, “Crystal.”

  “Okay. Then let’s proceed. Where are we?”

  Capelli took the baton, pushing his glasses over the bridge of his nose and gesturing to the keyboard in front of him. “I ran the nickname Rusty through the system, then cross-checked the possibles with the description of our guy, but I came up empty.”

  “So, our boy has no record,” Garza said, then tacked on, “which means we have no leads on who he is.”

  Capelli shook his head and, surprisingly, laughed. “Oh, ye of little faith. I didn’t find anything in our system, so I hit up hospital databases for white, male victims of facial burns over the last seven years, and got a hit. Randall McGee, twenty-eight, spent ten days in the burn unit at Cleveland Med four and a half years ago. Look familiar?”

  An image—a driver’s license photo, from the look of it—of a guy with dark red hair, a pair of flat, soulless eyes, and, yep, a nasty burn scar spanning from one cheekbone down to the corner of his mouth flashed over the center screen of the array, and Xander nodded immediately.

  “That’s him. That’s Rusty,” he said, and okay, yeah. Gamble had to admit it. McCullough’s boyfriend had some skills.

  “The Remington DMV has McGee’s last known address on Berkshire Court in North Point—looks like an apartment building—but it’s not clear if that’s current, and he doesn’t have a criminal record. At least, nothing that popped on our database. It looks like there was some stuff in a juvenile file in Lexington, Kentucky, that was expunged ten years ago when he turned eighteen,” Capelli added with an apologetic frown. “Not even I can pull that up without a serious act of God, though. That stuff gets wiped pretty clean.”

  “Not sure it would help much,” Sinclair said, and Gamble tended to agree. A profile would be nice, sure, but they had to catch Rusty in the here-and-now. “Garza, what’s the word on Ice?”

  At Kennedy and Xander’s confused expressions, Garza explained, “Ice is the gang leader who hired Rusty to plant the bomb under Engine Seventeen last spring.” He turned back to Sinclair, his own expression speaking of nothing good. “As you can imagine, he was less than cooperative when I went to pay him a visit earlier today to ask him about Rusty’s involvement in the attempted bombing. I believe his exact quote was, ‘unless you’re offering full immunity on all my charges in exchange for my cooperation, fuck off and die, you worthless pig’.”

  “Sounds like he’s still as charming as ever,” Hale murmured.

  “Yeah, I declined on reaching out to the DA with his generous offer, although it would’ve been nice to get him to flip on Rusty.”

  “It would,” Sinclair agreed. “But without concrete facts to back it up, anything Ice gives us is one criminal’s word against another’s, and Ice isn’t exactly a shining star of credibility. I don’t just want an arrest; I want a conviction, here. We need evidence if we’re going to put Rusty away for good. Speaking of which”—the sergeant turned from the spot where he stood at the front of the office, looking at Gamble with his gray-blond brows lifted—“where are we with the device recovered from the dumpster?”

  Gamble blew out a breath, because damn, he’d been dreading this question. “It’s hard to say. The device was made with fairly standard materials, available in most hardware stores and on the Internet. They were all on the list of things Xander said he’d bought for Rusty over the past couple of weeks”—the kid had given up a surprisingly accurate inventory, to the point that Gamble had been impressed—“but they have such a wide range of practical uses that he could’ve just as easily been doing home improvement projects with most of them as making remote ignition devices. Delacourt is running tests for accelerant residue and the results are still pending, but I’d guess anything that pops there will be run-of-the-mill, too.”

  “So, what you’re saying is, you have no way to link Rusty to the bomb from Seventeen,” Kennedy said, and at least here, he had some decent news.r />
  “Oh, no, I can definitely do that. The bomb squad disposed of the device after it had been completely neutralized.” The polite phrasing used by the brass had always tempted Gamble to laugh. Those boys and girls from SWAT had blown that goddamned thing to kingdom come once they’d done their due diligence for the case. It wasn’t as if you could keep a disarmed explosive device, especially one made with a bunch of C-4, in some evidence locker somewhere. “But we still have plenty of images to cross-check other devices against in addition to the information Kellan and I included in our report.”

  Not to mention all the details that were seared into Gamble’s brain, but he wasn’t about to go there in front of a room full of people. Or ever.

  “Explosive and incendiary devices aren’t one size fits all,” he continued, smashing down on the twinge in his chest. “A pressure-triggered IED, for example, can be made one of at least a dozen ways, and even if you have five people make one using the same basic method, their technique, experience, preferences—all of that will make each device look a little different.”

  “Every person has his own signature moves, then,” Isabella said, and Gamble nodded.

  “Exactly. And even though the materials are pretty garden variety, the techniques used on both of these are a spot-on match. Whoever made that bomb”—Gamble pointed to the photo Capelli had displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the array—“definitely also made the device recovered from the dumpster. That, I know. What I don’t have any proof of—yet—is that the person is Rusty.”

  “There were no prints on the bomb recovered from beneath Engine Seventeen,” Capelli said. “Although, it’s not unusual for someone working with volatile substances to wear gloves, not to mention that it would also cover his ass if he’s doing something like planting a bomb for nefarious purposes. Fingerprints almost never survive the sort of heat that occurred in that dumpster fire—not that we didn’t try, of course—but prints were a no-go on that device, as well.”