Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 04]

by Over the Line

  “Yeah,” she said, giving him his due. Even more. Believing him. “I’ve got it.”

  Because she couldn’t take one more second of a tension that was as thick as sludge, Janey made sure it went away. “Guess maybe I’m glad you’re on the payroll after all.”

  He grunted. Grinned. Shook his head.

  “What’s funny?”

  “The ‘guess’ and the ‘maybe’ part of your endorsement. Your unqualified confidence just makes me all gooey inside.”

  His sense of humor pretty much did the same for her. She couldn’t help but wonder what could have happened between them if they’d met under different circumstances. Which was a ridiculous thought because they never would have met. Different circles, different styles.

  He was pure country. She was rock and roll. And yet here they were. Sharing a suite. Sharing a life, for all practical purposes, and sharing a common goal: keeping her alive.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t often give endorsements, so consider the source.”

  “I have. I am.” He rose from the sofa with a long, indulgent stretch that delineated the impressive breadth of his chest beneath his T-shirt.

  And the butterflies revved up their engines again.

  It had been so long since she’d had a man affect her this way—with fluttery heartbeats and tingling fingers, not to mention with X-rated thoughts the likes of which the tabloids would figure were status quo but she found, well, shocking.

  His cell phone rang then, giving her a much-needed opportunity to regroup. But when he glanced at her mid-conversation, his jaw as hard as the Italian tile on the floor, a sense of foreboding had the bottom of her stomach dropping again.

  What?” Janey asked when he’d snapped his cell phone shut.

  “That was the detective from the Atlantic City PD. He just got a call from Officer Rodman.”

  “From Tupelo?” She fought a heightening sense of alarm that tried to grab her by the throat when he nodded.

  “They found a car. Sunk in the Tombigbee just outside of town.” He wiped a hand over his jaw. “An old Pontiac—probably stolen. They’re still running the plates. Anyway, seems a fisherman hooked a propeller on the roof, got stuck, and when he went into the river to cut himself loose, there was this car.”

  Okay. So this wasn’t real news, she told herself, working hard to dodge an escalating sense of doom, despite the fierce scowl on his face. “I imagine there are all sorts of junk cars stuck on that riverbed.”

  “I imagine so,” he agreed, his eyes hard. “Only this one wasn’t junk. Hadn’t been submerged long enough to get rusty.”

  Janey felt her blood run cold as she waited, knowing that what came next would land as heavily as a hammer.

  “They found a piece of cloth stuck in a headlight. They’ve been able to match it to the dress your mother was wearing the night she was run down.”

  Cold changed to hot like a switch had been flipped. From her ears to her fingertips, she suddenly felt hot.

  “And they’ve found a witness.”

  She touched her fingertips to the cross. It was warm from lying against her chest. “Someone saw what happened that night?”

  “Some guy in a parked car outside the bar was playing patty-cake with a woman who wasn’t his wife. He was reluctant to come forward until now, but apparently his conscience finally got the best of him.”

  Like anxiety was getting the best of her. Her heart kicked out several fast, hard beats. “So . . . so he saw the accident?”

  He gave her another long, searching look, like he was hesitant to tell her the rest of the news.

  She braced herself, a sixth sense making her just as hesitant to hear it.

  “It was dark and he couldn’t see the person driving, but the witness stated that whoever was behind the wheel had to have seen your mother, that they had plenty of time to break or swerve to miss her. Instead, the driver of the car accelerated and deliberately headed straight toward her when she crossed the street.”

  Janey’s mouth was so dry and her heart was suddenly beating so fast she could hardly get the words out. “Some . . . someone intentionally k-. . . killed her?”

  He shoved his hands into his back hip pockets, nodded. “It’s pretty much looking that way, yeah.”

  She dragged a hand through her hair, aware on some peripheral level that it was shaking. That she was shaking. “Why? Why would someone want to kill my mother?”

  The look on his face had her pushing herself back against the sofa—like someone riding in the passenger seat of a car going too fast, and instinct made them press their feet against the floorboard as if they could put on the brakes and stop a wreck from happening.

  But nothing was going to stop this.

  “There’s something else. I didn’t tell you this before,” he said slowly. “Grimm left a message with his ‘gifts’ today.”

  She closed her eyes. “Something tells me you don’t want to share it any more than I want to hear it.”

  He puffed out his cheeks, clearly reluctant, confirming her suspicion.

  “Let’s have it,” she said, bracing herself.

  She watched his face, waited in horrified silence until he reluctantly told her what Grimm had written.

  “ ‘We’re both orphans now.’ ”

  . . . and the silence became a white-hot roar of noise.

  She took it like a soldier. It was the biggest compliment Jase could give anyone. Yeah. Janey Perkins knew how to take a punch. All the while looking like a small, fragile doll.

  Jase walked over to the fully stocked bar, grabbed a Coke and a bottle of water. He twisted the top off the water and handed it to her.

  She accepted the bottle without a word, sat quietly for a moment, then rose and walked over to the window, absently touching her fingers to the cross she’d put on again after her shower and had pretty much always worn since she’d found it at her mother’s.

  And she said nothing.

  It didn’t seem to matter that prior to starting this assignment Jase had crammed in several hours of online research on “Sweet Baby Jane the Rock Star” in her spike heels and black leather and badass pout. Each time he saw her like this—her face scrubbed clean and her hair pulled back in a thick, shiny tail like a thirteen-year-old would wear—all he could think of was innocence. It was not the image she portrayed to the general public.

  Living the life she lived, exposed to some of the fastest crowds, the highest thrills, how could she possibly be innocent? And what that had to do with the price of an RPG in Iraq he didn’t know.

  In the meantime, she had to be quaking inside over this latest bit of news. But she’d sucked it up. Just like she’d sucked it up during her mother’s funeral. And when her mother’s house had been broken into. Taken it in stoic silence. And Jase’s admiration factor kicked up another notch.

  It had to be hard enough to think your mother was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. But to find out she was intentionally run down. Murdered. All of this on the heels of a burglary and a convicted stalker’s impromptu “visit” to her hotel room.

  Jase could think of any number of things he’d like to do to the pervert if he ever got his hands on Grimm. Things he’d learned from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from the fedayeen in Iraq, where barbarism was king and human life held no more value than the price of a spent rifle shell. Sometimes, when he was aching cold on a godforsaken mountainside north of Karbāla’ or rotting in a hellish hot sand bunker outside of Tikrit, the only thing that had separated him from the bad guys was a very loose grip on sanity.

  Seeing what Grimm was doing to Janey—well, Jase felt a little too close to a savage side of himself that he’d discovered over there and wasn’t very proud to know existed.

  He didn’t want to think about any of it now. Yet the memory of one night in Ramadi surfaced without warning. The night patrol. The crack of a door against a mud hut wall. The burst of firepower.

  He swallowed, unable to erase the grisly image of the sev
ered head. The lifeless eyes of what had once been an Italian journalist, the violated body on the other side of the room.

  “Would he have done that?”

  Her tentative question brought his head up and his attention back to the here and now.

  “Grimm,” she clarified, turning away from the window to look at him with eyes that looked a lot hunted and a little wild. “Would he have gone that far? Did he . . . do you think he killed my mother? In some . . . some sick attempt to . . . be closer to me?”

  “We don’t know that Grimm had anything to do with your mother’s death.”

  She looked up at him and his heart damn near broke for her. “We’re both orphans now? We’re both orphans now?” Her voice rose on a note of hysteria.

  She checked herself. Gathered her composure. “My God. He practically confessed.”

  “Whoa, wait,” Jase cautioned, battling the urge to go to her and offer that shoulder again. “You’re making a huge leap of logic here. He could have read it in the papers, heard about it on the news.”

  And yet. Jase had been thinking the same thing—not that he wasn’t covering all of his bases. He’d called No back in West Palm after he’d showered. Asked him to run background checks on everyone from Max Cogan, to Derek McCoy, to Christine Ramsey. Neal Sanders and the rest of the band and backup singers weren’t off the hook, either. No was running checks on them, too. Any one of them had access to Janey’s suite. Of course, the hearts were 100 percent Grimm’s MO, but even so, Jase wanted them checked out.

  All he could do on those counts was wait. Right now, however, he had to stop Janey from taking the direction in which she was going. He saw in her eyes what she was doing to herself. Heaping on the self-blame with a shovel the size of a tank.

  “Edwin Grimm’s obsession is not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” She shouldered past him. But she had no place to go. She stopped in the middle of the suite, spun back around, knotted her fists in her hair, and appealed to him with guilt-filled eyes.

  “Every time I take the stage, isn’t that what I’m asking? For people to be so obsessed with my music and my image that they become my fans? My fanatics? Fanatics who might resort to murder to get my attention?”

  “Don’t do that,” he said so harshly that she flinched. “Don’t get caught up in the blame game. Even if—and that’s a big if—Grimm is responsible, your mother’s death is not your fault.”

  He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to set her straight. Maybe it was the haunted look in her eyes. Maybe it was because he’d been where she was now—questioning his motives, questioning his calls. Men were dead because of him. In the name of freedom. In the name of good. Sometimes even in the name of God. But the end result was the same. Men were dead.

  “You can’t hold yourself accountable for the actions of creeps like Edwin Grimm. You’ve got millions of fans who do exactly what fans do. They buy your music. They come to your concerts. They don’t blur the line. The Grimms of the world are born waiting for a chance to dive off the deep end. They don’t need to be coaxed or coerced. They’ve spent their lives looking for a reason. You just happened to be the one to provide his. And let me repeat—there is nothing but conjecture to tie him to your mother’s death.”

  She wasn’t buying it. He understood.

  Dead was dead.

  “Janey.” He forgot about his determination to call her Miss Perkins as once again he found himself resisting the urge to reach for her and hold her together until she sorted this out. “It’s not your fault,” he insisted.

  She blinked back tears, shook her head. He saw the transition on her face, recognized the exact moment when she decided she needed to move on. Still heaping on the guilt, no doubt, but dealing with it.

  “The police have to be looking at him as a suspect, though, right?”

  Despite the way Janey was beating herself up over the possibility, Jase hoped Alice Perkins’s death could be pinned on Edwin Grimm. The sonofabitch would never see the light of day again. If they got real lucky, the death penalty would come into play.

  But Jase knew better than to assume. “Yeah. I’m certain they are. Right now, he’s probably on the suspect list, but the witness’s report has just taken the investigation to a new level. We’re no longer looking at negligent or vehicular homicide. We’re looking at murder. And we need to give the police time to retool their investigation.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, I think you should consider canceling the rest of your tour dates.”

  She didn’t even think about it. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Max. It’s not going to happen. Besides tonight’s final booking here in Atlantic City, there’s only the Garden and the Boston gig before we take a two-week hiatus anyway.”

  He’d figured that would be her response. Just like he’d figured that without Max to support his argument, he didn’t have a Humvee’s chance against an IED of making her see reason.

  And that brought up another question.

  Where the hell was Max? And why hadn’t he answered his cell?

  9

  Despite the cool, dark interior of the heavily air-conditioned bar, Max Cogan felt a trickle of sweat slide down his back beneath his shirt. His brow was damp. His hands were shaking.

  And the damnable tightness in his chest just wouldn’t leave him the hell alone.

  He fished a pack of antacids out of his slacks pocket, popped a couple in his mouth. Elbows on the bar, he huddled back over his gin and tonic and lit a cigarette. Gin always tasted good on a hot day. Nothing tasted good now.

  Where the hell is Meyers?

  He was doing this on purpose. Making Max wait. Making him sweat. Bastard knew exactly what he was doing. And Max couldn’t do anything but take it.

  He checked his watch. All of five minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked.

  The tightness in his chest had intensified to an ache when a hard clap on his back damn near knocked him off the bar stool.

  “Cogan,” Herb Meyers said in a jovial, good-ole-boy greeting. “Sorry to keep you waiting, partner.”

  Max closed his eyes, gripped his glass with both hands. He drew a settling breath and lied between his teeth. “It’s okay. I haven’t been here that long myself.”

  Just long enough to know he had a message on his cell phone from Jason Wilson that he needed to return but couldn’t deal with until he got past this meeting with Meyers.

  Max forced himself to look at Meyers. Made himself smile at the droopy-eyed, bulldog-jowled man who used to be his bookie but was now a lieutenant in the organization. Meyers’s barrel belly strained the buttons on a limp white shirt and folded over a pair of baggie brown Bermudas. He smelled of sour sweat and casinos.

  Herb Meyers looked like a schlep. Red, ruddy face beneath a Friar Tuck pate, fat, freckled arms, and an embarrassment of grayish-red hair curling out of every visible orifice.

  Yeah. He looked the part of a chump. A patsy. And he owned Max Cogan right down to his tighty whities.

  “Me,” Herb said conversationally, after motioning the bartender to bring him a draw, “I like sitting lakeside in my own backyard. Sweet breeze off Superior. Shaded under an umbrella. Give me Chicago and leave the Jersey shore to the gamblers. Too damned hot in July. And bars . . . bars just ain’t my thing. Even hoity-toity ones like this.”

  “To each his own,” Max said, and drained his glass. He rattled the ice and slid it across polished mahogany toward the bartender, who promptly refilled it.

  “Speaking of own,” Herb said, twisting sideways in his chair and looking directly at Max, “guess you could say you own the corner on bad luck lately, huh, partner?”

  Max shook another smoke out of his pack. “I’m on a little downward streak, yeah.”

  Herb grunted. “You’re on a mud slide, Maxie. Like one of them big ones out in California that wipes out everything in its path.”

  Max could feel Herb’s beady eyes bore into t
he side of his face and knew what was coming next.

  “I just need a little more time, Herb. Things will turn around. You know I’m good for the money.”

  Herb managed to look sad. “That’s an old song, partner. And this is the second time in two weeks we’ve had this conversation. Me and my backers are growing a mite weary of hearing it.”

  A sharp pain stabbed Max right beneath his sternum. He breathed deep. Dug for the antacids again.

  “But here’s the deal, Maxie. You’ve been a good customer over the years. That’s why they flew me out here to have this little face-to-face. To let you know we understand. That we’re willing to work with you.”

  Work with him? So why did he feel like he was about to get worked over?

  “You’ve got forty-eight hours, Max. That’s a four and an eight. You come up with the two hundred K by then, okay, buddy?”

  Jesus.

  Max chased the antacid with a stiff hit from his gin. “You’ve got me by the balls here, Herb. I can’t get you that much money that soon.”

  Herb sucked the foam off his draw, then wiped the mustache off his mouth with the back of his hand. He snagged a beefy handful of peanuts from a communal bowl. “How much can you come up with?”

  “Thirty, maybe forty K.” Max stared at his glass, waited for the fallout.

  Herb chomped noisily on the nuts, then finally swallowed. “Not good, Maxie. Not good,” he said, after downing another deep draw on his beer.

  No. It was not good.

  “That little girl . . . that client of yours. What’s her name? Janey. Janey, right?”

  Max could suddenly hear his heart beat in his ears. Feel every pump like a sledgehammer on his chest. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Word is, she’s big-ticket. Really raking in the coin,” Herb continued as if he hadn’t heard Max. “I’m thinking she might be a good place to look for that money you can’t find.”

  “You leave her out of this,” Max ground out as panic paired with the pain in his chest to make him dizzy.