She scrubbed at her face with her sleeve, thankful for the first time that she was entirely alone in the lab, because there was nobody there to see her struggling to pull it back together. She was there to do a job, period, end of story. And it was time to get back to work.
But when she heard a set of men’s footsteps coming down the stairs, her heart didn’t just give a thudda-thudda, it took up the whole percussion line of a decent dance number, rocking and rolling in her chest as she turned slowly in her chair, trying not to look desperate as she said, “I’m glad you— Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“I get that a lot,” the stranger said, grinning as he hit the bottom of the stairs and came through the door to the lab’s data-crunching area where she’d set up shop. “Tori Bay, right?” As he got within a few strides of her, he held out a hand. “I’m Percy.”
He was of average height, build and looks, with thinning mid-brown hair, murky eyes and decent business casual going on in the clothing department.
Her pulse sagged back to normal as she rose and shook. “As in, Mayor Percy Proudfoot?” His hand was dry and a little cool, and even up close she couldn’t really get his face imprinted on her mind. She had a feeling that five minutes after they parted, she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup if her life had depended on it.
His grin almost made dimples. “That’s me. I’d ask for your vote, but I understand you’re not from around here.”
“Just passing through,” she said, not quite able to suppress the pang. She thought it prudent not to mention that he would have been hard pressed to get her vote anyway, given that he’d cut the P.D.’s budget to the bone during the course of his first term. In fact, she was surprised to find him nonthreatening, with an open, earnest face that inclined her to like him right off the bat.
Then again, he was a politician.
“What can I do for you?” she asked as she reclaimed her hand. Turning, she gestured to the computer. “Want me to run you through what we’ve got so far on the Death Stare investigation?”
“No, thanks, I’m up to date on that. I actually came to get you for an appointment across town.”
“Excuse me?” She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “I think there’s been a—”
He was suddenly right beside her, crowding her as he got one arm around her shoulder and his hand across her mouth, then used the other to deliver a painful jab in her kidney that had her sagging against him with a muffled, disbelieving cry.
No!
Her heart hammered suddenly in her ears and adrenaline flared in a wild surge. She stumbled back and tried to yank away from him, but he torqued her shoulder and jabbed her again, this time in the side, growling, “Quit it. See that?” He wrenched her head down, forcing her to look at the gun he had partway buried in her borrowed sweatshirt.
She moaned at the sight of a snub-nosed .38. The little gun didn’t have much power, but at close range it would do some serious damage.
“Right. Behave and it doesn’t go off. Screw with me and it does. Got it?”
Rolling her eyes in an effort to see her captor, near panic as she struggled to breathe through nasal passages gone tight from her recent tears, she nodded jerkily, tried to speak but couldn’t, and wound up whimpering instead—a sad, pitiful noise that said Why?
“I need your help with a project,” he said, all of a sudden sounding eerily calm, as if the two of them were negotiating for a dozen more picnic tables on the common. “But first things first, we need to get out of here without attracting any real attention. So we’re going to walk nice and easy. You’re going to speak when spoken to, and do whatever it takes to get us out of here. If you don’t, I’ll shoot you and then I’ll shoot whoever you were talking to. And I’ll keep shooting until I get clear of the building. Any questions?”
The horrible scene painted itself so vividly in her mind that she could picture the blood, hear the screams, and had to do her best not to put faces to the images. She shuddered and shook her head in a violent negative. “You’ll behave?”
A nod. Yes.
In a flash, his hand was off her mouth, his grip shifted so it looked like they were walking together like new friends who’d hit it off right away. “Move,” he directed tersely. “Out the back and up to the parking lot. And don’t try anything.”
“I won’t,” she whispered, her voice gone thin and shaky with a terrible fear that grew as he used an official code to get them through a rear exit that she’d been told was completely sealed off. No doubt that was how he’d gotten into the building in the first place. Things got even worse when he hustled her over to a white Cadillac parked at the farthest extent of the lot, just out of range of the security cameras, and popped the trunk. She balked. “No!”
Her struggles didn’t matter, though; he was stronger and ruthless, and used his fierce grip on her arm to lever her into the cavernous trunk, which smelled of spare tire and spilled cherry soda. Once she was in there, he held the gun on her, pulled a bungee cord from a dark, dank corner and said, “Hold out your hands.”
Feeling smaller and weaker than she had in years, maybe ever, she did as she was told, then flinched when he whipped the elastic cord around her wrists and then latched the curved ends together. “It’s too tight,” she said, voice breaking. “My hands are going numb.”
“I don’t give a… Damn it.” He loosened the cord one turn and refastened it. Then he leaned in and gave her a thorough but impersonal pat-down, finding nothing because she was wearing borrowed clothes and had her own stuff in her knapsack back at the lab. Grimacing, he shot her a narrow-eyed glare. “Remember, you do anything to draw attention, and you’re going to be responsible for the deaths of anyone who comes after you.”
She nodded miserably, and then screamed involuntarily when he slammed the trunk. The noise was very loud, very final, and it left her alone in the darkness knowing one thing for certain: unless she thought fast and managed to do something to save herself, she wasn’t ever going to get a chance to tell Jack that she was sorry for what she’d said to Chondra, and that she hadn’t meant it. She had been scared of her feelings, scared of what they might mean and what kind of trouble they could get her into.
Now, though, she knew what it felt like to be really, truly scared for her life. And it was very different from the way he made her feel…so different, in fact, that she thought he might make her feel something other than fear, after all. She wasn’t ready to give it a name yet, but as the vehicle bumped its way down from the elevated parking area and the mayor accelerated away, taking her God only knew where, she whispered deep in her heart, Please, Jack, trust me. Trust us. And please don’t think I left without saying goodbye.
Chapter Fourteen
On his way back to the task force’s war room after his run-in with Tori, Jack got waylaid by two guys with legit questions about the vehicles and arms he’d seen at the encampment, and two others who could have answered their own damn questions if they’d just read the transcripts of his and Tori’s debriefings. Finally free of them, and without having caused major bloodshed, he decided on a detour to the vending machines. Like a soda was going to fix things.
But as he passed a cracked-open door, a voice called, “Hey, Jack. Got a second?”
He had turned with a snarl before it registered: Tucker’s door, Tucker’s voice. He exhaled and made an effort to smooth out as he strode through the door.
Tucker must have seen his first reaction, though, because he waved to the visitor’s chair. “Sit. Talk to me.” And when Jack made an “it’s nothing” gesture, he pointed to the chair. “I said sit. The last time you got this wound tight, my witness ended up in the E.R. Not your fault directly, granted, but I know you. If you’d been on your game, that guy never would have gone down.”
“Hell.” Jack sat. “Yeah, you’re right about that.” At Tucker’s surprised look, he shrugged. “You told me to use my time in the woods to do some thinking. Mission accomplishe
d. I won’t be doing Ray any favors by going off half-cocked or screwing up perfectly good police work, and I’m sure as hell not interested in helping out the members of the Shadow Militia by giving their eventual lawyers something to work with on getting them off.” He nodded. “I’m good. I’m solid. You don’t need to worry about me.”
Tucker regarded him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll buy that. So what was the snarl for? Someone hassling you?”
Jack intended to brush him off with a vague reference to the two idiots who had decided to waste time tracking him down and quizzing him rather than reading the damn transcript—or, hell, asking someone who had read it. Somehow, though, the words got all turned around in his brain, and what he wound up saying was, “How is it that two rational, intelligent adults could have entire conversations where they end up agreeing with each other, but it later turns out that they thought they agreed to two completely different things?”
Tucker blinked. Then the corner of his mouth twitched. “Welcome to the world of adult relationships.”
“I’m being serious here.”
“So am I.” Glancing at the framed photo of his wife and daughter, as if wary on some level that they could hear him, he said, “Look, men and women are wired differently, so sometimes they’re just not going to process the same information in the same way. Add in some preconceptions and the basic human desire to get our own way if it isn’t going to hurt anyone else, and you’ve got the potential to do some major talking past each other.”
Jack frowned and shook his head. “Kayla and I never did that.”
“Or else you did and neither of you ever figured it out. Which might be part of why it didn’t work. You weren’t pushing hard enough to get to the bottom of things.”
“We…” Jack’s brain stuttered to a halt. “What?”
“I take it you and Tori had a fight?” Tucker shrugged. “Well, fights happen in every relationship, sometimes more so when you’re off to a quick start like the two of you seem to be.”
Still trying to catch up with Tucker’s offhand comment about him and Kayla, Jack said, “Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know. For starters, we’re not in a relationship, which was news to me.” Without really meaning to, he gave his boss a five-minute rundown of his and Tori’s interactions, which to him had been a romance, to her a good time. He kept it tame, knowing that Tucker would fill in the blanks as needed, and ended with, “I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Why make ourselves crazy trying to make it work?”
Tucker just shot him this smug Cheshire cat grin and said, “Because when it works, it’s the best damn thing in the universe.” He tapped the picture frame. “I wasn’t looking for this when I came here, but I found it, and I worked for it and made the changes I needed to make. We both did, and I’m damned grateful for that—for them—every single day. Alyssa made my life better and the baby made us a family. That’s the golden ring, Jack, at least it turned out to be for me. And I think it’s even more that way for you. You’re a domesticated kind of guy, a family man. You deserve that…but it’s not going to just show up on your doorstep, and it might not even show up when, how and looking like you want it to.” Tucker paused and looked from the photo back to Jack. “I don’t know if she’s the one for you, buddy, but she’s sure as hell the most interesting candidate since I’ve known you. You’re fired up like I’ve never seen you before, and that’s not just the way the case is breaking. It’s her, and the two of you together. There’s something there, and I think you should ask yourself whether, if you let her go now, you’re going to kick yourself bloody later.”
Head spinning, Jack said, “You’re saying I should…what? Offer to go with her? Try to talk her into staying here? Do the long-distance thing?”
“None of that matters really until you’re sure she’s the one and vice versa. And I predict that when you’ve gotten to know her a bit better, and you’re sure she’s it for you, then the other stuff isn’t going to seem nearly so important. This isn’t real estate, Jack, with all the ‘location, location, location’ crap. This is romance, and it’s about the two of you and whether you care enough about each other to make it work.”
“But the things she said to her friend…”
“Could have been Tori’s way of saying she didn’t want to talk about it…or maybe she wants to mean it because of the way she’s been living her life. Because from the looks of you two together this morning, you’re probably not the only one who’s doing some reevaluating and not finding it all that comfortable a process.” Tucker paused, then grinned. “But like I said, when it’s right, it’s so damn worth it.” And this time when he went for his drawer, he bypassed the antacids and went for an energy bar instead, as if to say It’s the job that runs me ragged; being a husband and father is the good part.
“You know,” Jack said reflectively after a moment, “I think that’s the most I’ve ever heard you say about anything ever.” When Tucker’s eyes kindled, he held up a hand. “And no, that’s not all I got out of it. I got a hell of a lot out of it, in fact, so thanks. I appreciate it.”
“And you’re going to go back down and talk to her?”
Jack glanced in the direction of the vending machines and the task force’s war room, then the opposite way, to the stairs leading down. “Yeah, I’m going to try, anyway. The whole talking past each other thing has me a little on edge.”
“Mars. Venus. It happens. If this thing is going to happen between you two, you’ll work it out. If not, well, it’s good exercise for the next time around.”
When Jack’s gut tightened at how casually Tucker was throwing around the idea of a “next time,” he was forced to admit—inwardly, at least—that he was already a fair ways down the long slide of falling for Tori. Which was probably why it had ripped him up so badly to hear her dismiss him like that to her friend, and why he’d pushed things further than he probably should have with her.
Well, she’d had some time to take a breath—they both had. Maybe it was time for round two. “The task force is meeting in fifteen,” he said with a nod. “I’ll see you in there.”
The corners of Tucker’s eyes crinkled. “Good luck.”
“Thanks, I’m gonna—” He broke off at a shout from out in the hallway, which was followed by a volley of questions, and then more shouts, unintelligible but urgent. “What the hell?”
Jack spun for the door as Tucker got up and moving, and both of their phones started going off simultaneously. The yelling got louder, the ringing kept up and things were teetering on the brink of chaos when Tucker tossed his phone to Jack with a terse “Take this,” and stepped out into the hallway to bellow, “Quiet!”
The bull pen went dead silent. Even the on-loaner feds clammed up, although they made it look like they were just playing along. The phones stopped ringing, dumping to voice mail.
Pointing at a grizzled veteran who still wore his uniform because he’d had no interest in being promoted to soft clothes, Tucker said, “Twenty words or less. What the hell is going on?”
“The prints came back from the brake and steering lines of Detective Williams’s car, sir. He didn’t even wear gloves, cocky bastard.” The sneer in his voice made it sound personal.
“Who did the prints ping to?” Tucker prodded.
It was Jack, in the middle of checking their voice mails, who cursed and said, “It was Proudfoot.”
Tucker whipped around. “The mayor? Seriously?” But he was more surprised than disbelieving. He, like most of the others, was plenty ready to pin something on the slick bastard.
That it had turned out to be this big…well, yeah, that was a hell of a surprise.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack muttered under his breath as it started to sink in. “The bastard tried to kill me and Tori personally. Why, because we were getting too close to the drug operations? Is that why he’s been making it so damned difficult to get choppers and supplies up to the Forgotten?” All of a sudden, a bunch of things that had seemed like ol
d-fashioned penny-pinching started to seem more like part of a larger, more insidious whole.
“War room, now,” Tucker snapped, waving them all in that direction. As an aside to Jack, he said, “Sorry, you’re going to have to postpone the semi-groveling.”
“Duty calls.” And there was no way he was missing out on this takedown, especially knowing that Tori was safely tucked away downstairs, with a whole layer of cops between her and their enemy…aka one Percy Proudfoot, slimeball mayor of Bear Claw City.
The task force meeting was brief, mostly because they couldn’t afford to give any leaks time to warn the mayor. Although the information flow had been kept as tight as possible, there was always the risk, especially when politics were involved. The plan was simple: lock down the mayor’s office, his mansion and the private residence he’d kept hold of when he moved into the mansion. The warrants were being issued, the evidence being lined up and vetted by the prosecutors. The moment the task force had the go-ahead, they were moving in.
That meant, though, that Jack had a few minutes before he needed to be rolling. As he headed for the door, he caught Tucker’s eye and got a nod, along with a gesture that he thought meant Good luck. Or maybe it was more along the lines of Don’t get too caught up in the little stuff when the big picture works so damn well, which was what he was starting to tell himself. Because Tucker was right: if he and Tori worked together as a couple—and it sure as hell seemed like they did—then they could make the other stuff happen, one way or another.
That was a big “if,” though. Because despite Tucker’s optimism that she, too, had been in mid-freakout over how fast things were moving, she’d been pretty damn clear that she had been in it for the fun. So the question was, had that been a defense mechanism or was that really the way she felt?
He was about to find out.
“It’s me,” he called as he hit the bottom step. “We need to talk.” Then he stopped dead, his stomach sinking as his instincts warned him that he was alone in the basement lab. Still, though, he called, “Tori? You in here?” and did a quick walk-through to be sure.
Bear Claw Bodyguard Page 16
