The raw pain in her voice sent an answering jolt through him, and before he could stop himself, his hand settled gently on her shoulder. “The asthma isn’t your fault. And even if you’d been there, the same thing could have happened.”
She turned away from him. “You don’t know that. No one will ever know. But I would have gone in with him. I would have been there when it—”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Reag.”
“Don’t call me that,” she lashed back. “You don’t even know me anymore.”
“I know enough to see you’re torturing yourself for no reason. Who’s it helping?”
After a pause, she whispered, “No one.”
“Come on, then. Let’s go for that ride.”
She nodded. “Better go tell the detectives or the arson investigator you’ll contact them in the morning. Otherwise, they’ll be imagining the worst. And don’t mention you’re going with me, or they’ll suppose we’re cooking up some kind of story. That jackass Detective Worth is already convinced we’re sleeping together.”
“I’ve been suspected of worse things.” He smiled at her.
Her answering smile looked strained, but he caught a spark of her old spirit in her eyes.
“Well, I haven’t,” she said, “so hurry up and meet me at my car before I change my mind.”
For the sake of his promise to the Firebug, the driver of the green car kept the images alive throughout the night. Not only the smashing glass and the exploding colors—yellow, white, and blue around the spill of fuel—but the tremendous whoosh as the flames took hold of not only the wooden framework of the fireplace where the bottle struck, but the carpeting and sofa where the flaming mixture splashed.
In its own way, it had been so fucking beautiful.
Grabbing a handful of fast-food napkins from the dashboard, he wiped his nose, still running from the acrid petroleum odor. While the doctor and his woman were inside the hospital, the driver had risked losing them to run to a nearby burger joint, where he had washed up in the restroom. But no matter how he scrubbed his face and neck, his hands and arms, the smoky stench clung to his hair and clothing, as damning as a freaking set of fingerprints if the cops should pull him over.
And the stinking food had given him a gut ache, too, coating his intestines with a greasy film that left him sweating out the hours he’d spent waiting. But he remained inside the parking garage nonetheless, eager to figure out where the doc would be staying, now that his home was gone.
And planning how to catch the man alone to deal with him.
The girlfriend had come out first, and this time he recognized her. The parking lot, of course, the one over by the clinic.
She had been the one he’d nearly mown down on his way out, a long, lean bitch, and sexy as hell, despite the pale hair cropped closer than he liked it on a woman. He remembered glancing in the rearview and seeing the way she’d stared after him—the only one he knew of who could place him at the scene.
The only one who might connect him to the fire at the apartments…
He wondered how it would play if he were to grab her and snatch a piece of ass before he left her somewhere dead. Close that pretty mouth before she started talking to the cops.
His grip tightened on the steering wheel, and his skin seemed to constrict around his body as an internal current raised the coarse hairs along his arms. A strange, hot flutter replaced the queasy ooze inside his belly, and he had a vision of himself as a great, dark, predatory presence—a goddamned stalking tiger bringing down a lithe gazelle.
Then, when he next saw the Firebug, he would bring a far better offering than a pale imitation of the “master’s” arson jobs. He’d bring something the burned-up bastard would never top, now that he wasn’t much more than stinking bandages over clots of fresh scar tissue.
Yet the driver hesitated, thinking of the carefully constructed plan and the contact who’d helped craft it, who had made the calls from various pay phones and used a digitally altered recording to get across their message. If he changed the plan, would he risk everything—including his reward?
When the woman didn’t pass him to leave the garage within the next few minutes, he wondered if she was having trouble with that piece of shit she called a car. Temptation gnawed at him, and he pictured himself walking two rows over and asking her, “You need some help, miss?”
They would both laugh at the way his appearance scared her, at this late hour, and he would pop the hood to take a look, his well-practiced smile convincing her it was a good thing he had come along, and not some criminal. A few minutes later, he would have her leaning toward the engine, overbalancing as she strained to see some part he pointed out.
And utterly helpless when his hand clamped over her mouth and he jerked her back into the last and longest nightmare of her life.
Leaving the hospital with Reagan was not a good idea. Though Jack mentioned it to no one, he wondered what would happen if the two of them were seen together, sneaking around like a pair of teenagers—or criminals. Would Reagan, too, be forced to hire an attorney because their paths had crossed today?
After tracking down the two arson investigators, Jack hesitated near the exit to the parking garage. He lingered there for several minutes, weighing what common sense was telling him against the image of Reagan waiting for him outside, shivering inside her idling car.
“Oh, what the hell,” he said before stuffing his hands into the pockets of his black jeans and striding toward the second level.
It wouldn’t be the first time of late that his emotions pushed him past his better judgment. But this time, his hurry also propelled him beyond something equally important: a seemingly empty green sedan hidden in the darkest corner of the parking garage.
The driver of the green car gave his head a shake, realizing at the same time that, despite his grandiose plans for the blond bitch, he had been drifting off to sleep. He’d been startled by a shift in shadow—one he now recognized as Jack Montoya trotting past, between him and the red security light.
His heart hammering, he whacked the steering wheel and swore at his own weariness. Another minute or two and he would have been out cold. Would have missed the doctor’s departure—and then where would he be?
Less than a minute later, when the couple drove out past him, he was ready. Despite its faded paint and scratches, the worn upholstery and the stolen plates, the old Ford thrummed eagerly to life, its performance a testimony to his automotive talents.
Now it was time to test again his skill as a tail. Time to find out where it was the doctor imagined he’d be safe.
Chapter Seven
Used to working twenty-four-hour shifts, Reagan had punched through the membrane of fatigue into energy reserves fueled in equal parts by nerves, caffeine, and pure determination. She could run for hours on that heady mixture; keyed up as she felt, she couldn’t sleep now if she tried.
The traffic had thinned somewhat by this hour, but Houston’s Medical Center never really slept. Day or night, one might find the streets jammed with both pedestrians and vehicles carrying medical and support staff, families and friends of patients, emergency crews, and local media. Some Friday and Saturday nights, a visitor might mistake the scene for a street festival.
As Reagan left the parking garage, she pulled up short to let two women, both wearing scrubs beneath their jackets, cross in front of her car. They were smiling, their hands animating what appeared to be a friendly conversation. One of them paused to sip a steaming, overpriced beverage from what must be an all-night coffee shop.
It was the type of scene she had seen a thousand times, ten thousand maybe, and yet tonight, it smacked her as surreal.
“It doesn’t seem right,” she said to Jack. “How can they go about their lives as if everything’s normal, when the captain’s inside, maybe dying, and your life’s been turned upside down?”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “But you and I both see people hurt and suffering, som
etimes worse, in our jobs. All the while, we stand at the edges of their nightmares, going about our normal lives.”
As they made their way toward the Heights, Reagan wondered what “normal life” would be after today, and whether she had been wrong to slip away from her crew and Donna in the hospital. Perhaps Jack was thinking along equally somber lines, for he didn’t speak except to give directions to his mother’s house when they reached her neighborhood.
“I really appreciate the lift,” he added as they turned the corner. “Damn it all. Look at that!”
Reagan pulled over, her eyes focusing on a half-dozen vans and pickups parked in front of a neat one-story bungalow. Even from half a block away, she could make out the logos of a couple of television stations.
Jack swore again. “I was afraid of this. What I’d give to know who the hell leaked my mother’s address to those vultures.”
Backing around the corner, Reagan drove past another vehicle and made her way out of eyeshot of the news crews.
“Do you know where you’re heading?” he asked. “There’s a half-decent motel off of—”
“Stay at my place,” she offered. “I have a guest room and an extra bed.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea, Reagan?”
Something in his tone made her stomach feel as if it had just fallen through the floorboards, especially when she glanced over and noticed the intensity of his regard. Shaking off her misgivings, she said, “Why not? You’ve just lost everything you own, so you don’t need to spend the money on a room you won’t be using more than a few hours anyway. I’m going right back to the hospital, so we won’t…we won’t be tripping over each other. And besides, you can feed Frank Lee and take him out in the morning so I won’t have to ask Miss Peaches to do it. She usually works late, and she gets a little testy if I call her before noon.”
Not only that, but after a long night spent photographing murder scenes, accident sites, and the occasional autopsy for the Harris County medical examiner’s office, Peaches was likely to show up needing a shave—of her chest hair, which she invariably left exposed by some sort of low-cut top.
“What kind of name is Miss Peaches?”
Reagan snorted at the thought of Jack picturing an old-fashioned Southern girl. “That information’s strictly on a need-to-know basis,” she answered, not wanting to get into it. “Let’s just say she’s a nice neighbor lady who spoils Frank Lee when I’m gone.”
“You said before he’s a therapy dog of some kind?”
She nodded, momentarily distracted. “Yeah, we make weekly visits to a nursing home nearby. It’s the only thing besides a crowbar that’ll get the big lummox off my furniture.”
Once they reached her house, Reagan took Jack inside through the back door, which led into her kitchen. Gesturing toward the fridge and pantry, she said, “You’re probably hungry. Help yourself to anything you see. I’m going to wake up my fabulous watchdog and take him out. Then I’ll show you around.”
Rousing Frank Lee took some doing, as he was comfortably ensconced atop her bed, snoring with his head on her pillow. Six feet away, the ultimate dog bed, a billowy bag whose advertising promised never-ending comfort, lay unused.
“What am I going to do with you?” she asked the stretching greyhound. “That bed cost more than your therapy certification.”
Frank Lee yawned in answer, his long pink tongue curling—which was probably the most exercise he’d had all week.
After walking the dog, she returned to find Jack munching the last of a pack of peanut-butter crackers from the pantry. He washed it down with milk, then rinsed the empty glass and set it in the sink.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m more wiped out than anything, but I needed to eat something.”
Nodding, she fought an impulse to brush a few crumbs off his upper lip. An image reared up from the past, of the day the thirteen-year-old came home from school with his glasses broken and a suspicious swelling beneath his left eye, both resulting, she knew, from the stand he’d taken against Paulo Rodriguez and his delinquent brothers at the bayou. To save her, she understood now, from something an eight-year-old could never cope with.
But Jack had long since grown past the brave boy she remembered. She had only to look at the strong shoulders and the rough stubble on his face to see that. She had only to see him looking at her with his man’s eyes—with a man’s needs reflected in their darkness.
“Let me show you to the bedroom.” Against the quiet backdrop of the ticking kitchen clock, her traitorous words sounded suggestive. Disgusted with herself, she chattered on. “This is the bathroom. There are extra towels beneath the sink, and I think I have a spare toothbrush in that second drawer, probably a pack of disposable razors, too. Here’s your room—sorry you’ll have to share space with my treadmill and punching bag. But the sheets are clean, and there are blankets in the closet if you need them. The thermostat’s out here in the hall. If it’s too cold—”
“It’s fine,” he said as the greyhound trotted up and sniffed his hand. “Don’t worry. Uh, do you have an extra key, so I can lock up when I leave?”
She nodded, then went to get him one. “There’s a tub of dog food on top of the refrigerator. If you’d give Frank two scoops and take him out back to do his business in the morning, I’d appreciate it. Just put him back inside before you go.”
“So Killer here can guard the house, right?” Jack’s hand glided over the animal’s smooth white head, and he gave the dog an exhausted-looking smile.
Reagan wondered how it would feel to have him look at her with the same easy affection, his eyes bleary after a night spent—
She gave her head a shake to clear it and quickly said good-bye. She needed to get the hell out of this house, before the evening’s stress and whatever-the-hell estrogen attack she was suffering conspired to push her into doing something stupid.
Or more stupid, she decided, as she’d already crossed that particular line when she’d invited him to stay here at her house.
It was all Jack could do to keep from reaching out to Reagan as she turned to go. Though his better judgment provided a thousand reasons he should keep his peace, at that moment he would have given almost anything for the perfect pretext to get her to stay here with him.
And not only in her little house, but in his bed and arms as well. He wanted—needed desperately—to lose himself in a woman, to forget the nightmare that his life had become. Between the ebb and flow of memory and what he’d seen today—or yesterday, he supposed—of Reagan’s courage and compassion, he saw a thin sliver, no more than a scalpel’s edge, that gleamed with possibility.
The possibility of a cut straight to the heart, he warned himself as he listened to her moving through the house and toward the back door. The dog’s toenails clicked behind her on first the wood floor, then the tile.
Let it go. Let her go. Act as if you have two working brain cells and the sense to use them.
From the direction of the kitchen, he heard the back door open. His ears strained for the sounds of closing, locking, leaving. Instead, he heard a faint but distinctive riff from AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”
He didn’t realize it was her cell phone’s ring tone until he heard her say, “Hello. Beau? What’s wro—oh—oh, God. That’s not right. It can’t be. He can’t be. I won’t believe it—I’ll be right over. No…what do you mean, you don’t need…you don’t need me there?”
Understanding immediately that Captain Rozinski’s condition must have worsened, Jack raced down the hall, past the darkened living room, and into the kitchen. There, he found her leaning in the open doorway, her head down and her back against the frame as the cold night air pushed its way inside the house. Her white dog nosed at her free hand, nervously trying to insinuate himself beneath it, as if for reassurance. His thick tail thumped rhythmically against the side of a wooden cabinet, beating out a funereal drumbeat.
The cell phone slipped from Reagan’s grasp and struck the tile floor.
Something cracked, and a small plastic piece spun sideways before coming to rest several feet away.
She glanced up at Jack, her eyes already red. “This is turning out to be a damned expensive night. That was Beau, and he was saying…he was saying that…that the captain’s—”
Jack folded her into his arms. Pulling her inside the house, he closed the back door. Shutting out the cold wind, but closing in her grief.
Instead of collapsing into his embrace, she remained so rigid he felt as if he’d wrapped himself around a sculpture: something angular, metallic, and utterly unyielding.
“I’m going to flatten Beau next time I see him.” Despite the threat, Reagan’s voice thinned and rose, like a guitar string tightening as it neared the breaking point. “He might be upset that I was questioned, but what right does that give him to tell me the captain’s dead?”
“Reag, please listen,” whispered Jack, his mouth pressed not far from her ear, his hand rubbing soothing circles on her back.
“He isn’t,” she insisted, her head jerking stiffly from side to side. “I told you my crew was looking at me funny—and now they’re mad I left. If he had really died, I would have been there. I would have been there for Joe Rozinski, the way he always was for me.”
Jack pulled back, gripping her shoulders and holding her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eyes. “They wouldn’t lie about this, Reagan. No one would do that.”
“Then they’re mistaken. There could’ve been a mix-up, the doctors might have gone to the wrong room and told the wrong people about some—some other…”
He watched her face fall as her denial wound down like a clock. As an EMT, she’d undoubtedly heard patients’ loved ones do the same thing on numerous occasions, as their minds scrambled to find purchase on the terrifying slopes of sudden death. For Jack’s part, experience had never made it any easier to witness, particularly in someone he knew personally—someone he had thought, only moments earlier, that he would like to get to know a great deal better.
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