Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  He leaned in a little, eyes going narrow. “Or you could be a dick and a stupid one at that, by refusing to tell me what I need to know. That’s literally the worst thing you could do. Play nice, keep providing information when I ask for it, and you have nothing to worry about. All right?”

  The man nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s get started.” He sat back, his eyes never leaving the man’s face. “Did you kill Jack Douglas?”

  “A car crash killed Jack Douglas.”

  “Wrong answer.” Logan aimed the gun at the man’s forehead. “Try again. I swear to God, I will blow your brains out. We don’t actually need you. I’m trying to help you here, man. Make yourself useful.”

  “All right, all right. Yes. I planted a device on his car.”

  “And what about Harris? What about his car?”

  Again, he nodded. “Yeah. I did that, too.”

  “Granted, I expected as much, but I’m glad you’re telling the truth.” He leaned in again, nostrils flaring, jaw tightening. Jenna knew this was when the real questioning was about to begin. “Okay. What about us? How did you know where to find us?”

  “He told me to find you. Or she. Really, I don’t know. I just assumed it was a guy. I’ve never heard their voice, whoever they are.”

  “How do they reach out to you?”

  “By text. A few different people have my number, people I’ve worked with before. It’s not unusual for me to get random messages from new clients who heard about me from wherever they heard about me. I don’t ask a lot of questions, and that’s why I end up with jobs.”

  “Well, you must be very proud of yourself.” When the man licked his lips, Logan asked, “Thirsty?”

  “Very.”

  “That’s too bad. Anyway, back to the subject. So this person randomly texted you, and… What? Do you have any sort of vetting process? Anything at all?”

  “No. If they found out how to reach out to me, somebody knew they were worth passing my way. In this line of business, you rely on your network, people you trust. If somebody I trust trusted this person? That’s good enough for me.”

  “How much did they give you?”

  “Fifty-thousand bucks wired directly to my bank for each kill.”

  Jenna’s mouth fell open. Logan whistled, reeling back. “Wow. Not a bad payday.”

  “It sounded pretty good to me,” the man shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”

  “Yeah, you’re a real hero,” Logan muttered, rolling his eyes. “Okay. This person sends you from one place to another. Was Douglas your first kill for this new client?”

  “Yeah. Just these two. Well, and the third.”

  “The third?”

  “Ed Carter.”

  Jenna’s stomach flipped, the contents threatening to spill all over the floor. She had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting out the natural question he’d brought to mind.

  If Logan was surprised, he hid it well. “And have you collected on Ed Carter yet?” A nice way of putting it. A very delicate way to describe murder.

  Their eyes locked, with Jenna looking back and forth between them. There was one silent moment where it felt like every last bit of air had been sucked from the room. She pressed her lips together tight, holding back a scream of desperation. She just had to know.

  The man nodded. “Yeah, I was on my way back from the house when I got a message telling me which hotel you guys were at.”

  She had to sit down. Somehow, she staggered her way to the sofa, plopping down with an audible thud.

  Somebody knew exactly where they were. Somebody had set them up to be murdered.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Only the uncertainty of how Jenna would react kept Logan from blowing the man’s brains out then and there. Once Val was in his phone, they would have no more use for him. Once they pinpointed where the texts were coming from, he might as well be dead.

  It was such a tempting thought just to kill him, to put an end to his miserable life, to make sure he never got to collect on the hundred-and-fifty thousand he’d earned so far. He would certainly never collect on Jenna’s life or on Logan’s.

  He looked at her, her face drained of color. He wouldn’t expect her not to understand the importance of the situation, to comprehend what this newest development meant. Whoever was behind this knew exactly where they were somehow.

  “Hey.” When she looked at him, he murmured, “You’d better pass this on to the team. They need to know.”

  “It’s just you two I’m following,” the man interjected, his mouth snapping shut when Logan glared at him.

  “I don’t remember asking you a question. You’ll speak when I tell you to speak.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Jenna stand, stumbling toward the bedroom. She closed the door. He was glad for that since he was about to ask questions she might not want to hear the answers to.

  He turned back to the piece of garbage in front of him. “Was it just Ed Carter you killed? Was there someone else? What about his family?”

  He shook his head. “No, just him. They were at the movies. I got him when he went to the men’s room in the middle of the flick. It was empty. I put an out-of-order sign on the door before following him in so nobody would disturb us.”

  “You killed him while he was out with his family? Just like yesterday at the restaurant?”

  “When you see an opportunity, you gotta take it. Would you rather I waited until he was with the kids?”

  Bile rose in Logan’s throat. The fact that pieces of filth like the one in front of him walked the earth was enough to boil his blood. His wolf howled, enraged. For a moment, he considered stripping down and shifting, to show this man exactly who he was dealing with.

  But there was no way he wouldn’t scream, and they couldn’t run that risk.

  “Do you have any further instructions? Aside from killing us, I mean.”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. That’s not how it works. I confirmed the job was done, I get a message from my bank saying the money got wired, and I move onto the next task. But the task isn’t given to me until it’s time to make it happen.”

  “Okay. Did you get back to your contact when you found us?”

  “No. I don’t get back to them until I finish the job. We don’t, like, randomly chat with each other.”

  “Thank you for cluing me in on the finer points of being an assassin for hire,” Logan muttered. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “Is it safe to assume that if you didn’t get in touch with your contact, they would get back in touch with you?”

  “I guess. They might get impatient, wondering what was taking so long. I’m usually pretty efficient, so we’ve never run into that problem before.”

  “I guess that’s why you get the big bucks, huh?” He wanted to put the animal out of its misery then and there. He hated to think he needed this guy, but he did. Sad but true.

  Jenna emerged from the bedroom, nodding to show she’d passed on the message. She was still pale, a little shaky as she poured herself a drink from the bar. He couldn’t blame her. He was starting to consider pouring a drink for himself, too.

  “Hey, you think I could get some water?”

  “Not yet.” Logan leaned back, tilting his head from one side to the other as he studied his captive. “Once the contact gets back in touch with you and you send a message back, we’ll see.” He got up then, going to Jenna.

  She’d managed to spill whiskey on the bar and was in the middle of trying to clean it up with hands that shook. He took the napkins from her, blotting the liquid. “Hang in there,” he murmured, his heart tightening at the sight of her this way.

  “How is it possible?” she asked in a whisper, her lips barely moving. “Who could be doing this? Who’s following us?”

  “I wish I had a clue,” he admitted. “I’ll go down and check the truck for any tracking devices, but all of our vehicles are hooked up with just about every type of security you can imagine. The minute anybody w
ho shouldn’t be touching it tries, three different alarms go off at once.”

  He could’ve slapped himself silly for having missed the obvious. “Another hacker?” he whispered, hating the way her face crumpled at the thought.

  “Well, I was able to hack into the truck,” she whispered. “God, I feel sick.”

  “Take it easy. We’re going to come out of this okay. I swear it.” He thought as quickly as he could. “I’ll check with Hawk, have him run a diagnostic test on the truck from headquarters. He should be able to tell me if anybody’s gotten in recently—anybody besides you, of course,” he added with what he hoped was a smile but probably came out as more of a snarl. He wasn’t exactly in a joking mood, no matter how he wanted to lighten her spirits.

  “What if I did something to leave you open to this?” she whispered, fretful. She wasn’t usually like this. The girl he met at the café was long gone. Maybe she had never existed in the first place.

  He reached out, tucking hair behind her ear before stroking it, letting his hand run down her back. “Don’t blame yourself for this. You’re not the bad guy here. They are, whoever they happen to be. We’ll find them. I’m sure of it. Do me a favor, call Hawk, then maybe lie down. I think you need it.”

  Just like he expected, her eyes hardened. Her jaw set in a firm, tight line, her teeth bared in a snarl. “Is that all you think of me? You think I can’t handle this, that I’m weak? Just the little lady needs to lie down, maybe on a fainting couch or something like they used to use in the old days? Is that all you think of me?”

  He didn’t care if the man saw. He kissed her forehead, smiling. “No, that’s not what I think of you. I didn’t really mean it. Go talk to Hawk.”

  “Cute,” she muttered, shaking her head with a look of disbelief, but she went to the bedroom anyway, closing the door again.

  He turned back to the man in the chair, noting the way his head turned. He’d been watching them, no big surprise. “You have a family?” Logan asked, sauntering his way.

  The man blinked in surprise, thrown by this abrupt change in direction. A deliberate change on Logan’s part, calculated. “Yeah. Two kids.”

  “Must be nice. I don’t have any kids. My fiancé died two weeks before we were supposed to get married, actually.”

  The man’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Oh. That’s a shame.”

  “Yeah, a shame. That’s a word for it.” He swung his leg over the chair, straddling it again. “I was sure I would never live through it. That I would just… die. The pain would kill me. I wanted it to, to tell you the truth. If it hadn’t been for me driving too fast, it never would’ve happened. Sure, her seatbelt broke—that model was recalled because of the defect in the seatbelts. Maybe Beth ended up saving a bunch of lives with her death. Who knows? All I know is my future got taken from me that night, and you’re trying to take my new future away too.”

  He raised the gun, and once again, he aimed it squarely between the man’s eyes. Was it wrong to take perverse pleasure in the way he squirmed, wincing like he was bracing himself for what was to come?

  “You’ve stolen a lot of futures,” Logan whispered. “Sure, you don’t kill the kids or the wives, but their lives will never be the same. The Douglas kids, definitely Frank Harris’s daughter. She watched her father get blown up. Now the Carter kids whose dad ducked out of the theater to use the john and never came back. You may as well have ended their lives tonight, too. They’re going to be scarred for the rest of their lives. Does that make you feel anything?”

  Emotions flashed over the man’s face, one overlapping the other. “Look, man, I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s just a job. I can’t make myself think about the families. I do what I can to make sure they’re not killed, but that’s all I can do.”

  “So what if Frank Harris’s daughter was in the car? She could have been. Jack Douglas could’ve had his family in the car with him too.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “But they could have. Just like I could blow your brains out right here and now, and your kids would never know why. Hell, I hope they never know. Maybe they’ll remember you as being a decent guy. Maybe they’ll even miss you. I sure as hell doubt they would if they knew what you were doing with your free time, if they knew you were a heartless murderer, killing people for money.”

  “If you had kids, you would understand. I’m doing this for them. You think it’s cheap putting kids through school? Giving them opportunities? How the hell else could I have made this kind of money so quickly? If I go to hell for it, so be it so long as they’re set up. And they will be. I’ve seen to that.”

  For the briefest moment, Logan could almost understand why a person would act the way this one did.

  Still… “That’s not good enough. There are plenty of people out there trying to support their kids, trying to give them a good future. That doesn’t mean they have to resort to murder for hire. Listen, I’m not your conscience. You don’t have to explain anything to me because I really don’t care anymore so long as I can protect myself and that girl in there. That’s all that matters.”

  “So, you would kill me to protect her? But it’s not all right for me to kill people to protect my kids, to make sure they have a good life?”

  “That’s faulty parallelism,” Logan smiled. “Because the people you’ve killed recently? They weren’t trying to kill you. They didn’t even know you existed. So don’t give me that.”

  “These weren’t good guys. You and I both know that. I asked around. They did all kinds of testing on people. Soldiers, vets, civilians. Maybe the world was better off without them.” His dark eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you wanted to pay them all a visit just to see how they were doing? No, you were staking them out because you intended on getting rid of them too. Don’t even pretend with me.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Maybe it’s the gun you’re carrying around with you, that you seem to have no trouble aiming at my forehead. You’ve done this before. Don’t act like you haven’t.”

  For a second, Logan was at a loss for words. He was going to kill those men too, the same as this guy was. What made him any better? Because he didn’t do it for money? “I’m trying to save my own life, the lives of my team members, her life.”

  “Well I hate to tell you, but you would’ve been taking out the wrong people. They’re not the ones behind your problems, obviously, or else they wouldn’t have been the ones who got killed.”

  It made too much sense. Logan had already said too much and let the man get into his head to make him question himself. He opened his mouth to fire off a sharp comeback when the man’s phone buzzed.

  They both looked at it, their heads snapping around. Sweat broke out on the bound man’s head, rolling down his cheeks and forehead. “I wonder who that could be,” Logan murmured.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Your contact thinks we gave you the slip.” Logan scrolled through the messages on the man’s phone. They still hadn’t learned his name, and Jenna guessed she could go the rest of her life without ever knowing it. “And now you’re on your way to Scranton to catch up with us and say hello to Pete George and kill him or whatever.”

  The man didn’t offer an answer. He was too busy glaring.

  “You might wanna be more friendly,” Logan murmured. “I don’t need you anymore. We’re in your phone and our techs are working on tracing where the texts are coming from. You’re still breathing air because I’m a generous person, and we’re taking you to Scranton with us because I’m so generous. So be nice. Got it?”

  The man looked away. Jenna decided to call him Red for his hair. It was as good a name as any. “Come on, Red. We’ve got a ride ahead of us.” It was little more than two hours to Scranton where their last contact had moved his family.

  “Remember what I said,” Logan murmured as they left the suite. Jenna’s heart sank a little on leaving—they hadn’t even gotten the chance to sleep in the bed or
to do anything else in it.

  Her eyes met Logan’s, and there was something in them that told her they’d have plenty of time to do all those things. And she believed him.

  Either Red had a plan up his sleeve, or he knew better than to fight back. Nobody would know as they crossed through the lobby that the man was their captive, walking between them on their way to the garage. “I’m going to assume there aren’t any devices on the truck?” Logan asked as they stepped into the dark, cool concrete structure.

  Red shook his head. “No, that wasn’t the deal. Too much attention from something like that.”

  “Not like blowing a car up in a restaurant parking lot, huh?” Jenna asked. There was obvious anger in her voice which she didn’t bother trying to hide. Why should she try to smooth over the absolute loathing she felt for this man? Heartless, gutless. No matter the reasons he gave Logan for doing what he did, he was the lowest of the low.

  He didn’t answer. Of course, because there was nothing to be said. She did wish he would get the smirk off his face, though.

  The fact that Logan bound his hands behind his back before they started out did the trick. It wasn’t easy for a person to look smug with their hands tied.

  Traffic was heavy, which was to be expected on a late Sunday afternoon. There wasn’t much of an opportunity to talk, to banter, to pass the time pleasantly with a murderer in the backseat—that and the fact that neither of them wanted to reveal too much to the man, for fear of leaving themselves vulnerable somehow.

  As they drove, her mind raced. Was this last person the one who’d set them up? They had to be, didn’t they? There was nobody left. It would’ve done her heart good if Val called to announce that the texts were coming from Scranton, but there seemed to be some sort of holdup. It happened sometimes—she certainly wasn’t immune to little hiccups, bumps in the road.

  This happened to be the worst possible time for a bump in the road, though. Wasn’t that always the way?

  Every once in a while, she took a look at Logan out of the corner of her eye, wondering what he was thinking. Strange, but she could get a sense of his thoughts like she could feel what he was thinking but nothing specific—more the energy going through him, the strain he was under. She sensed it almost as clearly as she would’ve felt it in herself.