Prodigal Son (Lean Dogs Legacy Book 3)

by Lauren Gilley

  Axelle did not notice the way his lips fit against the ceramic of the mug. “Morning.”

  He finally lifted his head and made brief, inscrutable eye contact. He waved at the prospect, who put his phone away and slouched toward the kitchen.

  She refused to look away, even though she wanted to. His gaze was weighty, bright as polished glass in the scant amount of sunlight that filtered into the pub. Here it comes, she thought. A grin, a joke, a jab about her looking like shit. No amount of concealer on earth could have hidden the dark smudges beneath her eyes.

  But what he said was, “You like eggs?”

  She felt her brows lift, surprised, and forced them down. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “My little sister doesn’t. Then again, they make her sick. When she was really little, we just thought she was being picky. But we figured out that she cried and cried afterward. She finally got old enough to tell us they hurt her stomach.” He shrugged. “Just checking. You never know.”

  “Eggs are fine.”

  The prospect arrived at their table and set a plate and mug before her, a roll of silverware in a paper napkin. Coffee, eggs, bacon, and toast. Her stomach growled.

  “Thanks.”

  The prospect nodded and retreated.

  “This is like a Waffle House,” she said, reaching for the pepper shaker on the table. “How’d you know I was coming down?”

  He shook his head and returned his attention to his paper. “The kitchen’s always running. Especially at proper meal and tea times. Usually, someone’s got something on the flattop.” He added, “Also, I talked to Phil. Raven’s on the way.”

  She knew a momentary twinge of disappointment, and pushed it aside. “Right. Time to be the good little assistant again.” She took a bite of eggs that proved to be cooked to perfection, with a detectable splash of heavy cream and pinch of something spicy, maybe cayenne.

  Albie lifted his head again, and this time he was serious, no misunderstanding. He set the paper aside and rested both arms on the table.

  She paused, fork suspended over her plate. “What?”

  “You need to be very careful today.”

  She sighed. “Haven’t we already had this conversation?”

  “We’re having it again. This bloke Raven’s meeting today: I don’t trust him.”

  “I think the list of people you do trust would be shorter. Look, we’ve talked about this. Raven’s getting you intel, I’m backing her up, what’s with the constant lectures? We’ve already established that I’ve got literally nothing to lose.”

  His lips compressed, nostrils flaring as he took a breath. “Yeah, well, think that if you want.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You think you’re badass – and you are, alright? I can admit that. But what we’re dealing with here is big government and big money. These people are so rich…these are the guys who have people disappeared and no one ever finds the body. This isn’t some back alley, sloppy drug dealer shit. This is a very big deal.”

  “So your brother’s told me. I get it.”

  They stared at one another; glaring, on his part. Axelle had no idea why he was so hellbent on repeating himself.

  He finally sighed and looked away, reached for his coffee. “You’re taking a security detail,” he said with an air of finality. “That’s non-negotiable.”

  ~*~

  “Absolutely not,” Raven said, arms folded, hips cocked at a dangerous angle. She wore all black head-to-toe, hair pulled back in a slicked-down, severe bun. She looked absolutely lethal, right down to her spike heels. Albie was grateful not to be the brother she was squared off against, even if he agreed with Phillip’s insistence on this particular matter.

  “Phil,” she said, “the reason I went yesterday to see Ryan Anders, and now have a meeting with an important person relating to this case, is because I’m in the fashion business. I didn’t kick down any doors, or flex any muscles, or flash all my ghastly leather biker patches – of which I have none, thank Jesus.”

  Phil’s face bore a smoothness Albie knew well: he was trying hard not to smile.

  “I went because I can come at this from a different angle. One they’ll never expect. If you insist on sending your hairy bloody bodyguards along with me, it will become glaringly obvious that I’m working hand-in-hand with the most notorious biker gang in the world, and no one will tell me anything useful.”

  Albie cleared his throat. “Club.”

  Raven whirled on him. “What?”

  “You said ‘gang.’ It’s a biker club, love.”

  “Ugh.” She turned back to Phillip. “Are you even listening to yourself? Does stealth matter to you at all?”

  Phil grew serious again, frowning. “Your life matters to me, Raven. “Right now, we’re trying to accomplish two things while we give Fox time to find the rest of Project Emerald: gather some intel, and provide a distraction. I also want all of us to stay very much alive and unharmed.”

  “That’s three things.”

  “Fine. Three things. I appreciate your help, and the unique opportunity your line of work offers us. That’s a boon I didn’t expect. But I won’t let you throw yourself into a dangerous situation without protection.”

  “Perhaps,” a crisp, feminine voice said from the doorway, “she needs a different kind of security.”

  Eden’s mother, Vivian, stood in the threshold, in a cream suit so stiff and fitted it looked carved from marble, her makeup, and hair, and nude pumps all flawless. She carried a slim little matte pistol in one manicured hand.

  Albie sat up straighter in his chair and let a hand drop casually to his hip, and the 9mm in his waistband.

  He didn’t think anyone breathed as Vivian strode into the room, right up to the desk, and set the gun on its surface. A Browning, he saw now, and she handled it like she was comfortable with its weight, and its capability.

  “Beg pardon?” Phillip said.

  “You’re sending the girls into a meeting, yes? One where they need protection? I do this sort of thing for a living.”

  “I thought you and Eden were PIs?” Albie said.

  She huffed a short, sharp sigh. “My daughter and I both worked for British Intelligence before we started our investigation firm. Do you think we don’t know anything about proper security and personal protection? I can assure you, Mr. Calloway, I’m a far better shot than any of your biker boys. And unlike them, I would actually look appropriate at Raven’s side.”

  Raven put her hand over her mouth, but not quick enough to hide her delighted smile.

  “Send some of your men, if you wish,” Vivian said, “and have them set up a perimeter and be ready to move in if necessary. Surround the building, and put eyes on all entrances and exits to the parking garage. If we break contact, then they stage a full-on assault of the place. But they mustn’t be seen, or else you’ll tip your hand to these people, and they’ll tell us nothing of any use.”

  Phil studied her a long moment, considering. “This is my baby sister we’re talking about.”

  “Who isn’t a baby, and who’s standing right here,” Raven said.

  Vivian’s expression softened the tiniest amount. “Yes, I understand. This would be my suggestion no matter who she was.”

  Phillip looked over, and Albie could only shrug. “I can have a crew ready to leave in ten minutes.”

  “No colors,” Phil said, and Albie nodded, rising from his chair. To Vivian: “If anything happens–”

  “You’ll have my head, certainly. I should warn you, though, Calloway – the same goes for my daughter, who’s currently with your brother.”

  Phil sighed. “Well. You’ve got me there, I suppose.”

  ~*~

  “The building doesn’t have metal detectors, we’ve already checked,” Albie said, and held up a compact little Smith & Wesson 9mm. “Do you know how to use this?”

  Axelle arched one unimpressed brow. “I’m from Tennessee. What do you think?”
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br />   He handed the gun over. “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.”

  Her other brow shot up to join the first.

  “But if you do have to, then don’t spare any bullets. Here. Extra magazine.”

  She let him hang there, looking like an idiot, before she finally took both items and dropped them into her bag – something big and black and leather, obviously on lend from Raven. As were the clothes, he assumed, since she was dressed very much like her pretend boss in a black ensemble, hair slicked back so that her cheekbones and chin looked extra sharp – and the circles under her eyes extra dark.

  She looked lovely.

  “I want you to text me every fifteen minutes,” he instructed. “Just a simple OK to let us know that all’s well. Send SOS for help if you need it – and if you can.” His stomach curdled at the thought. “And if I go twenty minutes without hearing from you, we’re moving in.”

  “How am I supposed to text you constantly without looking suspicious?”

  “You’re an assistant. They’re on their phones all the time.”

  “Sure.” She shrugged…but then she looked away, reaching to smooth a hand across the crown of her head in a gesture that struck him as self-conscious. She took a deep breath, and Albie heard it catch in her throat.

  “Hey.” He stepped in closer, and she flicked a hunted glance to him up through her lashes. “It’s going to be fine, I’m sure. We’re just being overly cautious. This is just a meeting.”

  “Just a meeting. Says the guy who handed me a gun and an extra magazine.”

  He offered a smile he knew was crooked. “Can’t be too careful, huh?”

  She didn’t return the smile; stared at him, hard to read. “Why are you being like this?”

  In an instant, he knew what she meant. Not like this, here, now, with guns and warnings and OCD requests for constant check-ins. No, she meant last night. Showing her the chair he’d made; the way, when she’d stumbled, full of whiskey and soft and giggly, he’d only steadied her, and eased her back when she’d tried to press her face into his throat. He’d wanted her then – damn had he – and he still did, in a way that was becoming less and less about her physical charms. But he was trying to keep his distance; this woman wasn’t a diversion, or a willing accomplice to a one-night stand. Every hour spent in her presence was one in which his aversion to hurting her grew stronger.

  “I just want you to be safe,” he said, quietly.

  She nodded, and turned away.

  Eighteen

  “Are you sure about this?” Fox asked, stepping over a puddle of something he didn’t want to look at too closely.

  “When am I ever not sure?” Abe shot back over his shoulder.

  “Well. Maybe you’ve never been, and you’ve just been lying to me all my life.”

  Abe hummed a note that was neither agreeing, nor disagreeing, and kept walking.

  If Abe lived in a seedy part of town, then Fox wasn’t sure what this area counted as. Condemned? Chernobyl? At the outskirts of the city, several turns past a cozy, suburban area with tidy two-story semi-Ds and cottages, Abe have given them directions into a derelict neighborhood that reminded Fox of some of the nastier parts of the US backwoods. Tumbledown houses crammed cheek-by-jowl in weed-choked lots. Rusted iron fences with sagging gates. Boarded up windows. Dogs on chains. They’d turned down a deeply rutted dirt track that led through an untended, unfenced field full of loose goats – Fox guessed that was the source of the smell. A squat, rotting clapboard house lurked beneath a tangle of tree branches, all of it dark and wet from a recent rain. The yard was mud. Goats stood on the porch, and on the roof of a rusted-out lorry.

  Beside him, Eden carried her gun in both hands, ready to raise and fire if she needed to. Her lip was curled as her boots sank up past the soles in the muck, but she didn’t comment, head on the swivel.

  “I stepped in goat shit,” Evan grumbled quietly. “At least…I think it’s goat shit. I hope it is. What does goat shit look like?”

  “Your mother’s face,” Fox deadpanned. “Dad, get over here, what are you doing?”

  Devin had drifted over toward the toolshed, its siding peeling up from the concrete foundation at the bottom, a few scabs of faded red paint still hanging on for dear life. He cupped his hands around his face to peer through a window so cloudy it might as well have been boarded up. “If I remember Norris right, then he was always tinkering with something. Woulda spent more time out here in his workshop than the house.”

  “Not much of a workshop,” Fox said, and glanced deeper into the property, out past the house toward a truly frightening thicket of trees and shrubs and abandoned farm equipment, toward a large detached garage. It didn’t look to be in any better shape than the other buildings – at first. But the windows were clear, and a well-worn track through the grass led from the house to its pedestrian door. “Maybe that’s it out back.”

  At the head of their party, Abe course-corrected and headed that way.

  “I don’t like this,” Eden said at Fox’s side, moving in to walk closer beside him. “Nobody’s here – I can feel it.”

  “I know.” And yet the oppressive weight of the place left his skin crawling.

  In so many ways, empty houses had always left him twitchy; made him more nervous than inhabited ones. It was so easy, when you thought you were alone, to let your guard down. And for any set of watching eyes that happened along, you became the sole focus; the immediate target. People he could work around, could fool, could incapacitate, could kill. But he didn’t know what to do with shadows, and echoes, and all the pressure of undisturbed air.

  (A small voice in the back of his head chimed in: you don’t like empty houses because you’re afraid of being alone.)

  “Stay close,” Fox called back to Evan. “Quit worrying about your shoes and keep up.”

  There was some grumbling, but the squish of hurried footfalls through mud.

  They picked their way through muck and filth, past bleating goats that stared at them with their off-putting, alien eyes, and reached the garage without spotting any signs of human life. The lorry’s tires were sunk deep in undisturbed sludge; it hadn’t been driven in at least a week. If Norris had left, he’d done so a while ago, long enough that the tire tracks had been washed away. Fox didn’t spot so much as a twitch of the drapes in the small house.

  “Abe, wait,” he said as Abe reached the door of the garage, and moved up to join his former sensei. “Check for traps.”

  “I’m not stupid, boy.” But he was a little wild-eyed, Fox saw. Nervous. For them, or for his old friend?

  They walked the perimeter, careful, searching along the leaf-strewn ground, having to swat limbs and spider webs thick as cotton candy out of the way. Fox didn’t see any wires or sensors that would indicate the place had been rigged. Of course, there was no way to tell for certain, not without going in.

  When they got back to the door, he saw that Evan and Eden were staring in through one of the oddly clean windows, their faces pale.

  Evan swallowed hard, and then turned away.

  “Norris is home,” Eden explained, voice faint.

  Fox joined her at the window, and groaned.

  ~*~

  Norris had been tied to his own workbench with thick polymer chord. Deep gouges in the skin of his wrists, the blood long-dried, marked a struggle. Both his knees were broken; something heavy and blunt, some sort of hammer, most like. Same for his fingers, warped claws frozen in a last scrabble for freedom. His face was untouched, though. You didn’t have to beat someone in the face to get them talking – how could they talk when they’d bitten through their tongues and their jaws were cracked? Also, his killers wanted him recognized, clearly.

  Fox straightened from his crouch and wiped his hands off on the legs of his jeans; he hadn’t touched the man, but he felt like he had.

  When he turned, he found Eden standing in the open doorway of the workshop, gun still held casually in one hand, gaze m
oving around the interior of the building. The rest of the property was a complete sty, but the shelves here were surprisingly tidy: neat rows of varnish, paint, wood glue, nails, and sanding blocks. One wall of pegboard housed dozens of tools, some hand, some power. Albie would have appreciated them, Fox thought.

  “I can’t test for prints or fibers or DNA,” Eden stated the obvious. “And I’m pretty sure this group is too professional to leave that stuff behind anyway.”

  “Yeah.” He’d never met Norris, but he felt something like loss anyway. As he’d expected, Norris wasn’t a large man, instead wiry and slight, with hair gone white and a face deeply lined and tanned from the sun, hands that had doubtless been gnarled before someone took a hammer to them.

  But unlike Abe, his land and house and loose herd of goats suggested someone who’d stopped maintaining his life. Maybe someone paranoid, or sick, or drunk.

  “Where are the old guys?”

  “They went to look in the house.”

  They headed that way, passing Evan. The sniper stood in the middle of the yard, pitched forward at the waist, hands on his knees as he took deep, unsteady breaths through his mouth. A goat had come forward to study him, head cocked.

  At another time, Fox might have snapped a photo of him to save for tormenting purposes later. But now, he slapped him on the back as he passed. “Get it together and come on.”

  A few steps later, he heard the kid blow out one last deep breath and follow.

  A set of rickety stairs led up to the back porch: a sad, sagging affair that dripped mildew so aggressive it had begun to look like moss. Maybe it was moss.

  The steps, and then the porch groaned beneath their feet, though none of them was all that heavy, considering.

  The smell hit him a pace away from the open back door. He took a fast breath in through his mouth and stepped over the threshold.

  First was the kitchen, a cramped space with grimy lino and grimier cabinets, a sink full of dishes he thought were probably the source of the rotting-food stink. Flies buzzed around a sputtering overhead light fixture, eighties-era fluorescent.