“Akker—”
“I’ll tell him you’re concerned.”
“Thank you.”
Ox turned me around and gently pushed me toward the hall. I went, somewhat reluctantly, feeling suddenly powerless. Ox went through the same heavy door Akker and I had entered this place through, and I was fairly sure I heard him lock it as soon as it was closed.
Locked into a bunker God knows how far under the ground. How had my life become this?
Chapter 9
Akker
The pain was intense, but I refused the morphine Dr. Bishop kept insisting he could put into my IV. It was bad enough that I had to have the fluids; I didn’t want some drugs dulling my senses.
“Bullet’s lodged against the muscle,” the doctor said as he studied an x-ray. “Could be worse.”
“Can you get it out, or am I going to be setting off metal detectors for the rest of my life?”
“I can get it out, but you’re going to want that morphine before I do.”
“I told you; I don’t want it.”
“Don’t push him, Doc,” Ox said as he came into the room. “It will only make him more stubborn about the whole thing.”
I twisted on the examining table so that I could see him. “Where’s Eva?”
“She’s in the panic room, settling down in the bedroom.”
“You left her alone?”
“She’s in a locked room. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“I thought she was fine walking an undiscussed route, too. But she wasn’t.”
Ox came over and pushed me down against the table with his hand on my good shoulder. “Tell me what happened out there, Akker. You went to a motel? Why didn’t you remain there? And what’s with the stolen car?”
I closed my eyes, wondering why these stupid details were more important than the fact that Eva had been left all alone. When I opened them again, Ox was watching me with an eager look in his eyes, a familiar look that I knew all too well. I’d worked with Ox long enough to know he felt a certain level of excitement whenever a case began to generate puzzle pieces that he could carefully put together.
“The crowd at the River Walk got too dense, they were moving too close to her, so I pulled her out. We went to a portico I know on one of the less-populated legs of the walkway. I texted the driver—Willy, the new operative—and we were walking up the steps to street level when someone took shots at us, hence the shoulder wound.” I gestured at the wound, catching a glimpse of Dr. Bishop approaching with a large pair of tweezers. “Be careful with those.”
“It really will be easier with a touch of morphine.”
“No, thank you.”
The doctor shrugged, glancing at Ox before he began coming toward me again.
“What happened then?” Ox asked.
I focused on him again, closing my eyes once more as the doctor pressed a hand against my wounded shoulder. “I called for backup. Oliver showed with a couple of operatives. He said he wanted to take us out via Commerce, which seemed like a viable option to me. But then we’re back in the crowd on the River Walk and this guy comes toward us with a gun. I grab Eva and make a run for it. We catch a—Fuck!”
Pain seared through my shoulder and down my arm, making my stomach threaten to clutch on me. I turned to grab the doctor’s hand as he shoved those funky tweezers into my wound, but Ox grabbed my wrist, pushing me back down.
“Sorry, buddy, but he has to do this.”
I bit my lip hard enough that I tasted blood, holding in a scream as the pain turned into a burning fire that felt as though it was going to sear my entire left side. Tears filled my eyes, but I blinked them away, determined to get through this without showing any bit of weakness. I was quickly reaching my threshold, however, when Dr. Bishop finally removed his tweezers and held them up, a bloody, flattened bullet caught between the two arms.
“Got it!”
I closed my eyes, waiting for the pain to go back down to an acceptable level. Seconds later, a sharp pinch and a burn infused my shoulder. I opened my eyes to find the doctor injecting something all around the open, weeping wound.
“What’s that?”
“Just lidocaine. You don’t have a problem with a little skin-numbing before I sew it up, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Everything seems to be intact. You didn’t break the bone or rip any important blood vessels. I think you just bled so badly because you kept tearing the edges with all the movement you punished it with. Sewing it up should help that.”
“Then I’m good to go?”
“A week for the stitches, a few days rest. Yeah, you’ll be good to go.”
I glanced at Ox, about to argue the doctor’s prescription, but he wasn’t ready to hear it. “Tell me the rest,” he said, bringing me back to the report I’d been making.
“We got on a city bus because it seemed like the quickest way to get out of the area. The bus took us downtown, where we got a room at a little motel under an overpass. We were there maybe an hour when I went outside and saw a guy in a car screwing a silencer onto his gun.”
“You saw this guy? Do you remember what he looked like?”
I nodded, the image clear as day in my mind. “Blond hair, buzz cut. No facial hair. Military-fit.”
“Any tattoos or scars?”
“Not that I could see through the windshield.”
Ox nodded, unable to hide the disappointment my words caused. “Then what?”
“I had to get her out of there as quickly as possible. We ran to this park about two miles to the east and hot-wired a car. Then we arrived here—end of story.”
Ox moved away from the examination table, clearly trying to put the pieces together, almost like a computer going over imputed information. He dragged a hand over his chin, scratching at the new growth of hair that had popped out there during the day.
“A bomb, two dead bodyguards. And now two shooters out in open daylight.”
“Two shooters?”
Ox glanced at me. “We have the guy from the River Walk. Oliver pushed him into the river, then fished him out and brought him here.”
“Has he talked?”
“No, but we’re working on it.”
That was news. Maybe identifying this guy would give us a break. “The cops figure out anything with the bomb?”
The police had had to be involved when the dead bodies were found, which had obligated us to tell them about the bombing. They’d been great about not relating the whole thing to Eva’s visit to the hotel, so the press hadn’t made the connection yet, but it was only a matter of time, especially now that Lloyd and Harry’s uncle and mother had arrived to make arrangements for their bodies. We had less than twenty-four hours to figure this out before it went to the press, something that could be either a good thing in the sense that the stalker would get the attention he wanted, or a bad thing since the stalker would get the attention he wanted.
“Not really. It was a generic sort of build that anyone could have downloaded off the Internet. No fingerprints. No components that could be traced to anything but a big-box type of store.”
“What about the two bodyguards? They find anything in the autopsies?”
“Nope. Autopsy only showed they’d been strangled, as we suspected. Tox screens won’t be back for a week or more.”
Dr. Bishop came back and started sewing me up, the pressure of his hands the only thing I could feel. I stared up at the ceiling, trying to figure this whole thing out. Why would someone want to kill Eva? Her manager had the best motive, but if he hadn’t figured out she was leaving yet, he would have no motive. If he had, how would killing her benefit him? He wouldn’t inherit anything from her estate and he’d still lose his only client. Her father had a good motive in the fact that everything she had would be his if she died, but he was her father. From everything she said, they had a good relationship. Then there was Femi, but I couldn’t figure out what her motive might be. And if it was her, I got the impress
ion that she was just a small player in all this, just the one who opened the door for the bomber, the one who encouraged the mob that forced us to separate from everyone else. She was just a pawn in someone else’s game.
Eva couldn’t think of anyone else who’d want to hurt her. But I still had to wonder about rival models or actresses, or perhaps a fan who mixed up one of her movie characters with real life. It was known to happen. But if that was the case, he must have a lot of money or a lot of smarts in order to get more than one person involved to help him.
None of it fit a familiar pattern. But there had to be an answer.
“I’ll talk to her again, see if I can get her to think of someone she might have crossed, someone powerful enough to hire more than one gunman.”
“No,” Ox said. “I’ll do it.”
“It’s my case.”
“Not anymore. I think you should take a few days off, let that shoulder heal.”
I sat up, ignoring the fact that Dr. Bishop had a needle in my wound. “Absolutely not! This is my case, and I intend to stay with it until it’s done!”
“Go home, Akker. Call your daughter, spend some time with her. You’re done.”
“Ox, you can’t take me off this case just because of a stupid little wound! I’ve had worse!”
“And you took a month off to heal!”
“Not this time. I want to see this case through to the end.”
“It’s too personal,” Ox said. “For you and for her. I can’t let you blur the lines between personal and professional, not on a case this important for the firm.”
“I’m not blurring any lines!”
Ox pressed a hand to my good shoulder and forced me to lie back down. “Go home, Akker. I don’t want to see your face again for at least forty-eight hours. You got me?”
“Yes, boss.”
Ox smacked my good shoulder a couple of times, then walked out of the room. Dr. Bishop silently continued to sew up my wound, careful not to look me in the eye.
“Fuck!” I screamed, slamming my good hand against the flat of the exam table.
***
Eva was coming out of the bathroom when I walked into the room. Her hair was wet, streaming down her back in long, stringy curls, her face clean of all the makeup Femi had plastered onto it, revealing her natural beauty. Her skin was all warm tones and red from the scrubbing it had received in the shower, exposed in small places under the heavy bathrobe she’d borrowed from the collection of clothing in the closet. It was such an intimate scene it almost felt as though I was intruding as I leaned against the open doorway and watched.
“You would look like a dream in just about anything, wouldn’t you?”
Her head came up, a quick smile burning not just on her lips, but in her eyes, too. “You’re still alive,” she said almost breathlessly.
“I’m still alive.”
She crossed to me, tugging at the collar of my shirt until she exposed the simple bandage Dr. Bishop had plastered over my sewn wound. “They fixed you up?” she wanted to know.
“Good as new. Doc says there was no serious damage, and it should heal in a few days.”
“I hope he knows what he’s talking about.”
“He’s a pretty smart dude.” I pulled her hand away from my collar and held it loosely in mine. “I heard you had a nice conversation with Ox.”
“I don’t know if you’d call it nice.” She tilted her head slightly to one side, her eyes moving from my face back to the site of my wound. “He interrogated me about my friends and colleagues, just like you did. He wants to find someone close to me to blame for all this, like you do.”
“We don’t want just to blame someone; we want to make sense of what’s been happening. It’s not every day a client gets shot at on the street. Makes us look a little foolish.”
“You saved me.”
“Yes, well…”
“That’s everything, Akker.” She rose up on her toes and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I never had a chance to thank you.”
“No thanks necessary.”
She pulled free of my touch and wrapped her hands in the front of my shirt, pulling me toward her as she again rose up on her toes and kissed me. I didn’t need a written invitation. I wrapped my arms around her and returned her kiss with all the need that had been building inside of me since the moment I met her.
We turned almost as one thought and she fell back against the wall, caught between it and the length of my body. As exhausted as the tension of this day had made me, not to mention the energy my wound had sapped, I felt totally refreshed in her arms. I felt like I could conquer the world as long as she was waiting here for me in this little robe and nothing more.
I cupped her jaw in my hands, lifting her up so that I could have all I wanted from her gorgeous lips and sweet mouth. It’d been a long time since I’d been content to just kiss a woman, to enjoy the luxury of exploring just this one delicious area of eroticism for as long as possible. But I felt like I could stand there and kiss her for the rest of the night, maybe for days and days at a time. However, her hands began exploring, moving over my ribs and down over my hips, coming dangerously close to igniting a new fire that couldn’t be easily put out.
How did I keep getting so carried away with her? How did I let her so quickly get under my skin? She was a client, and I was her employee. I needed to stop doing this, needed to keep things professional.
I could tell my mind that, but the rest of my body…
“We need to stop,” I whispered against her mouth.
“Why?” She touched my bottom lip, drawing it out a little, her finger slipping into my mouth. “I think we’re both consenting adults, unless you’re younger than you look.”
I chuckled because I was drunk on her kiss. “I’m not. In fact, I feel almost ancient tonight.”
“Then why should we stop?”
“Because you are my client and I am essentially your employee.”
“Then I’ll fire you.”
Ox already beat you to it.
But I didn’t want to tell her that just yet. I don’t know why.
She slid her hands between our bodies and tugged at the belt that kept her robe closed. “You can’t possibly want to walk away from all this,” she said as it began to fall apart. I grabbed the belt and retied it.
“You’re making this far more difficult than it should be, woman.”
“Isn’t that my job?”
I groaned, untangling myself from her limbs even as she tried to snatch a piece of my shirt to pull me back.
“Why do you keep doing this? You’re going to make me think you don’t want me if you don’t stop pulling away like that.”
I groaned. Again. “It’s not about want.”
“Then what is it?”
I glanced at her, wondering if she really hadn’t figured it out on her own. “Do you remember how we met?”
She blushed. “I thought you were Brock. It was only four days ago.”
“Yes, well—”
“This is about Brock?”
“He’s my brother, Eva, and I already lost him once because of a girl. I can’t risk that again.”
She shook her head, laughing softly as she did. “Isn’t this the stupidest mess? I thought Brock was everything when I met him. But I was seventeen at the time. What the hell did I know? And my mom was dying when we met. He helped me through all that, got me through the funeral and all the grief that I’m still dealing with even today. That made him a saint in my eyes. So maybe I inflated his importance to my life when he mysteriously walked out on me.”
I sank down on the end of the bed, and stared at my hands for a minute.
“He didn’t have the balls enough to tell me why he didn’t want to be with me anymore. I should have gotten over it then, I just… I became obsessed with the whole thing, obsessed with the idea that there was more to it than there really was. But clearly there wasn’t. He simply didn’t want to be with me anymore.”
/> “That’s not it, Eva.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I do.” I looked up at her, wishing I could tell her the truth. But, once again, I had to remind myself that it wasn’t my truth to tell her. “He didn’t leave you by choice. And if you see him now, if you let him explain it to you, you might find yourself back to where you were.”
She shook her head. “I won’t. I’m done with the past, done with wishing a man who didn’t love me would come back to me.”
“What if I told you that he does still love you?”
She tried to hide the pleasure that idea brought her, tried to hide the excitement that flashed clearly in her eyes. There was still love there; I could see it written quite clearly all over her face. But then she turned away, trying to keep it from me.
“How do you know that? You didn’t even know about me.”
“But I know my brother, and I know what happened eight years ago that took him away from you.”
“What? What could be so bad that it caused him to decide I wasn’t good enough for him anymore?”
I shook my head, forcing myself to my feet. My shoulder was beginning to ache almost as badly as my heart. She was clearly still in love with Brock. I was just a poor substitute.
I’d been here before, hadn’t I?
“It never should have been you!” a memory screamed in my mind. “I was stupid, thinking the grass might be greener with the other brother, but it wasn’t. You’re nothing like Brock, and you never will be! I never should have come near you!”
“I’m not him, Eva. I never will be.” I dragged a hand over my face, the exhaustion of the day finally settling on my shoulders. “Talk to him. Tell him how you feel. I’m telling you, things are not how you think they are.”
I walked out, the weight of the world settling on my shoulders. How did I keep getting myself in these situations?
Chapter 10
Eva
It was a long, sleepless night, one filled with too many memories and too much pain. I’d not thought so long and hard about the past in a long time, but being back here in San Antonio, meeting Akker, and walking back into Brock’s life—even as peripherally as it was—had turned my badly balanced life upside down.
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