Stay All Night: Arizona Law 2 (Arizona Heat Book 6)

by Katie Douglas

  But this was exactly what I was born to do, I could feel it. I had no high school diploma or college education, but I wanted more than anything to be a police officer.

  What would Rick do if I applied to become an officer somewhere else? Phoenix, maybe?

  His whole life was here. His friends. His town. There was no way I could ask him to give any of that up. Wait. I was getting ahead of myself. Since we’d had sex, he hadn’t talked about it at all. Maybe it was just a one-night stand? Regret lanced at my heart and squeezed my throat. It hadn’t felt like a one-night stand.

  That had to count for something, right? Right?

  “You okay?” Rick asked.

  No. Not okay. I bit back my first response.

  “Sure. I’ve found out all the air conditioners are serviced by the same company. There’s only one for this whole town. Mr. Freeze.”

  “Then I think we need to go pay Mr. Freeze a visit. And also find out what his real name is.”

  Avery

  In the morning, we hit overtime. We needed to go talk to Mr. Freeze and we headed off at six in the morning, but he lived forty minutes away. Or, rather, that’s where his company’s mailing address was listed. When we arrived, it was just an abandoned gas station in the desert. The sign had most of its letters missing and parts of the roof were gone. Debris littered the ground around a single orange-rusted gas pump. We didn’t even get out of the squad car.

  “Wow, this place is in trouble,” I remarked.

  “It’s a phony business address,” Rick replied. “Whole place is abandoned. There’s no one living here.”

  “So where is Mr. Freeze?” I looked around like he might appear from behind a trash can.

  Rick shrugged. “If we can’t go to him, he’ll have to come to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our air con just broke.”

  I laughed and nodded. “So he comes out to fix it, and we pounce and ask him about the dogs?”

  “Hmm. Not quite. Just let me do the talking again. ‘Kay?”

  I nodded. We drove back to Snake Eye and handed over the shift to Bob, then we went out to the lot.

  “Oh, crap, of all the times!” Rick grumbled. I looked at his car. One of the tires was flat.

  “Do you want to take it to a shop?” I asked.

  “Not now. Screw it. I want to go to sleep.” He stomped back into the precinct, leaving me standing on the pavement, and he returned pretty quickly with some keys.

  “We’ll take the squad car.”

  Rick drove us home and I fell into bed for some much-needed sleep.

  Rick

  I awoke in a cozy glow. I hadn’t wanted to call Mr. Freeze before I’d slept. Anyhow, I didn’t want a repairman in the house while Avery was in bed. It didn’t seem decent, somehow. Not that decency was always my strongest point.

  We hadn’t talked yet about the sex. I wanted more, but I didn’t want her to feel like I was pushing her into something she didn’t like. She was vulnerable and needed protection.

  The warmth seemed to be spreading inside me. Was it gratitude? I had a quick shower and threw on some clothes. When I got downstairs I found Avery sitting at the kitchen table fanning her face with a piece of mail.

  “Air con’s broke,” she grumbled.

  That explained the warm fuzzy feeling I’d gotten upstairs.

  “I’ll call someone.”

  We both laughed.

  “Pretty funny that it’s not working right when we needed to talk to Mr. Freeze,” she said.

  “It makes the whole thing harder, too,” I pointed out. “If we ask the wrong questions or piss him off, we’re going to be frying eggs in the bathtub by tomorrow lunchtime.”

  “Ohhh, yeah that could be hard.”

  I nodded. “Remember that if you get the urge to ask him any hard questions.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if you’re good... maybe we’ll do more naughty stuff soon.”

  There was no mistaking the little smile on her face, even if she wasn’t overly-forthcoming with her emotions. She’d been hurt by the people who were meant to care for her. I had to remember that when I was trying to make sense of her sometimes odd-seeming behavior.

  I called Mr. Freeze and put him on speakerphone so she could hear how the conversation was going.

  “Hello?”

  The man on the other end of the phone didn’t sound very professional. Had I reached a company or had I accidentally dialed the wrong number and gotten through to some random guy?

  “Is that... uh... Mr. Freeze?” It felt so dumb to call him that, but we had no other name for him.

  “Sure. You need a fix?”

  “Yeah. Our air con’s broke.” I gave him the address.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  That fast?

  “Thanks. Wait! Don’t you need to know the make and model?”

  “Naw. It’s written on the side of the unit.” He ended the call.

  “Twenty minutes?” Avery looked surprised. I was, too.

  “When he leaves, we’ll tail him,” I told her.

  “This is getting exciting.”

  “Can you go put a fresh pot of coffee on? I need to call this in.” I dialed the precinct. Mike answered. “Hey, Mike, we got a lead on the missing dogs. Might be nothing—” I felt stupid even trying to explain why we were investigating an air conditioning expert.

  “Who, what, where, when and how?” Mike asked. I passed on all the details I had.

  “Listen, we’re gonna tail him when he’s through here. Can you be on standby in case we need backup, please?”

  “Sure thing, Rick. Just let me know what you need later.”

  “See you ‘round.”

  I ended the call and looked around the house.

  “We need to hide some stuff,” I told Avery. “I don’t want him knowing I’m a cop.”

  We spent the next ten minutes dumping stuff into the cupboard under the stairs.

  “Uh, Rick?” Avery was looking out of the window and biting her lip.

  “Is he here?”

  “Not yet, but you got a bigger problem than hiding your uniform.”

  Chapter 16

  Rick

  I followed her gaze and groaned.

  “Fuck. The squad car.” I’d forgotten that I’d brought it back with me, today. I had my own car, too, as the department only had three cars for four of us, and usually I left the squad car at the precinct but today I’d driven it home since my car had a puncture. I grabbed the keys and went outside. There was nowhere to hide it on the street. Damnit. I jumped in and drove it around the corner, parking it outside a church, then walked back home. Time was going to be tight trying to tail the suspect if we had to run here to reach the car. I knew there was only one solution. We had to split up.

  I took out my phone and called Avery.

  “Hey, everything okay?” she asked.

  “Mostly. Listen, I couldn’t park very close to the house. We’re going to lose the suspect if we have to try and run to where I’ve parked it while he’s driving away. If I park it closer, he’ll see the squad car and know there’s a cop nearby.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I’m going to wait here in the car while you show him the air con. Call me the moment he leaves.”

  There was a pause.

  “Sure. Okay. Bye.”

  I ended the call, got back into my car and waited. It was pretty funny being parked in a squad car beside a main road. In my mirror, I watched people appearing to move quickly down the street then when they saw me, they slowed down, taking a long time to drive past. It was rare to actually catch someone speeding past me.

  I wondered how long it would be before the heating engineer appeared.

  Avery

  Rick was leaving me alone to deal with Mr. Freeze? What if he was some sort of deranged career criminal? Stealing dogs might only be the beginning.

  I tried to cool off. I was going to hit Rick w
hen I next saw him. No. Wait. This was an opportunity. If I were a detective, I would have to deal with these sorts of incidents all the time. Were they incidents? I wasn’t sure. Either way, if I was scared of this guy, I wasn’t going to make a good cop.

  If I messed this up, would Rick still let me type up the reports or would he decide they needed someone smarter and stronger than I was? The stakes were pretty high.

  A knock at the door made me jump. I squeaked and hurried to answer it. Through Rick’s spyhole, I saw a tall, chunky man holding some sort of bag.

  Okay, this is it.

  I opened the door.

  “Hi, you must be Mr. Freeze?”

  “S’ right.”

  “Great. I sure hope you can fix our A.C. before we all melt!”

  He grunted. Talkative guy. I led the way to Rick’s air con and showed him.

  “Holler if you need anything.” I left him alone, but I’d set up my phone on a shelf near where he was working so I could find out what he was doing to our air conditioner.

  Finding something to do in someone else’s house while I was alone without my phone was difficult. And part of me was worried about leaving a potential dog thief alone in a room with the nice phone Rick had bought me, anyway. If the guy would stoop to taking dogs, surely a phone would be easy money for him?

  I went into the living room and turned the TV on, but quickly turned it off again. I needed to hear what Mr. Freeze was doing. He might not tell me when he was leaving. Wait. Did I need to pay a bill before he left? I was pretty reluctant to hand over my hard-earned cash to a guy who might be a dog thief.

  Was this what it felt like to own a house? All stress and uncertainty coupled with a strong sense that I was being taken for a ride by the repair guy?

  I ended up counting the threads in the rug in front of the fireplace. I lost count too many times to ever figure out how many there were. Finally, after about twenty minutes, repair guy loudly clanged tools back into a bag. I got up and returned to the kitchen.

  “Is it fixed?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What about the bill?”

  “I’ll mail it.”

  “Oh, okay, sure. Thanks.” Feeling awkward, I went to the door and held it open for him. The moment he stepped out, I closed and locked the door then went straight to my phone to call Rick.

  “He’s leaving,” I told him.

  “On it. Did you see him doing anything odd?”

  “Not sure. I need to watch the video I recorded.”

  “Great. Talk soon.” He ended the call and I assumed he was tailing our suspect. I looked back through the video. The guy had opened up the air conditioner then placed something inside it. It looked like he’d spent a lot of time on his phone before sealing the unit again.

  I went to the front cover of the air conditioner and tried to pull it off. It was attached quite hard but I knew I needed to see what was in there. I had a gut feeling that whatever it was, it might be the key to the missing dogs.

  Using a couple of dinner knives from Rick’s kitchen drawer, I managed to prize the plastic off. It was easy to see what shouldn’t be in there but knowing what it was, I froze in fear and just stared at it.

  Chapter 17

  Rick

  The van went past at a sedate pace. I would have preferred my own car for tailing, since it didn’t have big lights mounted to the top announcing my job to anyone who saw them. I waited for two cars to go by, then I began following Mr. Freeze.

  He immediately left Snake Eye, which wasn’t surprising, since I knew pretty much everyone in the town and I didn’t remember seeing this van parked outside anyone’s home at night time.

  He was an out-of-towner. But he wasn’t heading toward Phoenix. That was north, and we were headed south. Very odd.

  We weren’t so far from the Mexican border, and I didn’t like our chances of trying to stop him if he crossed over. I mean, sure, we had an extradition treaty. If they caught up with him. Mexico was the gateway to the whole of South America, a continent with enough hiding places for every wanted criminal in the US.

  I was about to call it in when he abruptly turned right along a dirt road. I slowed and pulled over, watching him until I figured I was far enough behind not to be noticed. Tailing in the desert was harder than anywhere else. There were no plants or buildings to use as cover. Just miles and miles of hot, flat sand. And not enough gas stations.

  I was off-road in a sedan that wasn’t built for this. I bounced up and down on the uneven ground and I had to slow to a crawl, skidding around. My back wheels kicked up sand.

  I was going to lose him.

  I remembered a trick Mike had told me once, about driving on sand. The wheels were liable to getting stuck because the sand wasn’t solid enough. He swore by driving in a high gear even at low speeds.

  I tried it.

  The car slowed but began to feel more stable. I started making ground on the van. It abruptly stopped and I had to slam on the brakes. I ground to a halt quickly as I hit some softer sand. By now, the man in the vehicle ahead had jumped out and was running toward me. He looked to be carrying an automatic assault rifle.

  Shit.

  I needed backup.

  I threw my car into reverse but it was stuck in some sand. He began shooting at me. I couldn’t move my car. With nothing else to do, I took out my gun from the glovebox, opened my car door and hid behind it for protection.

  I didn’t have my police radio because I wasn’t in uniform. All I had was my phone, and I’d left it on the dashboard.

  Another burst of gunfire landed near me. I peered around the edge of the door. Mr. Freeze was pissed. I wasn’t sure I could hold him off for much longer, but I was going to give it my best.

  Avery

  Staring back at me from inside the air conditioning unit was a big black camera with a shiny lens. There was something weird about seeing a camera. It must have been watching me the whole time I replayed the video of Mr. Freeze, but now I saw it, I was afraid.

  I didn’t know whether to move or not. Obviously, it had just seen me remove the front of the air conditioner. That meant whoever was watching knew I had found the camera. And if it recorded sound, it would know I’d called Rick.

  I tried to remember if I’d said anything to him that might make it obvious Rick was following Mr. Freeze. I didn’t think so.

  It’s just a camera. Nothing to fear.

  I got my own phone and took photos of everything inside the air conditioner. I didn’t know what the second thing in there was but it looked like another electronic doodah.

  I didn’t know where Rick was or whether he was safe. The best plan at this point was to call the precinct and let them know something was amiss.

  “Hey, Mike? It’s Avery. Rick and I were investigating the missing dogs, he’s tailing someone, but they put a camera in his air conditioner and now they know that he’s onto them. Can you send someone out?”

  “Sorry, can you back this up and explain properly?” Mike sounded really confused and I didn’t know why. I needed him to get with the program.

  “No time! Rick’s in danger. He’s taken the squad car to tail a bad guy. Can you go after him?”

  “Any idea which way he went?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll use his phone signal. Don’t worry, Avery. I have no idea what is going on but we won’t let anything bad happen to Rick.”

  “Thanks.”

  I felt a rush of gratitude. I didn’t want to lose him. He was the first decent guy I’d ever met.

  The problem with being the person left behind was I now had to wait to find out what was going on. I wished I had a car of my own, I would have gone after Rick by myself.

  I smiled as I thought about how pissed off he would be if I had.

  I went outside to check on Duke, since he’d been quiet the whole time I’d been on the phone. When I got out there, my worst fears were confirmed. He wasn’t in his dog run. Shit. I walked around the enti
re garden then the house, in case he’d gotten in while I was outside. No dog.

  I went back to the phone to let Bob know.

  Rick

  I was out of bullets. Mr. Freeze was not. He fired again and a burst of pain in my shoulder told me I’d been hit.

  I needed to try and get him to talk.

  “Listen, you can still change your mind right now. If you kill me, you’re going down for murder one. No judge in the state will let you off if you kill a cop.”

  “Shut up.”

  Another hail of bullets landed around me. I hadn’t expected this to get violent so fast.

  “What’s your name, son?” I asked him.

  “I said shut up.”

  But I’d noticed, while he was listening, he wasn’t shooting.

  “I have backup coming,” I told him. “They’ll be here any moment to arrest you. If they see you aiming a firearm at me, or shooting at me, they’ll shoot to kill. Put the gun down.”

  I wasn’t even thinking about whether my life was in danger. It was one of those moments where things just happened, and I knew I couldn’t control any of this.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. I breathed a sigh of relief. Blood was pouring down my arm from where he’d shot me. Must have hit something important. Damn.

  I tried to think my way through this situation. Truth be told, we weren’t hostage negotiators in Snake Eye. The only training I had for this moment was a half-day course on getting suicidal people down off bridges. And I hadn’t taken too many notes because we didn’t have any bridges or tall buildings in Snake Eye.

  What would my dad do?

  “You like dogs?” I shouted to Mr. Freeze.

  “I hate them.”

  “That’s a shame, there’s a lot of them out here in the desert.”

  “Dogs? Shut up. You’re lying.”

  “Naw. You’ve heard of dingoes? Australian desert dogs? Yeah, we got Arizona dingoes right here.”

  “There’s no dogs here.”

  “Sure there are. You might have missed them because it’s puppy season. There’s no force as powerful as a bitch with a new litter. They smell you on their territory? You’re dog food.”