Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  “Cassie, please,” Bernice said, “please try not to let him get hurt.”

  “I promise you, Bernice, I’ll do my best. Thank you.”

  She hung up without saying anything else, and I dialed Alfie immediately.

  “Gimme something hot,” Alfie said when he answered. He often had some kind of weird line that he used when he answered the phone.

  I rattled off the phone number to him. “That’s Danny Kendall’s cell number. Can you find it?”

  “Does a duck go putt-putt-putt across the lake when he farts? Hang on, this will only take a few minutes. Okay, I found the carrier, now I’m getting the electronic identification number for the phone. With that, I can turn on its GPS without him even knowing it. Okay, three, two, one, bingo! GPS is on, getting the location…”

  He was quiet for about ten seconds, and then he came back on the line.

  “Cassie?”

  “Yeah?” The back of my neck started crawling again.

  “Do you have your gun on you?”

  “Ye-es,” I said slowly. “Why?”

  “Because that phone is inside your house. I’m looking at a Google Earth map showing where it’s located, and the pin is right smack on your house.”

  “Okay, thanks, Alfie,” I said as calmly as possible. “I’ll talk to you later.” I ended the call and leaned closer to Dex.

  “Danny’s phone,” I whispered in his ear, “is inside this house right now.”

  Dex was cool. He pretended I had said something sexy and chuckled, kissed me, then raised his arms and stretched. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m ready for something to drink. Want anything from the kitchen?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll come with you.”

  We both got up off the couch and started toward the kitchen, and I suddenly spun, drew my new Kimber, and started going through the hallway. Dex checked the kitchen and the bathroom, then the garage, and then came hurrying down the hall to catch me as I got to our bedroom.

  There was no sign of Danny anywhere in the house, but we went through it again, just to be sure. When we still didn’t find him, I took out my phone and started to dial his number, hoping to make the phone ring so we could find it.

  Dex snatched it out of my hand. “I know what you’re doing,” he said, “and I think it might be a really bad idea. What we need to do is grab the cat and get out of this house, now.”

  It suddenly hit me what he was saying. Cell phones can be used as detonators on bombs, and I was just about to dial that very number. I spun, ran for the living room and grabbed Critter, and then both of us were out the front door and into the yard.

  I called Pennington as soon as we were out behind our cars. It took a few seconds to tell him what was going on, and there were sirens splitting the air only a minute later.

  Five squad cars showed up, along with a fire truck and an ambulance. A few minutes later, the bomb squad arrived with that weird truck of theirs. Pennington pulled in right behind them and walked over to where Dex and I were standing behind the fire engine.

  “You’re absolutely certain his phone is in your house?” Pennington asked.

  I nodded. “My computer guy is,” I said, “and that’s good enough for me.”

  He nodded. “Well, if he’s put it inside your house, I’d almost bet it’s rigged to a bomb. You are one lucky lady, do you know that? It’s a miracle he hasn’t set it off already.”

  The bomb squad guys were putting on their armored suits, and then they took a weird-looking device and started toward the house. The thing looked like a large portable radio, almost like a boombox, but it had a long rod that was attached to it by a cord.

  “What’s that thing?” I asked Pennington.

  “Electronic bomb sniffer,” he replied. “If there is a bomb in there, that thing will find it.”

  We stood back and watched, and the minutes dragged by. I was as nervous as could be, constantly afraid that Danny would call his phone and set off the bomb while those cops were inside. I know they were wearing armor, but I’m just not that confident it would have actually protected them.

  Twenty minutes went by, and then thirty. They were still inside, still going through the house and trying to find the bomb. After forty-five minutes, they came outside again, and took off their helmets as soon as they stepped out the door.

  “No bomb in there,” one of them called out. Everybody started to relax, but I was still a wreck.

  “Did they find the phone?” I asked. “The phone is in there, and I can’t imagine why it would be there if it doesn’t have a bomb attached to it.”

  Pennington motioned for the bomb squad to come closer. “Guys, is there any chance you missed it?”

  “Oh, sure,” the first guy said. “We can only detect the most common explosives, so if there’s a bomb using something really weird, we might miss it. On the other hand, the explosives we can’t detect are so unusual that they’d be almost impossible to get.”

  Pennington chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, then turned to me. “You got that number?” He asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was going to call it to try to find the phone, when Dex pointed out that it might’ve been a bad idea.”

  “Try it now,” Pennington said.

  I stared at him for a moment, but then I took my phone and finished punching in the number. My thumb hovered over the dial button for about five seconds, and then I pushed.

  Nothing happened. Pennington looked at me for a second, then said, “Wait here.” He started walking toward the house, and went right through the front door.

  The phone rang about eight times, then went to voicemail, which said the mailbox was full. I hung up, and Pennington shouted out, “Try it again.”

  I rolled my eye, but I hit redial. I could hear the phone ringing on my end, and then suddenly it stopped.

  “I found it,” said Pennington’s voice. “No bomb. It was hidden behind your toilet tank, stuck to it with duct tape.”

  He came walking out of the house, holding the phone. Dex and I met him at the front steps.

  “What the hell is he trying to do?” I asked. “Is he just trying to tell me he can get into my house?”

  “I’d say he’s trying to tell you more than that,” Pennington said. “He expected you to figure out who he was, Cassie. He figured you were going to get his number and try to call him, so he planted the phone in your house to scare you. He wants you to know he can get to you anywhere, and that for whatever reason, he has no intention of actually killing you at this point.”

  I looked at him and thought about what he had just said. “He’s going to bomb another shelter,” I said. “We need to evacuate all of them, now.”

  “Good Lord,” Pennington said, “how many people are we talking about?”

  I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know, but I guess probably a hundred or so. I’ve got all of their phone numbers, but I don’t know how they’ll get everybody out of them. Any idea where we could put them?”

  He grimaced. “Only place I could think of would be the gymnasium at one of the schools,” he said. “You start calling them, tell them to just get everybody outside and away from the buildings, and I’ll see what I can do about transportation and emergency shelter.”

  He walked away and took out his own phone, while I started calling all the shelter numbers in my contacts. I had them all, because sometimes I needed to reach them after hours or on weekends.

  It took almost two hours to get through to all of them, and convince them to get everybody outside. We were lucky that it was a warm night with no rain, but a lot of the guests in the shelters were pretty upset about having to evacuate, anyway.

  Pennington had hit the jackpot. He had called somebody at City Hall, who pointed out that the National Guard Armory had plenty of room and all the cots and such that could be needed. He got hold of whoever was on night duty there, and that person managed to reach his commanding officer. Arrangements were quickly made, a
nd then someone else came up with the idea of commandeering school buses.

  By midnight, every shelter in the county was empty. The bomb squad was going from one to the other, searching through the buildings with their electronic dog nose. Dex and I finally got to bed around one, and we just laid there holding each other for an hour before either of us got to sleep.

  My phone woke me at a few minutes before six, and I snatched it up to my ear.

  “Cassie McGraw,” I said.

  “You were right,” Pennington said. “They found a bomb in the Broken Arrow Family Refuge. If it had gone off with everyone there, it probably would’ve killed more than a dozen. Most of those would’ve been kids.”

  “Wow,” I said. “We got lucky.”

  “If we got lucky,” Pennington said, “then luck must be spelled C-A-S-S-I-E. We never would have thought to check the other shelters last night if you hadn’t tracked down that phone. A lot of people in this city owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “Bull,” I said. “We just have to catch this guy and put him away.”

  “We’ve got every cop looking for him, called in all the reserves, everything. The news shows are running everything we know about him, his picture, his name, everything. We’re playing out the reward angle as hard as we can, but I’m still looking for anything more we can do. You come up with any ideas, you better call me.”

  “I will,” I promised. “I will.”

  TWENTY

  I put the phone back on my nightstand and rolled over closer to Dex. I told him what Pennington had said, that we had actually saved lives, and he wrapped his arms around me and held me tight. We laid there for quite some time, but neither of us could get back to sleep.

  We finally got up around eight and went through the motions of showers and breakfast. I really didn’t have much of an appetite, but Dex insisted I eat at least a waffle. The last thing I needed was to let my blood sugar get low, which happened to me now and then.

  I called the hospital to check on Marsha and Angie, but since I was not family, they wouldn’t tell me anything. I called Nicole a few minutes later, she told me that Marsha seemed to be doing fairly well. She was talking more, even though her jaw was still braced the way it had been, and seemed to be in better spirits.

  “You ought to stop out and see her,” she said. “She doesn’t really blame you, Cassie. I think she was still in shock that day, because she’s asked about you several times since then.”

  “I might,” I said. “Maybe I should give her a little more time, though. The last thing I want to do is make her feel worse. What about Angie? Any news there?”

  “No,” Nicole said with a sigh. “She’s still in a coma. The doctors are worried, they expected her to wake up by now. One of the nurses told me they’re thinking it’s psychological, that she’s refusing to wake up because she’s afraid of what’s waiting.”

  We talked for a few more minutes, and I told her that we knew who the bomber was, now. I didn’t go into a lot of detail, and thankfully she didn’t ask. She promised to call me if there was any change with Angie, and I said I’d let her know of any new developments with the case. We said goodbye, and promised to call each other later.

  Dex and I went to the shop building and started working again. I went back to painting, while Dex climbed up on the roof and started spreading the coating he’d had me buy. It turned out the roof was pretty solid structurally, but it hadn’t had a new application of roof coating in many years. He was putting it on thick enough, he said, that it should last at least another decade before it needed any serious repair work.

  I finished painting around noon, but Dex was still up on the roof. I called up to him that I was going to get lunch, then got in the truck and drove away. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him staring at me, and I halfway expected him to call and ask what I was doing.

  He didn’t, though. He told me later he just figured I liked driving the truck, which might have had a small grain of truth hidden in it somewhere.

  The real reason I took it, though, was because I wanted to go by the office supply store. I went in and picked him out a desk and chair, got him a computer and printer and various other office supplies and gadgets, and then I happened to spot a video security system. It worked through the Internet with a cloud storage account that could hold up to a month’s worth of video, and you could log in from any computer and see what was going on in real time. When it ran out of space, it simply started over at the beginning, slowly erasing what it already had.

  It came with six cameras, and I added that to my purchase. When I got done, I stopped by McDonald’s and grabbed us burgers and fries, then drove back to the shop.

  Dex was down off the roof by then, and he looked a little like a kid at Christmas. He loved the desk and chair, really liked the computer system, but the video security system absolutely lit his fire. We sat down and ate lunch, and then he carried everything in. He started putting up the security system while I put the desk together.

  By the end of the day, Dex said he was ready to move his tools in. He called up Jimmy and arranged for him and Nicole to come join us for dinner, so Jimmy could help load the tools onto our truck. They said they would be delighted, so we made a stop at the grocery store on the way home.

  Dex is one of those men who is just an absolute genius on the grill. We had one, a nice gas grill that we had brought from his house when he moved in with me, so we bought steaks and potatoes and corn, and I grabbed a coconut cream pie for dessert. Dex added a case of beer and we headed for the checkout line.

  Once again, since we now knew that Danny had been in the house at least once, Dex insisted on checking it out before letting me go inside. He didn’t find any sign that anyone had been there, so he helped me carry the bags in and then went to get the grill out of the garage and set it up on my back deck.

  “I’m going to need to clean it,” he said. “You might stick some of those beers in the freezer, so they get nice and cold in a hurry.”

  “Already beat you to it,” I said. “They’ll be nice and chilled by the time Jimmy and Nicole get here.”

  Oh, I spoke too soon. Jimmy and Nicole showed up about twenty minutes later, and the beers weren’t quite as cold as I like them. The guys each took one, anyway, but Nicole and I decided to wait.

  Dex had the grill fired up, and he started cooking as soon as they arrived. The corn and potatoes got buttered and wrapped in foil, then went on the grill for twenty minutes. Dex had to keep rolling them over, using his big grill spatula like a maestro waving a baton. When he figured they were ready, he moved them to the edges of the grill and tossed on the steaks.

  Nicole went into the house and came out with a couple of cans of beer, then handed me one. “I think they’re good, now,” she said. She opened hers and took a drink, then smacked her lips and moaned in delight. “Oh, yeah.”

  I popped open my own, but I decided to drink slowly. With everything going on, with Danny out there somewhere, I didn’t want to find myself impaired. I can handle a couple of beers in a single night without any noticeable effects, so I sipped at it.

  Dinner was delicious, and it was nice to have company. Dex and I didn’t entertain very often, because we both tend to be loners, but Jimmy was Dex’s best friend, and Nicole and I had grown kind of close over the last few months. We talked about having them over more often, especially since they announced they were moving in together, themselves. I couldn’t help feeling a little pride in that, since it was Dex and me who introduced them.

  After dinner, Nicole and I sat on a couple of folding chairs in the front yard, and watched the hilarity as the boys tried to load up all of Dex’s tools. As I mentioned before, he had several big toolboxes on wheels, and they were far too heavy to pick up. He backed the truck in front of the garage, then slid the bed back and tilted it down. That way, he could hook the winch cable onto the toolboxes and pull them up onto the truck.

  Each time, he had to tilt the bed back up level
so they could move the toolboxes around and strap them down. Getting everything loaded up took almost an hour and a half, so it was getting close to nine o’clock by the time they were done. Dex and Jimmy drove off with the truck, and Nicole and I got into my car to follow them.

  “Jimmy’s excited about coming to work for Dex,” Nicole said. “It’s all he’s been talking about the last few days, how they’re going to build these fantastic cars, like you see on TV.” She looked over at me and raised her eyebrows. “I know you’re not hurting for money, Cassie, but isn’t this going to cost quite a fortune?”

  “Not nearly as much as I thought,” I said. “I know that Dex is a fantastic mechanic, and this is something he’s apparently always wanted to do. I consider it an investment. He’s already explained to me how the shop will make money, and it ought to do pretty well.”

  “Okay, I’m sure you know best,” she said. “I just can’t help but wonder what will happen if you decide things aren’t working out between the two of you. The last I knew, you weren’t ready to make this any kind of long-term commitment. Has anything changed?”

  I glanced at her and grinned. “Are you asking as my friend, or as my counselor?”

  “I’m asking as your friend,” she said, sticking her tongue out at me. “I don’t think you need a counselor, and if you do, you need to find somebody besides me. No, I’m just thinking of all you’ve been through. When you guys moved in together, you made it real plain that this was sort of an experiment. Now you’re going to be some kind of business partners on top of everything else. It makes me wonder if you reevaluated your position.”

  I licked my lips and thought about it for a moment. “Maybe you’re not my counselor,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want you repeating what I’m about to say. You okay with that?”

  She pretended to zip her lips shut. “Stays between you and me, I promise.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “There are occasional private moments when it dawns on me that the last thing I would ever want is to not be with Dex. Am I in love with him? I really don’t know how to answer that, but I definitely care a great deal about him. He gives me a sense of—I guess I’d call it a sense of completeness, know what I mean?”