The sincerity pouring from the man touched Sabrina. He was so genuine. She sensed it about him. This was a good and honest man.
“Tristan has to be stopped,” Lincoln said, Sajal’s gratitude rolling off him. He’d done it out of necessity, out of duty to do what was right.
Sajal put his arm around the young girl. “This is Isadora, my beautiful, precious daughter.” He kissed her forehead. “I would be so lost without you.”
Isadora began to sob. “Daddy.”
He wrapped both arms around her. “I love you. You are safe now. You are safe.”
“Hello?” the blonde called from the back of the pawn shop. “I’m not exactly partying back here.”
“Who is that?” Sabrina asked.
“Tory Von Every,” Lincoln answered.
He’d recognized her? He was that good at hunting people. Sabrina once again fought her appreciation for him that went far beyond casual.
* * *
Lincoln headed for the back of the pawn shop, where the blonde held the injured man at gunpoint. Sajal remained in the front of the shop, where he preferred to wait for police with his daughter.
Lincoln took the gun from Tory, holding it at his side after making sure it was ready to fire.
The injured man turned his grimacing face up to him and spat a vulgar curse.
Lincoln knelt before him, his forearm draped over his knee, gun hanging from his hand. “What is Tristan planning to do with the guns?”
The man responded with more vulgarities in Spanish.
“When is his next big sale?” Lincoln tried again.
The man only stared at him, glazed with pain and anger.
“Where will he go now that the police will be looking for him?” Lincoln didn’t expect an answer and received none. The man refused to cooperate. Maybe the police would have better luck.
Lincoln straightened and faced Tory, checking Sabrina to see how she’d react in the company of the woman who’d had an affair with Kirby while seeing her. A woman who was in love would react differently than one who wasn’t. Instinct told him she hadn’t been in love with Kirby, that their relationship was more complicated than that, complicated enough to keep secret.
“Why did Tristan kidnap you?” he asked Tory.
Tory glanced at Sabrina almost apologetically. “I was having an affair with him.”
Sabrina looked confused. “What about Kirby?”
After a pained hesitation, Tory said, “I was having an affair with him, too.”
She was married and having an affair with two men? Lincoln caught a hint of disgust from Sabrina, and, though he agreed, he stayed his course. “Did Tristan find out about you and Kirby?”
Tory turned to him. “Yes. And he was furious.”
“When was that?”
“Just before Kirby was killed.”
Lincoln looked at Sabrina. Tristan had more motive to kill Kirby than what she’d overheard and Kirby’s attempt to protect her. And then he’d kidnapped Tory...to force her to remain with him?
“I tried to break it off with Tristan,” Tory said, confirming Lincoln’s assumption. “When I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore, he lost it. I made the mistake of going to see him at a house he rented in Venice. He wouldn’t let me leave. That’s where he kept me until tonight. I think he was going to kill me after he was finished with me, and I think he would have been finished with me after tonight.”
“Why after tonight?” Sabrina asked.
“He’s been planning a big sale. He never discussed details in front of me, but I could tell by how anxious he was that he’s close to completing it.”
It wasn’t enough information. Of course, Tristan would be careful.
Lincoln checked on the injured man. He still lay holding his knee, but appeared to be fading from loss of blood. He was Mexican. Come to think of it, a lot of Tristan’s men were Mexican. Was that a coincidence?
“I blew it with Kirby,” Tory continued. “I could tell he was starting to lose interest, so I began to sleep with Tristan. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have fought for him. My marriage was over. Kirby once told me he wanted me to get a divorce. I put it off. I loved my husband, but, well... He knew about my affairs.” And there was no repairing a marriage that faced that kind of betrayal, when the affairs were compulsive, addictive almost. Tory had a problem in that regard. “But Kirby would have been worth fighting for. If only I hadn’t lost him before I started seeing Tristan.” She turned to Sabrina. “That was because of you, wasn’t it?”
“Kirby and I were just friends,” Sabrina said.
“Oh, I don’t think so. If you were the one who drew him away from me, he must have had strong feelings for you. Kirby hated it that I was married and hadn’t left my husband.” She sighed in exasperation, short on empathy. “I was torn over that. I have an unusual connection to my husband. There are things about him that I love, especially the way he loves me, but there were others... I wasn’t getting all that I needed.”
As in sexually.
“Now I have no one,” Tory said. “I don’t think my husband will ever forgive me.”
The man on the floor groaned. Lincoln hadn’t called for help yet. He’d wanted to talk to Tory first.
“It doesn’t sound like you deserve him,” Sabrina said to Tory. “He gave you trust and love and you gave him multiple affairs with other men and all the lies that go along with that betrayal.”
Lincoln supposed her red gloves would always come out when confronted with infidelity.
“You don’t understand,” Tory said.
“I understand you consider sex more important than your husband’s feelings. You have no concern for anyone other than yourself.”
Lincoln touched her arm, stopping her brutal honesty. They needed Tory to tell them all she knew about Tristan.
She blinked with her cooling ire. “Sorry.”
He grinned at her. “It’s okay. Just put the gloves away now.”
Her brow twitched at first in confusion, then she realized what he meant and that he was teasing her. She smiled back, and a spark of heat flashed before he tightened his control.
Turning back to Tory, who’d taken note of the exchange, Lincoln asked, “Is there anything else you can tell us about Tristan? Aside from his gun operation. Is there anything that might help the police find him?”
Tory shrugged, her gaze going around the back of the pawn shop. “He’s an abusive man. He didn’t treat me that way until I rejected him. That man has serious issues. He’s dangerous.”
She didn’t look abused now. If she had been beaten, there were no marks.
“He hates his mother. What kind of man hates his own mother? You should have heard him talk about her. Pure hate.”
“She was his stepmother,” Lincoln said.
“She was the only mother he had,” Tory argued. “She was his mother.”
Lincoln glanced at Sabrina and sensed her thinking what he was thinking; maybe it was time to go talk to Tristan’s stepmother.
“What’s her name?” Sabrina asked Tory. “Do you know where we can find her?”
Tory told them her name. “I don’t know where she lives. Tristan never said, and he never went to see her.”
“Please,” the man on the floor said, in pain and bleeding.
It was time to leave. Taking out his phone, Lincoln pressed in a number.
“Cash. Lincoln Ivy. Tristan Coulter has abducted three people and held them captive in a place called the Easy Pawn. Sabrina Tierney and I rescued them and Tristan got away. Two of his guards will need medical attention.” He told him the address and answered several questions from the detective.
Archer Latoya would not be able to protect Tristan after this. There were three victims who could
testify against him, reveal his crimes. They weren’t illegal gun trafficking crimes, but they’d be enough to turn suspicion off Sabrina and on him.
He disconnected and then turned to Sajal. “When the police get here, tell them exactly what happened.”
Sajal nodded. At last things were turning in their favor. This time he and Sabrina had witnesses.
* * *
Lincoln searched their surroundings, putting a hand on Sabrina’s back as they made their way along the sidewalk to Archer Latoya’s white, two-story home.
“Do you think he’ll talk?” she asked.
“One way to find out.”
Sunlight warmed the air under a clear blue sky. It was about midmorning now. All the houses were built close together here, and the front yards were small, many fenced in. Most had only single-car garages. Mature trees shaded the street and yards. The curtains were closed in the two dormer windows on the second level, and in the bay window on the lower level. The roll-down blinds on each of the narrow windows beside the double front door were also closed.
Here lived a man afraid to go outside.
They reached the front door.
Archer opened it before they knocked. In his early fifties, slight wrinkles creased his brow and mouth. An average-height man with a fairly trim body and no signs of gray in his brown hair, Archer stepped aside. “Come in.”
No resistance? Why did he seem so...welcoming? Or was it welcoming? Had he already heard about the kidnappings? He could have a police scanner, or someone could have called him. Cash? Perhaps to gloat? To push him into a corner? He didn’t appear to feel pushed.
Leading them past a laundry room that led to the garage door and into the living room off the front entry, Archer went to the front window Lincoln had seen from outside and stood there. The curtains were sheer, but made it difficult for anyone to see inside during the day.
He glanced around the average-size home. Behind him, all was as it had been the last time he was here, except this time it was daylight. A portion of one wall had been opened up to the kitchen. A small, round table sat before a glass sliding door. A stairway along the side of the dining area led upstairs. In the living room, the flat-screen TV that hung on the wall was dark this time. It was quiet in the house. Archer didn’t have much, a sofa and a chair with an ottoman, and he didn’t clean very well.
“We just came from Easy Pawn,” Lincoln said.
“I heard what happened. Cash Whitney responded to the call.” Archer remained standing at the window, resigned, and not happily so.
“Who told you?” Lincoln asked.
With a pass of his gaze to Sabrina, Archer put his hand on the window frame and sighed.
Sabrina moved beside Lincoln at the end of the sofa and coffee table, slipping her arm so that it hooked comfortably with his. Why she did that, he couldn’t guess, but he suspected she’d sensed the same as he had about Archer.
“I’m off duty today, but another officer called,” Archer finally said, still with his back to them.
“You must know I couldn’t have killed Kirby,” Sabrina said.
With that, he dropped his hand and turned. “Yes. I know.” More of that resignation.
Sabrina’s fingers flexed on Lincoln’s arm and did more than make him feel protective. Heat flickered for her. He doused it before it could grow into an all-out blaze.
“I’ve known it all along.”
“Then why—”
“Tristan Coulter is my half brother,” he cut Sabrina off.
“We know that,” she snapped.
“We were never close,” he replied, unaffected by her tone. “Ours was not a family of close ties. Tristan and I grew up together and that’s the extent of it. He never liked me. I never liked him or his sister. Both of them were conniving backstabbers. My mother left my father when I was young and took up with Tristan’s father shortly thereafter. She didn’t know he was abusive until after they were married. Tristan and I were angry with her for different reasons, but it was no pact.”
“Then why protect him?”
“After we left the house, we got to know each other. Grew closer, especially after his father died.” He spoke with bitterness now clipping his tone. “I didn’t realize until it was too late that he’d planned it that way. He never wanted to be close to me. He only wanted someone to control, someone in law enforcement. And at the time, I was vulnerable. My marriage was failing. I had no one to turn to.”
And Tristan had used that to his advantage, become the only one Archer could turn to.
“So you let him pay off all your debt?”
The depressed resignation hung over Archer’s brow. “He offered to loan it to me. Said I could pay him back over ten or twenty years, no interest. I was desperate. My wife had a credit card problem. She spent more money than we made. Not that I was any better. I’ve never been good at managing money. I spent it, too, on different things. We were in big trouble, going under fast with no rope to pull ourselves out. We were three months late on the mortgage payments, and even further behind on the credit cards and car payments. Creditors were calling multiple times a day. And then my wife came to me one night and said she was leaving me. She had her bags packed and had spent the day going through our things. Anything she wanted was already gone.”
Falling silent as he lamented over the memory, Archer continued after a moment. “My lawyer said I’d be stuck with half of everything. Most couples split profits from property and bank accounts. We were talking nothing but debt. The debt was staggering. Over a hundred thousand after you added in our upside-down mortgage. Half was crippling.”
He looked from Sabrina to Lincoln as though checking to see if they understood. Then once again, he continued. “About a month after the divorce was final, I found out she had been seeing another man and planned to marry him. He was a doctor and made a lot of money. That’s how she paid her half of the debt. I wondered why she was so calm about it, not worried over how she was going to pay her half. She didn’t care that I was left with the other with no way of paying for it.”
Archer rubbed his hands together, a jaded man.
“And Tristan came to your side,” Sabrina said.
Without looking up from his morose contemplation, Archer nodded.
“How did he threaten you to hide evidence?” Lincoln asked.
Now Archer looked up with the feral eyes of a caged wild animal. “A few weeks before he gave me the money, he invited me over to what he called his friend’s house. We spent an hour there talking. Tristan and the man disappeared for a short while into an office. I didn’t think anything of it then. But after he gave me the money to pay off my debt, he brought a picture of me shaking hands with the man he’d introduced me to.”
The money he’d given him had come from a gun sale, an illegal one.
“If the chief learns about that, I’ll lose my job,” Archer said. “And you can bet that if I betray Tristan, he’ll do his best to make that happen, or worse. For all I know, he’s fabricated enough evidence to show I was the one who made the gun deal.” He looked at Sabrina. Tristan had done the same to her.
“So you’d send an innocent person to jail?” Sabrina didn’t fall for the sympathy ploy, if that was what Archer had intended. “You’d throw someone else in jail to save yourself?”
Archer’s demeanor softened, and the same resignation that had shrouded him when they’d first arrived came over him again. “No. I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. An apology may seem shortcoming, but you have it. I’ve been trying to find a way out from under Tristan’s control ever since he double-crossed me. But you must understand why I have to be careful. Tristan has no empathy. He kills without remorse, whenever it suits his needs or he feels threatened. He’ll do it himself or have one of his men do it for him. And he’s destroyed my life far more than it
would have been with my wife leaving me and being left with debt I had no way of paying. I’d like nothing more than to expose him, but I’d also like to survive doing so.”
Sabrina folded her arms and didn’t respond, her indecision over whether to believe him evident.
Lincoln put a stop to his adoration and mentally ticked off all the points Archer had raised that he’d like to question. “Has he asked you to do anything for him before this?”
“No. But if I don’t stop him, it will never end. I can’t live like this,” he said to Sabrina. “I can’t live under Tristan’s control.”
“How is it that he has so many men working for him?” Lincoln asked.
Archer turned to him. “Gun trafficking is lucrative to those who know how to work it. I managed to find out about one man. Cesar Castillo. He’s a gang member.”
Sabrina inhaled a shocked breath.
“The Avenidas, they call themselves,” Archer went on. “It’s Spanish for the Avenues. Castillo was their leader.”
Spanish. There was the link.
“Was?” Lincoln queried.
“I haven’t found his body yet, but you can bet Tristan had him killed.”
“Tristan and Cesar were friends?” Sabrina said it as she absorbed the information.
Archer scoffed. “Tristan doesn’t know how to be a friend. He saw an advantage to befriending Castillo. Selling guns. But Castillo refused him.”
“Who is their leader now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would Tristan befriend a street gang leader?” Lincoln asked.
“The Avenidas aren’t like other gangs. Their main focus is to support Mexicans. They could almost pass as businessmen. They’re educated and have honest jobs. They aren’t centrally located, don’t wear colors or have a strict hierarchy. That makes them hard to catch. They look like you and me.”
“What makes them dangerous?” Lincoln asked.
“Don’t let their appearance fool you,” Archer said. “The Avenidas are an extremely violent gang. Warring against other gangs, protecting their criminal activity. They’ve murdered innocent bystanders, people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. They like money. Something they share in common with Tristan, and Tristan has a business mind. He can make them a lot of money.”
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