by Anita DeVito
“To the bar,” he said, holding her in place and smartly not saying anything about how wet his shirt was becoming.
She nodded. “I saw you check out the blondes—”
“I didn’t.”
She laughed, just a little. “You absolutely did. I wanted to know what you knew. And I knew how to find out.” She pushed him away and crossed her arms under her chest. “You can ask for an apology, but I won’t give it. You got what you wanted—a hard, guilt-free fuck. Nothing held back. I got what I wanted. No regrets.”
Tom winced. His love life was like one of those little plastic swimming pools they use for toddlers—cheap and shallow. Sure, it was fun to splash around in when things were hot, but once things cooled off, there was nothing left but empty. He opened his mouth to deny her pointedly accurate description of his intention from the minute he saw her. He shut it because he couldn’t.
The woman standing in front of him dared him to rebuke her. He looked at her face, seeing both strength and vulnerability in her beautiful features. In that moment, he felt something, a…connection. That’s what it was. He felt a connection to her that he had never felt with a woman. It wasn’t just sex. It was great sex. And it was the freaking incredible few hours they had spent together in that restaurant talking. Laughing. And, since he was being honest, he could admit that he respected her. After all, she had outsmarted him at a game he’d been playing for years.
He had to respect that.
He reached out to Peach, wanting to soothe the ache she wore on her sleeve. She stepped to the side, knocking his hand away.
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Oh, I’m not so sure about the ‘no regrets’ part.”
Jeb stood at the small kitchen table, disemboweling Peach’s purse. Her wallet was set to the side, flipped open to a none-too-flattering DMV picture.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said loud enough to wake her grandfather.
“What does it look like, Esmeralda?”
She kicked hard. Right between his legs. Jeb went down and took the table with him. Curled into the obligatory fetal position, he cradled his wounded soldiers as he rocked back and forth.
She put her foot on his throat hard enough to get his attention. “Are you going to use that name ever again?”
“No, ma’am.”
She pushed a little harder. “So we have an understanding, you and me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Jesus,” Tom said as he walked into the room. “Jeb, what did you do?”
Jeb’s eyes flashed. “Me? She’s standing on my throat. She kicked me in the balls, and you want to know what I did?”
She removed her foot but stayed light on her feet. Jeb was a big man, and she had no intentions of giving him any advantage. “If you guys are done, get on your way. I have work to do.”
Tom righted the table and picked up the purse and its contents while Jeb climbed off the floor. “What kind of work do you do?”
She shook her head. “The question and answer period of our show is over. It’s time for you to exit, stage right. Take the bug you put on my truck with you.”
“I want to talk to you more, about the accident. Here,” he said when she was about to put him off and handed her his card. “Call me. Well find a time and a place that works for both of us. What you know…it could make all the difference.”
Oh, he knew the right thing to say. She was feeling raw and irritated at Jeb, but those would pass. She was beginning to trust him and would give him any help she could. “Fine. I’ll call you tomorrow. Now please go. I need to take care of my grandfather.”
Like gentlemen, they left. Ten minutes passed, and she did a sweep of the neighborhood. If they were still out there, they were good. She didn’t find a thing out of the ordinary. Her cell phone rang. She’d deleted the contact but recognized the number. With a shake of her head, she declined the call. She’d had enough emotion for one day. She needed to work, to focus her mind in order to give her heart a break. The kitchen table was commandeered as a desk. She booted her computer and accessed the portable hard drive. Methodically, she searched and studied the files from Tom’s computer and the info she scanned from Hawthorne’s office.
Peach was blessed—or cursed—with a mind that loved chaos. She had a knack for seeing the order in disorder, for deciphering patterns and visualizing in three dimensions. Each image appeared on the screen for seconds, maybe a minute. She wasn’t memorizing it. She was looking for relationships. How thing 1 and thing 2 were related. How thing 3 was disconnected.
Two hours later, she had a worm. A nice plump, juicy worm, the kind that would make great bait on the end of a line. If she played this one right, she might just hook a thief.
Hawthorne’s files had given Peach a firm direction, but it lacked details. There was a reason people said, “The devil is in the details.” It was most often where a man screwed the hell up.
She needed to go out.
Poppy had come out of his room, tired bags under his eyes. He shuffled to the living room and turned on his shows. It was hard to leave him alone in this difficult time, but sitting in the house did neither of them any good. They needed facts, and she knew where to find them. She changed into jeans and a knit shirt that fit like a second skin, then restocked her “work” bag.
“Poppy, I’m going out.”
“Work or play?”
Her hand on his shoulder, she leaned in and kissed his leathered cheek. “My work is play.”
He clasped her hand. “You had a call before. On your phone. Maybe it was your friend. Will he be coming back with you? You would make a good team.”
“Poppy,” she said as a warning, then softened her tone. “The only man I need on my team is you. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Her grandfather kissed her hand. “Vaya con Dios.”
“Amen,” she muttered as she set out to not steal more information.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday, April 11 two p.m.
Tom felt back on track thanks to the hard drive Peach stole and then returned, and construction workers willing to talk. The phone interviews weren’t his first choice, but he would take what he could get. The stories varied, as they always did, but the basics were the same. Conditions weren’t perfect but were far from bad. There had been no discussion of postponing the lift. Start of shift inspection didn’t capture anything worth noting with the equipment. The only things that were out of the norm involved two of the missing.
“I’m back,” Jeb called out, the slam of the exterior door following. His boots reverberated in a sharp retort against the hollow floors. He stepped into the room wearing a hard, cold expression. “Until we get a handle on whatever is going on, I don’t want you driving the F&F truck. You’re too easy to spot. I brought in one of our special duty vehicles to use.”
Special duty meant tinted windows, bulletproof glass, armor, and a built-in gun safe. He wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse that Jeb was taking this so seriously. “I’ll need to take the truck back to Fabrini.”
“Leave it here. He can come get it. You aren’t driving it. Period. You called me. You play by my rules.” Jeb leveled his stare until Tom nodded. “Make any progress?”
“Yes and no. Tell me what you make of this. Joe Carter, our missing project engineer, didn’t do anything that could be considered edgy or dangerous, at least without a supervisor telling him to. He didn’t go out on the erected steel. He didn’t go into the holes.”
“He didn’t go up into that thing that the crane lifted?”
“The basket. Exactly. He was allowed to—it wasn’t that he couldn’t or shouldn’t—it was that he didn’t. Survivors I spoke with didn’t respect him. How could they when the guy liked to boss but stay on firm ground? So the question that’s nagging me is…why that day? Why would someone who stayed away from exposure get in that man basket on a windy day?”
Jeb shoved aside drawings laid out on the next desk, resting his hip o
n the clean surface. “No one told him to?”
“Not that anyone knew. Hawthorne would have been the one to do the telling.”
“And you can’t ask him.”
“No. And there’s another funny thing. Hawthorne climbed into the tower right before the lift started. People said Jack went everywhere, all the time, but you have to question the timing.”
“If he was the boss, shouldn’t he have been, I don’t know, doing whatever crane bosses do?”
“The crew foreman was the guy running the work from the ground. Jack’s work came in bringing everything together, then he was smart enough to stay out of the way.”
“You think it was just a bad timing thing? For both of them?”
Tom started to answer but stopped. He didn’t have one. Dumb luck—good and bad—did happen. Still, it bothered him that the crane failed in a completely different way than the math said it should. He didn’t want to get too hung up, assume too much. He learned the lesson: don’t assume; it’ll make an ass out of u and me. He slammed the keyboard drawer closed, needing his programs on a system with serious processing speed. The computer he used—Hawthorne’s secretary’s—was like walking a Chihuahua when you’re used to running with a Greyhound. “Damn I wish I had my computer back. Why couldn’t she have stolen the whole thing?” He dropped his frustrated head in his hands to keep from banging it against the wall.
“We’ll get you up and running tomorrow. Our IT guy is on it, and there’s a new computer on the way.”
“’kay.”
“Clyde, I didn’t expect overflowing buckets of gratitude, but something more than a ‘kay’ is in order.”
“Sorry.” He sat back, running his fingers through his hair.
Jeb pulled out a chair and straddled it to face Tom. “You’ve been sulking since we left your girlfriend.”
The accusation rammed the crane from his head. He had worked very hard to not think about her in the last four hours. One use of the “G” word and he couldn’t think of anything but her. And it pissed him off. He was not a guy that needed a G word. Ever.
“You pissed that she scammed you?”
“No.” He’d replayed the night in his head, and she’d played him right. Exactly right. “It’s more like I respect her for it.”
Jeb let out a belly laugh. “You’re falling for that delinquent.”
“She isn’t a delinquent,” he snapped. How dense was Jeb that he couldn’t see the obvious? “She’s smart as hell, brave, funny.”
“She is lawless, has questionable limits to her morals, uses sex as a means to an end, and steals.” Jeb ticked off the “facts” one finger at a time. “She’s a delinquent.”
“If she’s all those things, why did she give me my files back? She could have kept them for herself.”
“You don’t think she gave you the only copy, do you?”
His brain stumbled. “Shit.”
“You got issues.”
The phone rang. Tom answered hoping for a long conversation that didn’t involve women. Any of them. “Riley.”
Fabrini was on the other end. The conversation was short and sour. Didn’t matter, Tom was ready for a break. He shut the computer down and packed up the few files he’d printed. The hard drive and loaner phone in hand, Tom followed Jeb out the door. It felt so wrong to leave work carrying no more technology than fit in his hand. “I’m spinning my wheels here without my computer. Maybe I’ll get something from Fabrini.”
“I said I’ll have you another one tomorrow.” They could have gone to a store and bought one, but since opening Chameleon Securities, Jeb had become a champion of cyber security. More like a dictator. Hence, Chameleon provided IT security for Riley Architects and Engineers.
“Thanks, Jeb. I know I didn’t say it before, but I do appreciate it.” The wind off Lake Erie pounded on them over the thirty feet from the trailer door to the Jeb’s unmarked, decked-out Escalade.
“We’ll make it right. What’s the address?” Jeb activated the navigation system.
“I want to go to this bluff first. Peach said she parked over the site. It has to be to the west.” He didn’t know what it would tell him, but sometimes, seeing things from a different point of view was enough to make things happen. Minutes later, they stopped in a large parking lot with a centerfold view of the site in the foreground and downtown Cleveland in the back. Middle of the day, the park was nearly empty with temperatures still near forty degrees. Through the windshield, Tom looked over the remnants of the crane and the casino and hotel it was building. It appeared smaller but no less impressive. Behind it, the lake sloshed against the shore, taunting him. He wished he knew her secrets. “Do you think they’ll find them? Peach’s uncle and the others?”
“Eventually, sure. But soon? That I can’t say.”
“Can you image what they are going through? Peach and her grandfather. Every now and then, I get this…flash…in my head back to when Katie disappeared. I don’t think I could have handled it…” It had been one of the worst moments of his life. He’d locked away the nightmare, but imagining Peach’s feelings put him back in the middle of it.
“I’ve had to handle a lot of messed-up shit. Too much and it cost me. You’re circling around to something. You might as well spill it. You don’t tell me, I’ll sic your cousin on you.”
God. This was going to be hard to say. “Peach said some things about my lifestyle.” He stared back out the window, not wanting to see the judgment. “Some very accurate and not flattering things. I’ve never wanted a wife. I don’t need anyone, and I’ve never wanted someone who needed me. I know how that sounds, but that’s the truth. I don’t want to be responsible for someone else. For their happiness. For their health. That’s not for me.”
“It sounds like it bothers you.”
“It doesn’t. Or it didn’t.” He swore under his breath. “She treated me exactly like I’ve treated dozens of women.” He turned to his friend, looking for the reaction. There was none. Of course not. This was Jeb. His face was carved from granite and schooled in the military. Whatever ran through his head didn’t show. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“That was your secret? That you don’t want a serious relationship?” Jeb didn’t school his face now. He let Tom know exactly how stupid the confession was. “As for how she treated you, you are flat-out wrong. In the year I’ve known you, you have never once deceived a woman about what you wanted or where you were going. You may not have wanted anything long term, but you never acted with anything but respect and honesty. She did not at all treat you the way you treat your ladies. Is there something else gnawing at you?”
It helped, hearing that he wasn’t a user. His friend’s opinion mattered, and he was right. While he might not love a woman, he loved women. All of them. He would never intentionally hurt one, physically or emotionally. “When I was talking to her in her bedroom, she told me she wasn’t going to apologize. I didn’t realize I wanted an apology until she said I couldn’t have one. What’s with that?” It bothered him that it bothered him that she wouldn’t apologize. And it really bothered him that his thoughts were devolving into the style of Dr. Seuss. Oh bother. He let out a deep exhale that ended with a “Fuck me.”
“That’s normal. Most people want what they can’t have. That’s the way my mother used to get me to cut my hair. She told me I couldn’t. Peach told you you can’t have an apology, so of course, you want one.”
“She was telling me she saw her uncle fall. Her eyes, Jeb. I could see the pain. All I could think about was taking her away from it. Who thinks like that?”
Jeb sighed. “I think I know what’s going on here. You’re not going to like it.”
Sleeping pills, thievery, seduction. What else was there? “Just…tell me.”
“You’ve gone over for her.”
He waited for the punch line, but it didn’t come. “Did you not listen to a thing I said? I don’t go over. For anyone. Period.”
“Of cours
e you have. It’s not a bad thing, especially if the delinquent feels the same way.”
“She’s doesn’t, and I don’t.” He squeezed his hands into fists when Jeb chuckled. “I’ve known her for three days. I definitely have not and will not go over for her.”
Jeb put the truck in gear. “Anything you say. You got Fabrini’s address?”
The only one who spoke on the drive to F&F construction was the GPS woman. She sounded like every day would be a good day if only “in one quarter mile, turn right.” Tom would be the first to tell her, it wasn’t that easy, sister. Make three right turns and where would you find yourself? Left! And who wanted to be left?
“If we were in the deep south, I’d think this was a plantation.” Jeb stared at the building as he navigated the truck.
“Wrong style. Left me out here. I mean, leave me out here.” The truck was still rolling when Tom put shoe leather to pavement. He carried only the new phone Jeb loaned him and the notebook he’d found in the trailer’s supply cabinet. Naked was what he was.
Frank Fabrini built his “world headquarters” on a generous parcel of land, close to the lake, twenty-five minutes west of the city. The stone building was a tribute to the Victorian mansions of the late 1800s. Three stories high with windows that went floor to ceiling, the building looked ready, willing, and able to host a wedding. Tom entered through a heavy oak door that opened without a sound. Inside, a young woman in an electric blue dress came around the corner. She wasn’t conventionally pretty but had a shapely figure and a warm smile. “Dr. Riley?”
He grinned, and it felt good. “What gave me away?”
“Mr. Fabrini said you’d be easy to recognize. I’m Tammy, his assistant. This way, please.”
She left him in a well-appointed waiting area, but he didn’t sit; he paced. His disobedient mind went back to the conversation with Jeb. Him going over for Peach. Ridiculous. He didn’t want to be on the end of some woman’s leash any more than he wanted one sitting at his feet and giving him puppy dog eyes whenever he went his own way. If he had a woman, and that was a big if, she would have to be independent. They would be together when it worked for both of them, and when it didn’t, there wouldn’t be any kicking or screaming. They would be adults. Tom nodded. “Reasonable.”