The Marrying Kind

by Beverly Bird

  When they were standing outside the Administration Building, Tessa hugged herself. “I guess you’re not going to let me walk home now, either,” she muttered.

  “Sure I am.”

  Her jaw dropped. God, he kept her off balance.

  “Today you’re armed,” he explained.

  And that simply, her heart swelled. It was such a matter-of-fact vote of confidence. And it was given with no questions asked. She nodded slowly.

  Gunner waited.

  “So what about tonight?” she asked finally.

  “I’ll do it on my own,” he said again. And something inside him squirmed.

  It really made the most sense for them to do it together. He would have insisted on the cooperation of any of his three earlier partners. He did want backup, another pair of ears, eyes, another mind absorbing impressions. And if he should get caught, he’d sure prefer it to be two against one, two armed detectives against Benami’s madness.

  He was protecting her again. These lines, he thought, weren’t amounting to diddly after all, at least not where it counted.

  “No,” Tess said quietly. “If he comes home in the...in the process of this, I’d rather it be two against one.”

  Gunner smiled very slowly, hearing his own thoughts.

  “What?” she demanded when she saw his grin. In that moment, he looked more arrogant, more cocky, more self-confident than ever.

  “Good point,” he agreed.

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. So how...how exactly would this be accomplished? All that security—”

  “The sensors are easy. It’s the wires that are tricky. Assuming there are no wires on the doors, all we have to do is slide underneath the beams. They rarely cover the air below three feet, two at the least.”

  “Do I want to know how you know this?”

  “I had a reckless and misspent youth.”

  “You’re a cop. You can’t possibly have a record.”

  “Maybe I was too smart to get caught at anything.” His gray eyes laughed. She couldn’t be sure if he was serious or not.

  She sighed. “I was kind of hoping you’d tell me that you’d done a stint in the Burglary Unit. Or maybe that you’d had a case once where motion sensors came into play.”

  “Nope. Sorry,” he said baldly.

  “What if they do cover below two feet?”

  “Hope’s all we’ve got here, sweetheart. I just hope they don’t.”

  “Then there are the wires on the doors to consider,” she said pointedly.

  “That’s not what you said earlier.” His voice turned sharp. “You said ‘the windows are wired and there are motion sensors on both doors.’ Those were your exact words.”

  She thought they probably had been. She was beginning to realize that he had a mind like a steel trap.

  “Gunner, I don’t want to attempt this based on assumptions,” she said too loudly.

  “Shh.” He looked. around. “We need a little circumspection here, Princess. We’re more or less standing on a street corner, in front of Administration, no less.”

  Her skin flamed. “Which just goes to show I’m not cut out for this stuff.”

  “I told you. It’s your call. If you don’t want to come with me, then don’t.”

  She saw something tick at his jaw again. She took a deep breath. “Okay. So we break open the door—”

  “The back door,” Gunner amended. “And I break it. This is one of those things like driving, Princess. I do the dirty work.”

  She’d agree to that without a fight. “So what if you slide under the sensors, then we find out that they’re lower than you thought, or that the door was wired. What then?”

  He grinned. “We run like hell.”

  She had the strongest urge to slug him. She turned her back on him and began walking instead.

  “Call me when you have your ducks in a row, Gunner.”

  “They’re lined up, Tess. Hell, they’re saluting.”

  She stopped and looked back at him wildly. To her way of thinking, they were definitely still flapping all over the pond.

  “The sensors are the biggest thing,” he said, closing the distance between them again. “So I’ll go under first. That way if I set anything off, you can get out of there pronto before the police come. No need to drag your career down the tubes along with mine.”

  Her career? She was thinking more along the lines of what it would do to her brother’s reputation, to her father’s and her uncle’s, if she were caught.

  She shuddered. “What if the alarm is the silent kind?” she asked. “I forgot to ask that. I’m not any good at this sort of thing, Gunner.”

  “It probably is. But there’s got to be a box either inside the front door, or inside both doors, something that can deactivate the system. They all have some such thing, in case the owner messes up and trips his own alarm.”

  “There are codes, though, Gunner! You can’t just cruise in and turn the damn thing off! You have to put in a code.”

  He lifted a brow at her frustration. “Exactly. I’ll find the box and check it as soon as I’m inside. If it’s blinking, then I tripped it. I’ll try to untrip it. Even if I can’t, we should have plenty of time to get out of there. The alarm rings at the security company. The company calls the homeowner to see if it was a mistake. If there’s no answer, then they call the cops. Besides, homeowners aren’t crafty or creative by nature. The codes are almost always somebody’s birthday, or their anniversary, or their social security number. I’ll punch in every number pertinent to Daphne that I can think of. If it stops blinking we’re fine. If not, we go.”

  It was, she thought, the most comfort she was going to get.

  “What time is this thing supposed to start tonight?” Gunner asked.

  “Eight o’clock,” she whispered.

  “So I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  He left her and moved back into the building to return to the annexed parking garage. Tessa watched him and hugged herself again.

  She was actually going to do this, she realized.

  She was out of her mind.

  Or maybe, she thought, maybe he was starting to rub off on her, and in a lot of ways, that was even worse.

  Chapter 8

  At a quarter to eight, Tessa sat on the edge of her bed, her hands clasped tightly between her knees. Once she looked up and caught sight of her reflection in the dresser mirror.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  She wondered if she was overdoing this. She’d dressed all in black—jeans, a turtleneck, even boots. She wore no jewelry—gold and diamonds caught light. She’d found a pair of leather riding gloves that she hadn’t used in years, dark brown though not black, and they were clenched tightly in the single fist she made with her hands.

  Her eyes fell to Matt’s picture on the dresser.

  “I have to do this,” she told him breathlessly. And if he were here, she was pretty sure he’d understand.

  “I can’t let him go in there by himself,” she explained. “He’s my partner.” And there was a sanctity about that, a deep and profound responsibility. It didn’t always matter whether you agreed totally with what the other guy was doing or not, she thought. If you disagreed often enough, then you got reassigned, the way Gunner’s other three partners had eventually done. Because when push came to shove, you had to be there for your partner. You had to cover him.

  You had to keep him alive.

  She swallowed dryly. If Matt were Gunner’s partner, she knew that he would probably go into Benami’s home with him once he realized that he couldn’t talk him out of it. That wasn’t the part that disturbed her.

  What she simply couldn’t get out of her mind was the fact that Matt would never, ever choose to break in himself. No matter what. He would let Benami walk and curse the system, but he wouldn’t break his beloved law. Just as he would not have nearly come to blows with Benami yesterday, no matter what Benami had said to her.

 
Matt had always gone by the book. As she did. And it had gotten him killed.

  She thought shakily that if Gunner had stepped through that restaurant door that night, right into the middle of a mugging, his own gun would have been in his hand before his wife, his girlfriend, his date—whatever—had even hit the street. Matt had approached the perp carefully, placatingly, his hands outstretched, trying to reason with him.

  Crack, bang, roar. Three steps and he had been down, just as she’d stepped outside.

  Tessa made a small sound in her throat. Why, dear God, was she sitting here and comparing the two of them?

  Because she felt safer doing this with Gunner—this wild, irresponsible thing—than she had walking into the mugging that night with Matt. And that was heinous. It was surely some kind of betrayal, she thought. Somehow it felt so very wrong.

  Her heart spasmed. She looked at Matt’s picture again.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t...it doesn’t negate what we shared.”

  Then the doorbell rang downstairs. It was time.

  Gunner grinned approvingly when she opened the door. His gaze coasted down her legs, moved slowly upward again, then finally settled on her eyes.

  “You could make a new career out of this, Princess.”

  In spite of herself, Tessa’s heart swelled. She told herself that she didn’t want his approval because she had dressed appropriately for a break-in. Good God. She told herself that the approval of a man .like John Gunner should be dubious at best. And something melted inside her and she felt herself smiling back at him.

  They walked to the car and when they got inside, she noticed a small, black leather pouch on the floor in front of the passenger seat. “What’s that?”

  “Tools of the trade.”

  She’d had to ask. She did not ask where they’d come from.

  He pulled into traffic much more circumspectly than usual. She noticed that he, too, was dressed all in black. It gave him a delicious, devilish air. He wore a dark, long-sleeved T-shirt, untucked, and his hair was pulled back into a short ponytail—to keep it out of the way, she imagined. She got the strong feeling that he relished the job at hand and that dressing the part was half the fun.

  The closer they got to Benami’s place, the more her heart hurtled. When they turned around at Logan Circle and started south, and it boomed, leaped, hammered. She took a deep, steadying breath.

  “What about when—if—we get inside?” she asked. “What’s your plan?”

  “We stay together,” he said promptly. “That’s the whole idea of taking you with me in the first place. Two against one. We don’t want to get separated, just in case.”

  Still, Tessa tried for bravado. “We could cover more ground more quickly if we split up.”

  “No.”

  She saw that nerve at his jaw tick a little, warning her off the subject. She let her breath out slowly. “Okay. Fine by me.”

  He grinned. “I think that’s the quickest you’ve ever given in, Princess.”

  They parked a block away, at the mouth of the alley. When Gunner put the Philadelphia Police Department cardboard in the window, she laughed nervously at the irony of it. This time he grinned sheepishly.

  It was full dark.

  They moved back up the alley on foot. There was no one else around. The night was cloudy. There was no moon. Tessa kept close to the back of a large, sprawling, brick home, probably circa 1880. Before the turn of the century, it had been someone’s city mansion.

  Benami’s place was dark. There was a small, rear stoop just big enough for two people to stand on. Four concrete steps led up it. Off to the side, chained to the ornate, wrought-iron railing, were two garbage cans.

  The rest of the area was bare concrete, maybe six feet wide to the alley. Light spilled from the rear windows of the adjacent town house, the one belonging to her friend Anita. The homes were three floors, and it seemed to Tessa that every single rear room over there was illuminated. Golden-white light spilled out onto that side of the alley.

  Gunner had the pouch in his hands.

  “Where’s your gun?” he asked.

  “Right here.” She’d holstered it under her sweater. She hadn’t worn a coat. Her nerves were too wired to let her feel the chill, and it would only get in her way. It could slow her down if she had to climb, run...

  Oh, God.

  “Give it to me,” Gunner said.

  “What? Why?” Her heart skipped again.

  “Because if you have to make a run for it, I don’t want you armed. If you get caught darting up Eighteenth Street like your tail’s on fire, it’ll be easier for you to explain if you’re not waving a gun.”

  She began shaking. She gave him her weapon.

  “I’ll give it back to you as soon as we’re inside.”

  “If we get inside.”

  “We will.” He checked the safety and shoved her revolver into the waist of his jeans, beneath his own T-shirt, then he went to work on the door.

  She didn’t want to watch him, wanted to keep her eyes open for anyone approaching up the alley, or a change in the light from next door that would tell her that someone was standing in front of one of those windows. But she was fascinated. There was something dangerous about him now, something wild and titillating. He ran a gloved hand expertly along the door frame, his gray eyes narrowed and intent, the quintessential bad boy doing plenty wrong. Her heart rate picked up again, but not with fear this time. In that moment, he was the kind of forbidden male who made good girls the world over swoon in their tracks. His face was strong, ungodly handsome, for once unsmiling.

  “The sensors!” she hissed as he finally set to work on the lock.

  “They’ll be on the inside.”

  He had more little picks in that pouch than she wanted to know about.

  A moment later there was an almost inaudible click.

  “All right,” he whispered. He hunkered down.

  “Won’t the sensors pick up the motion of the door opening?” she demanded in an undertone.

  “The good ones are made to overlook that. They’re density sensitive. The density of a body is different from that of a door. Or something like that. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough. Let’s go.”

  There was no chance for her to argue further. Gunner was flat on his belly, sliding over the threshold, sliding the door open slowly with his momentum.

  Tessa held her breath, but no sirens went off.

  She did not want to be standing out here without him, without even her gun.

  Her heart started skittering in panic again. She dropped down quickly after him, onto her tummy, moving as he had done. A few moments later, she came nose to heel with his boots. She felt ridiculous. And then her heart exploded.

  Gunner swore.

  “What? What?”

  “It’s blinking,” he answered.

  “It’s blinking? What’s blinking? The alarm’s blinking?”

  “Yeah. When was Daphne’s birthday?”

  “Her birthday?”

  “You’re repeating yourself, Tess.”

  “How am I supposed to know when her birthday was?” she hissed. “You were supposed to know this before we got here!”

  “I did. I thought I’d memorized it. I forgot.”

  “You forgot?” She scrambled to her feet beside him and started turning in little, panicked circles, looking around wildly. “Oh, my God. Oh, dear God.”

  “Chill out, Princess. I’m just playing with you. A little levity to loosen you up.”

  That was when she realized that she’d been hearing little tapping sounds all along. Gunner was working at the number pad on the alarm system.

  She was going to kill him.

  “Gotcha,” he said finally. The little red light at the top of it went out. “With seven seconds to spare.”

  “Seven seconds,” she repeated hollowly, dazed. “You don’t know that, Gunner. You can’t se
e your watch. It’s too dark. What if—”

  “I was counting in my head.”

  “In your head? While you were putting another set of numbers into that thing?”

  He turned away from the alarm to look around as well. They were in a small mudroom. “Yeah. Turned out she used her mother’s birthday.”

  She’d been right, Tessa realized. He had a mind like a steel trap.

  It was vaguely—though not much—comforting. She forced herself to breathe again as she looked around as well.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  “What did he do that night?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Walk me through how you think it happened.”

  “Right.” Breathe in, out, she instructed herself. Relax. “The dining room.”

  “The scene of the crime. Before that.”

  “Her bedroom. No, no, he would have lured her downstairs on some pretext.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “He would have had a gun, or maybe a knife, would have tried to coerce her up onto that dining room chair.”

  “So we’re looking for a weapon.” He was already moving out of the mudroom, into an adjacent laundry room. “If you were a gun, where would you be?” He skimmed all the usual clandestine places. In the washer and the dryer. Beneath the basin sink and in the drain. The tools came out again for that job. He looked in the cupboards and checked to make sure the sheet vinyl flooring was firmly fastened in all the corners. He tapped the walls for hidden safes.

  “Nothing,” he muttered quietly, stepping across the small hall into the kitchen. “Go on.”

  Tessa took another deep breath and followed him as he methodically did all the same things in that room that he had done in the laundry room. Almost without thinking about it, she began helping him.

  “Daphne fought,” she said. “Hard and well. He hadn’t been expecting so much of a fight. He had to immobilize her. He tied her hands.”

  Gunner opened the refrigerator and moved fast to hit the little button that would keep the light out. “Hold this,” he said.

  Tessa reached over his shoulder to press her gloved finger against the light button while he rummaged, opening Tupperware and various containers and peering inside. There was no way to do it without touching him. Her arms just weren’t that long.