by Diana Palmer
Kilraven smiled. “Not a chance. She’s one tough bird.”
Matt caught his breath. He smiled back, hesitantly. He had perfect white teeth. That smile changed his whole look. “Okay.” He glanced at the little woman next to him. “Juana has to go. She’s already late for work and she has to take her kids to her aunt’s house. It’s all right,” he told the little woman. “I can stay by myself. I’m twelve.”
“You cannot,” Juana argued.
“His mother said that a Señora del Rio who lives a couple of doors down might be able to stay with Matt,” Kilraven began.
“But, no,” Juana said at once. “That is my abuela, my grandmother. She went to see her sister this morning! Her sister is in Juarez!”
“I told you, I don’t need babysitting,” Matt argued. “I’ve stayed by myself after school, until Mom got home. I know not to answer the door unless I know who it is.”
“You cannot be alone,” Juana argued. “You are not able…”
“I am so!” Matt flashed back. “I’m perfectly all right!”
Juana looked at the newcomers with anguish.
“Everybody makes such a fuss,” Matt muttered. He shifted on the sofa, dragging himself toward the arm.
That was when Winnie noticed the wheelchair. Matt pulled it toward him, placed it within reach and propelled his small body into it with efficiency. “I can do everything except walk,” he muttered. “I can even cook. And there’s a phone. I can call for help if I need to.”
Winnie felt her pride drop to her ankles. The boy was proud, and he didn’t like being thought of as handicapped. But he certainly couldn’t stay by himself.
“I must go,” Juana said. “I’m so sorry.”
“We’ll take care of Matt,” Kilraven said easily. He smiled. “I’m sure his mother is grateful that you stayed so long.”
“It was nothing. She sat with me when my husband was in the hospital. Here, in this neighborhood, we look out for each other. Tell her I pray for her, okay?”
“I’ll do that,” Kilraven said.
She and her children left, but not before Juana bent to hug Matt and assure him that his mother would be all right.
The door closed behind her.
“Who are you?” Matt asked his guests. “Law enforcement?”
“I am,” Kilraven said. “She’s a 911 dispatcher.” He indicated Winnie.
“I’m going to be a detective when I grow up,” Matt assured the tall man. “There’s nothing I can’t do, if I want to. Mom taught me that. She’s really going to be all right?”
“Honest,” Kilraven said. He glanced at the game console. “That’s an old one.”
“Yeah,” Matt said, grinning, “but it still works pretty good. Mostly I play the original Halo and it’s great for that one.”
“You play online?”
Matt shook his head. “Can’t afford that,” he said easily. “Do you play?”
Kilraven grinned. “Everything,” he said. “I’ve got three game systems and about three dozen gaming discs.”
“Wow,” Matt said. “It must be nice,” he added with a wistful smile. He moved the wheelchair away from the sofa. “I had a nice motorized one that Mom bought for me last Christmas,” he said, “but Dad came by and said he needed to borrow it for a friend of his. He just sold it to buy drugs,” he added. “Was Mom furious! But she couldn’t get him to replace it, so she borrowed this one from a neighbor whose father had used it before he died.”
Winnie felt sicker by the minute. “Your father took the wheelchair away?” she asked, shocked.
“Yeah. He was always coming by and taking things, usually he didn’t even ask. He sold anything he could get to buy drugs with.” He shook his head. “I’m never using drugs. I don’t ever want to end up like him.”
“How did that happen?” Kilraven asked the boy, indicating his legs.
“Dad had this idea that he’d wreck the car so he could get insurance money,” he replied. “He ran out in front of a semi and it hit on my side of the car. Mom said he had a big insurance policy on me and he meant to kill me.” He avoided looking at them. “He didn’t get a dime. Mom tried to have him arrested, but they wouldn’t take my word for what he did.”
Winnie was hearing her mother talk about paying for her past and now it made terrible sense. She couldn’t believe her uncle would treat a child like that. But people on drugs weren’t especially reasonable.
“You look like my mom,” Matt said suddenly, staring at Winnie.
“I guess I should,” Winnie said, smiling despite the lump in her throat. “I’m your sister.”
9
Matt studied her with open curiosity. “We went to see you down in Jacobsville,” he recalled. “Mom said I might get to meet you, but when she came back out, she was all quiet. She said it wasn’t a good time.”
Winnie could have gone through the floor. While she’d been shouting at her mother and cursing her for the past, this young, disabled boy had been hoping to meet his family. Nobody knew anything about him. She and her brothers hadn’t even known that he existed. She felt her sins line up and laugh at her. She’d never felt quite so low.
“It wasn’t a good time,” Winnie said, swallowing her regret.
He cocked his head as he looked up at her. “Mom said I had brothers.”
“You do. Two of them.” Winnie pulled out her cell phone. “I think it’s time you met them, too.” She started punching in numbers.
WHILE THEY WAITED FOR BOONE, Keely and Clark to show up, Kilraven sat down with Matt and played one of the games with him. Matt had a spare controller, a present from one of his mother’s coworkers.
“Hey, you’re pretty good.” Matt laughed when Kilraven fought him to a draw.
“Sometimes my job takes me to places where there isn’t much in the way of entertainment.”
“What do you do?”
Kilraven grinned. “Sorry. Classified.”
Matt was impressed. “Can you tell me who you work for?”
“Sure. CIA.”
“Wow! You’re a spy!”
“Not really,” Kilraven said easily. “I do all sorts of covert jobs. Last one was trying to break a kidnapping ring.”
“Did you have to shoot anybody?”
“I don’t shoot people,” Kilraven assured him.
“Then why do you carry a gun?” came the wry reply, because the holster of a small automatic handgun was visible under Kilraven’s jacket when he used the controller.
“So people won’t shoot me,” the tall man replied with a grin.
Matt laughed and they went back to another round of the game.
Winnie watched, sitting on the wreck of a sofa. The whole place was no-frills. The pictures on the walls were cheap, like all the furnishings. The only expensive thing in the room was that used game console and games for it. Her mother’s priorities were obvious—Matt came first. It touched her and made her feel very guilty that she had anything she wanted while her half brother and her mother were living almost at subsistence level on a police detective’s salary. It was a good-paying job, she knew from talking to Marquez; but anyone with a handicapped child had more expenses than parents of healthy kids.
The knock at the door was surprising. Boone must have flown up from Jacobsville.
She went to open the door. She grinned at Boone. “What did you do, put a jet under that Jaguar?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Just about. I noticed Kilraven’s car out front, too.” He paused. “Where is the boy?”
She opened the door. Matt stopped playing in midjump and turned to look at his visitors with wide, surprised eyes.
“You look like me,” he said when Boone moved into the room, dark haired and dark eyed, very imposing in his boots and white Stetson.
“I do,” Boone said, surprised. He moved closer, his eyes on the wheelchair.
“Don’t let the wheels fool you,” Matt said easily, when he perceived the big man’s reaction to the wheelchair. “I
’m faster than you are.”
“You like video games, huh?” Clark asked, moving forward. He smiled at Matt. “We haven’t introduced ourselves. I’m Clark. That’s Boone,” he indicated the tall man. “That’s Boone’s wife, Keely.” He introduced the smaller woman who was hugging Winnie. “We’re Sinclairs.”
“I guess I’m your brother,” Matt said hesitantly.
“I guess you are,” Boone replied. His glance around the room took in everything Winnie had already learned about their half brother.
“Why didn’t you know about me?” Matt asked reasonably.
“Because we weren’t on speaking terms with your mother,” Winnie said for all of them. “Something I’m really sorry about now, Matt. We made assumptions.”
“Yeah, because she ran off with your uncle,” Matt replied, grimacing. “She said it was the stupidest thing she ever did. She knew what he was the day they got married, when he started shooting up on their honeymoon. She left him. Then your father came to see her, later, but I was on the way and he thought I was Dad’s child.”
The three older Sinclairs went very still.
“What do you mean?” Winnie asked for them.
“Well, see, she never slept with Dad,” Matt said in a very grown-up way. “She said he was so repulsive to her that she couldn’t let him touch her.”
Which meant, obviously, that Matt was their father’s child. Their true brother.
“Oh, boy,” Clark said heavily. He was thinking, they all were, that their mother had gone through years of hell with a child alone, trying to support them, because of a mistaken belief.
“Here it comes,” Matt told Kilraven with some sarcasm. “Now we’ll get the hugs and the gushing about how I look like my real father and everybody will feel guilty. Give me a break!”
Boone burst out laughing. “Okay. Now I know he’s a Sinclair.”
Matt lifted an eyebrow. “Well, you don’t look like the gushing type,” he told Boone.
“He’s not,” Clark assured him. “He was in Special Forces in the army.”
“Wow,” Matt said admiringly. He glanced at Kilraven. “Does that mean he’s better at hand-to-hand than you are?”
Kilraven gave Boone an apologetic grin. “No. I was part of a SWAT team at SAPD before I became a Fed. I’m also a master trainer in hand-to-hand combat.”
“SWAT? Really? I watch these shows on TV about SWAT teams all over the country. They’re real brave,” Matt said. He sighed. “I wish I could do stuff like that when I grow up, but I guess I’ll be a desk guy. Anyway, I’m going to be in law enforcement, like my mom. Except I hope I don’t get shot, like she did.”
“Your mom got shot?” Boone asked, shocked.
Then Winnie realized that she hadn’t said much when she told them about Matt and that they should come up to San Antonio on the double.
“Yes, but not lethally,” she said quickly. “His mother—our mother,” she corrected, “is a sergeant of detectives with SAPD,” she said. “She works homicide. She was shot in the line of duty. She’s in the hospital, but she’s going to be okay.”
Boone was surprised, as were the others.
“She’s good, too,” Matt said. “Sometimes she gets these hunches, feelings, about cases, and she can solve them when other detectives can’t. They say she’s spooky.”
Winnie flushed because she had the same kind of hunches, and now she knew where the gift came from.
“Do you get them…feelings?” Boone asked him.
“Sometimes,” Matt said. “I knew something was wrong tonight, but I didn’t know what.”
“He’s going to be here alone,” Winnie said. “Someone who doesn’t want that cold case reopened—” she didn’t name it in front of Matt “—is assaulting people on the case. Marquez got beaten up, our mother got shot. She’ll be okay, but she’s going to be in the hospital for a few days. Matt needs someplace to stay.”
“He can come to the ranch,” Boone said, glancing at Matt. “We’ve got plenty of horses. You can go riding with me.”
“I can’t ride,” Matt exclaimed. “I mean, look at me!”
Boone smiled. “We have handicapped kids out riding one day a week. It’s therapy for them. We have the means to put you on and keep you on, safely, and the horses are very tame. Not that you’d go out unsupervised.”
Matt rolled his wheelchair closer to Boone. “I would really like that,” he said quietly. “I’ve never even seen a horse close up. Do you have cattle, too?”
“Sure do.”
“I wouldn’t be in the way?”
“Not at all,” Keely assured him with a smile.
“You can play video games with me,” Clark said. “I’ve got all the Halo series, including Halo: ODST…”
“The new Halo?” Matt exclaimed, all eyes. “Oh, I read about it in some of the gaming magazines Mom brought from the office after the guys finished with them. I’d love to play the new ones, but this won’t play anything much except the old games. I don’t mind,” he said quickly, defending his mother. “Mom does her best for us.”
The Sinclairs exchanged guilty glances.
“Yes, she does,” Winnie said. “She’s very brave, Matt. They had to force her back into the bed.” She chuckled. “She was trying to climb out and go after whoever shot her.”
Matt laughed. “Yeah. She’s like that. Some guy down the street tried to take our new push lawnmower off the front porch last summer and Mom saw him. She chased him down, jumped a hedge to get to him quicker, threw him down, cuffed him and called for backup to take him down to booking.” He laughed. “She’s my role model. Not that I want to be a woman when I grow up,” he was quick to add, and they all laughed.
“Let’s get you packed, if you’re coming with us,” Keely said.
“Okay!” Matt said with enthusiasm. He wheeled into his bedroom, leaving her to follow.
The Sinclairs moved into a group, all morose-looking. “I wish I’d known any of this twelve years ago,” Winnie said heavily.
“You aren’t the only one,” Boone agreed.
“We’ve been willfully blind.” Clark sighed.
Kilraven joined them. “He’s a great kid,” he said. “I wish I’d realized the connection before this, but Rogers never spoke about her family. We only knew that she’d had a lot of personal problems. Her ex-husband hounded her, you see,” he added, “always trying to get things from her to buy drugs with. He carried off Matt’s new motorized wheelchair and sold it.”
“What a bum,” Winnie said angrily.
“We’ll get Matt a new one,” Boone said. “No problem.”
“We can get him an Xbox 360, too, and some games for it,” Kilraven said. He glanced at the tiny television. “And a bigger TV to play them on.”
“Maybe an Xbox Live gold card, too,” Clark suggested.
Kilraven was thoughtful. “He can stay with Winnie and me for a few days, after we’re married,” he said. “I have a three-bedroom apartment. We won’t be able to go down to Nassau for a couple of weeks. The senator’s wife had a change of heart and went to visit her sister in New York, but she’s supposed to be going to the Bahamas week after next.”
“You spies know everything,” Clark said.
Kilraven grinned. “Of course we do.”
Winnie moved closer to him. “We could wait to get married….”
“No, we couldn’t,” Kilraven said firmly, looking down at her.
She averted her eyes, but the reply pleased her. Maybe he was getting used to the idea, and just maybe he wouldn’t want a divorce at the end of the pretense.
MATT WAS BUNDLED INTO Boone’s big Jaguar, along with a ratty suitcase full of things he thought he’d need, and the apartment door was locked.
“We’ll bring you up to the hospital tomorrow to see your mother,” Boone assured Matt. “I want to see her, too.”
The others voiced their assent.
“I’ll bring Winnie home in a little while,” Kilraven told them. “We
still have things to talk about.”
“We’ll leave a light on,” Keely said with a smile.
They waved the Sinclairs off and got back into Kilraven’s own Jaguar.
“This has been a very strange night,” Winnie said heavily. “I have a brother I didn’t know about, and a mother who’s a well-known police detective. I feel as if my life just turned on its axis.”
“I can understand that.” He moved out into traffic. “He’s quite a boy,” he said, smiling.
“Yes, he is. It’s amazing, how easily he speaks of his handicap.”
“It’s only a handicap if he makes one of it. I had a friend in Iraq who had lost both his legs to a rocket attack. He was fitted with artificial ones and he wins races now. He said that as long as he still had his life, he wasn’t bothered by trifles. Trifles!” He laughed. “Can you imagine?”
“Soldiers are tough,” Winnie said. “Boone came out of the service with wounds much worse than he ever told us about. Keely said some of them were bone deep. He never said anything, and we never knew.”
“We all have scars of one sort or another.”
She glanced at him. “You said you’d had bullets dug out of you.”
“I have.” His tone was grim. “One out of my lung, another out of my hip and one out of my arm. When I’m older, I’ll probably have some arthritis because of the way the bullet went in. They did repairs, but no repair is as good as the original part.”
“Battle scars,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
Her eyes narrowed. She looked at him evenly. “You wanted the most dangerous assignments you could find,” she said aloud, speaking as if she were accessing information from some intangible source. “You asked for them. One took you right into an enemy encampment and you walked straight at a man firing a machine gun…!” She broke off because he slammed on the brakes. Thank goodness they weren’t in traffic.
“Who told you?” he asked curtly. “Who?”
She was disconcerted. “Nobody,” she said at once.