I gestured for Bodhi to stay behind me and waited as he did, standing so close that his breath tickled the back of my neck. I pulled the door open with the hand not holding my gun, wishing I’d brought a heavy-duty flashlight for this. It was a squat, two story building. The back door opened into a small room with nothing but two sets of doors. One opened into a stairwell with steps leading both up and down. There was a basement. The other door opened into another room that, in turn, had a door at the other end that would probably open onto the lobby of the old bank. There was debris everywhere, food containers and abandoned blankets and old clothes, clearly a warm place where the homeless came on cold nights.
It would have been faster to send Bodhi down into the basement and to go upstairs to check out the second floor myself. But the memory of just how badly the last ambush had gone, I decided we’d be better off staying together.
Basement first.
I led the way down, keeping my gun down by my thigh, a bullet in the chamber. I wanted to be prepared, but I didn’t want to shoot an innocent. It was even darker down here, the light from Bodhi’s phone barely enough to cut through it. The basement, however, was not as large as it might have been. There were cement walls that were crumbling in perfect rectangles in a line on either side of the room. Clearly this was where the bank vault had been, but they must have ripped out most it when they abandoned the building, probably selling the metal for scrap. But there was nothing else down there.
We went back up, taking the steps to the second floor. This part of the building was divided into glass partitioned offices, paper scattered all over the floor. Once again, there was debris that indicated homeless activity, but nothing else. There wasn’t even a rat playing in the trash.
We ran into Ryan at the back door.
“Not a damn thing,” she said, clearly disappointed.
“We have another property to check out,” I reminded her, rubbing the back of her arm gently. She pulled away and headed out the door without stopping to acknowledge my words. I followed, but Bodhi grabbed me around the waist before I could step out the door, pulling me back against his chest.
“That was intense,” he hissed against my ear.
“That was nothing. Wait until we actually find them.”
He turned me and lifted my chin. He kissed me roughly, catching my bottom lip between his teeth and nibbling on it.
“I can’t believe I’m falling for a woman who could run a damn war against the mob.”
“You haven’t anything yet, babe.”
He groaned, pulling me closer to him. “Keep talking like that, and I might have to take you right here in this filth.”
“You don’t hear me arguing.”
He chuckled a little, but he pulled me so close that I knew there was some truth to his words.
I kind of liked that.
*****
The second building on our list was another dead end. It was just a few blocks from the first, an old storefront that held nothing more than the obvious use by the homeless. Ryan was clearly downhearted, especially when we met up with the guys at a local restaurant and learned they’d found basically the same thing at their addresses.
Even I was beginning to wonder if my idea might have been baseless.
“We’ll go back to the ranch and get a good night’s sleep, then start again tomorrow,” I decided.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bodhi said.
“Why not?”
He looked a little uncomfortable, his eyes moving to Hank and Grainger before settling on me again.
“You expressed concern about telling Kirkland what you were up to. Don’t you think he’ll have questions if you go back there tonight?”
“But it’s my home.”
“Yes. But it’s his now, too.”
I found myself wondering what he meant by that. I’d offered Kirkland and his wife the guest house on the property and they’d accepted, but that wasn’t public knowledge. And no one had said it was a permanent decision, either.
Had I told Bodhi about that? I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had.
“Where do you suggest we go?”
“I have cash. I think we should get some rooms at a motel.”
I looked at my team and they all seemed on board with the idea. Ryan even nodded.
“Maybe he’s right.”
“It has been a long day,” Hank said. “You look like you could use some rest.”
I thought I was hiding it well, but the pain from the accident as becoming an issue. My wrist had been aching all along, and my head hurt, but the deep muscle bruises across my chest and shoulder were beginning to make it difficult to do something as simple as lift my arm. Maybe I did need a break. But I was anxious to get this thing done.
“What if we drove to Midnight and just cased the three other properties?”
Lance shook his head. “I promised Becks I’d run by the hospital tonight.”
That made me feel a little ashamed. I’d forgotten Becks and Kipling were still in the hospital. I hadn’t even asked about her.
I reached over and touched his hand. “Of course. You go be with her.”
Lance stood, pausing to drop a kiss on the top of my head before he left. The rest of us settled down to a downhearted meal, all of us lost in our own thoughts. I couldn’t help but think it’d been too long since we walked into that room in the safe house and saw all that blood. Whoever was bleeding like that…he wouldn’t be in good shape now. We had to hurry.
But we couldn’t storm a criminal stronghold in the dark with only five people.
We decided on a motel not far from the hospital so that Lance could come get a few hours of sleep if he wanted. I texted him the address and room numbers with Bodhi’s phone, then followed Hank up the stairs to our grouping of rooms. Three rooms—Hank and Grainger in one, Ryan in another, Bodhi and I in the center.
“Hey, I need a second.”
Hank turned, stepping close to the railing to let Grainger and Ryan pass us.
“I talked to Shelby the other day. He thinks he has an idea of who has been causing havoc on the ranch.”
“That’s good.”
I nodded soberly, aware that Hank wouldn’t like what I had to say next.
“He set up a couple of camcorders in the south pasture near where most of the activity has been recently. By some miracle, he caught someone coming over the fence from Circle B with a gas can just a short time before that last grass fire broke out.”
“The one that burned Becks?”
“Yeah.” I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the rail beside him. “You’re not going to like who it caught.”
“Probably not.”
“It was Bobby Jensen, Hank.”
He nodded, more accepting than I’d expected. He turned toward me, watching Bodhi come toward us with a couple of bags from a local department store in his hands. He’d gone back to his car and run some errands, deciding he couldn’t spend the night in a cheap hotel without fresh clothes and proper toiletries. It made me laugh a little, the idea that I was welcoming a man into my life who was so spoiled by the good things in life that he couldn’t rough it in a motel for one night.
Hollywood actors.
I slipped the room key into his hand and watched him disappear inside, imagining the look of disapproval on his face as he took in the shabby furnishings. I wanted to laugh, the image was so amusing.
“The truth is, I kind of suspected it,” Hank said. “Bobby’s family has been struggling pretty badly since they lost their ranch and his father blames you.”
“Me? Why?”
“He thinks that MidKnight forced cattle prices down and that’s what killed his ranch, the fact that he had to sell his herd at half what he expected to get.”
“MidKnight struggles just the same with the price of cattle.”
“I know that and you know that, but the little ranchers…they tend to be of the opinion that the big ranchers have m
ore resources, therefore they don’t suffer the same.”
I shrugged. “That’s not exactly a lie. But if it hadn’t been for Gray Wolf, and then the win Grainger pulled out at the horse show, we would be out on the streets just like the Jensens.”
“They don’t see that. All they see is that they’re in a rent house working minimum wage jobs while you—and me, to some extent—are living on thousands of acres, raking in the money hand over fist.”
I understood that point of view. I’d had it once, looking at the families my friends went home to every night and going home to my often-disinterested foster parents. But I didn’t beat my friends up because they had a mom and dad to go home to every night. Bobby Jensen had no right to burn my pastures. He could have done so much more damage than he did. It was bad enough as it was, what with Becks in the hospital healing from third degree burns on her arm.
“We’ll have to deal with him when we get back to the ranch.”
“Are you going to press charges?”
“Depends on his attitude. I don’t want to, but—”
“I get it if you decide to get Steve involved. But let me talk to him first, okay? There might be something else going on here.”
“Of course.”
He lifted his hand to lay it on my shoulder, but thought better of it as his gaze fell to the bandage on my forehead.
“I’m sorry I brought this onto your ranch.”
“You’re as much a part of that ranch as I am. You and Shelby and Becks. I couldn’t run it without you.”
“Yeah, well…” He touched my jaw with his closed fist, like an older brother encouraging a younger sibling. “Go take some Vicodin and take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will.”
I let myself into the room Bodhi and I were to share after watching Hank disappear into his own room. I wondered if I should call Jonnie and apologize for everything I was putting her through by stealing Hank away. It was an overwhelming burden, the idea that if things went wrong tomorrow that I could have more than one woman to answer to in regards to the safety of their men.
It would be like the confrontation with Harley times three.
And two of those women were close friends of mine.
Bodhi’s hat was on the table. I found myself wondering if he really believed it did anything to disguise his identity. I picked it up and ran my hand along the bill the way I’d done with Mitchell’s uniform cap time and time again after he died.
I was in a damn maudlin mood tonight!
“Take your pills,” Bodhi said, coming up behind me with the pills and a bottle of water.
I sighed, but I took the pill. Then his hands were moving over my body, slipping the blouse over my head before I even realized what he was doing.
“A bath will make it easier for you to sleep,” he was saying, but then his eyes fell on the forming bruises across my chest and shoulder. They narrowed, his handsome blue eyes, anger tightening the line of his mouth.
“It looks worse than it feels.”
“You could have died.”
“But I didn’t.”
He ran his finger over the bruise on my shoulder. “I don’t think you understand just how dangerous these people are. I don’t know what stopped them from shooting you down right there in the middle of the street! They could have—”
“Don’t let your imagination get the better of you. This isn’t one of your movies.”
He stiffened, his finger pausing in its tracing of my flesh. He studied my face for a long moment, dark clouds blurring the rich color of those eyes.
“I know more about the Mahoneys than you know.”
“Yeah? You read about them in the newspaper?”
He tilted his head slightly.
“No.”
He stepped back a little, clearly expecting a big reaction from his next words. My heart jumped into my throat. I knew something big was coming.
And I was right.
“My biological mother is married to Jack Mahoney.”
Chapter 18
Bodhi
She laughed. It wasn’t the laughter of someone who was deeply amused, but it was laughter just the same. She snatched up her blouse and pulled it back over her head, wrapping her arms around her chest as she took a seat in the dingy armchair tucked into a front corner of the room.
“So, tell me about it,” she said.
It was a story I had never wanted to think about, let alone talk about. Who wanted the world to know—especially people he cared about—to know his mother hadn’t cared enough about him to find a good man to marry, to choose her son over her lover? But it was my story and we’d come to a place where it was finally time for Sutherland to know the truth. All of it.
It would all come out soon, anyway.
“My mother was a spoiled teenager who wanted to travel the world, but she didn’t have the means or the desire to earn those means. She was more of an instant gratification sort of gal, if you know what I mean. She learned about this program that was sort of like a student exchange, only it was a childcare exchange sort of thing. She got this girl from New Zealand a job as an au pair in New York and, in exchange, she was given free passage to New Zealand to replace that girl as a nanny to a wealthy family there. Only, of course, she was lazy and uninterested in the kid. They fired her after a week, but instead of going home, she took a job in a small shop in the town where the family lived.
“She worked as little as possible and partied every night. Eventually she found herself pregnant, alone, and penniless. The owner of the shop felt sorry for her, so he took her in, paid her medical expenses and gave her a roof over her head. And, for a while, it worked out. She cleaned the house and took care of their daughter in exchange for room and board. She even stayed in at night, took care of me—at least, that’s what I’m told. But then she met this American, a business man, who wanted to marry her. But he didn’t want a kid. So, she left, never looked back, never bothered to so much as ask the couple who took her in if they’d care for me.”
“Sucks.”
I nodded, remembering how Sutherland had been abandoned in a hardware store. She wouldn’t look at me, she just stared at her fingernails. But I could see the tension in her shoulders had lessened a little.
“Needless to say, the couple adopted me after chasing her down and getting her to sign the papers to terminate her rights. I was three when that happened. They were very kind, never wanted me to know the truth about my mother. But, of course, those kinds of secrets have a way of revealing themselves. It was a joke when I was in school, a way for the bullies to torment me and my siblings. It was humiliating.”
I sank down on the edge of the bed and stared at my own hands, remembering with the same old familiar rage how it had felt to hear my schoolmate refer to me as a bastard, to hear them joke about how my mother was more interested in getting high and having sex than taking care of me. It wasn’t just humiliating. It was the inevitable truth.
“When I was seventeen, I saw this picture…I decided I wanted to be a movie star. I saved every penny I earned working in the family store and around the homestead, adding to it by doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, until I had enough to go. I went to New York because I figured I could break into theater quicker than the movies. I worked at a deli and a local bar, went to auditions between shifts. I did okay, but I wasn’t an overnight success. And then Jonah followed me, a year later.
“That’s when the trouble really began. Jonah was a year younger, but he was so many more years behind me in maturity. He was the baby of the family, so he felt like we all owed him something. Working for what he wanted was a concept that had always escaped poor Jonah.
“He partied more than he did anything else. I was on the verge of calling our parents, begging them to find a way to get him back home. And then this woman showed up on our doorstep. She said that some people had overheard Jonah talking about me, talking about our life back in New Zealand. He’d mentioned my biological mother’
s name, and someone who knew her heard it. And that was her, standing there. She abandoned me when I was fifteen months old, but now she wanted to know me.”
“What a bitch,” Sutherland said in such a quiet, fierce tone that I wasn’t sure she really meant what she said or if she was being sarcastic. But then she looked up and I could see the shared hurt and pain in her eyes, the kind of pain that only an abandoned child could truly appreciate.
“She told me she had a powerful husband and she could make things happen for me, for Jonah. I told her I didn’t need her, that I didn’t want her help, and that I really didn’t want to get to know her. I told her to leave me alone. I could see that my rejection upset her, but she left and I didn’t think much about it. A month later, I’m suddenly winning every part I audition for and my career is taking off. And Jonah suddenly has money, lots of money. I was so busy that I didn’t stop to think about it. But then it finally hits me. Jonah was dealing drugs.”
Sutherland stood up, clearly agitated now. She began to pace, dragging her fingers through her hair even though the movement clearly caused her a considerable amount of pain. I watched her for a moment, watched her movements, seeing in them the pain caused by her accident and the pain my story was pouring over her. I wanted to stop. I wanted to pretend this wasn’t my story. I wanted to make it all go away. I wanted to protect her from the reality of our situation.
I couldn’t.
“I followed him to the guy he was working for, beat the shit out of the guy and told him to leave Jonah alone. The very next day, Jack Mahoney drives up to my flat in this fancy car, every eye in the neighborhood focused on it. Leave my people alone and I’ll leave you alone, you ungrateful bastard, he tells me. I try to help you and this is my reward, he says. I tell him I never asked for his help. I tell him I don’t want anything to do with him. It’s a pissing match with no clear winner. When he left, I put Jonah on a plane back to New Zealand and boarded one myself to Hollywood. I started over, worked my way through a thousand auditions and finally get the fame I was seeking. On my own. And then he shows up again.”
Gray Wolf Security: Wyoming Page 70