by Terri Reed
Then Brian walked into the garage, three masked men surged from the shadows and the world erupted in fire.
A car bomb. A weapon fired. A bullet through Brian’s chest.
It was like Baghdad, Manila and Damascus all over again.
Here. In Toronto.
Just moments ago he’d seen a woman running toward Brian. Now her screams echoed through the flames.
Instinctively, Daniel yanked open the glove compartment to feel for his bullets and gun. It might be too late for Brian. But he could still save the beautiful stranger from the line of fire.
His hand came up empty. There were no bullets. He had no gun.
Reality hit—Daniel wasn’t a bodyguard anymore. His handgun was long gone.
He was just a regular guy back home in Canada, a place where it was incredibly difficult for a personal bodyguard to even get a license to carry a handgun. This wasn’t his first firefight. But this time he was unarmed and unprotected, without even an armored vehicle to shield him.
His hand gripped the door handle. His eyes rose in a split second of prayer.
Lord? What do You want me doing right now? Can I still save her?
More gunfire now. Sounded as though only one of the masked men was firing. But he couldn’t see either the shooter or the target, just a series of bangs and flashes in the billowing smoke.
The woman’s screams fell silent.
He’d never once run from danger. But like it or not, his hero days were over. Daniel had given up being a bodyguard four years ago, because his former stepdaughter had no one else to turn to. I made a commitment to be Sarah’s legal guardian. With her uncle Brian’s death, the teenager was now the last remaining member of the Leslie clan. For all he knew, whoever had killed Brian would now be coming after her, too. He needed to be there for her. He needed to protect her.
How can I risk my life to save a stranger? The woman might not even still be alive.
Reluctantly, Daniel turned the engine over. He grabbed the gearshift, ready to drive. Then, through the smoke, he saw a flash of red hair. She was running toward him, beautiful and terrified, like a phoenix rising. Dark lashes fringed eyes wide with fear. Auburn hair tumbled loose around her face.
He couldn’t just leave her to die.
Daniel threw the door open. “Here! This way! Run to me—”
A second explosion shook the air and tossed her onto the ground. Daniel leaped from the truck. He pelted across the parking garage—toward the flames, the chaos and the woman now lying still on the concrete. In moments, Daniel had reached her side. Her eyes were closed. But when he clasped her wrist, he felt that her pulse was strong. He scooped her up into his arms—bag, camera and all—and cradled her up against his chest. He ran for the truck. A huge, faceless brute of a man loomed out of the smoke and yelled at Daniel to stop. He kept running. Bullets ricocheted in the darkness behind him. Prayers poured from his heart over his lips, “Please, God, guide me now!”
He climbed into the driver’s seat, not letting his strong arms loosen their grip on the woman’s body for an instant. As he slid her off his lap and into the passenger seat, her press pass caught his eye—Olivia Brant, Torchlight News. He reached across to buckle her seat belt. Her cheek brushed his shoulder. Luminous green eyes fluttered open, inches away from his own.
“Olivia? Hey, my name’s Daniel. Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. You’re safe here with me.” He glanced up and counted three masked, black-clad figures in the haze. The brutish one now had a gun in each hand. A short man was fiddling with a small box. An extremely thin one barked orders at them both. The big one raised both guns toward the truck. “And we’re getting out of here.” Daniel slammed his door. “Right now.”
He hit the gas and swerved a hard left, narrowly steering the truck between the thin man and a concrete support pillar.
“Daniel?” Her voice beside him was faint. “Who are you? What are you?”
Thank You, God! She was both conscious and able to talk, which hopefully meant no serious injuries, even though her mind was probably reeling and her ears would be ringing. No doubt she wanted to know what kind of man had just scooped her into his truck. But now was no time for long answers. The short version would have to do.
“I used to be a bodyguard.” He focused his eyes on finding an exit. “Spent a decade overseas. War zones and danger spots mostly. Getting someone safely from point A to point B like this was kind of my specialty. Now I’m just a carpenter.” One who apparently could still swerve around an obstacle course of parked cars and concrete at full speed.
“Carpenter?”
He couldn’t tell if that was really a question or if she was just repeating back the only word she’d managed to catch. Depending on how hard she’d hit her head, she might not even remember any of this. “How are you feeling? There’s a hospital only a few blocks from here. That’s where I’m taking you. If you’ve a phone handy, please call 9-1-1. We’ve got to let the police know what happened here.”
He couldn’t begin to guess how much of the garage was actually covered by security cameras or how security would respond to whatever they saw. Sometimes surveillance only covered the stairwells and exits. For all he knew, they’d just seen smoke and were treating it like a car fire. Instead of…what exactly? A terrorist attack? Some kind of organized crime hit on my former brother-in-law?
There was no answer from Olivia. Daniel risked a sideways glance. Her eyes had closed again. There was a cell phone in his jacket, but that was in the backseat and he wasn’t in any position to reach it. Could he afford to stop, grab his phone and call the police before he reached the hospital? No. He had one task right now and one task only—saving the life of the person in his care.
“Thank You, God, that we’re both still alive,” he prayed aloud. “Please have mercy on everyone else who might be in danger. Please prompt someone else to alert the authorities. Any help and guidance You want to give me right now would be awesome.”
An engine roared behind him. The sound echoed off the concrete walls. There was the crack of a gun being fired and the clang of a bullet hitting his tailgate.
He raced up the final ramp. Another shot was fired.
His truck’s rear window exploded in a spray of glass.
TWO
Glass hit the back of Daniel’s seat and fell down around them like rain. He clenched his jaw, pressed the gas pedal to the floor and forced his mind to block out everything but the growing space of sunlight ahead. The ticket barrier was unmanned, and he wasn’t about to stop at the machines to pay for parking. He just had to hope some security guard somewhere had seen this all go down on a monitor and called the police.
He swerved around the barrier and clipped the edge of the wood. Then he was outside, blinking in the bright summer sun. Smoke poured through the tunnel behind him. A few passersby were stopping to film it on their phones. A couple more took pictures of his broken back window as he merged into heavy downtown traffic. Hopefully someone had the sense to call 9-1-1. Another murmur slipped through Olivia’s lips. Delicate color had returned to her cheeks. Sunlight filtered through the window, setting her hair alight in a cascade of red and gold.
Tires screeched behind him. His gaze shot back to the rearview mirror. A black van with tinted windows shot out of the parking garage and forced its way into traffic. It was five car lengths back. No one was firing now, but the van whipped back and forth between lanes as the driver fought his way closer.
The gunmen were following.
Emergency vehicles streamed toward him on the opposite side of the street. That was one prayer answered—someone had called the authorities. But would they head straight to the garage, or would anyone notice his predicament? He flashed his lights, honked his horn and waved a hand out the window in the hopes of grabbing an officer’s attention. The cops flew past. Apparently a broken back window hadn’t been enough to raise suspicion. And he wasn’t about to stop.
The gunmen were now on
ly two car lengths behind. He cut through a parking lot, swerved into an alley and came out on another street. The van followed. He could see the driver now. It was the tall one of the three. He’d pulled a hood over his head to keep the mask covering his face from drawing the attention of anyone not looking straight on. But Daniel could still see the mask—black, oval-like fencing gear and utterly featureless. Would they be brazen enough to open fire on a busy Toronto street? The light ahead of him turned yellow. Daniel gunned the engine and flew through. He hit the other side of the intersection seconds before it turned red. The van followed tight on his tail. The vehicle was now so close he could practically feel it tapping his bumper.
The hospital sign appeared ahead. Cars lined up to enter the hospital parking lot, but Daniel wasn’t about to wait. He aimed straight for the emergency-vehicles ramp. Two cop cars and an ambulance sat near the emergency room door. He hit the brakes beside them.
A smattering of hospital staff and police ran toward him.
The black van kept going, disappearing into traffic.
“Hey! You can’t park here!” A paramedic reached him first. “You have to go around to the lot—”
Daniel threw the truck into Park and leaped out. Shards fell from his clothes. “This woman needs help and might have a head trauma. There was a car bomb inside the courthouse parking lot. People shot at us. A man named Brian Leslie was just murdered. Wait—be careful. The truck is full of broken glass.”
Two paramedics eased Olivia out of the truck and onto a stretcher. Daniel turned to follow her. A hand tapped his shoulder.
“Sir, you’d better follow me.” It was a hospital security guard, flanked by a uniformed police officer.
“Absolutely. I want to give a statement. Just let me get her stuff first.” He turned back to the truck. The messenger bag had spilled all over the floor. He scooped the contents up quickly. Her press photo identification badge was hooked on the edge of the seat. He pulled it loose, allowing his eyes one moment to linger over the adventurous curve of her smile. “Her name is Olivia Brant. She’s a newspaper reporter.”
The security guard took her belongings from him. “What’s your connection to her?”
I’m her bodyguard.
The answer he’d have given in his former life flew through his brain automatically and he just barely caught himself before it left his mouth. “Absolutely none. I just happened to be there when the bomb exploded and saw she needed help.” His eyes glanced toward the emergency room door. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay and give my statement here. Just in case she needs anything. Or at least stay until you’re able to reach her emergency medical contact, so she’s not alone.”
He had no real reason to stay. Yet something inside was urging him not to go.
“Sir?” The officer’s tone was definitely a little sharper now. He took another step toward Daniel. “I think you’d better come with me.”
*
Words swam in a jumble of black-and-white on Olivia’s computer screen. A pencil spun between her fingers. It had been two days since Brian Leslie had been murdered and her memory of the event was still nothing but an incoherent mess of disjointed images. She leaned back in her chair and listened to the clack of her colleagues’ fingers hitting keyboards. It was Friday afternoon and she seemed to be the only one blinking bleary-eyed at a story that wouldn’t come together. She added a few more pencil lines to the sketch in her small pocket-size notebook.
A blank oval face, like a black fencing mask, stared back at her through a haze of charcoal smoke swirls.
“Hey, can I borrow that a second?” Ricky rolled his office chair across the alcove from his desk to hers. “I want to check it against something I saw online.”
“Help yourself.” She shrugged. “It’s all I can remember of the killers. But it’s not much to go on.”
The young photographer picked up the notepad and rolled back to his computer. “I never knew you could sketch like this. Why aren’t you in the graphics department?”
She shrugged. “I really enjoy writing.” And editing, graphic design, ad layout and photography. Over the past few years she’d settled into a pretty comfortable role at the newspaper as a “bit of everything” journalist who could write one day, edit the next and field a decent classified ad page in between. But being good at a little bit of everything wasn’t the same as proving to Vince that she belonged on his new, smaller team.
Last summer, Vince had gotten into a major battle of wills with Torchlight’s former publisher when they’d tried to force him to fire crime reporter Jack Brooks over his investigation into the Raincoat Killer. So Vince had bought out the newspaper and turned it into a scrappy independent. Which was actually awesome, except that he’d warned them it would mean cutting staff. Now was no time to have a mind full of smoke and haze.
Her temples ached. If she closed her eyes, she could almost recapture the memory of the man who’d saved her—dark eyes, a voice as deep and soothing as a morning cup of coffee, chestnut hair curling ever so slightly at the nape of his neck. Daniel. But then she’d blink and he’d be gone again.
“Hey, Olivia? Come look at this.”
She slid her chair over. It was an internet web page. Three crude figures in black fatigues and featureless fencing-style masks stood in the center of the screen under the words The Faceless Crew.
The sudden reminder of how terrified she’d been sent adrenaline coursing through her. “What is this?”
“It’s a fragment of a website that was shut down a few weeks ago.” Ricky ran one hand through his shaggy hair. “Remember that car bombing in Vancouver last June that turned out to be some turf war between small-scale rival gangs? These guys tried to take responsibility for it and a few other car fires, too. They posted some stuff on various hate websites, trying to get attention as some kind of homegrown terrorist group for hire. No one took them seriously.”
She vaguely remembered Ricky bringing it up at a news meeting weeks ago. Vince had said no hard facts equaled no story and that the paper wasn’t in the business of chasing ghosts. But it seemed these men weren’t ghosts anymore. “Can you print it for me?”
“Yup, and look here.” He zoomed in. “I was able to recover some text, too.”
She read out loud, “‘The Faceless Crew are a gang of three killers. Rake is the strategist and leader. Brute is the weapons expert and, ah…assassin. Shorty is the explosives expert.’” She looked up. “They misspelled assassin. Looks to me like three brash, delusional kids who watched too many action films and decided to go start their own gang.”
“You can see why no one took them seriously.”
Right up until the moment they planted a bomb in the court garage and killed a man. Then again, an alarming number of gang-related murders, and even terrorist attacks, were committed by angry, mentally unstable young men whom no one took seriously at first.
They walked over to the shared printer and waited for the page to come through.
“Is it possible someone got them to murder Brian Leslie?” Ricky asked.
“I don’t know.” She ran both hands through her hair, then twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck. “Brian owed his crew a lot of money. They hadn’t been paid in weeks. He’d skimmed money off their checks. He had them working off the books without them knowing it, which meant they can’t even claim unemployment now. So I can imagine a lot of people wanted to hurt him. But there are far easier ways to get justice than hire contract killers with gang ties.”
The paper inched its way out of the printer. “What happens to the company now that he’s dead?”
“It’s a family business, started by Brian’s father. The only remaining member of the Leslie family is Brian’s niece, Sarah. But she’s just a teenager and can’t inherit anything until she turns eighteen sometime this fall.” It was any guess how she’d handle the mess her uncle left behind. “I’m just sorry I lost the camera. If I sti
ll had it, we’d have photographic proof that these were the guys. But it wasn’t in my bag at the hospital, so I can only guess it’s now buried in rubble. You want to come with me to talk to Vince?”
Ricky shook his head. “No. Just try to talk him into keeping me on staff if this turns into something.”
Torchlight’s editorial pool shared the large top floor of a converted Toronto townhouse. She climbed down the steep stairs to the second floor, went down the hall and knocked twice on the editor’s door.
“Come in.” Somehow Vince’s salt-and-pepper hair seemed even grayer than usual. His tweed jacket was pushed up over his elbows. She laid the printout on his desk. He leaned on his desk with both hands and stared down at it. “What am I looking at?”
“Something Ricky found online.” She took a deep breath. “I think this might be who I saw kill Brian Leslie.”
“I seem to remember Ricky showing me this printout before.” Blue eyes glanced up under bushy eyebrows. “You already know what I’m going to say about it, don’t you?”
Yup. Theories were for the writers’ meetings. Facts were what got printed in the paper.
“I know we can’t just print that these three random men might have been involved in this murder without something solid behind it.” Reporter Thinks She Kind of Remembers Seeing Three Masked Men Who Could Be the So-Called Faceless Crew was hardly a headline she’d put on the cover of the paper, either. “But I’ll get something solid. I’ve put in calls to the police, Sarah Leslie and the crown attorney’s office. I’m just waiting for someone to call me back.”
Not to mention, she’d also tried calling her older sister. Chloe was a detective in Northern Ontario. While this was hardly her jurisdiction, her sister had an incredibly practical way of looking at things that Olivia found both infuriating and helpful. Besides, it was always wonderful to hear her voice. But Chloe hadn’t called her back, either.