Fatal Courage: Shadow Force International, Book 3 (Shadow Force International Romantic Suspense Series)

by Misty Evans

  As Jax walked over, Emit boosted off the side of the Escalade, his mirrored aviators reflecting Jax’s image back to him. “This is not how I’d planned to introduce Rock Star Security to Chicago.”

  Even though Jax thought he’d done a kick-ass job controlling his anger and frustration at the club shootout, he’d earned a fine. Threatening a police officer, even if the guy was an idiot, meant that not only did his phone have a voicemail from Beatrice chewing him out, the founder and chief of SFI was waiting to pick him up from jail.

  “I’ll pay the fucking fine,” Jax grumbled, looking around. “How’s Ruby? Where is Ruby?”

  Emit cocked a thumb at the backseat. “Feds got her out almost immediately, but she spent the last few hours at Mercy getting checked out.”

  The sharp edge of anger filed across Jax’s skin. “How bad?”

  “Mostly cuts and bruises. A bullet winged her elbow.”

  Shit. He refrained from punching the Escalade. “Any leads on our shooters?”

  Emit glanced at two officers coming out the entrance, the breeze lifting a section of his blond hair. “I’ll brief you at headquarters.”

  Jax climbed into the backseat, found Ruby with her head leaning against the headrest and her eyes closed. Her elbow was bandaged, her left cheek bruised and slightly swollen. “Coffee,” she said without even looking at him. “Stat.”

  Emit, climbing into the driver’s seat, nodded. “Could use a bucket of the stuff myself.”

  One pit stop at the local coffee shop and they were on their way to the new Chicago branch of Rock Star Security, aka Shadow Force International, Midwest Division.

  Traffic was light at this hour and they made record time getting out of the heart of the city. The new headquarters building was under construction and several contractor vans were already parked outside when they arrived. Bulletproof windows were going in, new wiring for the extensive security system Emit wanted, and Rory was overseeing the installation of the new computers.

  The meeting room sat two dozen people. Cushy leather chairs surrounded a glass tabletop. Individual pop-up computer touchscreens were stationed at every place so no one had to crane their neck to look at a screen on the wall.

  Jax helped Ruby into one of the chairs. Someone had loaded a side table with coffee carafes, pastries, and fruit. Jax’s environmentally friendly cup was empty, so he refilled it and snagged a heaping plate of food to bring back to the table.

  Ruby, dark circles under her eyes, ignored his offer of a jelly-filled donut for a cluster of grapes instead. “I need a shower and a couple hours of sleep, Emit, so can we get on with this…whatever this is?”

  And whoa. Ruby sounded like she knew Emit. As in knew knew him. Not like he’d simply picked her up from the hospital because she needed a ride.

  “This,” Emit said, sipping his coffee as he fiddled with the touchscreen at the head of the table, “is a debriefing and client intake meeting.”

  “Client?” Ruby and Jax said at the same time.

  “Yes. Client.” Emit glanced up and pinned them both with a hard look. “You’re all over the news and YouTube after your little escapade last night. Ruby, you’re in deep shit with the Feds and your own agency, and neither wants to touch you right now, much less provide security for you. So guess what? As of 0200 hours this fine morning, you became a Rock Star Security client.”

  She sat back, a flustered noise coming from her throat. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  Emit glanced at her elbow. “I’m well aware that you have the skills to defend yourself, but you ruffled the wrong feathers last night and someone shot at you.”

  “You don’t know they were shooting at me,” she fumed. “It could have been totally random.”

  Emit continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Between Beatrice filling me in, and you and I having our talk this morning at the hospital, I can tell you, you’re in need of security. Your former partner is on the run from the government and there are a lot of people questioning your loyalties at this moment. I don’t know who took that shot at you, but there are plenty of players on the game board. Your employer specifically requested I keep you safe and off the grid for the time being.”

  Jax grinned. This was good. Really good.

  Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but was interrupted by a noise in the hall. A thunk, slide, thunk, slide was accompanied by two male voices.

  “Where’s your wheelchair, man? That puppy is sick. I don’t know why you want to kill yourself on those crutches when you can ride in style.”

  Jax recognized the voice and felt a jolt of awesome. Colton Bells, codename Shinedown, was in town to help Emit get the Chicago branch up and running. Colton had been all over the place recently—DC, San Diego, and a few compass points in between. The former SEAL never stayed in one place long. Jax suspected that was due to the fact nasty people were looking for him.

  “Shut up, punk,” Rory, the former SEAL-turned-assassin-turned-SFI computer expert grumbled. Thunkslide. “A couple more months of therapy and I’ll be able to take you with one hand tied behind my back.”

  Jax rose and met the two at the door. “I’m surprised you haven’t killed him in his sleep already, Rory.”

  Rory grunted and shifted one of his crutches to shake Jax’s hand. Colt gave Jax the manly version of hug—a chest bump and a pat on the back. “Righteous undercover work last night, brother.”

  “Fuck you,” Jax said good-naturedly. “It was Ruby’s fault.”

  “Hey,” she complained from behind him. “I told you to leave me alone. If you hadn’t followed me back to the club…”

  “You might be dead,” he interrupted.

  Emit pulled a chair out for Rory as he introduced the mad computer scientist. He also introduced Colton to Ruby, using his code name only. Standard protocol. Because of the sensitivity of most of the SEALs’ backgrounds, clients never knew real names. Ever. “Let’s get to work, people,” Emit said.

  Once settled, Rory updated them. “Police believe the initial shots were fired into the ceiling on the second floor.” He poked at his touchscreen tablet and a series of photos came up on each of their monitors along with the official police report. “Agent McKellen, you were on the second floor at the time of the shooting, correct? You told the detective who interviewed you that you didn’t see anyone with a gun, or anyone fire a gun. That true?”

  Ruby’s head jerked up and she gave Rory a narrow-eyed glance. “Of course it’s true.”

  He nodded. “Just checking, Agent. Don’t get your undies in a bunch. It’s not like CIA operatives don’t fudge the truth at times to law enforcement members.”

  Ruby gave Jax a frown. He shrugged, completely seeing Rory’s point.

  Another tap of Rory’s tablet brought up a video. “Surveillance footage from inside the club is sketchy since the owners purposely only have two cameras. One trained on the bar area and the other on this hallway upstairs.”

  The video showed the long hallway filled with people from the night before. The lighting was bad, making it nearly impossible to ID anyone. A rainbow of colors flashed in time to the music, the strobes sending a wave of light over the crowd on the balcony and going up and down the steps.

  A blue beam of color rolled across the ceiling and fell on a woman in a tight dress with dark hair.

  Ruby.

  “This is the twenty seconds or so of footage leading up to the first shots fired,” Rory said.

  “How did you get all this stuff?” Ruby asked.

  Rory scoffed and gave her a look that said seriously?

  Jax leaned close to her and murmured. “He’s a former spook.”

  “Oh,” she said, eyeing Rory with new respect on her face. “Cool. I think.”

  The scene played out, Ruby making her way up to the guards standing outside the private room Little Gus had rented for the night. Somewhere behind the two-way mirrored glass on the dance floor side, her target had probably watched her.


  Jax felt the slow burn of irritation under his skin as Ruby flirted with the guard. At one point, he wanted to look away, forced himself not to.

  A flash at the edge of the camera, the reverberation of the shots, panic.

  Ruby went down.

  It was only a video. Ruby was okay, sitting right next to him, but he still gripped the arms of the chair, fighting the instinct that suddenly shot through him. Get to her.

  He gritted his teeth. I should have been closer, should have been right next to her.

  Rory stopped the video. “Any idea who the shooter might have been? Why he fired up at the ceiling?”

  “Whoever he was, he wanted to clear the place,” Jax offered.

  Ruby rubbed her forehead. Her phone kept going off, and even though she had it on silent, he’d seen her checking it and disregarding the calls. At one point, she’d told him it was her mother, who’d seen TV footage of Ruby being arrested and had freaked out. “He wanted to stop me from talking to Little Gus.”

  “Who did?” Emit said.

  “I don’t know.” She stared at the screen a moment, shrugged. “Deuce?”

  “Keon James, aka, Deuce,” Jax supplied to the others. “Beatrice believes he has strong ties to Elliot Hayden and I was looking for him, trying to get a lead on Hayden.” He turned to Ruby. “What did he say to you in that supply closet?”

  She closed her eyes for a second as if debating how much to say, how much to cooperate. She was tired—exhausted, if the strain around her eyes said anything—and maybe she was finally realizing a little help wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Her eyes opened and she rubbed the top of her thigh. “From what I know, Keon James, aka Deuce, was helping Elliot with an undercover assignment in Morocco. He disappeared right before the Marrakech fiasco, and Elliot claimed it was because Deuce feared Al-Safari would blow his undercover identity. Last night, he said a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make sense to me, but it may be why he didn’t want me talking to Little Gus.”

  Emit rocked back in his chair, pulled a coiled up Twizzler from his front pocket. Guy was addicted to the strawberry twists. “Like what?” he said before taking a bite.

  Ruby also sat back, rubbed her eyes. Her mascara was smudged so badly that rubbing her eyes made no difference in the raccoon circles under them. “He said a terrorist was gunning for him—a guy by the name of Mohammed Izala, whom Al-Safari worked for. Keon also claimed the army was after him too. That he couldn’t go back to headquarters or his unit because he couldn’t trust anyone. He said his head was on the chopping block and Elliot knew it.”

  She swallowed hard, stared at the screen in front of her, avoiding all of their eyes.

  She was holding back. Something had disturbed her. “What else?” Jax said.

  She blew out a tight sigh, fiddled with the edge of the table. “He claimed Elliot promised him that if he got in good with Izala—a leader of AQIM—that when the shit hit the fan, the CIA would take care of him. Last night, he told me he believed everyone was after him, and Elliot had…”

  “Had what?”

  She stared at the table for a long moment. “He believes Elliot double crossed him.”

  Jax’s convo with Beatrice the previous day poked his frontal lobe. “Hayden must have been running both James and Al-Safari. The two were buddies, working together with Hayden, feeding intel to Izala and anyone else who would pay for it.”

  “Wait…how did you know Elliot had turned Al-Safari into an…” Ruby stopped herself. “Never mind. You obviously have intel even I don’t have. Anyway, we don’t know what the three of them were doing.”

  “Mr. James was killed last night,” Rory said, matter-of-factly.

  Ruby went a paler shade of flat-out fried. “Killed?”

  Rory touched his tablet again, a crime scene photo appearing on their screens. Keon James, lying on the ground, two bullet holes in his forehead. “His body was found in the alley behind the club shortly after the two of you were arrested.”

  “Oh crap,” Ruby whispered.

  Jax stared at the bullet holes.

  “Double-tap to the head,” Colton analyzed. “Execution style.”

  “Two to the head, one to the heart,” Rory confirmed. “Assassin style. CIA style. Someone put two slugs in him from behind, rolled him over and put another in his heart.”

  All eyes swung to Ruby. She sat up straighter, gave Rory the hairy eyeball. “The CIA isn’t the only one who uses that type of kill pattern.”

  “True,” he agreed, “but Keon James wasn’t killed in the crossfire by some amateur gang banger. A skilled assassin purposely put him down. Since he was dealing with the CIA, odds are one of them took him out. One of them…oh, say, such as Elliot Hayden, who escaped from prison a few days ago?”

  “Elliot didn’t kill him,” Ruby insisted, but her voice was weak. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Seemed pretty damn coincidental to him. “Elliot wanted to shut him up about their operation. Makes perfect sense.”

  Ruby came out of her seat. “Elliot is not a killer!”

  “Okay, okay.” He grabbed her wrist and tugged her back down. “We’re just brainstorming here. If not Elliot, who? Why would they kill him? Because he knew too much about something? So he wouldn’t talk to you or anyone else?”

  Ruby’s gaze dropped to the table once more. Silence enveloped them for a moment as they gave her the chance to implicate her ex-partner. Or anyone for that matter.

  She didn’t.

  Jax’s frustration grew. He needed one of those goddamned Twizzlers so he could bite off the end.

  “Another tidbit of info you might find interesting,” Rory continued. “Keon James and Augustus Nelson—aka Little Gus—were almost stepbrothers. Nelson’s father and James’s mother lived together for six months back in the day. The boys formed a close bond according to a citation made in Nelson’s child services file that was created after his father was shot and killed. Nelson was ten when he went into the system. He asked repeatedly to see his brother Kee. The social worker made a note that Nelson had no brother named Kee. He was probably referring to Keon.”

  Ruby looked up. “So that’s how Little Gus had the contacts in the Middle East. Keon James was his point man.”

  “Looks that way,” Rory said. “Nelson was taken into police custody early this morning and questioned, but the interrogation was interrupted by an Agent Brown, supposedly from Homeland. You heard of him?”

  Ruby frowned and shook her head.

  “Me either.” Rory sent them another video, this one from inside the police station. A man in a Cubs hat and a navy blue car coat was escorted to an interrogation room, then seen leaving with Nelson in cuffs a few minutes later. “The guy’s good. Kept his face off camera and who knows what was tucked under that coat of his, but the officer on duty claimed his Homeland credentials were legit.”

  Emit played with a new twist of red licorice. “We don’t have enough facial points for TracRec, but we’re running the guy’s build and gait through the software to see if we get a hit. We’ve matched people on less.”

  Nothing changed in Ruby’s demeanor—and maybe it was his overactive imagination, or the fact his body was so tuned into hers—but Jax was sure she contracted ever so slightly. Like she’d bit into a piece of Emit’s licorice.

  The video looped and Colton paused it at the moment Nelson was herded out of the room by Agent Brown. Nelson’s eyes were wide as saucers, his face drawn. “He look scared to you?” Colt said quietly to Jax.

  Damn straight he did. “Fuck, yeah.”

  Rory continued. “Before Brown took off with Little Gus, the guy told the detective interviewing him that Keon James and Elliot Hayden were both set up by someone.”

  “Who?” Ruby said.

  Rory shrugged.

  “Confirms what Deuce told you,” Jax said to Ruby.

  The gears in Ruby’s head were spinning if the laser gaze she shot him was any indication. That or she w
as morphing into Agent McKellen right before his eyes, her spy persona clicking into place.

  Color returned to her face, her hand steadied as she took a sip of coffee. “Sounds like nothing but conspiracy theories at this point. Unless we have hard evidence or a name, we’re at a dead end.”

  The hard line of Rory’s set-in-stone, non-smile eased a bit. One corner actually lifted as if amused at her challenge. “If I had to guess, Agent Brown swooped in just in time to keep our boy from giving up the goods. Question is, did our buddy Brown here kill Keon James to silence him too?”

  Emit chewed the last of his candy, swallowed. “Or did Elliot Hayden kill him?”

  A buzzing came from Ruby’s thigh. Jax raised a brow at her.

  “My phone,” she said. “Could someone point me to the ladies room?”

  She’d flipped on the ringer to use it as an escape.

  Agent McKellen was definitely back. Was it her mother again, or someone more important?

  Emit stood and showed her out, returning a moment later to drop into his seat. “I don’t like it. Jax?”

  Jax had turned over the idea in his head a dozen times already. “Ruby’s right. Intel is only as reliable as the source it comes from. All we have at the moment are theories based on a couple of random accusations by two men who may or may not have been involved in illegal, potentially traitorous activities with Elliot Hayden.”

  But what if Hayden is innocent?

  Jax shoved the ugly, unwanted thought away. “Little Gus Nelson is a known criminal whose word is suspect since he’ll lie and rat out anyone to save his own skin, and Keon James faked his own death and is AWOL from the army. On the other hand…”

  Colton grinned. “Conspiracy theories are fun.”

  Crazy motherfucker.

  The corner of Rory’s mouth did that lift thing again. “We do have legitimate links between Hayden, James, and Nelson, the fact that James was point-blank assassinated, and some mysterious agent from Homeland kidnapped the man everyone wants to talk to. Those aren’t coincidences.”