Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  "Yeah." They'd arrived at the demolition site. Garrett drove her car up over the curb behind other crew trucks.

  "I want you to sit here and look sick, okay? I'll be back in two minutes."

  He got out and slammed the door, heading toward the job trailer. This act was going to be a little dicey, nothing he couldn't handle, but he had to play it so Feder believed he was the one calling the shots.

  Feder was just coming out of the trailer. He glared at Garrett.

  "What do you think this is, Weisz, some banker's hours' job?"

  He jerked a thumb at Kirsten's car.

  "Wife's still sick. I couldn't leave her at home. I don't trust her." He kept on trudging over the site strewn with concrete chunks that had fallen off the dump trucks.

  "Where are your kids?" Feder demanded.

  "My sister's got 'em."

  "And you're just gonna let a pregnant woman sit there in the car all damned day?"

  Not answering, Garrett shrugged and pulled the work gloves out of his coat pockets. He bent over and started working the combination lock on his toolbox.

  "Truth is, we can't afford any more lost time. Not and pay for her doctors."

  "How many screws you got loose, Weisz? Wasn't it you lecturing me about women and kids? Get outta here. I'll spot you a couple of days' pay."

  Feigning gratitude, Garrett closed his toolbox and walked off. Feder made some parting shot Garrett didn't hear over the sound of a wrecking ball. He stripped off his gloves, opened the car door, got in and jammed the clutch to the floor, peeling out.

  Kirsten clung to the seat belt crossing her torso.

  "What did you tell him?"

  "You're sick." He grinned.

  "Feder insisted I take the rest of the week off."

  "You are shameless."

  "One of my many outstanding qualifications for an undercover cop."

  "Did you lay it on really thick?"

  "Only as thick as it needed to be. What was he going to think, Kirsten? I was ready to go to work."

  "But you weren't!"

  "Well, see, that's where you're wrong. I'm always ready to do what I have to do."

  "You mean you really would have let me sit here all day?"

  "Of course not." He gave her a look.

  "Kirsten... I know how to play people, okay? It's what I do, and I'm good at it. I knew he'd buy it."

  "But what if he hadn't?"

  "Then I would have thought of something else. Could we get back to the story now?"

  Shivering, she reached for the heater.

  "It's just so... false, I guess." She shrugged.

  "I don't know how you do it, is all."

  "I just do what I have to do. So, what happened when that plane went down?"

  She reoriented herself to where she'd left off.

  "I happened to be in Grenallo's office when he got the news. I was delivering some totally unrelated crime- scene graphics he'd asked for."

  "Interesting coincidence."

  "I'd been lobbying for a long time to get onto the investigative side, Garrett."

  "But no experience outside of crime-scene work?"

  "No. But they needed someone desperately. There were a couple of other cases taking up a lot of resources. Everyone else was assigned once Grenallo had a commitment from the FBI team."

  "Okay, I'll buy that in the short term you may have been the only choice. But that operation went on for weeks, didn't it?"

  "Grenallo was happy with what I was doing. He didn't have any reason to pull me off the case." She sounded a little defensive.

  "Is that so hard to believe?"

  "No. I didn't mean to suggest that you weren't getting the job done.

  But you know Grenallo. Are you telling me you weren't surprised that he let you run with it? "

  "No. I was shocked, really." She paused a moment, considering.

  "I made a believer out of him,

  Garrett. When he saw what I was producing, he was happy enough. "

  "What was it?"

  "Hundreds of photos, at least twenty videotapes when they were edited.

  I had Loehman on film suborning perjury, ordering an execution, constructing an elaborate smear campaign against Senator Vo- gel"- She hesitated, maybe seeing a flash of recognition on Garrett's face.

  "Did you know him?"

  He nodded.

  "Margo was Ben Vogel's executive assistant."

  Kirsten fell silent.

  "She was killed when Vogel's car went over the Aurora bridge. Vogel and the driver survived, but Vogel was left paralyzed." He looked at Kirsten.

  "You knew that?"

  She shook her head.

  "No. But everyone expected Loehman to feel cheated. He'd devoted months working the smear campaign. He'd really rather have seen Vogel's career destroyed than the man pull out."

  Garrett dragged a hand through his hair. He knew Margo had been struggling with the fear that her own image was suffering by her association with Vogel, who was an honorable man, but badly flawed.

  Even then, Garrett realized now, he hadn't much liked Margo's attitude.

  He pulled into parking a half mile short of the Federal Building. He needed the rest of it. They got out of the car, he locked the doors and they began walking.

  "Okay. So in the end, you had Loehman on camera executing one of the men who'd turned on him."

  "Yes. It took almost a year, but we finally had enough."

  Garrett drew her aside to a street vendor and bought a couple of cups of coffee, a Danish for himself, a poppy-seed muffin for Kirsten. They sat at a table beneath the cover of an umbrella to escape the constant drizzle.

  He went to the subject of her husband.

  "When did you meet Lane Montgomery?"

  "His company got the contract for the security of the Federal Building a couple of weeks after I was assigned to the undercover operation. We met almost immediately after that." She exhaled sharply.

  "I was such a fool. He was just so... I don't know. Earnest, I guess. So sweet." She swallowed hard.

  "Such a liar."

  "Kirsten, you weren't the only one who fell for his line. He had to have impeccable credentials even to be in the running."

  "I know that, Garrett. But I'm the one who married him. I had my evidence backed up and stored in half a dozen different places, but he was the security expert, and he knew where I had them all."

  Garrett shook his head.

  "What makes a man in his position sell out to someone like Loehman?"

  "I guess it's always about money."

  Garrett gave her a look. His question had been rhetorical.

  She shrugged.

  "In the end, either Loehman tried to stiff him the money he'd promised if Lane could make the case go away, or else Lane wanted more."

  "Not necessarily. Montgomery was a loose end Loehman had to tie up in any case."

  Kirsten's shoulders rounded down.

  "None of this leads us anywhere, Garrett. We have no more idea what's in that safe-deposit box than we did before."

  "I'm sure what we've got is enough to get a subpoena. It would have been cleaner with something more substantial to go on, but Grenallo's office isn't going to be refused. Particularly since Rawlings was Montgomery's corporate counsel."

  She finished her coffee.

  "I don't think I should be along when you ask Grenallo to go after the subpoena. I'll wait for you in the bookstore.

  Maybe try again to get through to Christo. " For several hours she hadn't been able to get an answer on the cell phone Garrett had given Ginny and Sam. The weather reports were all bad. The northern Rocky Mountain region was socked in by the blizzard Garrett had just beaten getting Christo there.

  Plagued by a fear that Loehman was somehow luring them all into some deadly ambush, she tried several times in the next hour and a half to reach the Wilders.

  There was no answer.

  Cut off from Christo, struggling to keep herself tog
ether, she took a little comfort from knowing that, as much as thwarting her, the blizzard insulated Christo all the more from the world in which Chet Loehman loomed so large.

  not until the end of the day did they have their answer. Grenallo had gone before a magistrate, made his case, but failed to come away with the subpoena Garrett had believed to be all but a slam dunk.

  It made no sense, only set them all on edge that any federal magistrate would refuse the petition. Garrett blamed himself. Grenallo had only shrugged. Loehman hadn't built his organization or remained a free man for so many years, through so many efforts to bring him down, without friends in high places, but to hear Grenallo intimating, even privately, that the judge was one of them, came as one nasty, disheartening blow.

  As if that weren't bad enough, at 7:37 and 33 seconds, by the digital clock on the monitoring equipment J. D. was handling, the bugs Matt had planted across the street fell silent.

  Matt responded by collecting the ones planted in her house, dumping them down the toilet.

  The jig was up on both sides.

  She could feel the tension of the men surrounding her ratcheting higher. They had no clue now as to what the boys in the band would attempt next. If they were acting under Loehman's orders. Matt believed, they would be closing up shop, and soon.

  "Look," Matt reasoned, "they now know Kirsten tried and failed to get at whatever is in the InterBank vault. What's the point in waiting around for her to come into possession of the contents of that box if a federal magistrate is going to keep it out of her hands?"

  "You're assuming," Garrett argued, "that they're convinced that what they've been waiting on is what's in that safe-deposit box."

  "Yeah, and I'm betting they're better informed than we are."

  "How could they be?" J. D. demanded.

  "We know what they know."

  "Yeah?" Matt raised his eyebrows.

  "Well, we didn't know they'd found the bugs. It's possible they've been stringing us along."

  "And we're right back to Loehman having invited us to this party in the first place." Garrett dropped a fist on the dining-room table and swore.

  "What the hell is he up to?"

  "I think he's won this one, Garrett," Kirsten said.

  "Loehman really can't lose. He won't stop until he tracks Burton down. When that happens, if Loehman still doesn't get what he wants from him, then Burt's a dead man, and whatever he had comes to me as the beneficiary, and then" -- "No," J. D. answered, preventing her from going on, uttering the words anticipating her own demise.

  "Then he'll have to come through us and that isn't going to happen."

  She shook her head.

  "He'll just wait. You'll see. If Loehman ordered Burt's murder tonight, the body wouldn't need to show up for months.

  He can afford to wait till you're not around anymore. You can't keep me on round-the-clock protection until Loehman decides to move, even if I could live like that. "

  Garrett sat both in awe and horror at her ability to reason as Loehman would. Perhaps it was all the weeks, all those years ago, of watching Loehman in action through the lenses of her cameras, hearing him plot and scheme, that gave her such a certain grip of Loehman's sheer cunning.

  She was right. Dead right.

  Even if Loehman made the expansive, foolish gesture again of letting her live, all he would have to do under Kirsten's scenario was wait a few months and then arrange for Rawlings's body to be found and identified without any fanfare. Once a death certificate was signed by a coroner, Loehman had only to move on Kirsten, force her to produce the certificate at the bank to claim the contents of the safe-deposit box, and then walk out with the goods, whatever they were, scot-free one more time, but with at least one more death, one more coup counted on the impotent Office of the U. S. Attorney.

  None of that mattered. Kirsten was the one standing between Loehman and whatever trouble Raw- lings had managed to bring down, and Loehman wouldn't let her draw one breath beyond the last moment she was of any use to him.

  "So what now?" Matt asked.

  "Keep Kirsten under guard until we can get someone to overturn the jerk and issue a subpoena?"

  "It's a possibility. Probably the best one we've got at the moment," J. D. agreed, but his next words upset her.

  "If we could just lay our hands on Raw- lings first, we might be able to pull this out."

  "I hope he's gone." No matter what happened now, whether Burton Rawlings lived or died would have no effect on Loehman's plans for her. She got up from the table and began to clear away the accumulated debris of a couple of fast-food meals. Garrett followed her into the dark kitchen, and when she couldn't contain the tears of utter frustration any longer, pulled her away from cramming wrappers into the trash, and into his arms.

  "Kirsten."

  He wanted to promise her that this wasn't over yet, but even if he dared, what was the upside, when all she wanted, all she was fighting for, was that it be over? Her body came curiously still against his, and he didn't know whether to think she'd given up or was trying to absorb a little more strength. The hours of having gone without talking to Christo had worn too thin as well and she felt cold.

  He held her tightly to him and rested his cheek on her head. She finally pulled back to look up into his eyes, but her focus went to his mouth and she lifted herself on tiptoe and brought her lips to meet his.

  He thought of nothing but answering her in kind. She needed desperately to feel alive, to find some reason to believe she could go on, that she would make it out alive. The sound she made blistered his soul. Aware that in a heartbeat she would trade anything for one look at Christo, profoundly aware that the thought only made him love her more, he opened his mouth and covered hers, drawing her into a kiss so deep, so fierce and replete with meaning that he could no longer discern a separation of their souls.

  She was all he knew, all he'd ever wanted, more woman than he'd ever had or known, still her own woman, still Christo's mother. And he was in love with her.

  He deepened their kiss again and again to assuage what ache no kiss could begin to reach, when Kirsten stiffened and pulled back, burying her face against his chest, fighting to breathe normally. Behind her, a dark figure against the dining-room light, J. D. stood in the doorway, clearing his throat.

  "Vorees just called. He's got Rawlings holed up in some dive down by the locks."

  he drove hard through the pouring rain south toward the locks at the address Vorees had given J. D. Visibility was about as bad as it could get. The windshield wipers couldn't begin to keep up with the downpour. They reached the bar inside half an hour. By then she knew how Garrett wanted to play their meeting with Rawlings.

  Vorees stood waiting, having a smoke beneath the tattered, mostly useless awning. Garrett let her out there, then sped around the corner to a parking place, reappearing in a few seconds.

  "Is Rawlings alone?"

  "Since he got here," Ross confirmed.

  "One of Ann's snitches found him.

  She's tied up so I tailed him here. Rawlings has been living in a rental at a trailer park about a half mile away. "

  "So he doesn't know he's been made?"

  "No idea. You want me to stand sentry out here?"

  Garrett nodded.

  "Get some backup to cover the back door, too."

  Vorees pitched his cigarillo into the gutter.

  "You got it."

  Garrett pulled open the door of the seedy Stowaway Tavern, and Kirsten walked in ahead of him. The place reeked of stale beer and faulty plumbing. She could barely see through the haze of smoke, or believe that Burton Rawlings would be caught dead in a place like this.

  "Do you see him?" Garrett asked her.

  She shook her head.

  "Not-Wait. There. Alone in the booth" -Garrett spotted him as well. Taking her by the hand, he threaded his way through half a dozen tables to the bank of booths covered in faded orange vinyl. Burton sat alone, his back to what passed for
a kitchen.

  If he'd been paying attention, he'd have seen them coming, but he wasn't.