He leaned back in the chair and sighed again. He wiped a hand down his face and shook his head. No, that wouldn’t work at all.
Chapter Thirteen – Ashley
As soon as we got back, I changed into something a little more comfortable for cleaning, and Frank and I set to work with brooms, dustpans, bags, and cleaning solution. As we worked, I caught him glancing at me in my yoga pants and tank top. I had to admit it was kind of flattering to know I could turn his head that way, especially with how distant and professional he’d been through this whole thing.
The afternoon sun had already started to come in through the back windows by the time we finished cleaning up the second floor. Together, Frank and I filled bag after bag of trash. Honestly, the work helped me clear my head a little and keep me from freaking out about Frank thinking he’d found the guy who’d broken into the cabin. It helped keep my mind, too, from the fact that my credit card was rejected again at the hardware store. Thank God I’d had cash, though I didn’t know what I was going to do when I ran out.
“Do you really think it’s him?” I asked. “Like, really think so?”
He nodded. “Yeah, pretty sure.”
“But, come on, you can’t be one-hundred percent, can you?”
He gave me a look. “Any other suspects on the list?”
“No,” I said with a frown as I dumped a dustpan load of stuffing and glass into the paper bag we were going to put in the garbage bag, “not really. But, something about that guy, he was just so creepy. Like, I just can’t stand the thought of him being the one who was in here, you know?”
“But a bunch of teenagers doing it, that isn’t creepy to you?”
I grabbed the broom and awkwardly began to sweep more of the debris into a small pile. I still wasn’t very good at it. “No, I’m not saying that. Okay, well, maybe I am. So you really think it has something to do with my father, not me?”
“Pretty sure,” he said.
“Do you think…” I licked my lips. “Do you think I should call him, Frank?”
He didn’t respond at first and just kept sweeping. “I don’t know everything about your father, the ins and outs of his business. I think we can still protect you, if only because I don’t think they want anything directly from you. So, if you don’t want to call him, you don’t have to.”
“What about him?”
“I reckon your daddy’s probably got enough protection in place that you don’t need to worry much about it. You get rich enough, you begin to realize there are things worth protecting all the time. Don’t see how we’d be much help to him, especially when he’s all the way in New York.”
I shook my head at the idea that my father might be in danger. I needed to do something. “I feel like we should at least tell them.”
“If you think that’s best, we can start speaking directly with them and let them know what we’ve found. It won’t necessarily hurt our position here any.”
“I’m safe, then?”
“I think so. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to take precautions.”
“Precautions?” I groaned.
He dumped a pan full of dust and debris into the garbage bag. “I’ve been putting off mentioning it, but I think we need to find you somewhere else to sleep tonight. Just to be safe, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to stay in some hotel room! All the hotels around here are awful!”
“I was thinking some place safer than some roach motel. Our safe house is, uh, under repair at the moment. But, my roommate, Matt, is out of town on business, so I’ve got a spare room for you, as long as Peter approves.”
“Your place, huh?” I stopped and gave him a look. “Buy a girl a drink first.”
He sputtered a little. “What? No, it’s not like that, please don’t get the wrong idea. We just don’t have another place to put you up, that’s all.”
I laughed. “Do you really think it’s that serious?”
He went through his reasoning again from top to bottom. The complete search of the place, the guy watching the place until I left, how the Russian hadn’t left yet.
“I’m still confused how you know it’s him.”
He paused. “His boots. I saw his boots, and they matched the prints Jake and I found out back.”
Something about the way he said it, though, made me not entirely believe him. It was like he was holding something back and not telling me. But why would he be doing that?
“Uh-huh,” I said doubtfully.
He rested his broom against one of the cut-up and searched chairs, put his hands on the small of his back, and stretched. “Damn, this sucks. Forgot how hard labor work is on the body.”
“Need to start doing yoga or something,” I teased. “I’m feeling fine.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, not as flexible as I used to be.”
“Really? I’ve just gotten more so as I’ve gotten older.” As soon as I spoke, my face went beet red, and I turned away as I felt the flush traveling down into my chest.
He chuckled and looked away, and went back to sweeping.
Oh my God, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been that embarrassed. I needed to get out of there. “Know what?” I asked. “I still haven’t heard from Barbara about the alarm thing. I’m going to go upstairs and call her, just to, you know, uh, check on that.” Still mortified as I stumbled over my words, I extricated myself from the living room and slipped upstairs, leaving Frank’s little chuckle behind.
I went into the bedroom I’d been using. The walls now looked so bare, so empty. But at least it was clean. No glass crunched beneath my feet, and I didn’t have to avoid any broken frames lying around on the carpet as I crossed over to the bed and sat down on the edge.
I stared my phone for a moment, dreading this second call to Barbara Hacks. Normally, she got right on all my requests, but I hadn’t heard a single thing from her all day. This was all very unlike her.
The phone began to ring after I pressed her contact number. Just like earlier that morning, it rang. And rang. And rang. And rang some more.
I pulled the phone away and checked the time.
Even though we were two hours behind, it still shouldn’t have been past five o’clock in New York. And, besides, none of father’s people got out by five anyways. They were always there with him, burning the midnight oil.
No, this was weird. Real weird.
Finally, Barbara’s work line switched over to voicemail. “This is Barbara Hacks. I will be out of the office for the rest of the week. Should you have an emergency–”
What the hell?
She hadn’t mentioned that she was going to be out of the office! What a bitch!
I began speaking just as it beeped. “Barbara, it’s Ashley Maxwell. You didn’t say you were going to be on vacation when I spoke to you. I thought you were working on getting the information on the alarm system for the cabin? Since I don’t have it yet, I’m going to assume you didn’t do as I requested. I wish you would have said something, or passed my problem off to someone who could be off assistance.” I paused, took a deep breath. “So I guess I don’t have any other choice but to call my father and let him know his people aren’t doing their jobs. Enjoy your vacation, Barbara.”
I hung up and began to scroll through my numbers, trying to find my father’s cell phone number. I looked at the 212 number and hesitated as I bit my lip. He was in the middle of some big business deal, Barbara had said. A really big deal.
Did I really want to pull him into this? Over her just not returning my phone call?
But then I had another thought. If father was in the middle of a big business deal, why would Barbara be taking off for the rest of the week? She was his right hand in damn near everything, far back as I could remember. The only thing I could be sure she hadn’t been involved in was his marrying Elizabeth.
I made a face. No, her taking time off didn’t make sense at all.
His number seemed to glare back at me, reminding me of the
last year that we’d been absent from each other’s lives. Taunting me. Yes, he’d been an awful father by marrying the bimbo. But what kind of daughter had I been for cutting off contact?
If what Frank said was true, my father might be in trouble. Was this really the time to be upset at him? What if there were more people like the Russian out there, but going after him instead?
No, I had to push our differences aside. No matter what he had done. I held my breath and called him.
“Hello, this is Martin Maxwell–”
His voice hit me unexpectedly, that lush accent you only heard on the upper east coast. I’d forgotten how much his voice had soothed me when I was a child. How, early on, he’d read to me late at night whenever he was home. Eventually, though, when I grew older, the bedtime stories had gone away, replaced by a constant emptiness. I finally released the breath I’d been holding, feeling like a giant balloon that had just burst at the puncture of my father’s words. “Dad? It’s your daughter, Ashley. I know it’s been–”
“–and I am currently unable to answer my phone. If you would care to set an appointment for a firm time when I can be reached, please contact my assist–”
I hung up. I sat there on the edge of the bed, my mouth half open as I stared at the blank wall, vaguely trying to remember what piece of art had been hanging there. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. I guess it didn’t matter, anyways.
This wasn’t good at all.
First Barbara, and now him? The cards declined this morning, the cabin being broken into?
I stood up shakily from the bed and carefully smoothed by tank top back into place, like it was the most important component of a weird calming ritual.
As I left the bedroom, I realized I needed a drink. A glass of wine, or maybe even a cocktail. Something. Anything to settle my hand and keep it from shaking the way it did on the banister as I went downstairs.
“Frank?” I called when I was halfway down the stairs.
“Yep?” he called from the living room. “What’s going on? Find out anything?”
“We need to talk. I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
He nodded at me as I joined him in the room. His eyes were serious and piercing. “It’s okay. I’d figured as much.”
Chapter Fourteen – Frank
We stood there, looking across the kitchen island at one another. Tears brimmed her eyes, threatening to spill over.
“Just start from the beginning,” I said as gently as I could.
She nodded and took a sip off her gin and tonic. Ashley took a deep breath. Then she began, taking me through the whole thing. I stopped, asked for clarification at certain points as she told me the whole story, from the falling out with her father after he'd married his new wife, how they hadn't spoken since. All the way to her credit cards being cut off, her father being completely unreachable and maybe on the run for some reason, and his assistant Barbara lying to her over the phone about what was going on.
“And now,” she said, tears from her red-rimmed eyes drying on her cheeks, “I have like just a few hundred dollars to my name, all my credit cards are shut off, and someone broke in here. That check I gave your boss? That's not going to clear. I just know it won't.”
“You’re right,” I mumbled as I leaned forward and braced myself on my elbows. “A drink does sound good after all that.”
She cracked a little bit of a smile, and pushed her gin and tonic forward across the granite countertop with one finger.
I took it, downed the last half, and slid it back to her, saying, “Anything else?”
She started shaking her head, but stopped. “One other thing. I want to apologize for not telling you what I suspected was going on.”
I waved it off. “That was just a suspicion, maybe a false lead. While what you just found out ain’t exactly concrete, it’s closer to actual information. Now, all that, though, it’s behind us. Sun is at our back, it’s a new day, and we’re headed west. Right?
She nodded. “Right.”
I slapped my hands down flat on the counter. “Your father is out of touch, his assistant is gone from the office, your cards are cut, you ain’t got a way to get into the alarm system, and there’s someone looking for something in this place.”
“Can we do something like hack the alarm system?”
I shrugged. “Probably. But would it tell us anything new?”
Ashley frowned.
“At a glance, I’m gonna say no,” I said, answering my own question. “What I do need to do, though, is talk to my boss about all this. Peter needs to know what’s going on so he can make a better decision about the whole thing.”
“What do you think he’ll say?”
I took a moment to think about it. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to give her false hope either. My pack leader could be unpredictable at times, disappearing and dropping off the face of the earth for days at a time. But he’d always seemed to come through in the clutch.
“I think,” I carefully began, “Peter’s as frosty as his last name, but he’s a good man. One of the best men I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen him pull an investigation like this because someone couldn’t pay or because it suddenly got too dangerous for us. We’re all big boys and we can handle ourselves just fine.”
She reached across the table and placed her hand on top of mine. Her skin was warm, her palms soft. “Thank you, Frank.”
Without giving it a second thought, I clutched her hand in return, gave a little squeeze, and rubbed my thumb across the back as I looked into her eyes. “It’s gonna be okay, Ashley. Things are scary, but I’ll make sure you make it out of this okay, or I’ll go down myself trying. Hear me?”
I guess I nudged her over the edge, because a single fat tear trickled down her cheek.
“So, you take another second to collect yourself,” I continued, “and I’m gonna step out back on the deck and call Peter right now. Got it?”
She nodded.
I squeezed her hand again. Something about holding her hand like that just seemed…right, the way her skin felt beneath mine, the way her eyes looked as she gazed right back at me and smiled a little despite the situation, her eyes slightly dilated. “Thank you,” she said again, this time her words nearly a whisper.
It was like a flip switched in my head, or somewhere else, and I realized how much she’d changed. She didn’t seem like the spoiled little rich bitch I’d met this morning. She seemed like any other human out there, taken from their comfort zone, dropped into the deep end of the pool and told to sink or swim. I reluctantly released her hand and left her in the kitchen.
I headed out onto the back patio, sniffed the air, and licked my lips as the fresh mountain air hit them.
My heart was still galloping from just touching her hand. What the fuck had just happened in there?
I had no damn clue.
But, like any good soldier, I put my head down and focused on the foxhole I was in. All your emotions getting in the way, all the confusion—none of that matters. All that matters is the mission, the purpose. And, right now, the mission I'd been given was to make sure Ashley was safe, not figuring out what was going down with her father. Far as I was concerned, right then, I'd been hired by her and no one else. And keeping her safe was priority number one.
I called Peter on my cell and he picked up on the second ring. I could hear car noises in the background as he spoke, the rush of air as he raced down the highway. “Frank, talk to me.”
“Oh, boss man, we are in a spicy jalapeño dill of a pickle here.”
“That bad?”
“That bad.” I ran him through all the new information. The hardware store, Barbara being out of pocket. The lot of it.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “This is certainly less than ideal.”
“Got a plan yet?”
“Notice any tattoos on your Russian? Identifying markings?”
“Not that I saw. But he was dressed to be as inconsp
icuous as possible.”
He grunted in acknowledgement. “Alright, first thing is to stick by her side. Mission parameters may have changed. Too much in motion at the moment, but we were hired to investigate a break-in, and now she needs protection in case something spills over and affects her.”
“My thoughts exactly, boss.”
“Glad we’re on the same page. I’ll get back to you on our next move. Want you to sit tight in the meantime, though, and don’t make any extra moves. This is a protection detail now. Got it?”
“Got it. Going to send in the cavalry?”
“Going to do a couple things. I’ll get Lacy to find out about the alarm system first. Second, I’m sending Jake and Richard both after the Russian. Gonna take two to tail him, especially in this small of a town, if your suspicions are true. Put out some feelers to my contacts, see if they know of anything. With Matt out of town already, that spreads us pretty thin.”
I nodded, my eyes tracking up and over the back piece of the property. The wind was blowing in from the northwest still, from the direction we figured the Russian had tracked in on. “So I’m on my own for now?”
“Sorry, soldier, but that’s what it sounds like. Don’t worry, though, we’re going to keep our eyes on this guy of yours. He makes a move, we’ll know what he’s doing before he does.”
“Sounds good. I’m out.”
“Good luck.”
We hung up and I stuffed my phone away. I glanced back into the house and smiled when I saw that Ashley had gone back to her broom. Apparently the alcohol hadn’t taken her mind off her problems as well as she thought it would. I knew it wouldn’t, but telling somebody they’re wrong isn’t a way to get someone to listen to you. Sometimes they needed to find that kind of thing out for themselves.
Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series Page 33