In the Line of Fire

by Beverly Bird

  She turned her head to look at him, and he prayed that it was anger making her eyes glint. If she cried, it would undo him. “I could have taken an after-school job instead of studying all the time.”

  He fought back…this time because he sensed it would make her feel better. “Oh, yeah, that would have worked. Minimum wage wasn’t going to get your brother off the streets, Molly.” He knew. He’d tried that route first…before he’d hooked up with Ricky.

  “I never even attempted it, though,” she said. There was a tightness to her tone.

  “And now—what? You’re doing penance? Bashing yourself against walls all the time?”

  She didn’t take offense. “Most of them fall down when I hit them.”

  “They won’t, Molly, not every time.”

  “Then I just hit them harder.”

  “What if they still stay up?”

  “Then I’ll know at least this time I tried.”

  She surprised him by standing suddenly. Danny looked up at her, finally understanding. “That’s why you volunteer here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She reached for her shirt again and shrugged back into it.

  “You’re going to save all of Mission Creek’s Mickeys.”

  “I’m going to give it my best shot.” She started to button her shirt, then she gave up because her fingers seemed unsteady. “I give these kids support, funds, whatever I can. It’s more important than basketball, Danny.”

  He thought about it. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have sweet-talked Fiona Carson into donating five hundred dollars.”

  She reached down to give him a hand up. “If it helps them somehow, I’m willing to give it a shot. I just have my doubts.”

  He took her hand. Her fingers were warm, small, as delicate as her cheekbones and the freckles on her chest. That surprised him. He’d never thought of her as fragile.

  Then she let his hand go and flipped her hair out from under her collar. “Good night.”

  Before he could get his voice back, she was already strolling for the door, hips moving nicely.

  “Are we friends now?” he called after her.

  She turned to walk backward so she could look at him. “I don’t think so. We’re worlds apart. But maybe we could be civil enemies.”

  He would accept that. For now. Danny watched her go.

  The trouble was, there was a whole lot more going on here than friendship. There were undercurrents that could have rocked the Titanic.

  Chapter 5

  When Danny went outside the next morning, he found the trash cans planted squarely on the hood and the trunk of his car. He stared at them for a long time before he realized he was grinning. “Point to French.”

  He took the trash cans off his car and headed into town. It was Friday—either the last day of his life or his coup de grace. Exactly which, remained to be seen. His smile faded. His gut went tight, and impatience started to hum in his blood.

  One thing was a given. He couldn’t show up at the Lone Star Country Club to meet Ricky Mercado in gym clothes. Today’s lunch was going to necessitate dipping into what remained of his financial base. He had to play the part, had to resemble his old self—cocky and self-assured—and that would require a smooth wardrobe. He’d need a steady hand and nerves of steel.

  The clothier he’d once visited with lavish regularity was—not surprisingly—still in business. The guy enjoyed the support of the Wainwrights, the Carsons, the Mercados—all of Mission Creek’s wealthiest citizens. Six years ago Danny had been one of them. Now Trevor Edmunson’s prices were going to hurt.

  No help for it, Danny thought, leaving the store fifteen hundred dollars and two hours later. It put him in a foul mood until he returned to the rec center and saw a black Camaro in the parking space he’d vacated.

  Anyone could have come along and tucked into his spot in the time he’d been gone, but he knew it wasn’t just anyone. It was Molly. There was something about the car that reminded him of her. It was sleek and sporty, somehow as feminine as it was powerful. Danny found himself grinning again as he went in search of another parking space. He found one two blocks away and around the corner and had to walk back to the center.

  She was in the office with the door open when he passed through the vestibule. He paused to watch her. Her curls were tamed into a straight look that he didn’t like half so much, but judging from the way she kept driving her fingers into it, he couldn’t imagine the effect would last long. She was gnawing away on the eraser end of a pencil. She started to reach blindly for the phone—her eyes were still on a sheet of paper on the desk in front of her—then she sensed his presence. She looked up.

  A smile that would have brightened the shabby office almost got away from her. Danny found himself wishing she’d let it go. There weren’t many people who were that glad to see him anymore.

  “Parking’s a bitch these days, isn’t it?” she murmured.

  Damned if he was going to laugh. “I thought we were going to be friends now.”

  “Uh-uh. You said that, I didn’t.” She gave a quick little shake of her head and one lock of hair sprang into a curl. “Civil enemies is the way I believe we left it.”

  “Civil enemies don’t put trash cans on each other’s cars.”

  “Hey, I didn’t empty them on it, did I?”

  A bark of a laugh escaped him.

  He’d tried to forget a lot of what she’d told him last night about her childhood. He didn’t want her to have come from the same kind of streets he had. But then she flipped out a comment like that and he couldn’t help but remember how it had been before the poverty had gotten painfully oppressive, before it had started sucking the air right out of life, before it had become something that had to be escaped at any cost. Back in those days he had probably emptied a few trash cans of his own. Old McGlinchey’s front yard came to mind—he’d been the guy on the corner who had hated kids so much he had tried to booby-trap his sidewalk against them.

  Oddly, the memory made him feel good. Then he noticed that Molly’s gaze had fixed on the wardrobe bag he held.

  “Edmunson’s,” she read aloud. “How can you afford Edmunson’s?”

  The suspicion in her eyes hurt more than he would have expected. “I robbed a bank.” Danny moved for the double doors into the gym. He heard her chair scrape back.

  “Damn it, Danny, stop!”

  “No.” He headed for the stairs to his apartment.

  “It was a simple, innocent question!”

  “I didn’t like it.” Something hot bubbled up in his blood. Temper. He finally stopped halfway across the gym to look back at her. “Tell me something, Officer. If you didn’t know what you know about me, would you have asked that question?”

  “If I knew you worked here? Yes! Ron can’t afford to pay you enough for Edmunson’s!”

  He chewed on that for a moment. It was reasonable. He nodded, breathing carefully in an effort to let the anger go. “Okay.” He started to turn away again.

  She had never been able to hold her tongue, Molly thought. Its tendency to get away from her was as much a part of her as her freckles and her green eyes. She took off after him again. “So where did you get the money for that stuff? And why do you need it?”

  “And this would be your business…how?” He kept walking.

  “The kids around here aren’t going to be impressed by that kind of wardrobe.”

  He jerked back to face her. “I need it for my funeral.”

  That stalled her in her tracks. There was just enough of a glint in his eyes to tell her that he might be serious. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you ever give up?”

  “No. It comes from my same ingrained tendency to win all the time.”

  “You don’t win all the time. You just endeavor to.”

  She shot her brows up deliberately. “Endeavor? Another fancy word.”

  “I read a lot in prison. It helped to pass the time.”

  �
�Are we back to that again?”

  It made something darken in her eyes, he realized. She really couldn’t accept the fact that he’d done time.

  “That’s where the money for the clothes came from, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly. “The convenience store thing.”

  The garment bag dropped from his hand. He felt something dangerous fill his head. “They recovered every penny of that money from my apartment. They framed me, remember?”

  “It was mob money, then. Somehow.”

  “That I just spent on these clothes? Yeah, Molly, it was.”

  Her eyes widened—went almost stricken—before she schooled her expression back to passivity and turned away.

  He was on her before he knew he was going to do it, jogging back to her, catching her elbow. He spun her around to face him. “Don’t do that to me. Don’t you ever do that again.”

  “What?” Her expression was still carefully bland.

  “Judge me with your eyes.”

  She jerked her arm away. “Hey, it’s your life, your moral code.”

  “It was money I put aside a long time ago.” Tiny hot fists started battering the inside of his temples. Damn it, he’d made his decisions and he wasn’t going to apologize for them, especially not to her, not to a cop. Her opinion didn’t matter.

  But it did. Somehow it did.

  That made him want to hurt her back. “You know, if your own code had been a little less anal, your brother might still be alive.”

  It was cruel, inexcusable, and Danny regretted it the moment the words left his mouth. She took a hard step back, her head whipping to the side as though he had actually struck her. The color drained from her face until her freckles stood out. “Damn you,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “I shouldn’t have judged.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. You weren’t there. You have no right.”

  “Ditto.”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t there, Molly. You have no right.”

  It knocked her legs out from under her. Literally. One minute she was standing, Molly thought, the pain and the guilt snarling inside her, clawing through every part of her. Then her knees folded and she sat. She dropped to the gym floor and pulled them up to her chest, leaning her forehead against them. “Touché,” she said finally when she trusted her voice.

  He gave a rough sigh and sat beside her. “You did what you had to do, what you thought was best. So did I.”

  Molly looked at him again. She wanted to know, she realized. She needed to know why he’d gotten involved with the mob and how much of his soul it had taken. Was she just searching for some way she could somehow excuse what he had done because she badly needed there to have been mitigating circumstances to his crime? She had actually started to slide her palms up his chest last night, had wanted to kiss him in that moment as much as she had ever wanted anything…and because of that, she couldn’t bear to know that he was not a good man.

  “I don’t want to make excuses to you,” he said finally, harshly.

  She put a hand to her chest to stop her heart from squeezing. She wanted to tell him he didn’t have to. That she liked him and it didn’t matter. But it wouldn’t have been the truth.

  “Damn it,” he continued, “I want you not to need them. Why is that?”

  Because something was happening between them, she thought, and it was so much more than taunts and sexual innuendo. But he was so wrong for her, for everything she was. “I…I don’t know.”

  Danny rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I could have done two things back then—back when it started. I could have taken your way out—study, a careful, long-term plan—or I could have ended the poverty right there and then. I never had your patience, Molly.”

  Hers hadn’t done Mickey any good, she thought.

  “I was always big for my age. Strong. I played basketball for my high school team, football in the fall. I could have had a scholarship either way, but I liked basketball for it’s quickness, for that sweet, split-second edge where anything could happen.”

  He paused for a long time. Molly waited, wondering if he would go on. Needing him to.

  “Ricky came to me one day the summer after I turned sixteen. Ricky Mercado. He was a little older than me, had already been away to the military academy. He was back home on vacation. We knew each other from school—we overlapped for a year or two. I admired the hell out of him, looked up to him. He had all those sharp clothes. That cool car. The life. He had everything I didn’t—a full stomach, cash in his pocket. And I wanted all that.”

  “He offered you a job,” Molly guessed.

  “His uncle, Carmine, was doing some major shindig out at the country club. All I had to do was hang around in the background of that party, keep an eye on Carmine, make sure he stayed safe. Carmine was going to have enemies at that bash.”

  “That sounds innocent enough.” Don’t tell me anymore, please don’t tell me it wasn’t.

  Danny pinned her with his eyes. “Molly, I knew what Carmine was. I knew what he did. Ricky and I had few secrets from each other. I took the job regardless—because I was hungry.”

  “But you didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “I put a man in the hospital that day.”

  She felt everything inside her cringe. “But—”

  “Someone made a move on Carmine. I was closest to him at the time. I picked the guy up and threw him against one of those stone pillars on the back patio. Knocked him out cold. His skull hit and cracked. Carmine hired me as a regular bodyguard after that.”

  “That’s what you did for them? For the family? That’s what you were?”

  “Yeah, Molly, that’s what I was. Does that sit well enough for you?” There was a bite to his voice now.

  He’d been honest. She’d do it, too. “I’m not sure.”

  “He paid me a thousand-dollar bonus for saving his life that afternoon. Do you have any idea how much money that was for me back then? It might as well have been a million. I bought my mother a coat so she wouldn’t have to freeze her way through another cold winter—she didn’t even own one, was too busy trying to make sure that I did. I saved the house for her—the city was going to take it for back taxes, so I put the balance of the money down on that debt. But there was still sixteen thousand or so outstanding, so I went back to Ricky for more.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Instant gratification. I grabbed it, baby. And I looked the other way from that day on because the money was the most important thing.”

  She understood now and it terrified her. “You would have been beside Carmine all that time, part of his…his inner circle. You’d…know things.”

  “I know a lot of things. I know so much that now I’m pretty much a marked man since I left their ranks.”

  “But they didn’t kill you for it. In the end they were willing to just have you locked up.”

  “Ricky interceded. He was the only chance I had.” He watched something bloom in her eyes. She was too smart for her own good, he decided.

  “You’re going to meet with him, aren’t you?” she asked. “That’s why you need the clothes. It’s not over. You need him to do it again.”

  He didn’t answer, not directly. “And if I fail, then my mother can bury me in that suit.”

  Her heart seized so hard, so suddenly, it was a physical pain. “Danny, no.”

  “Molly, yes.” He pushed to his feet again. “Happy now?”

  “No.”

  He glared back at her. “You can’t have more questions. I’ve told you everything that matters.”

  “When are you meeting him? Where?”

  “Are you going to put on your cop uniform and come watch my back?”

  Her chin came up. “Maybe.”

  He picked up the garment bag again. “Molly, don’t you get it yet? I don’t want your help. I don’t trust you. You’re a cop.”

  She watched him leave, hurting more than she would have
thought possible.

  Danny pulled into the circular drive of the Lone Star Country Club at ten minutes before one o’clock. That was planned. The impact of seeing the place again was not.

  A million mental images flashed through his brain as he tucked the Dodge under the covered portico and got out to gaze at the stately oak trees lining the drive. He remembered gorgeous women gathering out here in sleek, barely-there dresses as the limousines pulled up one by one. He imagined Ricky throwing his dark head back and laughing, clapping him on the shoulder in easy camaraderie. They had enjoyed a lot of parties and extravaganzas here at the country club in those days. There had been fellowship, liquor, women.

  “Your keys, sir?”

  Danny jolted and glanced at the valet, pulling himself back. “I left them in the car.”

  The attendant looked from him to the lemon-yellow Dodge, from the Dodge to Danny. Danny fought an urge to laugh at his expression. A man dressed as well as he currently was driving that heap. No, it didn’t reconcile. He wondered what the guy would have thought if he’d driven up with those trash cans still on his trunk and his hood.

  He carried thoughts of Molly inside with him, couldn’t seem to shake the image of her. He had an image of the belligerent Lester, as well. And Cia with her dark, laughing, way-too-wise eyes. Anita with her wishful expressions. Bobby J. always there on the outskirts, watching.

  All of them mattered, Danny realized with a jolt. They had become his source of fellowship now. That comforted him somewhat as he strode into the lobby.

  Time had stopped here. The original four-story brick clubhouse was the centerpiece of the country club and it was as old as the feud between the Carsons and the Wainwrights who had conceived its every nook and cranny. The lobby was double-storied, vast. It led straight through to the covered patio where he had broken a man’s skull at the age of sixteen. Beyond the patio was a trellised walkway and, he knew, one of those old-fashioned gardens with pretty paths winding through them.