by Beverly Bird
“Because I was raised pretty much in the same part of town you were and my mother was going to lose her house if I didn’t. I needed the money.”
Bobby J. nodded as though he understood that perfectly. “But, man, you bailed on her if you stopped getting paid that way.”
“It was what she wanted. She didn’t want me to have to do what I was doing.” And now, God help him, she was in danger of dying because of it. Guilt had claws, he realized, and they were all sharp.
“My mom doesn’t give a damn,” Bobby said suddenly, bitterly. “She just takes the bucks whether I want to give them to her or not.”
Danny opened his mouth and closed it again. This was fragile. “You’ve got to decide what to do about that, then. You’ve got to figure out if whatever you’re doing is worth it.”
He straightened from the wall. “I still don’t want your damned shoes.”
“Never dreamed it.”
“I’m not going to play some candy-ass game.”
“Bobby, that game might surprise you.”
Bobby started for the door, then he stopped to press the soda can to his forehead, his face etched with something close to agony, Danny thought. It hurt his own heart.
“It ain’t worth it. I’m not stupid. I know that,” the boy said. “But man, they’d kill me if I tried to back out now.”
“You’ve got to be smart,” Danny said carefully. “Smarter than they are.” And who the hell were “they”? he wondered again. “I wasn’t. I was a little too naive and I hoped for the best, and I ended up doing time because of it. But I learned my lesson, so let me know if you want to bounce any ideas off me. Sometimes you just need an adult to intercede for you, whether you like it or not.” He paused. “If you didn’t want help, Bobby, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t need nobody.” Suddenly his moment of vulnerability was gone again. His eyes were angry and antagonistic.
“We all need somebody, and you’re lucky you’ve got me.”
But the boy was gone again, vanishing out the door like the ghost Danny had once likened him to.
Danny stayed on the sofa for a long time after Bobby’s footsteps had receded down the stairs. Then he reached for the telephone, intent on calling Molly with this update on one of their kids. He realized that he didn’t know her phone number. He knew nothing about her, not where she lived or how she lived or who she spent time with when she wasn’t here.
She was off-limits. Even if he knew where she lived, he couldn’t go there. Carmine had eyes on her—and probably on him, as well. He’d always have eyes on them.
Danny stood from the sofa, anyway, and headed downstairs to Ron’s office. The mob was clever, but he was better. They’d trained him, after all, and he was smarter than most of them. Molly was off tonight. He was pretty sure she’d mentioned that somewhere along the line.
He’d find a way to get to her safely.
Chapter 7
Molly’s personal information was in Ron’s files. Two could play the snoop game, Danny thought, and he felt not the slightest spasm of guilt as he read the volunteer info sheet that she had filled out two years ago.
She’d listed no next of kin. So what had happened to her mother?
The phone number she’d given in case of emergency was that of the police station.
Who was she close to? Who did she share her free time with? His stomach gave an odd hitch as he realized that he really wanted to know.
She lived at 11639 Wellington Drive. Danny thought about that for a moment. There was a fairly large apartment complex out that way. The complex was just on the other side of a wide stretch of federal land that also bumped up behind the Saddlebag Bar. That was convenient, Danny thought.
Her phone number was 555-1219. But he didn’t want to call her.
He slid the info sheet back into Ron’s filing cabinet and went outside to his car. Then he went to the bank and opened a checking account before they closed for the day. He earned himself a cash card for the first time in his life…unfortunately there wasn’t enough money in his account that he could do much with it. He didn’t dare deposit what was left of his stash—that would surely raise a few law enforcement eyebrows.
He went to the supermarket, just to try the card out. He stopped at the post office and rented a box there in case anyone ever wanted to send him mail. He dropped in at the library and returned Molly’s book. And he was whistling when he returned to his car for the last time.
Anyone watching him would be bored out of their minds by now, he thought. He was being such an upstanding citizen it even nauseated him a little. When he finally got to the Saddlebag, he imagined that he could hear his tail moaning with relief. This was a place where he could be expected to stay put for a while.
None of the women at the bar or at the pool tables was able to approach him this time because Danny walked straight through and let himself out the back door. He started across the federal land on foot. Night was beginning to press over south Texas. He was as sure as he could be that no one would notice him walking away in the darkness.
Her tears were long since spent. By 6:30, Molly was boiling mad again.
“They think they can keep kicking me and I’ll just take it like some kind of…of chump!” She shot a frozen dinner into the microwave and slammed the door hard. “An IAD interview isn’t just poking at someone they resent.” She grabbed a bottle of wine out of the fridge. “It’s serious. Why? What are they afraid I’ll find out from being a part of that task force?”
Bad cops, she thought again, digging in a drawer for a corkscrew. They had to be worried because she suspected that there were bad cops operating out of that war room. Nothing else made sense. Who had she voiced that theory to? Spence Harrison, she thought. And Joe Gannon. Had one of them betrayed her? Or had they simply, innocently, repeated what she’d said to the wrong ears?
“Who are they? And who followed me off shift and took pictures of me at the rec center?” She turned to the kitchen table, then she screamed.
There was a face pressed against her kitchen window. Danny. Danny?
Molly dropped the wine and the corkscrew on the table and hurried to the back door, yanking it open. Her entire apartment complex backed up onto a center courtyard. There was a heated Olympic-size pool out there that she had been promising herself she would use for two years now. She’d never found time to dip a toe into it.
Beyond that, there was nothing but barren land. Had Danny come that way? He must have. Why would he walk all the way around the whole complex just to use her back door?
She had a headache. Nothing was making sense anymore.
“Were you talking to yourself just now?” he asked. He motioned at the window he’d been peering through.
“Of course not.” She advanced on him, everything else forgotten. “Do you have any idea what trouble you’ve caused me? Do you know what you’ve done?”
Danny took a surprised step backward. Something told him this wasn’t about lifting her personal information from Ron’s office. “No. What?”
Suddenly, her eyes went thin with suspicion. “What are you holding behind your back? A gun? Are you armed? Kill me right now, why don’t you, and put me out of my misery.”
“Molly, you’re a little off the wall here—even for you.”
She started to shove a hand into her pocket for the pink slip that Stanmeyer had given her. Then she remembered she’d changed into a robe when she’d gotten home. He was noticing that, too, she realized, if his eyes were any indication.
The robe was short, black silk, and it was clingy. His gaze slid down, up, then up and down. Molly felt her skin heat. Excitement started skittering in her blood. It had been a very long time since a man had looked at her with that kind of appreciation in his eyes. She hugged herself against reacting and searched for her voice again.
“I’ve had a bad day,” she said finally.
“I guess flowers won’t help your mood.” He brought them out from behind
his back.
“You brought me flowers?” Molly gaped. “You stole me flowers!”
“I did not.”
“These are from the garden behind the pool over there. I recognize them.”
“They aren’t. Well, okay, the rose is.”
“Once a thief, always a thief.” She snapped her mouth shut too late.
He scowled. “Do you want them or not? All the others are from the land back there behind the complex. Honest.”
“What were you doing back there, anyway?” she asked again, frowning in that direction.
“Long story.”
Molly decided that she wanted the flowers. No one with the kind of muscles Danny had ever gave her flowers. She took them from his hand and brought them to her nose. Heady, she thought…sweet. “Thanks. But why would you do this?”
“Can’t you just accept the damned things without picking it all apart?”
“You don’t strike me as the flowers type so you must have done something I’m going to be mad about.”
“That shows what you know. I’ve given plenty of flowers in my time.”
“Maybe because you’ve done a lot you’ve had to apologize for.”
“Uh…Molly.” He was really getting uncomfortable standing out in the open with her. He also knew he was going to end up losing this discussion. “Humor me here. Let’s go inside.”
Something happened to her face, something he couldn’t quite define, a sudden kind of dawning. “Good idea.” She stepped back from the door quickly and led the way inside.
As he watched, frowning, she closed the blinds in her kitchen. Then she went to the living room and drew the drapes there, as well. She couldn’t possibly know that she had the mob watching her, he thought. Or could she? Would Carmine go that far? Would he let it leak to her that her very life was in Danny’s hands? No, he decided. If that were the case, she wouldn’t have taken the flowers. She would have decked him. She’d be spitting fire.
“Want some more wine?” She came back to the kitchen. “I happen to have a bottle of the same stuff you bought this afternoon.”
“Sure. Molly, what’s going on?”
“Like I said, I’m having a bad day.”
“You were having a great day three and a half hours ago. You were happy I was alive.”
“I changed my mind.” She started to uncork the wine.
“About my living or the day?”
“Both.”
He watched her reach over her head into a cabinet for glasses. The little black robe hiked up her thighs. His mouth went a little dry.
“I don’t have any cheese,” she said, pouring. “All I’ve got is a frozen dinner and an old burrito I bought on Wednesday but didn’t finish.”
“I’ll pass on that.”
She swept past him into the living room, carrying the glasses. Danny went after her, then she did it again. She got halfway across the room and dropped down to sit on the floor. She put the wine on the coffee table.
Danny looked around. Night had gathered in the room, filling it with clever shadows that should have drained the color from it. But everything was too bright for that. Her sofa was a vibrant blue floral print with splashes of indigo. Some red throw pillows were tossed casually over it. The sofa sat in front of a picture window that would have looked out onto Wellington Drive, but it was all closed up now. The coffee table was old, marred oak and there was a rocker in one corner with a cushion of the same vibrant red as the pillows that dotted the sofa. It was female, but not fussy. Like her, it was vibrant, feisty, without a word of apology for it.
His gaze caught on framed photos that captured the wall space on either side of an old grandfather clock. Danny went that way and switched on a lamp so he could see them better.
He wanted to know about her, he thought again. He wanted to know everything.
The first photo was of a much younger Molly standing arm in arm with a strikingly handsome young man. The boy had black hair and piercing dark eyes. Danny knew without asking that it was her brother. Then there was an older Molly with a tired-looking, gray-haired woman sitting in the same rocking chair that now took up a corner of Molly’s living room. There was Molly—in uniform—with the governor of Texas. What was that about? The guy seemed to be giving her some kind of commendation. Then his gaze got snagged by a picture of Molly in a sleek, barely there dress of crimson, her wild hair swept up, looking glamorous and hot.
Whoa.
Danny found that he wanted to know the identity of the guy standing beside her in that picture. “Who’s the guy?” he asked, taking a seat on the sofa.
“What guy?” She followed his gaze to the photo. “Oh. Him. Well, these days he’s the chief of the Laredo Police Department, but back then he was only an officer.” It struck her then that she had always dated other law-enforcement types. And where had that gotten her? Maybe it really was time for an ex-con.
She almost laughed aloud. She was feeling a little giddy from the events of the day. Molly reached for her wine and took a deep swallow. “That picture was taken the night his boss retired, so he knew he was going to be moving up soon. He wanted to put on a show.”
“How long did you go out with him?”
She looked at him oddly. “One night. That night.”
“Why not ever again?”
“What do you care?”
Damned if he knew. “Just curious.”
“He wanted a mother,” she said finally, “not a wife.”
Something jolted hard inside him. “You wanted to be his wife? You knew all that from one date?”
“I did not want to be his wife. Because I didn’t want to be his mother. I knew that from one date. What’s wrong with you tonight, anyway?”
“Nothing.” Danny drank from his wine. “Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s so fine that you sneaked through Ron’s records to find out where I live, then you came here through the back like some kind of thief?” She winced at her own choice of words. “Sorry.”
“I didn’t say I sneaked through Ron’s records.”
“You didn’t have to. Where else could you have gotten the information? I’m not in the phone book.”
He shrugged and turned the conversation back to safer ground. “When I got here, you said something was my fault. So what did I do to you?”
“Nothing. You got off me too fast, remember?”
Danny felt cut adrift before he realized that she was referring to what had happened between them last night when they’d fallen together playing basketball. He never knew what she was going to say or do next, he realized. One moment he was rattling her with his own sexual innuendo, then, out of the blue, she grabbed that same innuendo and hurled it back at him. She was prissy and law abiding, then she bounced around his gym in a purple bra.
He was ready and up to playing more of the game with her—no matter that they’d both decided it wasn’t a good idea. Then she threw him another curve ball.
“The department wrote me up with IAD,” she said suddenly, “because of my association with you. It’s against regulations for a law enforcement officer to consort with a convicted felon. It’s that way in most cities I know of. I just wasn’t thinking. It never occurred to me because we never…you know, we don’t actually…consort. We’re just…friends.”
A wrecking ball in the chest couldn’t have hit him as hard. Danny stared at her. Then anger poured into his blood. “Who?” he said with deadly quiet. “Who did that to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She licked her lips, a quick little flick of that tongue again that made the heat in him change from anger to something else and shoot straight down to his groin. “It’s really not about you. It’s about the task force. They don’t want me on there. Someone took pictures of me with you last night in an effort to start working me off the detail.”
“How the hell could they do that?”
“Take the pictures?” She scraped her hair off her brow and looked miserable. “Well,
I’ve been thinking about that for the past two hours. They were probably in the vestibule. I didn’t lock the outside door behind me when I came in. I mean, why bother?”
“Maybe because the center is in a really bad neighborhood and you were a woman down there bouncing around in a purple bra alone?”
Molly’s brows lowered into a scowl. “That was a bathing suit top.”
“Why the hell would you wear a bathing suit top under your uniform?”
“Because my sports bras were all in the washing machine.” Her spine was starting to snap straight. “And a T-shirt is too hot under my Kevlar vest.”
“That’s no reason. The stores are full of regular underwear.”
“So are my dresser drawers! But I could hardly practice basketball in my underwear! I’d planned to go there after shift!”
“Yeah, well, you might have warned me!”
“What on earth for? And why are you yelling at me?”
Danny came up off the sofa. “Because you just took a hit to your career because of me!” he shouted.
It knocked her backward into silence. He was upset because he had inadvertently done something to hurt her.
Molly closed her eyes and felt something slide through her that she couldn’t identify at first. It was new, elusive. It was like smoke—there, then vanishing on a breeze. Then it gathered again in other corners of her. It struck her that she would have done anything to ease his turmoil, because she never ever wanted him to feel guilt over something he hadn’t done again.
“Danny.” She took a deep breath, found his gaze. “You didn’t do it. They did. They just…they used my association with you to strike me a blow. If it wasn’t you, it would have been some other dubious line I inched too close to. They were following me, looking for something, anything that even vaguely resembled an infraction they could use against me.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” He still didn’t sit again.
She blinked at him in surprise. “I’m going to fight it, of course.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t be here. I need to go home.”