by Beverly Bird
Thank God. “Received and acknowledged.” Or had Joe set her up? She had no choice now but to sit down by her front tire and wait to find out.
They hadn’t dared to suspend her, she thought again, fighting a hysterical laugh, so apparently they’d decided to get rid of her entirely.
Her gun hand was steady enough when the silver sedan came to a brake-screeching stop in the middle of the street next to her own car. The passenger window lowered. She couldn’t see Joe from her position on the ground but his voice came to her clearly. “Status, Molly?”
“By the manual, Joe. I’m alone so I waited for backup.”
“Good call.”
“Gee, thanks. I think he’s gone by now, though. Whoever shot at me. There’s been no further fire.”
“He was probably gone before his finger went cold on the trigger.” Gannon’s voice was tight, vicious.
He knew, Molly thought, feeling sick. He knew, too, that she’d been set up. Because he’d been in on it? She had to trust someone, but Danny’s was the only face that came to her mind. And Danny wasn’t here. All she had was Gannon.
“You’re senior officer here,” she said finally. “Advise, Joe. What do you want me to do?”
“Take the back of your car. I’ll take the front.” She heard his door open and close on the other side of his car. “You head for that lunatic screaming her lungs out on the porch. I’ve got your back. Get her inside and when you’re clear, I’ll head out to the rear of the property to check things out.”
She heard what he was implying. No one would shoot at him. They wanted her.
“Joe,” she said hoarsely, “I really need to trust you right now. You’re a good guy, right?”
“I’m not one of them, Molly.” His reply was even, not insulted, not surprised. Did he know that they had a whole damned organization, that they’d even gone so far as to name themselves? Just how much had Gannon figured out when he’d booked Bancroft into a holding cell only to have a dead prisoner on his hands an hour later?
If he was lying, she was either going to die on her way to the door…or here by the tire.
Molly moved around to the rear of her patrol car, her weapon drawn, then she darted for the cover of some oak trees on the rim of the property. There were no more shots. She was sure then that there wouldn’t be. Joe was right. The shooter was long gone. They wouldn’t risk staying in the vicinity any longer than was absolutely necessary. They might well even think they’d gotten her—at least until they heard her alive and well on the dispatch tape, bleating for backup.
Molly left the cover of the trees and ducked into the edge of the pyracantha. She avoided the steps and went up onto the porch from the side, then she ambushed the woman and pushed her quickly back through the door into the house. She found the light switch and turned the porch light out.
The woman was still weeping in her arms when Joe came back. Molly caught his gaze. “No footprints, right?”
“It hasn’t rained in well over a week. The ground’s too hard.”
“Convenient.”
“Isn’t it though?”
Her fury blazed. It burned in her blood, hot, lethal, staining her skin red. “Damn it, Joe! This isn’t just an IAD charge! This is my life we’re talking about here! I had shots fired and no one would come!” They had to be up to something terrible, something heinous, to be this worried, she thought, and felt her head spin.
Joe gave her a glare of warning and inclined his head in the direction of the door. Molly set the weeping woman away from her. She mollified her with comforting words. Joe told her that he would be back to take a statement from her in the morning, that none of this actually had anything to do with her or her husband. She was safe, but he’d arrange for another patrol car to sit outside her residence for the rest of the night.
They finally went outside. Molly pulled the door shut quietly behind her. Joe looked at her steadily.
“What the hell do you know, Molly? What have you done that I don’t know about?”
She hesitated. All she had, really, was a list of maybe-suspicious names and confirmation that there was a network of bad cops. She knew what they called themselves.
“I already have my gold shield,” he said. “I’m no competition for you getting yours. And if I were one of them, you’d be dead now.”
She was too shaky, too tired in the aftermath of adrenaline, to be offended. “That’s not it. I want to be sure of what I’m saying before I make accusations. But as soon as I sort through a few more things, I’ll bring you in.”
He thought about that. “Fair enough. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do now. We’ll leave the damaged cruiser and I’ll give you a lift back to the station. You’ll need to fill out a report and I’ll send a tow truck for the car. Damn it, Molly, I wish you had stuck with no-parking signs.”
“At this point…me, too.” She followed him to his Acura, her legs feeling boneless.
Forty minutes later Molly hunched over a desk in the squad room and dug the heels of her hands into her tired eyes. Joe’s words rang through her head. What the hell do you know, Molly?
Someone had shot at her. In her twelve years in law enforcement, she had never come so close to death as she had tonight. She had been talking on the radio with Danny, her left shoulder leaning against the driver’s-side door of the car. That slouch may have saved her. They’d brought her car in a little while ago; the bullet had gone through the right-side stuffing of the driver’s seat. If she had been sitting upright, it probably would have caught her in the right shoulder.
Had the shooter been close enough to the car to see that she hadn’t been sitting up straight? Even assuming he had been, it had been pretty damned close if they had just been trying to rattle her. No, she thought, no. They had definitely been trying to kill her. They had to be protecting something huge to justify murder.
Dispatch had known she was talking to Danny. They’d put the call through. What did that mean? She would drive herself crazy trying to figure it out, Molly knew.
“Damn you, damn you, damn all of you,” she said aloud, then she pushed her chair back and got to her feet. Okay, she thought, all bets were off. “You shot at me.” They’d put Bobby in a coma. They’d framed Danny.
It was time for some hardball.
She looked at the wall clock as she left the squad room. It was twenty past eleven. For all intents and purposes, her shift was over. They wouldn’t issue her another car now. She should probably stay on the premises for the next forty minutes or so, but that was fine with her. It worked to her advantage. Molly headed for the personnel office.
There was a glass window in the door there. Molly leaned against it and peered inside. Some of the computer monitors glowed overnight with screen savers. There was enough insipid light that she could tell that there were no keys, no coffee cup, no paperback novel on the counter. No surprise there. Evie had long since left for the day. Molly sighed and pushed away from the door, but she tried the knob for good measure. It was locked.
“What don’t you guys want me to find in here?” she murmured aloud.
She’d lost her chance with Evie’s keys when she’d been late today, but she had a credit card in her purse, Molly thought. Molly left personnel and started toward the women’s locker room—a misnomer if ever there was one. The space was pretty much a broom closet with two lockers stuck in there—one for her and another for the only other female officer on the M.C.P.D. They didn’t get a shower and bathroom facilities like the guys did. It was why she always dressed for her shift at home.
The locker room was inky dark. Molly hesitated in the door, her stomach roiling. She was getting paranoid—and why not? She finally stepped inside and inched along the short, tiled wall, her hand out until it connected with the light switch. She drew her weapon again and flicked it on.
Nothing. No one was there. The locker room was empty.
Molly pushed off the wall and stepped across the narrow room. Then her heel came d
own on something lumpy and unsteady. She swore aloud and backed up. The lockers cast a shadow on the floor between them and the wall. Molly glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was behind her, then she dropped to her haunches to feel around the tiles.
Her fingers closed over a set of keys.
Molly straightened quickly and went back to the door to look at them in the better light there. Her heart started beating like a snare drum. She had a flash of Evie Castelano strolling nonchalantly to the counter this morning to sip deliberately from that convenience-store coffee. What are you going to do about the charges?
Evie worked in personnel and would have access to the schedules. Evie would know that Molly would be the only person coming through this room tonight. The other female officer worked days. She would already have been gone from the police station by the time Evie got off work.
These were Evie’s keys. They’d been sitting on the floor in front of her locker. Evie had left them for her.
Molly’s first instinct was giddy gratitude, then paranoia sank in on her again, teasing her pulse. Was she being set up again? Lured to that office?
Did she have a choice but to find out?
She left the locker room and went back to personnel. She stopped in front of the door and shifted the keys in her hand, looking for a likely fit. The one she chose slid easily into the lock. “Okay. Let’s see where this leads me.”
She let herself into the office and closed the door quietly behind her, locking it. She couldn’t hear if anyone else was in here because her heart was galloping. When in her life had she ever done anything this outrageous? But they were pushing her to the wall now. They’d shot at her. They’d beaten up Bobby. They’d framed Danny. The Lion’s Den. She moved to the computer that she’d always seen Evie use whenever she’d visited this room.
It wasn’t one of those that had been left alive for the night. Molly sat down, booted it up and waited. It asked for a pass code.
“Damn, damn, damn.” She felt the skin on her neck prickle. She was being set up. If Evie had left her the keys, wouldn’t she have made this easier? Wouldn’t she also have left the pass code? Molly glanced over her left shoulder, then over her right.
“Pass code,” she muttered aloud, looking back at the screen. “Okay…Molly.” She typed in her name for lack of anything else.
The screen came alive.
At first she was startled speechless. Then she laughed aloud. “Bless your bright-red beehive.” Of course Evie would fix it so that no one else could see what she’d left. The woman had been calling her attention to those keys today. But Molly hadn’t taken the bait, so Evie had gone into high gear. Molly hit enter, and the screen filled with text.
Twelve years ago I was a police officer in Dover, Delaware. I fell in love with an ex-con. They drove me out of the department. But we are married now. Don’t know what you are up to, why you need to get in here so bad, but you go, girl!
“Oh, Evie, do I ever owe you a bottle of post-nuptial champagne.” Molly grinned and started to tap into the records she needed.
Forty minutes later, a line of cold sweat trickled down the back of her uniform shirt. It was nothing conclusive, she thought, but it was just enough to start with. It tied most of her suspected cops together in a web of favors and associations.
She sat back in Evie’s chair as a new screen came up. “What in the world?” Ben Stone?
It was nothing like what she had pulled up on the others, but it was curious. His paychecks were being hit to the tune of $5,500 a month by the Lone Star County Probation Department.
“That’s a haul.” She called up the rest of his payroll records. He grossed a little over $9,500 per month. Probation was taking more than half of his income. Why?
Was Chief Stone part of the Den? He hadn’t readily complied with all her requests, Molly thought, but eventually he seemed to get around to it. He’d always been a little put off by her, but she was pushy.
She knew where he lived. How in the world did Stone afford a house like that on the $4,000 a month that the probation department was leaving him?
Molly leaned back in Evie’s chair and finally turned off the computer. Then she heard a sound that had her diving for cover behind the desk.
The office doorknob turned once, then twice.
No more tonight, please, no more. But her adrenaline burned again even as every muscle in her body cried out from stress fatigue. Molly stayed crouched beside Evie’s desk. Had she locked the door behind her? Yes, she was almost positive that she had.
But she wasn’t taking any more chances.
Molly shot to her feet, her weapon in front of her and drawn. She jogged to stand beside the door, then she reached and unlocked it. She aimed her gun in that direction as it finally opened. “Stop right there. Damn it, freeze.”
“Alive and well,” Danny drawled, stepping through the door, “and as irritable as always.”
Molly hurled herself at him. “Oh, my God. What took you so long to find me?”
Danny caught her in his arms. He smelled her hair, felt the sudden heat of her against him and he cherished it. “You were supposed to give me more clues. A gunshot and ‘got to go’ doesn’t cut it. I couldn’t figure out where you might have ended up—here, or in the morgue. I checked there first.” She was alive, he thought. And he had found her. He wasn’t going to admit how weak his own knees were at the moment—or the lifetimes he’d lost when he had heard that gunshot over the telephone.
Finally, when he had called the hospital and the morgue and turned up nothing, he’d remembered her threatening to get to these records tonight.
“Come on home with me now so I can officially enter you into my ex-con hall of fame,” he murmured.
Molly pulled back from him. “What? Why?”
“Honey, from the looks of things, I believe you just pulled off a break and enter.”
Chapter 10
The apartment over the rec center hadn’t changed a lick in the two years since Molly had last set foot in it. She stepped through the upstairs door and realized she was hugging herself. She hadn’t expected the sight of the place to be so poignant.
The sofa bed was still the same hideous green. The refrigerator still groaned constantly. The telephone was still the big, old, black rotary type. “I stayed here right after I moved to Mission Creek while I was waiting to move into my apartment,” she said, peering out the window at the wretched street below. “I was so optimistic then. I figured I had a whole new clean slate on life.”
“Why did you move here?”
Molly glanced back at him. “My mother finally died.”
He waited, remembering the picture of the older woman on her living room wall.
“No one needed me in Laredo anymore,” she added finally.
“Who needed you in Mission Creek?”
“The woman I lost while I was taking care of everyone else. Now look at the mess I’ve got on my hands.” She laughed a little thinly. “I finally found her, only to have someone try to kill her.”
It still squeezed at something inside him. Danny found that he couldn’t even think about the sound of that gunshot without a sweep of the same utter physical debilitation he’d felt when he’d heard it.
He’d thought he lost her. He’d been sure of it.
He’d thought Carmine had ordered the hit, retribution for the scene in the hospital parking lot, because he’d gotten too close to her—a cop—and the mob had decided they couldn’t risk it. He’d wanted that bullet for himself. Then she’d said, “Got to go”, and he’d known that Carmine’s boys didn’t miss when they fired.
That left Bobby’s Lion’s Den. Maybe they were involved with Carmine; maybe they weren’t. He’d never heard mention of such an organization, but he’d been away for a while. Either way, Molly’s bad cops were no longer her own personal war. He wasn’t going to stay away from her, wasn’t going to lose her to any of them—and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life dying inside
every time a car backfired.
Somehow he was going to bring both enemies down.
Danny took two soft drinks from his refrigerator, then he kicked it once, squarely middoor, and it stopped moaning. Molly gaped at it.
“Wow,” she said finally. “How did you figure out that trick?”
“I had a temper tantrum one night at three in the morning. I wanted to hurt it. I ended up fixing it instead.”
“So how long does it stay quiet?”
“Three, maybe four hours. Just long enough for you to get into a deep sleep, then it wakes you up again.”
“The alternative is to pay rent, I suppose.”
He cocked a brow at her dry tone. “Or live with my mother. And I can’t do there what I want to do here. I believe we have unfinished business from this afternoon. Don’t we, pretty Molly?”
She took the soft drink from him, then her breath vanished and she got caught in the look in his eyes. They both knew why she was here. Her car had been parked down the street since they’d rushed to the hospital that afternoon, but he could have just dropped her off. She could have gotten out of his Dodge and behind her own wheel and gone home.
“So what are we going to do about this?” He toasted her can with his. “Are we going to take it the rest of the way? I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been thinking about it all night.”
Her heart jittered. So had she. Still, Molly tried for sanity. She needed to be sure. “There are so many reasons not to.”
“That’s funny. I’ve forgotten them all.” He put his can on the coffee table.
His eyes were so dark, she thought, so deep. And she wanted to drown in them, to forget everything else. Molly realized she was trembling a little. For the first time in her life she trembled with sheer wanting.
“There are two things I wanted to do the first time I saw you,” Danny continued in that same low, smoky tone. “You were on the court, playing some abomination you called basketball.”