by Lisa Childs
She wished she could have afforded a better monument. She wished that she could have done more to honor her baby brother.
“You deserved so much more,” she murmured, and tears stung her eyes. She furiously blinked them back to focus on that marker, which recorded Javier’s date of birth and date of death.
He had deserved more than the twenty years he’d lived. As his older sister, she’d been the one who had always taken care of him. Their drug-addicted mother certainly hadn’t been capable. So Rosie, eight years his senior, had raised him and protected him.
And loved him.
She couldn’t fight the tears anymore. They spilled over and ran down her face, dripping onto the ground—onto Javier’s grave.
Clint was right. Javier deserved justice. Her going to Luther, even for Clint, had been an act of betrayal against both men. Neither of them wanted Luther to get away with his crimes.
That was why Javier had become Clint’s informant. If he hadn’t felt like it was the right thing to do, he wouldn’t have done it—no matter how much pressure Clint might have put on him. She’d thought it was a lot, but now she had to admit the truth she’d been avoiding.
She never should have blamed Clint for Javier’s death. She’d only added to the guilt he’d already put on himself, a guilt he shouldn’t be carrying.
Would Luther’s conviction help relieve that guilt? Was that why it was so important to him—not just because of his cousin but because of Javier, too?
She could understand that. She could also understand his being upset with her. She was upset with herself at that moment. She’d made a terrible mistake. She needed to tell Clint. She needed to tell the assistant district attorney, too. But when she turned away from Javier’s marker, she slammed into the body of the man who’d walked up behind her.
She hadn’t heard him approach. But then she’d been crying, so she’d heard only the sound of her broken sobs. She lifted trembling hands to her face and brushed away her tears. Then she blinked and focused on him.
If he hadn’t been wearing his navy blue River City PD uniform, Rosie might not have recognized him. Even then it took her a moment to place him—so much had happened in the past few days.
“Officer Maynard,” she greeted him. “I’m so glad to see that you’re doing well.” He’d been hurt that night at her apartment, the night Clint had been hurt. But he looked better than Clint.
She could see no visible signs of the injury he had sustained. A concussion? Was that what the chief had said he had?
“Ms. Mendez,” he greeted her back.
“Did Ms. Gerber send you to find me?” she asked. “Or the chief?” But how would either of them have known where to find her?
Clint was the only one who might have figured it out—because only Clint knew how much she had loved her brother. No wonder he’d been so shocked that she had decided not to testify.
Officer Maynard shook his head. “No. They didn’t send me.” And he drew his gun from his belt and pointed it at her. “Luther Mills sent me.”
She didn’t have to ask him why. She knew that he was going to kill her. And just like Clint had warned her, she’d been a fool to trust Luther Mills. If he still intended to kill her, he certainly still intended to kill Clint as well.
* * *
Clint had known exactly where to find Rosie. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one. The officer must have followed Rosie from the condo since he’d beaten Clint to her. His heart beat fast and hard as he saw the gun the officer pointed at her. But when Clint stepped out from behind a monument, he acted as though he hadn’t seen it.
“Good work, Officer,” he praised the young man. “You found her quickly. From those weeks of protecting her, you must have figured out where she would be.”
Rosie shook her head, her brown eyes wild with fear, and the officer whirled toward Clint, his gun pointing at him. Clint preferred that to having the weapon on Rosie. He kept his hands open, so the officer could see he had no weapon on him.
It was in the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back. He’d given up the holster since it had irritated his shoulder wound. But hopefully, since he wasn’t wearing it, the officer would think he was unarmed. Clint hoped he could draw his gun fast enough to save her.
“I can take it from here, Officer,” Clint continued. “And there are more Payne Protection bodyguards in the parking lot, so she will have plenty of security. You don’t have to worry about her.”
Like he was worried...
So damn worried.
Especially when she shouted, “No, Clint! He’s working for Luther.”
The cop whirled back toward Rosie, and Clint drew his weapon. He knew it was too late now for the guy to just walk away and pretend that it had all been a misunderstanding. But before Clint could pull the trigger, the man jumped behind Rosie, using her as a human shield. And he pressed his gun against her temple.
“No,” Clint said. “You don’t want to do this.”
The young officer’s eyes were wild with a desperation that made him capable of anything.
“If you’d wanted to kill her, you could have anytime when you were protecting her,” Clint pointed out.
The officer shook his head. “Not if I wanted to get away with it. I told Luther that. But he wouldn’t listen. He just kept pushing. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Rosie vehemently agreed. “So why would you trust him?”
“Why would you?” Clint asked her. “You had to know that he wasn’t going to take the chance you might change your mind about testifying. He was going to kill you anyway.”
The officer glanced from Rosie to him, following their argument. She opened her mouth to say something else, but the young man shook her as if she were a doll. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up!”
“The other bodyguards will hear you,” Clint warned him. But he was bluffing. He’d come alone to the cemetery. He’d wanted to talk to Rosie without an audience. He hadn’t realized that someone might have beaten him to her.
But he should have known—Luther always seemed to be one step ahead of them. Now he understood why. He’d had someone on his crew who’d worked Rosie’s protection duty. But yet the officer shouldn’t have known where the safe house was.
Who else was working for Luther?
The officer glanced around and then narrowed his eyes with suspicion.
Clint should have known better than to bluff. Landon always joked about how bad he was at it.
“You can’t kill us both,” Clint pointed out to him. “You might be able to get a round in her before I kill you. But make no mistake, you will die.”
The young officer’s eyes grew even wilder with desperation.
Clint cocked his gun. “And I’m not going to wait for you to fire the first shot.” Because that would have been the smart thing—for the kid to have already taken his shot, to have fired at Clint first.
But he was such a rookie, he might not have even had to draw his weapon on a suspect before, let alone an innocent person like Rosie.
“Don’t kill him,” Rosie whispered.
The guy didn’t yell at her to shut up this time.
“You’ll need him to testify against Luther.” Then she squeezed her eyes shut, as if expecting him to pull the trigger that second.
But the young officer laughed. “You better just kill me,” he told Clint, “because there’s no way in hell I would ever be stupid enough to testify against Luther Mills.”
His comment jarred Clint. How had he expected Rosie to do something no one else—but her dead brother—had been brave enough to do? That bravery had already cost Javier his life. Maybe she had been stupid to even think about testifying. And Clint had been even stupider to expect her to do it.
“Just put down the gun,” Clint implored him. He didn�
�t want to kill anyone, but most of all not a cop. This man had once been like him, had once cared about law and order. Clint wasn’t certain where it had all gone wrong or how Luther had gotten to him. “Nobody has to die.”
The young man shook his head. “Luther ordered it.” He expelled a shaky sigh. “Pretty much everybody who’s touched the case against him is going to die.”
A chill chased down Clint’s spine. The chief had been right to bring in bodyguards. The Payne Protection Agency was the only chance of this trial actually taking place. But he—Clint—was Rosie’s only chance of survival.
Somehow, he had to get the officer to take that gun away from her head—because even if Clint took the shot, the guy could reflexively pull the trigger and kill her even as he was dropping to the ground.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” Clint warned him. “You’re never going to collect whatever Luther is paying you.”
The guy flinched. So this was about money for him. But just in case...
Clint asked, “Or is he threatening you or someone you care about?”
The officer glanced away from Clint, as if unable to meet his gaze.
“It is all about money,” Clint said heavily, disappointed. So the cop had turned for greed, no other reason. “Money you’re never going to collect. So killing her is pointless.”
The guy snorted. “Killing her is the whole point, man. She’s the witness! She has to die!”
And Clint knew he had no choice. Someone was going to die. Here and now. He only hoped that it wasn’t Rosie. Not only would he be breaking his promise to Javier, and right on the man’s grave, but he would also be losing the woman he loved.
He should have told her. Now he might never have the chance.
* * *
Parker no longer had any qualms about being called to Chief Lynch’s office. Woodrow wasn’t the principal. After that hug he had given Parker earlier today, they weren’t just working together. They were family. He’d already known that, of course. But until that hug, until he’d realized how much his mother’s husband cared about him, Parker hadn’t felt it. Now Woodrow wasn’t just his stepfather; he was his dad.
That didn’t make what he had to tell the man any easier, so he hesitated for just a moment before knocking on the office door of Chief Woodrow Lynch.
“Come in,” Woodrow called out.
Parker opened it up and stepped inside, and as he did, he uttered an apology immediately. “I’m sorry. We lost the witness.”
Woodrow tensed. “She’s dead?”
“She sneaked out of the safe house,” he explained. “She has no protection, so it’s only a matter of time before one of Luther’s crew gets to her.”
“What happened to Quarters?”
Parker had thought the only way Rosie would get away from him was if he was dead. “He’s out looking for her.”
“He’ll know where to look,” the chief assured him, more like a father would rather than a client or a boss. “He’ll find her.”
“I’m sure he will.” But would it be too late? Not just for Rosie but for Clint, too?
Parker glanced down at the cell phone in his hand, willing it to ring, willing Clint to call him. “He refused to take anyone along with him,” he admitted. And even though other bodyguards had tried to follow him, he’d lost them. “He has no backup.”
Woodrow cursed. “Damn fool.”
Parker hoped Clint was just a damn fool and not a dead one. He shook his head. “Maybe he thought he could talk her back into testifying if he went alone.”
But a dead woman couldn’t testify.
“This is a mess,” the chief said with a ragged sigh.
And Parker figured he wasn’t talking about just Clint and Rosie. He studied his stepfather’s face and noticed the new lines in it, and the dark circles beneath his blue eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, because something else was going on; something else had rattled the chief. And Parker hoped it didn’t have anything to do with his mother.
“Ms. Gerber requesting the bank records of the correction officers at the jail got me thinking,” Woodrow said.
“You had her request subpoenas for the bank records of all your officers?” Parker asked.
Woodrow chuckled. “It would take a long time to run all of those,” he said. “And it may come down to that eventually, but for the moment I was just concerned about one.”
“Spencer Dubridge?” Parker asked. The detective could be a jerk, especially to Keeli, but he was a good cop.
Woodrow shook his head. “No. The young officer who was assigned to protect Rosie.”
“The one who got knocked out the night Clint saved her at her apartment?” Wasn’t that what had happened?
Woodrow nodded. “Officer Maynard. I couldn’t get access to his medical records to find out if he really sustained a concussion like he claimed.” His blue eyes twinkled slightly. “Well, I couldn’t legally get access even with a court order.”
Parker grinned. “Nikki.” There was no computer system his sister couldn’t hack.
That was another reason he and Logan had kept her chained to a desk. She worked magic at a keyboard, conjuring up whatever information they had needed.
“He didn’t have a concussion,” the chief shared with him. “The doctor even noted that he doubted the officer had ever lost consciousness.”
“So then where the hell was he when Clint and Rosie were getting shot at?” Parker asked, his temper heating up as he thought of Clint facing all those gunmen alone.
The situation had been so desperate that he’d been forced to jump out a third-story window with the witness. He was lucky that all he’d hurt was his shoulder. He could have broken his damn neck.
Woodrow shook his head. “I would have speculated that since he’s a rookie, he just might have gotten scared and run off.”
It happened sometimes with rookies. Despite all their training, they weren’t prepared enough to deal with the real thing.
“But then you got his bank records,” Parker surmised.
“He got a big influx of cash right around the time he started requesting Ms. Mendez’s protection detail.”
Parker cursed.
“Yeah,” Woodrow said. “She’s lucky to be alive given all the opportunities he had to take her out.”
“But then he wouldn’t have had anyone else to blame it on,” Parker said. So now that the Payne Protection Agency was responsible for guarding her, he was going to no doubt try again. “Did you pick him up?”
“There’s a warrant out to bring him in for questioning,” Woodrow said.
Parker tilted his head.
“Nobody’s picked him up yet.”
Cops didn’t like arresting other cops, even if they were dirty. So Officer Maynard was running around out there with his gun and his badge. If he had found Rosie before Clint had, she would have gone with him. Since he’d protected her before, she would trust him.
And it would be the last thing she ever did.
Parker couldn’t help but think that Rosie’s luck might have run out, and Clint’s along with it.
Chapter 24
She should tell him she loved him. Rosie had been about to explain to Clint why she’d changed her mind about testifying, that she had done it for him, when the officer had told her to shut up. The barrel of his gun pinched the skin of her temple and made her head pound, he had it pressed so tightly against her.
She should tell Clint, though...because she was worried she might not have the chance if she didn’t do it now. And then, before she could open her mouth, the gun blasted.
And she dropped to the ground. She felt no pain, though. She felt nothing but the weight of the officer’s body on her back. Had he knocked her down?
Had he changed his mind about killing her?
From what he’d been saying, she wouldn’t have thought so. She drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes. But then she wished she hadn’t when she screamed at the horror she saw.
Even if she hadn’t been a nurse, she would have known there was no way to treat Officer Maynard’s injury.
He was dead.
What about Clint? Had the officer fired at him first?
“Clint!” she yelled for him.
Had the officer turned his weapon on her bodyguard instead of her? It would have been the smart thing to do. If he killed Clint first, he would have had a chance of getting away with murder.
Or at least his life...
But he had not managed that. She shuddered and looked away from him, trying to see around him for Clint. Had he managed to take Clint’s life before losing his?
If he had...it was all her fault. She shouldn’t have left the safe house. She should have never trusted Luther Mills to keep his word.
“Clint!” she called out again as she tried to wriggle from beneath the dead weight of Officer Maynard’s bloodied body. But then she was free, the body rolled off her.
She hadn’t done it. She hadn’t had the strength. And Officer Maynard certainly hadn’t moved himself.
Then strong hands reached out for her, helping her to her feet. She felt the tremor in those hands, though. And as she stared up into Clint’s face, she saw that he was as shaken as she was.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking with regret. “I’m so sorry...”
Clint shook his head. “I thought he shot you.” And he pulled her against his tense body and wrapped his arms around her.
She shuddered. “I thought he had, too.” And if she’d died, Clint never would have known how she felt about him. Instead he would have probably just piled more guilt on himself, assuming responsibility for her death like he had for her brother’s.
She glanced down at Javier’s grave. Officer Maynard’s blood had spattered the small marker. But that young man’s blood wasn’t on Javier.