Bodyguard (Den of Thieves, #2) (12 page)

“Olivia, it’s only been a few days. These things take time.”

“I can’t wait any longer, Bo. I am sorry. I have to do something.”

“I can’t let you do that.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them with the palms of his hands.

She hated seeing him so torn. She knew he was only doing his job but she hoped that he would see the light before she gave him the ultimatum.

“I have to,” she said quietly, taking his hand.

Bo opened his eyes and stared directly into hers. His eyes searched hers and she had to wonder if he was trying to see just how serious she was about what she was saying.

“Bo? Please tell me you understand. Please tell me that you will help me. I don’t want to do this alone but I will if I have to.”

He closed his eyes one more time, took a deep breath and then looked right into her eyes as he spoke.

“I will help you.”

Her heart raced, and she had to refrain from jumping up and running around the table to give him a big kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you.” She squeezed his hand.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, opening his laptop up. “Come around here and have a look at this.”

She got up and walked around the table to sit beside him.

“While you were sleeping, I tried to see if I could get into the cameras down on the streets we were on when that car tried to run us off the road.”

“And?” She was instantly hopeful. The images she was seeing on the screen were blurry and she couldn’t make out much more than the fact that there were cars speeding down the street.

“Put it this way: I need more help than I have here. I can only see the live feed, which of course, does us no good unless our friends in the silver car are willing to drive back down the same road again.” He shook his head, “And even if they were so kind as to drive down it again we would never know the difference between the car that was chasing us and some random look alike car.”

“So what are we going to do?” All the hope from moments earlier had suddenly been drained out of her, and she slumped back in her chair.

“We are going to visit my friends down at D.O.T. I know one way or another, they are going to be the ones who can help us identify these people.”

“Are you sure?” She was skeptical.

“Only thing we are missing is a vehicle. Then we are good to roll out.” He held up his hands.

“I think I can be of assistance there. As long as you don’t scratch her up, you can use my girl.”

“I would never do harm to a vehicle I am driving.”  He held up his hand as if to say ‘Scout’s honor’.

“Yeah right. I have seen you drive, remember?” She headed to the hall to get her shoes and jacket while Bo packed up his gear and got ready to leave the apartment.

*****

T
he sports car that Olivia drove was almost brand new. He could still smell the leather interior when he got in.

“What year model is this?” He asked, as they got to her parking space.

“2015 edition,” she said, smiling proudly as he looked it over.

“Well, you certainly do have a nice taste in cars. Now how about we get in and I will see what this baby can do.”

“Again, I feel the need to remind you: please do not mess with my vehicle.”

“Don’t worry, I am hoping that whomever is behind all of this shit does not decide to come out to play a second time today.”

“I hope you are right. I don’t know if I can handle any more action of that sort today.” Her smiled belittled the emotions that he knew she was feeling.

It had been a rough day and even he with all his years of experience was burned out by the emotional rollercoaster he had been on all day.

The drive over to D.O.T. was thankfully a short and uneventful one. The reception he got when he got in the front door with Olivia at his side was not what he was expecting.

“Bo, what in the hell are you doing here?” Jake came out from behind his desk as Bo and Olivia crossed into the center of the room where the main table sat.

“We need your help,” he said shortly, opening his bag and pulling out his laptop.

“Help? Help for what?” Cat’s ears perked up as she came out of the weapons room, to see what the commotion was all about.

“I was just about to say. Aren’t you supposed to be keeping Miss Woods safe and comfortable at her residence?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, well, after they tried to run us off the road earlier, it has sort of become personal,” Bo grumbled powering up his laptop, willing it to go faster as he gave a brief rundown of what happened and where his Jeep was.

“What the hell are you talking about? You were supposed to be at Olivia’s home. What the hell were you doing out of it?!”

Bo looked blankly at Jake for a moment. In his mind, he was playing the whole conversation he had had with Olivia earlier over and over. It sounded sad and pathetic. Not something that Jake was going to want to hear.

“It was my fault.” Olivia spoke quietly and everyone standing around the table turned to look at her. “I was being a pain in the ass. I wanted to go get some files to work on while I was stuck at home, and I wouldn’t leave him alone until he took me. He did try to stop me, but I told him that I was going with or without him. I didn’t leave him much of a choice.”

“Great. Just fucking great,” Jake muttered, throwing his hands up in the air and giving Bo a look that said he was pissed beyond belief.

“Okay, I get it.” Bo tried to calm him down.

“Do you?” Jake spat, “Do you really? All due respect, Miss Woods, you don’t have a choice in this. Our job is to keep you safe, and the best way we can do that is to keep you in one place with surveillance and let the police do their jobs.”

Olivia looked back and forth between the two men, and Cat walked around the table to put an arm around her shoulder.

“I know that it wasn’t the best of ideas—” Bo started his mouth suddenly dry.

“It wasn’t the best of ideas, Bo? It was an absolutely horrible idea! And to make it worse, you both could have been killed! What the hell were you thinking, man?”

Bo said nothing.

“I know you did not want this assignment in the first place but for crying out loud. I thought you, of all people, given everything that happened, would have been able to keep her safe.”

“That’s not fair!” Cat interjected, trying to usher Olivia into another room away from the storm that brewing.

“No, Cat, it’s true! I expect that he would be one that would throw his all into seeing that she was protected. It was supposed be a chance to make shit right in his mind again. Instead I end up with someone who acts like he is green and never done a protection detail in his life!” Jake was mad.

“Jake, that is enough.” Bo’s own anger starting to spill over, “I know that it was a mistake—”

“A mistake that almost cost you everything,
again
.”

“No! It was never going to be that again—”

“And just how in the hell can you be so sure of that? Look at the last time! You had it all under control, until your CO took the control away and then what? It was no different than today.”

Bo’s heart ached. Why was Jake bringing all of this shit up now? Bo had enough to worry about and besides this entire thing was Jake’s idea in the first place.

“You need to pack your shit up and head back to Miss Woods’ apartment. Now. No more bullshit, Bo,” Jake ordered, turning and walking away, “I am going to head over to the police department to see what they have done with your Jeep.”

Jake grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the office.

“H
e was way out of line,” Cat said, coming back into the room as Jake left.

“He was right.”

“No, he wasn’t. What happened overseas? You couldn’t do anything about it. You couldn’t save her even if you had tried. If anything, you could have lost your own life in the process.”

“He was right though, I still shouldn’t have allowed Olivia to put herself in danger.” He rubbed his hands with his face. What the hell had he been thinking?

“You didn’t have a choice, Bo.”

Olivia stepped out of the room she had been taken to. “Forgive me for not staying in one place. I meant what I said. You had little to no choice but to accompany me to the office. I would have taken a cab had you not gone with me. And that would have been a complete disaster. If you had not been the one driving the vehicle, I was in there is no chance in hell that I would have survived.”

“You have a point, Bo is an amazing driver.” Cat nodded

“So please stop beating yourself up. I will have a talk with Jake about all of this when things are said and done and see what I can do to help cool his head off.”  Olivia put a hand on his shoulder and Bo saw the expression on Cat’s face when she did that. A mixture of shock and a smile

What was Cat thinking? That he was sleeping with her?

He wasn’t. She was an assignment. He pulled away from Olivia’s touch.

“Alright. You came here for help. What did you want help with?” Cat asked, breaking Bo out of his thoughts and back onto the task.

“For one, I managed to get into the city servers to view the live feed for the cameras on the streets that I was on when the bastards started trying to do their thing-”

“Someone was paying attention when I was teaching them,” Rudy interjected, smiling, coming up beside the three of them. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Woods, I’m Rudy, the resident tech guy.”

“Olivia, please,” Olivia said, taking the hand he held out to shake.

“So, you got into the city cameras, great lesson, and?”

“Yeah, it was a great lesson you taught, however, there is only one problem.”

“What’s that?” Rudy said watching the images of cars whiz by on the camera.

“Unless our friends are going to come by and wave at the camera, we need to see the archives of the footage from earlier today.”

“Oh, right, duh.” Rudy shook his head quickly.

“Can you help us?” Bo could hear the hopefulness in Olivia’s voice.

“I can, but I have to ask what the hell are you going to do if I can dig up the footage.”

Bo and Olivia looked at each other. Bo hadn’t really thought that far ahead, he was grasping at straws.

“I had this idea that if I was able to see the footage, I might be able to get a license plate that the police could track down,” Bo said, shrugging his shoulders.

“That sounds logical, but you know you could have just given me a call to do that for you and you would have avoided that whole showdown with Jake.” Rudy walked back over to his bank of computer screens at the back of the room.

“Yeah, well... I wasn’t expecting Jake to behave quite like that,” Bo explained, trailing after him.

Both Cat and Olivia followed until they had all crowded their way into the back corner of the office around Rudy’s desk.

“No pressure or anything,” Rudy muttered, as his fingers flew across the keyboard.

Bo watched in fascination as Rudy expertly navigated his way through all of the different screens; streams of codes rolled up the screen as he went along. Bo always wondered how Rudy could keep track of everything that he was typing at the speed he was, but then from what Bo understood of Rudy’s past, while he was young he had been doing this for a very long time.

He once managed to hack into the computers that run all the street lights and turned them all red remotely. The city had ground to a halt for almost a half an hour while they worked to undo what he had done.

“Go it.” Rudy smiled as the code slowed down and a pop up with files came up.

“What am I looking at?”

“You, my well-muscled friend, are looking at one hour bites of the traffic cams across the city. What were the streets and times again?”

Bo relayed the information Rudy needed and a few more keystrokes and clicks later, Rudy stopped again.

“I think this is what you are looking for.”

On the screen was a screen shot of the back end of the silver car that had been chasing them. Smack in the middle of the screen was a crystal clear shot of the license plate.

“How the hell did you do that?” Cat’s eyes were wide.

“If you paid attention more when I am showing you things, then you would have a better understanding of how I do these things.” Rudy rolled his eyes.

His computer beeped. Another pop up appeared.

“And there we go. Hang on, I’ll print it out for you.”

“What the hell?”

“I had it run the plate while you all were oogling the fact that I managed to find the shot of the license plate.”

“Brilliant.” Bo smiled.

“Also sent off a package to Detective Brookshire, so he now has all of this information. I do hope it helps. At least helps you enough that you both can go back to Miss Wood’s place and not get yourself into any more mischief.”

“Thanks for that,” Bo said, taking the sheet from Rudy’s printer.

“Any time.”

“Does this name mean anything to you?” Bo asked, handing the piece of paper to her.

Olivia looked at it a moment and Bo could see the look of shock and horror pass across her face.

“What is it?” Bo asked instantly worried again.

“This is my brother,” Olivia said, holding up the page in good hand.

“Your brother?” Bo felt his heart hammer hard in his chest. “Why?”

“Yes, my brother.” Olivia struggled with the words, Bo wanted so much to reach out and hold her. Nothing was worse than having to find out that a family member might be the one who tried to kill you.

“What can you tell us about him?”

“I haven’t seen him in seven or eight years now, I guess. He was into some pretty heavy shit the last time we spoke. I didn’t get all of the details, being an attorney for the justice department, but you know how that goes. I figured I would one day have to be removed from a case that involved him and some sort of wrongdoing. I never imagined any of this.”  She gestured to her arm in the sling, tears filling her eyes.

“I don’t think any of us would think that our family could do us harm,” Cat empathized quietly.

“The good news is that the police now have a lead on him and if there is any merit to him being a part of this then they will have him in custody soon enough and we can sort this out.” Rudy looked down at his keyboard.