FIRE AND ICE (3 page)

A
LL HE WANTED WAS A CHEESEBURGER.
Agent Jack MacAlister had just completed a grueling two-day undercover assignment in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods, and he was tired and dirty and hungry. The last thing he needed as he walked into the burger joint was to interrupt an armed robbery.

With a single shot through the center of the heart, Jack’s bullet propelled the man backward, away from the teenage girl he was holding hostage, and slammed him into the wall. A single stream of blood oozed down the perp’s dirty T-shirt.

Jack didn’t have to kill the other one. A couple of swift moves, and he was able to disarm the guy and get him facedown on the floor. He held him there with a foot on the back of his neck.

Outside, Jack’s partner, Alec Buchanan, heard the gunshot. Drawing his weapon as he deftly slid over the hood of his car, Alec raced to the door. Inside the restaurant, bedlam had erupted. The teenage girl was screaming at the top of her lungs and backing away from Jack. When she turned and saw Alec—though it didn’t seem humanly possible—her screams got even louder. It was apparent
that she was as terrified of them as she had been of the men who would have killed her.

Jack held up his badge. “FBI!” he shouted. “You’re okay now. You can stop screaming. You too, ma’am,” he added to the nearly hysterical woman fanning herself with a limp napkin and bouncing up and down as though she were doing some sort of manic jumping jacks.

Alec dug his badge out of his pocket and held it up as he made his way over to his partner. He squatted down next to the dead body. “Nice shot,” he remarked when he saw where the bullet had penetrated.

“Didn’t have a choice,” Jack replied quietly, so only Alec would hear. The man he was holding down started squirming. “You get up, and I’m just gonna mow you down again.”

Alec put his foot down hard on the base of the man’s spine to get him to stop moving.

Three police cars, sirens blaring, screeched to a stop in the parking lot. To keep from getting riddled with bullets, Jack and Alec continued to hold up their badges. Since the two of them had just been doing undercover work, with their greasy long hair and scraggly beards, they looked more like deranged killers than agents of the FBI.

“Don’t you want to know what happened?” Jack asked Alec as he tilted his head toward the man he’d killed.

“I figured he didn’t get your order right.”

“He was hopped up on something. God only knows what. He was gonna kill the girl, no question.” He glanced down and shifted his stance so that more of his weight pressed on the captive. “This guy’s eyes are so dilated they look like saucers.”

Alec noticed another teenager holding up his cell phone. He wondered how long the kid had been taking video. Muttering an expletive, he turned his back on the teenager and said, “We just blew our cover. How much you want to bet we’re on the Internet within the hour?”

Jack shrugged. “The job was done today anyway.”

Jack and Alec stepped aside as the police swarmed through the door.

The first officer knelt beside the body. “It’s Jessup,” he called to the others.

A couple of policemen came closer to take a look. “Son of a gun,” one of them said. “Never thought he’d be taken down.”

“Who’s Jessup?” Jack asked.

The officer kneeling on the floor looked up. “A major drug supplier. We’ve been trying to stop him for years. Looks like he started sampling some of his own stuff.”

Paramedics walked in with stretchers, and soon the tiny burger joint was crowded.

Jack leaned against the counter and turned to Alec. “You still hungry?”

Alec picked up a laminated menu. “I could eat.”

Three hours later, after filing reports and turning the case over to the police, they were finally on their way back to headquarters. The second they walked inside, they were told to report to the office of the special agent in charge. No surprise there. She had already texted them. Three little words that spoke volumes: My office. Now.

Margaret Don’t-Ever-Call-Me-Maggie Pittman sat behind her massive desk. A group of agents had formed a semicircle behind her, all of them intently watching her computer screen.

“Look who’s decided to join us,” she drawled in her Arkansas twang. “Agent Hot Stuff and his sidekick Agent Hot Shot.”

“YouTube?” Alec asked.

In unison every agent in the room nodded.

“That’s enough now,” Pittman dismissed the crowd around her desk. “You’ve all had your fun. Get back to work while I talk to the movie stars.” Had she been smiling, her comment would have been funny. “Gentlemen, step over here. Agent MacAlister, perhaps you can tell me what’s happening here.” She pointed to the monitor.

Damn. The kid had gotten it all. Jack winced when he saw himself leaning against the hood of Alec’s car. One ankle was crossed over the other, and he was devouring his cheeseburger while the paramedics were rolling the body bag past him.

“Do you know what this looks like, Agent? I’ll tell you. You kill a man, karate chop and tae kwon do the hell out of another man to put him down, and then you enjoy a nice cheeseburger while you take in the afternoon sun, acting like none of it affects you one little bit. That’s what it looks like.”

Jack thought she was finished. “In my defense—”

“Now we know it’s all in a day’s work, and we can’t let it get to us, but the public doesn’t necessarily understand that, Agent, and they expect us to be … sensitive. Yes, I said sensitive, Agent Buchanan. They don’t want us to be cavalier or blasé after we gun down someone.”

Sensitive? Jack thought. Was she serious? She couldn’t be, could she? Since Alec had worked with Special Agent in Charge Pittman longer than he had, Jack looked at him to see his reaction. No help there. Alec was stone-faced.

“What would you consider appropriate behavior, ma’am?” Jack asked.

She squinted at him. “I’ll tell you what
isn’t
appropriate. Eating a damned cheeseburger while they’re carting a corpse past you.”

He had a feeling she wasn’t finished. He was right.

“Sit down, both of you. I’m tired of cranking my neck back.”

She waited until both men were seated facing her from across the desk, then said, “Now today is an interesting exception. The higher-ups aren’t going to be happy when they see this video.” She sighed and then said, “They’ve probably already seen it. However, the public, at least the public looking at this video, have turned you two into rock stars.”

“Rock stars?” Alec said

“That’s crazy,” Jack said at the same time.

“That’s right, rock stars. So far, this little video has had over two
thousand visitors and counting. Hopefully, once you two clean up and get rid of the long hair and beards, you won’t be recognizable to your fan club.”

Jack groaned. “Fan club? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Pittman glared at him. “Do I look like I’m kidding, Agent MacAlister?”

Having caught on that she liked to answer her own questions, Jack didn’t respond.

“No, I don’t kid,” she snapped. “The media are another story. They’ll try to interview you, and we don’t want that, do we?”

She hesitated a good ten seconds before answering. “No, we don’t. Fortunately, you had already finished your last assignment, and of course there won’t be any more undercover work for a long, long time. Until this situation blows over and the public finds something else to get all worked up about, you two are going to keep a low profile. Got that? A low,
low
profile. In fact, I think it would be a good idea if you both took some vacation time.”

“I wasn’t planning—” Alec began.

“Agent Buchanan, did you think I was making a suggestion? Let me clear up that misconception right now. You
are
taking time off. You too, Agent MacAlister. This isn’t a choice. Oh, and you will stay in Chicago during your vacation.”

“Why aren’t you calling this what it is?” Alec asked.

“And what might that be?”

“A suspension.”

She shook her head. “A suspension would indicate that I believe you’ve done something wrong.”

“How long are we on vacation?” Jack asked. He folded his arms across his chest while he waited for a response.

She didn’t answer the question. Instead she said, “While you are enjoying your vacation
in Chicago,
” she stressed, “you will report in by e-mail or phone every morning. You will avoid talking to the media, and that includes telling them where you think they should put their microphones, Agent MacAlister. You will be ready to go
back to work twenty-four hours after you’re notified, which is why you will stay close in case I need you.”

Jack was going to argue, but Alec spoke first. “When does our vacation begin?”

“Now.”

Jack was following Alec out the doorway when Pittman called out, “Agent MacAlister?”

“Ma’am?”

“Good work today.”

What the … He didn’t say what he was thinking. He simply nodded to his superior and continued on, but once he and Alec were in the elevator, he repeated her remark.

“Good work today?
What’d she mean by that? You’ve worked for her longer than I have, so tell me, was she being sarcastic, or was that her attempt at humor?”

“Neither,” Alec said. “You did good work today, and she’s acknowledging it. You watched the video. The kid got it all, from the minute those drugged-out bastards walked inside, until it was over. You prevented a bloodbath.”

“One of us should have grabbed the kid’s phone before we ordered the cheeseburgers.”

Alec laughed. “Yeah, that’s what screwed both of us. They weren’t even good cheeseburgers.”

The elevator doors opened on garage level B. Alec headed one way and Jack the other.

“What time tomorrow night?” Jack shouted.

“Try to get there by nine, and bring money, Jack. Lots of it. I want to win back what I lost.”

Jack laughed. “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”

S
OPHIE KNEW SHE’D BE CUTTING IT CLOSE, BUT
SH
E’D
spilled salad dressing on her blouse at lunch and needed to go home first to change clothes before she met William Harrington at Cosmo’s. She also needed to grab her recorder.

Times like today, when she was rushing around like a crazy woman, Sophie wished she still owned a car. She would have to run in high heels three blocks—three long blocks—to get to the El, and at this time of day the train was going to be packed with the surly going-home-from-work crowd.

She squeezed into the train just as the doors closed. The air inside was stuffy and smelled of old disinfectant. Sophie slowly made her way to the back of the car. Two teenage boys tried to engage her in conversation, but other than giving them a quick smile, she ignored them and continued on. She passed a middle-aged man who reeked of whiskey and who obviously hadn’t touched a bar of soap in a long time. She thought herself fortunate to find an empty bench behind him and sat down. The drunk turned to face her. His eyelids were at half mast and he began to list to the left, but he jerked himself upright and moved toward her. He held on to the bar above his
head and kept trying to get her attention by making weird sounds as he leered at her. He embodied the expression “dirty old man.” Sophie thought he might be a relative of Gary’s: his repellent leer was nearly identical.

The two teenage boys turned out to be quite chivalrous. Like everyone else on the train, they noticed the man’s behavior. Jumping to their feet, they squeezed their way around him and blocked him from getting closer to Sophie. They also blocked him from getting off the El when she did.

She gave the boys an appreciative smile, though their sweet gesture hadn’t really been necessary. She was quite capable of taking care of herself. The husband of her best friend was an FBI agent, and he’d taught Sophie all the moves she needed to protect herself. She also carried pepper spray. And as she stepped off the train, she released the grip she had around the canister.