Game On (A Bad Boy Sports Romance) (14 page)

              “Oh, we don’t care about you at all,” Paul stated matter-of-factly. “But Kieran does.”

              “Though for the life of me, I can’t fathom why,” added Janet, with a scathing grimace.

              “So this is some weird extortion thing, is it?” I piped up, getting angry despite the clear and present danger of my situation. Somehow, this had been easier to deal with when I thought it was just some ploy of Brett’s to get back at me. Now that I knew Kieran was involved, I was pissed. He didn’t deserve this.

              “Extortion?” said Paul in mock astonishment.

              “What an ugly word,” Janet drawled, inspecting her fingernails.

              “I would stay quiet and stop making wild accusations, if I were you,” Paul warned me, smirking. He nodded to Tony. “Smack her around a little bit, see if that will mellow her out.”

              Tony looked outright appalled. “Smack her around? What kinda guy do ya take me for?”

              “A mob guy,” answered Janet, raising an eyebrow incredulously. “What else are you good for if you won’t even do what we hired you to do?”

              Tony shook his head and held up his hands. “No, ma’am. You hired me to kidnap the girl, not beat ‘er up. I don’t hit ladies unless I gotta. It ain’t right.”

              Paul shoved past him and lunged at me in one swift movement, hatred blazing in his eyes. He reached across the bed and hit me hard across the cheek before I could even process what was going on. Janet cheered him on, clapping her hands gleefully as Paul landed one blow after another while I tried in vain to shield myself with my arms. Finally, to my surprise, another pair of arms seized Paul by the collar of his sleazy black suit and ripped him off of me.

              Tony cried out, “Hey man! What did I just fuckin’ say? It ain’t right! Just ‘cause I won’t hit ‘er doesn’t mean you should do it for me!”

              “I’m not paying you to have a slumber party with the bitch,” Paul spat, his face blotchy with rage. Tony shook his head and stood his ground. Even though he was a couple inches shorter, the mafioso was still thicker and younger than Paul, but the stand-off went on. Janet had her arms folded over her ample bosom, looking annoyed. Finally she turned on her heel and stormed out of the room with a petulant sigh.

              “Dim-witted Italian bastard,” Paul hissed through his teeth as the two men stared at each other, their bodies heaving with hatred. And that was all it took.

              Tony took a swing at the older man’s face, knocking him back a few feet. Paul dove back at him with a furious roar, his hands out and fingers splayed as though he was planning to choke Tony out. As their bodies collided and fell through the door back out into the hallway, I took the opportunity to untie my ankles, my fingers barely able to function through the trembling. I quietly slipped off the bed and raced to the dresser, rifling desperately through my purse to find my phone. I knew I didn’t have time to make a call or anything, but I hoped I would be able to turn on the GPS tracker. Finally, my fingertips landed on the smooth, hard shell of my phone and I whipped it out, rapidly sliding the screen open and tapping the little tracker icon before tossing the phone and purse back on the dresser and running to the bed before anyone could notice.

              To my good luck, the two men were still grappling with each other, unaware that I’d even moved at all. For once, it was working out to my advantage that people tended to overlook and underestimate me. Now, the best thing I could do was just wait.

              Carter was rummaging through a closet, Jamal was leaning against the counter, and I was at the table with my hands on a small map of the city as we talked things over. It had been a tense few minutes, and we’d already gone over the basics: Danielle was kidnapped, and we knew damn well who was behind it, but we had no way of proving it to the authorities and now way to know exactly where she was.

              Anna, Carter’s wife, was at school working today, and her paperwork was likely going to keep her there for a while after hours, Carter had said. That was probably for the better. We didn’t want to worry her with more trouble like this.

              “How many black cadillacs can there be in Vegas?” I asked absently, staring at the map of the vast city.

              “More than you’d think,” Carter said from the closet. “And you’re sure we can’t go to the police with this? Kieran, I know you’re a hell of a fighter, I’ve seen you sparring a few times, but it sounds like Paul and Janet are in with the mob, and if that’s the case, no matter how much training you’ve got, you’re in over your head.”

              “I don’t care,” I said, slamming my fist on the table hard enough to make Jamal step forward and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “I’m not going to let them lay a finger on her, and I don’t care if they’ve got a whole army at their backs. They can’t have her. And they can’t jerk me around like this, either.”

              “Hey,” Jamal said, getting me to look him in the eyes, “my family knows better than anyone else what it’s like to be afraid of losing someone dear to you. And I can tell you firsthand that losing your cool isn’t going to get you anywhere. We need to approach this carefully and methodically. If we don’t, then things will get hairy real quick.”

              I nodded, knowing him to be right, and my shoulders slumped. “Alright. You’ve got a point, let’s get at this together.” I bent back over the map, scouring places I knew to be shadier parts of town--warehouse districts and the like. “But this feels so pointless. There’s a dozen places to disappear in Vegas, and even if we searched every part of town that looked like it would have something promising, this is the mob we’re dealing with--they might as well have disappeared anywhere in the whole damn city.”

              Jamal opened his mouth to say something, but he paused as his eyes, along with mine, were drawn to my phone, which had lit up on the table next to my hand. It was calling from an unknown number.

              Immediately, I felt color rushing to my face, and before Jamal could stop me, I seized the phone and brought it to my ear.

              “Listen, Paul or Janet, whoever the fuck had the nerve to call,” I snarled, cutting off whatever voice had started to talk. “I don’t want to hear whatever asinine threat you’ve come up with, because I’m going to find you, and when I do, you’re going to be real fucking sorry real quick, do you hear me? Nobody fucks with the people I love like this.”

              There was a pause on the line as Carter and Jamal winced visibly, and finally, there was a chilling chuckle on the other end of the line in a voice I didn’t recognize.

              “You kiss ya mother with that mouth?” The New York Italian accent was thick, and it was the voice of a bigger man. “I’d be glad I ain’t neither of those two, pal, ‘cause all that sounded like threats that’d be admissible in a court o’ law, if you ask me.”

              “Who are you?” I said after forcing myself to take a breath and regain my center. “And why are you calling me? You obviously know what I’m talking about.”

              Carter strode over to me, holding in his hand some kind of device that looked like a walkie-talkie with a cord attached to it. Without a word, he reached over to my phone with the cord and plugged it into the side. I gave him a confused look, but he gestured for me to keep talking, and realization dawned on me. The device he had been looking for was a GPS tracker, something he’d mentioned the fire department using to track down missing persons from time to time.

              “I’m no one special,” the voice said, sounding simple. “I’m just a guy with a message.”

              “Paul and Janet too cowardly to try to contact me themselves anymore?” I snapped, trying to keep him on the line. “Or are they too strung out on blow?”

              There was a low whistle from the other end. “Pal, you oughta look into anger management. If they were here with me, your broad would be dead already.”

              My face blanched, and I nearly crushed the phone in my hand with anger. “Danielle is with you?”

              “Yeah,” he said, sounding both knowing and reticent like a petulant child. “Boss told me to let her say ‘hello’ so you knows it’s her, but ah, she’s the type who’d try tellin’ you where we are if she got a hold of the phone, so...no.”

              “Listen,” I growled, “if you so much as lay a finger on her, I’ll--Paul and Janet aren’t stable, you can’t trust them to come through with whatever they’re offering you.”

              “Oh, that much I know,” he mused, “they’re fuckin’ nuts. But they’re loaded, and my boss don’t care much about who he works with so long as they’s payin’, and buddy, your broad’s worth a lot to them,” he chuckled.

              “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” I said, already having forgotten that I was supposed to be just keeping him talking.

              “Nah, I know who you are. Tough guy,” he said, sounding bored. “But uh, oh, right. Warning. Listen, they wanted me to tell you that if you don’t sign that contract thing of theirs, Danielle gets killed.”

              The words sunk into my stomach heavy, and my lips were cold. I couldn’t handle that. Not now. Not like this. “You rat bastard,” I said numbly, and I heard something that sounded like a noncommittal grunt from the other end of the line. Carter looked up at me and nodded as something blinked on his screen.

              “What can I say? It’s a job. But I’d hurry up if I was you. Your girl bruises pretty easily, so I dunno how long she’ll last with me,” he said as casually as though he were talking about the weather, and before I could respond, he hung up.

              I raised my hand to hurl my phone across the room in anger, but Jamla caught my wrist from behind, and I set it down before standing up and pacing around the room.

              “Fuck.
FUCK.
How could I have let this happen? She never would have gotten into all this if I hadn’t made a move on her. She should have never gotten involved with me, I shouldn’t have dragged her into my life with all this going on.”

              “Kieran,” Carter said calmly.

              “Those fuckers are going to
kill
her now that--”

              “
Kieran
,” Carter said more firmly, and my gaze snapped up to glare at him, the two of us staring hard at each other before he spoke.

              “Love isn’t something you can control,” he said, “neither of you. And you had no idea this was going to spiral out of control the way it has. Kieran, I know you better than you think. You’re a lot like me.” He crossed his arms, leaning back against the counter. “My first month on the job at the fire department, we got a call about a big fire in an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city. By all rights, it should have been an in-and-out job. Twenty-five people were trapped in that building when we rolled up to the place,” he said, his gaze level with me. “Twenty-four made it out. You know how close I was to turning my two weeks in after that job? Captain had to hold me back. It was the hardest week of my life, but I had to power through it.”

              I stared back at him long and hard. “You trying to tell me I should just accept that this shit’s gonna happen?”

              “No,” he said, “I’m telling you that you get up, you fight hard, and you brace yourself for the next fight when this shit does happen, and you do not blame yourself. Because if you do, that’s going to kill you long before you can do so much as think about saving Danielle’s life. If I had given up when I lost a life in that building a few years back, I wouldn’t have been there for the people in the next call we got. I wouldn’t have been there for my wife. I wouldn’t have been there to do anything else, because I would have stopped being me right then and there. And if you make yourself your own worst enemy, Kieran,” he said, his fists balling, “you won’t be there to make these bastards pay for what they’re doing to you and Danielle.”

              After a long pause, I nodded, and the two of us embraced tightly before turning our attention to the GPS.

              “Alright,” I said, picking the device up, “what have you got here?”

              “I was able to triangulate their position based on the cell phone signal of the guy who called you,” said Carter, and Jamal moved around to peer at the GPS locator.

              “Dunno if that kind of device is exactly street legal, Carter,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

              “No,” said Carter with a smile, “but we help out with missing persons searches from time to time. A friend of a friend set me up with this thing to make sure those went smoothly whenever the fire department could lend a hand.”

              Nodding, Jamal looked at the GPS trace and furrowed his brow. “So, we’ve got a lead on this guy, then?”

              “At least where he was calling from,” said Carter.

              “I recognize that area,” I said, taking the device and comparing it to the location on the map. “It’s not the worst part of town, but it’s seen better days. It’s not too far from the Fighting Chance. I can get there in no time.”

              Carter shook his head. “We have an address and a verifiable threat to someone’s life and unlawful imprisonment, Kieran. This is the best time for us to take this to the police.”

              “Hell no,” I said, looking at him firmly. “did you hear anything that guy said? No emotion. Not even anger. This whole thing is just some kind of fucking daily routine for him. If he catches wind of a bunch of police cruisers rolling up on the place, I don’t believe for a second that he’d hesitate to follow up on his threat. The fact that Paul and Janet are involved makes this situation delicate enough, and it sounds like they picked a bona fide sociopath to do the dirty work for them.”

              Carter nodded reluctantly, and Jamal stood up, striding around to the window to look out at the cars in the driveway. “He’s right,” he said reluctantly. “Sometimes, it’s necessary to take things into your own hands, and in a place like Vegas, where corruption runs as deep as the vices, it may be more necessary than usual.” He put his hand to his chin thoughtfully. “Now, police cruisers might be something that would make our mobster panic, but they’d be helpful to keep the rest of the apartment residents safe. Things could get violent, and we don’t want anyone caught in the chaos. And we have access to another kind of emergency vehicle that could do just that.”

              Jamal turned and looked at Carter meaningfully, and it took him a moment to realize what he was implying. “What? You’ve got to be kidding me. Are you asking me to use the fire truck for this? Hell no, I’d lose my job!”

              “For rescuing a young woman being held hostage?” Jamal shot back, and that seemed to give Carter pause. He gripped the back of a chair, lips tight.

              “If this goes badly, we’ll all be arrested,” he said. “I don’t want to lead all of you into a deathtrap, but I don’t want to risk getting this thing botched and having all of us end up in the slammer, no closer to having rescued Danielle.”

              “Carter,” I said, and this time, it was my turn to level with my brother. “I want you to think about Anna.”

              “What?” he said, furrowing his brow, but I went on.

              “Think about waking up next to her smiling face every morning. About how you feel every time the two of you hug, about what it’s like to go through every day knowing there’s someone incredible and talented right next to you, doing everything she can to see you happy, and you doing the exact same thing for her. Providing for her. Helping her flourish.
Loving
together, Carter. I know you feel that for Anna, I see it every time I come by here. You and Anna have something incredible and rare together, something you have in common with Jamal and his wife.” Jamal nodded, his eyes misty.