Seduced by a Dangerous Man (7 page)

Rob’s obvious ploy worked, but only because I was already feeling so guilty about keeping the Zachary fiasco from him. “You know… the stuff that frustrates me about him. How hard I tried to live up to his expectations. He wants to talk about it, but I’m not ready.”

Rob nodded. “So let him make amends.”

“You assume that’s what he wants.” I threw my brother a desperate look. “Suppose he plans to defend himself? Tell me that my feelings, my experiences, are invalid? It wouldn’t be unlike him.”

“Almost dying has changed him, you know.”

“I said I would go tomorrow,” I grunted.

“Hope you do.” Rob punctuated this with a sage nod and heaved himself to his feet. “Picked up some strawberry shortcake at the store,” he said. “Interested?”

I smiled. “That depends. Is it a euphemism for a hot girl or the actual dessert?”

“I’m not nearly as bad as you think I am,” he said as he walked away.

I followed him into the kitchen. “So when is good? To see what we can dig up?”

Rob forced a scoop into the half-gallon of vanilla ice cream that he had pulled out of the freezer. He nodded at the package of shortcake. I opened it and cut the pieces in half and arranged them in bowls.
 

“This weekend should be perfect,” Rob said. “There’s a six-figure bounty to pick up Saturday. Henry’s too much of a control freak to let anyone else head it up.”
 

He twisted the scoop and black-speckled white ice cream curled smoothly into the air. “Not that I would be on that job regardless. Not unless the guy also has some overdue library fines or something.”

He thwacked the edge of the scoop into a bowl.
 

“Wow,” I said. “Never would have imagined you’d take the job so seriously.”

He shrugged one shoulder as he teased another ball of ice cream from the container.

~~~

I really had intended to see my father the next day, but by the time I finished work, I was completely exhausted and in no mood to deal with anything that required subtlety or finesse.

The next day wasn’t any better. Or the next…

It didn’t help that most nights, uneasy dreams about Corbin had woken me several times. Corbin, and sometimes Zachary. Dreams where Zachary slowly choked the life out of me while Corbin watched impassively.

Not fun.

Butch was waiting outside the diner when I got off. That made me feel better; I couldn’t take much more of Henry. Remembering what Rob had said about how Henry had treated Butch, I didn’t give him a dirty look.

I went to the gym—one expense I hadn’t cut—then went home, showered, and took a power nap. Afterward, I started a load of laundry. So this was what my life had become. Boring. And I had to face it… I was lonely. I needed to spend time with people other than Rob and demanding customers. But it wasn’t going to be easy to make friends with creepy guys shadowing me everywhere.
 

I poured myself a bowl of corn flakes and settled onto the couch to watch some sitcom reruns that were even less filling than the cereal had been.

Maybe I needed a hobby. I couldn’t open my own bounty hunting operation until the fall, when the non-compete expired, and while I could get some things set up for that, it was a little premature. Though it wouldn’t hurt to look at a few offices. Get an idea of what it would cost to launch.

Wow,
I thought. Look at me, thinking about the future. Imagining I had one. Must have been due to seeing the tools of the trade the night before. I missed working as a bounty hunter. It was what I’d wanted to be since I was a little girl. It wasn’t a noble calling, and it certainly lacked glamour (especially when someone spit in my face or tried to attack me with a used syringe), but I was good at it, and I liked it. I missed the chase.
 

When I had my own business, we would go after the big bounties. We would save every penny those first few months so that we could hire Katrina, get her out of Henry’s clutches, save her reputation. Though maybe she didn’t deserve it. Well, I had plenty of time to decide.

I also planned to dedicate a part of the business to private investigation. To me, that would be a much more interesting challenge. Finding patterns. Locating trails.
 

Too bad I couldn’t use those skills to find Corbin, but then, he had a lot of infrastructure, money and power on his side. Not to mention experience.
 

It had just gotten dark when Rob arrived home. I muted the television when I heard the door open.

He came up the steps and went straight into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close. A drawer full of utensils slid out noisily. There was a moment of quiet, then a soft clatter. A beer bottle top hitting the counter, I guessed.
 

“Bad day?” I called out.

The drawer closed and Rob returned. He sank into his recliner and pushed back. I noticed his socks didn’t match.

“It was a day,” he said, washing away his words with a few noisy chugs of beer.

I clicked off the television. “What did he do?”

Resignation slumped Rob’s shoulders. “Guess whose name went up on the whiteboard a few hours ago? No, don’t guess. One C. Lagos, worth two million buckaroos.”

My spine wrenched as my body shot straight up. “It’s a joke, right? He’s fucking with you.”

“I really don’t think so.” He shook his head and took another long, noisy draught. “He’s got a lead. Sorry.”

A shuddering chill ran down my back. “What did he say?”

“Nothing yet. I only saw the name up when I got back from my daily busywork. Of course I went to ask. Henry installed himself in Dad’s office while I was out. So I might have had some sharp words about that. Henry said it was temporary, but he’s getting anxious. I think Dad’s having second thoughts. If you talk to him, maybe you can nudge him a bit.”

Normally I would have been all over that news, but there were bigger things on my mind. “Tell me about Corbin,” I pleaded.

“Sorry. Before I could dig for info on Corbin, Henry said he had to go home to get ready for a date. Guess I’ll find out more at the meeting tomorrow morning.”

Blinking as I tried to collect my thoughts, I put down the empty cereal bowl that I’d been holding for over an hour. I could see a vein in my wrist pulsing furiously.
 

“We have to do it tonight,” I said. “We have to stop him.”

“No way. We need the extra time to get ready.”

I shook my head. “I think we’re prepared. You could—”

“I’m not in the right headspace to do anything but drink,” Rob said. “I spent six hours sitting across from an elementary school, waiting for someone to come by to see her daughter. You have any idea how much that sucked?”

“A lot,” I said. “What had she done?”

“Shoplifting. The woman is no angel, but grabbing her when she was trying to see her kid? I have never felt so low in my life. And the kid. It was like a waterfall. Like in cartoons, when the tears come out at a sixty-degree angle. That girl will grow up terrified of redheads. Christ.” He took a long, hard swallow.

“The mother will probably be out before we get back from Henry’s place.”

“I said no.” He emptied the beer, rocked forward on the chair and set the bottle on the coffee table, using a piece of junk mail as a coaster. “Maybe it’s time for me to quit.”

I didn’t know what to say as Rob walked past me and up the stairs. He wasn’t given to periods of dejection. Adversity made him crack jokes, not drain beers.
 

The chime of his game system starting up told me he was going to take his frustration out on some enemy snipers. He could have played downstairs, with me, but apparently he wanted to be alone.

It was official. I had worn out my welcome.

Above me, Rob’s footsteps came down the hallway, and he thumped down the stairs. He stopped halfway and leaned forward so he could see me. “You’re going to go, aren’t you?”
 

“Go?” I asked around the lump in my throat. It would take me at least a few days to find a new apartment—

“To Henry’s. You would go without me tonight.”

I expelled a sigh of relief. “I…” I actually hadn’t gotten around to thinking about it. Though, yeah, that would have been next on my list of problems to worry about. And unlike fixing things at work for Rob, I could do something about moving ahead the date to break into Henry’s place.

“Fine. I’m in. I want to nail that bastard’s hide to the wall.”

I jumped to my feet, my mind instantly going into preparation mode. “Put on dark clothes. I’ll load all the stuff we need into a bag.”

I gathered up everything I could think of, including tape, putty, spare batteries, and all my gadgets. Twenty minutes later, we were both ready. Rob delved into his pocket. “Haven’t tried these out,” he said, handing me a wadded plastic bag with something heavy at the center.

I shook the bag open and stared inside at two black plastic ovals, the size and shape of bullets. “What are they?”

“Cameras,” he said. “Two of them. They each hold a week of data. Figured we could plant them somewhere at Henry’s, then go back for them.”

I grinned in surprise. “Maybe we are related after all.”

He smiled. “They’re actually yours. I bought them for you for Christmas a few years ago, then I opened them. This girl I was dating was curious, but we never even used them.”

“TMI.” I stared down at them. They were so compact. “That was the year you gave me tube socks, wasn’t it?”

A furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “I couldn’t find the packaging. The girl wouldn’t return my texts—”

“Huge surprise,” I said.

“And when she did, she told me she’d thrown away some trash that day,” he continued, ignoring my interjection. “By then everything else was closed, and I didn’t want to give them to you like this. I was going to buy a jewelry box, but they got buried in the back of my closet and I forgot. Plus you seemed so happy with the socks.” He snickered.

“I knew you were broke. I was trying to be nice.” I hugged the bag close to me. “Exactly what I wanted! Best Christmas present ever, even if it’s three years late.”

Rob broke into a huge grin.
 

I had never been to Henry’s place, but Rob knew the way. “It’s only a few minutes from your diner,” Rob said.
 

I knew. Rob had told me when I first got the job. Hearing it again still made me shudder. “If I could have gotten a job anywhere else, I would have. Maybe I should have expanded my search radius to the next town over.” I fell silent, remembering the night I’d almost hit the road for good.

Henry lived in a manicured suburban development about a half hour from the condo. It was the kind of area where I couldn’t park on the street without attracting notice.
 

I looped around, took another pass. The back of Henry’s house overlooked a wooded area. “What’s back there?”

“A creek. Good for privacy once we’re back there, but we have to come at the house from the front.”
 

The management, or someone, had razed any trees near the excessively wide streets, so places to hide were scarce. And the individual houses were lit up on the outside like they were on display.
 

We found some overflow visitor parking.

“Not the sort of neighborhood I imagined for Henry. He seems mostly unconcerned with image,” I mused. “I expected something more… working class, maybe.”

“He bought it from his parents when they retired to Florida,” Rob said.
 

I glanced at him. “You have to do something about your hair. It’s too vivid. Unfortunately for you, all I have is this.” I handed him the wig.

He took it, dangling it on the edge of his index finger. “Fine,” he said, shaking his head. “What about your hair?”

“What about it?”

“It’s recognizable.”

“But my hair is dark. If light shines on it, it’s not a flashing sign.”

He twirled the wig. “And this isn’t?”

“You’re probably the only redheaded guy Henry knows. If one of his neighbors happens to see us nosing around—”

“Can’t I just wear a hat?”

I flicked at his bangs. “If you’ve got a hairnet handy, why not?” I frowned. “Maybe I should drop you off closer to his house. I can walk over alone.”

“We stick together,” Rob said, working the wig onto his scalp. I shoved the fringes of his fine hair under the wig. “Ouch,” he said.

“Wait till you take it off. Let’s go.”

We got out of the truck and headed one direction, then cut across a huge lawn that felt like padded carpet under my boots. A dog started barking inside the adjacent house, its yaps high-pitched, irritating.

Getting to Henry’s house definitely was stressful. I felt exposed, and we didn’t even see anyone. With all the houses so large, busybody residents had plenty of windows to be accidentally looking out of at any given time—though only a small portion of them faced in any particular direction.

Hell, I’d take comfort where I could get it. Especially after it took me forty-five seconds to set up the motion detector at the bottom of Henry’s driveway. There was nothing to shield me but a mailbox on a post, and nerves plus general rustiness had made me clumsy.

I hooked the receiver onto one of my belt loops and hurried up the driveway to join Rob.

“Back door is locked,” he said.
 

We searched under rocks and earthenware planters for a key. I wasn’t above breaking a window, but that was a last resort.

I tapped on the underside of one of the window ledges and felt metal. “Jackpot.” I peeled the key away and unlocked the door, pushed it open.
 

The slow, flashing light of a security system stopped me cold. Disabling them wasn’t part of my repertoire.
 

“Excuse me,” Rob said confidently. He stepped forward and pushed a four-digit code. The light flashed green.
 

“How?”

“Henry changed the code at the office twice, and both started with 42 and ended in 86.” He shrugged modestly. “I’ve been over here, and I saw him push in a four, and I also knew there were only three after it.”