Slow Heat (33 page)

Micah adjusted his arms around her and Maggie found herself sagging against him. In the dark, just the two of them, there was plenty of room for all this insanity to roll around in her head. How long ago had her uncle
lost
his key? Months ago; she couldn’t remember. How long had she been running a club that was a cover for a huge drug operation? From the beginning? Maggie felt sick.

Also, Micah might be more dangerous than she’d imagined. He wouldn’t hurt her, though. Maybe that’s why she’d been pissed and hurt when he hadn’t talked to her in over forty-eight hours. There was a connection between the two of them. If he tried denying it she would kick his ass no matter how dangerous he was supposed to be.

As if he read her thoughts, Micah ran his fingers up and down her arm. Her hand moved to his and he locked fingers with hers. They held hands, waiting out the silence in anticipation of act two.

It sounded like a chair scraped over the bare kitchen floor. The high-pitched sound made Maggie jump, and she almost shrieked. Micah’s hand moved to her mouth, and she covered his hand with hers. Once again their fingers interlocked and he moved their hands together down her body to her waist. There were hurried footsteps, a door opening and closing, then two men began speaking in Spanish. Their conversation was in low, soft baritones; they spoke very quickly. Maggie barely managed to pick out a few words here and there. Other than hearing mention of them being in a hurry, she wasn’t sure what was said.

“Señores, you’ll have to forgive me but I’m not bilingual like you are. I’m afraid this transaction will have to take place in English.”

“Why isn’t Larry Santinos here?” a man asked. He didn’t speak with an accent although he was one of the men who had just been speaking in Spanish.

“Eric, you remember he went to jail,” Frank said. “This is Judge Ryan Stabler. He’s here with everything as we agreed. Judge, this is Eric Torres. He is a good friend of mine and Larry’s.”

“Santinos is still in jail?” Eric repeated everything in Spanish and ended his conversation with his partner with, “And if you agree, senor, we’ll speak in English for Senor Joe and Senor Ryan.”

“So Senor Santinos remains in jail?” the second man, who had yet to be identified, asked with a thick Spanish accent. “If you are a judge, then why do you leave our friend behind bars?”

“I’m not the judge who can release Santinos,” Ryan said in his professional and too-friendly tone. “If I understand his case correctly, it will be a while before he’ll be released. Santinos worked for me, though. Everything he told you, I approved.”

“I see. Then you are now doing the work of your laborers.”

Ryan Stabler’s laugh was as fake as the rest of him. It made Maggie sick thinking her uncle was the fall guy for this creep. Stabler would never spend a minute behind bars, let alone be arrested for any crime.

“I don’t mind the work when it will make us all incredibly rich men.” Stabler said. “But we haven’t been properly introduced.”

“Forgive me,” Torres jumped in. “Judge Stabler, this is Senor Gomez.”

“Gomez,” Stabler said.

Maggie wondered if they all noticed that Stabler didn’t say Senor Gomez but simply used the man’s last name. It was a subtle insult and one she wished they would all call him on—even call the drug deal off based on the judge being a rude and pretentious jerk.

“Since Santinos won’t be joining us tonight, or anytime soon, I’ll conduct all future business transactions with you.”

“I will have to see if the quality holds up to what Santinos provided me. He will be missed.”

“I guess if you want you could always wait until Santinos can meet with you again. Of course that could be in twenty years, if not longer,” Stabler said, then laughed.

Micah’s hands moved to her arms. He moved her to the side of the closet and she looked at him through the darkness, her eyes wide and burning.

“Stay here and don’t come out,” he mouthed.

“What?” Maggie started shaking her head.

Micah stepped around her, left her standing there without him, and walked out of the closet. Was he insane?

“Who the—?”

“Who are you?”

“I’ll be damned,” Stabler said in a frosty, menacing tone.

It was all that was said. Micah didn’t speak. But Maggie screamed when she heard gunshots fired. The gun went off again and again. Why the hell had Micah gone out there? Was he dead?

She sunk to the floor of the closet and pushed herself as far from the door as she could manage. When her back hit the wall, she pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. They would check the closet. It was where Micah had been hiding. They would check it and she would be dead, too.

The shots ended and an eerie silence followed. The echo of the gun going off still rang in her head. Maggie looked down, resting her forehead on her knees. There wasn’t anything she could do. Even if she pulled out her cell phone and called 911, she would be heard and they would kill her before help arrived.

Maggie hugged herself tighter when she heard footsteps. One of them was still alive.
Please be Micah. Please be Micah.

The closet door opened and light flooded over her. Maggie didn’t dare look up.

“Come on, let’s go,” Micah said calmly and reached down to pick her up.

“What? What happened?”

“Put your face against my chest and walk with me.”

She stood, her legs shaking so badly that Micah lifted her off her feet and pressed her head against his chest as he backed out of the closet.

“We’ll be out of here in a second,” he whispered.

“Mulligan.”

Maggie stiffened at the strained voice calling out to them. “Oh God,” she whispered and twisted against Micah, although for the life of her she had no idea where to run. She was probably the only one not armed. “Run, Micah. We’ve got to run.”

“You won’t get away with this. You’ve messed with the wrong judge.”

Maggie’s ears were ringing again. She was shaking terribly and it took a minute before she realized her feet were dangling in the air. That was, until Micah lowered her so her feet touched the floor.

“Walk to the back door. Don’t look back.” Micah sounded strained.

“You’re coming with me,” she insisted.

It was one time she wished she had blindly followed instructions. Maggie was standing on her own two feet and Micah pressed his hand into the middle of her back, pushing her toward the back door. She turned, her insistence he come with her on her lips.

No sound came out. Maggie looked in horror at blood splattered against the shelves and kitchen utensils. Four men were lying on the floor, sprawled in strange positions.

“Maggie!” Micah snapped.

She shot her attention to his face. Micah looked frustrated. There was something else, too. Was it pain? Maybe sadness? He blew out a loud, exasperated sigh at the same time that one of the men behind him said something else. Micah turned around and Maggie thought he was going to answer the man. Instead, Micah raised a gun and fired.

“Let’s go,” he insisted. When he turned toward her, his hand disappeared behind his back. Then the gun was gone.

As easily as someone might pull their wallet out of their back pocket and put it back again, Micah had his gun in his hand and then he didn’t.

She was shaking her head, her jaw hanging open, when Micah began pushing her backward.

“Out of here now, sweetheart.”

“But wait … I mean … Are they?” She stammered with every sentence she began and finally gave up.

Later Maggie would remember Micah tugging on his shirt to cover his hand when he turned the doorknob on the back door. That was about all she clearly remembered. They were parked in a very nicely lit-up shopping mall. There was a Bed Bath & Beyond, an American Vintage clothing store, and a Barnes & Noble bookstore, all with bright lights and normal people entering and leaving. Where they were parked, in her car, with her in the passenger seat, the parking lot was empty. There were plenty of vacant stalls on either side of them. At the edge of the parking lot, on the corner of a fairly busy intersection, a Mexican restaurant was doing a fair amount of business.

Everyone’s life was in order. People got out of their cars talking with one another or hurrying children to the sidewalk. None of these people knew four men were dead. Holy crap! One of them was Judge Ryan Stabler.

“Are you okay?” Micah looked too big to be sitting behind the wheel of her car.

Maggie looked at him. She didn’t remember them driving here. She didn’t remember giving him her keys. Micah was so damn sexy. He stared at her, watching her closely.

“You just killed four men.” Her voice was trembling. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, too.

“We had all of our answers,” he said simply, as if it had been the plan to kill them all along.

Maybe it had been Micah’s plan. Maggie couldn’t wrap her brain around any of it and get it to make sense. “But you killed them,” she stressed. That was the big hurdle. Once she understood why she’d seen four men lying on Club Paradise’s kitchen floor, covered in blood and dead, maybe she would probably understand the rest of it.

“You said he was a judge. You remember overhearing their conversation, right?”

She nodded and at the same time forced her brain to replay facts it would much rather shut out. “Stabler is—was,” she corrected herself, “a drug dealer and an asshole.” Maggie looked over at Micah. “He thought I knew what my uncle was doing.”

“And was having you followed and tried having you run over.” Micah covered her trembling hands with his hand. It was cool and felt good holding her. He wasn’t shaking. He didn’t look bothered at all about having killed the four of them. “Think about it, sweetheart. If we had taken what we’d learned to the police and tried proving your innocence, it would have been our word against a judge.”

He had a point. “But now you’re going to be charged with murder.”

Micah looked very confident when he shook his head. “A judge will be found dead in a nightclub closed down because it was involved in money laundering. He is lying dead among drug dealers and a lot of drugs. Trust me, they are going to keep this very quiet. I’m not going to be charged with anything.”

She wished she was as sure about that as he was. Good people weren’t accused of crimes. Maggie had been hauled in for a crime she didn’t commit. It would be just as terrible if Micah was hauled in for the death of despicable lowlifes. And it was a crime he had committed.

“What did the judge say before he died?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He nodded toward the steering wheel. “I’ll drive us back to my motorcycle if you’re ready. But then I think you should follow me to my house.”

“Why?” She suddenly remembered how upset she’d been that Micah hadn’t called her for over two days. “I’m not going to come over and have sex with you then be ignored until you are in the mood again,” she snapped.

He let go of her hands and brushed his knuckles over her breasts before reaching her face. Micah stroked her jawbone with his fingers.

“You’re right. I didn’t get ahold of you.” He didn’t say anything for a minute and stared into her eyes. Then he gripped her chin. “I usually keep things casual with any woman I spend time with.”

“I’m not going to be a casual fuck partner.” Maybe with someone else. But with Micah … Maggie shook her head. They’d crossed over some line that existed between casual and not casual.

“I know,” he whispered, his voice turning gravelly. “I didn’t call you because I was taking time to sort things out. I needed to figure out what was going on between you and me.”

“What did you figure out?”

“I haven’t,” he admitted.

She couldn’t condemn him for that since she hadn’t figured out what was happening with them, either. “I won’t come home with you if you aren’t going to talk to me afterward.”

“You are coming home with me and I will talk to you afterward.”

Chapter Thirteen

The next couple of days didn’t help Micah understand what was happening between him and Maggie. She came over to his house the night they left Club Paradise. Each night after that she met him there once he was done working for the day. When he left for work the following morning, Maggie drove back to her house.

No matter how he tried twisting around how things might be in his head, he couldn’t come up with a plausible resolution. Maggie’s problems were solved. That morning she’d mentioned that she needed to start job hunting. After lunch she had called him excited that her accounts were no longer frozen. She’d laughed and asked how much she owed him for solving her case. Micah had been a sap and told her he’d have to get back to her on that one.

His father and uncle wanted him to drive up to Utah and join them. The investigation over the CIA agent Micah had killed, Sylvester Neice, had been closed. Uncle Joe had obtained a few files that revealed Neice had in fact not been working undercover but had gone rogue. He had the names that Micah had wanted. His father had been excited when he’d handed the file over to Micah.

“They’re yours for the taking, son,” he’d said with pride.

Four months ago Micah would have been on the next plane to Washington. The men who had wanted Neice’s killer were now his. He’d split up with his father and uncle for the first time in his life. They’d shut down Mulligan’s Stew. Micah could have his revenge and return to his old life. His old life didn’t sound as appealing as it had four weeks ago.

“I still don’t know how you shoot like that.” Ben had been quiet most of the drive back to the KFA office but now started back up again on their last case. “He had a gun pointing right at you. Yet you drew and fired so fast I didn’t even see it happen.”

“Got lucky,” Micah mumbled. Luck had very little to do with it. The guy they’d been chasing for more than two hours had been cornered, was nervous, and screamed empty threats at all of them. The guy never had planned on pulling his trigger.

Ben laughed. “Don’t be modest, man. You’re an amazing shot. I wish you’d teach me how to be as good as you.” He looked out his passenger window. “That is, if I get to stay on here.”