Bear Claw Bodyguard (7 page)

While she might not have hiked circles around him—his longer reach and greater strength gave him the advantage in places—she’d held her own out in the Forgotten, clambering out on edgy precipices and high into the gnarled limbs of the sickened trees to get the samples she wanted. She had brushed him off a few times when he’d wanted to rein her in, but her instincts had proven good and he’d eventually backed off even further.

With the shooter’s story checking out and no concrete sign of the Shadow Militia—though he was keeping a damn sharp eye out—he’d had far too much time to think about other things. Like the Death Stare case…and Tori. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known before—an intriguing mix of occasional shyness when it came to him, guts when it came to just about everything else…including, it seemed, relationships.

Their lives were completely different, their styles worlds apart, yet he liked her. More than liked, in fact, although he was fighting the urge to make it be anything else. He knew what worked for him, and quick and temporary wasn’t it. Which meant they needed to stay on a professional level, he reminded himself, and made himself focus on her rundown of the lab results, which he’d been only halfway paying attention to.

One piece of information, though, had stuck out. “Hang on, back up. It’s a genetically engineered organism?”

“It’s looking that way, possibly a hybrid of a mushroom, an air plant and a sulfur bacterium at the very least.”

“Why would you want to cross those together?”

She gave an eloquent shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine. The air plant allows it to live suspended. As for the others, we’re looking at a toxic fungus and an anaerobe. It’ll take more of an expert than me to figure out why you’d put those two together unless you wanted…I don’t know, a long-lived poison, maybe?”

Jack stilled. “How about a drug that’s addictive at low doses but deadly at higher doses?”

Excitement seared through him. Had they just found the source of the Death Stare?

“A drug?” Tori frowned, then shook her head. “I’m not an expert, but I’d tend to say that would be a long shot. A poison, sure. But the amatia isn’t a ’shroom of the psychedelic variety.” She thought back to a couple of snippets she’d overheard during his nightly base-touch with his boss. “Are you thinking of this Death Stare case?” At his clipped nod, she pressed, “Tell me about it.” When he hesitated, she said, “I learned a long time ago not to discount even the most far-fetched-sounding idea. Occam’s razor doesn’t always apply when it comes to Mother Nature…or humankind.”

His lips twitched. “The simplest explanation isn’t always the right one?”

“Not in my experience. So, the Death Stare. Start talking.” It wasn’t just the case she was curious about either. Clearly this one was personal to him.

After a moment’s hesitation, he said grimly, “Okay, the short version is that there have been fourteen deaths that we know of, probably more since it’s mostly been hitting the kinds of people who don’t check themselves into the ER when they start feeling crummy.” He shrugged, but his expression didn’t match the casual gesture. “Anyway, it’s seriously nasty stuff. It’s highly addictive, easy to OD on
and the withdrawal is a killer. Literally. Worse, according to the lab results, it’s not any one thing. It’s this funky blend of a bunch of known drugs plus a couple of components nobody can quite figure out. The analysts are working on it, but meanwhile we’re losing good men out there on the streets.”

“Cops?” she asked, though she knew the parlance.

He nodded. “Three were shot the other day, trying to get a bead on the drug traffic. But cops aren’t the only good guys out there. Sometimes a good guy is just a good guy.”

“I know that,” she said, surprised because she wasn’t used to cops who knew it. In her experience, the protect-and-serve mentality came with a good dose of “us versus them.” Then again, she was starting to get the sense that Jack wasn’t like any of the other cops she’d known before.

He grimaced. “Yeah. Sorry. Touchy subject.” When he paused, she just waited, having learned that it sometimes took him a moment. Sure enough, he eventually continued, “One of the ODs was a good friend of mine, Ray Prews. We knew each other all through school, hated each other through junior high and then after that glommed as friends, bonding freshman year over the horrors of chem class.” His eyes softened, saddened. “He was the guy who had it all, you know? Honors student, football star, good family, pretty much his pick of colleges.”

This time when he stopped, she said, “What happened?”

“It’s an old enough story—he got hurt a little, took some painkillers to play through it and got hurt worse, right around the time the early predictions were being made for the NFL draft that year. More drugs, more play
ing and he wound up with major surgery, a permanent limp, no contract and a hell of a drug habit.” His lips thinned. “He came home, and things got worse rather than better. He kept using no matter what his family and friends said or did. He lied, stole and sneaked around until finally his parents staged an intervention and shipped him off to a rehab facility they couldn’t really afford. He lasted three days before he checked himself out and came back to the city. Got a job working as muscle for a third-rate party-promoter-slash-drug-dealer, rented a room at a crappy motel, and pretty much cut us all off. Family, friends, nothing. It was like we didn’t exist anymore, when all we wanted to do was help.”

With another of her friends, acquaintances or coworkers, she might have reached across the table and squeezed his hand in support. With him, because she wanted to too much, she didn’t let herself make the move. Instead, she said cautiously, “You can’t help an addict until he’s ready to make a change.”

He grimaced. “I know that now. Hell, I knew it back then, we all did. But it’s one thing to hear the experts say it and another to live it. Anyway, he eventually got to that point on his own. He met a girl at one of the clubs. She wasn’t perfect—hell, neither of them was—but she had a daughter, and he fell for both of them and started to turn things around. Got a steadier job doing maintenance at the club the girlfriend—Ginger—was working at, got an apartment. He even reached out a little to his family, was starting to put that back together. And then one morning he didn’t come home.” Voice flattening to an all-too-familiar cop tone that carried facts but not emotions, distancing him from the pain, he said, “Ginger
called me, and I did some checking around. I was angry at him, disappointed, thinking he’d slipped and was hiding out until he sobered up. But he wasn’t. He was in the morgue as a John Doe because after the Death Stare got him, the alley rats had gotten his wallet and ID, his shoes, jacket. Hell, they practically left him naked.”

Tori knew the tone, but always before she’d only seen the flat affect behind it, the “just the facts, ma’am” that her father and brothers hid behind when the going got tough. Now, though, she saw pain behind the mask. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“Not your fault.”

But there was a piece of it that
was
her fault, if only obliquely. “I took you away from the investigation, didn’t I?”

“No,
I
took me away from it,” he said. “After Ray died, I threw myself into the case, and not in a good way. I worked it even on my downtime, let the other stuff in my life slide, got obsessed…and wound up making some mistakes. Most recently with a witness, a street guy named Hawk who said he saw the guy who sold the Death Stare to the vic. When I got there, though, he was all scared-looking, and said he couldn’t remember anything. I leaned on him pretty hard. There was, uh, an incident, and my bosses decided they couldn’t keep ignoring the problem any longer.”

Dull shock twisted through her. “You beat him up because he wouldn’t tell you what he saw?”

He shot her a reproachful look. “Try, I took a step toward him, he overreacted, slipped on some alley slime, fell and broke his wrist.” He paused, then said quietly, “Do you really think I would have gone after someone
like that?” More than his words, his tone of quiet entreaty reached into her and squeezed her heart.

She flushed. “I’m sorry. You haven’t done anything to deserve that. It’s just that I also know that grief and anger can make people do things they might not do otherwise. So maybe I, uh, jumped to a conclusion.” More, she was checking baggage into the conversation, which wasn’t her style.

He looked more resigned than offended, though. “Unfortunately, you’re not the only one who looked at the equation of one obsessed cop plus one reluctant witness equals slip-and-fall injury, and assumed I’d gotten rough with him. Add in an eager junior partner at one of the local firms, looking to make his name with a big pro bono case, and you get a whole lot of trouble brewing. Which is what I got, along with an Internal Affairs investigation and some desk time.” His face darkened with frustration. “The case is going to settle and the other stuff will go away—the only thing I’m guilty of is getting in the guy’s face, after all—but in the meantime, I’m off the case right when the others need me the most.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and again, would have touched his arm if he’d been someone else. “You had good intentions.”

“Which doesn’t get me anywhere if I’m not going by protocol.” He exhaled. “Hell, they were right to bench me. I had lost perspective and was running on more heart than head. If it hadn’t been Hawk getting hurt, it would have been something else, and that ‘something else’ might have been even more damaging to the department and the case.” As he paused, his expression went faintly rueful. “Tucker told me to use the time out here in the backcountry to get
my head screwed back on straight. Guess he was right after all.”

“He seems like a smart guy.”

“He’s a good friend.” He said it with the simple affection of a man who had many friends, which was yet another difference between them. He was surrounded by his close friends and family.

She lived among a sea of acquaintances. Even Chondra and June were convenient friends—not that she loved them any less, but she was self-aware enough, had been through it enough, to know that when she moved on to another lab, as she did every few years, they’d all make good faith efforts to keep in touch, but over time the friendships would fade. They always did.

Jack’s friendships, though, were the sort that dated back forever. It was yet another example of how different they really were deep down inside.

Not wanting to look too closely at those differences just now, she filled the silence by asking, “What happened to Ray’s girlfriend and her daughter?”

“A few of us helped them out right after, and are keeping an eye on them going forward, just making sure they’re okay. It’s what Ray would have wanted.” He said it like that was nothing, as if anyone else would have done the same.

She knew different, though, and the knowledge squeezed a tight ache around her heart. He’d gone to war for a friend he’d lost touch with, and was stepping up now to make amends as if he owed something, even though he’d already done more than most people would have.

He was the kind of lawman the others in her life wanted to believe they were, she realized suddenly. Or maybe it
wasn’t all that sudden of a realization. Maybe she’d been sneaking up on the idea ever since that first harrowing ride down from the Forgotten, when he hadn’t wasted time berating her or issuing a string of I-told-you-so’s, but had just buckled down and got both of them out to safety. And then, based only on her conviction that the forest was in grave jeopardy, he had stayed with her, worked with her, even though part of him had to be dying to get back down to the city and pick up what he could of the Death Stare investigation. He hadn’t put that on her, though; he’d kept it to himself until now.

He’s the real deal,
she thought, and felt nerves sizzle. Because if she’d felt a little out of her depth when she first met him, now she was totally treading water, caught in the countercurrent pulls of attraction versus her better sense. Without really meaning to, she said softly, “You’re one of the good guys, aren’t you, Jack?”

Heat kindled in his eyes. “I don’t know about that, but I think I should give you fair warning. You don’t want to say things like that—or look at me like you’re doing right now—unless you mean it.”

She hesitated, realizing suddenly that they were getting close to the point where they had to choose to either keep things professional, or go over the line to personal. And once they crossed the line, they could decide not to go any further, but there was no going back. “I’m not sure what I mean right now,” she said finally. “You’re nothing like I thought you were going to be.” That wasn’t quite professional, but it didn’t take it all the way to personal either.

“What were you expecting?”

“Someone who thinks being a cop gives him enough karma points to make up for him being pushy—or worse,
indifferent—in other areas of his life. Someone who thinks his own stuff is far more important than mine, because people matter more than trees, and cops matter more than civilians. Someone who—” Realizing that her heart was thudding too fast, her blood running too high, even though none of those sins belonged to him, she broke off and blew out a breath. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It explains a few things.” He paused, leaving it hanging.

She hesitated because it just wasn’t her style to talk about her family. As far as she was concerned, people should take her at face value without worrying how she had gotten that way. To her surprise, though, she found that she didn’t mind the question coming from him, and might not even mind answering it. She trusted him enough, wanted him enough. And if he was ready to give a little, as hinted by his asking personal questions even though he knew there were fundamental places where they didn’t mesh, relationship-wise, then she could give a little, too.

So, after taking a sip to wet her suddenly dry throat, she said, “My father is a cop, along with my sister and two of my three brothers. My youngest brother is an MP, which wasn’t that much of a leap. It’s the same way with the rest of my family—almost everybody does the protect-and-serve thing…or else is a housewife to a guy who does.” In the interest of fairness, she added, “I’m not the only exception to that rule, granted, but it feels like I am sometimes, especially when they start in on the whole ‘what we do is so much more important than what you do’ routine.”

He arched a brow, but didn’t comment, just got up and started clearing the plates. She started to rise to help him,
but he waved her back down and said, “So…I take it that means there aren’t many cops among your exes?”

“Definitely no cops,” she said quickly, but hesitated a beat before she said, “and not really any exes either. At least not the way I think you mean, the kind that break your heart and leave you raw after. I’m more of a ‘get together, have some fun, move on’ kind of girl.” She said it breezily, but heat touched her cheeks. She wasn’t offering, not exactly. But she was testing the waters, and they both knew it.

So was he, though, and he’d been the one to start the personal stuff. But the thing was, she wasn’t sure whether they were trying to talk themselves into something or out of it.

When he didn’t say anything, just went about rinsing off their dishes, she added, “It’s another part of my being the black sheep of the family, you see. Not only did I skip going into law enforcement, but I also don’t own a house, haven’t ever been married or even really seriously involved with a guy and change universities every few years. My dad says it’s a phase and my brothers and sister call it self-indulgent. They don’t seem to get that I’m happy this way and, more, that I’d be miserable if I tried to shackle myself into a life like theirs. It works for them, great…but that doesn’t mean it has to work for me.”

They both knew she wasn’t just talking about her family anymore.

“What about your mom?” he asked without turning around. “You haven’t really mentioned her.”

She was aware that his tone had shifted a little even though the difference was difficult to pinpoint over the rushing sound of water. She thought, though, that he’d put
a distance between them that hadn’t been there moments earlier.