Dangerous Loves Romantic Suspense Collection (50 page)

“Why not? I’m already ruined. How can I live?”

“There is much more to life than success or caring what others think of you, Brian. No one needs a stamp of approval to live a good life. I don’t need anyone praising me to let me know I’m good at my job, and you don’t need it either.”

“But don’t you see?” Brian said, reaching for something in his coat. His hands shook. “Getting to where I am now is everything I am.”

The trigger.

Vega knew she had to act quickly.

She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the girlfriend had gotten herself out of the house. “Everything, Brian? Tell me about your family. Do you love them?”

His knuckles whitened as he gripped the black plastic tube. His thumb hovered over the plunger. Vega knew just enough about explosives to know she shouldn’t wrestle him for it. She’d have to talk that damn thing out of his hand.

“How about your youngest son? Your wife told me today he just got accepted to MIT. Will he feel a void without you to cheer his success?” Vega asked, this time with twice the fire in her voice. “I want an answer, damn it.”

Brian’s gaze lost its focus. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I can’t prove my innocence. I can’t figure out where the money went. Guy probably took it—that rat bastard. He was the one who insisted on investing that drug money for Finn Kayne. But it doesn’t matter, nothing does. I can’t prove anything. And even if I could, Kayne would still kill me.”

By the time he finished, his finger sat squarely on the triggering plunger. Vega’s time was up.

“I plan to take Kayne to hell with me.”

“Damn it, you selfish bastard,” she said, ripping her cell-phone out of her pocket. “I’m going to call your wife and let her know how you plan to ruin her life, too.” Since she’d called the Wright household earlier in the day, the number was still stored in the phone’s memory.

“No!” He lunged at her, which wasn’t the smartest thing to do when strapped with so much explosive material. Any odd movement could blast them all into the next block.

Vega kept her head, backing smoothly away. She held the tiny silver phone just out of reach.

“Don’t call anyone! No one can know about this, especially my wife. She can’t know about Kelly or this house.” His shoulders slumped in defeat. “Please.”

“Don’t you think she’ll guess that you’ve been playing her for a fool after the police scrape your remains from all over another woman’s living room? Drop the trigger and maybe I’ll consider changing my mind about calling her.” Finally, she’d hit a hot button. “Drop that damn trigger now!”

Brian’s fixated gaze had transferred from that black triggering mechanism to Vega’s phone. She held it high, taunting him.

His arms erupted from his side, reaching for her. “Give it to me,” he spat. “Give it!” He stretched for the phone and let the trigger slip free to swing by his side.

Better, but still far from safe. She took a couple of steps back. He followed like a dog hungry for a bone.

“I’ll put this phone in your hands if you let me have control of the trigger, and don’t move for at least one minute.”

He stopped dead in his tracks when Vega began dialing again. He placed the trigger into her outstretched hand.

“Vega Brookes, here. I need a bomb squad out in the Lake St. Claire neighborhood, like five minutes ago,” she said to the watch commander who’d answered the local police precinct phone and gave him the address.

Brian paled. His eyes widened. He must have realized that calling in the cops was just about the same as calling his wife. He lunged for the trigger.

Shit.

She didn’t have time to waste. One wrong move and she would be blasted to bits along with Brian. She dropped the phone and swung a quick blow, aiming for the spot where the jaw met the skull. Not too hard, she just put enough power into the move to knock Brian senseless.

Like a switch flipping off the lights, the madness fled Brian’s gaze. His mouth dropped open at about the same time his knees buckled. Vega slipped her arm around his waist and used her weight to guide him, slumping against her chest, to the floor.

They were both still alive. Thank God. A few moments ago, she’d been feeling sorry for him. What a stupid mistake. Sometimes she wondered if her father hadn’t been right about her being too damn soft.

She plucked the phone from the floor. “Still there?” she asked, her gaze glued on Brian. Her fist poised to put him back out if he stirred.

“What the hell’s going on?” the watch commander shouted over the line. “Is this a joke?”

“No joke. Got a man strapped with some kind of explosives in someone’s living room.” She gave the address.

“A real live wire, huh?” He said and chuckled.

Vega didn’t appreciate his humor. “Just get someone out here. I don’t have enough experience with this stuff to be messing with it.”

* * * *

“That freak’s a raving lunatic,” Vega’s old friend, Officer Ford said shaking his head as he watched a team of officers lead the now deactivated Brian from the cute little bungalow. It had taken more than an hour to unhook all the explosives from his body. “A freaking lunatic.”

Vega shrugged. Safe now, she couldn’t help but feel fresh compassion for the lunatic. “He’s just been shoved over the edge, could happen to anyone.”

“Nope.” Ford sucked on the end of his pen, an irritating habit he’d started when he gave up smoking three years ago. “Seen bunches of men arrested for embezzling. This is the first one to pull a psycho stunt like this one.”

Ford and Vega had suffered through police academy together and had formed a strong bond of friendship along the way. She trusted Ford probably as much as she trusted Jack. If he said this looked different, she believed him.

“He says he’s innocent,” she said as they stepped back into the warmth of the house’s foyer.

“They all do.”

“Not my place to judge, but it sure looks like his partner, Guy Pollock, got their brokerage mixed up with some illegal money from a Finn Kayne. You know anything about him?”

Ford’s pen popped right out of his mouth. “No wonder that poor bastard lost his mind. You should’ve let him blow himself up. You said he wanted to take Kayne along with him? You would’ve done everyone a favor if he had.”

“This Kayne some new heavy hitter in town?”

“Best we can tell, which ain’t much. He’s not in charge by any means. A regional distributor, perhaps? All we know is that eighty percent of the drugs on our streets are now flowing from him.”

Vega remembered that piece of paper that had fallen out of Lionel Wahl’s pocket. It had a phone number and the name “Finn” scribbled on it. And Monroe, her street contact, was complaining about some new guy’s high prices and had warned her to keep away from Brian Wright. Finn Kayne and whoever he represented apparently had tentacles reaching everywhere in the city—even into the glossy Grosse Pointe.

“I’ll pass your information on to the feds. They’re panting down our necks, nervous about Kayne. No one has a clue who’s his boss, but the feds say a man like him has cropped up in just about every major city within the past several months. Every major city. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.”

“Glad it’s none of my business then.”

None of her business or not, on the way home Vega called Snitch and asked her to dredge up whatever she could on Kayne from her electronic snoops. Perhaps she was just feeling overly sentimental, but she just couldn’t leave Brian Wright out to hang like that. He might not have been perfect or the poster boy for innocence. But who was? Her gut nagged her. Brian was a tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle—a hapless victim in desperate need of help. And if that was true, who else was being destroyed by this new wave of organized crime?

Chapter Nine

“If I can take out a security guard, I can use his keycard to get into the building,” Grayson said. He was sitting at a small blue linoleum-topped kitchen table with Matt Lockler, the fourth man in the ISA team Grayson had led in Colombia, and feeling pretty damn antsy.

Matt stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. He looked decades older than the rest of them. His face was a maze of wrinkles and his thinning hair the color of dried hay. “Let me come along. Been a while since I’ve killed a guard.”

Grayson winced. Matt lived in Atlanta on the edge of society. He too was on the run from the law, which made this hovel of an apartment a logical place to hole up for a few days. The years Grayson and Greg spent putting themselves through graduate school Matt had spent institutionalized. The stress of the ISA had snapped his mind, or perhaps it only nudged him to where he’d eventually end up anyhow. Either way, Grayson found it ironic how such dissimilar circumstances, colleges and mental hospitals, had led to the same awful apartment.

Matt wouldn’t say why the police were after him, but to hear him talk, Grayson could only assume he’d done something horrible.

“No—no thanks.” Grayson pushed back from the table. Matt worried the hell out of him. “I’ve got it covered.”

A cop car drove past on its regular patrol. When it slowed to make the turn around the corner, Matt dove under the table. Convinced the police were circling the neighborhood searching for him, Matt always dove under the table at the sight of their patrol. Grayson bent down and stared at him huddled under there, puffing nervously on his cigarette. “I’ll bring dinner back with me,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say. He wanted to help his friend, but damn, this guy needed a professional.,

“Kill the guard real dead for me,” Matt said when Grayson made a move toward the door, “and pick up Chinese food.”

* * * *

Grayson drove Matt’s puttering Geo Metro into downtown, parking on Peachtree several blocks away from Six-Star Enterprises’ glass tower. He sat in the car a few moments, assessing the scene. It was close to midnight. The streets in this business section of Atlanta were empty. Not a soul in sight, which wasn’t ideal. Being the only one out in the street made him visible—vulnerable.

His plan was simple. Get into the building.

When Grayson had discovered Greg’s body—what was left of it—there’d been a pile of papers scattered on his desk, which sent up an instant red flag. One thick folder in particular had caught Grayson’s eye. The tab read “Financial Audit”—a second red flag when up.

Greg had never taken an interest in the company’s financials before. His strengths had been in networking. Or if a hostile takeover was in the works, Greg had a knack for breaking down psychological barriers put up by the company they were targeting. Financials bored Greg. He skipped meetings where nothing but money was discussed.

So, what was Greg doing with a financial audit on his desk the day he died? Grayson never did find out. Six-Star security descended on Greg’s office not more than a minute after Grayson had walked in to find Greg’s body. Less than an hour later, he’d been dragged away in handcuffs.

Of course, that financial audit file wouldn’t still be on Greg’s desk. And if it contained, as he firmly believed, something that had gotten Greg killed, the file would be long gone from this earth.

But his partner had been an anal bastard. If the file had been important, Greg would have digitized it and stashed the copy away in that secret vault Grayson had installed for him.

Tonight, his biggest roadblock was getting past security and up to Greg’s office on the sixth floor. The security in the building was state-of-the-art, unbreachable. He should know. He designed it.

He smeared black face paint on his cheeks and under his eyes to make it easier to sink into the shadows and took one last look in the rearview mirror to make sure the street was still empty. He got out of Matt’s tiny car and edged along the side of a building. Several minutes passed as he blazed a careful trail to Six-Star’s back service entrance.

He’d practiced this for the past four nights and knew it would take him exactly six minutes to get into position. Three out of those four nights, a security guard had stepped out the service entrance door, taken a quick look around, and then lit up a cigarette. The security guard, due to appear in about four minutes, was breaking the rules and putting the building at risk. He’d patiently watched the building for more than a week to find such an opening.

As he crouched in the darkness, a stocky club in hand, he hoped the guard wouldn’t choose tonight to kick that nasty smoking habit.

Five minutes passed.

Where was he
? He began to bounce on his heels.

Six minutes.

Still, no security guard. He decided to give him another few minutes before calling it a night. He could try again tomorrow.

Eight more minutes passed.

Just as he rose from his hiding place to leave, a shadow moved. A dark silhouette drew close to the service door.

What’s this
?

He held his position; confident the darkness concealed him as the shadow stepped boldly into the light.

A sick feeling twisted in his gut in reaction to what he saw. Word on the street was that a woman bounty hunter had been asking questions about him. At first, he’d suspected Vega. But this new bounty hunter wasn’t discrete, he’d been told, and had thoughtlessly gotten herself into a few difficult situations. Vega was good. Too good. She’d be breathing fire down his neck if she had been actively on his trail.

This woman who’d stepped into the light, a curvy piece of work wearing a black cat suit that left nothing to his imagination, was probably the new bounty hunter. She tilted her head and stared at the locking mechanism on the door.

You’re not going to get in through that way, sweetie
. The longer he watched, the stronger the feeling of recognition grew. Though her long hair was brown, much darker than Vega’s dishpan blond color, her high cheekbones, trim nose and insolent lips were nearly the exact duplicates of Vega’s.

This hunter had to be a sister or cousin of hers.

“Damn if I’m going to slum around in that neighborhood talking to senile old biddies for one more day,” the hunter muttered without a care that a security guard could appear at any moment. “If Six-Star won’t let me into their personnel files, well then, that’s exactly where I want to be.”