One Kiss More (14 page)

Crawford’s expression soured. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Emma. Deputy McCabe is no longer working this case. I doubt he’s even still in the building.”

By getting rid of McCabe, Crawford had managed to cut Emma off from any possible support system. She struggled for a deep breath, but found that there wasn’t enough oxygen to fill her lungs. “Well, that’s too bad for you, then.” She infused her voice with every ounce of strength in her reserves. She didn’t know if she could trust the SOG bigwig, but she was starting to believe that she
could
put her trust in McCabe. She’d been going it alone for so long that the prospect of having a little help gave Emma hope that she might get her dad out of this situation after all. She didn’t want to be alone, not anymore, and Crawford needed to know she wasn’t going to let him make an island out of her again. “Because I’m not saying another word until you find him.”

Emma leveled her gaze on Crawford and stared him down. She clamped her jaw down tight for good measure to drive home her point. A few moments passed, a battle of wills that was laughable when Emma considered her situation. The sound of Crawford’s phone sliced through the quiet, effectively ending their standoff. With a curse under his breath, he pulled his cell from his jacket pocket and answered with a curt, “Crawford.”

As he listened to whoever was on the other end of the call, his gaze landed on Emma and he shot her a glare that should have killed her right where she sat. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he growled into the receiver. Without a parting word, he spun on his heel, phone still glued to his ear, and stomped out of the room.

Despite the interruption, Emma considered herself the winner of round one.

Landon waited in the dark conference room, laid back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table. When he heard the door open behind him, he let his eyes drift shut, a pleasant, albeit triumphant smile playing on his lips. Sometimes, having influential friends paid off, and though he’d owe Galen for the rest of his damned life, it was totally worth calling in the favor.

“I suppose you think you’re hot shit, Deputy. But all you’ve proved to me is that you’re willing to risk national security by running off at the mouth.”

Landon didn’t need to look at Crawford to know the man was absolutely livid. Each word he spoke was clipped with barely restrained rage. And he knew Crawford hadn’t counted on Landon being quite as connected as he was. Well, to tell the truth, it was Galen who had all the fancy-dancey political connections, but Crawford didn’t need to know that. Besides, it wasn’t as though he was going out of his way to ruin Crawford’s operation. He wasn’t that big of an asshole. First and foremost, Landon was a professional. What he’d wanted to get from the strings he’d pulled was the chance to be close to Emma. To watch out for her. She needed someone who had her best interests at heart. Instead of being a hindrance, he wanted to be an asset to the investigation.

“Pull your Hanes out of your crack and try to settle down, Crawford. I didn’t compromise your mission. I just want in.”

“You want in all right, but I doubt it has anything to do with this operation.”

The innuendo in Crawford’s words ignited Landon’s temper, and he swung his legs down from the table, turning in his chair to face the other man. He leveled his gaze on Crawford and stood slowly, his fists clenched at his sides. “You make an insinuation like that again and you’ll be picking your ass up off the floor. I don’t give a shit who you work for or what kind of weight you can swing around. Get me?”

“Get this, McCabe,” Crawford said as he opened the door and held it open in invitation. “You step a toe out of line and I’ll show you exactly what kind of weight I have. You won’t be able to land a job as a security guard at the local mall when I’m done with you.”

Landon smiled as he walked out into the hallway ahead of Crawford. He’d like to see him try.

They headed down a long corridor into a section of the emergency room reserved for trauma patients. All around them, nurses and doctors hustled from one room to the next, machines beeped and buzzed, and no one paid them a bit of attention. For all intents and purposes they were ghosts. And Landon was willing to bet the SOG had little trouble maintaining their obscurity.

At the end of the corridor, Landon noticed a couple of Crawford’s men standing guard outside of a room. He moved out ahead of the other man, shouldering his way through the door, daring either one of them to make a move to stop him. Once inside, he stopped just shy of the doorway, his gaze drinking in every last detail of the woman seated on the hospital bed before him. Her T-shirt and chest were stained with red dye. Her curls were wild and disheveled. She was obviously worked over and exhausted.

And she looked damned beautiful.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded in response and gave him a wan smile. “I have no idea what’s going on, though.”

“Well, that’s not going to be a problem because we’re about to get down to brass tacks, right, Crawford?”

The door closed quietly behind them, and Landon gave Emma a reassuring smile.

“Thanks to your stubbornness and McCabe’s . . .
resourcefulness
, you’ve both created a problem we’ll be forced to deal with before we can even let you out of here.”

“Which is . . . ?” Landon asked without turning to face Crawford.

Crawford walked deeper into the room and settled down on a stool next to Emma. He propped his feet up on the rungs and leveled his gaze on Landon. “The whole point of orchestrating Emma’s death was to give the appearance that you—and the Marshals Service—were off her back. How am I supposed to explain your presence to our target and his associates? I can’t exactly have you hanging around.”

Emma’s expression went from zero to abject panic in less than a second, which told Landon that Emma knew even less about what was going on than he did. “Okay, let’s back up a bit.” Landon didn’t dare take another step closer to Emma because he didn’t know if he could keep himself from reaching out to take her hand. Her apprehension was palpable, and no matter how mad he was at her for keeping her damned secrets, he doubted she deserved what Crawford was putting her through. “We need to start from the beginning before we can even think about making a decision about how to proceed.”

“We don’t have all night, and now I’ve got to deal with debriefing not only the Portland chief, but Seattle’s as well. So let’s get to it before this whole plan goes to shit.” Crawford propped his elbows on his knees and leaned in toward Emma. “In digging for information to exonerate your dad, you inadvertently landed in the middle of an arms deal, Emma. And if Cesar Molina’s employer gets his hands on the weapon he’s trying to buy, a lot of people could lose their lives.”

“Wait.” Emma’s brow furrowed as her gaze darted to Landon for a split second. “Arms deal? What are you talking about? Cesar and his boss are human traffickers, not terrorists. They’ve been smuggling women out of Mexico for the past ten years and selling them into the sex trade. They used Mike Shanahan to launder their money through Mendelson. And when the FTC brought insider-trading charges against Mendelson, they framed my dad with some bogus story about extortion to divert the feds’ attention from finding out what they were really up to. I’ve got all of the records to prove it.”

Oh, shit, Emma
. A renewed sense of anger boiled in Landon’s gut at the thought of how deep this went. And by nosing around where she clearly didn’t belong, Emma had landed herself right in the middle of an international terrorism investigation.

“I was getting ready to contact the FBI when they kidnapped my dad.”

Landon rolled his head on his shoulders in an effort to banish the tension holding his neck in a vise. “They couldn’t have known you were going to the feds, Emma. What did you do that would prompt them to kidnap Javier?”

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth as she looked askance at Crawford. Landon tried not to let her mouth distract him, but he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away. “About six months ago, right after my dad got sick, he told me everything. He said that when the FTC and DOJ was investigating Mendelson, a man by the name of Teyo Sousa reached out to him. Apparently they’d grown up together and Teyo figured that my dad would do him a solid for old time’s sake. A grand jury was being convened to indict Mike Shanahan and more arrests wouldn’t be far behind. Sousa couldn’t afford for Mendelson to be investigated because it would lead back to his organization and money laundering. When he refused to help him, Sousa sent Cesar to visit my dad and he told him that if he didn’t throw out the case and the indictments, they’d make his daughter suffer. So Dad did everything they asked him to do. Then, to make sure he wouldn’t talk later down the line, they framed him, had him thrown in jail, and told him that I’d never be safe unless he kept quiet.

“But I couldn’t let Dad go to the feds without information to back up his confession. So I hacked Shanahan’s private files, looked into Mendelson’s finances and followed the trail back to Sousa. I can’t prove the human trafficking, though I know without a doubt it’s going on. But I have enough to put him and Shanahan away on money laundering and conspiracy. And I thought that with what I had, and the information my dad was going to give them, that the feds would negotiate his release from prison.”

“That’s not all, though, is it, Emma?”

A dark cloud passed over her expression as she said to Crawford, “I also hijacked all of Sousa’s financial records, siphoned the money from his accounts, and buried it so deep he’d never find it. I wanted him to pay for what he did to my dad and so I took something away from him that he cared about. His money. And”—she cringed—“I might have dangled the fact in front of his face to show him what it felt like to have something important taken away from him. I got cocky. Thought I had him right where I wanted him. I gathered up everything I had on Sousa, and he took my dad before I could go to the FBI with it.”

Landon thought his eyes might bug right out of his head.
Holy fucking shit
. Crawford gave him a look. The only reason Emma was still alive was because she had a badass arms dealer’s money. And what she’d taken as the spoils of her personal war were now being used as ransom to secure her father’s safety.

“Emma . . .” Landon didn’t know what to say. Where to begin. “You’re lucky you’re not dead right now!” He hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but the gravity of the situation hit him with the force of a jackhammer to the chest. No wonder Crawford was wound up. This was a disaster! “Do you realize what you’ve done? Who you’ve pissed off? Jesus Christ.” The danger she was in was not only real, it was goddamned severe. Because they were dealing with a WMD, Crawford and his people would put Emma’s safety second to making an arrest. Their only concern was intercepting a bomb. In their eyes, she was an acceptable sacrifice. A casualty of war. And Landon had no clue how he’d manage to get them out of this mess in one piece.

Not when Emma was already in too deep.

“So with the Marshals Service bringing heat down on Emma, your guy on the inside suggested to Sousa’s number two that he could find a way to fake her death, am I right?”

Crawford nodded. “More or less. My undercover man was on the other end of that sniper rifle tonight. We were hoping to get to Emma before you did, but it didn’t work out that way. We certainly hadn’t intended to let you think someone was trying to kill you, Emma. You weren’t ever in any real danger tonight.”

Landon was thankful that Crawford was being more upfront, but he knew that he was intentionally leaving out more than a few details. He’d let Landon fill in most of the blanks and confirmed the truth when it was absolutely necessary. That way, he wasn’t offering up more information than he needed to, keeping the hows and whys to himself and holding just enough back that Crawford still maintained control over the situation and the safety of his undercover man.

“The buy is supposed to happen in less than a week. If Sousa doesn’t get his money back, he’ll miss his one and only opportunity to get his hands on the merchandise. They need Emma. Right now, she’s holding all of the cards.”

Landon expelled his breath in a single gust. “Yeah, she is.”

Their gazes locked and for a moment, Emma merely sat there. She was too damned smart for her own good and he was waiting for the moment when everything clicked into place for her and she lost it completely.

“What now?” Her voice was quiet, but not even a little unsure. Landon respected that. He’d always known she was stubborn, but she was also tougher than he’d given her credit for.

“Now, we put you up somewhere for the night. The PIO for the Marshals Service will be making a statement to the press soon, confirming that you were shot at your apartment this evening and died en route to the hospital. Once we make contact with our man on the inside, we’ll proceed. If we’re lucky, we can trade Sousa’s money and the information you have on him in exchange for your father. We’ll take it from there.”

Sounded simple enough, but Landon knew from experience that even the best plans were never as simple as they sounded. “Luckily, witness protection is sort of my business. My hotel is outside the city limits. It’s low-key, easy to patrol, and if it comes down to it, I could set up a security protocol with little to no effort. Emma can stay there tonight.”

“In your room?” Crawford cocked a curious—and not a little mocking—brow.

“Why not?” Landon kept his tone level, though what he wanted to do was pop Crawford in the face for his snarky bullshit attitude. “I’m already set up and no one will notice if I bring a woman in with me.”

Crawford let out a derisive snort.

“And what makes you think we’ll remand custody of Miss Ruiz over to you, McCabe? As far as I’m concerned you were trying to sneak her out of her building under your own people’s noses when we intercepted you. What’s to say you don’t take off with her the second we let you two out of here?”

Though he was sorely tempted to do just that, Landon knew that Emma would never abandon her dad. And likewise, he would never abandon his duty. “You’re just going to have to trust me, Crawford.”