THE GUARDIAN (Taskforce Series) (17 page)

“It’s gonna take that long to tell his life story,” Corey pointed out.

“Maybe we should go an’ get ‘im.” Nadim shot
Jackson
a pleading look. “Ain’t nobody gone into the store in all that time. What if he don’t mind his manners?”

Jamal perked up suddenly. “Here he come now!”  

Sure enough, Muhammed was darting across the highway with a ghostly plastic bag over his head. He whipped it off as he joined them under the overhang.

“How was it, brotha?” Jamal asked him. The men gathered eagerly around him.

Jackson
remained on the periphery, feigning disinterest.

“Nice,” Muhammed gushed. “Just like we was on a date. She gave me a hot dog and a soda. “We was in the back room, sittin’ all close and shit.”

Jackson
’s temples throbbed. Surreptitiously, he studied the faces of the men around him, especially Davis, for signs that they suspected ‘Maggie’ wasn’t who she said she was
.

“She look’ good, too,” Muhammed said, warming to his tale. “She had on a white shirt that was all tight and showin’ off her stuff.” The men broke into guffaws as Muhammed pretended his hands were breasts. He thrust them into Nadim’s face and said in a falsetto, “‘Tell me about your chil’hood, Muhammed.’ Damn, I had trouble rememberin’ my own name!”

The men roared with laughter.

“What kind of questions she ask?” Nadim wanted to know
.

Muhammed shrugged. “All kinds. I tol’ her what I done and how conversion changed the way I thought about myself and all.”

The men lapsed into thoughtful quiet.

“Did you tell her everything?” Hasan wanted to know.

“Yeah, all I could think of,” Muhammed admitted. “Hell, I got no shame. She ain’t usin’ our real names, no how.”

As the men argued over how much of their shady pasts to divulge,
Jackson
slipped into his dorm room to peel off his waterlogged clothing. He’d heard enough to confirm that Lena Alexandra had successfully pulled the wool over Muhammed’s eyes. Plus she’d indulged him with just enough flirtation to announce to the others that they were going to get their turn at flirting with her, too
.

Having read several of Lena’s published articles,
Jackson
acknowledged that she’d interviewed murderers like
Davis
before. She knew what she was doing. Only, this situation was strikingly different. The men she’d interviewed had been incarcerated, with armed guards at the ready, not on parole. And none of them had butchered a member of her family. The more he considered it, the more convinced he became that her plan would backfire.

Davis
would smell her fear, no matter how many parolees she interviewed first to prepare herself. As a former cop,
Davis
had questioned plenty of perps. He knew what a leading question sounded like. If he sensed her questions were geared to entrap him, he would react like the predator he was
.

In good conscience,
Jackson
couldn’t let it come to that. He had to supply a solution to
Davis
that didn’t involve her interviewing him and, at a risk to his undercover assignment, he needed to do it tonight. Peeling off his sodden shorts, he cranked on the shower. Why waste another moment? His chilled, naked body tingled with anticipation. And it wasn’t just the thrill of violating orders once again that egged him on. It was the prospect of going toe-to-toe with that feisty woman and seeing who came out the victor, this time.

Stepping into the narrow tub,
Jackson
soaped himself under the warm spray while imagining the look of dismay on
Lena
’s face when he called her by her real name
.
After last night’s showdown, he couldn’t wait to turn the tables on her.

Feeling a tingling in his groin, he glanced down to find himself fully erect. He indulged in a moment of fantasy, stroking his sex and envisioning Lena pleading with him not to tell
Davis
who she really was.

“Please, I’ll do anything you ask,” she begged, her eyes welling with desperate tears.

“Anything?”

“Anything,” she confirmed, sliding her palm over the bulge in his slacks
.

Cut! Disgusted with himself,
Jackson
doused the lights on that imaginary vignette. Christ, was he that pathetic that he had to coerce a woman to have sex with him?

Don’t answer that,
he quickly warned himself.

But then a new scene evolved in his head. He was telling Lena that he knew men in powerful places; that he could help her find the evidence to put
Davis
behind bars for good. It felt better to play the hero
.

“Are you serious?” Her eyes welled with tears of relief.

“Positive. You don’t have to continue with this charade,
Lena
. I’ll take care of
Davis
. You just take care of yourself.”

“You’d do that for me?” she asked, melting against him. Her breasts pillowed his chest. The kiss she planted on his lips ignited the kerosene in his veins.

Suddenly, they were both naked and she was straddling his lap, guiding his cock into her liquid heat. She rode him with the same feisty bravado with which she’d wielded her pistol last night. Oh, baby.

Grinding his molars together,
Jackson
swallowed the groan issuing from his throat as pleasure stormed him. Ejaculate shot across the length of the tub, hitting the fiberglass wall as he succumbed to a climax so powerful he had to throw out a hand to steady himself.

Holy hell.
The water continued to stream over him as he caught his breath. He dropped his hand with a touch of chagrin and a heavy dose of self-mockery.

One thing he was sure of: His encounter with
Lena
tonight wasn’t going to go down like that, not at all. But a man could dream about rescuing a damsel in distress, even if that damsel refused to acknowledge she was in grave danger.

**

Lena
peered through the dark drizzle. As tense as a hair trigger, she clasped the money pouch under her left arm while her right hand cradled the reassuring contours of the gun buried deep in the pocket of her purse.

When she’d arrived at work in a downpour that evening, her usual parking spot under the floodlights had been taken, forcing her to back into a space under the pecan tree and make a mad dash for the store.

Now she knew what a mistake it was to park so far away. The light cast by the floodlights didn’t reach as far as the pecan tree, which meant that Peter’s Jeep was sitting in total darkness. Considering Abdul had jumped her just last night, she shouldn’t have been so careless.

But she neared the Jeep without mishap. No one leapt from behind the tree trunk to assault her. Her fears were a figment of her imagination. She relinquished her pistol for the car keys and slipped behind the wheel, locking the door and setting her purse and the pouch on the passenger seat.

She was combing her damp hair back from her forehead when fingers emerged like tentacles from the darkness behind her. One hand stifled the scream that erupted from her throat; the other pinned her right arm to her chest, keeping her from groping for her pistol.

“Shhh! Be still,” commanded a deep voice she would have recognized anywhere.
Dear God, Abdul was going to kill her, after all!
She twisted violently, scarcely registering the words he spoke firmly in her ear. “Calm down. I am not here to harm you.
Magdalena
, be still!”

It was the sound of her full first name that penetrated her haze of terror.

“Breathe,” he ordered, lifting his hand off her mouth and locking his arm loosely but threateningly around her neck
.

As she dragged deep breaths into her lungs, her eyes wide with fear, she saw him take both the money pouch and her purse from the front seat and stow them in the back. So much for shooting him
.

“What do you want?” she demanded in a voice that betrayed her by wobbling. “Why did you call me
Magdalena
?”

He removed his arm from around her neck and angled his chest between the two front seats. “Because your real name is Magdalena Anastasia Xenakis,” he said to her profile with perfect pronunciation.

Shock paralyzed her body.
How could he know that? Had she registered her laptop by that name?

“I know who you are,” he stated with calm certainty, “and I know why you’re here.

“Well, let’s hear it then.” She tried to sound flippant, but her thoughts were scattering in all directions.

“Rupert Davis murdered your sister, Alexandra,” he said on a sober note. “You’ve come here to coax a confession out of him.”

Lena
couldn’t breathe. If he told anyone else this, all her carefully architected plans had the potential to crumble into dust. “How could you know that?” If
Davis
found out, he would hunt her down until she lay six feet under.

“Relax.” Abdul’s deep, musical voice steadied her erratic pulse. “So far no one knows but me. If you want to keep it that way, you need to do as I say.”

He was blackmailing her, the SOB! It wasn’t so fun being on the receiving end for a change. “How dare you,” she seethed, conscious of the broad, warm shoulder touching hers
.
 

“Calm down and listen to my offer. The first thing you’ll do is surrender this.” His fingers curled around her pendant.

“What are you doing?”
Lena
clapped a hand over his to keep him from tugging on it. “That’s a family heirloom.” She tried prying his fingers loose, but her efforts proved feeble against his superior strength. So that was why he’d had his hands around her throat last night. Just as she’d thought, he wasn’t going to strangle her; he’d wanted her pendant
.

“Bullshit. I know it’s a camera,
Lena
. I know you’ve been filming me and the other parolees all along. Is it recording now?” 

“Of course not. How would I have known you were waiting in the car? How did you get in here, anyway?”

“You left a window cracked. Take it off or I’ll just break the chain,” he warned
.

Fuming silently, she lifted both hands to the back of her neck and unlatched the clasp.

“Are my images still in the memory?” he asked, sliding the pendant off the chain as it slipped loose from her neck. “Or did you offload them somewhere?”

In her befuddlement, it took her a moment to supply an answer. All she could think of was that after last night’s victory, she was losing this round badly. “They’re all still on there,” she lied. “How was I supposed to offload them? You stole my laptop, remember?” She made no mention of the computer in Artie’s where she’d offloaded all her files so far.

“Part two of my offer.” He tried squeezing farther between the seats so that he could look her in the eye, only the opening was too narrow. “Hang on a sec.” In the next instant, he was out of the vehicle and rounding it to join her up front.

Run!
Lena
told herself, reaching for the door handle. Only where would she go? She tried to think of something, but then the passenger door popped open and Abdul slid into the seat next to her, having apparently moved at the speed of light.