Dangerous Loves Romantic Suspense Collection (54 page)

“Of course, baby. Anything you want.”

“Let me talk to Jack first. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.” She hung up before Butch could say anything to make her change her mind. Besides, she had a teenage kid in trouble that reached way over the girl’s head, still to find.

* * * *

“Jack!” Vega called down the hall at Skip Tracers.

He waited for her to catch up but looked pretty impatient about it. His briefcase was tucked under his arm and a stack of files filled his hands. “I’ve got appointments with three bonding companies this morning. I don’t have time to hear how you’ve managed to turn a beauty queen assignment into something deadly.”

“I haven’t…I mean I won’t.” Candice, the beauty queen’s best friend, had reluctantly given over where Tyree’s boyfriend, the drug dealer, might be found that afternoon. Seemed he’d been the one to convince Tyree to run away from home. There should be no problem with the pick-up. “I’ll have the girl home before dinner.”

“Good.” He started for the door again.

Vega caught his arm. “Butch made a proposal last night that I’m seriously considering accepting.”

His expression fell. “What kind of—wait, I don’t want to talk about this in the hall.”

She followed him to his office and took her regular chair. Jack chose to stand. He crossed his arms and scowled.

“I suppose Butch wants you to help him go after Walker.”

She propped a leg across her knee. “As a matter of fact, he does. I’ve got quite a reputation, Jack…and some charm. I could easily lure the contract away.” Not that she really wanted to. That was one reason she wanted to talk with Jack first.

“Butch has been itching to go into business for himself for several years now. He’s money-hungry, you know.”

“I know.” She felt like she knew Butch inside and out.

Jack leaned forward, his gaze trying to pin her to the chair. “And unpredictable.”

“You don’t need to tell me.” She gave him a little smile. “It’s all Mom’s doing, you know. She’s the one who wants to see me married.”

“Married?” He threw his hands in the air. “And I thought you were running away from Skip Tracers because I was keeping you from Walker.” He settled down long enough to catch his breath. “I can’t believe you’d turn your back on your family and go work for Butch just to escape your mother’s lectures. Leaving won’t make her give up on you.”

She just had to tell him right out, though the thought of marriage to Butch still put a sour lump in her throat. “You don’t understand, Jack. Butch has asked me to marry him—to be his partner in business and in life.”

“Oh.” He actually paled.

“I haven’t agreed…yet. I’m tempted.”

“Do you love him?” Jack asked in a whisper-soft voice.

The question propelled her to her feet. “That’s really not important,” she said, and started for the door. A good bounty hunter always knew when to retreat.

“I’m not asking as your supervisor, Vega. But as your uncle who loves you like a daughter. Do you love Butch?”

She shrugged.

The buzzing of the florescence light in the ceiling was the only sound in the room for several minutes. She was not about to dig herself into a hole by talking too much.

“Your father wouldn’t approve,” he said at last.

She smiled at that. “Mom won’t either. Guess there’s no chance you’d hand me Grayson Walker as a bribe to keep me at Skip Tracers?”

He didn’t even pretend to consider the idea. “Not with you less than one hundred percent, Vega. I won’t be the one to get you killed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Just like her father, his lack of faith in her ripped her up inside. Maybe Butch couldn’t give her love. But he could offer her the kind of acceptance she’d been searching for. She opened the office door. “I’ll let you know what I decide.”

She was halfway out of the office when Jack’s intercom buzzed. “Jack, you’ve got an urgent call from Atlanta,” his secretary said, not sounding at all flirty, which was enough to make Vega step back in and close the door behind her.

“Fiona?” she asked as the blood drain away from her head.

Jack picked up the receiver. He didn’t speak a word, which was even more distressing than his secretary’s flat tone.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said after listening to the person on the other end of the line for far too long. It wasn’t a plea but an order carrying the threat of death behind it.

Vega reached over the desk and switched on the phone’s speaker.

“Bring the cash to the men’s bathroom just outside the Atlanta Cyclorama.” She recognized Grayson’s voice immediately. “Come alone or she’s dead.”

“Let me talk to her,” Vega said.

There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected. “Vega.” There was a grin in his voice. “Your sister doesn’t hold a candle to you.”

“Bastard, if you touch her—”

“I would worry instead how she fell into my clutches.”

The line went dead.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

Jack ignored her. He’d dialed the phone and was waiting for an answer.

“I’m going with you to Atlanta, Jack. I know this guy. I know we can trap him.”

“Run a trace on the last call to come to this number,” he said, still ignoring her.

She couldn’t stand it. She felt close to jumping out of her skin. No matter what Jack said, she’d be on the next plane to Atlanta. She planned to tear Grayson into little pieces and toss the mess to the local cops.
No one touched her sister.

Jack dialed a second number. Vega, too wound up to sit, paced his office while cursing Grayson under her breath.

He had the chance to kill you twice, but he didn’t
. The intruding thought did nothing to settle her nerves. She wanted her anger. Wrapping herself up in the raw emotion empowered her.

She caught no more than snatches of the conversation Jack was having with the Atlanta PD. Her complete focus had shifted to the future, to her confrontation with Grayson.

Jack finally hung up the phone. “You’re not going to Atlanta with me,” he said. His tone was calm and sounded terribly final.

“The hell I’m not! He’s got my sister.”

Jack sighed. “Yes, and he said if you came to Atlanta, he’d kill her. You’re not coming.”

Oh God
. She could picture far too clearly Fiona’s body lying lifeless in a casket. And Fiona’s death would be entirely her fault. “What does he want?”

She sank into the closest chair, focused on a spot on the rug, and tried to calm her racing thoughts.

“He doesn’t give us much time. I have to be in Atlanta this evening with fifty thousand in cash. I can do it, no problem. And the police will be there to scoop up Walker once Fiona is safely out of the way.”

“What do you need me to do?” she asked.

“Do you consider yourself still employed here?” he asked, still using that dangerously calm tone.

Vega gave a quick nod.

“Good. I need you to find Tyree Robinson. Have that assignment wrapped up with a nice bow by the time I get back tomorrow.”

Chapter Thirteen

“How is asking for a ransom going to get our hands on her sister?” Matt asked. “This one looks much sweeter than money.” He lunged forward and managed to poke Fiona in the side with his finger before Grayson pulled him back.

Still holding onto Matt’s collar, Grayson led Matt into the other room. There were some things he wanted Fiona to hear, like the phone call to Jack setting the terms for the trade. There were other things he didn’t want her to know, such as what he really had planned.

“I’m not going to kidnap Vega. After what happens today, that bounty hunter will be all over Atlanta asking more questions than a curious four-year-old.”

“Never liked kids,” Matt grumbled. “I don’t recommend you kidnap any. Too much trouble, kids.”

“Try to focus, Matt. My plan doesn’t involve kidnapping anyone right now. I just want to play with Vega’s mind.”

Matt grinned at that. “Torture is a kind of mind game.”

“Matt, not now. I need your help with this. You have to hold it together for the next couple of hours—that’s an order.”

* * * *

Vega left Jack’s office and went straight to the arsenal room, a small locked closet at the end of the hall where Jack kept an assortment of handguns and Jack’s new toys, a pair of advanced air gun Tasers, a new kind of stun gun guaranteed to disable a man from a distance of fifteen feet.

She rarely ventured into the arsenal room, preferring to purchase her own equipment. But she’d been unwilling to buy a new pistol, not when she planned on getting her father’s Glock back. She weighed a light Beretta M9 in her hand. The balance felt adequate. It would do.

She signed out the Beretta and took it back to her office to take apart, clean, and load. Though chasing after a stock broker on the run without packing any heat hadn’t bothered her, she sure as hell wouldn’t step foot into a drug pusher’s domain without some fire power behind her as a backup. Martial arts could only get her so far.

A trigger-happy dope dealer, even a gangly teen, which was who Candice had said Tyree had hooked up with, armed with an automatic weapon or the kind of submachine gun so popular now with the street gangs would blast several holes through her before she could hope to get close enough to disarm him. And though she hoped she’d be smart enough to avoid getting into that kind of Mexican standoff in the first place, she certainly wasn’t in the mood to be blindsided by anything—not with her mind all knotted up with worrying about Fiona.

Jack was right, of course. She shouldn’t go to Atlanta if going would put Fiona’s life at greater risk. And she should keep herself occupied with the Tyree Robinson assignment. Searching for Tyree and her drug pusher boyfriend, Byron—according to Candice—went a long way to help calm her flaring nerves.

After seeing Jack to the airport, she drove straight to the corner of Lafayette and Griswold to wait for Bryon to arrive as Candice had said he would. Shortly after three, a man who fit Candice’s general description—slightly gangly in his long height without an ounce of fat and very little muscle—parked illegally on the road and dashed inside a diner. He didn’t stay long. With a bag in each hand, he hopped back in his huge SUV and roared off.

Vega followed a few car lengths behind into a neighborhood called ‘Little Paris’. At one time, the city’s tycoons had built their mansions in this part of the city, bringing with them a decidedly European flare with their grand architecture. Many of the homes sat abandoned, literally crumbling on their foundations. This was a haven for the homeless and prime developments for crack houses. A few urban pioneers had moved into the area, gutting and renovating, but “Little Paris” still had a long way to go to return to its original splendor.

Bryon parked his mammoth of a car in front of one of the smaller homes. It looked as if it had benefited from some recent repairs. Although the home screamed for a new paint job, the windows were all intact and the roof had been patched. A pirated electrical line slipped into the house through a small hole near the front door.

Vega parked a few houses down and waited for him to disappear inside before venturing nearer. The street appeared as abandoned as the three-story hull of a showpiece sinking into the frozen ground across from where she’d parked her jeep. But she knew how deceiving looks often were in a neighborhood where eyes seldom had faces, and arms nearly always held weapons.

With the Beretta securely in her hand and her hand in her coat pocket, she approached the house by going through the side yard of the two-story home next to it and cut through the back yard. Icy snow crunched under her boots and cars rumbled in the distance on busier streets. Her senses alert, she kept to the yard’s long shadows and crept up to the house’s back window.

She waited several moments, making sure she hadn’t alerted anyone’s suspicions, and then rose slowly from her crouched position just below a corner of the window to peer inside. The lights in the room flickered, a common problem with pirated electrical lines.

The room was sparse with a wooden double bed pushed up against the wall and a lamp sitting on the floor. She spotted Tyree right away. Dressed in jeans and a MIT sweatshirt, she sat cross-legged on the bed reading
Pride and Prejudice
. The Miss Motor City tiara sparkled on top of her head.

There was no sign of Byron.

She kept the Beretta in her pocket and circled around to the front of the house. She wiggled the doorknob and found it unlocked.

“Tyree, come get the damn food I bought you!” Byron’s loud voice blew through the front door.

“I don’t want another hotdog,” she whined. “That’s all you bring, day after day. Hotdogs. I’m sick of it. Can’t we order a pizza? They’ll put sausages on them, you know.”

Trouble in paradise, Vega thought. Good. Breaking up the happy couple just got ten times easier. She pushed the door open a crack. The foyer was dark, empty. Not a lick of furniture to be found. She stepped inside, pushed the door closed behind her, and turned the lock. She didn’t need any unannounced guests barging in on their private party.

“Tyree if you keep griping, I’m going to smack you.”

Vega heard a scuffle. Playing it safe, she peered into the living room. A threadbare sofa sat across from a high-tech flat-screen television. Not a surprising combination for someone like Byron. The whole interior of the house smelled smoky sweet, like a tightly packed marijuana joint. Poison. How people could pollute their bodies that way, Vega just couldn’t understand.

Second-hand inhalation wasn’t a new experience for her though. She pressed on to the next room, the kitchen. The cracked linoleum actually shined. The drab olive appliances gleamed. Someone had taken the time to care for them. Vega guessed Tyree.

Two hotdogs, fixed all the way, sat unwrapped on the table.

Vega stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to the soft grunts and giggles from the adjacent room. The door between the rooms remained open. Tyree looked to be the kind of girl who would have insisted Byron close the door if anyone else was with them inside the house. The poor lovers were in for a rude surprise.