Bulletproof Princess (6 page)

As soon as Mack opened the door to the outside, Ange stepped into the pool of light from the old wrought iron lanterns that flanked the garage doors. The porch lights from down the street gave their tiny areas a desolate glow that died quickly away from the source, swallowed up by the night. Her headlights flashed as she unlocked her car before coming over to Cassie’s side. He didn’t know what was said between them, but it ended in a hug and his partner leaving with a wave. He knew she was on her way back to Vegas tonight and would be up Eli’s ass in the A.M. Mack kind of wished he would be there to see it.

Once he’d checked on Cassie’s stuff in the back seat of his truck and tossed in his own gear, he held the passenger door open for her. “You ready to go?”

“No.”

Her simple answer confounded him. She didn’t look particularly distressed or confused, just leaned against the rear fender with her arms crossed and looked at him. “Okay? You gotta pee or something?”

She shook her head. “No, I just need you to explain to me what the hell we’re doing and where the hell we’re going and what the hell is going on.” The corners of her mouth twitched into a grin. “Nothing major.”

Mack opened his mouth a couple times, but couldn’t get his tongue on board to form words. He was working without a net, stepping completely out of the framework of his job, for reasons that still didn’t make sense to him, but knew he had to proceed. The problem was, he wasn’t quite sure how to bring Cassie, no longer his professional charge, around to his way of thinking. He finally settled on, “I’ll explain on the way. Come on.”

“No.” Her expression didn’t change, at least from what he could tell from the shadows of the garage. Cassie’s eyes were serious, and her cute little mouth was set in a mulish line.

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Was the whole ‘in danger of a slow and painful death’ thing unclear to you?” Dammit, that was not what he’d meant to say, but Jesus, they needed to get going before someone figured out what he was up to.

She shook her head, loose strands from her braids shimmering around her face in the faint light. “Not at all, but I
do
get to know what’s going on as far as
I’m
concerned. You said it yourself, I’m a free woman, and I’m not agreeing to anything until you tell me
what the hell is going on
. What is Jefferson Peak? Where is it? How long are we going to be there? These are not hard questions, Inspector Jefferson. I have a right to know what’s going on in my life.”

She sounded so damn reasonable, he fumed, and while normally he wouldn’t have to have this conversation with a witness, these were definitely circumstances outside his normal box. “First of all, call me Mack. Second, I promise I will tell you everything in the truck. I mean it. We just need to get going before someone figures out where we are and where we’re going. I’ll even buy you breakfast.” Normally, he didn’t have to resort to shameless bribery except with his nieces, but he wasn’t too proud to admit—to himself—desperation.

Her eyes narrowed in open suspicion. “Breakfast, huh?”

Mack shrugged and sighed. “It’s all I got on short notice. I might even be able to guarantee it’s hot.”

“And you swear you’ll tell me?”

It was difficult to take a woman in little girl hair braids seriously, but considering the alternatives, he nodded. “Okay. Do I gotta give you a pinkie or something?”

She wrinkled her nose, in addition to narrowing her eyes to tiny slits as she climbed into the passenger seat. “Only if you don’t want it back.”

He snorted in laughter as he closed the door and walked around the truck to climb inside. “Are you always this cranky when you’re sleep deprived?”

Cassie watched the night pass by the window, doing her best to relax. Not that Inspector Jefferson—Mack was making it easier. He explained he was taking her to the safest place he knew and she was in real danger, and he calmly told her he didn’t know how long it would take to catch the guy, but where they were going could keep them indefinitely. He seemed confident, though, that it wouldn’t take too long.

“Ange is a beast,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t let the sexy walk fool you. She is easily more dangerous than any predator out there.” His assessment of his partner’s prowess was surprisingly comforting.

About an hour into the drive, she found herself drifting off to sleep, unmindful of the cold glass against her scalp or the classic rock playing softly on the radio. She murmured along with the lyrics as her mind wrapped itself in her primary comfort, music.

“Did you say something?” he asked as he turned the radio down further. She didn’t have to see him to know he looked concerned.

“No. Sleeping.”

Her answer seemed to appease him since he turned the music back up slightly and continued driving. The next thing she knew, he was shaking her lightly by the arm to rouse her. The sky was indigo, the shade it washed as the sun decided to get out of bed with streaks of pink and orange saturating the clouds.

“What’d I miss? Are we doing breakfast yet?”

Mack grinned slightly and shook his head. “Almost. I just thought you might appreciate the sunrise.”

It was an unusually kind, insightful gesture from a man she barely knew, who barely knew her. “Thank you,” she murmured as she took in the sights. Stretching in the seat, she looked out at the landscape. The gorgeous desert traveled out in every direction as far as the eye could see, low tufts of bur sage, creosote, and cactus, the occasional critter scurrying between stripes of shortening shade. They were off the paved road, and probably had been for a while if the prevalence of local plant-life and bumpy ride were any indication. “I love the desert. It’s like my soul feels whole here.”

“Me, too.”

The stress and grief of the last twenty-four hours took a brief respite as she oriented herself to the land and their place in it. For a moment she had peace, and she was beyond grateful.

They were on an angle, almost like they were driving into the blushing sky from the pallor of the desert floor. Halfway up the mountain, a strange sight caught her eye, not a natural formation of rock exactly. She wasn’t quite sure what the hell she was looking at until the road leveled out and became somewhat paved once more.

“Where in the hell are we?” she asked as they drove through a massive gate in a fence marked ‘Electrified’. The driveway was long and straight, lined with straggly fingers of ocotillo cacti and bleached white bricks, leading up to a house. A massive, sprawling spread that was part Tuscan villa and part Spanish mission, with liberal touches of Pueblo thrown in, two stories tall, at least three wings she could see, with an obscenely large and baroque fountain in the middle of the driveway that formed a circle which somehow didn’t look out of place at all.

Mack parked the truck on the circle, foregoing the collection of garage bays, and came around to open her door. As he handed her down to the cobblestones that made up the pavement he said, “Welcome to the very last place on Earth anyone would think to look for either of us.”

The old black hinges on the ironwood front doors, plural, groaned as they opened, revealing a tiny white-haired woman with equally miniscule glasses on the end of her nose and the most welcoming face she’d ever seen. She rushed out to meet Mack, who swept her up in a bear hug that spun them almost halfway around the fountain. It was sweet and jarring juxtaposed against the man she’d known to this point. He looked happy, as odd as it was to say.

As soon as he put her down, he walked over and took Cassie by the wrist and drew her into the conversation physically with an introduction. “
Mamita
, this is Cassie, and she needs a place to crash for a bit.”

The white haired woman smoothed her hands down her shirt like she was pressing out wrinkles, and her eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh! I didn’t realize!” She slugged him in the arm and broke into Spanish too rapid to follow that had Mack ducking his head with chagrin. He replied softly before the woman turned back to her. “I’m sorry, Mackenzie didn’t tell me he was bringing
you
, he just said he needed the place for a while since his parents are out of town.”

Cassie straightened and took her hand from his light grasp. “It’s lovely to meet you, señora, and I really appreciate your hospitality.”

“
Y muy educada
,” Conchita remarked joyfully to Mack as she took her hand. “First, call me Conchita, and I’m glad to have you. Second, please, come inside.” When her escort turned to head back to the truck she waved it off. Linking her arms through both of theirs, she led them into the massive dwelling. “Now, I didn’t know what you’d want to eat, so I made a little of everything. Is that okay?” the woman asked as she herded them in the door.

Mack leaned down and kissed the top of her fuzzy, cotton-ball white head. “Perfect. Thank you.”

Being home was always an ambivalent thing for Mack. On the one hand, he adored Conchita, who’d been more of a mother to him than his own by a long way, and he loved spending time with her, but at the same time, that usually meant he had to be
here
, something he’d have just as soon avoided as breathed. Even without his parents’ overwhelming physical presence, it was still heavy in every tile, tapestry, piece of indigenous art, and antique buffet table.

The physical trappings, though, were much more easily ignored in the face of Conchita’s love and cooking. Keeping up a steady patter of conversation, she updated them on everything from his nieces and nephew to his father’s recurring bout of gout while she sat them at a table that practically bowed under the amount of food.

Cassie seemed to appreciate the attention, becoming more lively and happy than he’d seen her to this point.
She has a great smile,
he thought absently, and in the kitchen of his
mamita
, he saw her—really saw her—for the first time. He could draw her curves from the pictures in the magazines he swore he didn’t read, pictures of her in fashionable clothes or less, sometimes, though never so little as to be vulgar, but this view he had was different. Remarkably so. In her braided hair and Star Wars jammies, sitting at the kitchen table with this woman who loved him and raised him like her own, she was…his mind searched for a minute before circling back around to the only word that made any sense to him: beautiful.

Not like a priceless piece of art, or some faux-tawdry (fau-dry?) spread in Vogue or Maxim, but like sunshine in the afternoon as it peeks around the skyscrapers in New York City, unexpected and blinding, bringing all thought to a halt for a moment to process and proceed.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, alerting him only a moment before it sang out, in full voice, the chorus of ‘Gunpowder and Lead’. He could feel both eyes rivet to his flamingly embarrassed face as he awkwardly fished the phone out to answer before the caller hung up. “Hey, Ange, hold on a second,” he said as he rose from the breakfast nook to head into the hallway and then further into the center of the house, stopping when he got to the confines of the room his father used as an office. Normally it was not someplace he sought out, but in the interest of privacy, he ducked behind the ironwood door that matched the front one and leaned against it to get his bearings. “Okay,” he breathed. “How’s it going so far?”

“Did you know Bex was on the FTF? Apparently she was there right before I was and traded out just as I came in.” Ange sounded contemplative as she avoided answering his question, but told him quite a bit just the same. She’d made contact with Eli and Bex and hopefully—hopefully—had a lead on where to find this killer so he could return to his normal life.

“I learned that in Boston a few years ago, but I don’t see how that’s going to help our situation. You remember
our
situation, right? The one where I ask you to go to Sin City while I keep the pop princess at the one place on Earth neither of us would like to be?
That
situation?” He wasn’t given to impatience for the most part. That trait had served him well as a sniper and also as a Marshal, but now, hurrying this along was the thought leading up the jumbled pack in his head, with the fact that Cassandra Wittfield was probably the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, his throwaway description of her notwithstanding. Ange would know, like any good partner, when something was up with him, the moment the game changed or shifted in any way, and he didn’t want to have a discussion with her that he couldn’t even have with himself first.

Ange’s slow laugh did nothing to calm him. “I remember. Eli and I have a couple things working right now. We’ve got the security footage from the party and the hotel, and with a little facial-recognition wizardry on his part, we were able to get a few names that might go with the sketch. We’re searching for info on them, plus looking at the vic, himself.” She covered the phone, and he could hear a deep voice in the background, though he couldn’t make out the words. When she returned to their conversation, she sighed. “I don’t have much more beyond that right now, since I’ve only been here a few hours. As soon as I know more, you will, so keep your phone on.”

The fact that she was not too much closer to knocking on doors and knocking in heads was disappointing, but not unexpected. “I will. And Angela?”

“Hmm?” Her response sounded suspicious at his use of her full name.

“Thank you for this.” He just wanted to make sure she knew he appreciated what an above and beyond favor this was. At this rate, he’d owe her both his kidneys and maybe a lung if she needed them.

“I gotcha. We’ll talk in a bit.” The phone died in his hand and that was just as well, really, since he had to return to the kitchen and report his findings. A part of him—the part that was starting to see Cassie as more than just his charge—did not look forward to telling her they were no closer than they were the night before.

As he sat down to his empty plate, he felt Conchita’s reproving glance as she rose from the table to get more orange juice. Taking some tortillas and scooping up some beans and huevos rancheros, he schooled his features into a pleasant expression. “Ange says hello.”

“And?” The naked eagerness on Cassie’s face as she asked made his stomach twist a bit.

“And she’s working on it.” That was all he could say truthfully from his end of the table. Ange was a damn good investigator, and he could speak to Eli’s thoroughness, so he wasn’t worried about that, but Cassie’s downcast expression did something to him. “Hey,” he gestured to her with a forkful of beans, “it’s gonna be okay. In the meantime, think of this as a vacation.”

She frowned and nibbled on the corner of a triangle of toast. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t find that comforting.”

Her sarcasm cut him closer than it should have, but he tried to keep them both positive. “I get it, but while you’re here, I can at least keep you comfortable. There are far worse prisons in the world.”

He hadn’t meant it as a barb, but the stricken look that chased across her features said she’d heard it that way. “I know, and I appreciate that you all are doing this for me. Truly, I’m grateful, but I’m in the way, and I don’t want you to lose your job over me.”

Her concern was touching, and so not in synch with his initial, but dwindling, idea of her as this self-absorbed twit who profited from her looks and the fact that she could pick a few chords. In fact, he found her refreshingly nice, pleasant even, though as soon as it occurred to him, his mind followed up with exactly why that was not an appropriate line of thought. “Let me worry about that, okay?”

Conchita snorted, breaking the moment between them. “
Mi niña
, you don’t need to worry about Mackenzie. He has the reflexes of a cat, always landing on his feet. You will both be fine.” Rising from the table with Cassie’s empty plate, she took it to the sink. Over running water, she asked, “Have either of you had any sleep?”

Right up until the moment she’d asked, Mack hadn’t given any thought to anything other than forming a plan to work, so sleep had been off the table. At its mere mention though, he yawned as he pushed his eggs around his plate. “Now that you mention it…”

She nodded sagely, and pulled her glasses off to make a show of cleaning them, an action he knew from as far back as he could remember. Her way of suggesting, perhaps, he wasn’t seeing the whole picture. When she replaced them on her face, she looked from him to his mostly empty plate. “Get your things from the car and I’ll deal with this.”

Cassie was already up and gathering dishes to take to the sink, and looked unsure of her place in this conversation, this house. “Are you sure? It’s a lot of—”

His
mamita’s
smile was full of compassion. “Please, let me. Mackenzie will show you to your room once you get your things.” Her eyes moved from Cassie, to him, to the door, and he needed no more prompting.

Cassie met him at the truck, and he’d already unloaded her two bags and her guitar onto the cobblestone driveway. “I’m really not going to be in the way?” she inquired after he shut the doors.

The uncertainty he’d seen at breakfast still lurked behind her eyes, and while a glib answer was on the tip of his tongue, he wanted her to understand his sincerity, though his reasoning was still a bit sketchy. “Not at all.”

* * *

The best she could reason was she was on a cloud. A cool, fluffy cloud in the sunshine of the afternoon that smelled like clover honey and sunflowers. Carefully opening one eye, she peered at her surroundings and found she wasn’t far off with her initial assessment. From the fluffy white pillows, the pristine sheets and duvet that covered her, the delicate cerulean of the ceiling, it was entirely possible to believe she was on a cloud.

Then her memories of the day before crashed over her like a bucket of cold water. She sat up and groaned. The sleep had been much-needed, and she had no sense of time other than her knowledge they arrived at sunrise, and dusk was beginning to gather in the mountains outside her balcony window. Stretching, she looked around the room done in early equinophile. Horse and riding memorabilia on every available surface, trophies on the desk at the far end of the giant room, paintings of rearing mustangs at pink-streaked sunsets on the walls, culminating in a portrait of a young woman with red hair not unlike Mack’s in a red jacket and black boots flying over an obstacle on an impossibly large Arabian. Feminine, yet classy, the giant bed was one of the many pieces of white painted antique furniture in a room that reminded her of the presidential suite at the Bellagio.

At the end of the room farthest from her was an open door with a crystal knob that led to a blue and white tiled bathroom. One look in the mirror as she washed her face and hands had her cringing. She looked as hollow as she felt with the matching set of luggage under her eyes and face all splotchy like she’d been crying for weeks. It was hard to imagine less than twenty-four hours ago, she was still on top of the world, playing a little girl’s birthday party and making everyone happy. She missed her family, Trista, her road crew, and Clint most of all. She wanted her phone back to reestablish a connection to them and the outside world, but first, a shower and a change of clothes.

Refreshed and dressed like someone fit for human consumption in a pair of cutoffs and a shirt that had been pink when she’d purchased it a couple years ago but had long since retired its pretense. She finished her ensemble with her worn in sparkly flip flops and set off to find her minder.

Her journey started in the other room that adjoined the bathroom. He’d put them there so he could be close to her while still giving her space, he’d said, and she’d appreciated his thoughtfulness. Mack was really going out of his way to take care of her, even going to someplace he admitted he was not comfortable being, all to keep her safe. Cassie felt a bit guilty for invading his privacy by entering his domain, but she felt weird being in what was essentially his house without him.

The door whispered open to a room of navy walls and dark woods with Mack’s open duffle on the floor by the bed. The pictures on the wall were tasteful but unremarkable. She would have thought it a guest room except for the picture wedged between the second and third shelves of an inset—and empty—bookshelf. Leery of touching it, she got just close enough to see a much younger Mack, red hair ablaze in the glow of stadium lights, his football helmet aloft triumphantly over his head. He looked like a kid who’d gotten the key to the world and knew what to do with it, and yet, why was it just shoved aside and discarded?

Nothing else indicated the room belonged to anyone, like he’d systematically erased himself from here. Walking over to stare out the window to watch the shadows of the evening roll slowly down the mountain, she saw the back of the house for the first time. A tennis court was off to one side, a lengthy garden vista off to the other with a path that wound through the center, and directly below, the pool, with cabanas on either side and numerous chaise lounges, but only one of them was occupied.

Finding the stairs had been easy enough, a sweeping arch with wrought iron accents that went along with the rest of the Western Americana theme of the house. The red tile of the ground floor was glossy with a fresh sheen of wax, and her flip flops squeaked as she made her way to the French doors that led out to the pool and associated cabanas. Once outside of the house, Cassie felt as though she was intruding on his space again. Something about being near him made her feel strange, not bad, just not her usual, and the last thing she wanted was for him to send her packing to whatever mayhem awaited her upon her return to her real life.