Command Indecision (Lexi Graves Mysteries) (26 page)

The difference between him and me was I knew how women thought; and that some women overstepped their limits for all the
y
played the friend, and colleague. I wondered how much he told her about me, or if she were just being polite. For all I knew, Rebecca Blake would be quite happy to have me out of the picture. She might even work on ensuring I stayed that way. After all, she could probably lend Maddox a sympathetic ear, a shoulder, or something more... I shook my head in disgust, the feeling only just giving way to angst as again I thought of Solomon.
Was that what I was doing with him? Taking comfort?

I'd known him almost as long as Maddox. There was something between us, even from the start, but I tempered it when I chose Maddox. When I took Solomon's job offer, I put a big distinction between the two of them. Solomon was a man who respected boundaries, but didn't mind testing the waters to see if they were crossable. He asked to cross the boundary once before, giving me the opportunity if I chose it. And as far as he was concerned, there were no boundaries now. Exce
pt… again the feeling nagged at me
that this was
pretend.
It was going undercover with extras. He could just as easily turn his back on me next week. And he didn't love me.

Maddox loved me.

But could I trust him?

I hung so far back, I missed the next exit, only realizing that I lost my target when I saw headlamps off to my left, rather than straight ahead. I had to confess: my mind wasn't totally on the follow.

"Damn." I pulled a
sharp
U-turn and headed back, this time finding the road. It was a narrow lane, just wide enough for two cars to pass
, and easy to miss
. Shrubbery and weeds sprang up wildly on both sides. Ahead stood a large structure, slightly obscured behind a ten-foot-high wire fence. The gates were open where the car had passed through, disappearing around the side. I slowed. There was nowhere to conceal
the Lexus
on the road, and if I left it, it would be noticeable to anyone returning this way. That gave me a choice: either leave
it
on the main road and risk getting it towed
, should the county sheriffs pass by and assume it abandoned;
or continue along this way, claiming a wrong turn if anyone challenged me.

I drove on. The warehouse loomed closer, its only backdrop the dusky sky. The full moon hung fat, now the rain had passed
and the clouds parted
. Out on the outskirts of town, the stars twinkled. It was pretty. It would have been prettier if I were sitting at an outside bar of a terrace, but you know how they say that beggars can’t be choosers.

I rumbled along slowly and killed my headlights, pulling into a service yard just inside the gates. The other car was nowhere to be seen. I backed the
Lexus
behind a broken down truck, the tires long since rotted away,
so it now sat on rusted rims.
I shut off the engine, pondering my next move. The warehouse yard didn't seem to get a lot of traffic. I had a feeling it was abandoned.

First things first, I checked my phone to see if I had service. I did. I contemplated shooting off a message to Solomon, telling him where I was, but decided that was a little premature, since I would probably be out of there in a few minutes. On second thought, I messaged:
Following a lead. Back soon.
I switched my phone to “silent,” just in case Solomon called back.

"Strictly reconnaissance," I said to myself, stepping out of the car. "Piece of cake."

Cool air passed over my face, giving me the shivers, as I took a look around.
Given that there was only one set of tire prints on the way into the yard, I decided that the warehouse had fallen into disuse some time ago, maybe even years. The yard
itself
wasn't even fenced in. Instead, the pot-holed asphalt diminished into waist-high grass and weeds
that stretched towards the distant freeway
.
The perimeter fencing was torn and patched in several places. Hardly a deterrent.

I walked swiftly after the
fresh
tire tracks, following them around the side of the building. Hugging my body close to the wall, I jogged forwards, hunching over so I wouldn't be seen through the windows. I didn't hear anything from the warehouse, but that wasn't surprising. It was late and too far out of town to be a hangout for the homeless, or kids with nothing better to do.
I had to assume someone was inside.

Coming to the end of the building, I paused and stopped. I darted my head around the corner to peek, pulling back almost immediately. I found the car. Dropping to one knee, making my body smaller and less obvious, I peeked again, slowly and cautiously, in case the man waited. After a few seconds, I decided I was alone. The car sat next to a black SUV, clearly newer and more expensive than the car I followed, even from this distance. Both were
apparently
empty.

I checked the building, inspecting the wall and upwards. I was relieved to see there were no doors on this side either and the windows were high
er
up. This meant the entrance had to be on the far side of the warehouse. I felt sure that if anyone came out, I'd at least be downwind from them, perhaps even able to scurry back around the building before being spotted.

Seeing as there was no time like the present, I grabbed my cell phone, set it to
“
camera
”
and sprinted to the cars. Pressing the back of my hand to the hood, I felt it. Hot, like I expected. I crossed to the second car and repeated the motion. Cold. Whoever drove the SUV had been here a while. I moved around the side of the car, on the furthest side from the rear of the warehouse, and peeked through the windows. The front was clean and empty, save a take
-
out coffee cup in the cup holder. I saw a map book tucked into the door pocket. Moving to the rear, I put my sleeve over my nose and mouth and smooshed my face as close to the window as I could get without actually leaning my forehead on it. Without my breath fogging the glass, I had a clear view of the
bright pink
scarf on the floor of the SUV. It was a scarf I remembered Roxanne wearing when I saw her drive past the night she was kidnapped. If I thought it was distinctive then, it was even more so
now,
alone on the floor of the truck.

I glanced over at the warehouse, mentally placing a bet on the likelihood that Roxanne was inside. I would put money on a win.

Aware that I might not have a lot of time, I moved around the back of the SUV and snapped the license plate, sending it to
Lucas
' email. Moving over to the car I followed, I snapped its plate too and emailed it in. Hopefully,
Lucas
would be able to tell me who owned the vehicles. Somper's car was absent
, if the one I saw him in earlier was even his,
but that didn't mean he wasn't there.

Somper was muscular, his biceps like young trees, but when I saw him at the gym, he wasn’t one of the ones to tackle Solomon. Instead, he hugged the wall, watching while the others flunked out. But he watched every move carefully. He was a man who wanted to get it right first time. Whether he
could
was a different matter. All the same, he was bigger than I, and undoubtedly stronger.
I thought about the
man
I’d followed
. He was similar in height and build to Somper
, perhaps more thickly set
. I didn't want to run into eith
er of them without an equalizer, which for my height and weight, meant a weapon.
With that thought came the realization that I hadn't checked the secret compartment to see if Solomon had a weapon stashed. A rookie move if there was ever one.

Edging away from the cars, I jogged back alongside the building, peeking around the side. Seeing it was clear, I slid around the corner, my back to the wall, and checked my cell phone. No messages from
Lucas
. Usually he was fast. Glancing at the clock
on the screen
, I pulled a face. Of course, he hadn't called back. He'd probably gone home. Funny, it never occurred to me that
Lucas
had a life. I'd yet to see him out of the office. He was there when I got in, and there when I left; but my hours were odder than his, and neither of ours strictly conformed to regular office hours. Unless Solomon had given him instructions to stay, there was no need for
Lucas
to be at work so late.

My loss, his gain.

Just a few minutes and I would leave.
Sticking the phone back in my pocket, I crouched towards the windows that overlooked this side of the yard. Rising slowly, I peeked inside, but the window was so filthy, I couldn't see a thing. I moved to the second window, this time getting a better view of the interior. Like the yard, the warehouse had an abandoned air to it
and weeds scratched at my jeans as I pressed myself against the building
. I couldn't see much, but there did seem to be the faint glow of light now coming from the other end of the warehouse. I moved along to the next window, rolling my head to each side as I squinted
through the grime.
I didn't see any people. My best guess was that they were holed up in some side room across the building where I couldn't see them.

Not being completely stupid, I decided storming the warehouse, alone, with who knows how many
potential
assailants inside, was a b
ad idea, especially given I was
armed with only a cell phone. If my suspicions were c
orrect, the people inside were A
rmy men, all far more experien
ced than I when it came to hand-to-
hand combat and weapons. My training extended to failing boot camp, a brochure in Krav Maga at the rec center from my mother, and being a fairly decent shot with the gun locked in a drawer in my apartment.

My best move now would be to head back to the car, and return to the main road, then call Solomon, and ask him what to do. If he came, maybe with Fletcher and Delgado too, we could distract them long enough to scope the place out and look for Roxanne.
If not, at least I had three new leads to follow: the two cars and the warehouse.
Heck, there was no time like the present. I pulled out my phone again, my thumb hovering over the “speed dial.”

I didn't even hear anyone behind me until there came the ominous click of a gun.

"Don't move."

It probably wasn’t the smartest idea for me to immediately stick my hands up.

Chapter Nineteen

I froze, my hands
inches from
the rotten windowsill as I stared inside the warehouse. Nothing reflected
back from
the grime.
No face. No gun. But I felt it, hovering inches away from my head. At this distance, he couldn’t miss.

I suppose it was too much to ask that he be a moron with no sense of aim?

"Don't make a sound," came the man's voice.
It was smooth and firm; he had no fear. He also showed no irritation at finding me, none that I could discern anyway.
"Arms above your head and step back."

I raised my arms, my heart pounding
in a steady tempo,
and stepped back. A hand reached forward, removing my cell phone
then checking around my belt and under my arms for a weapon.

"Let's go for a little walk," he said, nudging me with the gun.

Feeling the barrel of a gun, I have to say, does nothing for me. "Where to?"

"Did you not hear the bit about don't make a sound?"

"I thought we'd already moved past that." I squeaked as something hard pressed into my back
, a not particularly encouraging way of indicating I should start moving
.
Personally, I was more of a carrot than a stick sort of person. Somehow I don’t think my faceless captor cared one bit.

"Move."

Following his
sharp instructions
,
we turned the c
orner of the building, with me first.
By the time we reached the cars I
photographed earlier, I
started to shiver. One of two things was about to happen. I would enter the warehouse alive, though it wasn't a given I'd leave the same way. Or, I would be in a car trunk and my body dumped
somewhere where raccoons would eat my face
. Neither reassured me.

"Move." Prod. We walked past the cars. I didn't dare heave a sigh of relief. Instead, I concentrated on my surroundings. There was a burnt-out shell of a car, some
ramshackle
outbuildings,
their
rooftops long gone
, and rubbish spilling out of broken doors
. Nowhere to hide. If I ran, I'd have a bullet in my back.

"Inside." Prod, prod.

"Where?"

"The warehouse."

We approached the entrance and the man reached around me to open the door.
I didn’t want to go in there. I wanted to race back to Solomon’s car. Even if there wasn’t a weapon, I had the keys in my pocket. I could, theoretically—and it was a big theory—just drive the hell out of there until I got to a phone where I could call for backup. H
unch
ing, I
rammed my elbow back, putting all my power into the swing. I felt it connect with a squishy sto
mach, nothing like the hard six-
pack I expected.
Bonus!
The man grunted, but didn't go down.
Before I could right myself,
a fist swung at me and connected with my cheek, sending me slamming into the side of the building.
I rolled against the wall, and kicked out, my foot connecting with a knee. He yelped as he went down. I made to leap around him, but he caught me by the ankle, lifting it up behind me. My chin took a swan dive towards the dirt.
Before I could
lurch to my feet
, the muzzle of the gun pressed into my forehead
and a heavy weight settled over my back
. I blinked, seeing stars.

"Don't do that again," he growled.

From under my lashes, and through the throbbing pain
emanating from my chin and ankle
, I got a look at the man. Somper's friend.
The man I followed.
Again, there was
that same familiar feeling that I had earlier
, but before I could process what
it was
, he pushed me inside the
open door of the
warehouse. I stumbled forward, but didn't fall
, my hands flailing in the air for balance
.
Focus
, I told myself because that could be the difference between life and death for me.

"That way."
The dark-haired man
pushed me on and we walked in the direc
tion of the window I'd been peering through.

As far as silver linings went inside the gloomy abandoned space, t
his way, I hoped, was Roxanne Connor, frightened, but in a few steps, not alone.

"I knew you were trouble," the man told me to the beat of our footsteps, "the moment you popped up in Home and Tool."

I didn't answer.

"That husband of yours is no gym instructor," he went on. "I don't know who the hell you are, but you aren't leaving. Open the door."

I grabbed the mental handle, easing it open. It gave a low whine that echoed through the cavernous space.

"Inside."

I stepped in. Sitting hunched on the floor was
Roxanne Connor, her arms behind her back. Her face was streaked with tears
and grime
and she shivered uncontrollably. She strained
against the post as we entered, her shoulders pulling backwards.
She was handcuffed.

"Sit." A sharp push had me sprawling on my hands and knees on the dirty floor. I winced
at
the contact
with my grazed hands
, waiting for the bullet
with my eyes squeezed closed
. It didn't come
. Instead, only a sudden rush of stale air overtook me as the door opened.
I shuffled into a sitting position, sliding closer to Roxanne
, with a backwards glance to check if we were alone
.
We weren’t.

"Stay here," he said, grinning like he'd just made a funny. "Not like you have any choice."

"What a charmer," I said to Roxanne when he closed the door, his footsteps beating a retreat. I looked around. At some point, this room must have been an office, but now appeared to have been unoccupied for a long time. A desk and chairs remained, along with a couple of flimsy bookcases. The windows, disappointingly, were nailed shut. I could see the
iron
heads bent over as if they'd been shoddily knocked into place quickly. "Hi," I said as Roxanne continued to stare at me. "
You must be Roxanne.
I'm Lexi. I'm here to rescue you."

"Awesome," said Roxanne. "You had me fooled completely. I thought you'd just been captured."

The corners of my mouth pulled down. "A kink in the plan."

She narrowed her eyes, appraising me. "I recognize you," she said. "You work at Fort Charles."

"Sort of," I admitted. Now was probably a good time to get honest.
"I was hired to look into your sister's murder."

"Nathaniel didn't do it," she said, immediately.
“He didn’t kill Jillian.”

"You're not the only one who thinks that," I told her. "Not that Tate's helping himself."

"He's just protecting me," she said, sniffing. She leaned forward and rubbed her eyes against the knees of her jeans
, not quite succeeding in moving the stray hair stuck to her cheeks
. "They said they'd kill me too if he told them what really happened." She fell silent.
Though her cheeks were streaked, her eyes were dry, like she was all cried out.

"Does Tate know who killed your sister?" I asked softly, keeping one eye on the door.

Roxanne nodded. "Yes. So do I."

"Why didn't you come forward?"

"Did you see what they did to my sister?" I nodded. "I was scared," she added. "I thought if I got them what they wanted, they'd leave us alone, but they're not going to, are they?
Not with the shipment coming in.
"

I thought about it.
With Tate in the hospital under
guard, and still not talking, and Roxanne prisoner, I couldn't see how they would ever risk letting the two of them go. If the block of drugs in Roxanne's room was just a taster, there was a lot of money at stake. Too much cash to let us get in the way.
There would be another attempt on Tate, I was sure. As for Roxanne and me… things definitely weren’t looking good.
"No," I
decided
. "I don't think so."

"Is Nathaniel okay?"

"He's in hospital. He was stabbed this morning."

"Ohmigod." Fresh tears slid down her face.

"Hey, hey," I said, patting her shoulder. "You've got to stay calm. We're going to get out of this, I swear."

"How? Are you armed?"

"Um..." The gun I hoped Fletcher had replaced in Solomon's car was still a promising thought, if it was there at all.
Though, now that I’d just been found, I could hardly count on the great lump of a Lexus remaining concealed for long.

"Jesus!
"

"On our own there, too." I crept over to the door, raising myself just enough to see through the window.
With a grimace, I stuck two fingers into my mouth, wetted them and rubbed a circle clean in the grime, enough to press one germ-phobic eye.
A few meters away stood two men, my captor and someone else, his face hidden in the shadow. Nevertheless, I recognized the stance, even if the man wore dark clothing instead of Army issue. I crawled back to Roxanne. "You need to tell me what's going on. Who is
Tate, uh,
Nathaniel
,
protecting?"

Her shoulders slumped. "Me.
Nathaniel is
my boyfriend. I met him one night when he came to pick up Jillian.
I know what everyone’s saying but t
hey were never more than friends. It started off as a date, but there wasn't that spark for either of them, however, there was for Nathaniel and me. Right from the moment I met him."

"And he and Jillian stayed friends? That's why she called him that day?"
I didn’t need to spell out which day I meant. The way Roxanne nodded told me she knew.

"She was afraid of something, but she wouldn't tell me
the whole story
.
Only that she was in trouble and they would make it look she was a part of it. They put thousands of dollars into her account so it looked like she was in on it and she didn’t know who to turn to.
I said Nate would know what to do, that she should call him. So, she did. But he got there too late." Roxanne started sniffing again, but this time she gulped back the sobs. "He tried to help her, but she was already dead. He called me in a panic. He said they would think it was him.
Later, t
hey said that's what they'd tell th
e military police. They said
he had to shut up, let them finish the job,
or they'd kill me too. He didn't know what to do. Next thing I heard was he'd been arrested."

"And you've been helping them?"

"I didn't have a choice. They promised if I helped them, all this would be over and Tate would get out of jail."

"So Tate kept quiet to protect you and you helped them to protect him?"

Roxanne
nodded. "Look where that got us!
I was just so scared. Jillian's dead and I keep thinking, what if I had done something different? What if I had gone to the police and told them
…?
But they'd just think I was lying to get my boyfriend out of jail. They'd think we were having an affair and he killed her!
They could twist it any which way they liked.
"

"You can't know what would have happened," I told her.

"I should have done something." She sniffed loudly.

"Hey, calm down, okay? This isn't your fault." More importantly, we needed to move past the
‘
should have.
’
"This is all about drugs, right?
Are they trafficking?
"

Roxanne blinked. "Yeah. How did you know?"

I told her about the drugs I found in her room and the money.

"When they made Jillian
help get the first shipment passed through, she thought she could go to the police. She took
a little bit of the heroin and money as evidence, and when Captain McAuley came to say she'd been murdered, I went to get it from her place.
She’d told me about it one night.
Jillian wasn't a drug smuggler, I swear. She hated that they made her do it. She didn't even know at first that it was drugs
they were smuggling. She thought it might have been currency, or that they’d been looting,
but when she confronted them, they said they'd kill me and Mom and Dad too, and if they got sent to pris
on, so would my parents
."

"Why?"

"My father is
the maintenance manager here. They'd say he was in on it. This is where they store the drugs
, see?
It's so out of the way, no one ever comes here. My dad broke his leg four months ago and can't get around much, so Jillian used to drive out here and check the place over, so my dad wouldn't lose his paycheck." Roxanne gave a worried glance at the door. "She must have mentioned it to
him
."