Hard Landing (38 page)

Casting her a distracted glance, he helped himself to his own tumbler and tossed the whisky down in one swallow. "Oh, those HomeWatch people were out the other day, supposedly fixing the system when it was working just fine. Now I can't get the damned thing to turn on." Tugging his phone out of his back pocket, he accessed the HomeWatch application, all the while shaking his head in puzzled exacerbation.

Rebecca's blood abruptly thinned. The realization that Maya and her crew could neither see nor hear her ripped the mantle of self-imposed calm right off her shoulders. She was alone with the monster who'd tried to murder Bronco, a man who'd kept her under his cruel thumb for three tortuous years, who would certainly turn violent if she suddenly decided to leave.

"Well," he declared, oblivious to her sudden distress and putting his phone away. "I just sent them an emergency repair request, but you know how those things go. I'll be lucky if they come out before noon tomorrow."

All she could do was stare at him, the breath in her lungs petrified, completely mute.

Max took a step in her direction, and she couldn't stop herself from retreating.

He eyed her suspiciously. "What the hell's your problem?"

"This just... isn't a good time for your security system to break down." Her thin voice was scarcely audible. If she told him she needed to leave, he would first accuse her of overreacting, then suspect her motives for coming in the first place.

Max sent her an insolent smile. "Don't trust me to protect you?" he mocked. Snatching the tumbler from her hand he turned to the whisky bottle to refill it. "Here, drink some liquid courage," he invited, handing it back to her. "And have a little more faith in me," he added. His eyes glinted with dark promise.

With a stab of regret, she realized Bronco was right. Max was planning to get her into his bed tonight.
Never.
She would rather die than endure his insufferable touch ever again. She needed to leave—now. And yet, putting an abrupt end to their plans would certainly infuriate him, not to mention spark his suspicions. She needed to extricate herself carefully. Recalling Maya's contingency plan, she laid her glass on the table.

"The food smells delicious." She pretended to savor the aroma. "I'd like to use the restroom first, if you don't mind," she said airily.

The roll of his eyes communicated that he did mind; however, he waved her toward the front of the house, where the guest bath was situated at the head of the hallway. Purse tucked under her arm, Rebecca hurried toward it, conscious of Max's observant gaze as he watched her retreat.

She had just stepped into the L-shaped hallway and was reaching for the bathroom door when a soft sound drew her gaze down the dark, angled corridor. To her horror, a figure turned the corner, coming into the light. His aspect was so familiar and so unexpected that her throat closed up, keeping her startled scream locked inside.

Tony Scarpa, followed immediately by two of his goons, neither of whom wore hoods over their heads tonight, bore down on her. Each carried a wicked-looking gun and wore a grin of delight. Rebecca froze in shock.

"Well, look who we got here," Tony murmured, seizing her arm in a brutal grip. The point of his pistol jabbed her ribs as he jerked her closer. "Not a sound," he warned, thrusting her into the arms of his similarly stocky but bearded sidekick who covered her mouth with a beefy hand. "Don't shoot her yet," he added. "We'll make it look like the husband did."

Fear coiled around Rebecca's body, squeezing her like an anaconda. Thinking she could outwit Max, the king of cunning, in the first place was naïve. Now she'd put herself squarely into Max's embroilment with the mob. Maya couldn't see inside to know how dire her situation had suddenly become. And even if Bronco, who had promised to watch over her,
could
see inside, how could he possibly prevent the bloodbath that she could sense was about to take place?

* * *

"
What
is going on in there?"

Maya paced the narrow space between the walls of computers and monitors, waiting for anyone of them to blink on with an inside view into Commander McDougal's house. They'd waited ten minutes and nothing had happened yet. The worry that she had sent Rebecca like a lamb into a wolf's den kept her from drawing a deep breath.

Doug Castle conferred with his agents via radio. "Hobbs, Meyer, we need eyes on our witness,
right now
. Cut the wire on the floodlight on the southwest side of the house so you can move in closer. I want a situational report in one minute."

A sudden idea freed Maya's stymied thoughts. Snatching her phone from the nearest console, she accessed Brant Adam's number. "Come on, I know you're here," she muttered as it started ringing.

"Adams." The terse syllable uttered in a low growl evoked an image of him sprawled on his stomach on some raised platform peering through the scope of a rifle into Max's house.

"I need to know what you're seeing. The security system isn't working. What's going on in there?" she demanded.

"Well," he drawled. "They talked a little. Poured drinks. Looks like they're about to eat, but Rebecca just headed toward the front of the house. I've lost sight of her. Max is dishing out their dinner."

"Maybe she's about to text me. I told her to slip away and text me if she needed to get out. Something must be wrong with the security system. She was going to make him turn it on, but it wasn't armed earlier. What if it's broken? I should never have let her go in there."

"Well, I agree with that statement. Oh,
shit!
"

The expletive dropped on her head like a missile from a stealth bomber. "What happened?" she dared ask.

"Scarpa scum. Three of them, at least. Fuck, they were in the house all this time! Must have been hiding in the back bedrooms." Disbelief laced the syllables rolling off his tongue. "Fuck!" he repeated.

She could tell that his training alone kept his thoughts from shutting down completely.

"Describe what you see," she begged.

"They're all in the family room at the back of the house. I recognize Tony from her drawing—he's armed. One of his men is holding onto Rebecca—he's armed. So is the third man. Looks like they caught Max by surprise. He's got his hands in the air. They're talking."

Maya clung to the console to keep herself together. "Stay on the phone with me, Brant."

"I'll put you on speaker. I need two hands."

"Wait, don't shoot anyone yet."

Doug Castle had heard enough to catch the gist of what was going on. "Hobbs, Meyer, we have a hostage situation in the house with three additional hostiles inside," he said into his radio. "Try to get eyes on them, but don't be seen."

"They're all in the back of the house, the family room," Maya relayed.

He repeated the information to his men then turned to one of the techs. "Ringo, you come with me. Maya, stay here with Blake. Blake, call SWAT. I want them here ASAP."

She
had been the one in charge until the Scarpas made an appearance. Frustrated, Maya watched the RV door close quietly as Castle and Ringo slipped out to help Hobbs and Meyer. Listening to the agent named Blake relay the situation to FBI SWAT, she wondered how her plan to implicate Max McDougal could have gone so terribly off track.

* * *

"Well, hello, Max," Tony purred, grinning at the look of stunned dismay that Max wasn't able to conceal.

Having heard voices, he had rushed toward the front hall to investigate, only to realize that he'd underestimated the Scarpas.

"What a nice surprise," the mobster added, advancing cautiously into the great room, his pistol trained on Max's heart. "We came here to chat with you, and who should we run into but your two-faced wife?" His dark eyes trekked to the kitchen where Max had just laid out the food on porcelain plates. "Oh, I'm so sorry." He affected remorse. "Did we interrupt your romantic dinner together?"

"What do you want?" Max demanded. "You said you were cutting ties."

Thanks to his training, he was able to keep calm, to catalogue as many details as possible, including how many weapons they had and the ashen hue of Rebecca's face. Caught in the arms of a bearded man whose resemblance to Tony suggested blood kinship, she knew full well the Scarpas weren't going to let her go this time. And, until he got a weapon in his own hands, Max didn't stand much chance of stopping them.

Tony swaggered close enough to lean a hip against the leather love seat across from where Max stood. "You think we'd leave without getting our deposit back? You let us down, Max. We want our money."

"Of course you do." Max hid a smile. Without meaning to, Tony had just evened the playing field. "Let me get onto my PC, and I'll transfer it back to you. All I need is your account information." He started edging toward his study.

Tony tsked his tongue and waved him toward the couch. "Sit," he ordered, gesturing with the point of his semiautomatic.

Max sank reluctantly on the edge of his Italian leather sofa.

"You won't find what you're looking for in there." Smirking, Tony produced a second semiautomatic from behind his back and waved it at Max tauntingly. "I already have your Glock."

At Max's smoldering stare, Tony chuckled, reveling in his cleverness. He tucked the Glock out of sight again.

"I'll give you back your deposit, plus another ten thousand if you let her leave now," Max promised.

"Oh." Tony clapped his free hand over his heart, as if moved by the gesture. "Did you hear that, boys? He'll pay us ten thousand dollars to spare his wife's life. Hard to believe he would be so generous considering his wife has Feds watching her back." He cut a scathing look over at Rebecca, still in the clutches of the dark-haired goon. "She reported you to the authorities, Max. Can't you see the truth? Or are you too besotted with your bride to realize what a backstabbing bitch she really is?"

The words expanded Max's thoughts. Cutting his gaze to Rebecca's stricken face, he considered whether Tony might be right. What if she'd duped him into thinking she was open to reconciliation when, in fact, she was after information that would help the Feds?

"She's neither mean enough nor smart enough to play me like that," he insisted.

"Oh, yeah? Well, we'll see, Max. We'll see. Nick, go get that laptop off his desk and bring it to him. Easy in the handoff. Remember, he's a Navy SEAL. No funny business, Max, or I'll shoot you in the foot. Ever been shot in the foot before? It hurts like a sonofabitch, but the thing is, you can still use your brain and your fingers."

The chilling threat made Max wonder if they were going to kill him after getting their money back. He'd thought he could play with the big boys of the underworld and come out on top. He'd always won at everything before—when his task unit took on various scumbags all over the world. But terrorists and drug lords had nothing on these soulless bastards.

As Nick extended the laptop to him cautiously, Max glanced up and did a double take. "You," he accused, as the reality of the situation dawned on him. He knew immediately why his security system wasn't working.

"So, you remember me." The blond man grinned. "Thanks for letting me steal your HomeWatch password." He shrugged unapologetically. "You really shouldn't be so trusting."

Relief mingled with fury. At least it wasn't Doug Castle who'd ordered HomeWatch to scrutinize his security system. At the same time, he longed to punch the smirk off Nick's pug-nosed face. The unexpected appearance of a luminous red dot on the man's forehead prompted a surge of adrenaline as it drew his gaze up briefly. He forced himself to look down at the laptop.

Holy shit!
Someone—friend or foe?—was holed up in his back yard, probably over by the gazebo, aiming a rifle with a high-powered infrared scope into Max's great room.

He glanced over at Tony to see if the mobster had noticed, but Tony's gaze was fixed on the laptop Max now held in his hands.

"Come on, Max," Tony urged on a tense note. "We don't got all night. You need me to shoot your wife in the foot to make you work faster?" He aimed his pistol at Rebecca's left foot.

She cringed, visibly expecting to be maimed.

"I'm working on it!" Max raged. With stiff, uncoordinated fingers, he finished logging in to the online banking page for Emile Victor DuPonte. His browser speed was better than ever now that the laptop was fixed. If only his mind could work so quickly at identifying the shooter out back. Maybe Tony had set up his own sniper in case Max managed to turn the tables and get the upper hand.

The alternative made his heart stop.

Or maybe Tony was right, and the Feds were out there watching everything that was happening. Maybe they hadn't bugged his security system, but if Rebecca was the backstabber Tony insisted she was, then the laptop he was using right then might be loaded with spyware that allowed them to track his online activity.

If that was the case, he'd just revealed the contents of his offshore banking account.

"I'm in," he stated, lifting his gaze up at Tony and finding the infrared dot now fixed on the mobster's right shoulder. "Where do I send the money?" he asked, swallowing hard.

Tony never got the chance to answer. The glass window behind Max exploded into a million shards, and Tony flew backward, landing with a thud on the carpet, dropping his pistol and reaching for his bloody shoulder with his other hand.