Hot Pursuit (4 page)

“And they’re all people you trust?” Callahan asked. “People whose backgrounds you’ve cleared?”

“Yes,” Jenn told him, but then shook her head. “The interns, yes. But the volunteers … You can’t exactly grill someone who comes in to help stuff envelopes for a mailing.”

“But everyone who’s got a key has been checked?” he asked, as he glanced at his watch and frowned.

“I don’t think so,” Jenn admitted. “We were pretty free and easy during the campaign, handing out keys to just about anyone. It’s not as if there was anything in here to steal, so …”

“Lookit, I’m sorry, I gotta go. I’m already late to a meeting and …” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a business card, which she took. “This is my number. If there’s trouble call 9-1-1, but after that, make sure you also call me.” With a nod, he turned to the door.

“Detective Callahan,” Jenn said.

He turned back. “Mick,” he told her. “One of my many cousins is Michael, too. He’s older, so I got stuck with Mick.”

“Are you going to file a report?”

“Since there’s no real threat, best I can do is make a note about it,” he said, apologetic. “Beat cops’ll keep an eye out, but… It would be good if you punched up your own security.”

“Yeah,” Jenn said. “About that. Maria—the assemblywoman—she’ll definitely get an alarm system installed here, but… It’s her
own safety that she tends to be somewhat cavalier about. I wonder if you could … come back and … maybe … talk to her directly?”

He glanced at his watch again, but he didn’t sigh with disgust. “When’s she gonna be in?”

Maria had been nearly to Kingston when Jenn had called her. She looked at her own watch. “With traffic … ? Probably four thirty or five.”

“Keep her here till six,” Mick said, “and I’ll drop in after my shift.”

“No,” Jenn said. “You don’t have to do that—”

“Yeah,” he said, with another of those killer smiles. “I know.”

“Thanks,” she said, and despite the fact that her insides were melting—or quite possibly because of it—she found herself adding, “I’m also curious. I’m, um … What just happened here?”

Her heart was in her throat, because it was completely unlike her to be so flirtatious. She hadn’t gone out on a date, hadn’t so much as looked twice at a man in the four months since the tragedy with Scooter Randall.

Of course the detective didn’t understand what she was asking, so now she was forced to explain. “You weren’t very, um, friendly when you first got here and now you are. Friendly, I mean—and …” Jenn trailed off, unable to bring herself to say
I was wondering if you maybe wanted to get a drink later?

“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Sorry about the attitude before. I just… It’s been a bitch of a week and … I wasn’t expecting … But then you kinda crushed me like a bug, and … You reminded me so much of my sister, it just, um …”

His
sister
.

“Ah,” Jenn said. “Of course.”

“We’re twins and …”

“Twins.”

“She moved to England three years ago, and, well, I guess I haven’t had a good bug crush since.” He winked at her, the way he
might wink at a little kid or, yes, a sister. “I appreciate it, Jennilyn. I’ll see you later.”

And with that, he was gone.

She usually hated it when people used her full name—it was so feminine and flowery and it made her feel like a misnamed giant. And not a good giant like an Amazon warrior or Xena, but an ungainly one who wore sturdy shoes and support hose to keep her ankles from becoming even more sausage-like—even though her own ankles were actually quite nice.

But when Mick Callahan called her Jennilyn in his slightly husky voice, it had sounded like music.

Except he’d already gone and sistered her. He was not the first to do that—and he wouldn’t be the last. In fact, the only thing that she could predict more accurately than the fact that the attractive, friendly man she’d just met was going to tell her that she reminded him of his sister, was the fact that the attractive, friendly man whom she reminded of his sister always,
always
fell in love with her gorgeous best friend at first sight.

Always.

So even if Detective Steamy Hot
hadn’t
sistered her—twin-sistered her, which, okay,
was
a first—she’d be facing
that
impending heartbreak in just a few short hours.

As it currently stood, with her hopes already brotherishly dashed, she would feel no more than a pinch of regret when Mick took one look at Maria, fell to his knees, and broke into song.

It would sting, sure, but the disappointment wouldn’t last long.

And one of these days, she’d meet a guy who thought
of Maria
as a sister and he’d fall madly in love with Jenn.

He was out there—she believed it. Although, truth be told, he probably didn’t look
quite
like Detective Mick Callahan.

Which, frankly, was kind of a shame.

T
he man with the neck tattoo was reaching for a handgun.

It was a marvelous piece of artwork—the tattoo, not the gun—the swastika embellished and intertwined with curlicues and baroque swirls, to the point of being nearly completely disguised.

Although the handgun
was
beautiful, too. The theater’s lights glinted off of it as the gunman pulled back his shirt to reveal it tucked into the top of his ragged jeans. It was a museum-quality Nambu Taisho—long and skinny, a Japanese relic from WWII—that he’d no doubt lifted from some wealthy collector’s inadequately locked display case.

Alyssa Locke had already looked into this man’s hazy eyes, back before he’d jumped the flimsy metal fence that still contained most of the tourists, fans, and autograph-seekers. She’d picked him out of the crowd that came to cheer or jeer the stars as they walked the red carpet that led into this Hollywood movie premiere. She knew, just from one look, that he was jacked up on something that impaired his judgment.

And in those fractions of a second after he jumped the fence and reached for that pistol, as she sifted through her options and settled on the obvious—disarm him by force or someone was going to
get shot—she also knew, without a doubt, that using reason to talk him into surrendering that weapon wasn’t going to happen.

He wasn’t looking to get out alive. He wanted his fifteen minutes of fame, with his picture flashed, postmortem, on AOL and CNN, his name spoken by the news anchors in hushed tones as he gained notoriety as the man who killed movie star Robin Chadwick Cassidy.

And the killing-Robin part was probably a secondary goal, since he could have taken the shot from the crowd instead of making that theatrical leap over the ineffective waist-high fence.

No, Alyssa was certain that what this man wanted, most of all, was for his life to be over and done.

He’d targeted her as the weakest link in the Robin Cassidy security chain. True, she wasn’t built like her husband, former SEAL Sam Starrett, or their current team leader Ric Alvarado, or team member Jones, or even Annie, who was tall and voluptuous.

Alyssa wasn’t insulted that he’d singled her out—it happened often enough. Plus, it gave her additional insight into his reasoning abilities, or lack thereof. He was not any kind of trained operative, or else he would’ve instantly picked up her years both as a Naval officer and as an agent with the FBI in her movement and stance.

Instead, he’d chosen to trespass into her quadrant, flinching but not retreating when she’d first hit him with the full power and volume of her “I am in charge here” voice.

“Stay behind the barricade. Sir! I said
Stay. Behind. The barricade!”
As Alyssa got even louder, she’d felt the swift movement behind her.

She hadn’t had to look to know what the rest of her team was doing. They’d surrounded Robin, providing a very literal human shield as they hustled him into the safety of the theater.

Sam, she knew, would dump and run—straight back to her, to provide assistance. But she also knew that this was going to be over before it started.

Until, of course, the man pulled back his shirt to reveal that weapon.

Which was when time slowed way down, seconds stretching endlessly out, as she opened her mouth, and, as if possessed, words tumbled out.

“I have a baby,” she heard herself tell him. The mother in her was as much of an infant as her son Ashton was, yet it somehow effortlessly overcame the tough-as-nails operative and even the jaded little girl she’d once been—both of whom knew that any attempts at communication with this man were useless.

It was strange to realize how swiftly her life had changed; how differently she felt inside of her more matronly body, inside of her often noisy and crowded head, simply because this miniature person who was part her and part Sam and fully his own incredible self had entered her world. At times she still felt as astonished as Ash had been months ago when he’d first flailed and spotted one of his own tiny fists, staring at it like some UFO overhead, in gleeful, wide-eyed wonder.

“He’s ten months old,” she told the gunman, too, because beneath the swastika tattoo, despite the drug-rotted teeth, he was a person who’d once been as small as Ash. He’d once been held in his own mother’s loving arms, where she’d kissed the top of his downy, sweet-smelling head.

And despite her years of hard-earned knowledge which told her that, by pulling that weapon, he’d lost his identity and had, in fact, become
the target
, the part of her who was now Ash’s mother had to try to reach out to him.

But he wouldn’t hear her, or he couldn’t, or he heard her and he didn’t care, so she drew her own weapon—faster and in better control because her brain wasn’t stuttering from alcohol and God knows what else.

Her brain was, however, fatigued from too many midnight feedings,
from the strain of restricting her own diet in a hit-or-miss attempt to ease her baby’s relentless gas and give them all a chance to sleep through the night. Her brain was fuzzy from the off-the-charts splatter of her still seesawing hormone levels, from Sam’s wary confusion when she—usually more stoic than his teammates from his Navy SEAL days—simply couldn’t
not
cry.

Because even the joy was exhaustingly overwhelming. Watching Sam with Ash—holding their baby in his big arms, singing to their son as he adeptly changed his diapers, or even asleep on the couch with Ash on his chest—the TV light from a muted football game flickering across them both …

This current Troubleshooters assignment was supposed to be an easy one. It was a favor, really—providing additional bodyguard assistance to the team safeguarding actor Robin Cassidy’s appearance at a movie premiere while his husband, her very good friend Jules, was stuck back East.

It seemed provident: a simple assignment for her and Sam’s first full night—ever—with both of them working and away from Ash.

Taking down an assailant who was armed with a Nambu pistol on the sidewalk in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre was the last thing she’d expected to be doing tonight.

And her finger was already tightening on her trigger before the trivial-seeming fact that this was a Nambu flashed through her head again, along with the thought that getting bullets for that thing would had to have been a bitch and a half.

Did they even make them anymore?

The collector he’d stolen the weapon from might’ve had some.

But what brain-shredded druggie, having broken into some rich guy’s house, would know that the pretty, shiny handgun that he’d grabbed from the display case before he fled would need bullets that you couldn’t possibly score at the nearest Wal-Mart? Bullets that you might actually need to time travel back to the 1940s to buy?

Odds were that this Nambu had no rounds in its chamber, that
it was just a prop—and that this ornate man’s true motive here was suicide by celebrity bodyguard.

And regardless of who she was—mother or wife or second in command of Troubleshooters Incorporated,
the
top personal security firm in the United States of America—Alyssa knew that taking this bozo down with no shots fired might not be quicker, but it would be cleaner, on so many levels.

So she launched herself at him. Goal one: get that weapon out of his hands, in case she was wrong about the bullets thing. A well-aimed kick did just that, spinning him away from her, his hand outstretched as he started to scramble after the pistol.

She was still moving and she used her momentum to block his path, her own force pushing her almost past him, so she spun again as he now grabbed for her, clutching at the front of her shirt. But she brought her right elbow up and back, putting all of her strength into a blow that connected squarely with the side of his head.

He lost his grip on her and went down, and, as she continued the turn, she saw Sam, heading back toward her, not even slowing as he bent and scooped up the Nambu, as he raced to her aid.

But she was still spinning from that elbow blast and she used the full force of the muscles in her left leg—a leg that had helped carry a very healthy nine-pound baby to term—and she kayoed the attacker with a solid kick to the chin.

He was down, he was done, but her training had been instilled in her—it wasn’t over until the perp was cuffed and searched for additional weapons.

So Alyssa put the safety back on her sidearm and holstered it even as she pushed the man flat, her knee hard in the middle of his back, his cheek against Ginger Rogers’ ridiculously tiny handprints, as she reached into her back pocket for one of the plastic restraints that Troubleshooters Incorporated operatives carried on every bodyguard assignment. She cuffed him quickly, easily, before Sam reached her side.

He was pissed—at her as well as at the gunman. Alyssa could read his familiar body language even out of the corner of her eye. And the crowd that had been stunned into both stillness and silence—it had all happened so fast, she was certain that most of the people hadn’t even seen the assailant’s gun—suddenly seemed to exhale, in unison.