Читать книгу Deadly Temptation - Justine Davis - Страница 8

Chapter 3

Logan swore under his breath at his own stupidity. Then he sensed rather than saw a movement to his right, and crouched and spun in the same motion.

The man who was standing there, giving him a rather rueful smile, held both hands up in front of his chest, indicating he had no weapon.

“Detective Beck, I underestimated you,” the man said. “Sorry.”

Logan studied the man assessingly. Just slightly shorter than his own six feet, Logan estimated. And despite the total lack of accent, he was still guessing Hispanic from the dark eyes and golden-brown skin tones.

“Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Tony Alvera.”

He’d wanted considerably more than just a name, but he sensed the man knew that.

“IA recruiting from outside now?” he asked.

“I’m not a cop.”

Logan frowned. “Marcos hiring a higher class of thug now?”

The man laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment. But no, I don’t work for him, either.”

So he was working for somebody, Logan thought.

“And,” the man went on in a tone that matched the first ruefulness of his expression, “if the man I do work for ever finds out how easily you burned me, I may not be working for him much longer, either.”

“Who,” Logan said carefully, “is your boss?”

“Name’s Draven. John Draven.”

Logan frowned at the unfamiliar name.

“Yeah, not many on the outside have heard of him. He likes it that way.”

“Outside of what? Or where?”

“You might have heard of his boss, though,” Alvera said. “Most people have.”

“Look I don’t have time for games. Who the hell sent you to tail me?”

“Joshua Redstone.”

Logan Beck was not often astonished, but he was now. He knew he was gaping at Alvera, but he was stunned.

“Joshua Redstone?” He said the famous name incredulously. “The gazillionaire of Redstone Aviation?”

“The same,” Alvera confirmed. “And Redstone Resorts, Redstone Technologies and Development, and a few other assorted divisions of the empire.”

“Why? What have I got to do with Redstone?”

“Nothing,” Alvera admitted. “It’s more the other way around.”

Completely baffled now, Logan shook his head as if that would somehow make this all make sense.

“What,” he said slowly, carefully, “are you talking about?”

“I’m Redstone Security.”

Logan straightened up sharply. Usually, to the police, the mention of private security resulted in either visions of retired cops who were more often than not well past their prime or who had left the job ignominiously, or wannabes who couldn’t cut it as real cops. Neither engendered much respect.

But Redstone Security was a different story. Anybody who ever dealt with them, be it local law enforcement, the feds, military, or any other agency, universally came away respecting the efficiency and capabilities of the team Josh Redstone had built. Their reputation preceded them in most quarters, and they were, in fact, the envy of many for their freedom to do what needed to be done without jumping through the myriad hoops traditional authorities had to deal with.

But they weren’t glory hounds, either, Logan knew. More than once they’d succeeded where police had failed but they never made an issue of it. When they came across criminal activity in the course of one of their own operations, they handed what they had over to the cops and let them take the credit while they went about the business of protecting Redstone. In that, they’d earned the respect and admiration of law enforcement wherever Redstone operated, an area that covered a large portion of the globe.

And they should have nothing to do with this, he thought, even more suspicious now.

“You have some proof of that?” he asked.

The man nodded. Again he held up his right hand, palm forward, as indication of no malicious intent.

“ID,” he explained as he reached back with his left hand and pulled a canvas wallet out of his back pocket. He flipped it open and handed it over.

Logan studied the displayed ID card. It looked legitimate, with the gray and red Redstone colors and the stylized graphic of the prototype Hawk I jet in the upper left corner. The name on the card read “Tony Alvera,” as he’d said, but there was no indication of a job title or position, just the name and the Redstone address and contact numbers.

“So if I call Redstone personnel, they’ll cheerfully confirm you work there?”

“No.” His gaze shot back to the man’s face. Alvera shrugged. “Security keeps a low profile. Our work is often in-house, so we work out of a different location, and our files are kept separately.”

“So I should just believe you?”

“Your choice.”

He studied the man for a moment. The dark eyes held his gaze levelly, no dodging, no skittishness, just a calm, open response to his suspicions. After the men he’d been dealing with lately, it was a pleasant change. And also told him it was unlikely this man was one of them.

“What,” Logan said carefully, slowly, “does Redstone Security have to do with me?”

“Not us per se,” Alvera said. “The order came from the top, Josh himself.”

“I’ve never even met him,” Logan said. Meeting one of the five richest men in the world wasn’t something he was likely to have forgotten.

“But one of Redstone’s people has met you. And asked us to…look into your situation.”

Logan frowned. “I don’t know anyone at Redstone.”

“You do now. Liana Kiley.”

Logan blinked; of all the names he might ever have expected, that hadn’t been one of them. “What?”

“You do know her, right?”

An image instantly formed in his mind, as if it had been yesterday instead of years ago, of the blue-eyed redhead with a faint tracing of freckles across her nose. A sweet, pretty, girl-next-door type who’d been caught up in an ugly situation, she’d been justifiably terrified, and yet had managed to keep her cool enough to help him end it.

Liana?

He’d never forgotten her. How could he, after what had happened? Not only had they shared that adrenaline-pumping experience, but she had also, amazingly, spent hours with him during those long, pain-filled days in the hospital. His memories of that time were a little hazy, and consisted mainly of hospital personnel subjecting him to various indignities, doctors looking suitably grim, a parade of cops looking even more grim, the knowledge he was likely going to die…and Liana.

Oh, yes, he’d thought of her often. In fact, more than ever since he’d been undercover on this assignment. More than once he’d barely stopped himself from tracking her down, just to see how she was doing. There had been such an innocence about her, something he hadn’t seen much of since he’d gone under. He supposed that was the reason she’d been on his mind so much.

“Back then, she was working for JetCal,” he said slowly.

“She quit. After they got caught funding industrial spying. On Redstone.”

He drew back slightly. “And now she works for Redstone?”

The man nodded. “As of a couple of days ago, yes.”

In spite of himself Logan’s mouth quirked into a wry smile. “Now that sounds like her.”

An echoing smile flitted across Alvera’s face. “I’ve only met her once so far, but I’d have to agree.”

That “so far” irked him, and Logan tensed before he realized it. Then he wondered what the hell that was about. He had no reason to feel territorial about a woman he hadn’t seen in eight years, since the day one month after he’d finally gotten out of the hospital, when she’d presented the Medal of Valor to him at the request of the department. It was good PR, the citizen whose life he’d saved doing the honors, and the fact that she was impossibly cute and sweet only made it more so.

For all the good it’s doing me now, he thought, that medal might as well be a paperweight.

“What does she have to do with this?” It came out abruptly, but he felt like he had to say something. Fast.

“She thinks you’re innocent. In fact, she insists that you are.”

He blinked. “What?”

“She saw the news reports. They upset her. Josh doesn’t like his people upset.”

Something the man had said a moment ago finally registered. “Even someone who’s only been there a couple of days?”

“Family is family. If you’re Redstone, you’re Redstone,” the man said simply. “Josh asked what was wrong, she told him, and here I am.”

“To do what?”

Alvera shrugged. “Help, if I can.”

“And what the hell can you do? The department’s already all over this.”

“I can,” the man said quietly, “start with the presumption you didn’t do it, not by trying to prove that you did.”

The simple answer knocked the wind out of Logan as surely as a solid fist to the gut. That trust, that faith was what he should have been able to count on from the place he’d given twelve years of his heart, life and blood to. Yet when the time had come, they’d turned on him, so quickly he’d still been reeling in shock when some news photographer had grabbed the shot that had been splashed across the local rag.

“Why?” he asked, barely aware that his voice was hoarse. “Redstone’s got no stake in this.”

“We believe in our own. One of them believes in you. It’s not tricky, really.”

Logan shook his head, as if that would help him make sense of all of this.

“I haven’t seen her in eight years,” he said, feeling a bit numb.

Alvera studied him for a moment. “Then perhaps you should,” he said finally. “You know where Redstone is?”

Logan’s mouth quirked. “Every cop in Southern California knows where Redstone is. Josh Redstone does more to support his local police than anybody in the state.”

Alvera grinned. “That he does. In more ways than you even know. I’ll meet you there, at the front entrance.”

The man got back in his car, assuming, Logan noted, that he would follow. And rightfully so, he added to himself somewhat ruefully. Because with barely a few seconds’ thought, he walked back to the parked BMW and did just that.

Hearing the sound of someone approaching her office, Liana expected it was Lilith. She’d sent her boss an e-mail asking for some printed reports she needed to take her computer searching to the next level, and it would be very like Lilith—and everyone at Redstone, she was discovering—to hand-carry them herself rather than delegating a gofer to do it. In fact, Liana wasn’t sure Redstone even had gofers; people were expected to follow through on all phases of their work, and they did it, happily.

When it registered that there were two sets of footsteps, and that neither sounded like Lilith’s light-footed stride, she looked up.

She hadn’t expected to see Tony Alvera again this soon. The Redstone Security agent had come by to introduce himself just hours after she’d had her meeting with Samantha Gamble. He’d explained with a charming grin that it hadn’t been a great leap for Security head John Draven to decide that he’d fit into the world Logan Beck had been frequenting better than the blond, blue-eyed Sam would.

There had been something about that grin and the warmth in his dark eyes that had overcome her natural reticence with strangers and allowed her to tease him back.

“I don’t know,” she’d said, studying his golden skin and the small, rakish patch of beard beneath his lower lip. “You’re a little clean-cut, aren’t you?”

He’d laughed, and she wondered how many women fell at his feet anytime he did.

“I wasn’t always,” he’d told her. “And I’ve got scars to prove it. Josh plucked me off the street when I was a sixteen-year-old gangster, headed for nothing but prison, a lethal injection, or dying in the gutter. The day I tried to rip him off was the best day of my life.”

Liana remembered her amazement at his story, that he indeed had tried to rob at knifepoint one of the richest men in the world, and that man had, instead of surrendering, offered him the chance of a lifetime.

“I don’t know what he saw in me,” Alvera had said, his tone becoming solemn, “but he saved my life.”

Now, as Alvera stood in her office doorway with a smile on his exotically handsome face, Liana wondered how many others at Redstone felt the same way.

“I brought somebody to see you,” Alvera said. “He’s a little confused, I think.”

He stepped aside then. Although she’d already guessed, Liana’s breath still caught in her throat when she saw the man behind him.

Slowly, she got to her feet.

He looks so different, she thought, the change in him even more apparent in person than it had been in the photograph, his once-vivid blue eyes seeming not just shadowed but haunted.

“Logan.” She was barely aware of saying it until she heard it herself, just above a whisper.

Alvera said something about leaving them to it and left. Neither of them watched him go.

Logan Beck took three steps toward her, stopping in front of her desk. He stared at her, and she found it oddly difficult to breathe. It seemed forever before he at last spoke. And when he did, his voice was harsh and matched that haunted look in his eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“All of a sudden I’ve got Redstone Security on my tail. Alvera said you put them up to it. Why?”

“I’m trying to help,” she said.

He gave a low, humorless chuckle. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t waste your time.”

Liana studied him for a long, silent moment. Had he truly given up? Or was he just still in shock over what had happened to him, and hadn’t yet begun to fight back? She had to believe the latter; the Logan Beck she’d met that day would never give up so easily.

“It’s my time to waste,” she said firmly.

He looked startled. She supposed he was; she’d changed a bit since that day in the bank.

“Liana,” he said, at last using the name she hadn’t been certain he even remembered, “there’s nothing you can do.”

“Maybe there’s nothing I can do myself. But Redstone is a different story.”

“I know their rep,” he acknowledged. “But there’s no reason for them to get involved.”

“Apparently I’m reason enough,” she said.

His eyes narrowed. “Alvera said you just started working here a couple of days ago.”

“Yes. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Not a great way to start a new career, dragging your new employer into a corruption investigation of a crooked cop.”

“You’re not a crooked cop.”

He drew back slightly, staring at her. “You sound awfully certain.”

“I am.”

“Liana—”

“I know you didn’t do it, Logan. You couldn’t.”

He made a low sound that was almost a groan. “Don’t, Liana. Don’t waste your time, don’t risk your new career.”

“Are you saying you don’t need any help? That you trust—what is it?—Internal Affairs? You trust them to clear you?”

He laughed, this time harshly. “Hardly.”

“Then let me help.”

She saw a muscle along his jaw jump, then set. “Don’t,” he said, his voice cold now. “Don’t even try.”

Liana stared at him. What had happened to the hero she remembered, the man who had shown a courage she’d only seen once before in her life? How had he ended up so beaten, so broken? She hoped his wife—what had his fiancée’s name been?—was keeping a close eye on him.

“It’s my decision,” she said.

He stared at her. She saw something flicker in his eyes for the first time, some tiny glimmer of light. Hope? she wondered.

For the first time since the startling realization that Redstone truly meant to help him, Liana was certain he needed that help.