Читать книгу Backstreet Hero - Justine Davis - Страница 11

Tony tapped a finger restlessly on the steering wheel of his car. As he had been since they’d left Redstone ten minutes ago. “This is a mistake.”

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t need to do this. If you’d just tell me—”

“You said you wanted to rattle him. Make him mad.” She gave him a wry grimace of a smile. “I can do that better than anyone.”

“How can you want to see him?” Tony asked, barely masking his incredulity.

“Believe me, I don’t. I have no desire to ever lay eyes on that man again. But I swore I would never cower from him again, either.”

He admired her fortitude, but said, “It’s not cowering.”

“It is if there’s anything to Josh’s suspicions, and he’s really behind this. If,” she added, “there really is a ‘this.’”

He didn’t tell her that, while he’d been doubtful at first, the moment he’d learned about her ex he’d become as convinced as Josh that there was more to this than just a couple of accidents.

Or perhaps he simply wasn’t willing to risk her life on the assumption they’d been mere coincidence.

“I’ll handle this,” he said firmly. “It’s my job, remember?”

“And it’s my problem.”

He tried another approach. “Would you let me interfere with your work?”

“If it was your area of expertise, yes.”

“Exactly.” He thought she had just proved his point, but she’d said it too quickly and easily; Lilith Mercer was no fool, and her steely determination was well-known around Redstone.

She proved his unease well-founded with her next words. “And Daniel Huntington is my area of expertise, not yours. If you want to push his buttons, I’m the one who knows what they are.”

And just that easily, she had him. And he was going to be stuck in a car with her on the drive that would likely take nearly an hour.

The Redstone name carried a lot of weight in most places, and between Josh himself, John Draven and Josh’s mysterious right-hand man, St. John, Tony guessed there weren’t many places where one of them didn’t know someone. In any case, one phone call had netted them permission to see the prisoner Daniel Huntington as long as they got there within the next two hours. Tony guessed whoever the contact was, he got off duty then.

“You’ll need to change,” he told her.

She drew back slightly. “What?”

“Your jeans. You can’t wear them to visit. Too close to prison blues.”

She stared at him, clearly wondering how he knew that, and for some reason he didn’t even try to understand he felt compelled to go on, as if in some perverse way he wanted her to be even more aware of the differences between them.

“You can’t wear some shades of green, either, because it’s too close to the guard uniforms.”

“I…see.”

“It’s my world, Lilith.” It hit him then, what he’d been trying to do, to make her keep the distance between them, because he wasn’t sure he could. He didn’t want to keep doing it, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “I know a lot of people in Chino. Gangsters I ran with. Gangsters I ran against. A couple of them are there because they killed my little sister in a drive-by.”

She looked at him just long enough to remove her next words from the category of automatic platitude. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, wishing he’d never started this. He hurried her along then, knowing it was going to eat up some of their two-hour window for her to stop and change clothes. But it would give him a chance to look at the scene of this morning’s incident, something he wanted to do as soon as possible anyway.

He was surprised when she directed him to a condominium building that looked as if it had once been apartments. It was well kept, and nicely landscaped, but definitely older than the high-rise style buildings that were popping up in the area.

“Twice the space for half the money,” she explained, as if she’d read his mind.

So despite her background, she had a practical streak, Tony thought as they started up the stairs to her front door.

“Who cut the wire?” he asked, gesturing to where the ends of the thin silver line were still wrapped around both newel posts of the stairway. He pushed out of his mind the thought of what a miracle it was that she hadn’t taken that full tumble, and focused on the evidence left behind.

“I did. My neighbor is seventy-five years old. A fall like that could seriously injure, even kill her.”

And a tumble down that flight of concrete stairs could have killed you, he thought.

He crouched to look more closely at the posts as she went inside to change. She was right. A fall like that would have been devastating for her older neighbor.

As if his thoughts had conjured her up, a woman who had to be Mrs. Tilly appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and he realized she must have gotten off the community Dial-A-Ride van that had just pulled out. She had a small bag of groceries and a handful of mail in addition to a capacious black leather purse slung over her right shoulder.

“Is this because of that wire?” the woman asked as she came up the stairs, very spryly for a woman her age, he noted. But she was having trouble with the groceries and the purse slipping off her shoulder, so he instinctively did what he would have done with his mother, who was about the same age; he took the bag. “Let me get that for you.”

She looked at him with a touch of wariness he appreciated. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “I’m not a threat.”

“I didn’t think you were, or Lilith wouldn’t allow you around.”

So she knew Lilith well enough to make that assumption. He barely managed to stop himself from probing that knowledge, knowing asking questions would probably have the woman running to Lilith to warn her off.

She let him carry the grocery bag across the landing to her door, where she dug out her keys, opened it, set her purse and the mail inside, then turned back to him and took the bag; she might not be afraid, but she was still cautious. “Are you a policeman or something? Are you here because of what happened?”

“Or something,” he said.

“I think it was that little scamp who lives downstairs.”

“Lilith told me.”

The woman looked thoughtful. “If it wasn’t him, who could it have been?”

“I was going to ask you. Did you see anyone around in the morning?”

“Just the gardener,” she said. “Although come to think of it, it was a new man, not Jose, who’s been here for years.”

“You talked to this man?”

“Yes. He said Jose was his cousin, or something like that. And he had all the equipment.” She wrinkled her nose. “And tattoos. I don’t care for those.”

If you only knew, he thought, but managed not to smile. “So he was Hispanic?”

She gave him a wary look, as if she thought he was setting her up to insult him. “Yes,” she finally said, and left him standing there on the landing as she went inside.

He was pondering the possible significance of an unknown Hispanic with tattoos when Lilith returned. She’d exchanged those jeans he’d admired for a pair of black twill pants that were almost as distracting, and a crisp, white blouse.

“Here,” she said, holding something out to him.

It was a plastic baggie holding a coiled length of silver wire that matched the remnants he’d been looking at.

“Not sure why I saved it. It looks like something you could buy at any hardware store, but there it is.”

“Good.” He took the bag. “Can’t hurt.”

He pulled the small, red-handled pocketknife he usually carried out of his left front pocket and made quick work of freeing the two tied ends of the wire. He noticed there were flattened spots on the one end, as if the person tying them had used a tool of some kind, likely pliers, to tighten the wire. He added the ends to the baggie and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. He could have Sam verify whether wire had been sold to any of Lilith’s neighbors, at least eliminate that possibility. Sam would love it, tied to a desk as she was…

They headed back down to where his car was parked at the base of the stairs. She didn’t go with any more noticeable care than anyone would, clearly not about to let the incident make her afraid of every step. And again he thought of determination.

By the time they were on the freeway headed north, he was realizing the drive wasn’t going to be quite the ordeal he’d thought. Whatever her reservations about him had been to begin with, she seemed to either be over them, or at least ignoring them for the moment. She seemed more than willing to just chat amiably.

Or maybe she’s just looking for a distraction from having to face her brutal ex, he told himself.

He was still having a bit of trouble absorbing what she’d told him. He realized now how stupid he’d been, thinking that things like that didn’t touch her world, but still, it was nearly impossible for him to think of this elegant, classy woman as a victim of such brutality.

And when he did, when he pictured her frightened and in that kind of danger, when he thought of her hurt and bleeding and alone, a rage he hadn’t felt since his days on the street welled up in him. The kind of rage that had gotten him into far too much trouble in his life.

Only this time he’d asked for it. Hell, he’d demanded it, demanded to be the one to help her, even knowing it would mean time like this, alone in her company, fighting his tangled feelings every step of the way.

Great.

Masochist didn’t even begin to describe it.

“I think,” Lilith said when the conversation turned, as it inevitably did between people who had their particular boss in common, “you have to have the most amazing ‘How I met Josh’ story in all of Redstone.”

“The most infamous, maybe,” he said as he signaled for a lane change to get out from behind a truck spitting rocks off its uncovered load. They were in the Redstone car he drove on assignment, but he took care of it as if it were his own, she noticed.

“That, too,” she agreed with a laugh, and was oddly gratified when that made him smile, perhaps because it looked as if it was in spite of himself.

“I owe Josh my life,” he said simply. “And not just for not having my…butt thrown in jail back then.”

She didn’t miss the change of words, and wondered if it was because she was female, or older than he, or simply that she was Redstone and therefore deserved the respect Josh demanded for all his people.

“I heard he sent you to school.”

Tony nodded, although he didn’t look at her. It wasn’t because there was a lot of traffic at this midday hour, but maybe he was just a careful driver, she thought.

“Yes.” She saw one corner of his mouth quirk. “It was his price for staying out of juvie. I’d been there twice, and I didn’t want to go back.”

This, she hadn’t known. Either part. “His price?”

“He told me I could go to this school he knew about, or I could go back in the system. My choice.”

She laughed; she couldn’t help it. “That’s Josh. Giving you options but making the right one all but impossible to pass up.”

He did glance at her then. “Well, I wasn’t sure it was the right one. To me, then, school was just another form of jail.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’ll bet you loved school. Becoming a teacher and all.”

“I did love school,” she said. “At least, until I got old enough to realize that I was being fed somebody’s particular version of the world, to be memorized and spewed back when required.”

“Sounds like school to me,” he said dryly.

“I wanted the truth,” she said, “and to learn how to learn for myself. And that’s why I thought I wanted to be a teacher. To teach that. But when the trouble with my husband began, he used his influence to have me laid off. He didn’t want me working.”

“Hurt his self-image?”

“No, teaching was acceptable. It was control. He couldn’t keep me sufficiently under his thumb if I was out working every day.”

A little bitterness had crept into her voice, and it startled her. She’d thought herself long past such a feeling. Determined to end this now, she turned the conversation back to him. “So Josh made you go back to school?”

He accepted the change with surprising ease; perhaps he had sensed her discomfort. “Not back. To a different school. A college prep academy. I thought he was crazy. Me, in some snobby, upper-crust college prep? I laughed in his face.”

Since she had gone to such a place herself, Lilith had a full album of images to draw on. She couldn’t picture the kid he’d been in any of them. Nor could she begin to imagine how hard it must have been for him.

“But he didn’t give up,” she said.

“No. I told him it was a joke, no place like that would ever let somebody like me in. He said that was his problem.”

“And they did.”

“Turns out it was run by a friend of his.”

“He has them everywhere, doesn’t he?”

“That’s because he helps people everywhere.”

“I’ve often thought,” Lilith said, “that if Josh ever called in all the favors he’s owed at once, he could run the world.”

“And it’d be a better place,” Tony said.

“That it would,” she agreed. “So, after that college prep, what happened?”

“College.” He said it lightly, a small joke. But she was looking at him, saw the expression that flitted across his face, and guessed he’d still not quite gotten over the unexpectedness of it. “Business major. Which,” he said, still lightly, “as you can see, I’m not really using.”

She could not for the life of her imagine him tied to a desk. “Where?”

“U.C.L.A.”

She blinked; she hadn’t known that. “Great school.”

“Yes.” He flicked a glance at her. “And I’ve paid Josh back. Every cent of the tuition he put into me.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise her, although she knew Josh would never have expected it. She wondered for a moment what it had taken for him to get Josh to accept the payback. That, she decided, must have been quite a discussion.

As if he’d read her thoughts, she saw him smile. “He fought me when I started, so I put it all into an account I never touched. Then I handed it over. He finally took it, but only for the next person he decided to help. It became the Redstone Scholarship Fund.”

She smiled in turn. “That is so Josh it doesn’t even require a comment.”

That it was Tony as well didn’t escape her.

She studied him for a moment. His hands were relaxed on the steering wheel and one elbow was resting casually on the armrest of the driver’s seat. Logic, and her knowledge that Redstone Security was known worldwide even in traditional law enforcement circles, told her he might be relaxed now, but if anything happened, he would turn into what he was, a trained agent. John Draven would have seen to that.

But there was something more in this man, something somehow more intense than even Draven, who had arrived at Redstone via the military, a veteran of battles in various parts of the world, including the one that had taken from Josh his brother and last surviving relative.

Tony Alvera had been in only one war, but it was an insidious one that claimed casualties in a way that seemed little different to her.

Except that it took place at home, where kids should have been safe.

It struck her then that it was no small miracle that this man was here, now, where he was. And while he might want to give all the credit to Josh, she knew better. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out he’d had to fight every step of the way.

She suspected the thing he’d had to fight hardest was himself.