Читать книгу Saving Grace - RaeAnne Thayne - Страница 10

Grace couldn’t speak for several seconds after Beau’s announcement, couldn’t think straight, could only stand there, an empty bowl in her hand, while an awful, cold numbness began in her stomach and spread out through the rest of her body

Weapons smuggling.

The man with the sweet smile and the green, green eyes and the gentle way with his five-year-old daughter was a weapons smuggler.

She thought she would be sick suddenly. Totally and violently ill all over Jack Dugan’s glossy, elegant guest room.

“Grace? You okay?”

She blinked several times, then set the bowl down gingerly on the table, fearful it might shatter into a million pieces if she wasn’t careful. “I… Yes,” she whispered. “Fine.”

But she wasn’t. Her thoughts had turned black and horrific, to blood and sirens and a child’s shattered body.

Most of the time, she tried not to think about that day—just living without Marisa was torture enough—but with Riley’s words, everything she tried to block from her mind came rushing back.

She hated most that the last words between them hadn’t been spoken out of love but out of exasperated anger. Marisa had called her at work to tell her she’d missed the bus for the third time in two weeks.

“Can you come get me?” she had begged, and Grace—with a dozen cases open on her desk and two interviews scheduled within the hour—had snapped at her about being responsible and trustworthy.

In the end, she had reluctantly agreed to pick her up, but she had been too late.

Five minutes.

That’s all it took for her world to shatter.

If she had been five minutes earlier—if she hadn’t stopped to buy a Coke from the vending machine at the station house or to exchange jibes with the desk sergeant on her way out the door—her daughter would have been just fine.

They would have been at the little house they’d worked so hard to fix up, catching up on long division homework or watching TV or taking a bike ride through the park.

But she had stopped for a Coke. She had stopped to ride the desk sergeant about his pot belly and his junk food habit.

And she had arrived at the school five minutes too late to protect her eleven-year-old daughter from being caught in the crossfire of rival punks fighting over drug territory.

Her stomach pitched and rolled as she relived driving up to the school and seeing the two squad cars already on the scene, their flashing lights piercing the long afternoon shadows. Already a crowd had gathered on the playground. She’d picked out the principal of the school, the gym teacher and the lanky, tow-headed boy Marisa had a crush on, the one probably responsible for her missing the bus.

Their faces had been taut with shock, and she had known. Somehow she had known.

She remembered stumbling out of her car and rushing toward the crowd, then the horror—the devastating horror—of seeing Marisa there, covered in blood and completely, terribly still.

“You still there?” Beau asked in her ear.

She couldn’t answer him, lost in the nightmare she couldn’t seem to wake from.

“Say something, Gracie,” he demanded, and she could hear the concern roughening Beau’s voice.

She cleared her throat and felt the pain of the action through vocal cords suddenly thick with emotion. “What…what do you want me to say?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Anything. Just don’t freeze up on me like that. I hate it when you do that.”

“I didn’t know any of this. About Dugan, I mean. You shocked me. I’m sorry.”

He swore viciously. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. It’s Dugan who should be sorry. And he will be. Trust me, Gracie, if he’s dealing in illegal weapons—if he played the slightest part in providing the assault weapons Spooky and his crew got their hands on for their little turf war—Jack Dugan is going to be very, very sorry.”

With monumental effort, she managed to gather the memories and shove them back into the corner of her mind where they usually lurked. They wouldn’t stay long, she knew, would soon be scratching and clawing their way out. But for now she forced herself to tune them out, to become detached and clinical. The hard-nosed cop sniffing out a lead.

“How strong is the case against him? Who’s working it?” she asked.

She could almost see the shrug of his broad shoulders. “Who’s not? Customs, ATF, FBI. Five of us from the Seattle PD. Everybody wants a piece of it.”

“So do I.” She stared out at the water. “I want in.”

He snorted. “Absolutely not. No friggin’ way.”

“I’m part of this, Beau. I want in.”

“You’re too close.”

“And you’re not?”

He swore again. “Dammit, Gracie. You turned in your badge.”

For the first time in a year, she felt the loss of it, of the gold detective shield she had worked so hard to earn. She had been so proud of it once, amazed that she was finally doing the job she’d dreamed of since she was younger than Marisa.

Her father had worn his own uniform with such dignity. Manny Solarez had loved being a cop, the honor and the integrity and the ceremony of it. In the end, he had given his life for the job.

Her own passion for becoming a peace officer had been born that day when she was eight years old, after her father’s partner and best friend had come to the house bearing the news of Manny’s death in the line of duty.

Her job and her daughter had been the only things that mattered to Grace. Without one, though, the other had seemed pointless and she had surrendered her badge without protest.

Now she wanted it back, if only to make Jack Dugan pay.

“I don’t have to be official,” she said now. Excitement clicked through her, the almost forgotten buzz of bringing a criminal to justice. “I’m in the perfect position. I’m staying at his house, Beau. You can’t get any closer than that.”

“Which brings me to my original question. What the hell are you doing there?”

She debated how much to tell him, then shrugged. “I told you, it’s a long story, but he thinks he owes me right now. What do you know about his daughter’s kidnapping?”

“Holy cow! That was you?”

She frowned into the phone. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”

“That’s all? You’re a damn hero, Gracie!”

“Drop it, Riley,” she snapped. She wasn’t a hero. She was a weak, pathetic coward.

To keep him from making the inevitable leap and start asking her what she was doing there in the first place on the anniversary of her daughter’s death, she changed the subject. “How does the kidnapping play into the whole thing?”

Beau immediately changed gears, and she sat back, with a minor congratulatory pat on the back for still knowing exactly how to work him. “We’re still trying to figure it all out at this point,” he said. “One theory is that a deal might have gone sour or he might have pissed off one of his customers somehow.”

“So they took the kid as payback? Nice. Dugan must run with a real swell crowd.”

“That’s one of the screwiest things about the case. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t hang with any known criminal elements. He comes from East Coast money, but built GSI from the ground up after a well-decorated stint as an air force pilot. Other than a few problems with the law when he was a juvie and one disturbing the peace citation for hosting a loud party when he was in the military, the man is so clean he squeaks.”

“Or at least he manages to put on a good show.”

“Right.”

“I can find out, Beau. I can dig deeper than anyone on the task force. You know I can.”

“Grace—”

“I’m staying in his house. Not only that but he just asked me to handle his personal security. I told him no, but I can go to him and tell him I changed my mind. Think about it. I can work it so I have complete access to everything—where he goes, who he sees. What kind of damn breakfast cereal he prefers. Everything.”

His silence dragged on so long she was afraid she had lost the connection. “I don’t like it,” he finally said, reluctance clear in his voice. “My butt would be toast if anybody else on the task force found out what’s going on.”

“So don’t tell them. Just think of me as any other informant.”

He snorted. “Right.”

“Come on, Beau. Take a chance. You want Dugan and you know I’m the one to help you get him.”

“Yeah,” he finally said. “Yeah, I do. Okay. You can feed me whatever information you come up with. But for Pete’s sake, Gracie, be careful, would you?”

She tried not to let her grim anticipation filter through her voice. “I always am, Beau. I always am.”

Jack sliced through the water of his swimming pool with strong, steady strokes. Ten laps. Eleven. Twelve. With each turn, he felt his stress level drop a notch.

He had left the lights off in the indoor spa, preferring the glow from only the pool’s green underwater lights reflecting off black tile and the occasional moonbeam that thrust its way through the thick storm clouds to pour in through the wide row of sky lights overhead.

Including an indoor pool in the house design had been purely an indulgence—and an expensive one at that. But he didn’t regret a penny of the money he’d spent. In stress reduction alone, the thing had more than paid for itself.

At the end of the day, with his work finally done and Emma tucked into bed, all storied-out, he retreated here to unwind.

He needed it today. He had more kinks in his shoulders and neck than the cord of the damn telephone he sometimes felt was permanently attached to his ear.

He had spent the morning going over contracts, then had been on the phone in teleconference negotiations most of the afternoon. He had haggled and bartered and wrangled until he was bleary-eyed and hoarse-voiced, but he’d been successful. He had managed to swing a multimillion dollar deal for GSI.

Now, though, he wanted nothing more than to lose himself in hard, mindless physical activity.

After twenty laps, he paused to catch his breath and floated on his back for a few minutes, trying to see if he could find any stars in the murky night sky.

He ached to be up there. He hated sitting behind a desk—even when that desk was at his home office where he worked two days a week, instead of GSI’s hangar at the airport where he spent the rest of the week.

Desk work—even very lucrative desk work—made him feel trapped and edgy and out of sorts.

He wanted to be flying. If he had his choice, he’d leave all the negotiations and paperwork to Syd—hell, she was better at it than he was anyway—then he could do nothing else but fly.

But he didn’t have a choice. He had Emma to think about.

Even though Lily was wonderful with her, he hated leaving her overnight more than once or twice a month. She was only five years old and she needed her daddy right now more than he needed the thrilling rush of being behind the controls of a jet airplane.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to leave her if he didn’t know exactly what it was like to be on the other side of the equation. He had a whole childhood full of memories of yearning for his parents to remember he was alive. He knew firsthand the loneliness of another night spent in the company of only a surly housekeeper, of waking up alone after a bad dream and knowing he would have to comfort himself.

During those long nights after Camille took off, when he had been the only one there to get up with a baby crying out for a mother who wanted nothing to do with her, he had made a promise to himself and to his little girl. Even though her mother had jumped at the first chance to abandon her, he had vowed that Emma would always know she came first with him.

In a few more years, she’d be old enough that he could leave her without this guilt, without worrying about whether the pizza she had for dinner would give her a stomachache or if she had her favorite stuffed poodle tucked into her bed or if she remembered to brush her teeth.

Until then, he would work out his frustration at what amounted to a self-imposed standdown here in the water.

He curled over to his stomach again and started to freestyle toward the shallow end of the pool when a flash of color caught his attention.

He glanced up and found his houseguest standing in the doorway to the spa wearing that same robe of Lily’s, with vibrant red hibiscus and fronds of greenery splashed over it.

Her hair was tousled and her feet bare. From his vantage point in the water, he could see them clearly—slim and brown and somehow unbearably sexy.

Man, he needed a woman if he could get all fired up over a pair of bare feet.

“I’m sorry,” she said when he stopped swimming, in a voice as cool as a January wind blowing off the Sound. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

He frowned, wondering just what he’d done to earn such dislike, or if she treated everybody with the same chilly detachment.

“You didn’t disturb me. I was just about done anyway.”

With three quick strokes, he finished the lap and hoisted himself out of the pool then grabbed a thick towel hanging from the back of a koa wood chaise cushioned in bright tropical colors and wrapped the towel loosely around his hips.

“It’s after midnight—if you’re still determined to head over to the ferry in the morning, shouldn’t you be tucked in your bed, saving up your strength?”

She buried her fingers in the fold of the robe. “I was too restless to sleep. It feels like I’ve done nothing else for a month.”