Against the Fire (30 page)

Tomorrow, the captain said, the police were going to start working on the names on the eviction list. Dev told him about finding the applications that contained the socials and promised to get a copy over to him in the morning.

Gabe held up his phone, displaying the text message. “The bastard sent this.”

Daily read the message. “He’s escalating. Getting more and more personal. We can run a trace, but I think the result will be the same as before. He won’t make it that easy.”

Daily gave orders for Gabe to have the medic take a look at his face and arm, which he ignored. It was another hour before they were finished.

“I don’t want you home alone tonight,” Gabe said to Mattie. “You could stay here, but I’m not sure you’d be safe here either. Is there someone you can call?”

She wanted to stay with him so badly she ached. “I can…can stay with Tracy tonight.”

“Sam’s there.”

“Oh. I’m sure I’ll be all right at home.”

“Isn’t there someone else?”

“I suppose I could phone a friend at the office. Emily Bliss. I don’t think she’d mind.”

Mattie phoned and Emily immediately invited her over.

“You remember where I live?” Emily said, worry clear in her voice.

“I remember. Thanks, Em. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Mattie closed the phone. She wanted to stay with Gabe. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the truck bursting into flames, then the deadly explosion. He had come so close to dying. It was all she could do not to reach out and touch him, reassure herself that he was okay.

But Gabe wanted her to leave, which made her wonder if she had already pushed him too far away.

She swallowed, managed to look up at him. “Emily lives uptown. It won’t take long for me to get there.”

“I’ll follow you over in Dev’s rental car.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Dev said. “The guy might be watching you. If he is, you don’t want to lead him to Mattie. I’ll make sure she gets there safely.”

Gabe nodded but his jaw looked tight. “I want this over,” he said.

Mattie’s heart went out to him. And as she looked into his worried, handsome face, it struck her. Gabe wasn’t like any other man she had ever known. He was stronger, more protective, more caring.

And God help her, she was wildly, desperately in love with him. Her throat tightened. As much as she wanted to deny it, as much as she wished it weren’t so, the truth was suddenly plain.

She was deeply and irrevocably in love with Gabriel Raines.

Twenty-Eight

A cockroach crawled across the floor and disappeared beneath the sagging brown sofa. The lingering smell of the fish he’d cooked for supper hung in the air.

Seated at a rickety card table next to the hot plate in what served as a kitchen, Jacob stared down at the photos he’d spread across the top of the table.

Vera Mercedes Mueller was once a beautiful woman. Tall and blonde, with lips the color of cherries. She had even posed for a few cosmetic ads when she was a girl.

Jacob carefully rearranged the pictures and the magazine ads she had cut out and saved, and he had carefully stored away. Old black-and-white photos from when she and Jacob’s father were first married. Pictures taken with her sister, Betty, after Jacob’s father had died.

He’d only been two at the time. Vera had raised him, loved him. She had been an older woman when he was born, a wonderful accident she had called him. Jacob, she had often said, was her whole world.

Some of the photos he had taken himself in her later years. She hadn’t aged well. The stress of raising what people called a special child had been too great. She had tried so hard, worked two jobs to pay for his education as a gifted student. Ignored her prescriptions, even gone without groceries so that she could save more to send him to college.

Jacob had worshipped her, as close to a saint as any person he had ever known. He’d tried not to disappoint her, but he knew in some ways he had. He had never fit in with the other kids at school, never made friends. Never really wanted to.

His mother was all he needed.

All he truly cared about.

She took care of him, praised him, told him he was better than the other kids, smarter, more clever. That he would be more successful.

But he hadn’t been. Instead, he’d dropped out of city college in his second year and started smoking pot. When he couldn’t find work, his mother gave him money from the jar on the kitchen counter where she kept it. She had always been there when he needed her and now she was gone.

Jacob didn’t do drugs anymore. He had stopped smoking pot years ago and didn’t smoke cigarettes or drink. He had gotten a job in a music store two years ago and begun to make something of himself. His mother had been so pleased.

He thought of the apartment she had lived in, a place she truly loved. Then the eviction notice had come and she had been utterly distraught. He remembered the assisted-living home she’d been confined to after her stroke.

It never would have happened if she had been able to stay in the place she loved, where she could feed the birds outside her window and take care of her tiny garden.

It was all his fault. Gabriel Raines. If he hadn’t used his influence to trick the city into condemning the building, his mother would still be in her home. If he hadn’t been so greedy, if he hadn’t been more concerned with himself than the people who lived in the apartments, his mother would still be alive.

But three months ago, she had died, and now Jacob was alone.

His hand spasmed and his fingers jerked, knocking one of the photos off the table.

Jacob reached down and picked it up, set it carefully back in its place. He studied the picture he had taken of his mother, her hair turned to silver and wrinkles on her face. She looked old, but her soft smile was meant just for him.

Vera understood him as no one else ever had.

As no one else ever would.

He took out his personal cell phone, not one of the cheap disposables he had purchased with the money from his mother’s social security checks that still kept coming in. Jacob had been forging the signatures and cashing them without a hitch.

He smiled as he flipped open the phone, pushed the button and began to replay the video he had taken tonight in the parking lot: the big man running across the pavement, the truck exploding at precisely the instant Jacob commanded, the blazing wreckage that was all that remained.

He closed the phone.

One way or another, Gabriel Raines was going to pay for what he had done to his mother.

For what he had done to both of them.

In the bedroom of her apartment, Tracy lay in bed next to Sam. He was not quite dozing.

She felt Sam’s finger lightly tracing a circle around her breast, trailing lower, moving over her rib cage. As he got close to the scar across the left side of her abdomen, her body began to tense. Sam drew his finger along the pale line of the scar, which barely showed anymore, and she rolled away from him onto her side, pretending not to notice.

He came up over her, his chest against her back and pressed a soft kiss on the side of her neck. “Tell me about it, baby.”

Tracy ignored him, praying he would let it go.

“I know you don’t want to. I know it must have been bad, but I care about you, Tracy. Your past is always there between us. I need you to tell me what happened.”

She didn’t want to tell him. She never said anything to anyone. Only Mattie knew the truth. They had both been ten years old when it happened, best friends even then. Tracy’s dad was a lawyer and Mattie’s dad had a good job with one of the oil companies, so the families lived in a nice neighborhood just a couple of houses away from each other.

Tears burned Tracy’s eyes. She didn’t want to tell Sam what her life had been like back then, but she knew his feelings for her ran deep and so did hers for him, so maybe he had a right to know.

Sam eased her back down on the bed. “You can trust me with whatever it is, baby. Tell me what happened.”

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I don’t like to think about it. And I don’t want you to look at me with pity.”

“The only way I’ll ever look at you, Tracy, is with love. I love you, baby. I haven’t told you. I didn’t want to scare you, but I do.”

“Oh, Sam.” She slid her arms around his neck and he held her close against him. He felt so solid, so strong.

“Tell me,” he softly coaxed.

She dragged in a shaky breath and relaxed on the bed. “My father…drank. Sometimes he was a good father, but once he started drinking…he…he couldn’t stop. He just kept going until he was falling-down drunk. He got mean when he drank and he…he beat us. My mom and me.”

Sam took her hand and kissed her palm, silently encouraging her to continue.

“It happened a lot. Mattie tried to get me to tell the teachers at school, but I made her swear she would never tell a soul. I was embarrassed. And I was afraid of what he would do to Mama and me.”

Sam leaned down, gently pressed his mouth against the scar, and something loosened inside her. “Go on.”

“He was drunk that night. He slapped Mama so hard she fell and hit her head. She was lying there and her eyes were closed and I was so scared.” Tracy’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Sam, I don’t want to remember.”

He gentled her with a tender kiss. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s just…I think if you got it out, if you said it right out, you might be able to get past it.”

She stared up at him through the wetness spiking her lashes. He was so handsome. And there was that look on his face, the love for her he didn’t try to hide.

“I started screaming. ‘You killed Mama! You killed Mama!’ Then I hit him. I punched him in the stomach as hard as I could, but it only made him madder. He said he hadn’t killed her. He said he’d show me what happened when I tried to interfere.” She started crying and Sam pulled her into his arms.

“That’s enough,” he said. “You don’t have to say another word.”

“It was the buckle on his b-belt that made the scar.”

Sam’s eyes briefly closed and his hold subtly tightened. “Oh, baby.”

She felt the tremors running through his lean, hard body. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “No one’s ever going to hurt you again. I swear it on my life.”

Tracy clung to him. “I love you, Sam.”

“Marry me, Tracy.”

She had never imagined she would get married. She was too afraid she’d wind up with a man like her dad. But this was Sam and he was nothing at all like Marty Spencer.

She smiled at him through her tears. “Oh, yes. I’ll marry you, Sam.”

In the moonlight coming through the window, his eyes glistened for an instant before he kissed her.

“Soon,” he said. “We’re getting married very soon.”

Tracy didn’t argue, just looked up at Sam and gave him a wobbly smile. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt completely at peace.

Dev’s friend, Chaz, came through for them. It was highly illegal to break into a federal data bank, but Chaz liked the money, and he loved his work.

Thirty-two of the forty names on the eviction list had been matched to the social security numbers on the tenants’ rental applications. Through the data bank, Chaz had found addresses for twenty-nine of them. The rest of the numbers were either for people who had died, phony or the numbers had somehow gotten reversed or were otherwise useless. It wasn’t a hundred percent, but it was more information than they’d had before.

“The police are going to get on it,” Gabe said to Dev that Sunday morning. “They’ll have to run the socials on the apps themselves, but that way it’ll be legal. The addresses they come up with will be the same as the ones we’ve already got. Daily says this is the best lead they have and they’re going to be pushing hard.”

Dev nodded. “That’s good news. Maybe they’ll come up with something.”

In the meantime, Gabe planned to call on some of the evicted tenants himself. Chaz had done a little extra research and found six former tenants with criminal records. Three still lived in the Dallas area. Gabe had circled the names, intending to call on them first.

His brother’s cell phone rang. Dev answered and Gabe heard Jackson’s name.

“I know you want to come down,” Dev said into the phone, “but it would be better if you didn’t. We aren’t sure how far this guy is willing to go and even if you were here, there’s nothing you could do.”

Dev filled Jackson in on the investigation so far and that the cops would soon be on the trail of the former tenants of the Greenwood Apartments.

“You’ve got a family to think of now, big brother. And like I said, there’s nothing you can do that we aren’t doing already.”

Dev chuckled. “Swearing at me isn’t going to change anything. Take care of your wife and daughter.” Dev hung up the phone. “He called me a few choice names but I think I’ve convinced him not to come—at least for the moment.”

“I don’t want to put anyone else in danger. Matter of fact, I’m thinking maybe it’s time you went back to Phoenix.”

Dev cast him a sideways glance. “Good idea, I’ll be on the next plane.”

Ignoring Dev’s sarcasm and knowing it was useless to argue, Gabe went back to sorting through the names, trying to come up with the most likely suspects.

There wasn’t much to go on.

Someone knocked. Absently, his hand went to the bandage covering the burn on his arm as he went to the door. He felt a tug in his chest as Mattie walked into the condo.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

Since she had made her feelings clear, he was doing his best to forget her. Seeing her only made that harder to do. “I told you I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I was just out jogging and—”

“You were supposed to be staying with your friend.”

“I did, but I went back home this morning.” She was wearing shorts and a tank top, her arms and legs faintly gleaming with perspiration. It made him think of hot, sweaty sex, and heat pooled low in his groin.

“I had to go home, Gabe,” she was saying. “I’ve got to get ready to go back to work. My job is important to me.”

“No job is worth your life.”