Bear Claw Conspiracy (10 page)

And damn him for not being the man he should have been.

Behind him, a door opened and Ian’s voice became audible, saying, “…any time, day or night, seriously.”

“I may just take you up on that.” She sounded as if she really meant it, too, which put a nasty twist in Matt’s gut, even though he knew he didn’t have the right to feel anything even remotely approaching jealousy right now.

In college, Matt had been the charming jock, Ian the poet, and they’d both had their share of conquests. Later, though, their lives had diverged. Ian had gone to grad school, flourished, and emerged both poet and charmer, while Matt had worked long hours in uniform, trying to make everything okay when it couldn’t possibly be. And now Ian was still charming, while Matt was…hell, he didn’t know what he was, but it wasn’t good.

Ian and Gigi exchanged a few more pleasantries that had him grinding his teeth, then she headed in his direction, her silver-toed boots clicking like a ticked-off metronome.

She wore a studded black blazer, beige pants that clung to every dip and curve, and a purple shirt that did more than hint at her cleavage. But where yesterday he would have looked at her and seen a city slicker, now he just saw
her.

He pushed away from the wall as she neared him, stuck his hands in his pockets when they wanted to reach for her. “I know it’s not nearly good enough, but I’m sorry. Ian and I…well, he’s always been able to get into me like that, just keeps going until I snap.”

“He’s worried about you.”

So am I.
It had never been like this for him before, all rage and mood swings, with him feeling like he was barely hanging on. “Give it five minutes and he’ll be back to worrying about tracking down those supposed barred eagles. Which is what we should be doing.” Not wasting time arguing politics and impossibilities.

She stared at him for a long moment, her hair falling in angles across her face like war paint, making her look in that moment both wholly feminine and terrifyingly capable. “Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s hit the road.”

He had the feeling he had just failed a test he hadn’t even known he was taking.

As they rolled away from the U.C. Bear Claw campus, she called the lab, gave a brief report on the eagles, and had Alyssa send a bunch of altitude maps and ore surveys to her phone. When he tapped the brakes at the main road, she broke off her conversation to say, “Head for Station Fourteen. Jack’s waiting for me up at your place.”

Matt winced at the continued invasion of his private space, but he headed north out of the city without comment. She called someone else, got a different map sent and studied the information on her phone’s tiny display, frowning.

He glanced over. “I know you’re mad at me—and with good reason—but that’s my territory. Talk to me. I can help narrow down the search.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m thinking.”

And the thing was, she didn’t really look mad. She looked sad and resigned, and the two together tugged at something inside him. “What did Jack find?”

She glanced at him, brows furrowed. “Nothing that I’m aware of. Why?”

“I thought you were going to go over some new— Oh.” The detective wasn’t waiting to show her evidence. He was picking her up and taking her away.

“You said you wanted your peace and quiet back.” She was focused on her maps, or at least staring at them. “You saved my life. Giving you yours back seemed like the least I could do.”

“I didn’t…” He trailed off as a heavy weight settled on his chest at the realization that she was right that they should split up. Williams had his head on straight. He would do a better job of protecting her, because there wouldn’t be any emotion in the mix beyond friendship and respect.

“This is what you want, right?”

For a second the air between them went tight with anticipation; he had a feeling she was waiting for him to argue. When he didn’t, she gave a soft sigh and looked out the window.

He told himself to leave it alone, that it was better this way. Instead, after a moment he said, “Have you ever slept wrong on your gun hand, and woke up with it totally numb and useless?”

“I shoot okay lefty.” But the corner of her mouth softened a little, and she nodded, still staring out the window as they headed up into the foothills. “Yeah. I know the feeling. And I know how much it hurts when everything starts waking up again, how you just want to stand there and scream, or maybe hit something, because of the pain. But at the same time, you know you have to get through it or you won’t be able to shoot properly.”

How was it that she could see so clearly something he was just starting to get to himself?

“I thought I put myself back together the best I could. Now, though, I think maybe I’ve been sleepwalking for the past six years, and this case, meeting you…I’m starting to wake up.”

She looked at him then, expression unreadable. “And that back there was what, emotional pins and needles?”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t me. Or not the guy I want to be. Especially not around you.”

A flush touched her cheeks, but she looked down and fiddled with her phone. “I’m just passing through. Another thirteen days and I’m out of here, either to the academy or to fill in for someone who’s gotten the call.”

“Caught that, did you? Yeah, Tucker got word this morning. I wasn’t supposed to say anything until he knew one way or the other. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a reality. Just like it’s a reality that I don’t have time for a new complication right now, even a short-term one.”

He turned on to the winding route that led alongside brittle, dry Sector Nine to the western half of the backcountry. They were alone on the familiar road, so he put the pedal down.

He didn’t know whether she had meant to make him think about short-term, no-harm-no-foul sex between them, but he was suddenly filled with her flavor as if he had just kissed her, was warmed by her skin as if he had just touched her. Although his body was on board for short-term anything, logic said she would be far better off riding with Williams. He might be waking back up, but he was far from leveled off.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Yeah. Okay.” He glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if he could catch her expression, some glimpse of what she was feeling.

Instead, he saw a truck that hadn’t been behind them a minute ago.

It was big and black, with tinted windows. And it was catching up fast.

Chapter Nine

Matt’s pulse accelerated and his knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “Hang on,” he ordered grimly, “we’ve got company.”

“What?” Gigi craned her head to see out the back just as the rearview mirror caught a flash of metal coming out the passenger’s-side window of the vehicle.

“Down!”
Matt caught her shirt and dragged her aside a split second before a machine pistol chattered. Cracks spiderwebbed the rear window, radiating from a quartet of bullet holes.

Gigi screamed and flattened herself. More slugs punched through, one whining way too close past Matt’s ear.

Cursing, he swerved as much as he dared on the curvy road, trying to stay away from where a guardrail blocked a hell of a drop on their left.

“Call it in!” he snapped. “Tucker first.” McDermott wasn’t the chief, but he was the one Matt trusted.

Hitting the gas, he sent the Jeep lunging up the steady incline, accelerating away from the heavier truck.

He hugged the high side as much as he dared, blood chilling with the realization that these guys—whoever they were and whatever they wanted—were finished with leaving their victims to die. They were going to make sure they got the job done this time.

Not on my watch,
he vowed grimly. And not with Gigi there. If he had been alone he might’ve tried to turn the tables and get his hands on the bastards chasing him. As it was, all he wanted to do was get the hell out of there, fast.

More bullets came spraying through the back window. Air screamed into the cabin, turning the world to a roar.

When the road straightened out, he concentrated on getting ahead of the truck, out of range.

Gigi was talking into the phone, making her report in a shaky voice. “I don’t know,” she said, “we’re—hang on.” She punched her phone to speaker and held it up to him. “Where are we, exactly?”

“West access road, near mile marker ten, in that snaky section with the drop-off.”

“Christ,” Tucker said. “Okay, cars are on the way, and I’ll get a bird in the air. Somehow. Just hang on.”

“Planning on it. You’re looking for a black truck, late model Dodge half-ton, no front plate.”

“On it.”

Matt clenched his teeth as he gunned it around a sharp curve going way too freaking fast, and had to hit the brakes. Rubber chirped and the Jeep threatened to tip. But they were still three car lengths or so ahead of the truck.

Gigi braced herself, pocketed her phone, and went for the radio. Her hands were shaking, her eyes stark in her bloodless face, but she was holding it together like a warrior. A cop.

In another lifetime, he would’ve been proud to have her on his team. In this one, he didn’t want her anywhere near the action. He had seen too much, lost too much. But when she racked the radio and pulled her Beretta, he knew the choice was out of his hands. There was no way to keep her out of the action now. He glanced over, met her eyes, and nodded. “Go for the tires on the right.” That would send the bastards into the wall, giving him half a chance of getting a witness out of the crash.

They hit a straightaway that flattened and then descended. The truck picked up speed, caught up and the guns came back out.

Gigi found a decent vantage, took aim and fired.

“Headlight,” she reported, then cried, “Hang on!”

Matt had seen them coming, but wasn’t braced nearly enough for the shuddering impact that ripped through the lighter Jeep when the truck rammed them. He cursed viciously, but the sound was lost beneath the crunch of impact and the scream of tires as the Jeep half-spun and slid sideways, being pushed along by the truck.

That put the two cabs practically on top of each other. Through the heavily tinted windows, he glimpsed the driver’s panicked surprise, the passenger’s scramble as he tried to clear a jammed clip. The men were strangers, average-looking white guys who were trying to kill him and Gigi.

Acting on fury and instinct, blood going crisis-cold, Matt pulled out his Sig and fired into the tint, aware that Gigi was doing the same with her Beretta. The truck’s front windshield cracked and blood splashed inside the cab.

One of them was wounded, but would it be enough?

Then momentum swung the vehicles another ninety degrees, slingshotting the truck ahead of the Jeep just as the road curved. The truck flung free, fishtailing as it headed for the curve.

The Jeep kept sliding sideways, totally at the mercy of momentum.

“Take this!” Matt shoved his gun at Gigi and grabbed the wheel, fighting the top-heavy vehicle when it listed and tried to spin out. A tire blew on the left side, making the drag worse.

The truck’s brake lights flashed as the vehicle disappeared around the curve.

But the Jeep wasn’t turning fast enough; inertia was dragging it toward the far side of the road, where there was a low guardrail and freefall plunge. Pulse hammering, Matt fought the skid, trying to regain control.

They weren’t going to make it.

“Son of a— Hang on!” Giving in, knowing it was the only way, he cut the wheel the other way, hit the brakes, and sent them into a hard spin in the other direction. They whipped around once, twice, then headed for the rock wall.

Letting go of the wheel, he lunged against the restraints of his seat belt and wrapped his arms around Gigi as best he could, shielding her. “Keep your head down!”

They slammed sideways into the wall with a rending
crunch
of metal and a crash from what was left of the glass, the
whumps
of three of the four airbags, and Gigi’s soft scream, which was buried in his chest.

His belt burned his hips and shoulder; glass and other fragments pelted him where he was curled around her. But as the Jeep rocked back on its opposite tires and shuddered to crippled stillness, he became aware of a protected strip across the back of his neck and one shoulder, where she had wrapped her free arm around him and spread her hand to cover as much of him as she could reach.

Not daring to name the strange, soft feeling that moved through him, he pulled away from her. But he didn’t let go all the way. He couldn’t.

As he eased back, her hand slid along the side of his neck and down to flatten on his chest, over his heart, which was beating fast.

Her eyes were wide and dark, her hair an angular slash across her forehead, and the four diamond studs she wore, three and one, twinkled like stars. He realized that all the things that had initially warned him off her had become part of him now, because they were part of what made her uniquely
her.
And somehow, in the space of a day, she had wormed her way inside his heart.

She straightened a little and unwrapped the arm she’d held clutched tightly to her chest between them. In it, she held two guns: his and hers. Which was some seriously quick thinking, because if there was anything worse than spinning a Jeep and slamming it sideways into a big-ass rock, it was doing all that with a couple of pistols bouncing around.

She was a natural.

Any praise he might have given her jammed in his throat because he didn’t know what to say, how to tell her that her instincts and talent impressed him as much as her guts and reckless disregard for her own safety terrified him.

Then they heard the low thump of rotors and the building wail of sirens, and it was too late for him to say anything.

She drew away with a small smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes, and handed him his Sig. “Nice driving, hotshot. I guess that’s two rescues I owe you.”

“Let’s call it even. Your shooting kept them too busy to take out our tires.”

Beyond the drop-off, an unfamiliar stealth-painted chopper suddenly swung up from below the guardrail to hover. It was heavily armed but none of the guns were pointed in their direction, and as Matt watched, the pilot gave them a dip-wiggle that signaled “we’re on your side.” Where the hell had Tucker dug
that
up?

“Okay. We’re even.” Without another word, she booted free of the airbag and headed toward the chopper, holstering her gun as she walked…and leaving him kicking himself for missing a moment that suddenly felt like it could have been very important, even if he didn’t know what to say.

It’s better this way,
he told himself.
No complications.
But as he climbed out of the Jeep, his blood was doing a slow burn…not because the bastards in the truck had gotten away from him, but because Gigi was about to.

R
IGHT AFTER THE CHOPPER’S
arrival, three P.D. vehicles came around the corner and hit the brakes. Within fifteen minutes, Gigi was at the center of a law-enforcement huddle that her competitors for the academy slots would have killed for.

In addition to Tucker, Jack and the seven other Bear Claw cops that had converged on the remote stretch of road, the sleek chopper—whose tail numbers looked suspiciously magnetic—had dropped off Cassie and her husband, FBI analyst Seth Varitek, along with two people Gigi had heard about but never met: Jonah Fairfax and his wife, Chelsea, formerly one of Bear Claw’s medical examiners. The two had been instrumental in foiling al-Jihad’s terrorist plot, and now worked as partners in an unnamed government agency.

Based on the stories, Gigi had been expecting a pair of glossy superspies like something out of the movies. But while Fairfax—aka Fax—was killer handsome, with ice-blue eyes that instantly seemed to look through her, Chelsea was lovely in a honey-haired, girl-next-door sort of way. The two were clearly very much a part of the Bear Claw gang, fitting seamlessly with Tucker, Cassie and Seth, and razzing Alyssa, who was attending the meeting by speakerphone and was trying not to be too cranky about being left out.

In contrast, Matt stood well apart from the group near the guardrail, staring into the abyss.

A couple of times Gigi started to call him over, but stopped herself. He was a grown-up; he could join or not, his choice.

Besides, even though for a second there she had thought that he might finally be seeing her for who and what she really was, the evidence said otherwise. He was in a weird headspace right now, and if he needed to get away from the crowd, it was the least she could do for him. She owed him her life. Again.

He might think they were even, but she knew better. And a Lynd always paid her debts. So she bought him the room he seemed to need by briefing the others on the attack and describing—as best she could, anyway—the truck and its occupants, who seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

“They’re down a headlight and windshield,” she finished, “and the driver took at least one bullet.” She was pleased that her voice sounded level and businesslike. That was no small feat given that she was holding on to her cool by force of will, along with the inner promise that she could have the shakes later, in private, for as long as she needed to.

“Was either of them the guy who knocked you down during the fire?” Jack asked.

She thought about it, tried to picture it, but shook her head. “I barely saw him.” The whole shoot-out was a blur of fear and the ping-whine of ricochets. And she didn’t want to admit it, but Matt had been right—shooting was different when the cardboard cutout wasn’t cardboard, and it was shooting back.

“I’ll check the hospitals for any gunshot victims coming in over the next few hours,” Alyssa said from the speakerphone, “then see what I can do on the truck.”

“Seth and I can process the Jeep and the rest of the scene,” Cassie said, eyeing the crumpled vehicle and the trail of tire marks and glass that stretched around the far turn. “That should keep us busy for a while.”

Gigi’s body sang with bruises that hadn’t yet formed. She couldn’t believe it was barely noon, but she manned up. “I’ll help.”

“The hell you will,” Tucker said mildly, though there was steel in his eyes. “You’re out of here until tomorrow morning at the earliest. Both of you.”

“But—”

“Take some downtime. We’ll call you if something breaks.”

She drew breath to argue, then realized she didn’t want to. Letting out a long sigh, she nodded. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.” Glancing at the Jeep, she said, “I think I’m going to need a ride back to the city, though.”

Tucker and Jack both started to protest, but Matt’s voice overrode them. “Not the city.” He pushed through the crowd and stopped facing her, ignoring the others. “And not alone. Those guys came after us specifically…and they were shooting to kill. Not all that well, which, along with the expression on the driver’s face when he got a close-up of my pistol, tells me they’re not pros. But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. They missed, and one of them is hurt, but if we’re right about there being a bunch of them, those two will be calling in reinforcements.”

“They… Right.” Gigi pressed a hand to her stomach as it went suddenly raw. “Of course, you’re right.” He was standing way too close, his strength making her want to lean, despite everything.

“The break room at the lab should be safe,” Cassie suggested.

“We can do better than that,” Chelsea said. She glanced at Fax, got a nod of assent. “We’ve got a little place outside the city, part getaway spot, part safe house. It’s tight as a tick, so if you want, you can lock yourself in and forget about the world without needing any additional manpower.” She crouched for a second, fiddled with what looked like a high-tech ankle holster and came up with a keyless fob, which she held out.

“That sounds like heaven,” Gigi said fervently. “I’m in.”

“
We’re
in,” Matt corrected, and snagged the fob.

Something sparked deep inside her, feeling suddenly very different from the near-tears of moments earlier. She wanted it to be irritation. “I’m riding with Jack from now on, remember?”

He cursed under his breath. “Fine. Then he stays in the safe house, too. I don’t want you going it alone.”

She drew breath to snarl, then stopped when her mind played back Ian’s parting words to her:
Blackie’s coming back from a really dark place. I’d rather he didn’t have to go it alone.

She hadn’t been able to give Ian the reassurance he’d been looking for. Now, though, empathy tugged when she saw echoes of her own fatigue and stress in Matt’s expression. He acted as if she shouldn’t trust him, but then he’d been there each and every time she’d needed him.