Beyond the Rules (12 page)

Her house was searched not once but twice. Kimmer took advantage of the mess to weed out some underwear that no longer suited her and to donate books to the library. Rio bought a new puzzle book to replace the one the intruders had ripped to pieces.

No one bothered OldCat.

And now they sat outside the ice-cream shop on a spring day that had started beautifully but had dull, hazy clouds piling up, contemplating the situation and their next steps. Kimmer sat at the bench of the picnic table provided there and Rio plunked his butt down on the tabletop, his feet resting on the bench beside her.

“Maybe,” Rio said, licking wildly colored sherbet from the side of his waffle cone with enough of a gaze directed her way to let her know he’d seen her watching, “you should head down to—”

“No!” Kimmer startled even herself with her vehement reaction. She nibbled a careful bite of cold pralines ’n’ cream and pressed it up to the roof of her mouth, letting the ice cream melt while the praline chunks remained behind. Once she’d chewed them, she turned back to Rio. “I checked, remember? Everything’s fine down there.”

Rio’s response was mild, as he might well keep it given
the smudge of bright green sherbet along his bottom lip. Yeah, kissable. She wondered if he did that on purpose. The breeze stirred his startlingly fair hair, threatening to whisk their napkins away from the picnic table. Rio snatched them, weighing them down with his wallet. “It’s worth a try. You might see something that Hank and his wife don’t. Or you might stir things up, push them into making some sort of move.”

And if she hadn’t wanted to avoid that area so badly, it might even have made good sense. But…

She didn’t.

“It’s been quiet for days,” she told him. “They’ve given up. I’m beginning to think we were right all along. We didn’t underestimate these guys. We
overestimated
them. That Hank is still alive and kicking pretty much proves the point. It’s obvious there are more than just the two dead guys involved, but if they were truly bad-ass BGs, Hank would have been gone the minute his SUV waddled back home.”

“There’s one way to make sure,” Rio suggested, not bothering to be subtle about it.

“There are plenty of ways to make sure,” Kimmer shot back at him. She bit off more of the ice cream than she’d meant to, and struggled with a surge of brain freeze. Dammit. “I’m tired of the whole goat role, that’s for sure. It’s gotten boring, and boring is dangerous. How’s Wolchoski doing in county, anyway? Might be it’s time for another visit. He might be bored, too. Might feel like talking.” It was time to stir the pot…or walk away from it and put herself in the roster for another assignment. She often had periods of inactivity—Owen tended to hold her aside for those times when her knack of reading people would be truly crucial—but the circumstances of this one had made her antsy.

But when Rio nodded, his expression had grown more distant. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking…didn’t have a clue. Only that it made her uneasy. It finally occurred to her to ask. “What?”

And he looked at her with that heartbreakingly honest matter-of-fact way he had and said, “I’m having a hard time with the intensely ironic juxtaposition of your reluctance to connect with your family when it’s killing me to stay away from mine.”

Pow
. Kimmer’s gut flinched from those words, feeling them like a physical blow. She fought to swallow the dab of ice cream in her mouth and somehow managed. Finally managed, too, a few paltry words of understanding. “I’m sorry.”

Not that she felt guilty over how she’d handled Hank. Not that she intended to do anything differently. But she understood, looking at his face, how truly different it was for him. Couldn’t imagine it, but understood that somehow it could be different. Rio looked back at her, his brows drawn enough to shadow troubled eyes.

“Why don’t you call them?” Kimmer said. “It’s been days.”

“Too many days,” Rio said, and finally noticed that a splotch of bright green sherbet had landed on the knee of his jeans. He scrubbed briefly at it with a finger and let it go. “They must be overwhelmed.”

“They’d have called if there was more trouble?” Kimmer asked, uncertain. Nothing on which to base her guess but secondhand acquaintance and that brief glimpse of another way of life.

Rio nodded. “I’d have heard. Caro again, probably. Dammit, I’ll bet they’re trying to protect me. Since I got back—”

Kimmer looked askance at the thought of anyone feeling the need to protect Rio. Tall beyond tall, sturdy with his Danish genes, tempered by years in the CIA. He looked down from his perch on the table and saw her, gave a wry smile of acknowledgment. “They’re my parents,” he said. “And it hasn’t been so very long since they wondered if I wasn’t going to be anything more than a black star on the wall at Langley.”

CIA officers killed in the line of duty and a wall of anonymous stars. Kimmer had been there once, with Owen. Briefly, as a visitor. But the wall had made an impression.

“Even once they knew I’d live…I think it shook them up, seeing me like that.” Rio looked away from her, a rarity. “Rehab took a while. I wasn’t a pretty sight.”

She snorted, unable to keep her natural irreverent humor from coming through. “I find that hard to believe.”

That got him. He looked down at her with a flash of a grin. “Flattery will get you lots of places,” he said. “But you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“So call them,” she repeated.

“Actually,” he said, watching her carefully enough so she knew he was waiting for her reaction, “I’m thinking about going home.”

I
think you should,
she’d said. Never mind the fear that trickled through her at the thought. What if they decided they needed him? What if
he
decided they needed him? Or maybe he’d even find the contrast between his loving family and his loner girlfriend with her twisted sense of humor to be too great.

What if he doesn’t come back?

Not that he’d said any such thing. Not that he’d even earned that kind of distrust.

But Kimmer had learned not to make assumptions.

She heard the zip of his weekender bag. The flicker of relief that he’d packed such a small bag was short-lived; half his things were still in storage with his brother. Before she knew it she lingered in the doorway to the bedroom, watching him stuff a few last things into the side pocket of the carryon. He glanced up, saw her and straightened. “Hey,” he said,
full of reassurance. “They said she’s doing fine. They’ve just been so busy…they can use another hand to get the household changes sorted out. And since my brother’s still trying to run a business…” He shrugged. “If nothing else I can get a few boats into the water while he handles family stuff.”

Kimmer stiffened her spine. She hadn’t meant for him to see that wistful look, but then, she’d never truly been able to hide herself from him. “Your grandmother lives with your parents,” she said, in the manner of someone repeating what they’ve been told but not truly believing it.

Rio grinned. “Oh, yeah. For as long as I can remember. She’s got her own little section of the house and to us kids it was like an inner sanctum.” He finished stuffing something into his bag that probably shouldn’t have been stuffed at all and stopped again, this time his look more serious. “I wouldn’t be going if Owen didn’t agree with you. Whatever was happening here, it’s not happening anymore. The BGs convinced themselves that the keychain stick doesn’t exist.”

“Either that or they decided I wasn’t going to do anything with it anyway.” Kimmer realized she’d crossed her arms over her stomach. Good God. The next step would be going fetal. None of that around here.

With much determination she unfolded her arms and compromised by leaning on the doorjamb and crossing one ankle over the other. “He’s in agreement. Another discreet visit to Wolchoski, and Hunter is done with this. We know these guys are from Pittsburgh—no surprise since Hank is the connection—and we know they want a keychain stick that doesn’t exist. We don’t know to whom the damn recording was supposed to be a threat, and we’ll probably never find out.” She shrugged. “Well, we
could
find out, but Hunter’s not going to waste man hours on something that no longer
poses a threat. They already sent all our info to Pittsburgh. Let them deal with their own dirt.”

“And Hank?”

Kimmer had that one ready. “I’ll call him this evening, after I see Wolchoski. His wife will blow me off again, but if things are still in the clear down there, I think we’re safe to walk away.” Hank might end up in trouble with the law, but he’d earned it. “Owen’s already got something else in mind for me.”
And for you
. But she didn’t say the words. She wanted him back down here on his own, not prodded into obligation.

“Sounds like a plan.” He pulled the crammed weekender upright on the bed, zipper pulls tinking against each other.

Kimmer regarded it with skepticism. “It might explode.”

“Hasn’t yet,” Rio said, and gave her that look, the one that meant he’d seen beneath her words and the face she’d put on. “I’m coming back, you know. As soon as they don’t need the help.”

Whenever that might be.
But out loud she said simply, “Okay.”

He watched her, a long, searching look. He opened his mouth, closed it…and opened it again. “Kimmer,” he said, oh-so-carefully, “how I deal with my family…how you deal with your family…it’s not about them. It’s about you. Whatever you do or don’t do about this thing with Hank, it’s about
you
.”

She heard him. She heard the unspoken parts, too—that it was about the two of them, as well. About Kimmer and Rio. She nodded, unaccepting but understanding. And when she went to kiss him goodbye, she made it one for him to remember.

Albert Wolchoski spent the time awaiting his trial in the Schuyler County jail in Watkins Glen, but there’d be no chat
ting with him there in a way that Owen—or Kimmer—considered discreet. He was still an oddity among the prisoners, an actual big-city goonboy among the drunks and petty criminals and wife-beating scumbags, and his every move and every conversation was of note.

So Kimmer planned to have her little chat when Wolchoski went on his field trip to the Primary Care Center beside the hospital in Montour Falls. All on the up-and-up, as Chief Harrison knew what she was up to and had no problem with it as long as his transporting officer stayed in the room. Rather than make herself another visible oddity at county by joining them at the front end of the trip, she pulled over to the shoulder just south of Watkins Glen and waited. Roger Conners, the transporting officer, expected her.

But sitting there gave her time to think. Too much time. Too many events whirling around the core of her life, sharp-edged and slicing into what she thought she knew. Rio…gone. Leaving a void bigger than she’d imagined possible after only a handful of much-interrupted months together. Her home…invaded. Tossed and turned, and even though she’d expected it to happen, she’d also thought she could deal with it. She’d thought expecting it would prevent the lingering feelings of anger and violation.

Wrong.

And after all these years, she’d made herself vulnerable to her family. She’d let Hank stay in her
home
—almost as big a violation as the break-ins. She’d even phoned him not once but twice.

The second time hadn’t gone any better than the first. Worse, in fact. Hank’s wife Susan had accused her of making trouble, had told her to stay out of their lives. Had hung up on her.

And alone in the violated house, Kimmer had found herself staring at the phone with no better understanding of family than she’d ever had. For all she knew, this was simply part of it. The rudeness, the hanging up.

Then Rio can keep it
.

That wasn’t fair. He’d never hung up on Carolyne; she’d never hung up on him. They played their word games, they teased each other, they got upset with one another…but they didn’t batter at one another.

Fairy tale
. That’s all it was. Rio was wrong. Dealing with family was all about them. It was about what they did to you, and how you managed it.

Kimmer kept her eyes on the rearview mirror, watching for the squad car. She practiced some deep breathing. Her thumbs beat a tattoo on the steering wheel until she realized what she was doing and then went back to the deep breathing. She stared at the cell phone, tempted to call and confirm Wolchoski’s follow-up surgical appointment. And then she glanced in the rearview mirror and froze, astonished by the look of her own face. A haunted look, one she’d so often seen as a young woman but thought she’d long grown out of. She might as well still have that long, unmanageable mane of curls; she might as well still have the port wine stain splashed across the side of her face. Her eyes glinted back at her with the clear deep blue they’d always had, and yet they suddenly struck her as young and frightened and powerless.

She wasn’t that person anymore. She was Chimera as much as Kimmer. Hank’s reappearance into her life, Rio’s departure, her house in a shambles…none of it mattered. She had all the strength of the girl who’d run away to find her own fate. The girl who’d taken her mother’s rules to heart and built
herself into the resourceful young woman who’d once caught Owen Hunter’s eye at a dark bus stop.

And boy, was Wolchoski going to regret he’d been any part of this.

She refocused her attention on the road, ignoring her own reflection in the mirror. And there, finally, came the city squad car. Kimmer started her Miata and rolled along the shoulder until the car passed, then pulled smoothly out to the pavement. Finally. She’d already double-checked on Hank, and after she talked to Wolchoski she could report to Owen and Chief Harrison and throw herself back into her work. She’d leave loose ends behind, but nothing she couldn’t live with. After all, there was no keychain memory stick. No reason the damn goonboys couldn’t eventually figure that out. And Hank had said the two toasted goonboys were the only ones involved in the murder. Whatever else these current goonboys wanted, Hank’s hide was apparently not included. Time to wipe her hands of the whole thing and reclaim the life she’d built for herself.

Even if some very small, very tentative little voice said it all didn’t quite make sense.

The squad car traveled out ahead of her; there was no need to ride its tail on this road. Fifty-five miles an hour, light traffic. But when something even farther out moved across the road, she couldn’t suss out the details, only knew that it raised her hackles.

Here we go.

She leaned on the accelerator, making up ground.

Not enough. The squad car slewed badly over the road, brakes squealing; it lifted off one set of wheels and flirted with flipping before settling to a hard, rocking stop.

By then she could see the figure rise from the shoulder,
could see the Chevy Malibu at the other side of the road cutting across asphalt to angle to a squealing stop in front of the squad car. The figure ran up to the squad car, smashed a crowbar against the window, and tossed an object inside. Smoke instantly poured from the broken window, and by then Kimmer had the Miata up past eighty, swerving around the road debris of the spiked stop stick, shredded tire and crippled squad car to target the back corner fender of the Malibu. And who knew, dammit, that the Malibu’s driver would choose that moment to back up slightly. Just enough so she hit it hard, but not so much that it stopped her cold. The Malibu spun out of her way as her air bag blew, a stunning explosion that knocked her hands off the wheel and left her blinded and dazed.

When she blinked she’d come to a stop and the air bag was slowly collapsing into her lap. A quick, if still blurry, glance to the left showed she’d ended up halfway on the shoulder, clear of oncoming traffic. A quick and blurry glance to the right showed the Malibu turned around to face directly against traffic in the middle of her former lane. And smoke still poured from the squad car with a dark silhouette hunched over the wheel coughing and fumbling in a way that told Kimmer Officer Roger Conners was too stunned or injured or otherwise incapacitated to get his seat belt undone.

And coming back up on the squad car from the shoulder, the same figure she’d seen once before. Hammy Hands.

The goonboys were back on the job.

Kimmer didn’t wait to see if this was a jailbreak or an execution. She fumbled for her own seat belt, grabbing the SIG Sauer holstered at her side, and then surprised herself by tumbling right out of the car when she opened the door.
Get it together!
Half stumbling, half running, she skidded into
place behind the driver’s side front wheel and took another accounting of the scene—the Malibu still where it had been, the driver stunned behind the wheel. Hammy Hands on his way to the back door of the smoke-filled squad car in a crouch that was far from friendly, and Roger Conners still all but passed out at the wheel.

If she was a cop she might have given him warning. She might have tried the old
freeze, sucker!
line that always worked so well in the old cop shows. But she wasn’t, and when she discovered her hands still unsteady from the impact she’d just taken, she merely braced her two-handed grip against the edge of the car before she pulled the trigger.

Hammy Hands spun away from the car, discharging his own gun through the back window with such timeliness that his finger must have already started its pull before Kimmer’s bullet even struck him.

Not a jailbreak. Execution.

Hammy Hands rolled away from the car and into a desperate crawl away from the vehicle, gun still in hand and with any luck quickly clogging with debris as it jammed into the ground along the way. Kimmer pushed away from the Miata, one eye on Hammy Hands and one on the anonymous figure silhouetted behind the wheel of the Malibu. Pigeon Man, no doubt. His hands moved on the wheel, cranking the tires around; roadside gravel and bits of scattered glass spat back at Kimmer as Pigeon Man hit the gas, the tires squealing until they took solid hold.

For an instant Kimmer was impressed with herself, that her very approach would scare him into leaving a colleague behind. And then she realized there were people on the other side of the road—Good Samaritans, stopping to help a cop in a traffic accident without even thinking the accident wasn’t
an accident at all. Hadn’t they even heard the gunfire? Kimmer made sure they would, firing off a round into the hard ground of the shoulder and not waiting for their reaction as she turned her complete attention back to Hammy Hands, certain by now he’d think to turn back on her and catching him just as he torqued his body around to swing his sights on her while the rest of him still lay in the dirt.

No time to brace on anything, hardly time to bring the gun up into a Weaver stance, both hands supporting the grip, body centered and balanced and
blam!
the 9 mm round drilled Hammy Hands in the chest. He fell back and she wasted no time darting up to grab his gun, her eyes watering at the smoke curling out of the squad car windows to dissipate on the light breeze.

Please be calling for help, people. Please don’t just be gawking.

They’d crossed out of Watkins Glen…surely there was a sheriff’s deputy around here somewhere. Or a state trooper. Or even the nearest EMTs…

Kimmer wrenched the gun from Hammy Hands’s weak grip and hesitated long enough to realize his gurgling noises were a plea for help. She gave him a hard look. His big hand wrapped around her ankle, changing the plea to a demand, his fingers digging into thin skin over bone, painful enough to feel like he’d cratered her flesh. She deciphered his first guttural words even as he repeated them, “Get help.”