Nauti Nights (16 page)

Her calm slipped, just a little bit, as she stared back at him incredulously, her fingers fisting in the sheet she held around her. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Do you have furniture that needs to be moved?”

“No, I don’t,” she replied with sugary sweetness. “Because I’m not moving in here with you indefinitely.

As soon as I can, I’m returning to the house.”

The house she shared with Alex was small and located farther outside of town than she liked, but it was

nice. It was home.

It was nothing like the nice apartment she had shared with her roommate Mark and his lover Ty: the

two-bedroom, ultramodern, brightly lit apartment with a balcony that overlooked the beach. It hadn’t been home, though. Somerset was home.

“Tell me, Crista, do you want to die?” he asked her then. “Because you will. Those men at that warehouse weren’t playing games with those bullets, fancy-face. They were serious. And now, someone else could

possibly believe you have their money. How long do you think it will take them to find you and slit your throat in your sleep?”

Crista felt the color leech from her face.

“But I didn’t have anything to do with that,” she argued weakly, feeling the stupidity in her response even as it came out of her lips.

“You were there.”

“Accidentally.” She shook her head at the futility of her own argument. “Money’s involved, right? They

won’t just kill me.”

“No. They’ll torture you first.” He nodded with mock sobriety. “They’ll tie you down, cut you a little, let you bleed some. Rape you, most likely.” His gaze flickered over her with a flare of inner rage. “And when they realize you don’t know anything, they’ll really start having fun. You’ll pray to die before they finish.

Is that what you want?”

She was shaking by the time he finished, knowing he was right, knowing her life had just taken a very

serious turn for the worse.

She breathed out wearily. “I don’t have furniture. Just some clothes.” And not a lot, at that. Most of her stuff she was still waiting for. Mark and Ty had been good enough to hold it for her until she had a place for it. She just hadn’t found a place yet.

The same furniture and small items that she thought had been waiting for her at that warehouse. They

hadn’t been there. Her earlier call to Mark had confirmed that he hadn’t sent anything.

A year.

Had a year really gone by since she left Virginia?

A year that she had been steeped in the memories she had deliberately pushed behind her when she left

home. Memories that had the power to break her if she didn’t get a handle on them. Getting a handle on

them hadn’t been easy.

He nodded abruptly. “Get your shower and get dressed. We’ll pack the rest of your stuff and bring it here.

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You can keep your car in the private marina parking that Uncle Ray lets us use.”

“I still need a job.” Her chin lifted defiantly.

“I can put you to work at the lumber store.” He shrugged. “I hear you’re pretty slick in the office.”

Crista’s eyes narrowed. “I applied there months ago. There were no openings.”

“I’m the boss; I’ll make an opening,” he gritted out.

“And you couldn’t make one before I had to take that job at the diner?”

He grinned, devilry glittering in his gaze then. “I didn’t have enough incentive then. Maybe I do now.”

If she had something to throw at him, she would have given a pitch worthy of a baseball player at that

moment, just to wipe the smirk off his face.

“You’re a real ass, Dawg,” she sneered instead.

“So I keep hearing, fancy-face. So I keep hearing.”

NINE

Aaron Grael was dead, and no one else was talking. As far as the thieves and the buyers were concerned,

there was no one missing from either little group. And that was bullshit. They already knew that, a million of the two million dollar price tag on the missiles had been paid to a middleman, or woman as the case

may be. And Dawg knew Grael had been convinced Crista was that woman two seconds before Dawg

killed him.

Dawg’s report was turned in. He had seen Grael firing at the team; he had wounded several of them.

Dawg had made the shot and taken him out. It wasn’t exactly a lie, of course, but it wasn’t the truth,

either.

Now they had to figure out where the missing middle person was, where the money was, and how it

affected the case.

The four experimental, newly designed Sidewinders could be launched from greater distances and carried

an explosive weight nearly double their predecessors. And they could be nuclear-armed.

They were built with detonation chips, a safeguard that disabled the missiles entirely and effectively

halted any chance of detonation or guidance of the weapon without them. They were to have been

transported to Fort Knox without those chips before heading to another base. But, somehow, the Army

fucked up. The missiles were shipped with their safety chips, and the shipment was hijacked.

Fortunately for the task force, it seemed the hijacking was done by a group with little or no experience in the stealing and selling of the Sidewinder missiles.

A Swedish mercenary had negotiated the buy for a Middle Eastern terrorist with fingers in damned near

every conflict in the world. The Swede, alias Akron Svengaurrd, had contacted Aaron Grael for the

exchange of half the money down and two of the safety and guidance chips. The rest of the money would

come once the chips were authenticated—and the Army had made certain they were authenticated—and

the missiles were in place for the Swede’s team to pick up.

The operation the combined ATF and Homeland Security task force were working netted not just the

thieves but the Swede as well. And it was the Swede they had wanted most. Him and the missiles.

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The thieves might not have had much experience in the stealing and selling of weapons, but they were

damned smart. And they had the contacts imperative in such a sell. It had also made them harder to catch.

They were paranoid, and they were damned careful. And the only man they had a chance of getting any

information out of was dead.

Because Dawg had a hard-on for Crista.

“The woman was there.” Timothy Cranston wiped his hand over his balding crown in a sign of disgust as

he handed out the reports to be passed around. “No one identified her; no one saw where she went.”

“Do you think she killed Grael?” Greta Dane, a grimly determined agent at Dawg’s right spoke up.

“Why would she kill him?” Natches snorted. “That’s her money man. She would want him alive.”

“He could identify her,” Greta pointed out with a snide look in Natches’s direction. “And he would have

known there would be plenty of his guys left alive when the smoke cleared. Someone could have talked.”

“She didn’t kill our man,” Timothy assured them all, glancing at Dawg. “Shot came from the back of the

head and from Dawg’s weapon. Autopsy confirmed it this morning. The camera’s put our lady in front of

him. After she disappeared behind those crates closest to the wall, she disappeared from sight completely.

All we have on the outside cameras is some erratic shadowing too large to be a woman.”

Dawg sat back in his chair and kept his mouth carefully shut. He didn’t give a damn that Grael was dead, but he knew Cranston was pissed. Ultimately, it would work for them rather than against them. The

Swede was a major player in several conflicts; just catching him had been an incredible coup.

Which was pretty much Cranston’s opinion. But it also left the team with a contact they had been lusting after, a potential double agent.

And that was too bad. That contact was a dead end, and Dawg’s lust had come first. He had dibs on it.

“I want to know who that woman was,” Timothy barked in irritation. “Come on, boys and girls. All we

have is brown hair, brown eyes, slender, and pretty. That’s a third of the fucking women in this state or any other. If we get her, we get the money and hopefully break the silence among the thieves. This is the weak link, or they wouldn’t be so nervous they’re pacing their cells. She’s our weak link. I can feel it.”

Dawg almost grinned. Timothy’s fat little hands were rubbing together in glee.

He was the most unlikely looking OHS agent that Dawg had ever seen. Portly, grandfatherly, the crown of

his head shining, and the short gray hair around it standing out in spikes, he looked more like an

accountant or overworked executive than one of the sharpest minds in Homeland Security.

“Dawg, have you or Natches heard anything new?” Timothy barked then.

The lumberyard and Natches’s garage were two of the gossip points in the county. Information on the

theft had come to Dawg’s lumberyard before news of it had made the agency channels. Considering the

fact that so far, news of it hadn’t hit the television or radio stations, they were fairly certain it had to have leaked from the thieves themselves.

“Johnny’s come up clear on involvement.” Dawg grimaced at the thought of his estranged cousin, who

raked on his nerves worse than nails over a chalkboard. The news of the hijacking had first come from

Johnny when he stopped by the lumber store to buy shelving materials for the bakery goods store he

owned outside of town. “We can’t place him anywhere with our buyers or sellers, and according to the

agent that questioned him, he overheard it at the store. But he gets a lot of customers, especially

out-of-towners and soldiers from Fort Knox, so that makes sense. He could have just heard about the

hijacking. And he likes to gossip about everything he hears.”

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Asking Johnny where he heard it hadn’t worked out, and Dawg and Natches both knew better than to push

it. The snaky little bastard would immediately see a weakness and strike.

“Would you know it if you even heard anything?” Greta suggested snidely, her honey-colored eyes

gleaming with bitterness in her pale, freckled face.

It was rumored that she had lost family to a terrorist attack, and Dawg had always tried to temper his

sarcasm toward her, for that fact alone, but her own bitterness was beginning to create a sense of tension in the team whenever she was around.

“Meaning?” He arched his brows mockingly.

“Meaning these are your people.” She waved her hand to the files and reports. “Whoever stole the missiles knows this area like a native. Which means the woman is probably a native. You wouldn’t suspect a

friend or an ex-lover.”

He heard Natches snort mockingly at that statement.

“Sweetheart, I live for paranoia. I suspect everyone but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” He gave her a toothy grin and watched as irritation thickened in her expression. “Are you in that group?”

“Dawg.” Timothy’s voice was a warning little snarl. He was always snarling when he wasn’t rubbing his

hands in glee.

Dawg turned back to him, his brow lifting in question as Natches smirked behind him.

“Don’t you two get on my nerves.” He pointed his finger back at them demandingly. “I won’t be nice.”

Bald and portly he might be, but he could put a hurtin’ on the ego if a man wasn’t careful.

“Go over that information, and we’ll meet back here tomorrow afternoon,” Timothy finally ordered with

an edge of frustration. “Keep your eyes and ears open and hope we get something before the week is out,

or my boss is going to rip all our asses. Boys, we don’t want that.”

Dawg flipped open the file, his gaze running over the pages in a slow scan. He was more concerned about

finding any incriminating evidence that could have come up against Crista than he was information he had already read. If she was guilty, now was the best time to know. If she wasn’t, then she would gain the

benefit of the doubt until he saw otherwise. But not a lack of suspicion.

They were lucky. Crista had been in the shadows the entire time she had been there when the agents

moving into the warehouse had assumed she was with the buyers. They had swarmed the back end of the

cavernous building and worked their way forward.

Dawg had gone after Grael when the other man had sprinted for the shadowed, crated area in the front of

the warehouse. Grael had gone after the woman he believed had betrayed him. If Dawg had been a second

later, Crista would have died.

No one could possibly know Dawg was involved in this investigation. Other than the task force members,

no one else could have known. And they were die-hard agents. It would shock him to his back teeth to

find out one of them was a traitor.

But hell, he had been wrong before. And as he said, trust wasn’t one of his virtues. If he even had a virtue.

He was a vices type of guy, virtues weren’t his strong point.

The file was empty of any incriminating evidence against Crista, which meant he didn’t have to tell

Cranston she was involved. At least, not just yet.

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Slapping the file closed on the desk, Dawg rose to his feet and glanced at Natches. His cousin was rising from his own chair and snagged the dark glasses he had left lying on the table.

“Ready to roll?” Natches smirked, his dark, forest green eyes gleaming with amusement.

He knew Crista was waiting for them at the lumber store, safely ensconced in Dawg’s office and going