Wrapped Up with a Ranger

13

The subtle vibration of Holt’s watch had him wide awake in an instant. For a moment, he blinked in the dark before easing his arm from around Cayla so he could read the notification. She murmured in her sleep, shifting to cuddle closer.

When he saw the readout and the follow-up texts, he swore, sitting up and reaching for his prosthesis.

“Holt? What’s wrong?” Voice thick with sleep, Cayla pressed a hand to his back. “Did you have a bad dream?”

He wished it were a bad dream. That would be preferable to what he might be walking into. “Alarm’s gone off at the bakery. I’m gonna go check it out. Go on back to sleep.”

He’d already donned his leg and headed for the closet and the lockbox, where he kept his sidearm by the time she came fully awake and switched on the bedside lamp.

“You shouldn’t go up there alone.”

“I won’t be. The police should already be en route, and the guys are on their way.” He checked the magazine and the safety on the Beretta 92FS before sliding it back into the holster and clipping it inside the waistband of his pants.

Cayla’s eyes were wide as she tracked the movement.

“It’ll be fine. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m highly trained.”

Her cheeks paled. “I also haven’t forgotten someone tried to kill Mia up there a few months ago.”

“Brax got to him first. I swear, I’ll be careful. Try to go back to bed. You need more sleep.” He brushed a quick kiss over her temple.

She caught at his hand and squeezed. “There’s not a chance in hell I’m going back to sleep. Let me know what’s going on as soon as you can.”

“Promise.”

He pulled out of the driveway just in time to see Brax doing the same from up the street. They made it to the bakery in less than ten minutes. The alarm was still blaring. The cops hadn’t arrived yet, but Holt knew from prior experience that Stone County only had two or three deputies on duty at any given time. If they were at the ass end of the county, it might be a while. The vacation rental Jonah had snagged was a bit further out of town as well, so he’d take a few more minutes.

Holt slid out of the 4-Runner as Brax stepped from his truck. Mia sat white-faced in the passenger seat. After what she’d been through here, being held at gunpoint, having a man killed beside her, being here in the middle of the night was hardly going to bring up good memories. But Holt understood why Brax hadn’t left her home alone. While he’d shot the man who’d tried to kill her, no one had been able to track down who’d hired the thug.

Brax had his own weapon out. “We waiting on Jonah?”

“Doubt anybody’s still inside, but just in case. Split and circle around?”

With a nod, they broke apart, checking the perimeter of the building. The front door remained locked. They’d invested in a heavier door and locking system after events of the spring. But the lock on the rear kitchen door had clearly been jimmied. It hung ajar. Bracing himself for chaos, he nudged the door open and stepped inside for the sweep, Brax on his heels. But the kitchen seemed to be intact. They continued moving through the space, to the swinging door and out to the public area. The front was definitely not fine. But Holt bit back the curse and kept moving until they cleared the bathrooms and confirmed what his gut had already told him. Their perpetrator was long gone.

Holstering his weapon, Holt strode to the security panel and turned off the alarm.

Brax flipped on a light. “Son of a fucking bitch.”

The refrigerated bakery cases they’d nabbed for a steal from Nashville had both been overturned, the glass shattered. The floors beneath were likewise damaged, though it wasn’t clear whether that was separate or had happened in the course of flipping over the cases.

Jonah strode inside, letting fly a long string of some of the more creative curses Holt had heard during his military career. “One day. We’ve been open one fucking day for real, and now this?” He paced the room, hands laced behind his head, his boots crunching on pieces of glass.

“I thought we were done with this shit,” Brax muttered. “Why now? What purpose does this serve? Mia’s not even been on site since the renovation finished over a month ago, other than to pick up food.”

Holt stared at the damaged cases. “I don’t think this has anything to do with Mia.”

“What are you thinking? If it’s anything that’s gonna put my wife more at ease, I’m game to hear it.”

“This feels petty. Vindictive. A strike at us, not her.” He considered. “What if we were wrong about everything that went down before? What if it had nothing to do with Mia at all?”

“I’m sorry. Did you forget that asshole tried to kill my wife?”

“No, I’m not disputing that. But what if she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Everything we found was centered around this place,” Holt argued. “When he had Mia, Abruzzi kept talking about a flash drive. Somebody hired him to find some kind of information that he, for whatever reason, believed was here. Think about it. The supply theft slowed down renovations. The vandalism slowed down renovations.”

“What about the surveillance equipment in Mia’s office?” Brax demanded.

“We didn’t find jack shit when we searched her house. The malware Cash found on the Mountainview Construction computers would’ve given Abruzzi access to work schedules, which would have theoretically given him an idea of when he could search. The surveillance equipment here could have been an effort to keep up with whether that flash drive, or whatever it was he really wanted, was found by one of us or the crew.”

Jonah crossed his arms. “You’re suggesting that whoever hired Abruzzi hired someone else to pick up where he left off?”

“It’s a theory. We never got any true confirmation that everything centered on Mia at all. The evidence was circumstantial. The idea that someone would really come after her ten years after her father’s death never sat well with me, but we didn’t have any other explanations at the time. Brax had just found out about her past, so it was fresh in his mind, and we didn’t have any reason not to go along with it. What if we built the entire theory around confirmation bias?”

Brax stared at him. “Let me get this straight. You think Mia was never in direct danger except for the fact that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time that last night Abruzzi showed up?”

“Maybe.” Holt gestured at the busted display cases. “It doesn’t make logical sense that this would have anything to do with her. And what are the chances that we’d just happen to get targeted again by someone else mere months later?”

“I mean, I’d love to jump all over that theory because it would mean Mia’s safe. But I’m not willing to take any chances with her.”

Jonah’s brows drew together. “It’s a theory worth some consideration. But to play devil’s advocate, what if this isn’t a strike at us but is actually a strike at you? I mean, this wasn’t the slick security override we saw before. It was a basic jimmied lock and smash up job. I’m not buying that somebody hired a guy like Abruzzi and then sent a thug with no skills to finish the job. We have to consider that you have Cayla’s ex all pissed off that you’re in what he considers his territory.”

“Is this the kind of thing he’d pull, though?” Brax asked. “He went away for white collar crime, right? Busting shit up doesn’t seem to fit.”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask her. Right now, I guess we can be grateful that whoever it was didn’t get very far into the process. The alarm did its job.”

“And so did the cameras. Look.”

They all crowded around Jonah’s phone to watch the video feed of the break-in. The perpetrator was dressed all in black, including a ski mask. It was hard to tell, but the build seemed right for Raynor. Then again, the guy was pretty average, so the same could be said of a lot of people. Whoever it was came straight in and tipped over the cases, squatting down to do something behind them.

“What’s he doing?” Jonah asked.

“Prying up the floorboards. Doesn’t know there’s concrete underneath, I guess,” Brax said.

The sound of tires crunching on gravel drew their attention out front.

“That’ll be cops. I’ll go meet with the deputy,” Jonah sighed.

“I’m gonna go reassure my wife.”