“Fuck no. Damn it, Kane. Stay away. I have a job to do here.”
“Umbrella Man hit one block from our fucking apartment,” he says. “And Ghost was there?”
“Yes, but—”
“No but about this, Lilah, and if you need this in your own language: fuck no, Lilah. Nothing about that says you stay there without me. I’m coming for you. Don’t make me walk to your fucking crime scene and drag you out of there. Ghost is a killer of killers.”
“Is there any part of you that gets that I made it years without you, Kane? Or is your ego so damn big that it’s going to make your head explode one day and then I’ll have to get two caskets to bury you.”
“You were never without me, beautiful, and you know it.”
“Right. My stalker who did a whole lot of shit to piss me off. Don’t do more now. Stay away. Ghost and I stood across from each other pointing guns at each other. I told you. He didn’t come here for me.”
“He showed himself to you. He damn sure came for you.”
“He could have killed me. Hell, I could have killed him, and holy fuck, I wish I would have, but I wanted to know who hired him. Who hired him, Kane?”
“I’ll let you know after I talk to Ghost,” he says, and I can hear the rain pounding his windows.
“You think he’s just going to tell you?”
“I know he will,” he counters. “Ghost doesn’t warn his victims. He has another agenda.”
“I’m not a fucking idiot, Kane. You not only said and I quote ‘He came for me’ but you just diverted your car for a reason.”
“I’m a man of abundant caution. You know that, Lilah.”
“You’re fucking an FBI agent, Kane. I wouldn’t call that abundant caution.”
“I do more than fuck an FBI agent, beautiful. And who better to protect me?”
“Careful or I’ll think you have an agenda,” I say.
“Many where you’re concerned, my love, and you know it.”
“Are you trying to get me to shoot you instead of Ghost?” I don’t wait for a reply. “We both know—” I stop midsentence, my gaze rocketing to a glint of steel off the rooftop catching in the artificial lighting of the emergency crews, a stab of warning in my belly.
There it is again.
Another glint.
Fuck.
He’s still here, and I’m not even sure if I mean Umbrella Man, Ghost, or both. All I know is one of them needs to die today.
“Lilah?”
At Kane’s prod, I force a reply. “I have to go, but do not come here, or I swear to god I’ll shoot you myself, someplace painful but not deadly. In the hand. Hands bleed a lot.”
He says something in Spanish that sounds really fucking dirty. The man just made that about sex. Jesus. I hang up, and I’m already shoving my phone in my pocket. I step out from under the overhang, into the pounding rain, and rather than reach for my gun, an obvious move someone like Ghost would spy, I keep my hands free and ready to act. I dart across to the pavement, bypassing the crime scene. Hurrying to the side of a fire truck, I round the building and pull my weapon. Freshly armed, I enter the alleyway that runs on the opposite side of the building that sported the rooftop flash of steel. And I’m not alone. I feel it. I feel him. I flatten myself against the wall and watch the rain hit the pavement, darkness swallowing the droplets until the moment they make contact. I don’t move. I barely breathe.
I just watch and wait.
Seconds tick by that turn into minutes in which the cold weight of my jeans hangs heavily on my legs. The control freak in me that my father has called “ridiculous” often in my life, too fucking often, wants to force the next move. I want to own this crime scene and the person who created it, but I rein in my energy, forcing patience. Something that, oddly, most people don’t seem to believe I possess. They’re wrong. If I didn’t possess patience, I really would be a killer.
There’s a shift in the air, a charge interrupted, as thunder erupts with such sudden force that the wall vibrates behind me, while the rain seems to pour from the sky. It’s the distraction whoever is in this alleyway with me uses and uses well. The asshole piece of shit I’m hunting slams to the ground on two solid feet right in front of me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Whoever is in front of me might as well be invisible.
There’s a fucking black hole of darkness swallowing me alive, but instinct is one of those rare friends that I actually tolerate. It kicks in, and my weapon is instantly aimed in front of me, but at what, or who, I don’t have a fucking clue. A second later, an open umbrella all but pokes my eye out. I don’t even think about shooting wild and not because I’m one of those little bitches who freezes under pressure. I’m not. Evident in the way I stabbed a man a few dozen times after being raped. I’m okay with killing someone if they need to die, but I prefer to see them when I pull the trigger or shove the knife in their chest. Then I know they’re the right person. I know they deserve what they get.
I shove aside the umbrella, ready to find that confirmation, but my attacker is already running away, which makes him the little bitch. I lift my weapon and step into position to shoot, but something deep in my belly says no, don’t shoot. But I want to shoot, I want to shoot, but something feels wrong, really fucking wrong.
“Damn it,” I murmur, lowering my weapon, launching myself after the runner, barreling through the storm, watching the umbrella-wielding fool clear the alleyway.
I’m there right behind him, a streetlight giving way to a full view of his hooded frame when he runs straight into a WWE-sized man in a NYPD rain jacket. The officer catches the runner’s upper arms and holds him in place. “What are you doing, kid?” he demands.
Kid.
Thank god I didn’t shoot. And thank fuck, the rain faucet is abruptly dialed back to a sprinkle.
“I just wanted to see what was happening!” the kid screams. “I just wanted to see what was happening. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” The kid starts rambling in Spanish.
“Agent Love,” I announce, stepping beside the officer, his hard features turning harder as his gaze lands on me.
“I know who you are,” he bites out.
“Good,” I say, reading between the lines. He’s heard trash about me, and he believed it, and he apparently operates off of secondhand information, which tells me what I need to know about him, none of it good. I eye the “kid” who can’t be more than a pre-teen. “Name?” I say, bypassing a lame effort at Spanish, because cursing in Kane’s first language, and at Kane in his first language, is where my true skills lie.
“Diego,” the kid says. “I’m Diego, and I’m sorry. I just wanted to know what was going on. I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I ran.”
“Where do you live, Diego?”
He recites an address a few blocks away. “My mom told me to come see what was going on.”
I doubt that, but I don’t care how he got to that alleyway. I care about getting him out of here. “And if we take you home right now, will your mom be there?”
“Yes,” he says, “Yes. I swear. She wanted me to see what was going on. She didn’t know I’d come down here to where the police cars are. She’s a good mom. Please don’t think she’s bad. She’s not bad. She didn’t know I’d do this!”
In other words, he’s where he shouldn’t be and he’s afraid of getting in trouble. I might feel bad for the kid, but I could have shot his little ass. The Umbrella Man could have shot him. I lift my weapon to show it to him. “I could have shot you,” I say. “Somebody else would have.”
He starts to cry. Typically, I prefer making grown men rather than kids cry, but in this case, it’s good. The kid needs to cry. He needs to shit his pre-teenage pants. Me and this badge have seen shit, bad shit. Nasty shit. The premise of scared straight needs to be put to work right here, right now, while he’s just a good kid who did a stupid thing.
He’s also not the person I felt in that alleyway. Someone else was there.
I cut the officer a look. “Take him home and confirm his story. And make sure he doesn’t have a record.”
At this point, two additional officers have joined us, and the officer holding the kid hands him off to another and says, “Do as she said.” He then faces me, pulling off his hood to allow me to see his sharp features, shaved head, straight nose, and the splay of lines by his eyes that ages him to at least forty.
“Sergeant Morris,” he says. “I’m the ranking officer.”
Ranking officer with an attitude. A common illness that I usually blow off, but I’m not blowing him off. In this moment, I decide that I don’t like him, and not just a little but in a deep, instant, profound way. I also don’t like that he’s here, by this alleyway, when it’s technically not part of the crime scene. “Clearly, ranking officer makes you above taking the kid home.” I pull down my hood, as well, and eye the scratch on his face, down his cheek. “What is it that you have to say to me, Sergeant? Because you obviously have something to say or you wouldn’t be squaring off with me.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was.”
“Because you’re standing here, staring me down, to do what? Ask me out for coffee later?”
“Kane Mendez wouldn’t like that, right?”
“Ah, there it is. The bullshit I’ve been waiting on. Does it shoot just from your mouth or from your ass, too?”
“I’m the guy who keeps things real.”
“Real, is it? Well then, let me join the ‘keeping it real’ party. If Kane Mendez is all you got, you’ll have to think harder on ways to rattle me. Like perhaps eating the last donut when I’m at the precinct. Why are you back here by this alley instead of securing the scene?”
“I saw you run in this direction and thought you might need backup.”
It’s not unbelievable, if someone else said it. From him, it’s bullshit and ten kinds of bullshit in fact. “Secure the alley,” I say. “Do we know who the victim is?”
“Detective Williams.”
“The other victim,” I say.