Chapter 6
By sunset I was ready to roll. I didn’t want another run-in with GI Jane, but if she came at me again, I would get her.
I pulled my black leather jacket over the shoulder holster. I had the Smith & Wesson on me, freshly loaded with gleaming silver bullets. I wasn’t going to take chances with a smaller gun. At my back I had my SIG, and my knife was in its thigh sheath.
Still, I felt naked. I wondered if it would look suspicious if I drove around with the carbine on my back again, but I decided against it. The S&W would pack the right kind of punch, and the carbine hadn’t helped the night before.
I’d applied makeup around my eye and on my jaw to cover up the yellowish smudge the bruises had gone down to, but it looked wrong. The color was wrong for my skin tone, so I washed it off again. I didn’t really care what I looked like, but I didn’t want to look like I was trying to cover something up.
My phone vibrated in my pocket as I walked out the door.
“The reporter was here again today.” Ruben’s gravelly voice scraped through the speaker.
“You sure she doesn’t just want to write a review of your excellent accounting skills?”
Ruben’s firm had a good name, and he was charming enough to fool people who didn’t know the truth. Reporters fell into the “ignorant” bracket – in spite of all their research, and they ended up empty-handed almost every time.
“This one’s not letting go. She keeps coming by after hours, and she won’t listen when I tell her the office is closed.”
“Well, you are in the business of handling accounts for some vampires. Maybe it’s about that. But I’ll watch out,” I said. I slid one leg over my bike and straddled it. “I’ll come in in about an hour.”
I hung up before he could argue with me. This was business, after all. He’d pointed Jennifer in my direction, and he’d pay me for my time.
Joel was waiting for me in his open garage when I pulled in.
“What happened to you?” he asked the moment I took my helmet off. Like my sister, he knew that I healed up fast, and he was doing the math. I wondered if I should have covered up after all.
“Someone’s on my trail,” I admitted.
He looked concerned and lifted his hand to my face. His fingers brushed the skin under my eye, sending small jolts of electricity through my face. Maybe in a different life something more could have happened between us.
“It’s nothing. Just looks bad,” I said, leaning back so he wouldn’t touch me anymore.
“You need to up your training skills if you’re going to be fighting your victims like this.”
“It wasn’t a victim. She said something about me getting away with who I am, but to be honest, I was getting beaten up too much to follow the conversation.”
“She?”
I nodded. “I don’t know who she is, but she’s a damn good fighter.”
Joel shook his head and turned toward the door, expecting me to follow. I did.
“You’re going to back yourself into a corner one of these days,” he said over his shoulder.
I shrugged, but he couldn’t see it as we stepped into the stairwell.
The place looked neater than it had the night before, and I wondered if he had domestic help that he let down here once in a while. I didn’t trust anyone with my equipment, but maybe he had found someone he could rely on. To each his own. Trust in general wasn’t my strong suit.
Joel sat down in front of his computer. The bluish light fell on his face and colored his skin, making him seem bruised, like me.
“I didn’t get much for you. The system is still a tough one to crack. Whatever they’re using, it’s top of the line. My software could only do so much.”
“I didn’t know you could be outsmarted,” I teased. Joel prided himself on his ability to get into any system in the world if he wanted to.
“Are you trying to be funny?” he asked. “Because you’re not.”
His fingers clacked on the keys, and windows popped open on the screen.
“Did you get the e-mail I forwarded to you?” I asked.
“I printed it out. It’s still in the rack,” he said, not looking at me.
I walked over to the corner where his printers and scanners were set up and took the pages out of the printing tray. I flipped through them.
“You don’t usually take jobs on personally,” he said. He was talking about the fact that I’d sent him the details from my home e-mail and not from work.
“I’m working on a search-and-rescue. Ruben thinks he’s being funny.”
“Nice of you to give back to the community once in a while.”
“Bite me.”
Joel snickered. “The guy your social security number brought up – his name’s O’Neill.”
“What?”
I walked over to him. O’Neill was a common surname, but this kind of coincidence didn’t just happen. Not in Westham. Not to me. I bent over Joel’s shoulder and looked at the screen.
“Connor O’Neill, 442 Caldwell, Westham Hills,” Joel read out loud. “There’s a secondary address listed.”
I scrunched the edge of the paper I was holding, and it crackled in my fist. “Thirteen Mulberry Street?”
Joel scrolled down. “Yes, actually. How did you—?”
I held up the papers in my hand. Joel looked at them, and my eyes fell on the screen where the photo attached to his findings had opened.
The same photo was on the papers in my hand.
Ruben and Jennifer were after the same guy.
Shit.