Chasing Shadows (9 page)

Chase watched in fascination as KC's fingers traced the outline of her tattoo, a green, blue and purple lizard lying on its back, juggling balls with the yin/yang symbol in the air.  Most of the lizard's body and tail lay hidden beneath the waistband of her jeans.  

She took his hands in hers, placed them on her hips.  "Want to see the rest?" 

Chase felt a thump in his chest as his heart misfired.  She tilted her head to look up at him, long black eyelashes curling out over deep brown, almond-shaped eyes.  Chase was lost, drowning in those depths.  How could he not have noticed her eyes before?  Sure the purple hair distracted him, and those luscious lips, but still—

"What do you say, Big Bro?"  

He followed her gaze to the frilly white and gold canopy bed.  Exactly the kind of bed his mother would've bought if her baby girl, Diana, had survived.  But Sally Westin had only two living children, both of them sons.  

Chase jerked his head up as the image of Jay and KC tangled together on the bed filled his mind.  He sucked in his breath and stepped back, pulling his hands free of her.  

He couldn't do it.  As much as his body yearned to capture hers, to expose every one of her secrets, Chase just couldn't.

KC cocked her head and arched an eyebrow as if surprised by his reaction.  

"Suit yourself, then."  She gestured to the window he'd climbed in through.  "Best go out the same way you came."

Chase hated the urge that swept over him at the sight of her standing in front of him, hands on her hips, offering him something he could only dream of.  He wanted to take her, take everything she had to give and more, he wanted to drown in her scent, devour every inch of her flesh, wanted—

Chase choked down his impulse and took another step closer to the window and escape.  But he could not tear his eyes away from her.  Then she made it easy.  Her gaze flicked down to the obvious bulge in his jeans, and she smirked.  

"Stay away from my brother," Chase warned, opening the window and sliding over the ledge to the porch roof below.  The frigid air was bracing, restoring him to his senses as he climbed down to the yard.

He'd been a fool to come here.  To let a girl get the better of him so easily.  All she'd done was bat her lashes and wiggle her finger, and he'd practically fallen into her lap.  Poor Jay, no wonder he couldn't escape KC's power—an innocent kid like him, always seeing the good in everyone, he wouldn't stand a chance against a vixen like her.

KC was strictly poison.  Chase would find someway to keep her away from his brother.  Without becoming trapped by her venomous claws himself.

CHAPTER 11

KC locked the window, turned off the lights and crouched in a corner.  She'd almost lost control, almost allowed Chase Westin to get everything he had come for.  What was she thinking?  She was such an idiot to start down that path. 

But something about Westin fascinated her.  It was as if two men shared the same skin.  One the war hero, the man who'd saved the lives of dozens of his comrades, the eldest of the family who valiantly defended his baby brother's honor.   

The other the criminal, disgraced, betrayer of his oath of honor. 

If the second was the real Chase Weston, why had he left?  Her play-acting kiss had spontaneously combusted into a flash fire she knew Westin had felt.  Lord knew, she had.  Yet, he'd walked away, concerned only about his brother. 

KC slid free the knife sheathed at the neckline of her vest, twirled it between her fingers.  Her hands responded to the blade automatically without her having to think or look.  

She knew as well as anyone that a knife was useless in a gunfight and no substitute for the two Glocks she carried, but she felt better feeling its slim outline between her shoulder blades, knowing that if anything went wrong she had a backup plan.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, that was KC's motto.  

Should have been better prepared for Westin.  Next time she would be, she vowed.  The man wasn't going to overwhelm her defenses, not again, not with his brother's life in her hands.

The blade flew from her fingers, winging through the darkness to impale itself in the exact center of the windowsill, the last place Chase Westin had touched.

"Hey, KC!" Carson bellowed up the steps.  "Get down here, now!"

KC jumped to her feet.  Damn Carson, he was supposed to stay out of sight.  This had better be good, she thought, retrieving her knife before joining him and Glenn downstairs in the surveillance room as she prayed that his voice and Glenn's sounded similar enough to fool anyone listening.

"That's your Westin guy, right?" Carson was pointing to an enhanced digital image on one of his computer screens.  It showed Westin's military identification.  Amazing how much the man had changed in less than a year since the photo was taken.  In the photo, his eyes gleamed with pride, chin jutting forward, ready to lead a charge.  Now his face was all edges, eyes hollowed out, hair long past escaping anything close to a military cut, it now curled against his collarbone.  Not that she'd been paying attention.

"Yeah, so?"  What was all the excitement about? 

"I've been playing with the facial recognition software—tweaking it, you know?" Carson said as his fingers raced over the keyboard.  Hundreds of photos began to blink across the screen, too fast for the human eye to process.  "So I ran Westin's face through our archives of surveillance photos.  And look what I found." 

A grainy black and white image filled the screen.  A large black man was facing the camera, speaking earnestly with someone out of sight.  Beside him, half turned away from the camera, was Chase Westin.

"Where's this from?  Who's the other guy?" KC asked.

"That's the part you're not gonna like," Glenn spoke up from his seat at the audio monitors.  "The black guy is Lester Dinkum—"

"Also known as Deacon," KC finished for him.  "Leader of The Crusade.  Aw hell. This just keeps getting better and better."  She looked at the two men.  "If we're dealing with The Crusade, we're going to need more firepower."

"If we're dealing with The Crusade," Carson corrected her with a frown, "we're going to need more body bags."

"Dinkum and his group will target anything to do with the government.  They make David Koresh look like a pansy-assed peacenik," Glenn put in, drumming his fingers against the monitor's screen.

"Yeah, isn't Dinkum that whack job who single-handedly tried to take out the LA Medi-Cal office?" Carson asked, swatting Glenn's hand away from his equipment and calling forth an image of a half-burnt government building.

KC nodded.  "He blamed them for not saving his baby sister's life.  She needed a new heart or liver, I think."  

"Where's Westin now?" Glenn asked.  "We've got outstanding warrants on Dinkum.  If Westin leads us to him, we can end this tonight."

What was KC supposed to do, tell them that she and Westin had been necking in her room upstairs?  Damn it, she knew the man was trouble.

 "No," she said.  "Then we might lose Gianotti.  We need to document the exchange, nail them both." She ignored their frowns.  "Glenn, call the Staties, tell them we're going to need back up from their Emergency Response Team tomorrow.  Carson, you get me everything you can on Dinkum.  I'll take care of Westin."

"KC, it's too risky," Glenn argued.  "These guys think killing federal agents is like bowling for dollars.  We need to call Holstrom."  

Holstrom was the Special Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia office.  KC's boss.  Who currently thought she and her team were in Reading working a RICO surveillance.  Glenn and Carson had no idea how far she'd strayed from the reservation when she agreed to help Jay Westin.

KC shook her head.  She didn't trust anyone except her team.  Especially not Holstrom.  She couldn't prove it, but she was certain Holstrom was dirty.  She was sure he had burned Manny, set him up for the fall.  Maybe those other agents whose covers had been blown as well.  Could she ask Glenn and Carson to risk their lives based on her gut feeling?  

"Remember Manny?  Or Webster, the agent undercover inside The Crusade last June?  They needed DNA to ID his body, he'd been beaten and tortured so bad.  Someone is selling us out, someone with a high enough clearance to have access to the undercover database.  We can't risk it."

"So we're on our own?" Glenn and Carson exchanged glances.

"Until tomorrow when the Staties come to back us up.  You guys have a problem with that?"  She met their gazes, each in turn looked away.  Both men knew it was her life on the line, not theirs.  KC was the one playing a role where the slightest slip might get her killed.

A slip like getting too close to their new principal badguy. 

She crossed her arms against the frisson of fear that swept over her body as she remembered exactly how close Chase Westin had gotten to her, how he'd almost overcome all her defenses.

Wouldn't happen again, she vowed.

CHAPTER 12

It took all of Chase's skill and concentration to keep his Harley upright as he sped around the switchbacks down Rattlesnake Pike.  

KC filled his mind, her taste was in his mouth, not even the frigid air blowing in his face could dispel the memory of her scent.  He'd never been obsessed by a woman like this.  Especially not a younger one—he preferred his women old enough to enjoy a drink and intelligent conversation—but KC fascinated him.  

In the midst of this grey, dreary winter she was spark of color and vitality.  A spark that could turn his brother's future into ashes.  

He hoped she listened to him, ended things with Jay.  Rotten Christmas present for the kid, but better than a life tied down to misery.

He could almost feel her hands on his, leading him to explore the mysteries of her body, pressing them against her taut, flat belly, the tattooed lizard undulating and winking at him.  He imagined her breath quickening as he slowly, ever so slowly, peeled those skin-tight jeans away, taking his sweet time, nuzzling her with his mouth, stroking her until she writhed beneath his touch, hot and ready—

The Harley spun on a sheet of black ice.  His stomach lurched as he and the bike flew toward the edge of the mountain.  Brakes squealing, leaning all his weight to one side, his leg almost grazing the pavement, he finally regained control.  Then, instead of slowing down, Chase pushed the bike faster, imminent danger the only thing able to banish the vision of KC's face from his mind.

He leaned into the next turn, the same turn where he and Nicky Gianotti had almost crashed the Malibu when they were seniors in high school, heading over to Altoona to sneak into Palomino's and pick up beer and girls. Good times, it was a miracle they made it to graduation alive.  

By then, Nicky's father had already turned the family business over to the eldest son, Bruno, so Nicky was free to do anything he wanted.  He'd taken his freedom and turned it into a heroin addiction, dying his sophomore year after binging on Dominican Gold.

Chase remembered Nicky's funeral.  Old Man Gianotti had seemed ancient, bent with grief at the lost of his youngest. Bruno Gianotti had ranted and raved about drugs and the police's inability to do anything about them and vowed that his family would never support the narcotics industry. 

Bruno had already begun moving the family's interests out of the numbers racket, and although several of the Philly mob families had reached out to him, after Nicky's death he'd focused his attention on the more lucrative arms trade.  Why not give the drug dealers the means to kill themselves, Bruno argued one night shortly after Nicky's funeral when he was drunk on rage and whiskey.  Let them put each other six feet under instead of innocent kids.

And now here Chase was, back home, working to put Bruno and his customers behind bars.  As soon as he found a way to stop The Crusade.  

Nicky would be laughing, he was sure, raising a glass to Chase's crazy schemes.  Stop The Crusade, the largest, meanest bunch of psycho-fanatics in the country?  Hell, Chase couldn't even stop one skinny, tattooed, purple-haired girl from making a fool of him.

The Harley thundered around the last curve and the Blue Bird Inn came into view.  Chase put on his game face and forced all thoughts of teenaged vixens aside.  Time to go to work.

He entered the bar, scanning the crowd.  Lucky was nowhere to be seen.  Deacon sat alone in a rear booth where he could keep an eye on everyone.  Chase gave him a nod before heading in that direction.  The sound of a woman's laugh grabbed his attention.  Chase spun around, certain that KC had followed him, envisioning her rushing toward him, leaping into his arms, wrapping her legs around him.

It was only the waitress flirting with Redman.  

"What's wrong, Westin, didn't Santa bring you anything warm and cuddly?" Redman asked, swatting the waitress' fleshy buttocks.  "Shirley here can take care of that, she's just oozing Christmas cheer."

Chase frowned and waved off the waitress, ignoring her feigned pout as he moved around the pool table.  Damn it, he couldn't be distracted, not now, not with so much at stake.  He slid into the booth across from Deacon, accepted the shot of Jack Daniels.

"Lucky fill you in on the meet details?" he asked.

Deacon nodded.  "How's your brother?  Everything all right?"

"Family.  You know how it goes."  He took a drink, hating that Deacon knew about Jay's existence much less that he lived near by.  Couldn't be helped, though.  "Anything going on I should know about?"

Deacon paused, his dark eyes boring into Chase's in a way most people would find disquieting.  Chase merely shrugged it off.  He knew Deacon needed to be intimidating to maintain power over his rag-tag group of enforcers, but he'd been working with Deacon for months now, he had no need to prove anything to the man.

The ex-Crip had some surprises of his own.  Chase had tailed Deacon a few times, trying to gain insight into the man.  Whenever they were in a major city, Deacon would invariably spend most of his free time at the local Children's Hospital, always leaving behind a substantial anonymous donation.