The Marine Next Door (12 page)

“Who was that? Same guy who called before?” He gently pried the gun from her grasp and she curled all ten fingers into the front of his T-shirt, burrowing against his neck and chest. Her breath stuttered across his skin like a whispered caress. Her hips and thighs lined up squarely against his as if she’d been built to fit his big, brawny frame, yet there was no doubt that she was feminine and soft in every way he was not. He set the gun on the counter and flattened his palm near the small of her back, along the cool strip of skin exposed beneath the hem of her shirts and the low waist of her cotton pants. And even though his body awakened and warmed at the needy, full-body contact, John wanted answers. “Easy, Sarge. You’re okay now. You tell me who was on the phone, what he said to you and what the hell is going on around here that has you so spooked.”

* * *

“T
HERE WAS SOMEONE OUTSIDE?
Why didn’t you say something?”

Maggie picked up her gun from the counter, reloaded the magazine John had pulled out for safety’s sake, and dashed out of the kitchen. Parts of her were still a little numb, a little in shock from the midnight phone calls and how easily she’d turned to John for comfort. And parts of her were firing with a panicked need to find where these threats were coming from and squash them into dust.

“You were a little preoccupied.” John followed her into the living room. “He was there a few minutes ago, before I knocked. That guy is long gone.”

She wouldn’t believe it unless she saw it with her own eyes. If Danny had gotten this close to her home, this close to Travis…

“Why didn’t you tell me there was an intruder in the building? Did you call 9-1-1?” She stopped at the front closet and slipped into her running shoes and windbreaker. She grabbed her keys and badge, stuffed them into a pocket and opened the front door.

John’s big hand reached around her and caught the door before she could get out. “You’re chasing down a perp in your PJs?”

The square jaw and hazel eyes and look that said she was behaving irrationally were right there when she spun around. Sarcasm bubbled up as she looped the chain of her badge around her neck and pushed him back a step. “I’m a cop. We go after people who break into buildings.”

“Especially when they’re lurking outside your door at the same time you’re getting crank calls?”

Not so irrational, after all, eh, big guy?

Breathing out a muffled curse, John opened the door and nudged her into the hallway. “Lock it.”

Maggie shoved her key into the dead-bolt lock. “You should go back to your apartment. You’ve already run the stairs once tonight and you’re not armed.”

“Lock the damn door. I’m coming with you.”

By the time she twisted the key, John was already at the stairs, holding the door for her. Maggie scooted past him to peek over the railing. There was nothing to see or hear as far as she could tell, but she wasn’t taking any chances. “Keep to the wall. I’ll take lead.”

Despite the uneven rhythm of his gait behind her, Maggie was surprised to feel John at her heels every step of the way down the stairs. The dim wattage of security lights in the stairwell limited her vision to only a few steps at a time, frustrating her need to find the man who was turning the hard-won serenity of her settled world into a nightmare.

Every time she checked a hallway and passed an empty landing, she mentally noted a
clear
report. John was right. Whoever had been outside her door was long gone or so well-hidden that she’d never find him. But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t give up on the desperate idea that catching Danny in the act of stalking her would be a simple see-him, catch-him, send-him-back-to-prison operation, and she’d be able to live a normal life again.

By the time they reached the last flight of stairs without seeing so much as a pet cat moving about the building, Maggie’s adrenaline was waning and she was about to give up hope of putting an end to all the weirdness happening around her. Still, her training had taught her a thorough search meant inspecting every floor so that there were no surprises once a building had been cleared.

She slowed her pace as they reached the garage level and put up a hand to warn John to stay behind her. “Let me go out first. There are plenty of places to hide down here. What are you… Let go!”

John clamped his hands around her shoulders and forced her to an abrupt stop. She shrugged free of his grasp, but her protest stopped up in her mouth when he moved past her to feel the steel door and sniff the air.

“I smell smoke.”

“Where’s it coming from?” She took a deeper breath and the acrid smell stung her nostrils, shifting her concern from a man she couldn’t catch to the more immediate danger. She craned her neck back, looking up into the murky shadows of seven flights of stairs. “Travis.”

“Don’t panic yet. Door’s cold.” John pushed open the door to the parking garage beneath the building. “The fire can’t be that big or that close.”

Maggie followed him out and turned 360 degrees. Concrete, brick, cars, trucks, laundry room, storage area, elevator. She lowered her gun to her side and darted out toward the rows of vehicles. “Could it be an engine fire? I don’t see any flames.”

She didn’t see any signs of movement either. The laundry room was empty, and a padlock on the outside of the tenants’ storage lockers told her their intruder must have run up to the street, ducked under the security gate and disappeared into the night.

Maggie came back to the stairs and elevator. “Do you think the fire’s outside?”

“No.” John didn’t look any more like a firefighter in his red running shorts than she looked like a cop in her pajamas. But there was something so methodical and focused in his movements along the wall that he inspired both confidence and an uneasy sense of pending danger. He was trusting his nose, not his eyes. He ran his hands along the bricks, traced his fingers along the seams of metal access panels and smelled the air. Maggie jumped when he snatched his fingers back as though one of the bricks had bitten him. “It’s in the wall. Localized from the feel of it.” He glanced from the stairwell door to the elevator, then up into the support beams over their heads. “That won’t last long if it gets into the infrastructure. There are all kinds of conduits behind this wall it can travel up. Phones, power, cable, heating and AC.”

“The fire will spread to the seventh floor?”

“To the whole building. I’m guessing your friend rigged it as a diversion. Crossed some wires, maybe jammed a match into the insulation.”

Travis.

Maggie spotted the fire alarm beside the elevator and ran to it. But John blocked her path. “We have to wake everyone up and evacuate the building,” she argued. “Travis is asleep.”

“There’s no hammer.” He grasped both sides of the emergency fire box mounted on the wall. “One more thing Standage is responsible for that doesn’t work.”

“Why do you need a hammer? Hit the alarm.”

Instead, he wrapped his left hand around his right fist, flexed his forearm and shouted, “Don’t look!”

Maggie jerked her face away as he smashed his elbow into the glass front of the fire extinguisher box. The glass splintered and bowed. A second blow showered glass down on the concrete at his feet. She spotted drops of blood in the shattered mess. “John?”

He set the fire extinguisher on the floor and pulled out the ax behind it. “Stand back!”

“John!”

With a mighty, home-run swing, he attacked a small hollow in the wall beside one of the electrical boxes. Chunks of brick and mortar flew out and Maggie dodged out of the way of the stinging projectiles. A second blow, a third, caved in the bricks. Wisps of smoke feathered through the expanding crevice.

With a fourth blow, John hooked the ax head behind the brick facade and pulled down several chunks, revealing black char marks and smoldering insulation. “Maggie, get the extinguisher,” he ordered, swinging the ax against the wall with one last blow. The whole section of bricks tumbled out, forcing John back from the avalanche.

If he was hurt or his prosthetic was damaged, he never let on. He dropped the ax and reached for the fire extinguisher, but Maggie pulled the pin and rushed past him, squeezing the trigger and spraying CO2 foam all over the insulation, wood slats, junction box and bricks.

“You got it.” John squeezed his hand around hers, urging her to release her grip. “You got it, Sarge.”

Maggie’s hand popped open and she let John pull the extinguisher from her shaking hands.

“Are we out of danger?” she asked. “The fire won’t spread?”

He set the empty red can on the floor and brushed the dusting of mortar and grit off his hands. He turned his forearm and, for the first time, noticed the gash above his elbow. “I don’t think we’re catching your intruder tonight. If he didn’t have us beat before, he’s had plenty of time to get out of the building while we were distracted with this.” He bent down and reached into the white goop she’d sprayed all over the opening. “Here’s our culprit.”

He wiped off the squishy remains of a cigarette butt, then sniffed it, frowned and held it up by the light next to the stairwell door.

“It’s fresh.” He flicked the butt back into the abyss. “Nobody’s that much of an idiot to drop a lit cigarette inside a wall.”

She blinked against the gases from the chemicals and pungent smoke lingering in the air. “It was deliberate?”

“Oh, yeah.” Blood seeped through the fingers John clasped over his elbow. “I don’t suppose you managed to tuck your phone inside your bra?”

“You’re a pro at only answering the questions you want to, aren’t you?” She pulled her cell from the pocket of her windbreaker. “Now what?”

“You’re calling the cops and I’m calling KCFD. There are too many things going wrong around here. And I’m guessing this isn’t the only one that wasn’t an accident.”

Chapter Seven

Maggie cut another piece of adhesive tape. “I can’t believe Travis went back to sleep so fast. I figured he’d wait until the last firefighter left.”

Oops, the last firefighter in the building was still sitting at her kitchen table, letting her doctor up the glass cuts on his arm. She looked up from where she knelt beside him. “Sorry.”

“Pretty exciting night for a ten-year-old, huh?”

“A little too exciting if you ask me. That was nice of your friends to let him climb inside the fire engine for a few minutes, though. I just hope he’ll wake up in a few hours when I get him up for school.”

Maggie carefully placed the tape over the gauze bandage and gathered up the first-aid supplies. She noted a couple of tiny scratches in the rod sticking out of his black shoe. Who knew what injury the collapsing wall might have caused had that leg been skin and bone. A sudden attack of weary, guilty tears made her eyes feel gritty, but she blinked them away and pushed to her feet. John Murdock had already risked so much keeping her and the rest of his country safe. And now she’d put his life in danger again because of her stupid choices and sorry past.

The kitchen tile was cold beneath Maggie’s bare feet as she crossed to the sink to throw away the soiled cotton she’d cleaned his cuts with and wash her hands.

“The cops cleared the building and the men on the first-response truck confirmed that the fire hadn’t spread beyond that part of the parking garage.” Maggie shivered at the deep, even sound of John’s voice coming up behind her. He appeared beside her at the counter to pick up her GLOCK off the counter and dump the magazine. She watched the practiced efficiency of his long fingers opening up the firing chamber to remove the bullet there. He reloaded the bullet into the magazine and set both it and the GLOCK on top of the refrigerator. “So, are you going to tell me why you answer the door with a loaded gun?”

A chill traveled down Maggie’s spine at the ominous question. She folded her arms in front of her and rubbed at the goose bumps pricking her arms. She couldn’t blame him for asking. She’d been ready to shoot to kill when she’d heard the knock on the door and had come flying through the living room. He’d probably feel a heck of a lot safer if the crazy lady next door wasn’t armed. But Danny and her past had never been easy to talk about, even to a qualified therapist.

She turned her head in his direction without making eye contact. “It’s really late, and I think we could both use a little sleep.”

But the wide chest wasn’t budging. “That bastard said, ‘You can’t have her. She’s mine or nobody’s.’ Now that makes it sound like this guy thinks you and I mean something to each other. And the only type of man I know who would care about something like that is an old boyfriend. Or an ex-husband.”

The flinch in Maggie’s shoulders apparently told John all he needed to know.

He leaned a hip against the counter to face her. And even though he ducked his head to try to read what she was sure was an unnatural pallor to her chilled skin, she never raised her gaze above the earth, eagle and anchor logo on his T-shirt. “If that was your ex, making calls and setting fires and who knows what else, you need to call your attorney now.”

How could the man who’d chased away a bone-deep chill just hours earlier make her feel so cold now? She hugged her arms tighter and nodded toward the clock on the stove. “Before three in the morning?”

“I don’t mind waking him.”

“Fortunately it’s not your decision to make.” Tipping her head to finally meet that probing gaze, she flashed him a look that she hoped would put an end to the conversation.

She spun around to retrieve her windbreaker from the back of a chair and slide her arms into the sleeves. What had she been thinking—allowing John Murdock into her home? Standing here in her pajamas? Turning to him for solace and support because a nightmare from her past resurrected itself and caught her off guard?

She needed to back off the whole idea of having a hero come to her rescue. She needed to be self-sufficient. She needed to think this through. “We can’t even prove that that was Danny who called.”

“Twice. In the middle of the night.” He straightened from the counter, making the distance she’d tried to put between them seem insignificant.