Yours for the Night (16 page)

His head coming forward again, he looked her in the eye now. “I did. I was desperate. They made some serious threats, not against me—I would have let him kill me if it would have ended it, but they don’t get their money then. They knew about my family and friends. They have reach,” he said. “Helping them seemed like the only option, and they promised no one would be hurt. No one
was
killed in the robberies,” he said beseechingly. “No property was even damaged.”

“No, but livelihoods and what people like my parents worked for their entire lives could be lost. Because of you,” she said accusingly, not letting him off the hook.

“You’re right. That’s why I’m telling you this now. I can’t live with this, and it’s never going to stop. I thought maybe it would just be a few jobs, and when I saw the diamonds your parents had acquired, I thought that would be enough to end it for good.”

“But they want to keep stringing you along,” she added.

“Yes. With the interest they charge on the debt, I could be in this until I’m no longer useful to them, even though they have already been paid twice over. I knew I had to get out, and that you were doing some…investigating. It’s a federal crime, what they’re doing.... It crosses state lines. I can name names,” he said eagerly.

“I know a police detective who can help,” she said, nodding. “Do you know where the diamonds and the other items went?”

“I wasn’t involved in any way except letting them know where the special items were, the worth, any inside knowledge I had of the stores, that kind of thing.”

“Like that my parents were out of town that weekend, and I was running the store?”

“Yes, things like that. Vault makes, whatever details helped their team finish the job. After that, I have no idea what they do with the items,” he said, his head hanging again. “I am so sorry.”

“Arthur, we should go. It’s probably not safe for us to be out here.”

“They think I’ve gone to New York. I bought the tickets, went to the airport even, but then circled back here.”

“Did you take your own car? A cab?” she asked nervously, looking around. It didn’t seem right that Freddie would be okay with letting Arthur off the leash so easily.

“My own car,” he said hesitantly. “I could tell no one followed me.”

Right. Everyone who had watched a cop show thought they knew how to spot a tail, but Tiffany knew that it was harder to spot a professional than someone might think, and the people who were involved with Freddie were professionals.

“Let me call the detective I know, and he can meet us here,” she said, thinking that would be a better plan.

Dialing Finn Ramsey’s number, it went to message. Frustrated, she said, “Call me.” And hung up.

Pacing on the roof, a few minutes later, she tried again. Still no message. He was either on a call or not answering his phone. Maybe he was off duty, but Finn didn’t seem like the kind of guy to ignore his phone, no matter what.

“Okay, we’re going to have to go. But we’ll take the back way around, through yards, down to my car.”

Arthur nodded, and they made their way down to the driveway at the base of the fire escape as quickly as they could. Tiffany just couldn’t shake the feeling of unease, though it was probably because all of a sudden she was trying to get a prospective federal witness to safety.

The game definitely changed quickly in the P.I. business.

“This way,” she said, and motioned to Arthur to follow her, which he did, but as they started to make their way through a space between the houses, she saw two dark figures coming toward them on the other side.

Turning, her pulse slamming, they headed back to the street, where there might at least be the safety of the streetlights and possible passersby, but no such luck.

Another man waited patiently at the end of the driveway, illuminated in streetlight. It was the same guy from the back of Freddie’s club, and the way he held his hand under the front flap of his jacket told Tiffany all she needed to know.

She walked up to him, remaining calm. There was no choice.

“I don’t suppose you’ll believe we’re just out for a Thanksgiving walk,” she said pertly, making eye contact so the guy at least thought she wasn’t afraid of him as she started to pull the pepper spray from her pocket.

“Not exactly,” he said just as casually. “And I’d think twice about whatever it is you’re retrieving from your pocket,” he said as she heard the footsteps of the other two men coming up behind them.

Her fingers loosened from the spray can, and she pulled her hands out, showing empty fingers.

The thug reached forward, pulling the pepper spray out of her pocket.

“Nasty stuff,” he said, frowning. “I’d rather be shot.”

She didn’t agree, but to each their own.

He checked her other pocket, taking her picks and her cell phone. Suddenly, it started ringing, and people were getting knocked down and then up again. The thug actually laughed at that.

“I love that song,” he murmured, shutting the phone off and putting it in his pocket.

It had to be Ramsey. But with her phone off, now no one could track her signal, even if they thought to do so.

“Where are we going?” she asked, eyeing the car at the curb, and assuming if they were just supposed to be killed, it would have happened already.

“Freddie wants to talk. Get in the car,” he said.

Tiffany nodded and let herself be ushered forward to the waiting vehicle. For the moment, all she could do was hope that she somehow managed to walk away from this alive.

12

G
ARRETT
KNEW
SOMETHING
was wrong.

He’d tried to call Tiffany twice, but no response. Assuming she was mad at him, he’d gone over to her apartment, only to find no one answering the door.

So he picked the lock.

No one home, and nothing disturbed, but his gut told him something was off.

As he was searching through the place, he was relieved to find her gun still there, but it was obvious she had taken off somewhere.

Maybe to her parents’ house?

He didn’t want to worry her family without need, so he drove there himself, relieved to remember the way, and rode by the house, but her car wasn’t there.

It was just then that his phone rang.

Middle of the night and it was Ramsey. Not good.

“What happened? Is Tiffany okay?” he asked without preamble as he answered, his mind zipping over all of the possibilities. He never should have let her out of his sight, though nothing had been amiss when he dropped her off—at least, aside of the personal tension between them.

He’d been unable to settle down and absolutely unable to sleep. He’d missed Tiffany so much after coming back to the hotel by himself that he knew he’d been an ass worrying about being with her because of her profession.

His brother Jonas confirmed as much in far more colorful language when Garrett had called him to make sure he wasn’t nuts for falling for a woman he’d only known a week.

Jonas, who was usually brusque and blunt, often painfully so, though he had softened more since meeting and marrying Tessa, had said something that had shaken Garrett to his core.

It can all be gone in a minute, Gar, and you know that better than any of us. So why waste time? Why second-guess it?

It was all Garrett needed to tip him over into admitting his feelings for Tiffany—at least to himself. So when he’d called and couldn’t find her, he had an awful feeling that he might have missed his chance.

That couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let it.

“I was about to ask you that,” Ramsey said just as tersely, shaking Garrett out of his reverie. “I got two calls from her a half hour ago, but I was in the shower. I noticed the messages as soon as I got out, called back, no answer. Seems off. She sounded…intense.”

“What did she say?”

“Just to call her back, that it was important.”

“Can you track her cell signal?”

“Already tried. Phone is off. So I take it you don’t know where she is?”

“No. Not at home, not at her parents or with me. How about her car’s GPS?”

“Working on that now. Waiting on a call.”

“I’ll be at the station in twenty minutes,” Garrett said, hanging up and focusing on driving the unfamiliar
highways.

It was closer to thirty by the time he pulled up into the police station lot, and he ran into Ramsey on the steps.

“We have her car located down on a street in the Lower Haight,” he said. Unfortunately, that meant next to nothing to Garrett.

Almost. “Wait. Where is Pierce Street?”

Ramset stopped in his tracks. “That’s in Lower Haight. Why? What’s there?”

“The business for the appraiser the Walkers use for their store,” Garrett said, filling Ramsey in on their adventure at the bar the night before.

“And you didn’t bring this directly to me because?”

“There’s no proof he’s involved, or any of them. Just what we could guess from what we saw, which wasn’t much, aside of what my contact had to say. We know Hayden had some involvement with them, but there’s no overt connection to the robberies. It’s all circumstantial,” Garrett said, feeling more annoyed with himself by the minute. It was circumstantial—which meant the next step should have been obvious to him, but he was so wrapped up in his emotions for Tiffany, he hadn’t been thinking about the case.

“She probably went down there to get some kind of proof,” Ramsey said, speeding up.

“Yeah, that would sound about right. Arthur said something about being out of town for the holiday. Maybe she’s just in his place and turned her phone off to keep quiet,” Garrett said hopefully, but he didn’t believe it. His instincts told him something was very wrong.

“I lost my first partner in a shooting, you know,” Ramsey said as they fell into silence.

“Pardon?”

“None of my business, but you’ve only been in town a week,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. “Wondered if this was a permanent thing.”

Garrett tried to keep up. What the heck was Ramsey getting at?

“What’s that got to do with your partner?”

“You have that look. Who’d you lose?”

Garrett decided to play along, just to see where it was going. “My wife. Six years ago.”

“Ah. Sorry. That’s bad.”

“Yeah.”

“My partner, that was a little more than eight years ago,” Ramsey responded, breaking his thoughts. “We were both new detectives. She was hot,” he said with a smile and a whistle. “It’s not a good thing to get involved with someone you work with, but you know how it is. We did anyway. I couldn’t keep my hands off her, fell hard. Young love,” he said whimsically, but Garrett could still detect the note of pain lingering under his tone.

“What happened?”

“Routine drug bust. Sometimes I still find myself going over it in my head, how it could have happened. How we missed it. Uniforms brought in a guy, higher than a kite. He’d been searched, cuffed, but he had a gun shoved down inside his boot and he shot her right where she sat at her desk. He didn’t care about her in particular, he just started shooting randomly. We were talking about where to grab lunch when, suddenly, she was just gone.”

Garrett felt his stomach turn. He knew there were no words that could adequately respond to such a horror. Jonas’s words came back to him full-force, making him crazy to find Tiffany. Where could she be?

“My wife was a prosecutor on her first big case. We were meeting for dinner to celebrate. The guy she put away, his brother had been following her. Plowed his SUV into her side of the car at an intersection. She was DOS,” Garrett said, just as mechanically. Dead on scene.

Ramsey cursed. “So, you’d never do that again, huh? I mean, if you met her again, you’d never make the same mistake twice.”

“What?” Garrett asked.

“Your wife. If you met her, would you do it again, knowing the result?”

Garrett didn’t say a word.

“I asked myself that a lot. But I have to tell you, after the worst of it passed, I had a lot of good memories that outweighed that bad one. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it, my time with her. I missed it and I want it again. You know, the passion, the sex…and the rest of it, too.”

“So is this your way of telling me I’m making a mistake if I walk away?” Garrett said, turning to look at the detective as they hit a red light.

“Nah. It’s my way of letting you know that after an appropriate amount of time, maybe a week or so, when Tiffany’s really pissed at you and feeling lonely, maybe a little vulnerable, I’m going to ask her out,” Ramsey said, and laughed. “So if you plan to change your mind, I suggest you do it fast.”

If it wouldn’t have risked both of them getting killed, Garrett would have hit the guy. So all of this to let Garrett know he was interested in Tiffany? What a guy.

He had no doubt the detective meant it. He’d seen how Ramsey looked at Tiffany, and why not? He was right. They were both here, and had made a connection, one that could easily be built through the commonalities in their work.

Ramsey would show her the ropes, help her along, while touching her, kissing her, taking her to bed....

No way in hell.

“I would,” Garrett said under his breath.

“What?”

“I’d do it again. With my wife. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss those years that went before, even knowing how it was afterward.”

He didn’t want to miss the years he might have with Tiffany, either. The past week had been amazing, and he wanted more. Much more. He didn’t need to say it; he could tell Ramsey knew what he was thinking by the broad, tell-tale grin on the detective’s face.

“I hope it works out. But if it doesn’t, don’t worry, I’ll still be here to pick up the pieces.”

“Go to hell,” Garrett responded, but without any punch as they approached Freddie’s.

“The Waller station is just a few blocks over. I’m calling for some backup, just in case,” Ramsey said. “I have a feeling about this,” he said more to himself than Garrett.

Garrett agreed, and it was all he could do to stay in the car. The lights were on in the back rooms of The Dice, for one thing, and it was the middle of the night. He supposed there could be some other explanation, but he knew Tiffany was in there. He could feel it.

Two more cars pulled up behind them a few minutes later, and Ramsey looked at him. “Stay in the car.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Garrett gave him a look, and Ramsey sighed, tossing him a Kevlar vest from the backseat.

“Fine, but try to stay out of the way,” he said, signaling to the other cars where four more officers appeared.

Surrounding the building, they found the doors locked, no surprise, and so Garrett brought them around to the window in the alley he and Tiffany had look through before.

Tiffany and Arthur were both sitting in chairs facing Freddie and a tall guy with a gun.

Ramsey lowered his voice, telling as much to the cops out front, giving them permission to enter the premises in whatever way they needed to.

However, as he did so, he saw Freddie motion to Tiffany and Arthur to stand—they were apparently leaving, the armed guy ushering them out.

As Arthur stood, he limped, and turned to reach for the chair—it was obvious they had worked him over pretty well to get whatever they needed from him.

Garrett’s heart was in his throat as he couldn’t see anything but Tiffany’s back. Had they hit her, too?

His own fist clenched.

“If she’s hurt…”

“Down, boy. We’ll end this shortly,” Ramsey said, a hand on his shoulder as they got up and took position. “I don’t think they’d risk more than roughing them up on the premises, so it’s good we got here before they took them away. Let’s go.”

As they rounded the front of the building and Ramsey joined the other officers, Garrett stayed to the back, at the corner of the building, as instructed. It killed him to hold back, but he wasn’t armed, and he had to trust Ramsey to do his job now.

As the officers got through the door, sending silent signals to each other for how to proceed, everyone froze as two shots rang out. Silence was broken, shouts filling the air as the police stormed forward and Garrett bolted from his spot right after them, hoping they weren’t too late.

* * *

T
IFFANY
GROANED
IN
pain, rolling on the floor. She flailed and kicked at anything around her, feeling contact with something, someone, but not able to concentrate on the voices around her. The fiery pain on her skin was distracting her from everything else.

She knew, when Arthur had told Freddie that he was going to expose them, that time was running out if she didn’t do something. Desperate, she managed to stumble forward into the thug—Edward, as Freddie called him affectionately—and pickpocket her pepper spray. As he paused, she used it—and the stuff went everywhere. It certainly blinded Edward, and shots rang out, but she had no idea where they hit. The last thing she saw was everyone dropping, including herself, Arthur and Freddie. Multiple cries of discomfort immediately rose along with a whole lot of other noise.

When someone grabbed her shoulders, she fought back, assuming it was Edward, but then the scent—what she could smell through her irritated nasal passages—told her differently.

“Garrett?”

“Pepper spray!” someone yelled, and then warned everyone not to rub their eyes, which was torture.

The next thing Tiffany felt was someone gently wiping down her face with a cooling, soothing cloth, and she sighed, trying to open her eyes, which still burned.

“Take it easy. You really sprayed that stuff around, it will be airborne for a while,” Garrett said, coughing as he ushered her out into breathable air.

Opening her blurry eyes, she saw figures milling around, and heard more sirens. More wet wipes were pushed into her hands, and she didn’t hesitate to use them, feeling the effects of the secondary exposure to the spray diminish considerably, though her eyes continued to burn and water, as did her nose.

“I never used that stuff before. I had no idea it did that,” she said.

“Only because you didn’t aim straight,” Ramsey said with a smile in his voice, then a cough. “You kind of sprayed the whole hallway.”

“I did aim for Edward, but I wanted to get Freddie, too, and then I lost my balance,” she explained. Her finger had been on the spray pump the whole time.

“You managed to take them all down peacefully just as we went in, so good job, Walker,” Ramsey said.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Tracked your car to Arthur’s street, and Garrett filled me in from there.”

“I went to your place, your parents’, looking for you,” Garrett said, his tone reflecting a depth of emotion that might have made her cry if her eyes weren’t already tearing like mad. “I couldn’t find you, and it was the worst day of my life. Then we tracked you here, and I saw you in there…” he said, pulling her in for a tight embrace.

“Ah, get a room before I have to arrest you for gross displays of public affection,” Ramsey teased. “Then I’ll need you both down to the station for your statements as soon as possible.”

“Finn… Detective Ramsey,” she amended, given the scene, and all of the officers nearby. “Arthur Hayden talked to me tonight. He wants to be a federal witness. He says he can name names as to the jewel thieves, and everyone involved,” she said.

“Really? You never fail to surprise, Tiffany. We’ll make sure he’s taken care of. EMTs are on their way over to check you out. One of the uniforms can take you back when you’re done. Don’t argue,” Ramsey said as she opened her mouth to do just that, and then he turned back to business.

“You were looking for me?” she asked Garrett. “Why?”