Chapter 6
Billy slammed a fist on the bar. Dane figured it had to hurt.
He was glad he was past his days of futile destructive gestures.
That didn’t stop the tightness in his chest from nearly suffocating him, didn’t stop the need to control his breathing, to talk himself into calmness.
He needed more than ever to push back at the dark swirls of panic-fueled emotions circling through his head, tugging on his sanity.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. When he opened them he found Billy staring at him, wide-eyed and expectant.
Dane said, “You know anyone at police headquarters? Someone high up?”
“No. They’re all new. Almost all,” he said.
“Who’s still there from a few years ago when the police pension fraud case went down?
” Dane had a working theory that whoever was involved stuck around inside to protect his ass while loose ends floated around.
A loose end named Shana, in particular. Someone who wasn’t ready to retire.
Maybe he—or she—was being blackmailed. Or maybe he or she continued to use their position to beef up their own personal pension stashed somewhere in a Caribbean or Swiss bank account.
Billy shook his head. “I don’t know, man. There’s a few of them. I was never close. Not after I quit the idea of becoming a cop. I went my own way, the way to make money. Top notch financial analyst.” He looked miserable.
Dane didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to see that the young man was feeling guilty about not going into law enforcement. He slapped the kid in the back, though he was truly a man and had a good thirty pounds of muscle on Dane. Though not thirty pounds worth of experience, Dane figured.
He’d be smart to remember that tomorrow was another day. And he was getting older and softer with every sweep of the dial.
“Shana’s not going to show up at your place and no one will be expecting her to, if my hunch is right.”
“What hunch is that?”
“That the watchers at your mother’s house are connected to the police department, not Chancy Peterson who threatened her.
The threat was for show. Chancy is either working with or for the inside guy in the police department.
My money is on the latter. I’m betting the insider is the brains of the operation and that’s why they stuck around until now, until Chancy got out of jail. ”
“None of this makes sense to me.” Billy shook his head, sounding more frustrated than angry now and Dane supposed that was an improvement. “You really think the police are holding her?”
Dane nodded.
“Maybe they’re protecting her,” Billy said. His face brightened as if he had just been presented with a cake full of birthday candles and was about to make his wish.
“That’s probably what they’re telling her.” Dane doubted they’d get away with it for long. No way would they stop her from calling him unless they had her tied up. No way they would tie her up if they were on her side.
“Let’s go home.” Billy threw some money on the bar.
Billy’s place was the last place Dane wanted to go. He looked around the bar again, surveying the men and women. There were several female officers in the crowd, and a few who looked around Shana’s age, who might have been peers of hers. He decided to take a chance.
“Not just yet. I have one last card to play in this joint.” Dane lifted off his stool and took his half-empty pint of KB Lager with him in the direction of the young woman dressed in blue who looked fresh off her detail.
He’d bet his left nut that she was low on the food chain and knew all there was to know about the below-the-radar rumors in the police force. That was the intel he was interested in. The information coming from unofficial channels.
“Wait at the bar and don’t talk to anyone,” he said to Billy.
“Back me up if there’s trouble.” That last line was to placate the kid because Dane knew he wouldn’t like being told to sit down, shut up, and watch.
Not if he was anything at all like his sister, and he’d seen enough to know he was like Shana in their shared need to act.
Sucking in a breath laced with the nastiness of what he needed to do, he knew it wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever done. He approached the attractive young woman and, with his most charming smile in place, Dane captured her attention away from her two older female companions.
“Well, hello there, handsome. Can I buy you a drink?” she said as she looked him over. Maintaining his smoldering smile, he stood inside her personal space.
“If you tell me your name.”
Her two companions giggled and guffawed at the blatant flirtation and disappeared as he’d known they would.
“Maggie Baker. Let me guess your name—”
“Dane Blaise.”
Maggie Baker’s promising full smile faded after a beat as she contemplated his name and his face.
Probably because Dane was no longer sporting his lady-killer smile.
He’d switched to business mode because he didn’t believe in wasting time, especially not when he didn’t know where Shana was or whether she was safe.
“Do I know you?”
“No, but you may have heard of my fiancée.” Maggie’s face fell completely from tentative, unsure, yet hopeful flirty to a comically sour face the instant she heard the word fiancée.
He waited a beat for her to get over her disappointment and respond.
“Oh yeah. I have heard of her. She was a superstar detective when I was starting out, someone they held up as a success story for us lady cops to emulate. So you’re engaged to her?”
“You know of any safe houses on your beat, somewhere the brass would take someone who they wanted to keep out of the way, someplace they hardly ever used?”
“Why do you want to know?”
He stared her down.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s funny you should ask about that because me and my friend were just talking today about this place she knows.
No one had been there for months. She thought it was off the books, no longer in play, but when she and her partner went by there today because it was on her beat, she noticed a couple of men outside.
They had to be undercover, but no one she recognized. ”
“What’s the address?”
“Are you daft? I can’t tell you such a thing. It’s a safe house. And what does it have to do with you and Shana George anyway? You some kind of special status? Consultant? You look the part.” She looked him over again.
Dane grabbed her arm then with one hand and ripped the ID from his pocket from the other. He flashed it in front of her face.
“So you’re here on official business? Why ask me? What’s this all about?”
Dane thought long and hard about making up a story, but in the end he decided the truth was the most persuasive thing he could tell Maggie. Or a compelling version of the truth.
“My fiancée’s life is in danger. I have reason to believe she’s being held by force in that safe house.”
“Why can’t you get the address from—”
“You know I can’t trust the brass.” He didn’t want to explain any more, hoped she’d heard the rumors. They stared at each other for a few beats and then she turned away, made like she was going to walk off. He grabbed a fistful of her shirtfront, where no one would see, to keep her in place.
“They have her and if she dies, you die.” The words cost him for all sorts of reasons, but he kept his eyes on her, knowing he looked scary, wanting to intimidate but presuming it wouldn’t be easy to rattle a lady cop in Sydney if Shana was any example of the resident toughness.
She remained silent, defiant even but with a flicker of fear edging her eyes.
“Let’s go outside where we can talk in private.” He leaned in and whispered in her ear as if offering an intimate invitation. He knew she wouldn’t scream, or at least he hoped to hell she wouldn’t.
He took her arm as surreptitiously as he could yet still have a commanding hold on her, and propelled her to the back of the bar where he saw a hall that he was betting would lead to a back door.
“Are you crazy?” she whispered.
He heard more surprise than fear. He didn’t stop, putting on a bland smile as he met a few interested glances along the way.
As he maneuvered Maggie, he spotted Billy moving in their direction and planting himself in a spot at the end of the hall blocking the view from the bar, covering for him.
His esteem went up a hundred notches for the kid who was not as clueless as he’d thought.
Deciding to go for it, Dane dragged the still silent woman out the back door.
Outside the air was cooler and cleaner than inside and he breathed in deep, calming breaths of the sea air.
It smelled different than Martha’s Vineyard’s air, balmier, but it had the same refreshing seaside quality, filled with brine and the promise of adventure.
They stood against the building on the blind side of the door up against the wall in a narrow alley behind the block of buildings.
Her back was against the wall and he stood close, but not touching her, keeping her in place, still gripping her arm.
She wrenched her arm free, but stayed put and faced him.
“I know you’re desperate, but don’t be a fool,” she said. “That’s a pub full of my friends you’d be fighting.”
He put on his neutral face, the one that scared people most for its blankness, the shark look, Shana called it, and ignored her meaningless comment.
“I don’t want to be a badass about this, but I will.” His quiet, conversational tone put a wary look on her face. “I know you’re doing what you think is right, protecting the integrity of the safe house location, and I’d do the same thing in your shoes. But you know Shana George.”
She nodded, her eyes large, but calculating. The fact that she hadn’t screamed or taken a swing at him yet gave him hope that, on some level, she believed him, believed his story, knew that he was who he said he was.
“There’s been some talk, murmurs, real low, about Shana.” She lifted her chin in defiance, but he saw the concern in her eyes when she added, “Talk that maybe she was the one behind the pension fraud.”
Boom. That someone was spreading a nasty rumor made sense.
He held her gaze and gripped her arm again so she wouldn’t flee now that they were making progress.
She rushed her words, “But I didn’t believe it. I had no idea where that rumor was coming from. No one knew. Made me suspicious, especially when I heard she was coming back to town.”
“Where’d you hear that she’d be coming to Sydney?”
“Some of her old friends. They were looking forward to seeing her, but then I started hearing other things. That Ivory had made threats. That he was mad because she was the inside person and she had all the money.” She shook her head. And stopped talking.
He waited her out for several seconds, his heart picking up speed.
They stared at each other, not blinking.
She shifted her feet and he gripped her arm again.
She tugged to get free, but he didn’t let go this time.
She broke eye contact, looking around them.
He grabbed hold of her other arm and changed tack, going all on instinct now because his pulse pounded too loudly in his head for him to think.
“Look, I’m begging you. I know she’s in that safe house, that they have her and they aren’t going to let her go.” Dane was pleading now because he didn’t want to hurt this woman, though he would do it to get the truth from her to save Shana.
He hated himself right now, hated what his weakness for Shana was doing to him, but he put his heart on his sleeve, let his desperation show full force like the man with nothing left to lose that he was.
He hoped to hell that this woman had a heart bigger and stronger than the rules and the training and the brotherhood of cops she belonged to.
The woman stared back at him, stopped struggling to pull away, and her eyes filled with sympathy and hesitation, riding the fence of uncertainty about what was right and what was wrong, weighing the cost against what there was to gain.
He waited and those few blinks of time expanded and shrunk until he felt squeezed tight with nothing left. Wrung out.
“290 Darlinghurst Road. In the Cross. The two men were hanging around the back door.”
She yanked herself free from his grasp and strode through the alley and around the corner of the building as Billy and two other men came bursting out the back door.
He breathed again. Then with a massive rush of adrenaline and urgency, he waved to Billy and ran in the opposite direction around to the front of the bar before either of the two less-than-friendly men could question him. Billy ran after Dane.
“This way.” Billy pointed to a car on the street a block down from the bar to the right and Dane turned on a dime heading that way. He didn’t look back to see if the men or Maggie Baker were following him.
He jumped into the passenger seat and barked the address at Billy as he started the car.
“What did you do to that woman? You took a hell of a chance.”
“Chances are all we have. I believe Shana is being held at this address. Let’s go get her.”