Chapter 29
If nothing else, the way Erin was driving—fast, chance-taking, and on the edge of reckless—would have told him how wound up she was.
Usually she was smooth, careful and polite.
He used to joke about how she’d spoiled him, that passengering with anyone else made him carsick.
With her he could read a book if he wanted to.
Says the man who can autorotate without getting airsick.
Her usual rejoinder to that joke rang in his head now. That she had that ammo was his own fault, since he’d made the mistake of letting her see a video of what could have been an ugly crash when his engine began to misfire at about a mile up and he’d had to make the dive.
He’d explained as she’d watched, how when the aircraft stopped powering the rotor’s spin, you had to use the airflow itself, from a steep dive, to keep it turning and maintain some kind of control.
“Then at the last minute you flare up, to get the skids under you again, and you’re down.”
He remembered glancing at her expression then and trying to lighten it by joking about the heavy jolt. It didn’t work. She’d just gone from staring at the screen to staring at him.
“It’s just something you learn,” he’d said. “Like knowing that if you’re driving on ice and you start to skid, you turn in the direction of the skid.”
“I have a better idea. When it’s icy, stay off the road.”
“And it’s a good idea,” he’d agreed. “It’s just that the world doesn’t always cooperate.”
He was yanked back to the present when she cut someone off and earned an angry sounding of the horn and an obscene gesture.
He wasn’t sure if the jolt he felt was that or the last part of that memory that had been going through his mind.
The ever-vivid image of her holding his gaze and saying softly, “Then it’s a good thing there are men like you to make up for that. ”
She’d meant it then, he knew she had. Her voice had rung with the sincerity of it. Up until that day when the crash had come. No autorotation that day, because there’d been no rotor left to spin. They’d gone down like the nearly ten tons of bricks they essentially were without that big blade.
His life had nearly ended that day.
Life as he’d known it ended because of that day.
He hated this, the almost constant revisitation of a past he’d tried so hard to put behind him. He’d known when he’d gotten on that plane to come here that he was opening the door to a lot of things he wasn’t going to like, but it wasn’t like he had any choice. Not when Ethan was at stake.
He hadn’t realized he was clenching his jaw so tightly until a bump in the road made him tighten it even more. But he remembered the bump, at the end of the street that was their destination.
The gate was open when they reached the Foxworth building, and Rafe’s vehicle was already there. Erin started to pull in behind it, but changed without protest when Blaine suggested she pull over beside it, so they could either or both exit in a hurry if they had to.
“The kind of thing I never think of,” she muttered as she turned off the engine.
“The kind of thing civilians shouldn’t have to,” he said as they got out and headed, nearly at a run again, to the office door.
Rafe was standing with the remote in his hand when they stepped inside. He turned to look at them, and Blaine once more had that feeling that he would never, ever want to be in this man’s sights.
He didn’t waste any time with niceties. “Walker’s still working his area, but says no sign yet, and Cutter hasn’t signaled anything.
But this just came in from the sheriff’s detective he contacted.
” At Erin’s curious look, he took a moment to explain.
“Foxworth helped him find his kidnapped daughter when all else had failed. So he knows a bit about what you’re going through. ”
“That’s why he’s helping?”
Rafe nodded. “That’s all Foxworth ever asks in payment, the willingness to help someone else down the line.”
He turned then to the flat-screen and hit a button on the remote. The screen flared to life, showing a slightly grainy black-and-white image.
“This place is right at the east edge of the area Walker’s working now,” Rafe said.
It looked to Blaine like a convenience store of some kind, apparently at a gas station, since he could see the pumps through the glass front of the structure.
For a moment nothing was happening. There were no cars parked, or even at the pumps.
The front counter was deserted, too. He assumed whoever was running the place at the moment was out of range of the camera.
Then the door opened and a tall, gangly figure came in. A moment later—thirty-two seconds, according to the timer in the lower right corner—the door opened again and two more people, shorter, younger, came in.
Blaine heard Erin gasp in the same instant his gut clenched. Because the second kid who came in was Ethan. There was no mistaking it—the image was much clearer than the one from the pet store.
And then he was swearing under his breath as it became clear what was happening.
It began when Ethan and the other kid started a scuffle at the back of the store, near one of the refrigerated cases, at the very edge of the camera’s range.
The clerk, a middle-aged man with a bit of heft to him, stepped into the frame, clearly headed to break up the scrap.
In the center of the image, the bigger, older kid snuck around the counter and began to work at the cash register.
Ineffectively, as it turned out. He couldn’t get the cash drawer to open.
“Amateur hour,” Blaine muttered, wondering how much cash would actually be in there anyway, given the propensity for electronic payments these days.
“I’d say they planned everything but that little detail,” Rafe agreed, freezing the image just as the older kid slammed a fist on the register in frustration.
“You’re saying this was planned out?” Erin asked.
Blaine looked at her. “Obvious, isn’t it?” He gestured toward the corner where the clerk had pried Ethan and the other boy apart. “They were the distraction. I’d guess he—” he shifted to the kid behind the counter “—figured all he had to do was push a button and it would fall into his hands.”
“But…why? There can’t be much money there,” she said, echoing his earlier thought.
Blaine exchanged a glance with Rafe. “Initiation?”
“A little light for that. A line on the résumé, maybe.”
Erin’s gaze was shifting from him to Rafe and back. “You mean they did this to…try and get into that gang Walker was talking about?”
“To get noticed by them, maybe,” Rafe said. “They likely wouldn’t take kindly to some kids horning in on what they see as their territory.”
Rafe’s phone chimed a notification. He grabbed it, put it to his ear and said only, “Go.” Then, a moment later he said, “Hang on. We’re all here, just watched the video, so let me put you on speaker.”
Walker’s voice came through clearly. “I just talked to the clerk at the store. He’s also a co-owner, by the way.
Couple of things. First, they got sort of lucky, because the leader couldn’t get the register open, so they spooked and just ran, didn’t even grab any stuff on their way out.
So that’ll keep the legal situation banked a little. ”
“And second?” Erin asked, tensely.
He seemed to hesitate, then said, “The guy said when he went back to break up the fight, the older, bigger kid just cussed a blue streak.”
“But Ethan?” she prodded.
Blaine thought he heard the other man take a breath. “The clerk said he looked scared. Said it looked like more than just getting caught, that the way he kept looking toward the front of the store, where the leader was, it seemed like that’s who he was afraid of.”
Erin winced visibly, and lowered her head. But when Walker started to say something more and then stopped himself, it came up again.
“Say it.” Her voice held as much command as Rafe’s had earlier.
“This is nothing but the guy’s feeling, okay? But he does have three kids of his own, so he’s not coming completely out of nowhere. He said he had the feeling that if he could have, if they’d been alone, Ethan would have asked for help.”
Blaine saw the shudder go through her. He moved automatically, instinctively. He put his arms around her and held her, because this was Erin and this was what he did when she was upset. And no amount of time or distance could kill that instinct, apparently.
At the same time he was fighting the urge to go charging into that space Walker said was theirs, guns blazing.
He was not in a war now, at least not the kind he’d been trained to fight.
No, this was a much deeper, more personal war.
A battle for his son. And, he thought, almost overwhelmed by the feel of Erin in his arms again, possibly for even more.
And he would do whatever it took to win that battle.