Chapter 17
HAWK
Callie stood on the porch, waiting for me when I walked out with my keys. Cody stood beside the door with Colt at his side. She crossed her arms at my approach and set her jaw in that mulish, stubborn line that I’d never been able to forget. “I’m coming with you.”
I took a good look at her wrapped hands, the smudges beneath her eyes, and the way she held herself together with sheer willpower. A tiny burn marred the side of her neck and dipped beneath the collar of her shirt. Did she even know about it? It hadn’t been treated.
I could tell her no, but she’d find a way to follow me.
Unless I had a good reason that would convince her, I might as well let this battle go.
“Get in the truck.” The harshness that grated out with every word sounded worse than I thought, and I ran a hand down my face, pulling the muscles out of their rigid tension. “Please.”
She kissed Cody on top of the head, muttered something about being good, then pinned Colt with a look. “I’m trusting you, Colt.”
His shoulders straightened. “I won’t let you down, Callie. I swear it.” His hands settled on Cody’s shoulders, and he squeezed. “We’re going to have a great time.”
“Yeah, I get to show Colt what you taught me about engines.” Cody fist pumped the air, spitting out the hoodie strings in favor of leaping around the porch until his shoes lit up.
Diesel walked around the back of the house and gave me a thumbs up that meant he’d finished installing the new cameras and checked all the locks.
We were as secure as possible. “Stay close to the house.” I motioned toward Colt and Cody.
“You might want to stay inside. Away from windows. Watch the back gate.”
“Got it under control.” Diesel took out his phone and showed me the cameras panning left and right on his screen.
Colt swallowed hard when Cody said something else about the shop. “I promised we’d go to the shop. We’ll go right to the house after.”
I let it go at that. Colt wouldn’t let anyone near his son. He might be a flight risk but he had this. One hundred percent.
The drive to the sheriff’s station took half an hour, and Callie did not say a single word the entire drive.
All the things I wanted to say were more likely to need extra time, and we both needed to focus on the threat coming at us instead of letting the potential fallout from a sideways threat distract us.
I opened my door. “You don’t have to say anything to them.”
“Is that your way of telling me to be quiet?” She opened her door and slid out, catching my eye before slamming her door shut.
I walked around the hood and caught up with her. “Are you going to take everything I say as a challenge?”
“Are you going to make them all sound that way?” She kept pace with me, her strides loose and fluid despite the tightness in her frame. Only Callie could pull off that precise contradiction.
Not now. I reminded myself of my own flaws and prickly edges as I pulled the door open and walked through behind her.
The air conditioning brushed my skin and cooled the heat gathering across my neck.
Plain brick walls with a single line of previous sheriffs lined one wall, and a woman sitting behind a desk stood.
“You must be Mr…um. Sorry.” She dug through the papers on her desk.
“Hawk is fine. I’m supposed to meet Deputy Reeves.”
“Right. Right.” She rounded the desk. “Right this way.”
Callie closed her eyes slowly shaking her head side to side. “Are you serious right now?”
The question barely reached me. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head again.
Deputy Reeves met us halfway down a narrow hallway and pushed open a door to a small office with two chairs in front of a desk covered in stacks of manila folders.
Not exactly a neat kind of operation he had going on, but as long as he did his job, I wasn’t going to say a word.
“Thank you for coming in today. You too, Ms. Jameson. It’ll save me some time if I can get your statement while you’re here. ”
“Of course.” Callie perched on the edge of the chair closest to the room, forcing me to scoot around her and take the other chair next to the wall.
A hemmed in feeling settled on my shoulders but I pushed it aside. “What did you find?” The smell of old coffee mixed with industrial cleaner when Deputy Reeves shifted some papers and moved a half-full cup of coffee to the edge of the desk.
He picked up a clear evidence bag and held it out.
“Fire crew found this in the debris near the back of the structure. Surprised it was protected enough to survive once the roof starting caving in.” He set the bag on the table and pushed it toward me.
“We can’t release the original, but I can show you photo documentation.
And you can look at the original through the bag.
Do not open or touch it. I can’t risk a break in chain of command.
” With that, he picked up several pictures and held them out.
“This is where we found it and the condition of the paper.”
I plucked the pictures from his hand and leaned toward Callie so she could see them too.
“Best we can tell, it’s a cheap, universally used sheet of notebook paper. Nothing exciting about it or the pen used to write the note. If it wasn’t for the wording itself, we might not have even realized it had any relevance.”
The edges of the paper had curled from the heat and one edge had blackened into ash. I took all that in while reading the words that chilled my blood. We know you have the ledger. Return what you took or the next fire will end differently for you.
My temper spiked. We’d suspected Callie was in danger, but to have the threat laid out in my hands brought a rush of fury sweeping through my veins. No one was going to touch her.
No. One.
Callie’s eyes narrowed. She read the note slowly, her mouth moving around every word. Her expression remained the same, hints of worry mixed with determination. “Is there any way to trace the handwriting? Any technology that can compare it to anyone you have on file?”
“We’re working on it, but there isn’t really anything like that available to us.” Reeves pulled a notepad from his pocket. “Does this mean anything to you? They mentioned a ledger. Any idea what they’re talking about?”
“No.” She made it sound normal, but I caught a hitch in her breathing.
Deputy Reeves might notice it too. He had to have been trained in all that body language stuff, but he didn’t know Callie the way I did. I flipped through the pictures again while Reeves asked his questions.
No, she hadn’t noticed anyone hanging around. No, no one had come in asking about anything out of the ordinary. No, she didn’t have any old boyfriends who might have a grudge against her. It took a remarkable amount of control not to look her way on that one.
She knew what the note meant. I held back from accusing her in front of the deputy, but I would find out the truth. I waited until we’d wrapped up in the office and returned to the truck before I asked the single most important question of the day. “What was in the ledger?”
She tried to push her hair over her shoulder, but it caught in the gauze. With a frustrated growl, she yanked her hands to her lap and stared straight ahead. “What makes you think I know?”
“Because you do.” I cranked the truck and pulled onto the highway before she decided to take off. “I need to know, Callie. It’s important to them, and knowing might be the difference in understanding how to keep you and Cody safe.” I felt like an ass for using Cody that way, but it was true.
Her resolve crumbled with a whooshing exhale that curled her body forward. “Old paperwork. Stuff my stepfather kept. I burned it all.”
Shit. Another coincidence that Callie burned the ledger and now someone burned her building? But if they knew she burned it, why come after her?
“What kind of stuff?”
“Records.” She shrugged but the motion lacked any kind of grace and when she turned her head, her pulse pounded in her throat.
“Please don’t lie to me. I need to know the truth.”
“That’s the truth. I found it after he was arrested, and I burned it. Everything in there was written in code.” She turned her face toward the window. “There’s nothing left to return. I can’t give them what they want.”
The highway stretched ahead of us, empty despite the midday hour. A cattle truck crawled past in the opposite direction, and the smell rolled through the vents before I could close them. Callie didn’t react. She sat with her wrapped hands in her lap, telling me absolutely nothing.
“Would you?” I lifted my foot off the accelerator before I reached the main highway and the turn that would take us home. “If you still had the ledger, would you give it to them?”
Her lips pressed into a flat line. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t care what you want to be true. I care what is true. Whoever left that note is not going to believe that you’d burn something like that. If it was that important to them, they’re going to do anything to get it back. What happened last night was nothing compared to what they will do.”
“I don’t have it.” She forced each word between clenched teeth. “All I want is for Cody to be safe. If I had the ledger, and I knew that giving it to them would keep us safe, I’d give it to them. But I know men like that, Hawk. I grew up with one. It won’t end with the ledger.”
Fuck. I’d hoped she didn’t realize that, but I’d known all along she was too smart not to figure it out.
I pulled off the highway onto the service road that ran parallel to the back property. Loose gravel popped and cracked under the tires. “Is there anything else I need to know?”
“No.”
If I thought it would do me any good to push, I’d give it a try.
But if I pushed, I had to be ready for the fallout of Callie bolting again.
Pushing Callie into a corner resulted in one thing.
She’d run. I’d found that out the hard way, and Colt would never forgive me if I pushed her into taking off again.
The property gate came into view and I hit the remote. The gate swung open and I pulled through, the gravel lot spreading out ahead of me with the main house on the left, the shop on the right, and Diesel crouched near the rear of Callie’s car. He aimed a flashlight at the car and bent forward.
I stopped when Callie reached for the doorhandle. A second later, she dropped to the gravel and took off at a dead run. “What is it?” Her voice rose as I killed the engine.
Diesel didn’t answer. He angled the flashlight at the undercarriage, stiffened, then straightened.
Colt jogged over from the house. “What’s going on?”
“Where’s Cody?” Callie skidded to a stop in the middle of everything, her body twisting toward the house.
“He’s watching TV. I found a how-its-made video. We were watching it together when I saw Diesel walking around your car.” Colt stalked over to Diesel. “What did you find?”
“Tracker.” Diesel brushed dust from his knees. “I can’t reach it. Need someone skinnier.”
Colt dropped onto his back and shoved half his body beneath the car.
Diesel stood with his arms crossed and his face a flat, blank mask to anyone who couldn’t read the absolute fury in his eyes.
He raised his head to stare at the gate, then the road and the fence surrounding the property.
“They must have put it on the car before the fire. They wanted to know where she’d go. ”
“Fucking assholes. Motherfucking bastards.” The curses continued as he wiggled his way free, slamming his palms on the ground as he stood. He held out a tiny black box.
I took it from his palm. Small and flat, with a magnetic backing and covered in road grime that told us it had been on the car long enough to collect dust. “Any way to tell how long?” I handed the tracker to Diesel, who raised one shoulder.
“I can try. Not much to learn from this kind. They create a map like a GPS, so depending how long it’s been there, they might have used this to figure out Callie’s routine.”
Colt slammed both palms on the trunk of Callie’s car. “They’ve been watching my kid.”
Callie turned toward the house as the sound of Cody’s laughter trickled out in childish glee.