Laura Kaye - Hard As It Gets

The lanyard holding her UMC credentials still hung around her neck. She lifted it and rose to her feet. “Becca Merritt.”

“Hmm,” he said, his light brown eyes flipping from the plastic card to the green scrubs she hadn’t bothered to change at the end of her shift. “You a doctor?”

“Nurse. Have you seen Charlie? He’s not answering his phone or returning any of my messages.”

He swiped his fingers against his temple. “You’re bleeding there.”

The sting had already told her as much. “It’s okay. Have you seen him? Please.”

The man rested the bat against the door and shook his head. “I don’t think he’s been staying here. Ain’t seen him coming and going, ain’t seen no lights, haven’t heard that music he likes to play.”

Becca’s stomach prepped for a three-story drop. “How long has this been going on?”

He gripped the rusted iron railing. “I’d say . . . a week. Maybe two. He’s current, though.”

Hope held her stomach in place. “Are you the landlord? Can you let me in?”

“He’s in some kinda trouble, ain’t he? Boy’s too damn smart on a computer for his own good.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, suspicion curling in her belly.

“Let’s just say my son had a little parking ticket problem, and now he don’t.” His eyebrows arched on his forehead and let her come to a conclusion all on her own.

Typical Charlie. He’d gone from obsessively studying software and web code as a kid to hacking into websites when he was a teenager just because he could. All self-taught. Luckily, he’d parlayed his hacking skills into a legitimate job as a computer security consultant—a fancy way of saying big companies paid him a boatload of money to hack into their security systems as a way of testing and evaluating them. But he still occasionally wandered on the wrong side of the cyber law. Just for fun. “Sounds like him,” she said.

He fished a set of keys out of his pocket and waved her up the steps. “I’ll let you in, Miss Becca. Come on.”

“Thank you,” she said, following him. Uncertainty fluttered through her as she approached the door, but she pushed through it and latched onto the affection she’d heard in the man’s voice when he’d spoken of Charlie.

Inside, the kitchen was like time traveling to the 1970s, with its mix of green and gold appliances. But the room was tidy and smelled of fresh, strong coffee. The assemblage of roosters on one wall gave the space a sort of outdated charm and hinted at the presence, at one time at least, of a woman’s touch. The living room was more of the same.

A cascade of reds and blues fell over the worn hardwood of the foyer, cast by the sun shining through the colored glass of the fan-shaped transom so typical of Baltimore row houses. She followed the man out the front door and down into the cement stairwell where she’d started this little adventure not long before.

His key went right in. He pushed the door open but held himself back, gesturing for her to go first.

“Thank you, Mr.—”

“Call me Walt. Everyone does.”

She smiled and stepped past him. “Thank you, Walt.”

Inside, murky gloom shrouded the apartment, the slice of filtered daylight from the open door the only illumination. “Let me get the lights,” he said.

Becca walked forward, her foot coming down on something—

The overhead light came on.

The place was a disaster. Books and magazines shoved off shelves, the contents of drawers spilled every which way over the floor, clothing strewn about, the remains of cardboard boxes lying caved in here and there.

Her heart flew into her throat, and she charged forward. Charlie!

A hand clamped on her arm. “Wait. Let me check things out,” Walt said, urging her toward the still open door. “Got a cell phone?”

Becca nodded, her mind reeling. He didn’t need to tell her what to do with it. “Maybe we should both wait,” she said. Last thing she wanted was for this old man to get hurt on her account.

“I’ll be all right,” he said, his brows an angry slash over his eyes. “Somebody did this in my house.”

She dialed 911 as she watched the old man prowl around. When the dispatcher answered her call, she told him who she was and what had happened.

“Charlie’s not here,” Walt called from the back room, and relief surged through her. “No one is.”

She relayed that information as well. All she could do now was wait for the police to show. Walt returned to her side at the door, shaking his head and making a bewildered sound low in his throat.

A few minutes passed, and she couldn’t stand still anymore.

Careful not to disturb anything, curiosity born of anxiety dragged her through the apartment and into the small bedroom at the rear. Well, it was supposed to be the bedroom. An office was far more important to her brother. He slept on the couch and reserved this dedicated space for his huge L-shaped desk and computer equipment.

The damage was even greater here. Normally, a row of laptops covered one part of the desk, and countless other gizmos she couldn’t begin to name or understand filled the shelves above. Paper, overturned containers of discs, haphazard piles of cable, empty pizza boxes, and other debris covered the desk and floor. The chair was overturned. The file cabinet had been emptied out, and all the desk drawers stood open.

The computers were all gone.

All she could do was shake her head in disbelief. It was surreal. Totally freaking surreal.

And it meant her internal gauges had been reading just right. Ultrasensitive was the perfect frickin’ setting. Because Charlie was in trouble. Goose bumps erupted over her whole body.

Somebody had tossed this place upside down and over again. What were they looking for? Had they found it? And was Charlie here when they came looking?

The little choked noise she made was completely involuntary. The hand she pressed against her lips shook. Don’t go there. Don’t go there until you have to. Oh, God, please not again.

Sirens sounded in the distance and got louder—closer—fast.

“Miss Becca, the police are here,” Walt said, placing the emphasis on the po.

Not sure of her voice, she nodded to the empty space and carefully picked her steps back through the overturned piles of her brother’s life.

Walt waited at the door for her with kind, sympathetic eyes. How far they’d come in such a short time. For all she knew, he might’ve been the last person to see Charlie. Alive, her brain added, giving silent voice to her worst fears and raising an image of her older brother, Scott, in her mind’s eye. He’d died of a drug overdose a few weeks after his college graduation, and it had shocked the hell out of all of them. They’d gone to different colleges, and she’d had no idea Scott even used. She couldn’t live through the nightmare of burying a brother again. She wouldn’t.

Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes. No. No way she was falling apart. Or assuming the worst. She would find Charlie and figure out what the hell was going on—and who was behind it. With both their parents gone, they were each other’s only remaining family. And she refused to let her little brother down. She’d done enough by refusing to listen to him last week.

Becca shifted into crisis management mode, sliding into the cool, dispassionate discipline the most critical cases in her emergency department required—the one that helped make sure lives got saved, not lost.

A pair of light green eyes flashed into her mind’s eye, and the rest of the man’s face—the angled jaw, blade of a nose, and grim set of his lips—filled in around that cold stare. Nick Rixey. If Charlie’s note meant he’d been a member of her father’s Special Forces team, he would’ve had training and skills she really could’ve used right about now. If her meeting with him yesterday had gone differently. If he’d just heard her out. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. A blaze of anger flooded through her veins. No use yearning after what wasn’t and would never be.

Car doors slammed out front. Becca stepped out the door, the transition between Charlie’s cave and the late afternoon sun making her eyes squint and water.

Would they take her more seriously than they had when she’d filed the missing persons report? Please, God, let them actually help me this time. But if not, she’d damn well figure this thing out.

One way or another.

Charlie’s life might very well depend on it.

Rixey’s mind was still standing in the back corner of Becca’s yard, keeping watch and waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Had been all damn day. The distraction was making him sloppy. And sloppy pissed him off.

Sloppy meant mistakes. Like missing the perfect opportunity to intercept the witness in an assault case he’d been tracking all afternoon. It was like his brain needed a frickin’ tune-up, because he sure as hell wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

As he sat at his desk completing the affidavits for the three sets of papers he’d managed to successfully serve, he had no illusions about why that was.

His instincts refused to let go of this thing with the woman. It was like a fucking stone in his shoe, rolling around and jabbing at him. Normally, he was all about paying attention to instinct—sometimes it was all a man had on his side. And, generally, he trusted his instincts. They almost never failed him.

Almost.

The one glaring exception had been a spectacular crash and burn of a failure that had left men dead, injured, and changed forever. Himself included.

And it had involved a Merritt.

Now he didn’t know whether the instinct rubbing his hide raw over Becca should be trusted or if his recent history was mindfucking him.

The forms chugged from the printer and Rixey scrawled his signature in all the appropriate places.

He leaned back and stretched, the reclining desk chair supporting his weight, then scrubbed his hands through his hair. The light in the room dimmed considerably, drawing his gaze to the window. Clouds were rolling in, blotting out the remains of the evening sun.

Too quiet. Too still. Too alone.

Story of his mothereffing life these days. Goddamnit, he missed the guys. The ones who’d died and the ones who hadn’t.

Nope. Not gonna go there.

Becca . . .

Rixey was up and out of the chair before he’d even thought to move.

In his bedroom, he suited up just as he had the night before, a whole lotta déjà vu filling the space between his ears.

Only one way to un-fuck his head. He had to put boots on the ground and eyes on the subject. Shit. And he needed more intel, which meant he was gonna have to talk to her this time.

Keys, phone, and jacket in hand, he made for the living room.

His brother walked in the apartment door just as Rixey reached for it. Jeremy’s gaze dropped to the holstered gun under Nick’s left arm, and he frowned. “You’re going out serving tonight?”

“Nah,” Nick said. He usually had sufficient turnaround time on a service to avoid working at night, when things were more likely to get dicey quick. “Got something else.”

“Something that requires your gun?” Jeremy’s pierced eyebrow arched.

Not wanting to open up an inquisition about what he was doing—especially since even he didn’t really know—Nick ignored the question. “All done downstairs?” Rixey asked. Hard Ink didn’t usually close ’til nine.

Jeremy shook his head, longish hair tumbling into his eyes. He swept it back. “Grabbing some food before my next appointment. And that wasn’t subtle at all, Mr. Spook.”

Hand on the metal door latch, Rixey smirked. “Never a spook. That’s CIA.”

“Whatevs.” Jeremy tugged the fridge door open, casting a yellow glow over that corner of the kitchen.

Rixey stepped out into the hall.

“Hey, Nick?” He ducked back in. Jer looked at him over the top of the refrigerator door, an unusually serious expression on his face. “Be careful.”

The civilian version of Don’t get shot. Roger that. “Yup,” Nick said and closed the door behind him.

As he turned onto Becca’s street for the second time in as many nights, he was struck by how close she lived to Hard Ink. Between the crosstown jaunt from the wrong Rebecca Merritt’s house and his brain-dead trip home the previous night, the observation hadn’t really sunk in before. Twelve minutes driving time was all that separated them.