The Protected

hanging off her toes. She was tempted to take it off and pummel Jones across the side of the head with it.

Orlando . . . so many nightmares. So many bad dreams. And the bitter knowledge that she hadn’t been able to save the one person who’d always mattered to her.

“You know avoiding it won’t make it any easier.”

Jerking her attention back to Jones, she stared at him. “This isn’t supposed to be easy,” she said quietly. “But what in the hell would you know about it?”

For a second, though, as she stared at him, she thought she saw something in the cool depths of his eyes.

Then he looked down and it was gone.

“Just tell me about the job, Jones. I need more than just ‘a kid’and ‘an adult male.’”

* * *

GUS Hernandez pulled the battered, beat-up truck into the driveway of the little house he was renting. It was falling apart, and instead of paying five hundred a month as the landlady had originally requested, he paid three hundred . . . and did repairs. He was good with his hands and always had been. What he didn’t know how to do, he was able to learn, and he’d fixed the place up quite a bit over the past few months.

So far, he’d managed to tear up the rotting boards of the porch and replace those. He’d repainted three of the rooms. He still needed to fix the deck in back, and it was an ongoing struggle to keep the yard free of weeds. If he had the money, he’d reseed it, but he didn’t. Most of the work he did was using either scrap he found cheap at his other jobs or clearance stuff at the local hardware or home improvement stores.

He still needed to get more work done around the little place, although what he wanted to do was go inside the dark, quiet house and just sit. For a few minutes, with a cold beer and do . . . nothing. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to talk. He wanted to do nothing. It was a luxury he hadn’t been able to indulge in for a good, long while, though, and tonight would be no different.

Although it was a bright, sunny day, he felt like he had a cloud hanging over him.

Always.

Pulling the truck into park, he stared at the old place, studied it, made sure everything looked the way it had this morning when he’d left. He hadn’t had a single phone call. Not one. So that was good.

It had taken more charm than he generally cared to exert these days, but he’d managed to convince the lady living across the street to give him a call if she saw anything, and that woman? Old Mrs. Werner was nosy. If anybody had been snooping around, more than likely she’d notice something.

It didn’t let him breathe any easier, though.

He didn’t think he’d ever breathe easy again.

Please . . . you must do this for me . . .

Blocking the echo of a woman’s voice out of his head, he pushed the door open. Before he climbed out, though, he reached below the seat and took out the one thing he never went anywhere without.

The butt of the Sig Sauer P250 fit solidly in his hand. He checked it out of habit and then looked over in the passenger seat. A solemn pair of eyes looked back at him. “Come on.”

The boy sighed and slid out of the car. “Do we have to do this every day?”

He’d asked the same question yesterday. He’d asked it the day before. He’d keep asking it, Gus knew. It would only get worse, because the boy wasn’t exactly a child anymore, and that rebelliousness that always crept out during those years between child and adult was getting ever closer.

Still, there were things in life that didn’t care that Alex wanted some freedom. Things that didn’t care that the boy just wanted to live a normal life.

Gus’s job was to make sure the boy lived. Period. Staring into a pair of eyes eerily like his own, he said quietly, “Alex.”

That was all he said. Alex’s lids drooped and his skinny shoulders slumped, but he climbed out of the truck, plodding around to stand next to Gus and stare up at the old house.

Alex grumbled under his breath. Gus ignored him as he looked around, eyes never resting in one place. Before he shut the door, he grabbed a bag from the back and slung it over his left shoulder and then pulled out his denim jacket, draped it over his arm and hand to hide the Sig Sauer.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Nope.”

“There’s nobody here,” Alex said, his voice sullen, bordering on rude. He mumbled something else and Gus stopped, looked back at him. The anger in the boy was getting worse, flaring closer to the surface today than it ever had.

“We’ve talked about this, Alex,” he said quietly. “You want to be angry with me, you got a right. But remember what we talked about.”

Gus didn’t blame him. The kid had every right to be pissed. Gus wasn’t a twelve-year-old kid who’d had his entire life uprooted and he was pissed.

“This is so fucking stupid,” Alex snapped.

Stopping in his tracks, Gus turned around and stared at Alex. “Watch your mouth,” he said. “Your mother raised you better than that.”

Alex sneered. “Yeah, she raised me better but she’s dead—”

The boy’s voice cracked. And as the anger faded away into agony, Gus reached out, hooked his hand over Alex’s neck. “Yeah. She’s dead. But she wanted you safe. And you’ll be safe, Alex. Now come on . . .”

You must promise me . . .

A hard, shuddering breath escaped Alex, but then he pulled away, looking at Gus with glittering eyes. The tears he wouldn’t shed still shone in his eyes until he blinked them away. “I told you, there’s nobody here.”

“Yeah. I heard you. We’re checking anyway.”

* * *

TWENTY minutes later, while Alex oversaw their dinner of macaroni and hot dogs, Gus stood at the sink, trying unsuccessfully to scrub the engine grease from his hands. He’d worked eight hours at the construction site, then picked up a hundred bucks helping one of the guys from the site do some work on his car. He was filthy, he was tired, and he was hot. He wanted to plunge his head under the cool stream of water coming from the faucet, but he just kept scrubbing at the grease on his hands.

The phone rang just when he’d decided to give up. Hurriedly rinsing his hands, he grabbed it and spied Elsie Werner’s number. The sweet, incorrigibly nosy lady from across the street. “Hello, Elsie . . . need me to come clean out the pipes again?”

“Well, now that you mention it, the one in the bathroom is running rather slow,” she said.

Gus would swear she clogged them up just so he would come over and she could ogle his ass. He’d had plenty of women ogling his ass in his lifetime. It wasn’t a new experience and he’d used it to his advantage more than once. But to his knowledge, most of them weren’t old enough to be his great-grandmother.

Still, the lady was kind. She’d made more than a few meals for him and Alex once she figured out neither of them could do anything more complicated than pizza, burgers and fries, macaroni and cheese, or hot dogs. If she had her way, she would have taught them both to cook.

But Gus was intent on keeping his distance. Very intent. Letting a sweet old lady teach him or the kid how to cook wasn’t the way to keep a cool distance. It wouldn’t help either him or the kid, and in the long run, it could harm her. He had enough blood on his hands.

“I’ll come by later tonight,” he said. “Although I don’t know if I can fix it tonight. I may need to go to the store for the drain cleaner.”

“Well, that can wait. I wasn’t calling about that, Gus. We have a new neighbor moving in . . . did you see?”

The skin on the back of his neck prickled.

Lifting his head, he looked to the front of the house. “A neighbor, huh?”

“Yes. A pretty girl. The moving van pulled up not long after you arrived. I was thinking about inviting her for dinner . . . maybe you and the boy can join us?”