“At ease,” Alex said, even though he sat ramrod straight in his upholstered leather executive chair, those laser eyes of his raking over Tripp from his head to his booted toes.
Tripp met the man’s gaze and raised him one. “Good job taking Driscoll down yesterday, Boss. Great shooting.”
“Thanks for working with Tucker’s team. They can be…” Alex thumbed his clean-shaven chin like a prizefighter between rounds. “…challenging.”
“It was Eden who located Ashley, or we would’ve been chasing our tails, what with that elevator out-of-order ruse.”
“Driscoll thought he was smarter than you.”
Interesting word choice: you. Not us. Alex knew how to play the game.
“He damned near was, but Jameson sensed he was still on my floor.” Tripp always gave credit where credit was due. There was no I in TEAM. No asses, either.
“We need to talk.” Dipping his hand into the pencil drawer at the center of his desk, Alex withdrew a single folder and tossed it across the desk.
Thumbing the file open, Tripp faced several high-res, black and white action shots of… Shit. Himself. Whoever’d taken the photos was good. All were high-clarity. Good angles. Taken from both Seattle and Alexandria, each shot showed his profile or his face. He couldn’t deny the truth. These shots were all of him.
Going for broke, Tripp slid the eight-by-eleven glossies onto Alex’s glass-covered desktop and arranged them in chronological order. The line-up started with the shot taken the night he’d rescued that five-foot-nothing woman from those thick-headed morons on Pike Street in Seattle. It ended with the shot of him tossing those punks into the Potomac River, after they’d roughed up a harmless, down on his luck, Vietnam vet. Once he’d lined up the evidence, all photos faced his boss. Tripp asked, “Now what?”
Alex leaned back in his chair, interlocked his fingers behind his head, looked at the ceiling, and said, “You tell me.”
“Whoever took these shots is good.” Okay, that was lame.
“The integrity of traffic and security cams has come a long way.”
Which meant either Mother or Beau had busted their asses accumulating this specific intel. One or both of them must’ve scoured hundreds of miles of security footage to locate these few specific sightings. Also meant if Alex had this intel, someone else could put two and two together.
“Technology…” Tripp breathed. Gotta love it and the computer geeks behind it. Damn them. They’d caught him.
Alex had the stone-cold eyes of a sniper. Didn’t blink. Didn’t speak.
Tripp chewed the inside of his lip, not wanting to fight his boss, but he refused to apologize for doing the right thing. If Alex had these shots, he also knew precisely what transpired before Tripp stepped in. “You want me to resign? Is that what this is about?”
“Did I ask you to?” Alex shot back.
“Then what? Do you want me to quit fighting for justice? Me to stop hunting bastards after dark? Me to let good people get raped or beat, while everyone else looks the other way? What?”
Leaning his elbows onto his desk, Alex tented his fingers into a damned stiff-looking steeple. “I want you to decide who you’re going to work for, Junior Agent. If this is what you do…” He spared a quick glance at the photos. “…you’re on your own. Go for it. I don’t employ vigilantes, but I promise you, I will hunt them down.”
“Despite the obvious fact that, without me, these victims could be dead?” Unbelievable.
“No one gets to play cop, judge, and executioner on my watch.”
Tripp wanted to ask, ‘Then why aren’t you out there saving innocent folks with me?’ But he sensed another big, fat ‘but’ coming up. So, like Alex had before, he waited.
“If you want to circumvent the law,” Alex said, “I know someone who runs several black ops teams. You’ll fit right in.”
That didn’t sound like a compliment. “Who?”
“Senator Sullivan, Texas.”
“He the man who went to bat for Walker Judge?”
Alex shook his head. “No, that was me. If you go to work for Sullivan, you’ll make good money, but you’ll be overseas more often than not. Might work out better for you. Think about it.”
Not if he had to leave Ashley behind. Tripp held his breath.
“But if you want to work for me…” Alex made that sound like a threat. Here it comes… “The son of a bitchin’ night hunts stop now.”
“Like hell!” Tripp’s shoulder muscles flexed and his nostrils flared at that pompous demand. “Then who’ll be there when the police haven’t shown up yet, and shit’s still going down?” He stabbed his finger at the photo of the poor blonde in Seattle. “They had her half-undressed and backed against a brick wall when I stepped in. You think she cares who saved her, the police or me? You think her husband or her three kids care?”
Lifting with deliberate grace to his feet, Alex leaned over his desk and stabbed the photo taken deep within the Winkler Botanical Preserve. “Do you have any idea who the young man you saved last Friday night is?”
Tripp looked down at the shorter of the two kids, the one who’d called him a hero. “Of course not. I don’t check IDs when I’m working. Would you? I just do what I should. All I heard was a couple names in a biker bar and the location of an upcoming beatdown. Spencer something-or-other. I acted on that intel, located the boys, and it’s a damned good thing I did because…” Tripp lifted to his feet and faced the man who could destroy him with all this evidence. “I saved that kid and his buddy, and you know it! Those bastards went after them with chains and tire irons. They would’ve died that night if not for me. Sure as fuck didn’t see you there!” That came out a little stronger than he’d meant it to.
Alex shrugged off the underhanded accusation like it meant nothing. Never even blinked. “The name Spencer Nantz ring a bell?”
Oh, shit, damn, and son of a bitch. That wimpy kid was Spencer
