Nothing remained unscathed.
An overturned bookshelf had its contents scattered around the room, picture frames lay shattered on the carpet with photos torn apart. Her bills and personal mail had been strewn over the floor. And a knife had shredded her small sofa, tufts of foam yanked out and thrown across the room. Her possessions were piled high, touched by the stranger who had invaded her home. And the carpet smelled of urine. Nothing would be salvageable. Jess knew the malicious break-in was more than a mere robbery the moment she saw it. This was an act of sheer rage.
Lucas Baker had left her a message.
She was aware of Sam staring at her, expecting a reaction. But she couldn’t move. And nothing came from her mouth, although inside she felt like screaming. Eventually, Sam left her side and continued her search through the tiny apartment, checking for intruders. It wouldn’t take long. She remained behind in the living room, completely stunned.
Her body ached from the fresh bruises, but nothing hurt worse than this cold violation of her privacy. Her eyes began to water, but she choked back the emotion. She didn’t have much to her name, but what she owned now lay in tatters, a lifetime ripped to shreds in a matter of minutes. The degradation only brought back the fear—the mind-numbing fear she despised.
When Sam rejoined her, Jess barely heard what she said. She crossed her arms to stop from shaking.
“I’ll call it in if you want, but there’s something you gotta see first. In your bedroom.”
Sam touched her arm, forcing her to finally move. By the time she got back to her bedroom, she was numb with loss. It looked the same as her living room. None of her possessions were recognizable, heaped in piles like so much garbage. And insult to injury, the bastard had taken her backup gun. A sweet .45-caliber Glock 21 with thirteen ACP rounds in the mag and one more in the chamber. Angry words were smeared across the walls in her lipstick, mixed with death threats. If there was any doubt of the intruder’s intentions, Baker’s coercion became perfectly clear with the harsh words scrawled across her dresser mirror.
YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT!!!
Written all in caps, she could hear him screaming in her head, a replay of what happened hours before. The sound mixed with other voices from her past, a paralyzing recollection. And with haunted eyes and her face bruised and cut, Jess stared at her own reflection in the mirror through the scrawl, feeling lost and alone. The rage of a lifetime swelled inside her, on the brink of breaking loose. She’d worked so hard to keep the past behind her. To control it. But now it glared at her through accusing eyes. Her eyes.
While the police held her for questioning, the scum bucket had plenty of time to rip apart her life. The anger threatened to burst inside her, a seething pool of heat. The urge to cower in a corner like a lost child waged its quiet war against grabbing her Python to hunt Baker down like a crazed vigilante.
Jess gritted her teeth, fighting off the itch to nail Baker—now.
“He stole my backup gun. A Glock 21,” she muttered.
“Do you know what he wants?” Sam asked. When Jess didn’t answer right away, Sam grabbed the cell phone clipped to her belt. “I’m gonna call this in. Get a team over here to dust for prints.”
Jess held out her hand to stop her overzealous friend.
“No, don’t. Let me handle this, my way.” She locked her gaze on Sam, but turned away the minute her friend opened her mouth.
“You know more than you’re letting on. I know you. What’s this all about, Jessie?”
Sam didn’t stop there. She ranted on about reporting her stolen weapon and about not taking the law into her own hands, but Jess stayed focused on the problem at hand, struggling to regain her composure. Baker wanted his property back, but she couldn’t tell Sam everything about her recent skirmish with the bastard. At least not yet. She had to respect Sam’s position as law enforcement. And her friend had done too much already, risking her job to tell her about Baker. This was her problem, and she’d deal with it her way.
With Seth’s help, she’d get her shot at Baker’s computer. By the looks of her place, she’d paid a hefty price for the right to invade his privacy, returning the favor he’d just bestowed on her. But she had no intention of getting Seth more involved than he already was. With Baker acting as an informant to the cops—a fact she hadn’t known until today—one of them might have leaked the information on her address. And that thought scared the hell out of her. She didn’t have the heart to tell Sam what she suspected. And no way would she drag Seth into this cesspool. After the kid dissected Baker’s laptop, he’d be out.
“Aw, Jessie.” With her voice laden with disappointment, Sam shook her head. Her eyes filled with the sympathy of a friend—absent the judgmental glare of a jaded cop who knew better. “What have you gotten into now?”
Getting in hadn’t been the problem. Walking away in one piece would be the real challenge. She always figured that if you’re gonna walk on thin ice, you may as well dance. And she and Baker weren’t done with their time on the dance floor.
Outside Talkeetna, Alaska
Mid-morning
Warm sheets felt good against his bare skin, especially with the soft patter of rain tapping its sweet music along his rooftop and windowpanes. He’d always been a sucker for rain, Nature’s version of a lullaby. Behind closed eyelids, Payton Archer pictured a steel gray morning, heavy with the smell of rain, commonplace in Alaska this time of year. The summer sun rarely made an appearance through the constant and dense cloud cover, even with the longer daylight hours.
With eyes shut, Payton could imagine his world a different place. Rapt in the last vestiges of sleep, he lay perfectly still, clinging to the twilight before he opened his eyes to the reality of his life. He listened to the sound of his breaths as if they came from someone else. A slow steady rhythm. The simple ebb and flow of a man who didn’t know failure.
Today, things might be different. Maybe
The serene moment of complete denial didn’t last long. When he rolled to one side, the top of his head nearly exploded. Shooting pain charged up his shoulders and neck, burrowing behind his eyes like it had a perfect right to be there. And who was he to argue? Hell, his brain took up prime real estate in his skull and certainly wasn’t working hard enough to pay its own way.
“Shit.” His rumbling baritone vibrated through his aching head with all the finesse of a shrill air horn at close range.
Bleary-eyed, he squinted across his small cabin, propped on an elbow. Every detail rolled in and out of focus—clothes strewn along the floor, an old liquor bottle with its spilled contents, and his bed pillows, which had migrated across the room. Strands of his dark blond hair hung over his eyes, masking much of the upheaval from last night. A good thing. He’d never get high marks from
To clear the haze, Payton ran a hand over his face and scratched the stubble on his chin. Every bone in his head throbbed with a dull pain. Even his teeth hurt. And his throat felt like someone had jammed an old sock down it, foot and all.
“You’re up. Good. I thought you might be dead.”
Payton jerked his head when he heard the man’s voice. The sudden move punished him. A shadow stirred, a dark shape sitting at a wooden table next to his stove. A blur of red flannel and a slick navy windbreaker beaded with rain.
Gradually, the deadpan expression of Joseph Tanu emerged from Payton’s self-induced fog. Oval face with dark skin and long black hair streaked with gray. Joe’s deep-set eyes looked like dense volcanic glass, shiny obsidian reflecting the man’s ancient Haida lineage. Age lines furrowed his face, but Payton had no idea how old Joe was. He never asked; it never seemed important. He’d known the Native Alaskan since his early teens. Being a local trooper at the time, Joe had been the one who told him and his sister Susannah about their parents—right after his father’s Cessna slammed into the mountain range outside Juneau. The worst day of his life. And that was saying something.
“Thanks for the concern,” Payton grumbled. He sat up in bed and raked fingers through his hair. Every muscle and joint bellyached from old gridiron war wounds, a persistent pang made worse by his self-inflicted booze bullet to the brain.
