Hot Pursuit (19 page)

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

His eyes were hard. “It means the organized
crime connection is no longer a theory. David West worked for Ryan
Rivera. Have you ever heard of him?”

The coffee in her stomach was making her
queasy. “Should I have?”

“Not necessarily. He’s West Coast, but he’s
been moving east for a while. Loans, numbers, money laundering,
drugs—you name it, he’s probably doing it. And he doesn’t do it
alone. West was one of his guys.”

Evie felt as if her knees were made of water.
If she hadn’t been sitting, she’d have sunk into a boneless puddle
on the floor.

“I didn’t know.” Her voice was little more
than a whisper.

“You weren’t supposed to.”

She closed her eyes and tried to process it
all. David had blown into her restaurant one day, tousled from the
surf and cheekily handsome. He’d flirted with all the women on
staff. And then he’d kept coming back. Eventually he’d started
talking about the business, offering advice.

What he’d told her to do worked. She’d hired
him after checking out his impeccable references.

“He was an accountant.” She speared a hand
through her hair and tossed the long strands over her shoulder. “He
had such great ideas for the restaurant, and I needed the financial
advice. I started everything on a shoestring, and it was often
month-to-month as we struggled to make ends meet. But when David
came along…” She shrugged. “The restaurant boomed. He really seemed
to know what he was doing. I was looking at paying off my loans
early—and then it all ended.”

“I’m sorry, Evie. And I’m sure West did know
what he was doing. He also had an influx of cash from Rivera, I
guarantee it. They were washing the money through your
business.”

The betrayal felt as fresh as that night when
she’d realized he’d taken the payroll and wasn’t coming back. “But
why me? Why my restaurant? It was just a little bistro near the
beach, nothing big and fancy. Nothing with a huge cash flow when
David came to me.”

“They didn’t want to draw attention to what
they were doing. And I’m sure Rivera planned an expansion once he’d
gotten a toehold there. You were the toehold.”

“Obviously, it didn’t go as planned. David
robbed me blind.”

“And not on his boss’s orders, I’m
guessing.”

“So is that why he was killed?”

Matt looked grave. “Probably.”

As she processed all this new information,
she started to get mad. Waves of fury flooded her system, made her
want to punch something. Instead, she smacked her palms against the
counter. “Damn him! He brought that shit here. To my life, my
family’s life. My friends! He didn’t care how it touched me, Mama,
or Sarah. He only wanted to use me again.”

“I think you’re right about that.” Matt’s
tone was soothing, as if he knew she was on the brink. “But I think
it’s more than that too.”

Her throat hurt from suppressing the urge to
scream. “What do you mean, more?”

“Think, Evie. Why would he come here? Why
would he risk it unless there was a big payoff for him? He didn’t
want your protection. And he certainly didn’t want any money since
he knew you didn’t have any.”

Evie blinked. “What kind of payoff could
there be in just talking to me?”

Matt leaned toward her, his eyes gleaming. “I
think you have something, Evie. Something West wanted very badly.
Did he give you anything before he left? Leave anything
behind?”

Confusion swirled in her brain. “Why would he
give me anything? He stole everything I had. He knew he was
planning to do it, so I’d be a poor person to entrust with
something once he had.”

Matt shrugged, but she didn’t kid herself he
was feeling casual about this idea. “He wouldn’t have been overt
about it. But you do have something. He wouldn’t have come
otherwise. It has to be something small, something easily carried.
Something you would overlook.”

Evie frowned as she ran through the last few
days with David. He’d seemed stressed. And they hadn’t been
sleeping together at all. Not that she’d minded that part. They’d
only hooked up a few times in the two months they dated, and while
it had been pleasant enough, there weren’t any real sparks.

“I don’t think so…” And then she stopped.
Thought about packing her car for the trip back to Rochambeau. The
things she’d piled into it. A small cherry box slid to the front of
her memory. “Wait, there was one thing. He forgot an old humidor he
said was his dad’s. He kept it in his office. But there was nothing
in it except a few cigars.”

Matt’s gaze sharpened. “Do you still have
it?”

She nodded. “I tossed everything in my car
when I left. I don’t know why I kept it.” Except that the box was
pretty and she’d thought it might be worth a few dollars if she
needed to sell some stuff.

“Where is it now?”

Evie felt the heat of embarrassment roll
through her.

“It’s still in the car.” She’d never gotten
around to unpacking because she kept hoping to leave again. Kept
hoping she’d get that call from somewhere asking her to come work
in a great kitchen.

So pitiful.

“We need to go get it. It could be
important.”

“You really think the humidor has something
to do with this?”

He shrugged as he dug his keys from his
pocket. “We won’t know until we take it apart.”

She grabbed her purse and they walked out and
got into the car. Matt was backing out of the garage when his phone
buzzed. He snapped it up. “Girard… What? You’re kidding? Yeah,
we’re on the way.”

“What is it?” Evie’s gut was churning when he
tossed the phone down again.

The look he gave her was indefinable. “Kyle
Jenkins has been detained.”

BRIANNA SWEENEY HATED SMALL TOWNS. She was
also developing a severe dislike for the South. It was hotter than
hell, for one. Louisiana was muggy, the mosquitoes came in
supersize, and she couldn’t make sense of the food. She’d bartended
at Evangeline’s, and she’d even tried the jambalaya and gumbo, but
this thing about boiling itty-bitty lobsters—crawfish—with
potatoes, lemons, and corn on the cob was just too weird.

Julian ripped the tail off a red bug-looking
thing and sucked on the head before peeling the shell away from the
tail meat.

“That shit stinks,” she said, sucking on her
cigarette.

“So don’t eat it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” She gazed out over
the water. They’d stopped and grabbed lunch at a roadside stand
about twenty miles from Rochambeau. She didn’t like being so far
from the town, especially after last night, but you couldn’t
disappear in the damn place. Old ladies stared at you. Men nodded
and said howdy—or something like that. She couldn’t understand half
of what anyone said in South Louisiana. They were speaking English,
sometimes, but it wasn’t any English she’d ever heard. It sounded
thick to her ears, had a different rhythm entirely, and she often
found herself trying to work out the words while people smiled and
nodded like she was an idiot.

She felt like an amoeba under a microscope in
this town, and she didn’t like the blatant loss of anonymity. And
now, shit—

“What’re we gonna do with the girl?”

She narrowed her gaze on the man dripping bug
juice from his chin. How had she ever lost her head enough to screw
this guy? He was a big hunk of masculinity, muscular and full of
stamina, but he was the male equivalent of a bubble-headed blonde.
So long as he didn’t talk, she’d been able to ignore his
deficiencies. She was fast losing patience. The sex was good, but
not that damn good.

“We’re going to trade her for the
information, just like I said before.” About a million times
before.

“What about George?”

“What about him? Nothing we can do now.”
George had fucked up and there was nothing for it now. He was gone
and they had to work without him. Which they damn well would do
without issue.

“Rivera call yet?”

“Yeah. He wants us to finish the job.”

“So we finish it then.”

Yeah, shit-for-brains, we finish it
.
Brianna forced smoke from her nostrils. God, how had she ever
gotten herself into this mess? And how could she ever get out?
Working for Rivera wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. She was tired
and getting more worried by the day that she’d be the one to take
the hit the next time. If she could deliver what Rivera wanted and
walk away, she’d consider herself lucky.

But they’d never let her out.

David West—now that guy had balls, that’s for
sure. He stole all that money—not only from Evie Baker’s place it
turned out—and stashed it in offshore accounts. Then he
systematically collected as much dirt on Rivera as he could and
built a database.

Too bad he’d been stupid enough to leave
everything where they could find it in New Orleans. Everything
except one last puzzle piece, which was the source of her freaking
headache now. Rivera didn’t know what it was, but he knew West had
something else that contained all that evidence. And she wasn’t
leaving here without it.

If only she knew what to do with the
information once they’d gotten it, and how to access that money,
she might have been tempted to keep the computer instead of
shipping it off so fast. She could be on an island somewhere,
sipping a tropical drink. David had once told her the same damn
thing when he’d tried to recruit her into his schemes. She hadn’t
believed a word of it, or maybe she’d have warned Rivera.

Then again, maybe not.

“We need to find a place to stay,” she said,
making a decision. Last night’s little fuck up made it necessary to
lie low for a while, and staying in town wasn’t going to cut
it.

Julian wiped his chin and fingers. “We got a
place.”

“We can’t stay in the motel any longer. We
need to check out. And then we need a base of operations. This job
could take a couple more days.”

“Where you planning to go?”

She motioned toward the bayou. “In there. I
saw an advertisement for fishing cabins on the bulletin board at
the general store.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the metal
ashtray. “We’ll get a cabin and stash the girl there, then make
contact with Evie. Once she knows we aren’t playing around, she’ll
give us what we need.”

* * *

Kyle Jenkins stammered and sputtered and
swore he hadn’t seen Sarah since he’d left her at the gas station
outside of town. Matt had glared at the guy with his best
elite-soldier stare, but the story never changed.

“You believe him?”

They were exiting the sheriff’s office where
Kyle had been detained for questioning in a complaint lodged by a
neighbor of his mother’s. Evie looked as if she could chew nails.
They’d come straight here after Kev’s call, hoping to find out
where Sarah was. Matt had had to sweet-talk the deputy into letting
them in. Having Evie along didn’t hurt. She was pretty damn
pleasing to the eye, especially when she smiled and flirted the way
she had with Deputy Boudreaux.

She was also pretty damn pleasing in other
ways. Matt shoved thoughts of a naked Evie out of his head—no mean
feat—and concentrated on what was happening right now.

He knew what she wanted to hear—that he
thought Kyle was lying and they’d find Sarah in his mama’s trailer,
playing Suzy Homemaker or something—but he couldn’t do it.

“He hasn’t seen her since last night.”

They were on the sidewalk in front of the
jail. She put a hand on the brick wall to steady herself. “How can
you be sure? How do you know this tough guy stuff works?”

He’d broken much stronger men than Kyle
Jenkins—though of course he’d been able to use other methods of
persuasion while doing so. Kyle was a pussy who disintegrated
beneath a strong look and the threat of future violence. He knew
the type well.

“I’ve been doing this for a while,
chère
. Believe me, he hasn’t seen her.”

Evie grabbed onto him, facing him squarely,
her chin inching up, her lip just the barest line away from
quivering. So why did he want to kiss her? Why did he want to wrap
her in his arms and make this all go away?

“What do you think happened to her? I have to
know, Matt. I have to. I can’t face my mama without having
something to tell her.”

Sonofabitch, the hard part. He’d been
expecting it. And he still didn’t know how to ease the blow. So he
just said it. “I think someone took her.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Behind the tears
was the kind of pain that kicked him in the gut. He wanted to make
it better, but he was having a hard time doing so. He felt almost
as desperate as when he’d been twelve and couldn’t make his mother
better again. It was disconcerting, and he worked hard to focus. He
had to concentrate on the here and now, not on how his past and her
past were all tangled and twisted and how he felt responsible for
her now.

How he wanted to make everything right
because he wanted her to smile again.

She sucked in a breath. “You said last
night—”

“I was wrong. It didn’t happen at your mama’s
house, but someone has her. It might not be related to the murder,
but it’d be a damn amazing coincidence if it wasn’t.”

“We have to tell the police.”

He touched her cheek with the back of his
finger and caught the single tear she dared to let spill free.
“Tell them what,
chère
? That I have a feeling?”

“Why not? She’s still missing. They’d have to
listen to me now.” Her eyes shimmered. All he wanted to do, all in
the world he could think about, was lowering his mouth to hers and
stealing whatever he could take. Taking away the heartache and pain
for however long he could manage it.

“We need something more than that. They have
your report from last night, and they’re questioning her friends.
But they won’t issue an Amber Alert without something more
concrete.”