Bending the Rules (25 page)

“He did?” Twisting around, Poppy stared at Jason where he was talking to Henry across the lot. Damn the man—just when she had him pegged as a total ass, he had to go and smooth things over for her. Could he just once be consistent?

As if he felt her stare, his head started to come up and she spun back, not wanting to make eye contact again. The ladder seemed to take a spongy dip beneath her weight and she grabbed the top. Yet her precautions to protect the kids aside, she knew darn well her father kept his stuff in tip-top shape. So this sudden unstable feeling likely had more to do with a case of the whirlies from her quick turn than a problem with the stepladder. Pulling her pencil out from behind her ear, she consulted the master drawing again and set back to work.

A short while later she leaned out to finish a mountain peak that, after all her big talk about safety, she knew she shouldn’t attempt before moving the ladder. Just as she stretched to her fullest extension, she felt a slight jolt beneath her. Immediately the stepladder’s front right footing torqued in a direction it was never intended to move. Then both sets of legs started sliding beyond what should have been their securely locked position. The front set hit the wall and abruptly stopped, throwing her off balance.

Her hands shot out to prevent her head from coming into contact with the wall, then scrabbled for a grip on its ungrippable flat surface while the section she stood on kept going in the opposite direction. The space between her hands and feet grew wider and wider as the ladder angled away from the wall toward the ground.

She heard Danny yelp and jump away from the heavy-duty aluminum legs skittering toward him across the concrete as the ground rushed up at her at warp speed. As her hands slid down the wall while her body became less and less upright, she had just enough time to realize that when she pancaked on the concrete it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Then a hard arm hooked her around the waist and jerked her against a harder body before she could plummet that final few feet. Having her descent halted in such an abrupt manner folded her in half, which cut off her breath. Jerking back to a less hinged position, she cracked her right elbow against the wall.

“Sssssshit!” Pain zinged up to her shoulder and down to her fingertips. But when Jason set her gently on her feet and supported her back against his strong torso, it dawned on her she could probably stand on her own.

She didn’t bother to try, but it was good to know that she could. Drawing a few unsteady, deep breaths, she took stock.

And discovered that thanks to a much less nasty landing than she’d anticipated in those few eternal freefall seconds, she was in damn good shape.

She felt Jason’s heart pounding against her back as his hands slid up to her shoulders then down to her wrists before slipping beneath her underarms and running down her sides, his fingertips brushing impersonally across the sides of her breasts on their way to her ribs, which he palpated lightly as if seeking fractures.

“Are you okay?” his voice rumbled in her ear.

She sucked in a breath. Blew it out. “Yes.”

Stepping back, he turned her to face him. “What is it with you?” he demanded, sounding surly and on edge. “First you’re nearly clocked by that wrench and now your ladder fails?” He squatted to examine the cross-struts that should have held it upright.

“You’re asking the wrong person, because I don’t get it, either,” she said, stooping down next to him. The kids swarmed over to join them around the fallen ladder. Cutting across their exclamations, she informed Jason, “This is my father’s and he takes excellent care of his equipment.” Watching him run his fingers over the twisted holes—all that was left where the rivets anchoring the struts to the legs of the stepladder should have been—filled her with sick confusion and she said again, “I just don’t get it.”

W
ATCHING THE
activity down the block from his car, Bruno Arturo admitted that dicking with the rivets had been a lame impulse. Well, tough. When he’d come across the ladder while scoping out the site late last night he’d still been pissed off from that short news feature he’d seen on KING-5. Here he’d tried to cut the kid a break. He should have known better than to go soft over some little girl.

Information on the Capelli kid had been surprisingly hard to come by. He’d made the mistake of assuming that the street kids knew what he had not—that she was a girl not a boy, so it took him longer than usual to even discover she went by the name of CaP on the street. Then when he finally did have a name for his inquiries, nobody seemed to know her well. It wasn’t until one kid said that CaP had let slip once that he was from Philly that Bruno’s luck began to change. That’s when he’d contacted a numbers runner he knew there and got the story on the girl’s father.

But he still didn’t know where she lived, which astounded the shit outta him, because that was usually the easy part of running someone to ground. But the girl was wily, taking circuitous routes home, cutting through yards and racing down one-way streets the wrong way until she seemed to disappear into thin air. His record for sticking with her before she vanished was four and a half blocks. She also wasn’t among the Capellis listed in the phone books, which, given what had happened to her old man, he figured was her mother’s handiwork. Losing someone to murder had a way of making a person cautious.

He’d come to the conclusion his boss was right: the girl wasn’t a threat. Seeing exactly what stepping up had gotten her old man had no doubt taught her to keep her yap shut. So for the first time in what seemed like weeks he’d taken a deep breath and relaxed.

Only to turn around and catch that news clip on the tube.

He’d blown sky-high to discover that while he’d been preparing to cut the kid a break and just walk away from this the way Schultz wanted, she was working with a cop. A fucking Robbery cop.

Still, sabotaging that ladder had been a dumb-shit response. Hell, there was no predicting who’d climb the thing. Not to mention that, at most, the strut failures would maybe crack the skull of whomever did—but more likely merely inflict a couple of bruises.

At least he’d thought far enough ahead to wrap a chamois around the tungsten blade he’d used to loosen the rivets and avoid leaving shiny silver scratch marks all over the ladder. He didn’t aim to have a cop crawling up his ass.

Which brought him full circle to messing with the fucking ladder in the first place. He still didn’t know how he was going to handle the kid when he did catch her. But he knew he didn’t want any previous “accidents” scratching at the back of the cop’s mind.

On the other hand, this might have shaken the kid up. And an off-balance mark was easier prey.

Of course, until he could separate her from the detective that meant bugger all. So he might as well remove himself from the neighborhood before someone noticed him.

He fired up the engine.

Then he blinked, realizing he’d been staring at the action down the street without actually paying attention for a few moments now. Capelli and the blonde were no longer in the group around the busted ladder. Looking around, he saw the girl crossing the street right in front of him, if down a ways. As he watched, she stopped in the middle lane and turned to say something over her shoulder.

And. Holy. Shit. He sat forward in his seat.

No one was out on the street at the moment.

The cop’s back was turned.

And the opportunity he’d been presented was just too fucking good to pass up.

He floored the gas.

J
ASE WAS SQUATTING
next to Danny G., going over the busted cross braces one last time, when he heard a car suddenly accelerate out on the street. He was twisting around to see who the hell was driving so fast when Henry shoved to his feet and sprinted away, exclaiming, “Jesus, are you guys okay? Cory, Ms. C.? You okay?”

Heart pounding in his chest not only at the words but at the shaken tremble in the boy’s voice, Jase surged to his feet, his gaze sweeping the area. Poppy was sprawled facedown on the sidewalk with Cory draped half on top of her, and even as he spotted them Henry came to a halt so abrupt that it jerked the boy up onto his toes before he caught his balance and dropped to a squat alongside them.

Neither of the downed women so much as twitched a finger and Jase’s heart seemed to come to a crashing halt. For one second. Two.

Then he jerked back into cop mode.

“What was that guy, drunk?” Henry demanded, shooting a glance at him over his bony shoulder. “Did you see that, dude? It was almost like he was aimin’ for Ms. C. If Cory hadn’t shoved her outta the way, they’da both been creamed.”

Jase was already striding over to assess the damage for himself when Danny pushed past him. Although it took two seconds max to catch up, the teen had all but muscled Henry aside and was helping Cory to her feet.

“Easy,” Jase cautioned. “You want to make sure nothing’s broken before you go hauling her around.”

“Not,” Cory wheezed. “Harda…breathe…though.”

“Just draw it in slow and easy,” he advised. “I know it feels like it won’t come back, but if you can let that fear go, you’ll find it easier to inhale.” He squatted down next to Poppy. “How about you?”

“Gimme a minute.”

He did until she flapped a limp hand in his direction, then he and Henry helped her to her feet. He brushed her off, gave her his second hands-on inspection of the day, then felt a knot in his gut unclench when he found her sporting nothing more than mild abrasions. He looked back at Cory. “You sure you’re all right?”

She nodded shakily and he returned his attention to Poppy. “Can you tell me what happened?”

She stared at him with wide brown eyes showing too much white around the irises. “A dark car,” she said shakily. “A big—no, God, huge car.” She swallowed audibly, staring up at him. “Holy shitskis, Jason, the thing was barreling right at me! And I froze.”

She shook her head. “One of my kids was in the street about to get run down and I froze.” She turned to Cory. “God, I am so sorry. If you hadn’t tackled me, we both would have been run down.”

“No, it wasn’t your fault!” Cory hugged herself as she stared at Poppy with anguished eyes.

Jase didn’t give a shit whose fault it was. He knew it wasn’t rational, but anger was starting to take over his usual professional detachment. “What were the two of you doing in the street to begin with?” he snapped.

“I saw Cory leaving and I wanted to talk to her for a minute. She seemed so down today, I wanted to make sure she was all right.”

Cory made a choked sound.

“So you thought you’d have a heart-to-heart in the middle of a damn arterial?” He was taken aback by his combative tone. Jesus, man. Take a deep breath here. Where the hell is your objectivity? Poppy’s eyes narrowed and for the first time since he’d scooped her up off the ground, she looked like her usual take-no-crap-off-anyone self. “No, Detective. As I’m sure you’d be the first to point out, I wasn’t thinking, period. I caught up with her and before we could get out of the street that big honkin’ car was barreling right at us.”

“About that.” He pulled his ever-present notebook out of his hip pocket. “What kind of car was it?”

“I told you—a freaking huge dark one!”

That was helpful. “Dark as in black? Charcoal? Navy maybe?”

“Yes.”

He gave her a look and she snapped, “I don’t know, okay? It was big and it was dark, that’s all I saw. You experience a ton of screaming metal bearing down at you at fifty miles an hour and then we’ll talk about powers of observation.”

He sighed and turned to Cory. “Can you do a little better?”

She shook her head.

“It was black,” Henry said. “I don’t know squat about models, but it was a new-looking SUV. I think maybe one a them high-end ones.”

“Like an Escalade?” Danny demanded.

Henry shrugged. “Beats the hell outta me.”

“Don’t swear,” Poppy said, but it was clearly automatic.

“How come?” Henry asked. “You did.”

She blinked at him. “I did?”

Jase snapped his fingers to redirect her attention to what was important. “Have you made yourself an enemy that you haven’t bothered to mention?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Then what the hell is going on here? Because you’ve had three close calls in as many weeks. Now, maybe you’re just having a real bad run of luck. But me, I don’t believe in luck, good or bad. And I’m not big on coincidence. So if you think I’m going to stop digging before I get to the bottom of this, you can think again.” He braced himself for her argument.

Instead, shoving her hair off her forehead, she gave him a weary nod. Her teeth started chattering as if the temperature had suddenly dropped thirty degrees.

“Works for me.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

To paraphrase ol’ Charlie D: It was the best of days, it was the worst of days.