Conn’s phone rang the next afternoon. He felt a leap of relief that Kenny was finally calling him back. But the name displayed on the screen was Ian Hawthorn’s.
“McCormick.”
“It’s Hawthorn. I’m checking in to see how things are going with Ms. Ward.”
“Fine,” Conn said. “She sleeps a lot. Her sister spent the night last night. We ate popcorn and watched a romcom.”
“Sounds delightful,” Hawthorn said drily.
“You want the job, it’s yours,” Conn replied.
“Bored?”
“Out of my skull.” Except when Cady was awake, and not in her studio, as she was now. Just being in the same room with Cady made him feel more alive than he’d ever felt without gunfire involved.
“Anything suspicious?”
“Two things that may or may not be connected. One, someone hacked her website, which is a real problem for her right now. Two, I saw someone lurking at the end of her driveway,” Conn said.
Conn heard him typing on the other end and knew he was making notes of his own. Nothing escaped the ice cool Ian Hawthorn. “Do you think the two are connected?”
“To each other, or to that file of psychos her manager compiled?” Conn said. “I’m treating them like they’re all connected. Her website guy is working on tracing the hacker. I’ve stepped up my patrols of her perimeter. She once again refused to install security cameras. She doesn’t have any appearances scheduled for the next few days. That will help.”
“Do you need backup?”
He looked out the big windows into the bare trees climbing the slope behind the house, then crossed the floor to the smaller front windows overlooking the driveway and peered through the shades. “No,” he said, surprising himself. A few days ago he would have given anything to get a break from this kind of work, to go back to the only family he had and find out who had set him up to take the fall for a brutal crime he didn’t commit. But while he’d been assigned to protect “Maud,” Cady was slowly slipping behind his defenses. She wasn’t just a job anymore, an obstacle. She was his to protect. His.
Except nothing belonged to him, least of all Cady Ward.
“No,” he said again. “I’ve got this.”
“You know, McCormick, it’s not a crime to ask for backup,” Hawthorn said mildly. Conn could just imagine the LT leaning back in his chair, hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “Teamwork is considered an asset in most situations.”
“I know, LT. But I really don’t need it. She’s used to one person. Another guy coming and going means more for the neighbors to notice, and handoffs mean more chances for something to slip by unnoticed.”
“And a second set of eyes means it’s more likely something will be noticed.” More typing. “Fine. You’re it, for the moment. Best to keep you out of sight.”
“What’s going on with the investigation?”
“We’re investigating,” Hawthorn said blandly. “And you are not. You’re doing what I asked you to do and maintaining a low profile. Right?”
Calls to Kenny didn’t count as getting in anyone’s face. “Yes,” Conn said.
“Good. Just stay out of sight. We want to keep this out of the media as long as possible.”
The door to Cady’s studio opened. “Got it. I have to go,” Conn said, then disconnected.
“I’m going out of my mind,” Cady said. She brushed past him, up the stairs to the main floor. Her voice floated down to him. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Fine by me,” he said.
She’d made her way to the kitchen, filling the steamer with automatic movements that went beyond habit and into the bone. “Like, now.”
“Just say the word.”
She contemplated him, her hot gaze flicking over his body. “You didn’t have to hang up for me.” Her hair looked like one of the clumps of brush out back, tangled golden brown thicket with a life of its own. “You really don’t have any family, people you talk to on a regular basis? I don’t expect you to give up your life entirely.”
It had to be hard for someone like Cady to imagine, but the department was the only family he had. Maybe that was the other reason Hawthorn chose him for this gig. Most everyone else had a family to go home to, people who would miss them if they were assigned to a long-term close protection assignment. He had no one. “I’m good. My friends know I disappear, but I always turn up.”
“What have you been up to?”
He shrugged. “Not much. Took a shower. Watched some NASCAR.” Pored over the psychos file, then Jordy’s file. Tried to figure out who in the Demons had the kind of access to beat up a Stryker in police custody and hang it on him. Both files were on the kitchen island, but he didn’t reach for them. He’d learned that drawing attention to the scars over what you wanted to hide only made people that much more likely to poke at it.
But Cady wasn’t looking at either file, just plugging in the steamer and reaching for her towel. He didn’t understand that, either. If he was on the receiving end of a file like that, he’d track down each and every anonymous troll and make them pay. Cady seemed content to just do her thing. “Who won?”
He wrenched himself back to the moment. “Kyle Busch. He’s first in points, too.”
“I’m more of an Indy car fan myself,” she said. Her voice was muffled by the towel. “But I’ll take NASCAR when the Indy season is over.”
“Want to watch some racing?”
“I thought the race was over.”
“I meant at the airfield.”
She flipped the towel back and stared at him. “You’re still racing this late in the year?”
“As long as it’s dry, we race.”
“Yes.” She gave a delighted little laugh. “God, yes. That’s perfect. Let me get dressed.”
He called Shane while she was changing her clothes. She came out of the bedroom wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, with her hair caught back in a braid and covered with a hat. She stomped her feet into fur-lined boots, and pulled on her down coat, gloves, and a scarf.
“Chris won’t like this,” he said.
“What Chris doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she replied as she pulled the scarf up over her nose and mouth.
“When did you hire Chris?” he asked, thinking about the website, and the sparring he’d seen at the precinct.
“The second he offered me representation. Agents weren’t exactly beating down my door. Are you always this suspicious?”
“In this case, yes. So as long as you’re acting in his best interests, he’s got your back. What happens if you insist on taking a big risk at this stage of your career? Then your interests don’t align with his anymore.”
“Are you suggesting he’s trying to ensure I do the financially lucrative thing for his own benefit?”
She could read him so easily he wondered if a news feed scrolled across his forehead. “I’ve seen people shot dead for the price of a cheap carryout pizza,” he said. “I assume you’re talking about a lot of pizzas.”
“Many, many high-end pizzas, made with organic ingredients and the cheese from goats fed ground-up unicorn horns,” she said. “I know Chris looks like a slick snake oil salesman. He pushes me, I push him. But in the end, I trust him completely.”
He waited until they’d left her gated community and were heading south on Highway 75 before he brought up Emily. “Has your sister always been that … high strung?”
A smile flashed across her face at his diplomatic choice of words. “You really don’t know any teenage girls, do you? Patience has never been Emily’s strong point. She’s impulsive, and emotional. She’s ready to be done with high school but has to finish in order to get to college. She’s trapped here, full of dreams and ambitions, but stuck. It’s enough to make anyone irrational.”
“You know how she feels.”
Cady nodded. “Our mom wanted a house and a job and kids to look after. Our dad was the big dreamer, and when little Lancaster and our little family of little girls got too small for him, he moved on. We inherited his drive.”
She spoke lightly, not bitterly, but he knew how much that kind of equanimity cost. “She’s got plenty.”
“It used to be cool to be my little sister. Now I think she wants to be known as Emily Ward, a person in her own right.”
When they got to the airfield, he pulled up next to the guys taking admission fees in exchange for wristbands. “She’s part of Team McCool,” he said and got waved through. Inside the chain-link fence cars, trailers, and trucks were lined up in a staging area on one side of the runway. Big banks of lights illuminated the runway now serving as the drag strip. Tents covered the tire warm-up spot, while a couple of cars that just finished their run drove back along the other taxi strip. The big doors to the ancient corrugated metal hangar were open, and a steady stream of people made their way inside to get food and drinks or to warm up a little.
He parked the Audi in the grass, then got out to assess the temperature. Upper forties, he guessed, a little colder than his dad’s best run. He wouldn’t get weather like that again this year. The colder the air temperature, the better and faster the engines ran. He didn’t want to beat his dad’s time in more optimal conditions, but that wouldn’t stop him from racing anyway.
She came around the Audi’s trunk and met him in the weed-strewn gravel. “You going to be warm enough?”
“I’m wearing long underwear, and a down coat. I do live here,” she said.
The fake fur around her hood wasn’t moving. No breeze, which was a blessing and a rarity at this time of the year. Cold air could howl out of Canada at any time. He reached out and pulled her scarf up to cover her mouth and nose. “Got your Cady juice?”
She held up the thermos. “I made a fresh batch.”
“Let’s go.”
She kept up with his stride as they crossed the tarmac, headed for a trailer parked in a prime spot close to the hanger. Shane was there, only his legs visible as he worked under Conn’s car. “How’s it going?”
“Fine. Just … fucking … fine,” Shane said, between grunts as he tightened down the bolt on the fuel pump. He wormed his way out from under the car and took Conn’s hand to get to his feet, then did a hilarious double take when he saw Cady. “Oh. Hello. Sorry about the language.”
“Shane McCool, this is Cady Ward. Cady, meet Shane.”
“Welcome to pit row,” Shane said, doing an admirable job of putting the cool in McCool. “I’d shake your hand but mine’s covered in grease.”
Cady gave him a friendly little wave. “You’re a friend of Conn’s?”
“Since third grade. He wanted to race cars and I wanted to fix them.”
“Sounds like a match made in heaven,” Cady said.
“Shane’s a pretty good driver,” Conn said.
Shane jerked his thumb at Conn. “And he knows his way around an engine. But I’d rather fix them than drive them.”
“I don’t have time to do the repair work.”
“She’s a high-maintenance girl,” Shane said, patting the roof of the car. “Good thing I’m patient.”
“Good thing one of us is,” Conn said.
Shane snorted. “You’re more patient than I am. I would have given up on this a long time ago.”
Conn shot Shane a look. He wasn’t ready to tell Cady about his quest to beat his dad’s time. Shane knew about it, had known almost as long as he’d known Conn. But he balked when it came to telling a stranger, an outsider, someone who might not understand.
But Cady was just smiling, looking around, then focusing on Shane. “McCool from McCool’s Garage?”
“That’s us.”
“My mom takes her car there. She says she’s found the real unicorn, an honest mechanic. She was married to a lawyer, so she knows unicorns when she meets them.”
“Your mom’s Patty Ward? She brings in cookies and cider every year at Christmas.”
“That’s my mom. “
Shane laughed. “You’re basically family, then.” He turned to Conn. “You driving, since you’re here?”
His first priority was to Cady. “Finn can make a couple of runs,” he said, nodding at Shane’s nephew rummaging in the tool chest.
“It’s all right if you want to,” Cady said. “No one knows I’m here, and I’m all masked up like a bank robber. I’ll sit on the bleachers and watch.”
“You sure?” Conn asked.
“I’m sure,” she said. Hazel eyes twinkling, she pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth.
He got a folding chair from the trailer and set it up by the trailer’s bumper, where he could easily see her. How could she go unrecognized? She was beautiful, vibrant, famous, and apparently, perfectly happy to sit on a sagging lawn chair in a drag race pit and watch him tinker with a forty-year-old muscle car.
“We’re getting good times,” Shane said. “The weather’s damn near perfect.”
“Who’s running?”
Shane started rattling off teams and names. As Conn worked on the engine with Shane, he glanced around the airstrip. Lancaster’s airport was basically for small planes, a skydiving school, and the occasional weekday commuter flight to Chicago or Pittsburgh. The weekend hobby pilots had an amicable relationship with the drag racing association. Occasionally they had to clear a taxi strip of cars finished with their runs so a private plane could land, but the announcer kept his ear tuned to the air traffic and just about anyone who flew in and out of the airstrip on a regular basis had the announcer’s cell phone. On one memorable occasion they’d had an engine-failure emergency landing, but as there was always a fire engine and ambulance on standby; a good chunk of the racers were off-duty firefighters, cops, or EMTs; and the cars were all designed to go very fast, very quickly, the crisis went like a textbook training exercise.
Between making adjustments to the fuel pump, he looked around the airstrip, seeing it through Cady’s eyes. A taxi strip flanked either side of the main runway; Conn, Shane, and Cady and the rest of Team McCool, along with the crews for the other cars were arrayed in a kind of pit row along the one closest to the airfield entrance while cars that had finished their runs cruised back to the pit along the other. Cars lined up to make their runs at the near end of the runway before rolling up the staging lanes to the burnout strip. Two cars revved their engines on the burnout strip, warming up their tires, sending the smell of hot rubber into the air.
He and Shane both stopped to watch the run. The cars roared down the track, engines revving into a high whine. Ten seconds, give or take—races won or lost in hundredths of a second. It was a sport of reflexes and speed, reputations solidified and legends made on less time than it took to blink. When they’d made the final adjustments, Conn rummaged through the trailer for his safety jacket and helmet.
“I’ve got that,” Cady said.
He looked over at her and found his jacket draped over her legs. “I’ll swap you,” he said, and shrugged out of his jacket. “Sure you’re not too cold?”
“Not at all.”
He zipped up the jacket and plucked his helmet from her outstretched hand. “Thanks. You don’t have to watch or anything,” he said. “Grab some tea. They’ve got portable heaters inside the hanger.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” she said. “It’s a dial-in night, right?”
“Yes,” he said.
Some races were straight head-to-head competitions, but Conn wasn’t here to race kids in their souped-up street cars. He was racing a time. 9.99 seconds. That was his dad’s best time in the ZL1. In dial-in, the focus was on the driver’s performance, the starts adjusted so that, theoretically, the cars would cross the finish line at the same time. It rewarded both the driver and the car’s consistency, not who had the most cash to buy the newest, best equipment. It was all about driver skill.
“What did you dial-in?” she asked, peering at the slip of paper in his hand.
“Nine point nine-nine.”
His dad’s best time. Conn had never broken ten seconds. A 9.99 finish would tie him with his father. Nine point nine-eight or faster would mean he’d “broken out”; he’d be disqualified from the race, but would’ve beaten his dad’s time.
Still carrying his jacket, Cady kept pace beside the ZL1 until he turned right to get in line for his run and she turned left to find a spot in the bleachers. They weren’t crowded, only family members, girlfriends, and die-hard fans willing to sit on backless metal bleachers in this weather. Cady got a good seat on the first row and draped his jacket over her knees again. She was looking around with interest, taking in the Christmas-tree starting system, the interval timers, the speed traps used to calculate top speed.
Shit. This was a stupid idea, leaving her protected only by her anonymity while he raced down a demon he’d never beat.
He rolled forward a few feet to prestaging, as another pair of cars left the line. Burn the tires to warm them up, roll to the starting line, watch the amber lights on the Christmas tree flash down in half-second increments. At the last one, he floored the accelerator and shot down the track. The bleachers passed in a blur. All he heard was the engine and his own breathing as he focused on a fast, clean run. Shit. He mistimed the shift from third to fourth! The GT beat him to the line, but in handicap racing all that mattered was staying under your time.
The interval timer flashed 10.00 just ahead of the shutdown area. Fuck, fuck! As he drove sedately down the taxi strip at ten miles per hour, he caught a glimpse of Shane sitting by Cady. Keeping her company, keeping an eye on her. It didn’t matter. Shane had his back.
It was open night at the track, so he did a few more runs. His times varied from 10.01 to 10.00 before he gave up and exited the track, rolling back to the trailer. Shane was already there.
“Driver error,” Conn said.
“Don’t be too sure about that,” Shane said, hands on hips, listening to the engine. “I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.”
“Thanks for looking after Cady.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” Shane said, then winked at him. “She seems down to earth. Normal. Not like your typical famous person.”
“How many famous people do you know?”
“One, now,” Shane said. “Mom loves all those entertainment shows. Batshit crazy, the whole pack of them. But not Cady.”
Not Cady, who had dated Harry Linton and planned to drop a record that would make her a global superstar. “No,” he said absently. “Not Cady.”
Cady strolled up, wearing his jacket over hers. She looked absurd, her petite body disappearing into her puffy down coat and his denim jacket. She had her hands jammed into the pockets, and based on the bulge inside the coat, her insulated mug wedged inside.
“Nice runs,” she said. “You were close. A hundredth of a second.”
Not close enough. “Thanks,” he said, slicing Shane a look to keep him from telling her why they weren’t great runs at all. He had maybe a month left of weather closest to the dry, cold air in which his dad made his best run. If he couldn’t do it by Christmas, his chances were shot for another year.
“I’m going to stop at the porta-potty,” she said.
“You sure? We’re not far from town.”
“I could wait,” she mused, “but I have to pee, there are porta-potties by the hanger, and I’m not that fastidious about them.”
“I’ll come with you.”
He escorted her there, and stood discreetly to the side when she went inside. He was leaning against the hangar wall, examining the grease under his nails and wondering what the hell had happened in his life, when someone very big and very solid thudded back against the corrugated metal beside him.
Conn straightened, shoulders squaring, hand automatically going to his hip before his brain caught up with his body. He recognized this guy.
“Cesar, right? From Eye Candy? Why aren’t you at work?”
“It’s my birthday. Miss Eve gave me the night off.”
Conn’s eyes narrowed. Could be true. Could be total bullshit.
Cesar kept his gaze focused on the line of cars waiting to race. Outside Eye Candy he seemed harder, the years of street life coming to the surface. The gang tattoo on his neck was visible in the light before he hunched his shoulders. “You’re looking in the wrong place.”
Two seconds earlier Conn’s brain had been coasting along in neutral. Now it jerked from second gear into overdrive. “For what?”
Cesar just looked at him. He was all but hidden in the dark shadow angling across the hanger’s metal wall; a sharp line delineated the lights on the drag strip and the pitch-blackness leading into the grassy field behind the hanger the jump school used as a landing site.
“It ain’t the county. Ain’t the street. Look closer than that. Inside the Block,” Cesar said.
The Block was street slang for the Eastern Precinct, based on the building’s square shape and brick facade. The architecture was uninspired, as most city facilities were, and felt like a prison or the kind of place to make a last stand when the zombie apocalypse arrived. Cops were insiders. Everyone else wasn’t.
Cesar was saying the answer to who beat up Jordy Jackson and framed Conn for it was inside the Block. He’d been betrayed by one of his own.