I shouldn’t have trusted him.
Lauren took several jogging steps to catch up with Jason. He was tall, his strides were long and he was moving quickly.
Like an idiot, she’d let her guard down with him because he had nice manners. And he’d looked her in the eye when they’d talked about apprehending his brother, giving her the impression that he was honest. And admittedly, there was something about him that caught her attention on a personal level. A hint of attraction that had clouded her judgment.
She knew better than to let that happen. And from now on, she’d make it a point to keep her emotional distance from him.
“Hey!” she called out, but not too loudly. She didn’t want to risk Matt hearing a commotion outside, looking out the window and realizing something was up. He’d take off, and she could lose him.
“I’m going to go knock on the door,” Jason said reasonably, focused on his brother’s apartment and not even turning to look at her. “I’ll act like I came here alone and I just want to talk to him. You wait for your backup. If there’s anybody else in the apartment with him, I’ll look out the window. That’ll be your signal so you’re prepared for that. I want to do this as calmly as possible.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. But it wasn’t her idea, and having Jason take control of the situation was not in her plans. This was her capture. She’d brought him along because he might be of help to her. She didn’t want him getting too comfortable giving orders.
Her phone vibrated. At the same time, she heard and then saw an SUV pull up on the side of the street behind her own vehicle. She looked at the screen and saw a text from Toby letting her know that he and Tim had arrived. That was fast.
“Hold up,” she called out to Jason. They were just about to pass by the corner of the apartment building. Once they were beyond it, anyone looking out the front window of Matt’s unit would see them. “My people are here,” she said. “Let me get them in place in the back of the building before you knock on Matt’s door.”
“You do what you feel you have to,” Jason said without breaking stride.
She stopped and let him continue on without her. She got Toby on the phone and brought him up to speed. Then she directed him to take Tim with him and cut through a grassy passage between the apartment building and a duplex next door to it so they could get in position behind the apartments.
Before they could get into position, she heard Jason knock on Matt’s door. She moved away from the hedge to get a clearer view. There were a few lights outside the building, but there were still plenty of shadows, so she was partially hidden. A familiar emotion—a combination of nerves and high-voltage excitement—swirled around in the pit of her stomach. This moment, before a capture, gave her the sense of focus and purpose that she loved.
Jason knocked again. “Matt, open up. It’s me.”
Light from an outside fixture reflected on the front window, making it hard to tell if there were any lights burning inside the apartment.
Jason knocked again. He waited, then turned his head and pressed his ear against the door to listen. A few seconds passed, and he pulled his head away from the door. He knocked again and then started pounding on the door. “Matt! Open the door!”
Lauren’s muscles tensed, and a sense of unease crept up her spine. Something was wrong. Matt might have been suspicious after Jason’s call. Maybe he was hiding from them.
A door to one of the other apartments was yanked open, and someone shouted words Lauren couldn’t quite understand.
Jason took off jogging around the corner toward the back of the building, disappearing out of sight.
What was he doing? Lauren sprinted after him. From the back of the building she heard a jumble of voices shouting, and then she clearly heard Toby yelling, “Get on the ground! Now!”
They must have found Matt climbing out a back window and the hunt was over. Good. It had been a long day, and she was exhausted. She rounded the corner of the building.
It turned out that the hunt wasn’t over.
Jason hadn’t obeyed Toby’s command to get on the ground. But in the illumination from Tim’s flashlight, she could see that Jason did have his hands up. And he kept glancing warily at the canister of pepper spray in Toby’s hand.
“Is everybody all right?” Lauren asked.
Jason turned to Lauren, his anger evident in the hard line of his mouth before he spoke. “You couldn’t tell your backup that Matt had an identical twin walking around out here?” he snapped.
“You couldn’t follow directions?” she snapped back. “If you had, they would have met you before we all moved to surround the apartment building and this would not have happened.” She turned to her fellow bounty hunters. “Guys, this is Jason Cortez. This isn’t Matthew.”
Toby put away his pepper spray, and Jason lowered his hands.
“Sorry, man,” Tim said, turning his flashlight away from Jason’s face.
“And yes, I did let them know about you,” Lauren said. “In a text I sent to the bail bond office earlier today when I let them know what was going on.”
“We couldn’t be sure which twin you were,” Tim added. “You really are identical.”
“What’s going on back here?” a voice called out, followed by the wash of light from a flashlight. “Do I need to call the cops?”
The person talking drew closer. Lauren realized it was the guy who’d yelled earlier when Jason was pounding on Matt’s door. He was a short, heavyset man wearing a thick coat.
He shone his light on each person’s face until he got to Jason. “Hey, where have you been?” he demanded. “I’m tired of all these people looking for you. You owe ’em money or something?”
“I’m not Matt,” Jason said. “I’m his twin brother.”
The guy stared at him for a minute. Finally Lauren jumped in, assuring the guy that Jason was not Matt.
“Well, I’m your brother’s landlord,” the guy said. “I’ve been waiting for him to show up for two weeks now. As soon as he does, I’m giving him notice to move out. Too many creeps hang out around the building when he’s here, and now he’s got some scary-looking people coming by asking about him. That’s why I yelled at you to go away when I first heard you knocking on his door. I thought you were one of them.”
“What can you tell me about those people?” Lauren asked.
The landlord shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. Now that the sun was gone, the temperature was dropping fast. “Just that they showed up a few times looking for him. They asked the other tenants if they’d seen him. They were polite enough, but kind of intense.”
“Could we have a look in his apartment?” Jason asked. “That might give us an idea of where he is. Or if anything happened to him. We talked earlier today and agreed to meet here tonight.”
When he agreed to meet with you, he was lying to you, Lauren thought. Jason didn’t want to face the obvious truth that his brother had lied to him. She knew how that felt. Her dad had lied to her all the time. But she resisted the temptation to feel bad for him. He wasn’t her friend. She was standing here beside him because they were working a case together.
“I won’t let you into his apartment,” the manager said. “I could get sued or lose my job. But I might accidentally leave his door unlocked.” He shook his finger at Jason. “I will be watching, though. I don’t want anybody stealing from any of my tenants. So if I see anybody carrying anything out, I’m calling the cops.”
Jason nodded. “Understood.”
The manager took some keys out of his pocket and headed back toward the front of the building, presumably to go unlock Matt’s door.
“I’m leaving,” Tim said as soon as the manager was out of earshot. He glanced at Toby, who nodded in agreement, then he looked at Lauren. “You know I’m all about getting the job done, but what they’re talking about is too close to breaking and entering. I’m not going to risk getting busted for that.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” she said. The fee she earned for tracking down Matt would help pay the rent this month, but at the end of the day, it was just one case. There would be others.
They all started walking around the building. When they reached the front, Tim and Toby said their goodbyes and walked toward their SUV.
Jason was already headed for his brother’s apartment.
“I’m waiting out here,” Lauren called to him, standing outside the door. “Let me know what you find in there.”
It sounded like he said, “Right,” as he disappeared into the apartment, closing the door behind him. But did he mean it sarcastically, as in fat chance he’d tell her? Or did he mean he really would tell her?
She wrestled with the temptation to go in there with him and see for herself. But Jason was Matt’s family. She obviously was not. He was checking on his brother’s welfare. That was not exactly her motivation. There was a line there that she couldn’t cross.
She should have told Jason to leave the apartment door open. Although now that she knew him better, she realized that he might not have done it.
“Dear Lord, please let Matt be okay.” Jason whispered the prayer as he walked quickly through the apartment, searching the rooms, dreading the moment when he would find his brother’s lifeless body. It was the fear that he’d lived with over the last few years as his brother had fallen deeper into his criminal lifestyle.
But Matt was not in the apartment. The thermostat for the heater had been turned down, and the place was cold. There was no recent mail on the countertop with the unopened bills. The sliced turkey and potato salad in the fridge were definitely beyond their expiration dates. Everything in the smelly kitchen trash can had obviously been there for a while.
It looked like the landlord’s story was true and that Matt hadn’t been here for days. He’d lied to Jason when they were on the phone and he’d confirmed he was home. But why? He could have just told Jason it wasn’t a good time for him to stop by. He hadn’t been shy about doing that in the past.
Jason walked through the apartment again, looking for signs of a break-in or a struggle, but he didn’t see anything. There were still clothes hanging in the closet and an expensive pair of cowboy boots sitting on the closet floor. Matt hadn’t skipped out to avoid paying rent. It wouldn’t make sense to do that and leave everything behind. And money was not usually a problem for Matt. He always found a way to get some.
“Hey, what do you see?” Lauren hollered through the front door.
“Nobody’s here,” he hollered back.
There were a few empty beer bottles on the coffee table and the place reeked of weed. The strong smell saturated the upholstered furniture and the drapes. Otherwise things looked normal. There was no sign that Matt was using harder drugs, so that was encouraging. There was nothing flashy or expensive in sight. Whatever money he got from his criminal enterprises seemed to disappear pretty fast. It was hard to believe Matt would break the law and risk prison time for such an average kind of life.
“Any idea where your brother went?” Lauren called out to him.
“He didn’t leave a note,” Jason called back.
“Funny.” She didn’t sound genuinely amused.
Jason walked over to the door and pulled it open. “It looks like he’s been gone for at least a few days,” he said. “But it also looks like he plans on coming back.”
He walked out and pulled the door shut behind him, making sure it was locked. From the other side of the building, the manager opened his door and gave him a quick wave before closing the door again.
“Where do you think we should go look for him?” Lauren asked as they crossed the lawn heading back toward her SUV. “You must know some of his friends.”
You’d think he would. They’d had a few friends in common when they were younger, but he had no idea who Matt spent time with these days.
A shotgun blast echoed across the front of the apartment building.
Jason threw himself on top of Lauren as shards of glass from nearby light fixtures rained down on them. A second blast followed. And then a third. His heart pounded while at the same time his senses sharpened and his attention focused on his surroundings, on what might be moving in the shadows and on making sure Lauren didn’t get hurt.
The sudden darkness following the destruction of the lights was a blessing. Now whoever was shooting at them couldn’t see them as clearly.
The shots had come from the direction of the street. Full night had fallen while they were checking out Matt’s apartment, and there were no streetlights on this stretch of road. There were only a couple of other light fixtures attached to the building and still functioning, but the light they cast didn’t come anywhere near to illuminating the road. They offered just enough light to disrupt Jason’s night vision. Even so, he could tell there was a vehicle idling out there. Its lights were off, but he could hear it.
“Are you all right?” Jason asked, his lips not far from Lauren’s ear. “Were you hit?”
“I’m fine.” She reached for the gun on her hip and tried to roll to her side. “You can get off me.”
He started to move, and two more shotgun blasts boomed in the darkness. More glass rained down on them as an upstairs window shattered.
He shifted his weight so that Lauren could reach her gun. She lifted her head, propped up on her elbows and pointed her weapon toward the direction where the shots had come from.
Sirens blared in the distance.
A car engine growled, followed by the screeching sound of quick acceleration as the vehicle peeled off down the street. Jason couldn’t get a clear look at it, but he had the impression that it was not the sedan they’d seen earlier today. This was something bigger, like a large SUV or a van.
They got to their feet, and Lauren holstered her pistol.
“We need to go our separate ways,” Jason said. “It’s too dangerous for anyone to be around me. Obviously, these thugs haven’t figured out that I’m not Matt.”
“No,” she said. “This just makes me that much more determined to get him off the streets. For his own safety. For yours. For the general public. And we’ll be more successful if we work together.”
The sirens he’d heard were getting closer.
“We need to get you a gun,” she said.
Jason had already thought about that. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I could end up shooting and killing my brother.”
“I understand how you feel,” Lauren said. “But that’s not a smart decision.”
“Maybe it isn’t,” he said. But he wasn’t going to debate the point with her.
Blue and red flashing lights spilled over them as four cop cars pulled up on the scene. Jason and Lauren raised their hands high, just to be safe, as the officers opened their patrol car doors. There’d be plenty of time to explain the fact that they were the people who’d been shot at after the scene was secure and the tension level dropped.
Behind them, Jason heard apartment doors opening and neighbors calling out to one another, asking if they were okay.
“The vehicle the shooters were in wasn’t here when we arrived,” Jason said to Lauren as a couple of the officers, guns drawn, started walking toward them, yelling at them to keep their hands up and warning them not to move.
“Agreed,” Lauren said. “I would have noticed it. Maybe the bad guys have some kind of surveillance camera set up in the apartment that we didn’t notice. Or they could have paid someone to watch the place and give them a heads-up when they saw Matt. Or thought they saw Matt.”
The officers drew closer. “Just to let you know, I’m carrying a firearm,” Lauren said.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your backs,” the nearest officer barked at the two of them.
They complied and were handcuffed.
Jason hoped the process of dealing with the police wouldn’t take long. Because he needed to find his brother before the bad guys did. Unfortunately, he had no idea where to look for him.