The Rider Files
Romantic Suspense Series
Sullivan File
Book 6 of The Rider Files
Book 6 of The Rider Files
|
She's caught in a wicked scandal of illegal activity. He's her only hope of survival.
Jessica Ong saves lives in her ICU but never imagined she'd be caught in a scenario where she would have to save her own. When she's accosted by men searching her apartment for a mysterious USB drive, she embarks on a face-paced hunt for what information is worth killing for. What's worse? She's forced to work with her ex-boyfriend and security expert, Reece Owen. Reece guards lives and uncovers secrets for a living, and yet finds himself unprepared when having to protect the feisty ex-girlfriend he distanced himself from months ago. While he tries to help Jess untangle from her dangerous predicament, he must reconcile with emotions he's avoided. As enemies close in, can they uncover the truth to set them free? |
Chapter 1 Sample
Lori Sullivan exited the elevator and walked briskly through the dim parking deck. She tightened her wool coat more snugly to protect her against the biting Chicago chill as she neared her car.
The hospital should invest in better lighting for the deck, she thought. Half of the bulbs were burned out.
A faint scuffling of rubber soles on the concrete flooring pricked her ears. Was it another person, or had she mistaken the sound? The noise could have been a discarded paper cup scraping the concrete as the wind pushed it across the ground.
She walked faster, glancing at a security camera as she passed. Too bad they didn’t offer any actual security. She’d heard a colleague had once asked for the footage to be reviewed after her car’s bumper had been swiped, only to be told the parking deck cameras had been disabled due to budget cuts.
They were nothing more than plastic perches for the pigeons.
Lori reached her car and locked her doors as soon as she was inside the vehicle. Thankfully, she’d thought to remote start her Acura, so the engine and cab were already warm. In haste, she left the parking garage and drove toward home.
In the safety of her vehicle, she wondered if she’d only imagined being followed in the garage. Perhaps someone had been walking to work rather than toward her, although the late hour was after the night shift change.
She strummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Her nerves had been on edge all week.
Why hadn’t Jess called yet? Since Lori worried her phone might be bugged, she didn’t want to call Jess first and alert her pursuers about the USB Lori had created. She didn’t want to make Jess a target. But maybe, despite her careful efforts, she already had.
She needed her friend’s help. Jessica Ong would have the tenacity and resources to expose illegal activity. She knew people in the security business, and her brother was an investigative reporter.
On the interstate, Lori began driving erratically, watching the headlights behind her.
There.
She sucked in a deep breath as one driver repeatedly changed lanes in order to follow her. An icy fist closed over her chest. She couldn’t go home.
Certain she was being followed, she sped up and considered how to lose the tail. She needed somewhere to hide until she could assimilate the information she’d collected into a cohesive presentation for the authorities. Home no longer felt safe now that she had confirmation someone was after her.
Danger was exponentially escalating. What she’d thought of initially as a conspiracy theory she’d concocted had proven terrifyingly true.
She needed to speak with Jess. As she reached for her phone, the vehicle behind her closed the distance.
* * *
Call me as soon as you can.
Jess stared at the text message from her work colleague, Lori Sullivan.
Before Jess could call her back, Austin poked his head into the physicians’ workroom. “Dr. Ong, bed four’s sats are dropping.”
Jess pocketed her phone, pushed the chair away from the desk, and stood. Dropping oxygen saturations required a direct assessment for possible intervention. “Let’s have a look,” she told the nurse. She would call Lori back after she handled the current patient crisis.
She exited the physicians’ workroom and followed Austin down the hall to bed four, her comfy clogs silent on the linoleum floor. Accustomed to the beeps of various machines—vital signs monitors, ventilators, renal replacement therapy—audible even in the hallways, Jess tuned them out.
Through the glass partition, she saw her patient. Mrs. Monroe was a young suburban soccer mom—probably with 2.5 kids and a minivan. She was much too young to be in Jess’s ICU with respiratory failure. Despite the high-flow nasal canal device she wore, Mrs. Monroe still sucked air as if she’d just finished a soccer sprint down the full three-hundred-and-sixty-foot playing field.
“She’s tiring,” Jess told the nurse beside her, craning her neck to look up at him.
Austin, a big, burly nurse with a disproportionately quiet voice, asked, “You want to intubate her?”
“Yes,” she agreed reluctantly, hating that the patient’s condition had progressively worsened. “We’ve exhausted supportive measures. We’ll intubate before she completely tuckers out.”
“I’ll let the respiratory therapist know. You want your usual cocktail for intubation?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks. I’ll put in orders for fentanyl, sedatives, and paralytics. With the severity of her ARDS, she might need to be paralyzed for twenty-four hours to adequately oxygenate her.”
Jess entered the room and plucked the stethoscope off a hook near the vital signs monitor and then listened to Mrs. Monroe’s breath sounds. They were coarse, as if Velcro filled her chest rather than delicate organic lung tissue.
As she explained to the patient how she planned to put a breathing tube in and put her on mechanical ventilation, Jess’s mind churned with the details of this case and the insufficient medical explanation for the woman’s respiratory failure. She was suffering from adult respiratory distress syndrome—or ARDS—but the cause of her condition eluded Jess.
Within a few minutes, the respiratory therapist rolled the ventilator in the room, and Austin entered with a pocketful of the drugs Jess usually employed for sedation.
With proper personal protective equipment donned, Jess ran through the pre-procedure checklist with the team. She made a mental note to call the patient’s husband after the intubation and let him know the turn of events.
“Short Asian coming through,” Jess announced as she finagled her way through wires and IV tubing to the head of the bed. “Lower the bed, please.”
Time to insert the tube and save a life. Hopefully.
The patient needed mechanical ventilation but providing life support didn’t automatically mean she would recover from her mysterious illness. Sometimes life support bought the body time to heal, sometimes it only delayed the inevitable. In Mrs. Monroe’s case, only time would tell.
* * *
When Jess’s shift ended at seven a.m., she sat in the physicians’ work room giving sign-outs on each patient to her friend and colleague, Jenna Masters. The room was a windowless square with six computers in cubicles along the walls. The single door was closed to keep out the boisterous noise of the ICU.
Jess had saved the update on Mrs. Monroe for last. “I had to tube her last night and paralyze her. If she gets worse, the next steps are prone or even ECMO.”
“She’s so young,” Jenna marveled. Her long, copper hair was pulled back in a messy bun, and she wore scrubs like Jess.
“And we don’t have an etiology yet. Infectious diseases are all ruled out. She didn’t have any exposures to suggest hypersensitivity pneumonitis. She’s not taking any prescription drugs that could cause acute lung disease. Her tox screen was positive for narcotics, but her husband said she had an oxycodone prescription six months ago for a torn rotator cuff, so maybe she popped a few of those recently and that’s where the narcs came from. CT imaging shows classic acute lung injury with bilateral infiltrates. Can you lavage her lungs and check for eosinophils?”
“You’re thinking eosinophilic pneumonia?”
“The pattern doesn’t fit, but we need to keep ruling out everything we can think of.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jenna said.
“You might have to pull the trigger on giving her steroids.” Steroids were the drug doctors loved to hate. They saved lives, but at a high cost with brutal side effects—muscle wasting, poor wound healing, hyperglycemia, weight gain, and the list went on.
Jess rubbed at her temples as her tired eyes watered, reminding her how long and busy her twelve-hour shift had been. “I had a case just like this last month in Chicago.”
“You’re still doing shifts up there? When are you going to settle here in Atlanta?”
Jess straightened and gave Jenna a pointed look. “When I have a reason to.”
“Reece?” Jenna cringed.
Jess had met Reece at Jenna’s wedding a few years ago. Since then, Reece and Jess had an on-again off-again roller-coaster relationship, which was currently off.
“The man does not have his shit together,” Jess complained. “Anyway, my case in Chicago was an eighteen-year-old who took some new street drug—Luminous. His condition was also a mystery ARDS, until we learned about the drug from his girlfriend.”
“Luminous? Never heard of it. What’s in it?”
“No idea. Maybe narcotics. Maybe it’s a designer drug. His urine drug screen was pan positive because he’d taken other drugs with it. Dr. Lori Sullivan and I had six Luminous patients we wrote a case series article about. It wasn’t accepted for publication though. We’re trying a different journal. Damn. I was supposed to call Lori back.” She bit her lip at the sudden remembrance.
She had gotten tied up with emergencies through the night, and by two a.m. when things had slowed down, she figured it was too late to call Lori. The only important topic between them was research, and it could wait.
“Did the patients in your case series survive?” Jenna asked.
“Only half.”
“You don’t think soccer mom here took the designer drug?”
“I haven’t heard of this street drug surfacing in Atlanta.”
“Quite the mystery,” Jenna said, brushing a rogue strand of hair out of her face. “What about that case Arti had a few weeks ago? That was unidentified ALI.”
“That acute lung injury turned out to be a patient on an experimental study drug. Arti submitted it to the pharmaceutical company as a possible adverse event related to the drug. And I asked Mrs. Monroe’s husband—she’s not enrolled in any treatment trials. So, her illness remains a mystery.”
* * *
Reece Owen rolled and sprang to his feet as he managed a well-placed right hook. The man he’d clocked stumbled backward. While the man rocked off-balance, Reece looped the toe of his boot around the man’s ankle and tripped him. The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Hispanic crashed to the ground.
Seizing the opportunity to gain the advantage, Reece pounced. He rolled the man over and secured his hands behind his back with a twist tie.
“I believe that’s a new record.” He stood and dusted off his jeans, more for effect than actual dirt. In fact, he hadn’t even broken a sweat taking down his opponent.
“This isn’t a hog-tying competition.” His partner, Santino Alonso, wrestled on the floor with another man.
“No?” Reece cocked his head to one side, watching the rookie struggle to gain the upper hand against a nasty opponent. “Kinda looks like it is.”
Santino’s sienna skin glowed red from exertion. “Hijo de mil puta!” he yelled at the man he fought with before elbowing him in the ribs.
With a forced exhalation of pain, the man loosened his grip long enough for Santino to flip him and pin him facedown with a knee in his back.
Reece arched an eyebrow. “You kiss your sister with that mouth?”
Santino tied the man’s wrists together behind his back with a plastic twist tie. “I don’t have a sister. And you’re one to talk.” He stood up, catching his breath as he wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand.
“I am reforming,” Reece countered. “I’ve averaged only two quarters in my swear jar per week.”
“Oh, yeah? I read somewhere that swearing can be a sign of intelligence.”
One of the restrained men was cursing loudly at Reece and Santino, foam and spittle spewing as if he was a rabid dog. The two kidnappers lay on the floor of a dilapidated one-story house Reece and Santino had infiltrated. Because of the struggle, rickety furniture had been displaced in the living room and the battered coffee table and lamp had been knocked over.
“Can you verify that claim was substantiated with solid scientific evidence?” Reece stroked his mustache. “These men do not possess an abundance of wit or wisdom.”
Santino shrugged.
Another Rider team member entered the room, gun drawn.
“Pleasant of you to grace us with your presence,” Reece said. “As you can see, the rookie and I have handled the situation.”
Ryan Walsh, Reece’s long-standing partner, holstered his weapon. His broad shoulders filled the entrance. “And the girl?”
Reece jerked his head toward the closed door to his left. Based on the wailing, the girl that Lautaro Fernandez’s men had kidnapped waited in the other room.
“You two going to stand here and chat or finish the rescue?” Ryan asked.
Reece scuffed the toe of his cowboy boot on the ground. “Your temperament is better suited to kids than mine, Walsh.”
“All you have to do is walk in there and reassure her that she’s safe and the police are coming.”
Reece gave him a blank stare.
“Unbelievable.” Ryan shook his head as he stalked toward the door.
Reece didn’t like anything having to with kids and sickness, or kids and violence. He couldn’t stand to see them suffer. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he’d never considered having any of his own. If he entered that room and discovered the men on the floor had harmed the young girl, he was liable to put a bullet in each of them.
Shooting people created entirely too much paperwork.
“Hello? Is this thing on?” Claire spoke into the com piece in his ear. Her role was IT support for Rider Security and Investigation where Reece, Santino, and Ryan worked. She’d been the one who’d identified the location of this hideout.
“We’re here, Claire,” Santino said.
“Is Reece going to stand around and chat us up with his Southern drawl, or is anybody frisking the bodies before the police arrive?” she asked. “This is a rescue mission, but may I remind you that we also need to learn more about this drug on the streets that got the DEA agent’s daughter kidnapped in the first place?”
Santino bent down and began searching the men’s pockets. From the other room, the kidnapped victim’s wails stopped—clear proof that Ryan had been the right man to approach her. Aside from having a stepson who loved him like a father, Ryan Walsh had a calming ambience. Most people underestimated how deadly he could be.
Reece’s phone buzzed with an alert. He pulled it out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket and activated the app that had alarmed. “What the hell?”
“Ah, ah,” Santino scolded him. “That’s another quarter in the jar.”
“Somebody is breaking into Jess’s apartment.” Reece watched a man on-screen picking the lock to her room. His face was turned away from the motion-activated camera.
“I thought you and Jess broke up... again.”
“We’re merely on a temporary hiatus,” he lied. The last breakup had been so distressingly awful, Reece worried it might have been their last.
Santino rifled through one of the men’s wallets. “Right. So if you’re not together, why are you still monitoring her place?”
“I don’t expect one so young and inexperienced with relationships to comprehend my motives.” He continued to watch the screen in disbelief as the man picked the lock and entered the apartment. A second man came into view of the camera, following the first and closing the door behind them.
“Cualquiera.” Santino, who at twenty-eight was twelve years younger than Reece, rolled his eyes as he continued to check pockets. “Is she in danger?”
“She’s not home at present, but,” Reece checked his watch, “she will be in forty-five minutes if she doesn’t make any stops after her shift.”
Reece dialed Jess’s mobile number, intending to warn her about the intruder. Of course, it went to voice mail. He wondered if she’d programmed her phone to silence his calls—wouldn’t be the first time. He’d once had to use Rider resources to track her down at Nordstrom for a conversation.
“Call me, it’s important.” He disconnected the call.
Santino began frisking the next man on the floor. “If you need to go look out for your not-girlfriend who you’re stalking through a door monitor, vamos. Ryan and I will clean up here.”
“Take the car,” Claire said in his earpiece. “I’ll have Drake drive a new one to Ryan and Santino.”
“Thanks, Claire.” As Reece dashed to the car, he tried calling Jess again.
No answer. Damn stubborn woman.
His stomach churned at the thought of anything happening to her. He’d installed the motion detector for her after they’d had an argument where he told her she needed a safer place to live. A few months later, she’d told him she’d deleted the app from her phone because it triggered with every resident, delivery person, and dog walking down the hall. He’d then adjusted the settings so the alarm would only trigger for objects longer than five seconds in view, but by that time, they were taking another relationship break, so he doubted she’d reinstalled the app.
He drove in haste, palms sweating on the wheel as his heart raced, filled with worry and dread for Jess.
Lori Sullivan exited the elevator and walked briskly through the dim parking deck. She tightened her wool coat more snugly to protect her against the biting Chicago chill as she neared her car.
The hospital should invest in better lighting for the deck, she thought. Half of the bulbs were burned out.
A faint scuffling of rubber soles on the concrete flooring pricked her ears. Was it another person, or had she mistaken the sound? The noise could have been a discarded paper cup scraping the concrete as the wind pushed it across the ground.
She walked faster, glancing at a security camera as she passed. Too bad they didn’t offer any actual security. She’d heard a colleague had once asked for the footage to be reviewed after her car’s bumper had been swiped, only to be told the parking deck cameras had been disabled due to budget cuts.
They were nothing more than plastic perches for the pigeons.
Lori reached her car and locked her doors as soon as she was inside the vehicle. Thankfully, she’d thought to remote start her Acura, so the engine and cab were already warm. In haste, she left the parking garage and drove toward home.
In the safety of her vehicle, she wondered if she’d only imagined being followed in the garage. Perhaps someone had been walking to work rather than toward her, although the late hour was after the night shift change.
She strummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Her nerves had been on edge all week.
Why hadn’t Jess called yet? Since Lori worried her phone might be bugged, she didn’t want to call Jess first and alert her pursuers about the USB Lori had created. She didn’t want to make Jess a target. But maybe, despite her careful efforts, she already had.
She needed her friend’s help. Jessica Ong would have the tenacity and resources to expose illegal activity. She knew people in the security business, and her brother was an investigative reporter.
On the interstate, Lori began driving erratically, watching the headlights behind her.
There.
She sucked in a deep breath as one driver repeatedly changed lanes in order to follow her. An icy fist closed over her chest. She couldn’t go home.
Certain she was being followed, she sped up and considered how to lose the tail. She needed somewhere to hide until she could assimilate the information she’d collected into a cohesive presentation for the authorities. Home no longer felt safe now that she had confirmation someone was after her.
Danger was exponentially escalating. What she’d thought of initially as a conspiracy theory she’d concocted had proven terrifyingly true.
She needed to speak with Jess. As she reached for her phone, the vehicle behind her closed the distance.
* * *
Call me as soon as you can.
Jess stared at the text message from her work colleague, Lori Sullivan.
Before Jess could call her back, Austin poked his head into the physicians’ workroom. “Dr. Ong, bed four’s sats are dropping.”
Jess pocketed her phone, pushed the chair away from the desk, and stood. Dropping oxygen saturations required a direct assessment for possible intervention. “Let’s have a look,” she told the nurse. She would call Lori back after she handled the current patient crisis.
She exited the physicians’ workroom and followed Austin down the hall to bed four, her comfy clogs silent on the linoleum floor. Accustomed to the beeps of various machines—vital signs monitors, ventilators, renal replacement therapy—audible even in the hallways, Jess tuned them out.
Through the glass partition, she saw her patient. Mrs. Monroe was a young suburban soccer mom—probably with 2.5 kids and a minivan. She was much too young to be in Jess’s ICU with respiratory failure. Despite the high-flow nasal canal device she wore, Mrs. Monroe still sucked air as if she’d just finished a soccer sprint down the full three-hundred-and-sixty-foot playing field.
“She’s tiring,” Jess told the nurse beside her, craning her neck to look up at him.
Austin, a big, burly nurse with a disproportionately quiet voice, asked, “You want to intubate her?”
“Yes,” she agreed reluctantly, hating that the patient’s condition had progressively worsened. “We’ve exhausted supportive measures. We’ll intubate before she completely tuckers out.”
“I’ll let the respiratory therapist know. You want your usual cocktail for intubation?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks. I’ll put in orders for fentanyl, sedatives, and paralytics. With the severity of her ARDS, she might need to be paralyzed for twenty-four hours to adequately oxygenate her.”
Jess entered the room and plucked the stethoscope off a hook near the vital signs monitor and then listened to Mrs. Monroe’s breath sounds. They were coarse, as if Velcro filled her chest rather than delicate organic lung tissue.
As she explained to the patient how she planned to put a breathing tube in and put her on mechanical ventilation, Jess’s mind churned with the details of this case and the insufficient medical explanation for the woman’s respiratory failure. She was suffering from adult respiratory distress syndrome—or ARDS—but the cause of her condition eluded Jess.
Within a few minutes, the respiratory therapist rolled the ventilator in the room, and Austin entered with a pocketful of the drugs Jess usually employed for sedation.
With proper personal protective equipment donned, Jess ran through the pre-procedure checklist with the team. She made a mental note to call the patient’s husband after the intubation and let him know the turn of events.
“Short Asian coming through,” Jess announced as she finagled her way through wires and IV tubing to the head of the bed. “Lower the bed, please.”
Time to insert the tube and save a life. Hopefully.
The patient needed mechanical ventilation but providing life support didn’t automatically mean she would recover from her mysterious illness. Sometimes life support bought the body time to heal, sometimes it only delayed the inevitable. In Mrs. Monroe’s case, only time would tell.
* * *
When Jess’s shift ended at seven a.m., she sat in the physicians’ work room giving sign-outs on each patient to her friend and colleague, Jenna Masters. The room was a windowless square with six computers in cubicles along the walls. The single door was closed to keep out the boisterous noise of the ICU.
Jess had saved the update on Mrs. Monroe for last. “I had to tube her last night and paralyze her. If she gets worse, the next steps are prone or even ECMO.”
“She’s so young,” Jenna marveled. Her long, copper hair was pulled back in a messy bun, and she wore scrubs like Jess.
“And we don’t have an etiology yet. Infectious diseases are all ruled out. She didn’t have any exposures to suggest hypersensitivity pneumonitis. She’s not taking any prescription drugs that could cause acute lung disease. Her tox screen was positive for narcotics, but her husband said she had an oxycodone prescription six months ago for a torn rotator cuff, so maybe she popped a few of those recently and that’s where the narcs came from. CT imaging shows classic acute lung injury with bilateral infiltrates. Can you lavage her lungs and check for eosinophils?”
“You’re thinking eosinophilic pneumonia?”
“The pattern doesn’t fit, but we need to keep ruling out everything we can think of.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jenna said.
“You might have to pull the trigger on giving her steroids.” Steroids were the drug doctors loved to hate. They saved lives, but at a high cost with brutal side effects—muscle wasting, poor wound healing, hyperglycemia, weight gain, and the list went on.
Jess rubbed at her temples as her tired eyes watered, reminding her how long and busy her twelve-hour shift had been. “I had a case just like this last month in Chicago.”
“You’re still doing shifts up there? When are you going to settle here in Atlanta?”
Jess straightened and gave Jenna a pointed look. “When I have a reason to.”
“Reece?” Jenna cringed.
Jess had met Reece at Jenna’s wedding a few years ago. Since then, Reece and Jess had an on-again off-again roller-coaster relationship, which was currently off.
“The man does not have his shit together,” Jess complained. “Anyway, my case in Chicago was an eighteen-year-old who took some new street drug—Luminous. His condition was also a mystery ARDS, until we learned about the drug from his girlfriend.”
“Luminous? Never heard of it. What’s in it?”
“No idea. Maybe narcotics. Maybe it’s a designer drug. His urine drug screen was pan positive because he’d taken other drugs with it. Dr. Lori Sullivan and I had six Luminous patients we wrote a case series article about. It wasn’t accepted for publication though. We’re trying a different journal. Damn. I was supposed to call Lori back.” She bit her lip at the sudden remembrance.
She had gotten tied up with emergencies through the night, and by two a.m. when things had slowed down, she figured it was too late to call Lori. The only important topic between them was research, and it could wait.
“Did the patients in your case series survive?” Jenna asked.
“Only half.”
“You don’t think soccer mom here took the designer drug?”
“I haven’t heard of this street drug surfacing in Atlanta.”
“Quite the mystery,” Jenna said, brushing a rogue strand of hair out of her face. “What about that case Arti had a few weeks ago? That was unidentified ALI.”
“That acute lung injury turned out to be a patient on an experimental study drug. Arti submitted it to the pharmaceutical company as a possible adverse event related to the drug. And I asked Mrs. Monroe’s husband—she’s not enrolled in any treatment trials. So, her illness remains a mystery.”
* * *
Reece Owen rolled and sprang to his feet as he managed a well-placed right hook. The man he’d clocked stumbled backward. While the man rocked off-balance, Reece looped the toe of his boot around the man’s ankle and tripped him. The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Hispanic crashed to the ground.
Seizing the opportunity to gain the advantage, Reece pounced. He rolled the man over and secured his hands behind his back with a twist tie.
“I believe that’s a new record.” He stood and dusted off his jeans, more for effect than actual dirt. In fact, he hadn’t even broken a sweat taking down his opponent.
“This isn’t a hog-tying competition.” His partner, Santino Alonso, wrestled on the floor with another man.
“No?” Reece cocked his head to one side, watching the rookie struggle to gain the upper hand against a nasty opponent. “Kinda looks like it is.”
Santino’s sienna skin glowed red from exertion. “Hijo de mil puta!” he yelled at the man he fought with before elbowing him in the ribs.
With a forced exhalation of pain, the man loosened his grip long enough for Santino to flip him and pin him facedown with a knee in his back.
Reece arched an eyebrow. “You kiss your sister with that mouth?”
Santino tied the man’s wrists together behind his back with a plastic twist tie. “I don’t have a sister. And you’re one to talk.” He stood up, catching his breath as he wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand.
“I am reforming,” Reece countered. “I’ve averaged only two quarters in my swear jar per week.”
“Oh, yeah? I read somewhere that swearing can be a sign of intelligence.”
One of the restrained men was cursing loudly at Reece and Santino, foam and spittle spewing as if he was a rabid dog. The two kidnappers lay on the floor of a dilapidated one-story house Reece and Santino had infiltrated. Because of the struggle, rickety furniture had been displaced in the living room and the battered coffee table and lamp had been knocked over.
“Can you verify that claim was substantiated with solid scientific evidence?” Reece stroked his mustache. “These men do not possess an abundance of wit or wisdom.”
Santino shrugged.
Another Rider team member entered the room, gun drawn.
“Pleasant of you to grace us with your presence,” Reece said. “As you can see, the rookie and I have handled the situation.”
Ryan Walsh, Reece’s long-standing partner, holstered his weapon. His broad shoulders filled the entrance. “And the girl?”
Reece jerked his head toward the closed door to his left. Based on the wailing, the girl that Lautaro Fernandez’s men had kidnapped waited in the other room.
“You two going to stand here and chat or finish the rescue?” Ryan asked.
Reece scuffed the toe of his cowboy boot on the ground. “Your temperament is better suited to kids than mine, Walsh.”
“All you have to do is walk in there and reassure her that she’s safe and the police are coming.”
Reece gave him a blank stare.
“Unbelievable.” Ryan shook his head as he stalked toward the door.
Reece didn’t like anything having to with kids and sickness, or kids and violence. He couldn’t stand to see them suffer. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he’d never considered having any of his own. If he entered that room and discovered the men on the floor had harmed the young girl, he was liable to put a bullet in each of them.
Shooting people created entirely too much paperwork.
“Hello? Is this thing on?” Claire spoke into the com piece in his ear. Her role was IT support for Rider Security and Investigation where Reece, Santino, and Ryan worked. She’d been the one who’d identified the location of this hideout.
“We’re here, Claire,” Santino said.
“Is Reece going to stand around and chat us up with his Southern drawl, or is anybody frisking the bodies before the police arrive?” she asked. “This is a rescue mission, but may I remind you that we also need to learn more about this drug on the streets that got the DEA agent’s daughter kidnapped in the first place?”
Santino bent down and began searching the men’s pockets. From the other room, the kidnapped victim’s wails stopped—clear proof that Ryan had been the right man to approach her. Aside from having a stepson who loved him like a father, Ryan Walsh had a calming ambience. Most people underestimated how deadly he could be.
Reece’s phone buzzed with an alert. He pulled it out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket and activated the app that had alarmed. “What the hell?”
“Ah, ah,” Santino scolded him. “That’s another quarter in the jar.”
“Somebody is breaking into Jess’s apartment.” Reece watched a man on-screen picking the lock to her room. His face was turned away from the motion-activated camera.
“I thought you and Jess broke up... again.”
“We’re merely on a temporary hiatus,” he lied. The last breakup had been so distressingly awful, Reece worried it might have been their last.
Santino rifled through one of the men’s wallets. “Right. So if you’re not together, why are you still monitoring her place?”
“I don’t expect one so young and inexperienced with relationships to comprehend my motives.” He continued to watch the screen in disbelief as the man picked the lock and entered the apartment. A second man came into view of the camera, following the first and closing the door behind them.
“Cualquiera.” Santino, who at twenty-eight was twelve years younger than Reece, rolled his eyes as he continued to check pockets. “Is she in danger?”
“She’s not home at present, but,” Reece checked his watch, “she will be in forty-five minutes if she doesn’t make any stops after her shift.”
Reece dialed Jess’s mobile number, intending to warn her about the intruder. Of course, it went to voice mail. He wondered if she’d programmed her phone to silence his calls—wouldn’t be the first time. He’d once had to use Rider resources to track her down at Nordstrom for a conversation.
“Call me, it’s important.” He disconnected the call.
Santino began frisking the next man on the floor. “If you need to go look out for your not-girlfriend who you’re stalking through a door monitor, vamos. Ryan and I will clean up here.”
“Take the car,” Claire said in his earpiece. “I’ll have Drake drive a new one to Ryan and Santino.”
“Thanks, Claire.” As Reece dashed to the car, he tried calling Jess again.
No answer. Damn stubborn woman.
His stomach churned at the thought of anything happening to her. He’d installed the motion detector for her after they’d had an argument where he told her she needed a safer place to live. A few months later, she’d told him she’d deleted the app from her phone because it triggered with every resident, delivery person, and dog walking down the hall. He’d then adjusted the settings so the alarm would only trigger for objects longer than five seconds in view, but by that time, they were taking another relationship break, so he doubted she’d reinstalled the app.
He drove in haste, palms sweating on the wheel as his heart raced, filled with worry and dread for Jess.