“I need you to show up at a woman’s house. I want you to pull up in a patrol car, lights on, dressed in your SWAT suit, the whole friggin’ deal. Be armed. Look scary.” For Mike, that wouldn’t be hard. The special-issue body armor turned his barrel chest into a massive wall. You didn’t want to fuck with Mike. You particularly didn’t want to fuck with him on duty, fully suited up and armed.
Exactly what Sam wanted. He wanted Mike to scare the shit out of those two scumbags. Every hair on his body had stood up when he’d seen them come out onto the porch to stare at Nicole, hooting and whistling. The way they looked at her had had his gut churning. Their behavior had been classic predator behavior. Circling warily, coming ever closer. One of the fuckheads had touched her car while she was in it, Nicole had said. The next step was touchingher. And the step after that was a snatch and grab, the next time she came home after dark, and rape.
Over his dead body.
Sam had no illusions about the way the world worked. The strong preyed on the weak and in this world, the weak more or less included all women and all children. He’d seen enough women and children beaten into submission growing up to know that someone perceived as weak, without a protector, was going to attract violence, sooner rather than later. It was inevitable. He’d spent his entire life putting himself in front of the weak, standing for them. The three of them, Sam, Harry and Mike, had spent their lives trying to stop something that could never be stopped, only slowed.
Nicole was like a lamb staked out as bait.
Whatever the house had been like in her grandmother’s time, now it was smack in the middle of a neighborhood that degenerated daily. With the recession so bad, he’d bet that every other man there was unemployed. Out of work, resentful men, many high on booze or drugs, with nothing to do all day but fantasize—well, those weren’t the best neighbors for a woman to have.
Especially a woman like Nicole.
Off-the-charts gorgeous, living alone with a housekeeper and a sick father. Oh yeah, to men like those two fuckheads on the porch, and probably others in the run-down neighborhood, she was ripe prey.
Well, Sam would put a stop to that. First, Mike would drive by for a couple of days and make it clear that Nicole had friends on the force and that they were looking out for her. And then, whatever happened between him and Nicole, Sam was looking forward to a little chat with those two. And they could pay their own goddamned hospital bills.
First Mike. “I need you to go to 346 Mulberry Avenue. It’s the house of a woman called?—“
“Nicole Pearce,” Mike said, only not into his cell, which he was slipping back into his jacket pocket. He was standing in the doorway to the outer office and Harry was right behind him. Harry, much taller, towered over Mike. “Yeah, I know.”
They both came in, settled down in the two armchairs across from the sofa where Sam was sprawling. Both hunkered down as if it would take bolt cutters and a crane to get them out of there.
Oh Jesus, the double whammy. All three of them had been on the receiving end of that one, at one time or another.
One of them got in a mess and the other two ganged up on him. Looked like it was his turn. He sank lower in the sofa, knowing what was coming and knowing it was not going to be fun.
Sam looked at them, at his brothers, men he relied on, men he loved, men he’d kill for, men he’d unquestioningly die for, and wished them both gone. Poof. Disappeared in a puff of smoke.
But the whammy part could wait because first he needed to take care of business.
His gaze fixed on Mike.
“Yeah. Nicole Pearce.” He’d rather die than let them know that just saying her name hurt. “Right across the street is a boarding house, at Number three twenty-one. There are two dickheads, one black and one white. Dreadlocks, pant crotches down to their knees, the usual. They’ve fixated on Ni—Ms. Pearce, harassing her. I want you to drive by and make a show of force. Walk up to the house. Make it clear she’s protected, that the police are looking out for her. That anyone who messes with her will be real sorry. And I want you to do that for the next couple of days. I want to make sure the fuckheads get the message. Loud and clear.”
Mike nodded. “Sure thing.”
Harry simply looked at him pensively, long fingers under his chin. Harry looked awful, like he hadn’t slept in months. He’d been on the receiving end of the double whammy a lot since he’d come home, particularly while he tried drowning his sorrows in beer.
Sam and Mike tried to get him into physical rehab but when Harry refused, they simply hired a guy Mike knew. Bjorn looked like a wrestler and started whipping Harry back into shape, whether Harry wanted it or not. Harry was moving just a little more easily, and not like an eighty-year-old now. Harry bitched endlessly about Bjorn, the therapist, and called him the Nazi, though Bjorn had emigrated from Norway. Harry tried every trick in the book, including not answering the door when Bjorn showed up with his bag of massage oils and what Harry swore were his instruments of torture. Sam simply gave Bjorn a copy of the key to Harry’s apartment and everyone ignored Harry’s bitching until it eventually stopped.
Sam forced him to come into work and it did Harry good. He was even starting to put some weight back on, though the sleep thing wasn’t going well, to judge by the huge blue-black bruises under his eyes.
Harry was the poster child for messed up. If he was double-tagging with Mike, it meant they thought Sam was more messed up than Harry.
Well, hell.
Harry fixed him with his fierce yellow-brown gaze. “Would this be the same Nicole Pearce you’ve been calling every five minutes all morning?”
Sam gritted his teeth.
“And the one whose office doorbell you’ve been ringing every quarter of an hour?”
Sam sank even lower into the sofa.
She hadn’t come into work this morning. That was the thing that was driving him crazy. He could barely stay in the same room with the thoughts that were exploding in his head like grenades.
There was no good spin to put on Nicole Pearce not showing up for work, none. Every single option he could think of was bad. The worst, the very worst was—he’d hurt her. She was lying in bed in her home or was—God!—in a doctor’s office or hospital. He talked himself down from that one because he knew he couldn’t possibly have hurt her enough for medical care, but like a rabid dog, it was a thought he couldn’t keep away. It kept circling back at him, snarling and snapping.
