By Lethal Force Read online

  Heading for Dax’s office, I psych myself up for a fight.

  Hours later, I walk our latest client to the door. Evianna Archer is a little skittish. Understandable, since she’s being stalked, but all throughout that meeting, I felt like she was drawn to Dax, even though I’m the one handling her case.

  Shake it off. She probably just responded to him because he’s the owner. And he took the initial call. Whatever.

  It’s not like I’d start anything with her. Every relationship I’ve had—since Joey—has ended within weeks. No one else lives up to my memories of her.

  “Marjorie,” I say to our receptionist when we reach the front desk, “can you get Evianna set up with our billing system? Clive is going to follow her back to her office.” With a quick check of my watch, I frown. The dude’s taking his sweet time getting up here. “And book me from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. every night for the rest of the week. Will that be appropriate for getting you to and from the office, Evianna?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her cheeks flush, like she doesn’t want to be any trouble. “I can firm up my schedule this afternoon. I don’t want you to have to wait in the lobby or outside my house for hours.”

  I soften my tone and lean an elbow on Marjorie’s desk. “This is what we do, Evianna. A lot of PI work is waiting. And if you’re not ready to leave, I can surveil or handle email on my phone until you’re done.”

  “If you’re sure…” She presses her lips together, the move highlighting the stress lines around her mouth. The woman’s been through some shit in the past few days.

  “I’m sure.”

  Clive ambles up, his leather jacket slung over his shoulders. After I introduce him and verify that Evianna has everything she needs, I make a beeline for the coffee machine. Dax is standing at the counter, a mug in his hands.

  “Clive’s following our new client back to her office,” I say, pouring myself a cup of black gold. “Want some?”

  Dax’s brows draw inward, and he rubs the back of his neck as he extends his cup in my general direction. He may be blind, but he always seems to know exactly where I am. He and Ryker are absolutely creepy with echolocation.

  “What do think about her…her case?” he asks.

  Half of what Evianna talked about—home automation, code, data breaches—went completely over my head. “I wish we had Wren for this one,” I admit.

  Our phones vibrate simultaneously with a message from accounting. Evianna paid our retainer before she even got back to her office.

  Removing his Bluetooth, Dax tucks the little earbud into his front pocket. “She pays on time. And I keep telling you. Wren’s not dead. She’s in Seattle. They have the internet there. Hell, she emailed me this morning asking when we’d have something new for her. Pull her in so we can wrap this up quickly.”

  “You don’t like our new client.” I follow him back to his office where he sets his mug down on the center of the desk. There are days I’d swear the man wasn’t blind. “Why not?”

  “She clearly doesn’t like me. That handshake was—”

  I set down my mug before I double over with laughter as it hits me. Why the end of the meeting felt so off. Why she went from staring at Dax like he was a god to acting like he’d killed her puppy in the space of five minutes.

  Dax arches a brow. “You didn’t think she was a little…confrontational at the end?”

  With a final snort, I get myself under control. After this morning, Dax isn’t in the mood for my shit. “You’re wearing your glasses.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything? I needed the camera in the damn things to read me her police report. And I’ve had a low level headache for three days. They help with the light sensitivity.”

  “Look, I know you can’t see yourself, but your glasses hide a lot of the scarring. And how pale your eyes really are. Evianna smiled at you a couple of times. You didn’t respond. And when you held out your hand at the end? She was waiting for you to take hers. She doesn’t know you’re blind.”

  “And I came across as a total jerk?” He pulls off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Shit.”

  His voice holds an odd note. Somewhere between longing and regret, and I study him for a minute. I think…he might be interested in her.

  “I’ll explain when I talk to her,” I say as I head for the door. “Clive’s going to handle everything until I can line up Ronan or Vasquez for the night shift. She didn’t want close contact. Those two know how to be unobtrusive.”

  “Don’t. Don’t tell her anything about me. It’s not important, and I don’t want anyone’s pity. She doesn’t have to like me. She’s a client. One I probably won’t talk to again.”

  “Whatever you want.” My phone buzzes with a number I don’t recognize, but the area code…is San Diego. “Shit,” I say under my breath. “Gotta take this. Catch you tomorrow.”

  As soon as I’m out in the hall, I jab the screen. “Ford Lawton. Who’s calling?”

  “Ford?” The voice is vaguely familiar, but I can’t place the soft, scratchy tone. “This is Geraldine. Gerry Taylor. Joey’s older sister.”

  My heart stops, but my legs are still moving, carrying me back to my office where I shut the door. “Gerry? How did you even get this number? What’s wrong?”

  “I…I asked a friend of mine—a local cop, retired now—to track you down. Joey’s missing.”

  I don’t hear anything for another minute, and then my back is pressed to the door and my ass is resting on the hardwood. “Missing?” The word scrapes over my throat, like if I don’t say it, maybe it won’t be true. “From where? For how long? Tell me everything.”

  The office walls press in on me as I scour our various intel sources on Turkmenistan.

  Human trafficking.

  Two hundred women reported missing in the last two years.

  Turkmenistan authorities increase border security to stop trafficking of women into Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Closing my eyes, I see Joey. Scared. Abused. Bloodied. Twenty-two, and kidnapped to be sold down in Mexico. Because I wouldn’t talk to her.

  If she’s in trouble now—if she has been taken by traffickers—I have to do something. I have to find her.

  Pushing to my feet, I grab my jacket from the back of the door. I have to make some calls, and I do not want these records on Second Sight’s phone bill.

  Sinking down into my recliner with a brand new burner phone from the local Stop-N-Shop, I dial numbers I memorized twelve years ago when I left the Marines. I don’t even know if Nomar’s still alive, let alone using this number. But I have to try.

  “Identify yourself,” the rough voice with the hint of a Spanish accent says.

  “Master Sergeant Ford Lawton. U.S. Marine Corps. Retired.”

  “Where’d we meet, Marine?”

  I close my eyes, resting my head against the back of the chair. “Al-Faw Peninsula. Satisfied now, Lone Ranger?”

  Nomar chuckles. “How the fuck are you, Ford?”

  “Not good.” The coffee burns my throat, but I doubt I’ll be sleeping any time soon, and it’s either this or suck down gin and tonics until I’m dead to the world. “I need some intel. You still running covert ops in—”

  “This better be a fucking secure line if you want to finish that sentence…”

  “It’s a burner phone run through multiple anonymizers. How much more secure you want me to be, asswipe?” Slamming the coffee cup down on the end table, I watch, unable to move, as some of the black liquid splashes over the rim and drips onto my beige carpet.

  “Take a pill, man. Yes. I’m still in charge of ops in Uzbekistan.” Nomar sighs over the line, and for a minute, I feel ancient.

  I remember when calling overseas meant the perpetual hiss of static and long delays after every sentence. “Five days ago, a Doctors Without Borders group went dark outside of Sayat. They were headed for Turkmenabat, but they never got there.”

  “Shit. And they hired you
?” Nomar’s whistle grates along my spine.

  “No.” Clearing my throat, I lean forward and lower my voice. As if whispering will somehow make what I have to say untrue. “I know—knew—one of the doctors. We…fuck. We were engaged back in our twenties. She’s missing, Nomar, along with six others. I have to find her. And I need your help to do it.”

  3

  Ford

  With every passing minute, the tension gathering between my shoulder blades intensifies, and by the time I stand in front of Dax’s door, it feels like there’s a knife digging into my back.

  Dax looks like hell, and the apartment is completely dark when I stride through the door. “VoiceAssist: Lights on, sixty percent. It’s after eight, Dax.”

  He shrugs and ambles into the kitchen, his limp a little more pronounced than I’ve seen it lately.

  “Beer?” he asks.

  “Sure.” I can’t force out more than a one word answer, and he arches a brow, highlighting the scars around his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I take the bottle and follow him to his spartan living room before sinking into a single chair across from him. “You’re scary, you know that?” After a swig of beer, I let out a long, slow breath. “I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

  “It’s in your voice. Spill.” He drapes his arm across the back of the couch and stares straight through me. Despite not being able to see, he always knows right where to look. It’s like he’s seeing into my soul.

  “Joey’s missing.”

  “Joey?” Leaning forward, he shakes his head. “Sorry, but who is he?”

  Anger stiffens my spine, and I push to my feet and start pacing the room, needing to do something…anything…to distract me from the images running through my mind—all the things those assholes could be doing to her right now. “She.” I pause for another sip of beer before I clarify. “Josephine Taylor? The woman I was dating when I joined the marines?”

  “Don’t you mean the woman who dumped you when you joined the marines?” Dax says, his voice taking on a harsh tone.

  Shit. Maybe I have a little more…baggage surrounding Joey than I thought if that’s what he remembers from our conversations about her. “Well, sort of. I mean…no.” Swallowing hard over the lump in my throat, I start to pace again. “Her sister called me. No one’s heard from Joey in ten days. She was working for Doctors Without Borders in Turkmenistan, and the whole group’s just…gone.”

  “Shit. Turkmenistan’s a war zone, Ford. If she got caught between a couple of the local factions, she’s not missing. She’s in a shallow grave somewhere.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I snap.

  Dax flinches and throws his hands up in surrender as I clutch the bottle so hard, I worry it’s going to crack. “Sorry. Is the CIA involved? Any demands for ransom?”

  Anger turns to pure, unadulterated rage as I recount my call with one of Trevor’s contacts two hours ago. “The CIA won’t investigate. Something about not wanting to upset the fragile peace in the region. Total bullshit. And Doctors Without Borders doesn’t even know where the group was before they went missing. They were in some remote region where their SAT phone didn’t work properly. Their last known location was somewhere outside of Sayat, but they were heading to Turkmenabat.”

  Sinking back down into the leather chair, I lean forward, my elbows on my knees. “I can’t just leave her out there, Dax. I owe her that much.”

  “You don’t owe her anything. She couldn’t handle dating a marine on active duty and she bailed.”

  The sound escaping my throat is more like a growl than a sigh, and I roll my eyes. “No. She didn’t. She stayed with me for almost a year. I proposed before I left for my first oversees assignment. We wrote letters, even talked on the phone a couple of times. But…then I got three days leave. Back home in San Diego. And I didn’t call her.”

  Dax arches his brow. “So, let me guess. You were out with the guys, drinking until you were shit-faced, wearing your whites to impress the ladies, and she just happens to walk into the bar with her girlfriends to find you with a pretty little thing on your lap.”

  Bristling because he’s both right and wrong, I roll my head to try to relieve some of the tension. “I wasn’t shit-faced. That came later,” I say quietly. “Never touched another woman. Never even looked. All my mates were trying to hook up with anything that moved. Me? I just sat at the bar. Nursing a drink. For three fucking hours.”

  “Why?” Something flashes over Dax’s face. Longing. Pain. Frustration. But he takes a sip of his beer and waits for me to continue.

  Staring up at the ceiling, I send myself back twenty years to that damn bar the night I lost everything. “It was war, Dax. We were dropped in country after only six weeks of basic. The day before we got the news they were rotating us home…I killed six hostiles. One of them used a couple of kids as a human shield. The day before, we were a few blocks away when a suicide bomber took out a public market. Kids. Babies. Innocents. Joey didn’t deserve thirty-six hours of me crying and asking her why.”

  “And did you tell her that?”

  “Nope. I fucked up. And it cost her…more than I can explain. Because of me, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and…shit. It was bad, Dax.” I can’t tell him what happened to her. It’s not my place. “She tried to reach out…after…but I was on mission for almost six weeks, and I didn’t get her message until it was over. By then…it was too late. I wrote her letters trying to explain, apologizing, begging her to talk to me, but she returned every damn one of them. Unopened. Eventually…I stopped.”

  After Dax takes a long sip of beer, he asks, “What are you going to do?”

  “I have a contact in Uzbekistan—Nomar—who’s trying to slip unnoticed into Turkmenistan. If so—or if he can get in touch with some of his contacts there—he’ll check out their last known location, retrace the route they were supposed to follow. He’ll contact me tomorrow.”

  “And then?”

  As if he has to ask. “If there’s a chance she’s alive…I’m going to find her.” Setting my bottle down on the coffee table harder than I intend, I blow out a breath. “But that means I need you to find someone else to take over the Archer case. Or…at least run point on it with me until I hear back from Nomar.”

  Dax squeezes his eyes shut and presses the cold bottle of beer to his temple. “There isn’t anyone else. Ella’s tied up on that embezzlement case. Trevor can handle the basic surveillance on days, and Vasquez at night with Ronan as backup, but Clive messaged me right before I left the office. His mom’s about to have open-heart surgery.”

  “Fuck.”

  With a sigh, he shakes his head. “First thing in the morning, read me in with what you have so far. If you need to leave, take Trevor, and I’ll run point with Wren until Clive returns.”

  We finish our beers in silence, and when he walks me to the door, I clear my throat. If I’m going to go dark on him—and abandon a client—I have to come clean. “I never stopped loving her, Dax.”

  “Then you’ll get her back.” He grabs my forearm, squeezes once, and gives me a final nod. “But until we know more, don’t tell Evianna I’m involved with her case. No need to worry her until we know there’s something to worry about.”

  What the hell is he so concerned about? I’m about to ask when a sudden flash of memory—Joey in my bed, looking up at me with such love in her eyes—distracts me. “Whatever you say. I’ll see you in the morning.” Halfway down the hall, I turn. “Thank you.”

  Joey

  For what feels like an hour, I’ve been shaking, rocking back and forth as loud footsteps thunder over my head. Angry voices shout, and something heavy crashes to the ground.

  Hamid has brought me two meals since they took Ivy and Mia. Two days. All alone in this dingy, stuffy basement. And yet, I don’t know if I should wish I were with them. My heart breaks for what they might be going through. They’re young. Pretty. Just the type to be sold for
a premium price. Me…? At forty-two, maybe I don’t rate so high. But then…why did they take me? Why not just kill me?

  Pulling the paperclip from my pocket, I scrap it across my inner arm, hard enough to draw blood.

  I tried to resist. Tried to keep the pressure light. But it’s either cut myself again or let the fear drown me. I’ve been treading water for days, and I’m so tired.

  As crimson wells on my skin, then starts to roll towards my wrist, I let out a quiet whimper. A single tear escapes down my cheek. The first time I cut myself, I was twenty-two and still in the hospital after the police rescued me. The last? Two years ago. When the power went out at my apartment and I woke up in pitch blackness.

  No one’s touched me. Not once. No one’s even talked to me. I tried to ask Hamid about Ivy and Mia, but he just shook his head and grunted for me to keep quiet.

  The loud noises cease, and a second cut…this one to my inner thigh, lets me breathe again. After the last meal, I took a chance and used the lukewarm, brown water from the sink to wash my underwear and pants. The idea of giving up my underwear for even an hour left me shaking and nauseous, but I couldn’t stand my own stench anymore. Every time I inhaled, I was right back inside that railcar.

  At least I still have the abaya covering me.

  The silence doesn’t last long. Footsteps head for the trap door, then the scraping sound of whatever hides it follows. I spring up, my joints aching from disuse, lack of sleep, and so little food, and I sprint for the sink where I draped my clothes.

  They’re still damp, but I’ll be damned if I let these men anywhere near me wearing only the abaya. The fabric clings to my skin as I struggle back into the pants and I barely manage to zip them up before the door bangs open.