Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(19)
As they put the girl in the coroner’s van I stared out over the industrial waterway and felt the weight of one more unnecessary death settle deep into that part of my soul where they collected and filled me up. I lost track of time, trapped in my own thoughts wondering how exactly I was going to fix this particular mess, when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
I didn’t think.
I reacted and had my gun out and pointed at the offender before my next breath. We both swore as Race took a step back and lifted up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Whoa, Titus.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and put the gun back in the holster. “What are you doing out here, Hartman? Shouldn’t you be off running numbers, or better yet, dealing with all the dark shit that has to be in your head knowing your old man got smoked?”
I wasn’t being tactful or kind. I didn’t have it in me anymore and I think Race saw it because he just smirked at me and looked as regal and unruffled as ever. He was a different man from the one that had been in my office yesterday. I wondered how much a good woman, a woman that understood him and the life he lived, helped with that. I felt a surge of jealousy that I had to struggle to choke down.
“I live out here. Brysen’s little sister heard the commotion and we peeked at the security cameras from the building. I saw you arrive and figured I would wait until the rest of the boys in blue took off before coming down to see what was going on.”
“You live here?”
He nodded and motioned to a concrete-and-glass building that looked way too nice to be anywhere in the Point and definitely way too slick to be on these crumbling docks.
“My old man used this place to stash his mistresses. The property owner is shady as hell, so when all that stuff with Brysen’s stalker came to a head, I had him transfer the deed over to her name so she had a safe place to go. I like it out here. It’s quiet, and when Booker got out of the hospital after he was shot, I moved him into the building to keep an eye on things when I’m working. I like that the girls have someone they can run to if I’m not around. Plus I upgraded the security system so that it’s harder to get into the place than it is to get on Bax’s good side. No one gets in or out without me or Booker knowing it. There are cameras everywhere.”
Noah Booker was an ex-con and an all-around badass. He was a lot like my brother in both of those aspects. Booker was smart enough to know that Race was the one that was going to be running things in the dark and in the back rooms and alleyways now that Novak was gone, so he had gotten in on the ground floor. He had offered himself up as a bullet catcher when Race’s girl found herself caught in the sights of a deadly stalker. Booker had almost died trying to keep Brysen and her sister safe, so it didn’t surprise me at all that Race had promptly put the man at his right hand and was relying on him for protection not only for himself but for his girls as well.
I rubbed a thumb across my scruffy jaw as the wheels in my head started turning. I lifted an eyebrow at Race and asked, “Is there any open space in the complex?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and his green eyes narrowed at me.
“Why? What’s wrong with your place?”
I had a small Craftsman-style house that wasn’t exactly out of the Point but it was far enough at the edge of the city that when I did sleep I did so without worrying too much about my windows getting shot out or my front door getting kicked in. It was just a place to store my stuff and crash when I got a few minutes. It absolutely wasn’t secure enough to take Reeve, with all the people that currently wanted a piece of her. She would be too isolated and alone if I left her there while I continued to hunt down Roark.
“Nothing is wrong with my place, but I’m in the middle of a situation and I need someplace safe to hang out for a few weeks.”
“That situation involves a certain dark haired beauty that’s back in town?”
Goddamn, was he too smart for his own good. Well, my good, really.
“Yeah, it does, and I don’t want to hear anything about it. The guy that torched your car, the guy that worked over Roxie, the guy that tortured the poor girl and left her here on this dock like she was trash, is not only after the Point but he’s after Reeve with a vengeance. She gave me his name and she’s willing to be the bait we use to draw him out, so I need to do what I can to keep her safe. Help me out, Race.”
I could see him calculating the pros and cons of what I was asking him to do for me. Race didn’t do anything without weighing all of his options. He knew I was asking him to bring a verified security threat under his protected roof. He understood I was asking him to do something that Bax was going to be totally against. He grasped that I was desperate enough to plead with him to offer shelter to a woman that had not only offered his sister up as a sacrificial lamb but whose actions had led directly to him being beaten within an inch of his life. I was asking him for so much more than he had ever asked me for, and he knew it. And because he was f*cking brilliant, he knew that if he agreed it would mean I would owe him huge down the line. Get-out-of-jail-free huge.
I lived my life between very clear black and white lines but lately all the edges had blurred into so many shades of gray it was hard to see through the fog anymore. I believed in right and wrong, in good and bad. I was willing to die for those convictions, but I also wanted the good guys to win occasionally. Lately, it seemed like the way to do that was to play by the bad guys’ rules. It made everything inside of me snap and thrash around in anger but I didn’t have a choice and I could see Race knew that as well.