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“Cartels like Sangre por Sangre experience infighting all the time. Hostile takeovers, executions for not following orders. Dozens of people have died in their attempts to claw to the top of the ladder.” Her heart hurt. Which didn’t make sense because the morphine was supposed to numb her from her scalp to her toes.
Jocelyn fisted her hand back into Maverick’s fur. She needed to get out of here. To not be forced to stay still. To get her hands in some dough. “Or maybe, after everything you’ve been through, you want what he said to be true. Maybe, after all this time, you’ve been looking for someone who’s been through the same thing you have.”
“You could be right. Maybe everything he said out there was just another way to mess with my head. Unfortunately, Marc De Leon is in the wind. Nobody, not even his attorney, has been able to get a hold of him. The prosecutor is trying to go through the cartel, but it’s looking like we’ve hit a dead end.” He blew out a frustrated breath. “So far, he’s managed to detonate three bombs without leaving much of a trace. From what I can tell, he was planning on blowing me up just like he blew up Ponderosa’s chief of police.”
Baker took up position at the side of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight and triggering a low growl from Maverick. “Cool it, Cujo. I got you out of your crate.”
She scratched behind Maverick’s ear. As much as it’d annoyed her in the minutes leading up to the explosion at the station, she found Baker’s nicknames for the German shepherd the exact kick to get her out of the spiral closing in. “One of these days, he’s going to make you wish you’d called him by his real name.”
“One of these days?” Surprise glimmered in Baker’s dark eyes and tendriled through the numbness circulating through her body. Hard to imagine a man like Baker being surprised by anything, but she’d somehow managed. “Does that mean you’re not tapping out of this investigation?”
Jocelyn pressed her shoulders into the pillow to distract herself from the unpleasant thoughts waiting for a clear path through her mind. She’d fought them off this long. She could do it a while longer. She just had to concentrate and paste another smile on her face. “Hey, that guy blew me up, too, remember? I have as much a personal stake in this as you do.”
“How do you do it, Jocelyn?” His voice dipped into a near whisper. “How can you stay so positive after everything that’s happened?”
It was his turn to walk straight past the barriers she housed herself inside. Pinching the hem of the thin white sheet beneath her thumbnail, she sifted through a thousand answers in search of the one that would change the subject as quickly as possible. But her threshold for pain, for loss, for defensiveness had been reached long before they’d walked into Marc De Leon’s compound. “It takes a lot of effort. A lot of forcing myself to look for silver linings on stormy days.”
“Then why do it?” he asked.
“Because if I don’t, I’m afraid of who I’ll become.” She’d been on the morphine too long. It was inhibiting her internal filter. “I’ll go back to who I used to be. Hollow. Terrified of feeling anything real. I’ll shut down, and without the sarcasm and baked goods, movie nights, Christmas parties and trying to bring the team together, I’m afraid they’re going to realize I don’t have anything to offer. No reason to keep me around, and I want to stay, Baker. I need to be part of the team. Socorro’s team. Otherwise, I’ll go back to...”
No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t give up that piece of herself. Not to him. Not to any of them. Nothing good had come of it before.
“Back to what?” Yet even as he spoke the words, he seemed to accept she wasn’t going to answer that question. Baker interlaced his fingers with hers. A vicious scrape had scabbed over between his thumb and forefinger, arousing the nerves in her hand. “You run logistics for your entire team. You made sure soldiers got what they needed overseas. You fight for towns like Alpine Valley to get the resources they need in a crisis. I’ve seen it. You’re vital to this operation.” He swallowed hard. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead right now and half the people of this town would be buried under a landslide. Whatever you’re afraid of, you’re stronger than you think you are.”
She wanted to believe him, with every ounce of her being, she wanted what he said to be true. But that alone didn’t make it reality. Jocelyn watched as another drop of pain medication infiltrated her IV line. “That was before.”
His thumb skimmed over the top of her hand. “Before what?”
Closing her eyes, she lost the battle raging inside and let her eyes slip closed. “Before all I cared about was being numb.”
JOCELYNHADBEENcleared to recover in her room.
Mid-morning sunlight infiltrated through the floor-to-ceiling window at his back and cast his shadow across Socorro’s dining room table. Baker wasn’t sure how long he’d stared at his own outline, willing his brain to produce something—anything—that would give him a clue as to where Marc De Leon had gone. And his motive for wanting him dead.
He replayed the bastard’s words in his head too many times to count, until he wasn’t sure which thoughts had been his own and which had belonged to the bomber. Baker leafed through Albuquerque’s scene report from the initial bombing at the station. Nitroglycerin packed into a pipe bomb. De Leon obviously didn’t care about the impact of his chemicals on the environment, but Baker couldn’t actually name a cartel soldier who did. Newspaper dated over the past two weeks had been used as filler, but pulling fingerprints had been impossible.
The bomber had been careful. Most likely worn gloves. A brand-new car battery had been used to spark the initial charge, and the device had been triggered by a pager. In line with the other sixteen incidents accredited to the Ghost, including the bombing on Baker’s property. Though he was looking at another dead end there. The company who’d manufactured this one had gone out of business years ago. A relic. No way to trace the purchase, and the number of the damn thing was registered to an unending list of dummy corporations. “Why trust an old piece of technology when you could get your hands on something guaranteed to go off?”
Why take the risk? Baker had been asking himself the same question for over two hours in front of a dozen crime scene photos scattered all over the dining room table. He’d helped himself to one of the prepared meals Jocelyn was known for—this one lasagna and a heavy helping of garlic bread and a citrus salad he hadn’t touched yet. But no matter how much food he packed into his stomach or how many minutes he sat there with his eyes closed, the answer refused to surface.
The trill of dog tags cut through the headache building at the base of his skull. He was running on fumes, and he knew it. Awake for more than twenty-four hours. Hell, he shouldn’t have been able to walk, but this was important. Cutting his attention to the German shepherd perched to one side, Baker bit back his annoyance. Maverick had followed him from Jocelyn’s room. Though he couldn’t think of a reason other than Baker had access to her food. “Are you allowed to eat from the table?”
Maverick cocked his head to one side and licked his lips. The K-9 really was something now that Baker got a look at him. Lean, healthy, warm brown eyes. It was any wonder Jocelyn had fallen in love with him, but how they’d ended up together was as big a mystery as why Marc De Leon had blown up his own compound.
Jocelyn worked logistics for the military. No reason for her to come in contact with explosive ordinance on tour. Which made Baker think they’d met through some other means.
“You protect her, though. That’s why you nearly bit my hand off at the station.”
Maverick pawed at the floor.
“You want to bite my hand off right now, don’t you?” Baker collected his fork and took a stab at a section of lasagna, then offered it to the dog.
The shepherd licked the entire fork clean. Overhead lighting caught on the mutt’s ID tags, and Baker got his first real look at them. “Those aren’t military tags.”
Maneuvering his legs out from under the table, he stretched his hand out. A warning signaled in Maverick’s chest, and Baker stilled. No show of teeth, though. That was something.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Just want to look at your tags,” he said. “I promise to stop calling you Cujo if you promise not to bite me while I do that. Deal?”
