Page 53 of Guilty as Sin
Jace couldn’t tell if it was an exclamation or his new nickname. The cop’s weapon was trained on him now, but he’d long since frozen himself. Now, he kept his voice low and slow as he explained to both of them, “Jason Blackstone. Lily’s neighbor. Came to see what was wrong.”
He hadn’t got half of that out yet before the cop was shouting, “Get on the ground! Now!”
He got on the ground. On his knees, and then on his stomach. The cop was standing over him, and Jace said, “Ankle holster.” He hadn’t waited around to put on his shoulder holster.
The cop found it, and the tac knife on Jace’s other ankle, too. He wrenched one of Jace’s wrists behind his back, then the other, was cuffing him, and Jace sighed and didn’t say anything. When he was being put into the back of the patrol car, though, he thought,This is a new one. You’re Sir Galahad all right, mate.
Lily was standing close, looking more indecisive than he’d ever seen her. And shivering. He told her, “You need a jacket.”
She lifted her arms from her sides, then back down in aWhat the hellgesture he recognized perfectly. “What were youdoing?”she asked.
The cop stood, one hand on the door, but he didn’t shut it, so Jace ignored him and talked to Lily. “It looked like you were in trouble. I came to help.”
“You… came… to…” More arms. “You werechasingme.Aftersomebody had lured me down to my shop. I thought you were trying tokillme.”
“Well,” he pointed out, “you were flying like something was after you. Looked like you needed my help.”
“Fromyou.”
“Somebody did smash the window of your shop, though,” he said. “I’d say that’s your issue.”
She whirled as if she hadn’t noticed that. The cop, meanwhile, had been flipping through Jace’s wallet, checking his driver’s license with the aid of a Maglite. Jace said, “Concealed weapon permit in there as well.”
The cop didn’t say, “Every man and half the women in Montana has one of those. Doesn’t help me much,” although he could have. Instead, he asked, “Is the dog in your truck dangerous, sir?”
“He’s probably not happy,” Jace said. Tobias was barking now. “He doesn’t like it when people handcuff me. You may not want to open the door until I’m with you.”
Lily sighed. “You can let him go,” she said. “He’s an idiot, that’s all. Heismy neighbor.”
The cop said, “Sorry, ma’am. I can’t do that until I check him out,” and slammed the door on Jace. Which meant that by the time he did let Jace out, checked the truck while Jace told Tobias to stay, and finally unlocked the handcuffs, Lily was half frozen.
Jace told the cop, “I’m taking my jacket off to give it to the lady.” Not taking any chances. The bloke still looked jumpy to him, like he was wondering if he should have called for backup—which he should have, in Jace’s opinion, but he wasn’t going to say so—and wondering how a broken window had turned into this. He also looked about twenty-two, though that could have been the red hair and the freckles. Jumpy people shot too fast.
Lily looked like she didn’t want to take the jacket, but also like she could see that she didn’t have heaps of choice. Her hair was blowing around her, and she was shivering hard. She said, “Let’s do this in the shop,” went to her car, turned her own lights off, and came back with her purse and the keys.
Jace stood back, taking in a display window like a giant star, its center a ragged hole and cracks radiating around it, and said, “Somebody put some effort into that.”
Lily, as usual, wasn’t behaving anything like he’d expect. She didn’t look scared. Now that she wasn’t shaking quite so hard with cold, she looked bloody furious. She shoved the key into the shop’s front door, flipped the lights on, and asked the cop, “Who turned the alarm off?”
“Security company,” he said. “Once I got here.”
She stood in the center of the shop, and she was looking at the same thing Jace was. At shards of glass glittering in the light, and half of a brick.
“There’s your trouble,” the cop said unnecessarily, and Lily looked at him like,You think?Jace almost laughed.
“There’s a piece of paper around it,” Lily said. “Hang on.” She pulled her phone out of her purse and took a series of shots of the brick, the floor, and the broken window, jagged glass everywhere. “All right,” she told the cop. “You take off that rubber band. Use gloves, please.”
The cop looked at her for a long moment, and she stared back without saying anything. Finally, he pulled a pair of surgical gloves from a pouch on his utility belt, bent to pick up the brick—at which point, Lily took another photo of him holding it—slipped off the rubber band, and unfolded the paper.
Block printing in fine black marker.
Get out.
Lily took a photo of that, too, then told the cop, “Feel free to use the counter to write up your report.”
She got some more stare for that, but the cop just said, “I’ll do it in my patrol car, ma’am.” Lily took off Jace’s jacket and handed it back to him, went through a door behind the counter and came back shrugging into a sweater, and Jace and the cop both looked up.
Well, of course they did. She wasn’t wearing much top, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and she was cold. And she did have one pretty body. Jace got his gaze back up to her face fast and hoped she hadn’t noticed that. He saw a twitch at the corner of her mouth, though, that said she had.
