The Mia Quinn Collection Page 32

  And maybe that made sense. But not when her kids were due home—Mia checked her watch—now. Maybe were already home.

  She looked up at Frank. “I have to go. Now.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Coach Harper clapped his hands. “Okay, to finish off this afternoon we’re doing some fifty-yard sprints.”

  Everyone groaned, including Gabe. All he wanted to do was chug a Gatorade and hit the shower. Coach had drilled them hard all afternoon. And now, with the end of practice so tantalizingly in sight, he wanted them to do timed wind sprints.

  Gabe gritted his teeth and gutted out the first one. On the faces of the other guys, he saw frustration, pain, and sheer determination.

  After the third sprint Marc, one of the linemen, was struggling to come back. Someone yelled from the sidelines for him to hurry up. Gabe was catching his breath, his hands on his knees, so he didn’t see who it was. But it didn’t seem fair. Marc wasn’t a slacker. Before he could think about it too much, Gabe ran back onto the field and started running next to Marc, clapping his hands and cheering him on.

  They started their next sprint, and again Gabe was one of the first to finish. And Marc was struggling again, his face red and his chest heaving. But this time five of the team came back to help him finish. The last ten yards, Gabe and Eldon half carried, half dragged Marc to make sure he crossed the line.

  When they were all done, Coach had them gather around. He favored them with one of his rare smiles. “I like what I saw out there today. Not only did you strengthen your endurance and your will, you also started thinking about how to be a team. Being a team is all about working together, not tearing each other down. When you get a touchdown, it’s not just about the running back who has the ball or the quarterback who throws it or the receiver. It’s all of you together working as a unit.”

  As they headed back to the locker room, Coach clapped Gabe on the shoulder. “Good job, Quinn,” he said quietly. “What you did today—that’s part of being a leader.”

  By the time Gabe left practice, the weather had changed. The wind was lashing the trees. The rain came in gusts that threatened to tear off his baseball cap. As he walked to his sister’s preschool, his legs felt like lead. It had taken everything he had to go back on that field when he himself was finished. Still, it had felt good pushing his body further than he thought it could go. And even better to hear Coach praise him.

  Coach Harper did not give compliments lightly. Gabe had worked hard all fall, and it was beginning to pay off. He was getting put in more often, and he was now able to go all out without getting completely winded.

  He signed Brooke out and they began the trek home. His stomach growled. He was hungry enough that he could almost forget the ache in his legs, forget the weather. Would his mom be home in time to make dinner, or was he going to be on his own again, reduced to making a blue box of mac and cheese? He sent her a text but got no answer.

  Brooke was dawdling, even though a second earlier she had been complaining that she had to go to the bathroom. “Come on.” He tugged at her hand, but she pulled away and sloshed through a puddle that came midway up her yellow rain boots.

  As they started down their street, he heard a high-pitched whine. It sounded like some kind of alarm.

  The closer they got to the house, the louder it got. It was definitely their security alarm. Gabe’s heart started beating faster. They stood at the edge of the yard.

  “Come on, Gabe!” Now it was Brooke tugging at his hand. “I have to go potty!”

  “We can’t go in, Brooke. That’s the alarm.”

  “Is there a burglar?”

  He didn’t answer. The house was dark. All the doors and windows appeared to be closed and undamaged. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

  What had his mom said to do if the alarm went off? Gabe tried to remember. All he could remember was that if you set it off accidentally, you were supposed to punch in the code—the dates of his and Brooke’s birthdays—and hit the “clear” button. They had only gotten the alarm a few months ago, when his mom went back to work and there was no one home during the day.

  Taking out his phone again, he called his mom. It felt weird to be holding the phone up to his ear. Mostly he and his friends just texted. The only people he regularly talked to on the phone were his grandparents.

  His mom’s phone rang three times and went to voice mail.

  “Mom, um, hi, it’s me. The alarm’s going off and I don’t know what to do. Um, call me back.”

  He looked at the neighbors’ houses. Those were dark too.

  “Gabe—I really have to go!” Brooke was squirming. “Now!” The wind gusted so hard that it caught the hood of her yellow raincoat and blew it back. So hard that the windows in their old house rattled.

  It seemed really lame to call 911. He imagined the cops showing up, sirens screaming, and then rolling their eyes when it turned out to be nothing.

  Then he thought of Charlie Carlson, the detective who sometimes worked with his mom. Maybe Charlie could tell him what to do.

  Gabe had to look up Charlie’s name in his contacts. Again he got voice mail.

  “Hey, um, Mr. Carlson”—he’d told Gabe to call him Charlie, but for some reason that didn’t seem right tonight—“I’m at my house and I can’t get hold of my mom. The house alarm’s going off and I’m not sure what to do. I think it’s been going off for a while. So if you get this message in the next twenty minutes or so, could you call me back?”

  Brooke yanked on his hand even harder. “Come on, Gabe! I really have to pee!”

  What if he had just set the alarm wrong? Or what if it was just the wind rattling the door? He started towing Brooke along, and she stopped complaining for a second. But when she realized they weren’t going in, but rather walking around the perimeter of the yard, she started fussing again.

  “Just hold on a sec,” he told her. “I need to make sure it’s safe.” He looked at every window, even the ones on the second floor. None of them were broken. The front and side doors were closed tight.

  After they had made a complete circle, they were outside the side door at the end of the driveway. Still holding Brooke’s hand, Gabe went up on the porch. He tried the handle, ready to run, but the door was locked. He shook the handle and felt how the door moved in its frame. Stupid wind! That must have been what set off the alarm. Still, he crouched down until his face was on the same level as Brooke’s.

  “Brooke, I have to make sure it’s safe before you can go inside. I want you to stay right here and not move. Can you do that?” He hated to leave her alone, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  She nodded. “But hurry, okay? I can’t hold it for very long.”

  “I will. But if you see anyone you don’t know, do not talk to them and do not let them get close to you. Run away and hide if you have to. Do you understand?”

  She swiveled her head from side to side, her eyes wide. At least she was momentarily distracted from her obsession with the potty. “Is there a bad person?”

  “Probably not. It’s just to be safe.”

  Gabe wished it wasn’t all on him. Then he remembered how he had helped Marc. Remembered how Coach had complimented him.

  He put his key in the lock. The door swung open into blackness. Just inside the door, the lights on the control panel were blinking rapidly, some red and some green. He had never really paid attention to them before and didn’t know what they meant. He took one step inside and punched in the code.

  The silence seemed almost as loud as the alarm.

  He took a deep, ragged breath. Should he turn on the light? But if he turned on the light and someone had broken in, they would not only know he was here, but they would be able to move around easily. With the lights off, he had an advantage. After all, this was his house.

  Gabe stepped into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 6

  Charlie sat in his Crown Vic listening to his voice mail before he went back to the office. He had to
listen to the third message twice before he was finally able to pick out the hesitant words from some kind of annoying background whine.

  “I’m at my house and I can’t get hold of my mom. The house alarm’s going off and I’m not sure what to do. I think it’s been going off for a while. So if you get this message in the next twenty minutes or so, could you call me back?”

  It was Gabe Quinn. Mia’s kid. Fourteen years old. Charlie had been married three times, but he didn’t have any kids. Which was probably a good thing. He didn’t even have a cat.

  Sometimes, though, he saw a little of himself in Gabe. He’d seen the kid put on an I-don’t-care face when he clearly did. Seen him be brave when it might have been better to be cautious. But at fourteen boys were all hormones, impulses, and bravado.

  And since his dad had died, Gabe had been forced to grow up. To square his skinny shoulders and be the man of the house.

  The kid answered on the first ring. “Hello?” His voice was barely audible, but only because he was speaking softly. The sound of the alarm was gone. Charlie relaxed and pulled the keys from the ignition.

  “It’s Charlie Carlson. It sounds like you got the alarm taken care of. So is everything okay?”

  “No!”

  Charlie hadn’t known that a voice could be both soft and frantic. He slid the keys back in the ignition. “What’s wrong?”

  “I turned off the alarm and went inside to check things out. But I think someone else is here in the house too. I can hear them moving around downstairs.”

  Charlie sucked in a breath, his heart speeding up. “Get back outside! Now!”

  “I can’t. I think they’re right by the stairs.” And then the kid put the cherry on the sundae. “And I left Brooke outside.”

  Charlie started his car again, swearing under his breath. “I’m gonna scramble a unit out your way. Until then, is there someplace you can hide? Under a bed? In a closet?” He couldn’t remember what the top floor of Mia’s house looked like.

  Silence.

  “Gabe?”

  The only answer was a muffled thump. As if the phone had fallen from the boy’s hand and onto the carpet.

  “Gabe?”

  Charlie could hear something in the background. A man yelling. He couldn’t make out the words. But he could hear the emotions fueling them. Anger and fear and a little bit of panic.

  Hitting the buttons to activate his sirens and lights, he just prayed that the man in Mia’s house didn’t have a weapon.

  CHAPTER 7

  To Mia, it seemed to take hours for the courthouse elevator to reach the ground. It stopped on every floor. People held the doors for friends or to finish a conversation. She wanted to scream, but that would only slow things down further.

  Many of the people who got on wanted to talk to her, but she just held up her hand and shook her head as she scrolled back through the messages on her phone. Co-workers had reacted to the news of what had happened. Gabe had texted her about dinner. Eli Hall, a public defender who taught with her at the University of Washington Law School, wanted to know if she was okay.

  And in the middle was a phone message from Gabe. He had left it just ten minutes earlier. Mia put her finger in her other ear so she could listen to it a second time, trying to tease out her son’s voice from the blare of the alarm in the background and from the voices now surrounding her. Finally the elevator doors opened and she pushed her way out, not caring when she stepped squarely on someone’s foot. What had Gabe done once he hung up the phone? As she ran to her car, she called him back, but it went straight to voice mail.

  “Gabe, it’s Mom. Don’t go in the house. Go to the neighbor’s or something. And call me back as soon as you hear this.”

  Once she was in her car, Mia raced out of the parking lot, the squeal of her tires echoing off the concrete walls. Her car bounced out onto the street, forcing other traffic to screech to a halt. Ignoring a volley of angry honks, she began to weave in and out of cars.

  Her heart pounded in her chest and ears. Her fingertips felt numb. She forced herself to take a deep breath. She was probably overreacting. The term false alarm hadn’t become a staple of the lexicon for nothing.

  But if it was nothing, why hadn’t Gabe answered his phone? Why hadn’t he called her back? Had her call gone to voice mail because he was on the phone with someone else? Or because he had turned the phone off? Or because someone else had?

  As she merged onto the freeway, Mia’s hands were slick on the wheel. She drove the way she hated anyone else to, riding people’s bumpers until she forced them to move out of the way. The world had collapsed into a single thought, as if she were seeing it all through the sights of a gun. She had to get to her children. Now.

  As she raced home, Mia murmured a prayer that was just a single word repeated over and over. “Please. Please, please, please.” The rain was coming in gusts, forcing her to constantly adjust the windshield wipers from high to medium to intermittent and then back to high again.

  Why hadn’t they worked out a strategy for what Gabe should do in a situation like this? They had planned where to meet if they were separated in an earthquake, but wasn’t this more important? Of course, Scott was the one who had made the earthquake plan, and that was before they had gotten the security system. Before Scott had died. Accountants were good at making plans, making lists, making sure everything was orderly. Now Mia was trying to take up the slack, be mother and father both, and she feared she was doing a lousy job.

  Even if false alarms were common, that didn’t mean this one wasn’t real. Someone still could have broken in, looking for electronic gadgets or prescription drugs. And since burglars were often users themselves, an encounter with one could be unpredictable, even violent.

  And what if it was something worse, someone targeting her specifically? Mia thought of what had just happened in the courtroom. Could this be Young’s backup plan? Did he know that her kids were her life? Had he planned to take her life away just as she was taking his?

  Being a prosecutor was not a low-risk occupation. No matter how hard you tried to keep your home address and personal details off the Internet, anyone with a little cash could find someone willing to divulge them for a fee. Mia thought of the Denver prosecutor gunned down outside his home, the Texas prosecutor shot by a masked man as he walked to his office. In California a man with a grudge had even killed the daughter of his own attorney in some kind of twisted payback. And then there was Mia’s co-worker Colleen, shot down in her basement because she was getting too close to the truth of a scandal.

  When Gabe couldn’t reach her, what choice had he made? Had he done the smart thing and retreated? But fourteen-year-old boys didn’t really believe they might die. Not even when their own dads had.

  She heard sirens behind her. Red and blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror. After pulling over to let an unmarked Crown Vic with lights in the grill pass, Mia watched as it took the next exit. The exit for her neighborhood.

  Her heart contracted. No, no, no. Not her kids. She couldn’t take it if anything happened to them too. Scott’s death had nearly broken her. But her kids, her kids were her heart. Her life.

  Even after she got off the freeway, Mia was still driving at close to freeway speeds. She turned onto her block. In front of her house stood two blue-and-white patrol cars, their light bars now dark, as well as the Crown Vic that had passed her. The door opened and Charlie Carlson got out.

  She jerked the car to a stop across the street, then ran toward him.

  He turned toward the sound of her heels, then held up his hands. “Stay back, Mia. And don’t make any noise. There’s someone in the house with Gabe. We don’t want to spook the guy.”

  “Oh my God.” It was half prayer, half disbelief. This couldn’t be real, could it? “What about Brooke?”

  “I don’t know.” He said it plainly, but in the glow of the streetlight she saw the anguish in his face.

  One patrol officer was at the side door and
the other at the front. Both of them had their guns drawn. The side door was open, and the officer there was yelling, “Come on out with your hands up.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Anticipate the unexpected and assume the worst. That was what his first partner had told Charlie when he started working patrol. Now, years later, he had plenty of ways to fill in the blanks. All of them bad.

  He assumed that the person who had broken into Mia’s house was still inside. That he—or they—was armed. That he was dangerous. And that he was panicked. Panicked was worst of all. Panic led to poor decisions. Panic led to people getting hurt, even killed. That was why he had asked the responding officers to shut down lights and sirens before they arrived, lower the volume on their radios, and silence their equipment.

  “Go wait by your car,” he told Mia now.

  “But what about—”

  He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t have time to argue.” He turned away so he could scan the house, looking for clues, for anything out of place. Had he seen movement in the glossy green leaves of the camellia bush next to the side porch?

  He stepped onto the porch, keeping out of the line of sight of the open door. In the porch light the cop, with cheeks as red as apples, didn’t look much older than Gabe. “Who’s inside?” Charlie asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

  “That’s not yet been determined. I found the door open, indicating that we had an active B&E-type situation. I entered, heard movement, and attempted verbal contact. When there was no response, I exited and waited for backup. They just arrived.”

  “We don’t just have a burglar or burglars,” Charlie said. “We’ve also got a fourteen-year-old kid in there. Name of Gabe Quinn. Did you see him?”

  The rookie shook his head. “I didn’t make visual contact with anyone.”

  Charlie thought. If he called out to Gabe and the kid responded, would that simply provide the burglar with a ready hostage?