Lorie O - Strong, Sleek and Sinful

At least she was alive.

Perry ran through the stall, looking both ways on the other side of the car wash, until he spotted them at the edge of the lot.

“Stay right there,” John ordered, gripping Kylie against his chest while walking backward, the gun in his hand pointed at Kylie’s head.

Her hair was messed up and her expression looked panicked, but otherwise she didn’t look hurt.

“Are you okay?” Perry asked her, an overwhelming sense of calm hitting him. Something told him John wouldn’t kill her. It would be murder one, and there wouldn’t be any way out of it. Perry was convinced the man was too much of a survivor for that.

“I’m fine,” she said, also sounding too calm.

“Get back in your car,” John ordered, taking the gun from Kylie’s head and pointing it at Perry.

“It’s over,” Perry told him. “Franco is under arrest. The FBI has been contacted.”

As if to back Perry, sirens approached, growing louder by the second.

“Backup is here. Put down the gun.”

“Like hell.” John pushed Kylie forward, causing her to trip and fall to the ground.

Perry lunged for her just as the shot rang through the air.

Three months later

Kylie’s eyes burned, and she wondered for the third or fourth time since leaving Dallas if she had any sense in her head to start the trip to Kansas City this late at night. It was an eight-hour drive and it was damn near three o’clock in the morning. She wasn’t even sure there was a reason to rush back there.

Her leg cramped, the bullet wound she’d taken while in Nicaragua pretty well healed but still giving her grief from time to time. The humid night air, with summer kicking in hard and fast, seemed to make her leg act up. She didn’t mind the injury, other than it had hurt like fucking hell getting shot, since her return shot took out the leader of the cartel they were after. Her orders had been to bring him in alive, but arresting and escorting the cartel leaders’ number one in command had satisfied Susie, and Kylie’s government. She was awarded a two-month respite once she checked out of the hospital in Dallas, for her efforts and a job well done.

Kylie passed another mile marker and squinted when her brights reflected against the road sign ahead. Five miles to Mission Hills. Already buildings lined the Interstate as she got closer to her destination.

It had been two months since she last talked to Perry. Once she was buried in the Nicaraguan jungle, Internet access was limited to a “must have” basis. Chatting online with a man who’d changed her life didn’t qualify as a “must have.” And as she’d done throughout her career, she’d engrossed herself in the community, what there was where she was located down there, and taken on her assignment with everything she had. But even after being wounded and her time in the hospital, nothing she’d done managed to get Perry out of her mind.

Was he the one?

It was a question she’d fallen asleep asking herself too many times over the past few months. Now, with a slight limp she was promised would go away with continued physical therapy, thoughts of moving to a desk job had crossed her mind. It wasn’t the most appealing thought, but there was a job opening. Susie, her supervisor, was a bit too attentive to the needs of her agents at times, and had mentioned it while visiting Kylie in the hospital.

After being released, spending a week with her parents, she looked up the job opening online. John Athey’s position, supervisor of the FBI field office in Mission Hills, still hadn’t been filled. Paul qualified for the position but had turned it down. More than likely because he wouldn’t be able to sit and play his computer games as much.

“God, am I doing the right thing?” Kylie groaned.

When she’d mentioned to Susie she might come back up here to see how everyone was doing, her supervisor set up an appointment for her to meet the area field supervisor. There were no obligations, but it was more or less a job interview. “A desk job,” Kylie muttered, wondering if she could handle it.

Her mother didn’t have the insight to see it; there was still so much mending to do between the two of them. Kylie wasn’t sure if they would ever return to the closeness many mothers and daughters shared, especially now that her father was ill and most of their conversations and actions stemmed around him. But her supervisor questioned Kylie’s motives. She hated admitting her consideration of the job was based on where she might stand with Perry.

The night John Athey took a bullet to his head and Lieutenant Franco was arrested appeared a blur in her mind. Franco had ranted about Perry being the one, that all they had to do was check his computer at the station. Perry was too calm when he announced how he’d bugged his own computer, making it clear to everyone around them that he was innocent. He had set it up so anyone typing on his computer at the station would send all keystrokes to his computer at his house.

It was the days that followed that were clearer in her memory. Learning how the two men had worked together, capturing girls, torturing them, building a Web site where people could pay to see the atrocities done to many of the teenagers which they’d run out of Franco’s house. Perry had a friend in the FBI, who never blew her cover, but verified the ISP location. Athey had prevented anyone in his office from gathering the information. Rita Simoli and Maura Reynolds’ bodies were found in shallow graves on land John Athey had owned. Franco had started spilling his guts, especially after he learned his partner in crime had killed himself, anything to lessen the charges. Kylie doubted anything he said would get him anything less than life in prison. She wouldn’t be surprised if he still got the death penalty. And after it was all wrapped up, the flight out of Kansas City, talking to Perry on the phone a few times before leaving the country, and then after that a handful of times online.

Kylie accepted his story about the lady police officer at the crime scene the night she watched her grope Perry, that her actions weren’t reciprocated. Perry stressed that over and over again, his story never changing, nor his disgust for her indifference to the grotesqueness of the scene. Like Kylie, Perry was leery of any law enforcement officer who, so early in their career, wasn’t affected by the blood and gore they were sometimes exposed to.

Remembering how he had tried calling her several times a day the first couple days after she left Kansas City and how their phone conversations had changed from confrontational to friendly, and even intimate, gave Kylie hope. She had held on to the words he’d shared with her over the phone for quite a while. The phone calls ended after she left the country.

Kylie stared at the sign that welcomed her to Mission Hills as she passed it. The very next sign showed her the speed limit.

“Crap,” she hissed, hitting her brake, but it was too late. Lights flashed in her rearview and side mirrors. “Damn it. This is the last thing I need.” Like the potentially new FBI field office supervisor needed to enter the town with a speeding ticket.

She slowed quickly, watching the speedometer go down and knowing she’d been doing a good 20 miles per hour over the limit. There wouldn’t be any getting out of this, and she doubted she could use knowing one of the local cops intimately as an excuse to get the officer not to write her a ticket.

Kylie pulled to the side of the road, hit her hazards in her newer-modeled Toyota that had been in her parents’ garage for a few years now. She’d finally taken it out and decided to drive it instead of renting a car. The officer who pulled her over would run her tag and know exactly who she was. If Perry was working tonight, he would hear her name over the radio. This wasn’t how she wanted him to know she’d returned to town. Hell, she’d even thought of approaching his nieces, since she knew where they hung out, or at least where they hung out a few months ago, and paving the way to learn if approaching Perry would even be worth it. For all she knew, he’d moved on by now.