Page 8 of Cast in Shadow
“Why?” he asked.
Once again, the mysterious Charley seemed to know his thoughts. “I assure you, I mean her no harm. This is for her protection.”
He snorted. “I’m going to need more than that.”
“I can’t offer any more than that until you agree.”
“Then, you’ve made my decision easy. The answer is no.”
A moment of silence.
“May I ask why?”
“Because I think you’re full of shit. People like you only care about saving your own ass. You don’t care about anyone else. If you want her, it’s for your benefit, not hers.”
Charley didn’t miss a beat. “All the more reason why she needs you then, don’t you think?”
He laughed, a dark laugh that warned her not to bother trying to stroke a latent protector tendency. He was beyond that. The things he did now, he did because he wanted to.
“I already drank that Kool-Aid, and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Find someone else.”
Chapter Four
Zeke
Despite his best efforts to forget about Charley and her mysterious offer, the image of the woman in the photo continued to haunt him for the rest of the day and well into the night. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. When he closed his eyes, she was there, right behind his lids, silently calling out to him. But what exactly she was saying, he couldn’t make out.
Questions hammered him repeatedly on a continuous loop. Why had she gone missing? Why did someone like Charley care? Was she in danger, and if so, why didn’t Charley do something about it?
She did, jackass. She called you.
The whole situation irked him. And the fact that it irked him irked him even more. He liked his life neat, tidy, mobile, and most importantly, completely under his own control. He decided who, when, and if he’d help—no one else. He didn’t appreciate Charley’s blatant attempts to manipulate him into doing her dirty work.
Therein lay the crux of his problem. This strange pull he felt toward a woman he didn’t know was purely a fabrication, crafted by someone who knew a hell of a lot about him, including what buttons to press. Any other explanation was ludicrous. It was impossible to feel more than detached professional curiosity for a woman he’d never met, no matter how far her pretty eyes seemed to reach down into his soul.
Wasn’t it?
It didn’t matter. He could second-guess himself all day, but the fact was, the more time that passed, the stronger the pull became, and the less inclined he was to sit this one out.
He kept the shiny black phone in sight, waiting for it to ring again, but it remained silent and mocking. Had Charley finally accepted no as an answer and moved on?
He picked up the device and turned it over in his hands. As if sensing his touch, the phoenix logo glowed back into existence. Below it was a hyperlink—Click Me.
Zeke’s thumb hovered over the text. Was he really going to do this?
Apparently, he was.
He tapped the link, and a list of more hyperlinks appeared.
There were at least two dozen of them, each linking to a different online article from news sites around the country. The dates ranged over a span of about five years.
At first, they seemed completely unrelated. One was about a corporate CEO who lost everything after embezzlement charges were filed against him. Another, about a small, rural mountain town being declared as a superfund site after a high incidence of cancer was reported among the local population. A third detailed the exposure of a human trafficking ring operating under the guise of a women’s shelter.
The list went on, each item an example of dirty deeds coming to light through some anonymous do-gooder and justice being publicly served.
Zeke read them all. Then, he read them again. In each and every instance, an unidentified tipster had sent irrefutable proof of wrongdoings into hundreds, sometimes thousands, of inboxes, ensuring they couldn’t be ignored. The evidence included names, places, dates, phone records, and in some cases, damning video footage.
That was when Zeke knew why he’d felt a connection to the woman in the photo. Because that haunted, determined look he’d seen in her eyes was the same one he saw in the mirror every morning.
