Terms Of Surrender

Johnson bent his head, listening to his earpiece intently. “He’s marching a man toward the door. Has the kid draped over his shoulders still. The boy is crying.”

Dace shot a glance at Jolie, but she wasn’t looking at him. Studying her profile, however, he could see that the muscles in her jaw were tight. The involvement of the boy was hard on her. Odd how he could read her emotions better now than he’d been able to eighteen months earlier. She’d shut down then. They both had. And when he’d lashed out at her for her seeming lack of feeling, he’d been lashing out as much at himself. At fate. At a cruel God that had snatched away his greatest joy.

Just the memory of the accusation he’d leveled sent a burn of shame through him. Unable to reach her emotionally, he’d reacted with anger. Anger was about the only feeling that hadn’t hurt back then.

But it had hurt her. Them. Because a few short weeks after Sammy’s funeral, she’d left. And then there’d been no reaching her at all.

“The first hostage is out,” Johnson reported. He listened a few more seconds before continuing, “It’s a man. Naked. And inside the HT’s allowing one man and one woman to use the restrooms while he watches. He doesn’t leave himself exposed.”

The hostage would be given a blanket and led to the command center for debriefing. He could have valuable information about the gunman inside. And they had to be certain the released man was indeed a hostage, and not the HT himself, mounting a bold escape.

“He’s showing concern for the hostages,” Dr. Ryder said with a degree of relief. “Holding them in the vault kept them separate from the HT. Made it easier for him to avoid seeing them as human. This may be a very good sign.”

“Might be a good time to distract him with a call,” Sharper suggested.

“Go ahead and try,” Dace told Jolie. But he knew the HT wasn’t going to answer right now. The man was too smart for that.

But then, maybe he was giving this guy too much credit. How smart could he really be if he still thought there was any way he was going to be allowed to walk away from this thing?

Twenty minutes crawled by, with Johnson relaying the intel about the activity inside. The HT had worked his way through most of the captives before a rap sounded at the double back doors.

They were pulled open, revealing Lewis’s grim demeanor. Behind him Dace could see several unfamiliar faces, and his stomach took a nosedive. The effing-B-I had arrived.

“Officers.” The dispassionate tone was belied by the fury glittering in the man’s eyes. “The feds have decided to crash the party. They’ll be taking over negotiations.”

Chapter Three

It was more than a little anticlimactic to be relegated to onlooker after taking an active role in neutralizing the situation. Dace stood a few feet away from Jolie, near the edge of the inner perimeter, chafing at the change. An hour had ticked by since they’d briefed the feds and left the NOC unit. If they hadn’t been ordered by Lewis to stand by, he’d have gone back to the precinct to duty. At least there he’d be allowed to do something productive. There was no way the feds were going to accept help from the locals.

“Hey, Jolie!”

Dace turned his head to see Ron Wetzel, a sergeant from Jolie’s old precinct, pause as he was hurrying by.

“I didn’t know you were back in these parts. Had enough of busting movie stars and director wannabes and came back to the real people, huh?”

“You guessed it, Ron.” There was none of the guardedness in her tone that was present when she spoke to Dace. Her voice was friendly. “The glamour got to be too much for me. Give me a barricade any day over taking burglary complaints from self-important wine growers.”

“Where were you assigned there?”

Dace listened unabashedly to their conversation, more interested in her answers than he wanted to admit.

“Fifth precinct. Partnered with Selma Garcia. You know her?”

“I don’t think so.” Someone nearby shouted the man’s name, and he started to move away. “Hey, come on down to the Blue Lagoon sometime. See some of the guys.”

“I’ll do that. Tell everyone hello for me.”

“You got it.”

Dace kept his gaze trained on the bank, what he could see of it from this distance. So the rumor he’d heard had been right. She’d gone from here to the LAPD. He’d asked around after she’d moved out. After he found she’d changed her cell-phone number and left her job. Officers in her old precinct had been pretty closemouthed, but he’d heard she might have headed to LA. And that had been the end of it. Hard to find someone in a city of four million who obviously hadn’t wanted to be found. At least not by him.

That’s when the bitterness had swamped him and he’d forced himself to stop thinking about her for good.

At least he’d given it a damn good try.

But those efforts were going to be shot to hell if he had to see her every time they were called out to an incident. Metro City PD was large enough for them to coexist without running into each other often. With a population of half a million and a police force of over eight hundred, she could have been back in the city a year without them ever bumping into each other.

But instead, they’d been thrown together on the same HNT unit, requiring them to work closely together on volatile incidents. Which only went to prove yet again that fate was a fickle bitch with a mean sense of humor.

“What happened to Rob Marlow?”

Her question interrupted his dark thoughts. He and Marlow had been paired on HNT for three years, and the man had been his mentor in incident response.

“Took his twenty and out last month. He and his wife are moving to Burbank. And Thompson took a promotion and left HNT in January.”

“Burbank?” Her voice sounded as incredulous as he’d felt when his partner had relayed the news. “What are they—”

“So are you going to ask to be reassigned, or am I?” He didn’t glance in her direction, but knew she’d heard him. Sensed the stillness that came over her. “This is a distraction. For both of us. We can’t afford distractions in situations like this.”

“I don’t know. I thought we did all right together in there.”

He did look at her then, anger flaring abruptly at her even tone. Was she saying their proximity didn’t bother her at all? That it didn’t elicit the unwelcome bits of memory? The welter of suppressed emotion? He studied her, noting her composed expression, which gave away nothing of her thoughts. That had always been the problem—he’d never known what the hell she was thinking. Feeling. And rarely had she told him, even when he’d asked.

He’d had sex with her. Lived with her. Had a child with her. But he’d never really known her.

“I’ll ask for the transfer then,” he said flatly. Their messy personal history wasn’t something that could be swept neatly under the rug. And it would be unprofessional to enter situations like these and pretend otherwise. There was just too much at stake.

“No.” Although her expression didn’t change, her voice sounded strained. “It wouldn’t be fair for you to go. This is your squad. Your friends. If I’d known you’d returned to Alpha Squad I’d never have accepted this assignment. I’ll ask for a reassignment.”

He nodded curtly and returned his attention to the bank front. The food had been delivered, but it still sat untouched in front of the bank door. The second hostage hadn’t been released yet. What the heck was going on with the negotiations?

No answers were forthcoming. Reluctantly, he slanted a glance at Jolie. “What will you tell them?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t want to hurt my chances of being reassigned, and there’s only one other HNT unit anyway. I’ll have to see if that team has a vacancy.”

Dace went silent, refusing to feel guilty. She was bilingual, which made her a good prospect for any HNT vacancy that came up. And it wasn’t his problem if she couldn’t get a different position. Hell, if she’d been assigned to the other squad, they wouldn’t be doing this now. He could have gone along for months, never even knowing she was around. Whoever had said ignorance was bliss had been dead-on.

“I’ll think of something.”

“You could always leave again. You’re good at that.”

The instant the words left his mouth he wanted to retract them. He didn’t often stoop to being petty and mean. But right now he was feeling petty and he was feeling mean. When she didn’t respond he reached out, snagged the sunglasses off the bridge of her nose and watched her eyes. Sometimes he could read there what he couldn’t see in her expression.

They stared at each other in silence and for an instant their surroundings faded away. For the second time that day he felt like he’d been sucker punched. Her eyes were laser blue, an unbelievably pure color. Sammy had had his mother’s eyes with Dace’s dark hair.

But he’d never seen Sammy’s eyes filled with the misery he read in hers.

“Jolie…”