"She was here? " Rowdy came to his feet so fast, he half lifted the heavy table.

Reese stepped in, but Logan waved him back out. Reluctantly, Reese withdrew.

"In an hour I'll call again. One hour, Logan, you got that?"

"Why an hour?" he asked her, hoping to keep her on the phone.

"Everything should be done by then. If you haven't yet told Rowdy, I won't call you again. And you'll never get the answers you want."

"Don't let her hang up," Rowdy shouted. He thrashed against the cuffs.

"Pepper! Goddammit, Pepper, don't you dare-"

"She's gone."

"Gone?"

"Hung up." Closing the phone, Logan leaned on the table toward him. "You will stop shouting at her, do you understand me?"

"Do you know where she is?" Fear colored Rowdy's face, filled his tone.

"You have to stop her!"

"I'd love to." His urgency became Logan's. "Why don't you tell me what it is she intends to do? Something else in your contingency plans?"

"You have no clue." Rowdy leaned across the table to speak to Logan in a harsh whisper. "You want answers about that city commissioner that was killed? You want to rein in the fucks who shot him in cold blood? You want to know why he was shot?"

Ice filled Logan's veins. "Yes." Yes to everything.

"Well, I'm not the one who saw it all go down."

"Bullshit. The reporter said-"

"It was Pepper."

The ramifications of that couldn't sink in. Logan shook his head. "No."

Watching the door, still pulled taut against his restraints, Rowdy said softly, "Understand this, you bastard. If I had any other choice, I wouldn't tell you shit.

But if Pepper was here, then she's not following the procedure we laid out.

And that means her life is on the line."

No, and no again.

"Make up your mind and fast, Detective. Shit's about to get ugly.

Whose side are you on here?"

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

FOR AN ANSWER, Logan stepped to the door and locked it. He doubled-checked that the intercom was off, too.

Reese heard the lock click, tried the knob, then looked in the window with a dark scowl. He pounded on the door, demanding entrance.

Of course Reese didn't like being cut out, and the lieutenant would be livid, but he'd deal with them both later.

Close to Rowdy again, he said, "Tell me."

"It's...complicated. Convoluted."

"So give me the short version. Fast."

If Pepper was in direct jeopardy, the sooner he knew the details, the better he could help her.

Rowdy waffled only a second.

"Pepper and I both worked at Checkers.

I was a bouncer, guard, doorman, you name it. Pepper was an evening maid."

"A maid?"

"Cleaning the offices, the bathrooms, that sort of thing. It was a great-paying job for me, and Pepper made a decent wage. Working nights, downplaying her looks, and keeping a low profile left her mostly off the radar of the boss. She was...insignificant to the operation.

That's how she and I both wanted it. If she'd been a waitress or something..."

Rowdy shook his head.

Hatred burned like acid in his stomach. "Andrews would have hit on her."

"Hit on her?" Rowdy snorted. "He thought women were his for the asking.

No one dared say no to Morton."

"Not even a city commissioner?"

Rowdy rubbed a hand over his face.

"You knew him?"

"Jack Carmin was my best friend."

Rowdy looked down at his hands.

"Morton had cops in and out all the time, helping him with his business. I saw more bad cops than I ever saw good."

"Jack wasn't a cop, but he was definitely one of the good guys."

Rowdy accepted that without question. "The cops...they were well paid to look the other way when Morton did deals around town."

"What type of deals?"

"Drugs, guns, muscle...whatever was needed. You name it, he did it."

"You know this how?"

"Not the way you're thinking. Morton trusted me only so far as the door. As the bouncer, I let in the guys on the payroll and stalled the cops who came to snoop.

When I couldn't stall them, I hit an alarm that sounded only on the third floor to let Morton know they were around. That gave him time to clear out the upstairs rooms. By the time the cops got through all the locked doors, there was nothing to see."

"You interfered with justice."

He made a rude sound. "Hard to know when justice came calling. You guys all look the same."

"Meaning you couldn't tell the good from the bad?"

"I knew who to let in and who to block. But I didn't have details on what, when or where. I wasn't kept in the loop on arrangements. Far as I knew, creeps fed off creeps. If one died, another just as bad took his place. I didn't have firsthand knowledge of any of the corruption, but I didn't see any angels in the mix."

"You said you were muscle?"

"Not to beat down Morton's adversaries. The muscle I supplied was in restraint and booting out the guys who got too unruly, or too drunk. I never killed anyone, although I sent a few home with blood and bruises."

That didn't make Rowdy a saint, as Pepper claimed, but it didn't really taint him with the same corruption as Andrews, either.

"I was already making plans to get us both out of there. But it all went to hell before I could."

"Jack?"

"I don't really know that much about him. From what I could figure, Morton wanted more influence, so he went to your friend. Being the city commissioner, he could have reassigned Morton's cops to certain areas so they could be more effective."

Areas they had since occupied, maybe because Jack was out of the way.

Without a single doubt, Logan said, "Jack refused."

"I assume so. There'd have been no reason to make an example of him otherwise."

"Jack was the type of man who would have done what he could to expose it all." There was one thing that didn't make sense to Logan. "He went there to meet with Morton? Without backup?"

"I'm guessing they grabbed him off the street," Rowdy said, his expression dark, his hands fisted. "I was down on the main floor, and we had a crowd that night, so I didn't see any of it. Pepper had cleaned that area earlier and was supposed to be working on the main floor with me. But she realized she'd left the keys to the storage room upstairs."

Shit. Thinking of what she'd blundered into, what she'd seen, how close she'd been to danger, Logan went rigid.

Rowdy spoke in a quiet whisper that showed he felt the same as Logan. "She stayed hidden in the boardroom and kept quiet. But she could hear everything."

"Jesus."

Almost tortured, Rowdy looked away.

"She said they dragged in your buddy.

He'd already been worked over and was in a bad way, not really fighting back.

Pepper heard Morton say that he'd use him as an example to others."

Knowing what his friend had gone through, how he'd been beaten, Logan breathed deeper.

"The thing is..." Rowdy stared hard at Logan. "There were two other cops there. One of them fired the gun."

Though Logan already knew how it had ended-with a bullet-knowing that Jack had died at the hand of a cop twisted him with rage.

"You know the cops?"

He shook his head. "You all look the same to me-self-righteous with a hard- on for exerting authority."

Logan let that fly. "Male or female, black or white-"

"Men, white." He shrugged. "At least, that's what Pepper assumed from what she heard."

"She came to you?"

"Not right away. She sat in that room for over an hour, afraid to move." His mouth quirked in a sad smile. "She said she was afraid if they found her, they'd kill me, too."

"They knew you were related?"

"No, but Pepper's always been like that. A real mother hen. Protective."

Rowdy closed his eyes. "I try to keep her safe, but I'm all she has, and-"

"She loves you."

Rowdy looked him in the eyes and said again, "I'm all she has."

Sick, more scared for her than ever, Logan dropped back in his seat. "When did you find out?"

"We were swamped that night. I had six hours overtime. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn't want to risk talking to her overlong, and whenever I did catch her to ask, she said she was fine."

"If they'd caught her that night..."

"She didn't know who to trust,"

Rowdy explained. "She knew the cops were involved, so how could she go to them? She didn't want them to just get away with it, so she tried talking to a reporter, but that idiot talked to the wrong person about his scoop-"