Quinn's Quest (Bullard's Battle Book 7) Read online

  As they shifted the couch off to the side, Quinn saw some paperwork left behind. “Well, something’s here.” He pulled it out and read the label. “Chester. The mail’s addressed to Chester Langley.”

  “Interesting,” Ryland said. “That name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “No, not for me either. But you know what that’s like.”

  “True.”

  Just then, a knock came at the door. The two men looked at each other and froze. But the door opened, and in came the same guy who they had been speaking to earlier, the neighbor Ozzie.

  “Hey, did you see any signs of Dracon being here lately?”

  “Dracon? Is he the one who lives here?”

  At the neighbor’s nod, Quinn held up the envelope and asked, “Then who’s this guy then?”

  “Yeah, just a friend of his who stayed here for a while.” Ozzie looked around and wrinkled up his nose. “Man, he lives like a pig.”

  “Apparently. And so you say Dracon lives here now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “He doesn’t. Last I heard, he got laid off,” he said. “But what do you expect? The guy’s a bit of a loser.”

  “A bit?”

  Ozzie slid him a sideways look. “You really don’t know much about his relationship with Izzie, do you?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “She’s the niece of a friend of ours. We came to make sure she was okay and to let her know about her uncle.”

  “Well, she probably won’t want to see any male for a while,” he said. “Izzie’s a really nice person, but this Dracon guy’s been an asshole.”

  “What kind of an asshole?” Quinn asked, his stomach hardening at the thought of what could be coming.

  “He beat her up pretty good. I know he kept her captive for a while, and then she got loose.”

  “And you knew about it and didn’t do anything?” Ryland asked.

  Ozzie looked at him. “The guy’s a loser, also pretty scary as hell. Besides, I didn’t know that she’d been held captive, until I helped her get out of here,” he said. “And, if you tell Dracon that I helped her, well …”

  “We won’t,” Quinn said, “but we really want to have a talk with this guy now.”

  Ozzie looked at them carefully for a long moment and then nodded. “You won’t help him, will you?”

  “No, we’re trying to help her.”

  “Well, I didn’t even know she needed help,” he said, raising both hands in frustration. “I meant it when I said she was a nice girl. She should have left a long time ago.”

  “And maybe she couldn’t,” Ryland said. “Did you consider that?”

  “Now that I think about it, that’s probably exactly what it was,” he said. “And, like I said, it was a long time ago. She hasn’t been around for probably a year.”

  “Good. So how long were they together?”

  “Not very long. And I think she buggered off right away. He’s been kind of keeping this place barely floating. I don’t even know how he pays for it actually.”

  “That’s something I would like to know too,” Quinn said.

  At that, Ozzie shrugged and said, “Nothing in here to steal.”

  “Is that what you do in here?” he asked almost humorously.

  “Hey, you opened up the guy’s door, and I’m here out of curiosity. If I’d seen anything of Izzie’s, I’d have taken it, saved it for her.”

  “Doesn’t look like anything of hers is here, although clothes are in the closet.”

  “Well, she didn’t take anything when she left, so they are probably hers.” He looked around, shrugged, and said, “Dracon could have been such a great guy. Instead, he was just an asshole.”

  “Good to know,” Quinn said. “Unfortunately, it’s also sad.”

  “That it is. But whatever, I’ll leave now.”

  “You do that.”

  They waited until he was gone, and Quinn turned to face Ryland, “Was he as innocent as he wanted to appear?”

  “I am not sure,” Ryland said in the doorway.

  “We don’t have a last name on him either, do we?”

  “No, get the team on it. Ozzie could be high, but there’s no love lost between him and Dracon.”

  “But why wouldn’t there be? We’ll beat the crap out of him ourselves for touching Izzie.”

  “You can bet that Bullard didn’t know,” Quinn said. “He would never have tolerated it.”

  “So we’re assuming that he didn’t know, and we’re assuming that she’s run away for whatever reason and won’t want to have too much to do with anybody at this point.”

  “But it was a year ago, so hopefully she’s landed in a much better place.”

  “Yeah, but where?” Ryland asked.

  Quinn pulled out his phone and called Kano. “Hey, I need help running down Izzie. You know her the best.”

  “Izzie, Izzie?”

  “Yeah, Bullard’s half niece or whatever the hell that relationship is called.”

  “I haven’t heard from her in a long time. She and Bullard had quite a fight over her boyfriend, last I heard.”

  “Is that this Dracon guy?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly who it is,” Kano said. “Can’t forget that name. Sounds like a cosplay character.”

  “We’re at her last known address,” Quinn said, looking around. “According to the neighbor, her boyfriend Dracon beat her and potentially, according to Ozzie, kept her captive.”

  “Son of a bitch! Well, you can bet that Bullard didn’t know,” he said. “He would have gone in there and taken her away. How long ago?”

  “According to this neighbor guy, it was quite a while, one whole year ago.”

  “It would have to be,” Kano muttered. “Where is she now?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. Do you have any idea where else she hangs out?”

  “She was in college, had a problem there, but she did end up graduating, though I know an incident happened there too.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, Bullard said she was really vulnerable. Mostly still struggling over her father.”

  “And that just makes her a target in so many ways,” Quinn said. “I need a location though.”

  “Bullard had her phone number, which hopefully she didn’t change after their big fight,” Kano said. “Let me see if I can rattle around and find it.”

  “You should have it somewhere. I know he left you with all his important contacts.”

  “We all had it at one time. I think I’m the only one who kept up with it.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kano said. “I think at one time Bullard hoped the two of us would get together.”

  “And that wasn’t happening?”

  “No,” he said, “we weren’t the same people at all, and she was younger, still experiencing growing pains.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “Send me the number as soon as you find it.” And he hung up. He filled Ryland in. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” he said, “but it sounds like she and Bullard had a fight over a boyfriend, and maybe it was this one,” he said, “but apparently another incident occurred at her university.”

  At that, Ryland frowned and stared off in the distance. “I remember Bullard having quite the confab over it all. He was pretty apoplectic about it all.”

  “Do you know what the details were?”

  “One of the profs, he was stealing some of her material and then was trying to get her fired from the campus.”

  “Oh, good. At least it wasn’t a sexual assault or anything like that.”

  “Actually I think that was involved too,” he said. “The same prof.”

  Quinn stared at Ryland and added, “The guy’s got more ego than brains.”

  “Yeah, and I think Bullard stepped in, although I’m not sure that she wanted him to. I think soon afterward the prof was gone. And things got pretty ugly between Izzie and Bullard.”

&n
bsp; “No surprise there,” Quinn said. “If you think about it, that’s not exactly something Bullard would let slide.” Just then the phone rang again. It was Kano.

  “I found her number. I haven’t dialed it yet.” And he passed it on.

  Quinn quickly punched it into his phone and said, “Okay, talk to you in a bit.” He hung up the call and dialed the new number. When a woman answered, he asked, “Is this Izzie?”

  *

  “If you mean, Isabella,” Izzie said, with some exasperation, “yes.” Would she ever outrun that nickname? It had driven her crazy for the longest time. Although now it was bringing on a bit of nostalgia.

  “Good, this is Quinn,” he said, “Where are you?”

  “I am in Africa,” she said, “just outside Johannesburg. I was wondering about contacting Bullard for a visit.”

  “In that case,” he said, “we need to talk.”

  Her voice froze. “Why?”

  “In person, please,” he said gently, giving her the meeting place. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  “Good enough,” she said and hung up on him.

  She sat here, trembling. She could do this. She hadn’t done all that training to lead to a normal life for nothing. This was her chance to prove she’d gotten over that sick bastard Dracon. Even now she looked back in time, not understanding how she’d ended up where she had and with the man she had.

  He wasn’t her type; he wasn’t anything like what she would normally have gone out with.

  Yet she’d been so lost and alone and desperate after her best friend had died that she would have taken anyone who looked like they’d cared. Only he didn’t care.

  And after Bullard had bullied her to leave Dracon, she’d been determined to stay. Fool.

  And she’d paid for her temper. In many ways, she was more like Bullard than her father, even though they were half brothers. It hadn’t taken long for her ex to drop the smooth-talking persona and to show the real asshole underneath. They went from never fighting to her never doing anything right to him slowly threatening her to downright beating her.

  Then it got worse.

  She hiccupped, trying to hold back the tears. Not so much about what she’d been through—because she’d survived—but that she’d lost herself, so much so that she became someone who’d stayed with him.

  She was a different person now. It had taken a year, a hard year, but an important one. She’d grieved for her friend she had lost and also for the loss of her own innocence. Izzie had come to see that not all that glittered was valuable. That sometimes the shine wore off faster than anyone was willing to acknowledge.

  Her phone rang again.

  Quinn snapped, “And make sure you show up. It’s important.”

  Chapter 2

  Izzie stared at the phone, surprised. Quinn of all people. And what she had said was true; she was thinking about contacting Bullard. She missed him. When her father had disappeared after a mission, while he’d been taking off a few days, she’d been devastated. They hadn’t been super close, but the realization that she’d lost that opportunity to bond with her biological father had sent her to connect with Uncle Bullard. He, being the man he was, had opened his heart and home and had given her a sense of belonging. Then they found out her father had been kidnapped and Bullard, who’d never stopped looking for his half brother, managed to free him from a foreign prison some five years later.

  Only her father was a bitter recluse and preferred to live isolated and alone, rather than make any meaningful reconnection with her, both before and after his captivity. He barely spoke to her at the best of times. He was slowly getting better and had apologized to her once.

  But why did Quinn call her? The fact that he wouldn’t say anything on the phone bothered her and also made everything he did seem clandestine and shaky. And she’d done enough of that for a long time. She’d been hiding long enough that she didn’t want anybody to know that she was back in town. She wasn’t afraid of going back to the compound any longer, in theory, for now, but she’d also paid a heavy price and still didn’t sleep well.

  Frowning, she realized she didn’t have much time to meet up with Quinn either. Which meant that the men were close by. Something else that was a little disturbing. She headed out and decided that she would walk. If nothing else it would help burn off some of her nervous energy since getting that call. What could be so wrong that Quinn wouldn’t tell her over the phone?

  When she walked into the café, the two men were already here, looking the same as always. She walked over to join them. Ryland stood, gave her a quick hug, and went to get coffee for them all. She looked at Quinn and said, “You still haven’t said anything about why you called me.”

  “Let’s wait for Ryland to get back,” he said.

  She looked over and watched Ryland, moving slowly in the long line. “I gather he was hurt,” she muttered.

  “Yes, but he won’t appreciate it if you point out that he’s not doing as well as he’d like us to think he is.”

  She snorted at that. “You guys all have more than your fair share of egos,” she muttered.

  “Yep,” Quinn said, “we do. But it also gives us an awful lot of stiffness in our spine to get through some really tough scenarios.”

  The tone of his voice made her suspicious. She gave him a sidelong look to see him studying her carefully. “What are you looking at?” she snapped.

  “You,” he said. “Wondering how you’ve been, how life has treated you. We used to see you more often.”

  “Yeah, Bullard and I had a disagreement,” she said. Her lips turned down. “I figured it was time to make up with him.”

  “That would be a lovely option.” And just then Quinn turned, so she didn’t have a chance to ask him about his odd tone of voice.

  When Ryland sat down beside him, she asked him, “So how bad was it?”

  “How bad was what?”

  “Your injuries?”

  He gave her a crooked smile. “Survivable.”

  “Well, you’ve survived,” she said. “I’m not sure how well though.”

  “Well enough,” he said. “I’m here helping this guy out.”

  “Where’s the rest of the team?” she asked, her gaze going from one to the other. “And what the hell’s going on? In all these years nobody’s ever called me and demanded a face-to-face meeting.”

  “Maybe we should have,” Quinn said. “I hope you don’t feel like you were left out of the loop.”

  “Of course I was left out of the loop,” she said. “I wasn’t family. That was obvious enough.”

  “Did Bullard ever tell you that?”

  “No, but he was at a strange juncture in his life, and I’m probably the one who threw it in his face.” She stared out the nearby window. “I wasn’t close with my dad, but it was hard losing him. Then to find him after all that time … only to see the shell of the man he’d been.” She hated the reminder even now. Her father was improving, but he was only willing to do it on his terms. Meaning, alone and isolated, as he recovered from his years of imprisonment. He’d been rescued at least five, maybe six years ago now, but he wasn’t in any hurry to get back to a normal life anymore.

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “Still, Bullard’s a good guy, same as you.”

  Then she laughed and said, “Yes, you’re right. I know he is. So where the hell is he?” She looked around, as if he would pop out of the woodwork.

  “We don’t know,” Quinn said quietly.

  She froze and slowly pivoted to look at him. “What does that mean?”

  “It means, we don’t know. It means, there was a really ugly accident, and he was blown up in a plane.”

  “Oh, my God.” She stared at Quinn and Ryland, her skin turning clammy and cold, and all she could think about was that she’d waited too long. She really had been trying to get back here to make peace with Bullard, but she hadn’t been quite ready to face some of her own night terrors. She had hoped that maybe she c
ould contact Bullard and meet him somewhere else. “How bad?”

  “We haven’t seen any sign of him since,” Quinn said bluntly.

  She closed her eyes and reached for control, even while her heart was madly beating. “So he’s dead then.”

  “We’re not saying that,” Quinn said. “Ryland was in the same accident.”

  She turned and stared at him. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.” And he quickly explained what they knew.

  “Dear God,” she said, when he fell silent. “That’s no simple accident. That’s sabotage.”

  “You are right. Quite likely it is,” Ryland said. “But I survived.”

  As he spoke, all her mind could do was latch on to the fact that Bullard was likely gone. And that made no sense. The one thing about Bullard was, he was this massive soul, full of life. She sagged into her seat. “Dear God,” she whispered, yet again unable to formulate any other reaction, as she turned her gaze to stare blindly out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “I didn’t want to tell you this way. We were hoping to have good news. We are still looking for him. In fact, Dave is in the South Pacific area right now, working on rumors of a couple men who were picked up in the water.”

  She winced at that. “But were they alive?”

  “I didn’t ask for details,” he said, “because, so far, Dave’s had no luck.”

  She gave a strangled laugh. “Unbelievable,” she said. “Of all the people in my life, I didn’t think Bullard would ever cash in his chips. No, he was bigger-than-life, as if death were no end for him.”

  “He is bigger-than-life,” Quinn corrected.

  She stared at him. “Do you really think there is any hope?”

  “There’s always hope,” he said.

  “Are you just saying that to preserve the company?”

  “No,” he said, “not at all. I am more optimistic than some people in the company maybe, but I firmly believe in Bullard’s ability to pull out of everything.”

  She shook her head silently. “Why hadn’t I come back before now?” she said suddenly, staring at both men, as if either had answers for her. “I was just trying to make up for being an idiot.”