Against the Fire (5 page)

He wondered if he’d ever make the call.

Four

Too wide awake for sleep, Mattie settled back in the deep, cone-shaped chair in the living room of her loft apartment. Another chair just like it sat at the opposite end of a modern ivory sofa piped in black.

The place was open and airy, with big industrial windows, exposed brick walls and polished concrete floors. There were concrete countertops in the kitchen and baths, while the bedrooms had ebony hardwood floors. Black-framed architectural sketches of European cathedrals decorated the walls.

The simplicity of the apartment suited her. She didn’t spend much time at home. Mostly she was working or down at the center. But the two bedrooms and two bathrooms provided just enough room and the modern décor went with her streamlined lifestyle.

She wondered what Gabriel Raines would think of the place, and thought that he would probably disapprove. He’d expect a more feminine décor, maybe some ruffles and frills and a bunch of sentimental clutter. She was nothing like that and never would be.

She heard a familiar meow and turned to see her big orange-striped tomcat, Tigger, padding toward her.

“Hi, baby. Mama’s home.” As she reached down to stroke his fur, Tigger pushed his head into her palm and began to purr. “All right, I hear you.” She rose from the chair. “Come on, let’s get you some food.” Tigger wound himself between her legs as she walked toward the kitchen to retrieve a pouch of food and refill his bowl of crunchies.

She was a pushover for animals, especially cats, which Gabe would also probably disapprove of. If he had an animal, it would have to be a Rottweiler or a mastiff or something. She almost smiled.

Gabe said he lived just a few blocks away. Now that she’d seen him tonight in a pair of cowboy boots and knew he came from Wyoming, she could imagine him living in a place that sported Frederick Remington sculptures and Western paintings on the walls.

She tried not to think how good he had looked, the black jeans and T-shirt he’d worn, stretching over a powerful set of shoulders and muscular chest, and biceps bulging with muscle. In an article online, she recalled reading that he was a former marine. Clearly he stayed in condition.

She thought of those narrow hips and long legs and a little curl of heat tugged low in her belly. She told herself she liked more sophisticated men, the GQ type, guys interested in art and literature, men who enjoyed going to plays and dining in fine restaurants. Gabriel Raines was a man’s man, the macho kind she made it a point to stay away from.

Not that she’d had many dates in the past few years.

She was too busy for a relationship. She needed to focus her attention on her job, and what little time was left went to her work at the center.

And somehow with men, the past always seemed to intrude. The two years she’d spent with Mark Holloway had ended in disaster and the memory still haunted her. They were supposed to get married, or at least that’s what she’d thought. She had foolishly believed Mark loved her, but as soon as she found out she was pregnant, Mark disappeared from her life.

Just as her mother had warned, she couldn’t count on a man, even one who said he loved her.

Then things went from bad to worse and she miscarried the baby, a tiny part of herself she had already come to love. Her job was all she had to keep her going, the only thing that kept her from total despair.

That and her volunteer work at the center. Aside from manning the hotline, her job was mostly to offer support, to talk to people from needy families who came to the center for help, to listen to their troubles and try to provide resources and help them find solutions. Other people had such terrible problems that even the loss of her unborn child seemed small in comparison.

She was young, she told herself. She could have another baby. But she had never truly recovered from Mark’s betrayal and she had never met another man who had interested her enough to put aside her distrust and begin a relationship.

Still, she was a woman, and for the first time in a very long while, Gabriel Raines had made her feel like one. She thought of the way he had looked at her at the end of the evening, his eyes hot and blatantly approving, his lips curving into a slow, sensuous smile. He’d looked like a hungry cat who wanted to eat her alive. He might not be her type, but her body felt the pull of his masculinity even if her mind did not.

Mattie’s brain warned her in no uncertain terms to stay away from Gabriel Raines.

After a working weekend, Gabe spent a good part of Monday tromping through the wreckage that had once been the nearly completed lobby of the Dallas Towers. Wearing a pair of high rubber boots, he kicked through the water-soaked wallboard, burned wood and broken glass and shoved aside the melted light fixtures that had fallen from the impressive three-story ceiling.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Sam McBride walked toward him in his own rubber boots.

“Damned shame, is what it is.”

“Heard they charged the kid who set the fire, the one we saw there that night.”

“Kid’s only seventeen. And there’s a chance he didn’t do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe. He was downtown with a buddy that night, spray painting walls. Claims he saw the fire and went to check it out.”

“Tagging? I hate those little bastards. My dad would have beat my butt for doing something like that.”

Gabe chuckled. Since his own dad had flown the coop when he was just a kid, he made no further comment, though he didn’t like vandals, either.

“I’m supposed to talk to the kid this afternoon.” And since Mattie Baker had set up the meeting and said she would be there, he was more eager to go than he might have been.

“Be interesting to see what the kid has to say,” Sam said.

“He’s got friends who don’t believe he did it. They say he’s a real good boy. For his sake, I hope they’re right.”

“What time’s the meeting?”

“Two o’clock. A place called the Family Recovery Center.”

Sam checked his watch. “That’s forty-five minutes from now.”

“The address is nearby. Shouldn’t take long to get there. Let’s finish this inventory, try to see how much equipment we lost.”

Sam nodded and settled his hard hat back over his short blond hair and Gabe put his own hard hat back on. They stomped through more water-soaked debris, the fire suppression damage as brutal as the flames themselves.

Half an hour later, Gabe headed for the FRC. When he walked inside, Mattie Baker stood in the waiting room, a big open area lined with brown vinyl chairs and a couple of wooden tables covered with dog-eared magazines.

She was as pretty as he remembered. He felt a sudden urge to unpin all that fiery hair and spread it across his pillow, to strip off her plain gray suit and run his hands over that luscious little body, learn every supple curve.

His groin tightened.

Silently he cursed.

Mattie walked up to him and smiled. “Hello, Gabe.”

“Mattie.”

“Angel’s waiting. Now that Enrique’s come forward, he’s anxious to talk to you. He wants to tell you himself he didn’t do it.”

“That sounds good.”

Mattie led him down a hall decorated with amateur photos of the city, some of them pretty good.

Gabe enjoyed photography himself, especially when he was out at the ranch in the Hill Country near Kerrville he had purchased a few years back. It was only three hundred acres, but he kept a couple of horses there, and it got him away from the city. One of his other loves was flying, and in his twin Aerostar, it was a fairly short trip. Someday he hoped to live at the ranch full-time, maybe raise some quarter horses. Deep down, he guessed the West would always be in his blood.

He followed Mattie into the conference room and saw Angel seated at a long table next to a gray-haired man in a navy three-piece suit.

“Gabe, this is Sidney Weiss,” Mattie said. “Sid, meet Gabriel Raines.” The men shook hands. “And this is Angel.”

The boy met Gabe’s assessing gaze squarely. “I didn’t do it, Mr. Raines.”

Gabe took a seat across from him. “Maybe you didn’t. Your friend, Enrique, said the two of you were downtown tagging walls. Vandalizing other people’s property isn’t arson but it’s still against the law.”

The kid never looked away. He had a square face and somewhat blunt features, but he wasn’t a bad-looking boy. “We weren’t vandalizing. We were beautifying.”

Gabe had to smile. “That’s what you call it?”

“In this case, I do. I was hoping…maybe you would be willing to take a walk with me and Mattie. I could show you what we were doing that night.”

It seemed a fair enough request. And he didn’t mind spending more time with Mattie. Watching her with the boy, seeing her concern, made him even more curious about her. On one hand, she seemed purposely remote. On the other, extremely approachable.

“It’s just off Commerce, so it isn’t that far away,” Angel continued.

Gabe flicked a glance at the boy’s attorney. “I presume this is all right with you, Mr. Weiss.”

“I trust Mattie to look out for Angel’s interest,” Weiss said.

“Fine, then. I could use a walk, stretch my legs a little. Angel, why don’t you lead the way?”

The boy shoved back his chair and they followed him single file down the hall. The waiting room had a couple of people sitting in chairs as they passed, a black teenager with round flat earrings in his ears and an older Hispanic woman.

“We have counselors on hand at certain times of the day,” Mattie explained. “We’re still a small organization. But we have ten professional, full-time staff members, plus about twenty volunteers. Mostly we deal with families trying to get their lives together after dealing with violence and abuse.”

The three of them headed down Commerce and turned onto a smaller street a few blocks later. There was a vacant lot on the north side. Next to it sat an empty three-story concrete building. Angel led them into the lot then stopped halfway across. The boy turned and pointed.

“I brought Enrique here so that he could finish his painting.”

For the first time, Gabe noticed the huge mural on the wall. It was a painting of the neighborhood around the building, the scene populated with a variety of interesting and unusual people. Vibrant color leaped from the concrete canvas, snagging the viewer and pulling him inexorably into the scene. The vacant lot was there, but the dirt paths were gone. Instead there were walkways of brilliant red brick lined with pink, yellow, blue and purple flowers.

The painting itself was beautiful, the scene perfectly drawn, each line precise and in exactly the right proportions. But there was something else, something in-definable and strangely compelling that made the mural stunning.

For several long moments no one spoke.

“Amazing is too small a word,” Gabe finally said. “This is incredible.”

Angel smiled. “When we became friends, Enrique told me his dream was to become an artist. He showed me some tagging he had done on some walls in our neighborhood. I thought they were the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen. I knew no one would see them there, no one who could make his dream come true. I saw the empty wall down here when I came to the center. I wanted to help him so I drove him down at night. He’s been working on the mural for nearly two months.”

“It’s wonderful, Angel,” Mattie said.

“We finished the mural that night. We saw the flames and went to see what was happening, but we didn’t set the fire, I swear.”

Gabe turned to Mattie, his mind still filled with the scope and colors of the painting, the kaleidoscopic effect and emotional pull of the work. “Did you know about this?”

Mattie stared at the painting as if she couldn’t drag her gaze away. Finally, she looked at him and shook her head. “I had no idea.” She turned to Angel. “Enrique has incredible talent.”

“You were right, Angel,” Gabe said. “This isn’t vandalizing. It’s beautifying. Maybe this will give your friend the break he needs.” Gabe thought maybe he could do something to help. The city had been looking for some open space to purchase. They needed more parks, more green space, and this lot, done the way Angel’s friend had painted it, would be perfect.

“I didn’t set the fire,” Angel repeated. “I just wanted to help Enrique.”

Gabe rested a hand on the boy’s stout shoulder. “I believe you, son. Mattie and I will talk to the police, see if there’s something we can do to convince them and get them back on the track of finding the real arsonist.”

Angel’s relieved smile was so full of gratitude that Gabe felt a tightening in his chest.

“Thank you, sir.”

Gabe just nodded. When he looked over at Mattie, he caught the glint of tears. More of a woman than she wanted to admit, he thought. Interesting.

They walked back to the center and Angel went inside to speak to his attorney, leaving Gabe and Mattie on the sidewalk out in front.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” Mattie said.

“Where’s your car?” Gabe asked.

“In the lot behind the building.”

“So’s mine.” He started walking beside her, both of them heading toward the lot. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in having dinner tonight? We could talk about the boys. I’ve got a couple of ideas that might help Enrique. He’s an amazingly talented kid.”

He could tell she wanted to say no. But Angel meant a lot to her and now it seemed she was concerned about Enrique.

“We’ll go anywhere you want,” he said, his stomach quietly rebelling at the thought of a plateful of vegetables for supper.

“All right. I’ve got to work late, but I could meet you at the Taj about eight.”

“The Taj?”

“Indian food. I think you’ll find something on the menu you’ll enjoy.”

He wasn’t much on ethnic food. He was more a meat and potatoes kind of guy. “Where is it?”

She gave him the address and he agreed to meet her, not quite certain himself it was a good idea. The lady was a vegetarian, a little too independent to suit him, and probably a raging liberal. Still, politics and palates aside, Mattie attracted him as no lady had in a very long time.

It might prove an interesting evening.

Five