Page 1 of Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad World

Chapter One

Noah Merchant had planned to spend the fifth anniversary of his wife’s death getting drunk in the local Irish bar. Instead, he watched Violet Lee, one of his fellow security specialists, pound on the door of a red brick warehouse located on the edge of the Warehouse District in Central Houston.

“She isn’t in there.” Violet scowled at him. “This is pointless.”

Noah checked his phone. “It’s the right address, so she definitely lives here. The message says she has an apartment on the top floor.” He glanced up at the old three-story building. The windows were dark.

“I’m telling you.” Frustration thickened her Scottish accent. “She isn’t in there. This is a waste of time.”

Violet wasn’t known for her patience—he’d learned that the hard way when they worked together in the London office of Benson Security. To say he’d been dismayed when she’d also joined the Houston team would be putting it mildly. As a former cop, he preferred his colleagues to remain calm under pressure, especially now they were working in a country where every second person was armed. Strike that—this was Texas. Most likely,everybodywas armed.

“Shehasto be in there,” he said with all the patience he could muster. “She’s agoraphobic.”

The diminutive ball of barely contained rage glared at the door. “Then she’s just refusing to answer. I don’t like it when they don’t cooperate.”

Yeah, he’d foundthatout the hard way in London too. Yet again, he tried to explain that not everyone they dealt with was the enemy: “This woman isn’t a perp. She’s an important witness in a high-profile case.”

Noah pulled up the details their new boss had texted and called the witness’ number. No reply. He stepped back into the dark, empty street and eyed the building. Long and narrow, it took up the corner position on a block of older industrial businesses. A narrow alleyway ran between the building and its neighbor. The alley had been fenced off with tall ironwork. The main entrance was on the narrow side of the warehouse, facing what would be the busiest street during office hours. A larger goods entrance sat at the rear of the building, although the old wooden doors had been replaced with heavy steel ones that looked rarely used.

The front entrance also had an abandoned air about it. The sign over the door was cracked and faded, but you could still make out the wordsBella’s Antiques. Noah peered through the dark and grimy storefront window. The interior was crammed with all sorts of junk, the kind of stuff you’d find in a garage sale, and most of it was covered in dust. He looked up and spotted a camera in the corner above the door. A shiny new security camera. At last, a sign of life.

He rang the bell again—the one Violet had abandoned after declaring it didn’t work. “Can you see an alarm system?” Maybe they could call the security company to find out if it’d been tripped.

“Aye, it’s one of those cheap ones you can disarm by cutting the main wire.” She pointed through the small window beside the hefty door. “I could knock out a pane of glass and access it from here.”

“But it’s still functioning?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then nobody got here before us and disarmed it. She must still be inside.”

Violet wasn’t impressed. “She could have let an attacker in and then reset the alarm. Maybe a delivery guy or maintenance crew or someone from the DA’s office. They’re the ones with the leak, aren’t they? She’s probably already dead.”

“You’re a ray of sunshine, you know that? She could be sleeping. Or in the bath. Or wearing headphones. There are a million reasons why she might not hear the door. We’re two floors beneath her, and she isn’t expecting anyone to turn up. She’s probably just busy.”

Violet smirked knowingly. “You were one of thosenicecops, weren’t you? The ones who join the force to actually serve instead of hunting down bad guys.” Her words dripped with disgust as she opened one of the many zippered pockets on her cargo pants and withdrew a set of lockpicks.

“You can’t break in.” Noah pinched the bridge of his nose, desperately wishing he was sitting in O’Loughlin’s, nursing a single malt, instead of dealing with Scotland’s most unhinged cop. Make thatex-cop—they’d fired her ass for being a health risk to everyone around her.

“Watch me.” She set to work.

“Seriously,” he said, “you can’t go around picking locks.”

“We sure as hell can’t break down the door. It’s solid wood and a good six inches thick. And we can’t climb through the windows because of the bars.” She cocked a thumb at the metal security shutters pulled across the inside of each window.

“We don’t need to break in at all. We can call the local cops. Or the security company. Hell, the sheriff’s department only a few blocks away. They’ll get us in and walk us through the building.”

“The Assistant District Attorney called Benson Security because she isn’t sure who she can trust in local law enforcement—or in her own office. So, no calling the cops. Which reminds me, when we’re done here, I need you to explain all these different police forces to me. In Scotland, there’s the police. Full stop. Nothing else. Do Americans think competition will make their officers work harder? Because that’s just dumb.”

“The point is,” Noah said with long-suffering, “picking locks is illegal.”

“There’s illegal, and then there’sillegal,” she said.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, we aren’t cops anymore. We don’t need to follow the rules.”

“Uh… yeah, we do. They’re calledlaws. Everybody needs to follow them.”