Last Man Standing

Untangling her fingers from the mahogany silk of Cole’s hair, Tori flattened her palms against his massive chest and forced herself to breathe.

Though he still had her perched on the desk, Cole, too, was making a visible effort to slow his breathing and ease his grip on her. He peppered her face with tiny kisses, drawing out the last sparks of her combustible reaction to him.

He wanted something from her. But why?

Tori sorted her thoughts and calculated possibilities, trying to regain the upper hand, which she feared she’d lost for good. She raised an eyebrow and challenged his high-handed behavior. “I don’t know what kind of game—”

“Believe me, sweetheart, this is no game.” His deep voice dropped back to a whisper for her ears alone. He smoothed his palms up and down the bare expanse of her upper arms, raising goose bumps and placating her for the benefit of the witnesses behind her. He brushed the warning against her ear under the guise of yet another kiss. “Follow my lead and we’ll both walk out of here.”

Tori’s entire body went rigid with protest. “You want me to pretend—?”

“And I expect you to be a very good actress.”

Last Man Standing

Julie Miller

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Miller attributes her passion for writing romance to all those fairy tales she read growing up, and to shyness. Encouragement from her family to write down all those feelings she couldn’t express became a love for the written word. She gets continued support from her fellow members of the Prairieland Romance Writers, where she serves as the resident “grammar goddess.” This award-winning author and teacher has published several paranormal romances. Inspired by the likes of Agatha Christie and Encyclopedia Brown, Julie believes the only thing better than a good mystery is a good romance.

Born and raised in Missouri, she now lives in Nebraska with her husband, son and smiling guard dog, Maxie. Write to Julie at P.O. Box 5162, Grand Island, NE 68802-5162.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Cole Taylor—He was once the finest that the KCPD had to offer. But two years under deep cover is enough to break any man. He’s lost his soul to death and lies.

Victoria “Torie” Westin—She’s been assigned an impossible mission—one where she’ll have to choose between her life or her heart…and might very well lose both.

Jericho Meade—An aging, ailing crime lord. A lot of people are vying to take over his position in Kansas City. And someone doesn’t want to wait until he dies of natural causes.

Chad Meade—Jericho’s nephew and the #1 candidate for his uncle’s position in the family business.

Daniel Meade—A haunting memory? Or a very real threat?

Paulie Meredith—Meade’s right hand since their early days on the streets.

Lana Shepherd—She’s the mastermind behind Meade’s criminal campaigns. But she has a bad track record with men.

Aaron Polakis—Not your typical butler.

Backer and Brady—Who are those guys, anyway?

Lancelot—A mystery man with a grudge against the Meades.

A. J. Rodriguez—Cole’s former partner on the police force.

The Taylor Clan—Someone’s out to get them. They’ve banded together time and again to protect each other in times of crisis. But this time they may not be able to save one of their own.

In memory of Margaret Miller.

With special thanks to the gang on the CODE NAME: INTRIGUE discussion loop at .

I appreciate your enthusiasm for Intrigue, your support for the authors and each other, your insightful ideas and all the fun we have hanging out together.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Prologue

“One should be all dead when one is half dead…”

Edgar Lee Masters—SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Amazing what kind of dull, dreary errands a sixteen-year-old boy with a new license would run with his grandmother, so long as the opportunity to drive was involved.

Martha Taylor grinned, taking good care to keep her amusement out of sight behind the muscular shoulders of her newly adopted grandson. Already they’d been to the cleaner’s, the post office, and now the grocery store without a single complaint about boredom or getting up early on a summer vacation morning. She’d gone through this same spate of volunteerism with all six of her boys, starting more than two decades ago. Some things never changed.

A young man’s appetite didn’t change, either, she noted, following Alexis Pitsaeli Taylor as he pushed the shopping cart across the parking lot to her teal van. He’d already dug into the sacks and opened a box of cream-filled cupcakes. The first one had disappeared in two bites and now he was working on his second.

“Let’s put the sacks in the back, Alex.” Martha opened her new straw purse and fished out her key ring to unlock the doors for him. But he already had his shiny new keys—a spare set copied and given to him by his grandfather—in hand and had pushed the unlock button. She halted a step as he lifted the hatchback and started unloading the cart. He paused just long enough to pop the last of the cupcake into his mouth. Martha grinned. “I think we’d better go home and get some lunch before all these groceries disappear into that bottomless pit you call a stomach.”

Alex made a choking sound and spun around, apparently downing that last bite without chewing first. A stricken look dulled those soulful onyx-colored eyes that were going to make women weak in the knees as he matured. “Sorry, Grandma. I was hungry.”

Grandma. Was there any sweeter word?

Martha curled her fingers around the handle of her purse, resisting the urge to reach out and hug the teenager in public. “Oh, honey, I’m teasing you. I do that with all my boys. I just don’t want you to ruin your appetite.”

“Not possible.” His rare smile gleamed against the olive tint of his skin. “If you’re cooking, I’m eating.”

Martha laughed at the compliment. She was used to shopping for a big family—she’d raised six boys and a girl, after all. But a whole week watching her four newest grandsons while their parents, Gideon and Meghan, finally took a well-deserved honeymoon worried her that she might be a little out of practice. “I hope I bought enough food.”

He eyed the seven sacks. “This should get me through the day. And I’d be happy to run to the store again tomorrow.”

Ah, yes, another chance to drive. Sharp kid. Thank goodness he could joke with her. Alex seemed like such a serious boy. No wonder. He’d already outlived his abusive birth father, and his birth mother had lost her battle with drugs long before he’d joined a gang and eventually reformed himself. Martha’s smile became forced as she watched him diligently unload the groceries and push the shopping cart toward the cart corral. He’d seen far too much of life for a boy his age.

She hoped he knew how much he was loved. That he had a family he could depend on now. She hoped he knew how lucky he was to be part of the proud Taylor tradition, and how proud she was that he had become a part of that tradition.

A dark figure hurtled between two parked cars and slammed Martha into the side of the van. When she felt the tug at the end of her arm, she screamed.

“Shut up, lady!”

The assailant shoved her down to the pavement and snatched her purse from her pain-shocked grip. Then he was off, running into the glare of the midday sun, keeping her from making any sort of identification.

“Help! He’s stealing my purse!” Her sons who were cops had told her to make a lot of noise if she was ever attacked by an unarmed assailant—draw attention to the creep. Her knees and palms burned from where they’d scraped the pavement, and her sixty-three-year-old joints throbbed from the jarring impact of steel and concrete. But her mouth and her brain and her temper worked just fine. “Stop that man! Help me! Somebody help!”

“Grandma!”

Martha crawled to the edge of the parking stall and saw Alex hurl his stocky, compact body against the taller, lankier attacker, who clutched her straw bag in his fist. The two hit the concrete with a frightening thud.

“Alex!”

A kaleidoscope of images bombarded her senses. Black gloves. A stocking cap. The crack of a fist against a jaw, a spew of foul curses.

Urgent hands reaching down to help Martha stand. A kind voice. “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

The space-age tones of a cell phone being dialed. “I’ll call 9-1-1.”

Squealing tires and the stinging odor of burned rubber as a dingy white pickup truck skidded around the corner and screeched to a halt beside the two men rolling on the ground. Alex had the purse-snatcher in one of those neck-holds he’d learned on the wrestling team. He pulled him to his feet. He had the upper hand. He was reaching for her purse.

“No!” Fear churned in Martha’s stomach. Her bravado evaporated in an instant as the driver of the pickup threw open his door and ran around the hood of the truck. He, too, wore gloves and a stocking mask. “Alex!”

But her warning came too late. The second man punched Alex in the kidney. Martha flinched at the vicious power of the blow that arched Alex’s back and freed his hold. The man with the purse spun around and slammed his fist into Alex’s mouth.

“Stop them!” Martha clenched her fingers convulsively around the forearm of the good Samaritan who had stopped to help her. “Oh God. Take the damn purse! Don’t hurt him.”

Alex sank to his knees. The man who’d taken her bag raised his hand to strike again, but the driver of the truck snatched him by the collar of his black, long-sleeve shirt and dragged him to the truck. He shoved him inside, scrambled behind the wheel and took off at interstate speed across the parking lot.

“Looky here, Grandma!” The man with her purse stuck his head out the window, shouting a vile taunt through his mask. He ripped open her wallet, sending a handful of bills fluttering to the pavement. He waved the plastic sheath that held her precious family photographs, tore one of them in two, crumpled it in his fist and tossed the memories beneath the wheels of the speeding truck. As they careened around the corner onto the street, he pointed a finger at Alex—her brave, young grandson had climbed to his feet. “Watch your back next time, Taylor! We won’t leave you standing!”

The driver gunned the engine and quickly lost the truck in traffic. One kind citizen tried to gather the shredded picture and money before the wind carried them off, while the man with the cell phone hurried to Alex’s side.

Alex nodded at something he said, then brushed off the man’s hand and jogged back to the van. “Grandma?”

“Oh, Alex. Honey.” She didn’t care if they had an audience. She didn’t care how cool a teenager needed to be. Martha hugged the boy, hugged him tight. “Are you hurt?”

His arms squeezed briefly around her shoulders before he pulled away. “I didn’t get your purse back.”

A frown marred his handsome face. Blood ran from his split bottom lip. He inhaled short, hissing breaths as if the action pained him. He was apologizing? Maternal anger blazed pure and potent through her veins, masking the remnants of her fear. Martha pulled a floral handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it against his wound. He flinched at the pain, but she ordered him to hold still as she tended him.

“You did an incredibly brave thing. Your mom and dad will be so proud of you. I’m proud of you.” She reached into the back of the van and dug out a bag of frozen peas to hold against his lip. “But nothing is worth you getting hurt. Certainly not that silly purse. It wasn’t big enough to hold everything I like to carry, anyway.”

Alex took over holding the icy package against his swelling mouth. She followed his glance down to the blood oozing through the serrated skin on her knees.

“But he hurt you.”

“Yeah, we’ll have to talk about what a tough old fart I am sometime.”

He grinned at the idea of someone her age using a word like that. But the glimpse of humor quickly disappeared beneath a serious frown. “Something isn’t right about what just happened.”

“You mean stealing a woman’s purse in the middle of the day in a busy parking lot?” She’d never believed that petty criminals were terribly bright.

The sound of sirens in the distance alerted her to approaching help. The man with the phone had rejoined them.

“I got the license number of the truck and reported it to the dispatcher. I’ll tell these officers, too, when they get here,” he said.

“Thank you.” Kansas City was a growing metropolis, busting at the seams in nearly every direction. But it still maintained that small-town neighborhood feeling it had enjoyed since the days when Harry Truman served as the county’s presiding commissioner back in the 1930s. She turned to the young mother who had stopped to help as well. “Thank you all.”

“Grandma.” Alex said the word and demanded she listen. “I know what it is. Those guys called me by my new name. Taylor.”

Martha tried to grasp the significance of what he was saying. “They knew you? Were they part of a gang?”

He shook his head impatiently. “They were too old. The guy I grabbed was in his twenties or thirties, even.”

She didn’t laugh at his skewed conception of old. “They didn’t call you Alex or Pitsaeli?” Though Gideon and Meghan had been his foster parents for several months, his adoption and legal name change had gone through less than a month ago. Now she was thinking what he was thinking. And hating it. “I heard Taylor, too. And why would he throw away money but keep pictures?”

This was something a little more complicated and a lot more personal than a routine purse snatching.

She turned to the man with the phone. “May I?”

He handed her the phone and she punched in a number she knew by heart—that of the office of the police captain of the Fourth Precinct. She kept her gaze riveted on the wise eyes of her grandson. “I’m calling Mitch and reporting this.” She brushed a lock of his wavy black hair away from the corner of his bruised mouth. “And then we’re going to the hospital.”

Chapter One

Something wasn’t right.

Maybe it was him.

Cole Taylor looked through the limousine’s tinted window and watched the muddy, gray-green waters of the Missouri River rush beneath the arched steel and concrete bridge. The dual highway took them north from Jackson County into Clay County, leaving behind the congestion of interstate traffic and expanding commercialization for the scenic rolling hills and lush farmland of rural Missouri.

He was alert, but not afraid. He’d numbed himself long ago to the fear and danger he lived with every day. Ignoring his emotions was a matter of survival. Giving in to them meant madness or death. Or turning.

Some days he wondered if he’d gotten so good at his job that he had turned.

Truth and justice had once sustained him, driven him. But those ideals had blurred as he’d made enemies into friends, and a few friends into enemies. He’d ignored his conscience and turned his back on everything he’d once held dear. As the car picked up speed toward its destination, Cole admitted that this day—like so many others in these past few weeks—was more about surviving than caring why he was here.

Two years working under deep cover for KCPD and the DA’s office had whittled the scope of his day-to-day living down to nothing more than that. Survival.

It was a damn cold-blooded way to live.

He was the good cop gone bad, selling out his colleagues and his soul for big money and a chance to dispense justice on his own terms. That was the story that had gotten him here. Only the story was beginning to feel a whole lot more real than the life and loves and friendships he’d left behind.

“You seem antsy this morning, Cole—”

Years of training kept him from starting at the indulgent voice of the man sitting beside him on the black leather seat of the limo.

“Is something wrong?”

Cole pulled himself from his worrisome thoughts and turned to the white-haired gentleman. “Just a feeling.” He reassured his boss with an expression just short of a smile. “I wish you’d let me check out this private hospital before driving out here. You want me to be in charge of security, yet you insist on taking foolish risks like this.” He nodded toward the unlit cigar clenched in the other man’s arthritic hand. “And you know the doctor is going to tell you to give up those things, too. How many times have we had this discussion about your impulses?”

The older man laughed. “My wife, rest her soul, was the only one I ever let criticize my choices. Now you’re nagging at me.”

At six-four, with a muscular body and well-honed skills that made him a deadly fighting machine, no one would mistake former KCPD Detective Cole Taylor for anyone’s nagging wife. Yet Jericho Meade patted Cole’s knee and scolded him as if Cole were his nurse, not his bodyguard.

“I’m not nagging,” Cole insisted, hating these fond, almost familial feelings he had for his employer. “I’m laying it on the line. You make my job harder than it needs to be.”

“Keeps you on your toe—” Meade’s laughter wheezed into raspy puffs of air. He pressed a gnarled fist to his chest as a fit of coughing seized him.

Cole squeezed a supporting hand around the man’s bony shoulder. “Jericho?” The old man snatched at his left jacket pocket, desperate to retrieve what was inside. But twisted bones and rattling coughs kept him from succeeding. “What is it?”

“His mint.” The robust man sitting across from them leaned forward. Paulie Meredith’s thin strands of black hair barely covered his scalp, making it impossible to hide his deep wrinkles of age and concern. He reached into Jericho’s pocket, pulled out a foil-wrapped piece of candy, opened it and slid it into his friend’s mouth. “It soothes the cough.”

Cole frowned. “You’re sure he won’t choke?”

Sinking back into the plush upholstery, the seventy-six-year-old patriarch waved aside Cole’s concern. “I’ll be fi—” Another fit seized his chest, ruining the reassurance.

“Jer, old friend, you have to take it easy.” Paulie wore the trappings of his wealth in a half-dozen gold and silver rings, and the paunch of his belly that pulled at the buttons of his designer suit. “There are hundreds of doctors in K.C. Good ones. I don’t know why you insist on seeing this Kramer guy way out here.”

Jericho’s chest shuddered in and out, indicating just how difficult it was for him to catch his breath. But the firm command in his steely blue eyes brooked no argument, even from his oldest and closest friend.

“First of all, Paulie, never call a sick man ‘old friend.”’

The teasing fell on deaf ears. “You’re not dying.”

“The hell I’m not.” Jericho’s breath whistled in his throat as he gasped for air. But then, through sheer will, it seemed, his breathing regulated to a raspy but even rhythm. And though his pasty skin didn’t regain its healthy color, he smiled. “Dr. Kramer said he could run the diagnostic tests at his private research clinic with few questions asked and no publicity. My heart and lungs may be going, but I don’t want anyone outside the family to know about it. Not until I find Daniel.”

Find Daniel? Cole discreetly looked away at the mention of Jericho’s son. It was the one aspect of his employer’s personality he didn’t know how to handle.

Paul Meredith was more direct. “Daniel’s dead, Jer.”

“We don’t know that. I’m not selling the business, no one’s running me off, I’m not naming a new heir until…” He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t bring himself to speak of the gruesome task he’d given Cole. Find my son’s body and bring it to me. Then I’ll know he’s dead. The shallow wheezing became a moan of pain. But it wasn’t physical. “He’s still with me, Paulie. I feel him. I know he’s trying to reach me. He wants me to find him. He wants to tell me something.”

The pallor of Jericho’s skin alarmed Cole more than did his boss’s ramblings. “You need to take it easy.”

“You should be lookin’ to rip out the heart of the man who did that to your son,” Paulie advised, talking the way a strong, healthy Jericho Meade would have talked months earlier, “not pretending he’s still alive.”

“Paulie,” Cole warned. There was honesty, and then there was cruelty.

Jericho’s blue eyes clouded. “I’m not pretending. I know what I’ve seen and heard. If it’s not Daniel, it’s his damn ghost.”

“It’s obvious you need some kind of treatment, Jer. I want you to be in a place where they have the best staff and equipment.” Paulie slicked his hand across his ruddy scalp. “How do you know we can trust this Kramer guy?”

How could a man like Jericho Meade, who had destroyed so many lives in his half-century-long quest for wealth and power, ever trust anybody?

Cole watched the old man steel his will and battle past the grief that consumed him. He was considerably calmer, if weaker, when he spoke.

“I’m paying Dr. Kramer enough money to ensure his loyalty. He’d better work a damn miracle.”

“Maybe you should check yourself in to Kramer’s clinic, then.” Paulie was sounding like a gentle, lifelong companion once more. “I can run things for a while. Get yourself out of the house. Forget the business right now. Worry about yourself.”

“I am the business.” Jericho’s voice was firm. “I wanted Daniel to become the business too. Until I understand what he’s trying to tell me, I intend to hang around.”

Paulie shrugged. “What would a voice from the grave be trying to tell you?”

Cole had asked the same question the first time Jericho had pounded on his door in the middle of the night, sobbing and disoriented, claiming his son had been in his office and left a message, begging his father to listen.

“Maybe the name of whoever killed him,” replied Jericho.

The answer still didn’t make much sense.

Jericho pressed his tattered cigar into Cole’s hand and closed his eyes on a weary sigh. “Now you two shut up and let me rest. And tell the driver to kill the air-conditioning. He knows I don’t like it this cold in here.”

Paulie quickly spun in his seat and knocked on the partition window that separated the driver from the back of the limousine, to do his boss’s bidding. Cole tossed the cigar onto the car’s drink console before settling back into his corner. Then the three men fell silent and tuned in to their own internal musings.

Cole had been there four months ago, the night the unmarked package was delivered to the estate. After screening the box for any trace of explosives or chemicals, Cole himself had opened the box in front of Jericho, Paulie and a handful of family members. He’d nearly retched at the sight of the dismembered finger. Jericho had identified the ring he’d given his son and then collapsed in his chair.

Amidst the tears and curses that filled the room that night, Cole had read the attached, computer-generated note.

Jericho—

I thought a deal was a deal.