Forged in Ash by Trish McCallan

disbelief gripped her. Unbelievable. She’d found him again. What were the odds of that?
    A grim smile bloomed.
    Did he live in the apartment complex? Or was he visiting someone?
    Not that it mattered. All she had to do was park where he wouldn’t notice her and wait. Sooner or later he had to come out.

    Robert Biesel’s hand tightened around the Coke bottle until the plastic crackled, as he watched Jillian Michaels’s monstrosity of a car pull into the parking lot of one of the ritzier apartment complexes in town.
    What the hell was the damn woman up to now?
    Earlier, she’d tried to kidnap a baby. A baby, for Pete’s sake, as if that would go unnoticed. To top the insane behavior off, she’d tried to snatch the infant in front of the child’s mother, or nanny, or whoever was pushing the stroller.
    Really? Was she that much of a bimbo? His cell rang as he pulled over and parked along the side of the boulevard to keep an eye on her. He glanced at the caller ID and scowled. Phillip. His tag partner must have finally realized Simcosky wasn’t going to show. Time to put on his dancing shoes. He hit the talk button.
    “Hey,” he said casually. “You put our baby to bed?”
    A snort sounded on the other end. “I wish. Where did you drop him?”
    “Third and Orange, he was headed your way.” He sharpened his tone. “You lost him?”
    “I didn’t lose him.” Phillip’s voice tightened defensively. “He never showed.”
    “Son of a bitch.” Robert let the words hang there. “We better start a grid. You take Orange east. I’ll take west.”
    Sending him on a fruitless search east of Orange Avenue would keep Phillip both busy, and distant.
    “How much longer are we supposed to keep up with this waste of time?” Phillip asked, his voice still defensive, but annoyance had crept in as well. “We’ve been at it for months. It’s clear the poor bastard’s life revolves around doctors’ appointments and physical therapy. He’s not meeting deep throat in the middle of the night. If any of these poor bastards had an inkling of what the bosses have in the works, we’d know by now. There’s a ton of money being wasted on these clowns.”
    Robert would have agreed with him thirty minutes ago, before Jillian Michaels had attempted to hook up with one of the SEALs they’d been assigned to monitor.
    “Not our money, not our worry,” Robert said. “Besides, the job’s putting your kids through college, so what are you complaining about?”
    “It’s getting old, that’s—”
    “Tell you what,” Robert snapped. “You explain that to the bosses, and see what their take is.”
    Dead silence greeted the suggestion.
    “Yeah, I thought so. Call if you spot him.” Robert ended the call as Jillian stopped behind a black truck and idled there.
    He couldn’t see the make or model of the pickup truck from his vantage point, but the color and frame looked too much like Marcus Simcosky’s to be a coincidence.
    What the hell this meant was another big black question mark. Phillip was right, they’d been watching the guy for months and this was the first time he’d visited this place. And then there was Jillian.
    She pulled forward and disappeared behind a cluster of parked cars. He eased back into the street to get a better look. As he drove past the entrance to the parking lot, he caught a glimpse of her backing into one of the last parking places at the very end of the lot. He slowed his sedan to a crawl, watching intensely. Her car didn’t move.
    He glanced at the black truck and frowned. It looked like she was staking the truck out, which meant she’d hang around until Simcosky appeared. He scanned the entrance to the apartment building; lots of people were going in and out, but none of them were Simcosky.
    The number of people hanging around the parking lot made it impossible to grab Jillian and force her into his car…but then again…he didn’t need to.
    He could use her car instead.
    She’d set up