Tipping Point Read online

  Table of Contents

  Legal Page

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  New Excerpt

  About the Author

  Publisher Page

  Tipping Point

  ISBN # 978-1-78651-380-9

  ©Copyright Helena Maeve 2016

  Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright January 2016

  Edited by Sue Meadows

  Pride Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2016 by Pride Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN

  Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  Shadow Play

  TIPPING POINT

  Helena Maeve

  Book six in the Shadow Play series

  He has nothing left to lose. That makes him dangerous.

  Ex-con Elijah has run out of ways to make ends meet. Picked up by police in a bum-fighting sting, his only hope is the sister who landed him in prison many years ago. But catapulted into a world of veiled state interests and deadly secrets, Elijah soon finds himself torn between a past he cannot outrun and a spy whose dilemma he understands better than he’d like.

  Nate, an Englishman whose comings and goings are as suspicious as his gratuitous kindness, offers Elijah the second chance he didn’t realize he was praying for. It’s not long before living out of each other’s pockets brings clandestine desires to the surface, threatening the fragile peace Elijah finds in Nate’s home. A peace that may have been nothing more than a smokescreen to begin with.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Tommy Hilfiger: Dickson Concepts

  Calvin Klein: Calvin Klein Inc.

  Converse: Nike, Inc.

  Honda: Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

  Purell: Gojo Industries

  Home Depot: The Home Depot, Inc.

  Taser: Taser International

  Coke: The Coca-Cola Company

  Doritos: Frito-Lay

  HBO: Home Box Office Inc.

  Netflix: Netflix Inc.

  Columbo: NBC Universal Television Distribution

  Kill Them All and Come Back Alone: Fanfare Films

  Requiem for a Gringo: Paradise Film Exchange

  They Call Me Trinity: AVCO Embassy Pictures

  Wonder Woman: DC Comics Inc.

  BMW: Bayerische Motoren Werke AG

  Chevrolet: General Motors

  Nokia: Nokia Corporation

  Walther PP9: Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen

  SIG Sauer: SIG GmbH

  TCM: Time Warner

  Apple MacBook: Apple Inc.

  The Magus: John Fowles

  Chapter One

  Elijah didn’t know what he was doing at the precinct.

  He’d tried to explain to the cops that he hadn’t seen anything and didn’t want to press charges—not that anyone had offered him a choice—but no one listened. The flurry of uniforms around him was too intimidating to try again.

  After a while, words expired in his throat. His voice became a strangled whisper.

  He gave up.

  The officers responsible for his arrest seemed to find themselves in a similar predicament. Their chests puffed as they briefed superiors and ADAs on the facts, but the odds were already stacked against them.

  The young, all-American entrepreneurs with the pricey camera equipment had lawyered up within minutes of being processed.

  Bemused, Elijah looked on as suits patrolled between jam-packed desks, wielding cell phones and briefcases like weapons of war. He knew how the next round went. It was only a matter of time before the cage door opened to expel those who could afford to drop twelve hundred dollars for an hour behind bars, plus bail.

  Down the steel bench that made up the only seating inside the cell, his would-be employers couldn’t have been more relaxed. One had his feet crossed under his skinny ass and was methodically sticking chewing gum to the cinderblock wall behind him. Another was making eyes at a blonde officer on the other side of the bars. She could have been his mother, but that didn’t deter him.

  These were the people who made it through the justice system with a mere slap on the wrist.

  Tamping down the flash of bitterness was difficult, but Elijah had no other choice. His window was closing fast.

  With a hollow in the pit of his stomach, he shuffled the five or six feet closer to the pair.

  The chewing gum artist flicked a glance his way. A sneer was forthcoming, Elijah was sure, but he could live with that.

  “When do I get my money?” he blurted out, before either half of the smug pair could pipe up to tell him to get lost.

  Bewilderment crept onto the boy’s face. “What money?”

  Elijah dug his overgrown, blackened fingernails into the meat of his palms.

  “Fifty bucks. You— You said if I won three fights, I’d get the cash.” He despised the quiver in his voice but couldn’t calm down enough to bring it under control. His ribs still ached from that stray punch in the second match. He wanted nothing more than to curl up under a bridge somewhere quiet and catch his breath. Bruised ribs would heal up in a few days if he didn’t move around too much.

  Fifty bucks would go a long way toward earning him that kind of respite once the cops turned him loose. Elijah tried to be patient. They were sure to do it as soon as their excess of zeal met the first legalese roadblocks.

  The county didn’t have the funds to house tramps.

  “Dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Chewing Gum called to his pal, “Hey, Seth, we say anything about money?”

  The resident Don Juan shook his head with an expression of earnest confusion. “Nah, we were just there, recording a couple of hobos tearing into each other. Part of a documentary we’re working on… Maybe you should lay off the bottle, dude,” he added, looking down his perfect, aquiline nose at Elijah.

  The urge to fill the kid’s mouth with blood shot through Elijah like a hollow-point bullet.

  “I won all three fights,” he repeated shakily. “You owe me—”

  “We don’t owe you shit, man.” Seth’s buddy waved a hand. “Go talk to yourself or somethin’. You stink to the high heavens.”

  Elijah balled his fists. “But you said…”

  “I’ve never talked to you in my life, dude.” The lie was so painfully heartfelt, so falsely pitying, that Elijah almost believed him.

  He was homeless, sure, but he wasn’t crazy. He’d passed all evaluations with brio, even in prison—and
back then he would’ve given anything to be carted off to the psych ward.

  “That’s not… That’s not true.” Elijah chanced another step closer, a vein throbbing in his eyelid. Once, he would’ve been intimidating enough to wipe the smirks off those blond faces, but prison food had sapped his muscle mass, softened his edges. He was a beggar now, not a thug. “It’s just fifty bucks,” he pleaded. “That’s less than your phone bill.” Come on. Please…

  For those two, that kind of money would barely cover half a night at a local bar. For Elijah, it was the difference between two slices of white bread and a slab of ham, and starvation.

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” Seth replied smugly. “Don’t blame me, blame Jesus. The whole give a man a fish thing… You get it, right?”

  “Yeah, we don’t want to be seen encouraging the kind of shit you get up to. Don’t you know it’s illegal?”

  They regurgitated their lawyers’ platitudes with convincing flair. It didn’t matter that they were lying. They wore Tommy Hilfiger shirts and Calvin Klein underwear, brand-name jeans slung low over their hips to show off the trademark logo. Their Converse shoes had been distressed in some factory in Bangladesh and sold in Florida for ten times the price it cost to make them.

  Who’d trust the word of an unwashed relic over two such splendid examples of future America?

  Elijah scraped arthritic fingers through his oily hair. “If you don’t give me the fucking money, swear to God I’m gonna demolish that smirk.”

  It was satisfying, on a purely sadistic level, to see the pair stare at him as though for the first time realizing that they were locked up with a guy who had nothing left to lose. Who might even be looking forward to three squares and a bunk of his own in prison.

  Before Elijah could lend action to words, the cell door buzzed open.

  “You’re free to go,” one of the officers said.

  Seth had already sprung to his feet.

  “Not you.” The cop’s weary gaze landed on Elijah. “Your lawyer’s assured us that you’ll be available to answer any questions. You understand what that means?”

  “I… What?” Elijah breathed, though the truth was he didn’t.

  Since when did he have a lawyer?

  “Means you don’t skip town,” said the uniform. “You do, we’ll treat you as a fugitive.”

  This had to be a mistake. The officer had misunderstood.

  He was releasing the wrong man. Any moment now, they’d figure it out and Elijah would be thrown back into the cage, his punishment worse for not correcting the error when he had the chance.

  Powerful people didn’t like having their incompetence pointed out to them and the sallow-faced officer who led him out struck Elijah as the type to make retribution extremely painful.

  The officer shifted his weight. “You waiting for a signed invitation or something? Move.”

  Heart in his throat, Elijah turned his back on his two wise-ass cellies and gingerly marched out, the fifty bucks forgotten.

  It took a moment for his gaze to focus.

  A glut of detail vied for his attention all at once. The blur of too many people crammed into a small space, telephones ringing or slamming into cradles, handcuffs clicking on and off around the wrists of various suspects, women in short miniskirts cackling at sweating cops. It was all too much.

  Elijah pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily. It wouldn’t do to black out on city property. He wasn’t supposed to sleep on park benches, so surely having a panic attack inside the precinct would earn him similar punishment. He’d end up right back in that cell again, if not worse.

  “Mr. Roark?”

  The voice was familiar. Elijah forced himself to lower his hands.

  His lawyer was conspicuous in a black skirt and jacket, a black handbag clutched in her good hand. She extended the other for Elijah to shake.

  He did so, clasping Jules’ fingers in his as gently as though he were cupping the body of a wounded sparrow.

  “Uh… Hi.”

  “My car’s outside,” she said lightly. Her brown wig gleamed with subtle highlights in the soft glow of neon lights. “Shall we?”

  Elijah could only nod. He was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t losing his mind after all.

  The last time Jules had paid him a visit, he’d just been convicted. She’d stopped by once, to say she was leaving the country. She’d promised to arrange protection for him before she went. It was, Elijah knew, the only reason he’d spent the first year of his incarceration relatively trouble-free.

  He didn’t hold it against Jules. He would’ve lost interest in himself after that too.

  Elijah followed her through the labyrinth of desks with only a vague idea of where he was going. It was just as well that Jules steered him with a hand on the small of his back.

  “Gray Honda,” she murmured, once they were outside. “Other side of the street.”

  Heart descending back into his chest, Elijah spotted their ride—a nondescript model, nothing fancy—well away from the army of patrol cars parked in front of the station. The nearest streetlight barely reflected off the windshield.

  He couldn’t tell if there was anyone else inside.

  “You’re a lawyer now, sis?” he asked, instead of hinting at his real concerns.

  “I’m a lot of things,” Jules shot back.

  Noncommittal had always been her default, but Elijah detected a flicker of exasperation in her voice. She’d taken a chance going into that station on his behalf, never mind lying to the police.

  Paper trails were dangerous in her line of work. CCTV was even worse.

  Elijah tried not to let his guilt run away with him. “I don’t think anyone’s looking. I can head off—”

  “Get in the car,” Jules snapped, the show of patience tipping over into irritation.

  The Honda unlocked with a solemn beep.

  It was a little dusty, the backseat strewn with a trench coat and a couple of magazines—useful pocket litter—but still prohibitively clean for the likes of him. Elijah glanced down at his hands, dirt etched into the creases of his knuckles and buried deep under his fingernails, and hesitated.

  Jules sighed. “Get in the fucking car before I lose my patience.” She threw her handbag into the back, gaze flinty when she glanced up at Elijah. “Do you have any idea what kind of strings I had to pull to get you cleared? You’re on probation. If they charged you, you’d be on a bus back to County in a matter of hours. That what you want?”

  County was bunk beds and curtain-less showers. Maggots in his lunch. It was also three meals a day and a library he could escape to for a couple of hours with no one to chase him off because he was making the other visitors uncomfortable.

  Elijah reached for the passenger side door and slid carefully into the front seat. He made sure to keep his hands and feet to himself, to touch as little as he could of the dusty plastic finishings.

  “Where, uh, where are you taking me?”

  “A friend’s place.”

  Jules put the car in gear and violently peeled away from the curb.

  “This friend wouldn’t happen to be in the business, would he?”

  The sidelong glance Elijah leveled at her went unnoticed. He wasn’t so naïve that he’d expect an answer. Still, it would’ve been nice for Jules to scoff and tell him he had it all wrong.

  Those days were behind her now. She was a different woman.

  Jules flexed her hands around the steering wheel. “You were supposed to keep in touch. The shelter—”

  “Ran out of beds.” It was only half a fib.

  The first week, Elijah had been guaranteed a bunk, much like in prison but without the clang and clatter of the cell door locking him in at night, with no guards to berate him for every clumsy mistake. Then the interviews he’d been scheduled for hadn’t panned out. HR managers and construction foremen had taken one look at his shaking hands and pursed their mouths, apologetic
. Some had said the positions they were hiring for had just been filled. Others had promised to get in touch at a later date.

  None had ever called back.

  When he’d left the shelter, Elijah had told the coordinators that he’d be staying with a cousin of his. He couldn’t feed Jules the same fabrication. They had grown up together. She knew as well as he did that he had no family left but her. And Jules wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen, either.

  Sodium lights played on the angles of her face. She seemed younger somehow. It might’ve been the wig. Elijah desperately wanted to believe that she had turned the page on her old affiliations and gone back to law school. But her gaze was hard as she peered at the late-evening traffic, lips thinned in distaste. This wasn’t an idle trek. She couldn’t have heard about his getting picked up by the cops through official channels.

  She was still plugged in.

  “I’m sorry,” Elijah whispered into the silence of the car. His voice barely made it an octave higher than the rumbling of the diesel engine. Shame ate at him like gangrene. “I needed the money.” He’d needed it enough that he agreed to pummel three poor vagrants into the dirt—and for what?

  The promised spoils had been denied at the eleventh hour.

  Every punch he’d thrown had been for nothing.

  “Blow?” Jules guessed.

  He winced as the Honda lurched into motion again. “No.”

  She wasn’t wrong to assume.

  Those last few months before he went inside, he’d started making all kinds of bad calls. But seven years inside was a long time and the USP version of rehab allowed no half-measures.

  Elijah could either quit cold turkey or OD on whatever tainted product exchanged hands in the yard—laced with sawdust in the best cases, livestock deworming agents in the worst.

  He’d picked the former. If given another choice, he wasn’t sure he’d repeat the experience.

  Jules leaned softly on the gas pedal. “Good. I need you sober and clear-headed.”