Defender Cave Bear (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 1) Read online

  DEFENDER CAVE BEAR

  PROTECTION, INC: DEFENDERS # 1

  ZOE CHANT

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Tirzah’s Story

  Chapter 19

  Pete’s Story

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  CHAPTER 1

  Someone’s following me.

  Tirzah glanced behind her. The sidewalk was full of people, most briskly walking, plus a few elderly folk moving slowly and with the help of canes. No one seemed to pay any attention to her, let alone give her a sinister stare. But when she turned to face forward, she once again felt that prickling sensation at the back of her neck, as if the intensity of that unseen watcher’s gaze was actually striking her skin. She shivered.

  It wasn’t as if anyone could do anything to her on a busy city sidewalk in broad daylight. All the same, it wasn’t impossible that she could have a stalker. Someone could have found out about her little hobby. Or some creep could have just spotted her and decided that she looked vulnerable.

  She was vulnerable, now. Maybe she should go home…

  “No, screw that,” Tirzah muttered to herself, and kept on moving. “If the grannies are out for their walks, I’m finishing mine.”

  No one so much as gave her a curious glance. You had to do a lot more than talk to yourself quietly to get people’s attention in Refuge City. Screaming at yourself might get a raised eyebrow or two—

  “Excuse me!”

  It was a loud male voice. Tirzah almost jumped out of her skin.

  The man addressing her looked abashed. “Sorry to startle you. Do you love cats?”

  “How did you—” Then she smiled as she noticed his Humane Society T-shirt and clipboard. “I’m already a regular donor. But yes, I do love cats. So if you’re doing something special for them, I could chip in a bit more.”

  “We are!” Enthusiastically, he went on, “We’re building a new, state-of-the-art shelter exclusively for them. They’re very sensitive animals, and it stresses them out if they’re housed in the same building as dogs.”

  “Good for you! I mean, good for the Humane Society. Will it be a no-kill shelter?”

  He looked horrified at the very idea of it being anything else. “Of course!”

  “Sold.” Tirzah took out her purse and wrote the Humane Society a check.

  “Thank you so much…” He looked at the name on the check before carefully tucking it away. “…Tirzah. And pleased to meet you! I’m Jerry. Do you have cats yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to? Or doesn’t your landlord allow them?”

  Tirzah dodged the landlord question. “Just haven’t gotten around to it. It’s been a busy year.”

  That was certainly true. She’d intended to get a cat a year ago. And then, well, there’d been a whole lot of things she’d been too busy to do. But there wasn’t anything stopping her now.

  Though she should renovate her apartment before she got a cat. As Jerry had said, they were sensitive animals. If Tirzah herself hated having construction going on and her place all torn up so much that she’d put it off for an entire year, a cat would probably be terrified.

  But Jerry obviously knew the look of someone who didn’t have a cat and wished she did. An eager gleam lit his eyes as he asked, “Would you like to take a look at our kittens? Someone left a basket of them on a church doorstep yesterday, and we’re keeping them in here. Our very first guests!” He indicated the door behind him.

  “Oh, is this the place you’re converting into a shelter?”

  He nodded. “It’s still very much under construction, but we made some space for the kittens. Come on in and meet them. They like sleeping in the basket, so we kept it in their cage for them. It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen!”

  She knew that if she met the kittens, she very likely wouldn’t escape without adopting one. But she couldn’t resist the invitation to pet a litter of kittens—in a basket, no less! Anyway, it was about time for her to start moving on with her life.

  Jerry held the door open for her, and she wheeled her chair up the ramp.

  Tirzah knew the building well, though she’d never been inside. Locals here at Refuge City called it Sucks To Be You Square. It had last been occupied by a travel agency, Fly You To The Moon. The agency’s logo was the man in the moon, with craters that made him look like an ad for Clearasil and a distinctly sinister smile. Tirzah hadn’t been surprised when it went out of business.

  Before that, it had been a pizza parlor, Hollywood Pizza, with a logo of palm trees with pizzas instead of fronds, dripping melted cheese on to the Hollywood sign. Refuge City was famous for pizza, but East Coast style; the worst insult anyone could throw at a pizza here was that it tasted like it was from Los Angeles.

  Before that, it had been a plus-size clothing store called Bright. Its dresses made up in cheapness what they lacked in colorfastness. Tirzah had gotten an earful about that from both a plus-sized neighbor and the plus-sized neighbor’s teenage son, who had owned a number of black T-shirts with white images and writing. His skulls and angry slogans were now a bubblegum pink that was very bright indeed.

  And before that, the building had been No Pain Dentistry, which immediately had several letters of its neon sign burn out so it seemed to ominously advertise “Pain Dentistry.”

  If a cat shelter with baskets full of darling kittens couldn’t turn around the luck of Sucks To Be You Square, it had no hope.

  Tirzah winced as her chair went over a bump at the top of the ramp. She hated that jolt.

  Jerry closed the door behind her as she glanced around. As he’d said, the place was still under construction, with the old office cubicles still in place. The Humane Society hadn’t even had a chance to replace the creepy Fly You To The Moon posters with some cute cat photos. The pimply man in the moon leered down at her from every wall.

  “Okay, where’s these kittens you promised me?” Tirzah asked, grinning. “I gave you a nice fat check, so they better be adorable!”

  Only silence met her words. No answering chuckle. No meows. And then the unmistakable sound of a door being bolted.

  That eerie prickling sensation she’d felt earlier and then had been distracted from returned in full force. Tirzah twisted around.

  The man who’d lured her inside was standing in front of the closed—and padlocked—door, tauntingly dangling a key just out of reach. His contemptuous sneer was a nearly perfect match for that of the Fly You To The Moon man’s, only with less crater-acne.

  I can’t believe I fell for that, Tirzah thought. He might as well have said, “Want some kittens, little girl?”

  “You open that door right now,” she demanded. “Or I’ll scream for help.”

  Jerry—she supposed that wasn’t hi
s real name, but that was the only one she had—gestured with his other hand at the base of the door. “It’s soundproofed.”

  She looked, hoping it was a bluff. It wasn’t. That was what that bump at the top of the ramp had been: high-grade industrial soundproofing. He was right: no one would hear her scream.

  Tirzah considered the key. Jerry obviously didn’t know it, but she was capable of standing. If she stood up fast, held on to her chair, and leaned forward, she could snatch the key right out of his hand. Unfortunately, she could only stand on one leg, and she hadn’t brought her crutches with her. Why would she, when she hated them and had a perfectly good wheelchair? So even if she managed to get the key, Jerry would grab it back while she was still opening the lock, let alone opening the door and maneuvering her wheelchair out.

  “You want money? Fine. Just let me go. You can have my wallet. Here…” Tirzah reached into her purse. But she felt for her phone, not her wallet. She’d rigged her phone with an emergency button, among some other little alterations she’d made in her spare time, and could dial 911 with a single tap. The operator would hear any ensuing commotion, and would trace the call and—

  “Ah-ah-ah,” said Jerry, wagging his finger at her like she was a toddler. “Don’t try calling the police. If you do, I’ll tip them off about the real criminal they should arrest… Override.”

  Tirzah froze at the sound of the name that she’d never heard spoken aloud before, though she’d read it on a screen a million times.

  Override was the notorious hacker who broke into corporate databases, ferreted out their dirty secrets, and sent them to journalists. Override had been the catalyst for class action lawsuits against factories that dumped toxic waste near communities, and was responsible for handing actual jail terms to executives who had suppressed studies showing that their new wonder drug had the nasty little side effect of making patients drop dead.

  Override was also Tirzah’s secret identity.

  She withdrew her hand from her phone. As far as the law was concerned, it was irrelevant that she’d never stolen a cent from the multi-billion-dollar corporations she’d spied on, or that she’d only revealed their secrets if they were harming others. Hacking was illegal, plain and simple. So was corporate espionage. If the police ever found out what she did in her spare time, she’d go to jail.

  “What do you want with me?” Tirzah tried not to let her voice waver. She didn’t succeed.

  “Nothing important,” Jerry replied with an unconcerned shrug as fake as his Humane Society clipboard. “Just your password.”

  There was a pause as he waited for her to obey and she waited for him to be more specific.

  “Give it to me,” he said impatiently. “Now.”

  “Er…” Tirzah could hardly believe that a man smart enough to lure her with kittens could be that ignorant about computers. “Which one?”

  She caught the brief flash of confusion that crossed his face before he covered it up. “Both of them.”

  Tirzah felt like she was back in college and working part-time on a technical support hotline. Using the calm tone she’d used then, the one that soothed frantic students who’d spilled a venti latte over their keyboard right after they’d finished a last-minute essay that was due in an hour, she said, “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want?”

  “Just give it to me!” His voice rose angrily.

  “I have hundreds of passwords. All hackers do.”

  Jerry stared intently into her eyes, then nodded as if he’d seen that she was telling the truth. “What’s the password for your Amazon account?”

  That was random. And something about the way he was eyeing her made her skin creep even more than it was already creeping. She decided to give it to him. The worst he could do was order a widescreen TV or a whole lot of books on her credit card. “Um… Capital L numeral 4 exclamation point pound key pound key capital Z small h numeral—”

  “That’s enough,” he snarled. “You can get into everything with your phone, right?”

  She considered bluffing and saying she needed to use her computer at home, but if he didn’t already know where she lived, she didn’t want to be forced to lead him there. Tirzah nodded.

  “Last week you downloaded an encrypted file labeled Apex 3.0,” he went on.

  That was what he wanted? Out of all the valuable data she had, he wanted a file she’d come across by accident while looking for something else, downloaded out of nothing more than idle curiosity as to why it was encrypted, and had never gotten around to decrypting?

  “Did you make a copy of it?” Jerry asked.

  “Yes. I sent it to a friend of mine, a hacker who goes by—”

  “No, you didn’t,” Jerry said. She felt pinned against the back of her chair by his intense stare. “You didn’t make any copies, either. Did you decode it?”

  “No.”

  He again stared deeply into her eyes, then gave a satisfied nod. Was she really that transparent? He seemed to always know whether or not she was telling the truth.

  “Good. I want you to delete it. Can you do that from here?”

  Tirzah nodded.

  “Then do it. Now.”

  “I will,” she said. “But before I do, I want you to know that I have a dead man’s switch. If I don’t log in every day, all my files get sent to all my contacts—the New York Times, the Refuge City News, everywhere. Your file included.”

  He gave her that searching look again, then relaxed. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. Once that file is deleted, I’ll let you go.”

  Icy fear struck into Tirzah’s heart. It would’ve been easy to set up that sort of dead man’s switch. But she hadn’t done it. And just like he’d known she was lying, she intuitively knew that he was. Once she erased that file, he’d have what he wanted. And then he’d kill her to keep the secret.

  She took her phone out of her purse. Her hands trembled as she punched in the password to unlock her phone.

  Jerry smirked. He was obviously pleased that she was afraid of him. More than that, he seemed completely unafraid of her. He was standing between her and the door, but he hadn’t bothered to pull a weapon on her or even step out of her reach. He obviously thought a woman in a wheelchair was completely helpless.

  That made her fear smolder into anger. Sure, she couldn’t win a wrestling match with him. But she couldn’t have before the accident, either. And she wasn’t only Tirzah Lowenstein, disabled cyber security expert. She was also Override, hacker extraordinaire. Override fought wealthy, powerful corporations—and won! Sure, she did it by sneaking in through their virtual back doors rather than by punching them in the face, but a win was a win.

  She needed to stop thinking of herself as a woman who couldn’t even run away pitted against a man who could pin her down with one hand, and start thinking of herself as Override versus some idiot who probably kept his password on a post-it note stuck under his keyboard, reading “Password: mypassword.”

  Tirzah’s hands stopped shaking. Since Jerry was obviously good at reading her expressions, she lowered her head. Her hair fell across her face as her fingers danced over her phone.

  An ear-piercing siren went off, and a gruff voice blared out from a bullhorn, “FBI! STEP AWAY FROM THE DOOR!”

  Jerry leaped like he’d been goosed. Tirzah dropped her phone back into her purse and moved her wheelchair forward like she was in the last stretch of a Paralympics sprint. Her front wheel, plus the entire combined weight of her chair and herself, ran over her enemy’s toes.

  Now that was a bump she didn’t mind rolling over. His shriek of pain and fury was satisfying, too. Almost as satisfying as the jingle of the key falling to the floor.

  Tirzah leaned over and snatched it up.

  “Hey!” Jerry had been doubled over, but he started to straighten up.

  She spun her wheels in reverse, rolling over his toes again. The sound he made then indicated that he wasn’t going to chase her or anyone any time soon. She unlocked the
padlock and took it with her as she opened the door. Then she rolled over the soundproofing bump (not as big a bump as his toes had been) and twisted around to slam the door behind her. His second anguished scream was cut off.

  A few people were looking at her. Apparently her phone and Jerry had made enough noise to attract attention. Tirzah looked down in simulated alarm, pulled her phone out of her purse, and made sure to fumble around a bit before hitting the mute button. The cop movie she’d been playing in the directional sound mode she’d installed in her phone, so it sounded like it was coming from outside, was silenced as instantly as Jerry’s scream. The looky-loos lost interest and went on their way.

  Tirzah carefully stood up on her left leg and padlocked the door. Then she rolled sedately down the ramp, keeping an innocent smile plastered to her face. Just a harmless woman in a wheelchair enjoying the fresh air on this lovely day, nothing here to see, folks.

  Just in case Sucks to Be You Square had a rear exit, Tirzah took a roundabout way back, keeping to side streets with plenty of foot traffic, until she was satisfied that she hadn’t been followed. Only then did she turn toward home.

  By the time she got back to her apartment building, the jigsaw puzzle of the sky as seen between skyscrapers had gone from the deep blue of late afternoon to the gold and pink clouds of sunset. The old men playing chess on a folding table they’d put out on the sidewalk smiled at her, the chatting women holding grocery bags broke off their conversation to greet her, and the sullen teenager staring at his phone, hunched over to hide the bubblegum-pink anarchy symbol on his T-shirt, straightened up and wordlessly held the door open for her.

  “Thanks, Jamal,” Tirzah said. “Hi, Miriam. Hi, Khaliya. Yeah, I had a great stroll. I’d love some cookies, thanks! Just knock on my door when you bake them.”

  As she went up the ramp, Tirzah relaxed. Even if her mysterious enemy had figured out where she lived, he wasn’t likely to try ambushing her at home. Her apartment building was crowded and bustling, everyone knew everyone, and there were always plenty of people there. If she screamed, ten people would call 911 within seconds, and she’d have burly men breaking down her door only seconds after that, with grandmas and grandpas lurking behind them, ready to bash any evildoers over the head with their canes. She was as safe in her apartment as it was possible to be.