by Anne Stuart
“We’ll be discreet,” Blackheart assured her, dropping thirty on the desk. She pocketed it without looking up, tossed them a key and jerked her head in the direction of the elevators.
“She didn’t tell us the checkout time,” was all Ferris could find to say as they traveled upward in a creaking elevator that had served as a urinal in the not-distant past.
“That’s because she doesn’t expect us to stay more than an hour or two,” Blackheart said patiently, finally freeing her arm from that iron grip.
Ferris’s eyes opened wide. “Why?”
“This place caters to the hot-sheet trade, darling. They get quite a turnover, if you’ll pardon the expression.” The elevator doors creaked open, and Ferris wrinkled her nose.
“How could such a sordid place be so close to Olivia’s?” she demanded. “Isn’t there such a thing as zoning?”
“They don’t zone places like this. And the neighborhood’s on the upswing. I’m sure this place hasn’t got much time left.” He slid the key into the fifth door down from the elevator, opening it with a flourish. “After you, madame.”
Ferris cast him a worried look. “You don’t seriously expect me to—to—”
He shoved her inside, switching on the light and closing the door behind them. “No, I don’t seriously expect you to—to—” he mocked. “I can think of pleasanter places and better times. This is hardly my idea of romance.” He gave the sagging bed with its rose chenille bedspread a withering glance. “Make yourself comfortable, Mrs. Berdahofski.”
“But why? I thought Olivia would have been gone for hours now. We don’t want to run into them coming home.” She plopped herself down on the bed, alternating relief and panic washing over her. On the one hand, she was in no hurry to end her life in a fall from a San Francisco rooftop. On the other, the longer she put it off, the harder it was going to be. She didn’t want Blackheart to have to drag her, kicking and screaming, up there. She had no doubt at all that he would.
“I don’t want to run into her, either. But the desk clerk was watching the elevator when we went up—she’ll probably keep an eye on it for a while. I wouldn’t put it past her to head up this way. I want to allay her suspicions.”
“She wasn’t suspicious,” Ferris protested, bouncing slightly on the loose springs. “She didn’t give us more than a second look.”
“She wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t been giving her that helpless white-slave routine. If I hadn’t kept a grip on you, you probably would have bolted. And if I were you I wouldn’t sit on that bed—you never know what might be crawling around.”
She was off it in a flash, casting a dubious glance back. “How long do we have to wait?”
Blackheart smiled, that sinister, heartless smile. “It’s time. Come on, chicken. We’re going a-thieving.”
Even through her panic Ferris had to admire him. He picked the lock to the roof with practiced ease, using a small collection of tools that resembled a manicurist’s weapons. No one would have been faster with a key, and for a moment she wondered whether she could get him to teach her. Then she abandoned the idea as tactless. Besides, when would she have cause to break into a place? But still she paid close attention—anything to keep her mind off what was awaiting her.
The breeze was stronger up on the roof, but the reality of it was far less threatening than her imagination. The adjoining building was gloriously flush with the hotel, and a mere two feet higher.
“Put your hat and gloves on,” Blackheart instructed, doing the same himself. He looked different like that, she thought as she hastily complied. He looked like a cat, lean and lithe and dangerous, with his eyes aglow and his nerves tightly strung.
“You sound like my mother on Sunday morning,” she grumbled. The gloves were too small, the hat too big, with an unfortunate tendency to slip down over her eyes. She smiled up at him brightly. “I’m ready.”
He paused, looking down at her with a wry smile. “Okay, Poncho,” he said, pushing the hat back off her forehead. “Remember to do everything I say, without hesitation, backtalk or panic. Look ahead, look up, but never look down. You got that?”
She didn’t like the sound of that, but she nodded. “Good girl,” he said, kissing her on the forehead with unexpected warmth. “Let’s get going.”
Ferris scampered after him, up onto the adjoining building, her feet silent and just a tiny bit slippery on the tarred roof. This isn’t so bad, she told herself with a hint of pleading to the patron saint of cat burglars. I’ll be fine.
In the misty darkness the huddled shapes of the heating vents made eerie obstacles, but she kept her eyes trained on Blackheart’s narrow back, unconsciously imitating his catlike grace. He was waiting for her at the far end, and this time the neighboring building was a good two stories higher. He was standing by a rusty wrought-iron ladder.
“You first,” he offered kindly.
“Very convenient of them to have left a ladder,” she grumbled, glad now for the tight gloves. They gave her better purchase than her cold, wet palms.
“Most buildings have them. Didn’t you ever watch cop shows’?” She had paused three rungs up, and he put his hands beneath her black-denimed rear and shoved. The sound of his voice was blessedly distracting. “They’re always chasing around on roofs, and there are always convenient ladders.”
“And if there aren’t?” Her voice quavered slightly as she neared the top. She nearly collapsed on the next roof in relief, but with a superhuman effort she maintained her balance. Not dead yet.
“Then we’re in trouble,” he said with callous cheer, dropping down on the roof beside her, making no noise at all. “You’re doing okay, partner. Ever thought of taking up mountain-climbing?”
“No,” she snapped. “How many more buildings to go?”
“Only three,” he said, with genuine sadness, the swine. “And we’re just beginning to get the feel of it. I hope it’s not all as tame as this. You won’t get any proper taste of it.”
“I don’t want a proper taste of it,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want to get the damned job over with and get home.”
“You have no soul, Francesca,” he murmured, peering past her through the murky darkness. The tangle of antennas stretched against the cloudy night sky like bare tree limbs, and a look of inhuman delight lit his face. “Ah, now that’s more of a challenge.”
“Wh-what is?”
“No ladder.”
She swallowed the yelp of panic. “How are we going to get up?”
“Leave it to me.”
She only wished she could. She only wished she dared turn around and head back down, back to street level to disappear into the fog and never be seen again. South Dakota could be very pretty in February. If you liked the Arctic.
She’d thought those clothes of his fit like a second skin, but somewhere beneath them he’d managed to hide a thin coil of rope. Sudden dizziness assailed her, and she sat down abruptly on the rooftop, taking deep, covert breaths as she watched Blackheart size up the wall.
He looked back at her for a moment. “Sitting down on the job, Francesca?” he inquired.
“Just for a moment. I figure I may as well relax while I wait,” she said with deceiving calm.
Except that when had she ever deceived Blackheart? Maybe now, when he was distracted. She could only hope so. Her heart was thudding so loudly that surely he could hear if he weren’t so busy trying to figure out how to kill them both. She wouldn’t look any closer, she wouldn’t. But she had to.
Slowly she rose, edging toward the next building. Her quiet little moan was swallowed up in the night air. There was a good two feet between the two buildings. Enough for her body to bounce down, ending wedged in some narrow alleyway.
Blackheart had taken a small cylinder from his pocket and was unfolding it into
something that resembled a cross between an umbrella and an anchor. From somewhere in the murky mists of memory Ferris recognized it as a grappling hook, the kind used by mountain climbers. She watched him attach it to the end of the thin rope with practiced ease. He tossed it expertly, and it caught on the next building, some twelve feet higher than their current uneasy level.
“You want to go first?” he offered courteously, yanking on the rope a few times to ensure that it was sound.
“No, thank you,” she said, choking. “After you.”
He went up easily enough, though she could see that he was favoring his right leg. What would happen if he fell, she wondered. He’d done so once, and his father had died from a fall. Would it be better or worse if it was his body smashed against the pavement and not hers? She really didn’t know.
“Come on, chicken heart,” he called softly from the roof above her. “Time’s a-wasting.”
I can’t do it, she thought suddenly. I simply can’t do it. Taking a few steps back, she shook her head. Blackheart was up there, waiting patiently. “Come on, Francesca,” he said softly, and his voice was a siren’s lure. “I can’t leave you alone on the roof. Either come with me or I’ll have to take you back, and it will all be for nothing.”
Good, she thought, still not saying a word. She no longer cared about Trace Walker, the emeralds or anybody’s reputation. But Blackheart was looking down at her, and through the misty darkness she could see those calm, laughing eyes, daring her to come up. And she knew that if she turned and left she’d never see him again.
Some things were worth dying for, she thought dazedly, grabbing the rope. Was Blackheart one of them? Was the truth one of them? Would she ever find out?
“That’s right, love,” he crooned down at her, his voice soothing. “Just don’t look down. The rope’s more than strong enough to hold you—I’m up here to catch you when you get in reach.” He kept up the calming, gentle litany as she climbed, hand over hand, her feet bouncing off the opposite brick wall. Her face felt chilled, and she realized that tears were pouring down unbidden, tears of pure, simple terror. She couldn’t take her hands off the rope to wipe them away, and it would have done no good. They just kept coming, silent, copious, slipping down her face as she moved up the rope.
His hand on her wrist was like a vice, biting, blessedly painful, as he hauled her up the rest of the way. She kept herself stiff, not falling into his arms as she longed to do. If she did, she would start to howl and scream and he’d never get her to move another foot.
“Is this it?” she inquired, her voice calm, her face wet with the tears.
“One more,” Blackheart said. “We’ll have to jump.” She thought she’d reached the apex of terror, but she had been mistaken. She looked at him with shock and disbelief, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t think about it,” he advised. “Do it before you have time to be frightened.” He hadn’t released her wrist, and she felt herself being dragged to the opposite end of the roof.
There was a yawning abyss between the two buildings. A vast chasm of perhaps thirty inches. She couldn’t do it—she’d reached her limit. If that same space was flat on the sidewalk she would have made it with feet to spare. But if she tried to jump those thirty inches, twenty stories above the street, she would die. It was just that simple.
Blackheart jumped first, making it look ridiculously easy—a child’s hopscotch game. He stood on the other side, waiting for her. “Come on, Francesca,” he said. “Prove that you love me.”
“But I don’t,” she said, and knew it was a lie.
He smiled, unfazed. “Then prove that you don’t. Jump. For once in your life, trust me.”
It was rotten and unfair of him, and it left her no choice whatsoever. She knew if she hesitated one more moment she’d never move in the next five hundred years. She leaped, not preparing herself, and her shins hit the edge of the opposite building as she began to tumble downward.
Of course Blackheart caught her. How could she ever have had any doubts about it? One moment she was sliding down the outside of a building toward certain death, in the next his hands had clamped around her wrists and she had been hauled onto the roof before her knees had even made contact with the building. They tumbled onto the rough surface, his arms locked so tightly around her that she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t think she wanted to, anyway, and she hugged him back, closing her eyes and willing the dizziness to fade.
“Damn you,” he muttered in her ear. “Damn, damn, damn you. I ought to wring your neck. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were scared of heights?” There was no way she could answer, first because the arms crushing her didn’t give her enough breath to do so, then because his mouth had come down over hers, stopping any effort at speech.
She considered protesting for a brief moment, then decided against it. She’d really rather be kissing him than breathing anyway. Especially since he had just ensured that she would be breathing in the near future, she could give up a few moments of air in a good cause. And his mouth was so very wonderful. There was a faint, windy sort of humming in her ears, and little blue and pink stars in front of her eyes, and she wondered if she was going to come just from being kissed, and then realized that no, she was more likely simply going to pass out from lack of oxygen, when he released her. The return of her breathing almost made up for the absence of his mouth. Almost, but not quite. She lunged back for him, but he held her at arm’s length.
“None of that, wench,” he cautioned sternly. “We have work to do.”
“Oh, no, Blackheart,” she wailed. “No more rooftops.”
“No more rooftops. Everything is downhill from now on. We’re on Olivia’s building. See those trees down there? That’s her terrace.”
The tops of the trees looked bizarre twenty stories up, but Ferris took his word gratefully. “How do we get there?”
By this time she was past fear. Very slowly, very carefully he lowered her down the eight feet to Olivia’s flagstone terrace, very carefully he leaped after her, landing lightly on his cat’s feet.
“Blackheart, there’s a light on in the apartment,” she hissed, ducking behind a potted Douglas fir.
He caught her arm and dragged her back out. “Do you think Olivia worries about the electric company? It is—” he peered at his watch in the darkness “—ten forty-five. I don’t expect them back before eleven at the earliest.”
“Blackheart!” she moaned.
“More likely midnight. Regina promised she’d stall them. Come along, darling. You’ll reach street level by the service elevator.”
It sounded too good to be true. “Do you mean it, Blackheart?” she breathed as he busied himself with the terrace door. He was using an American Express card, and the door opened immediately and soundlessly.
“How did you do that?”
He grinned. “I never leave home without it. And yes, you’ll leave by the elevator, or at worst twenty flights of stairs wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“It would be sheer heaven. But what about the people in the lobby?”
“It’s a lot easier going out than in,” he explained patiently as he stepped through the sliding glass door, beckoning her to follow. “Even so, we’ll probably leave through the basement. It should be deserted this time of night.”
The apartment was still and silent, the bright lights lending a false sense of security to the whole operation. “You take the bedroom,” he ordered. “I’ll start in here. Use your gloves, and don’t disturb anything. We just want to make sure the emeralds are here, we don’t want to take them.”
Ferris nodded obediently, heading into the bedroom and shuddering at the strong reek of Olivia’s perfume. Shalimar. Wouldn’t you just know it? The room was spotlessly, compulsively neat, even the makeup and perfumes on the glass-topped dressing table in alphabetical order. The clothes i
n the closets and drawers were arranged by color and season, each shoe had its mate, and though the jewelry looked very valuable to Ferris’s untrained eye, there wasn’t an emerald among them.
Nothing between the mattress and the box spring, nothing under the bed, not even dust or a missing paperback novel. The woman was definitely sick, Ferris decided righteously.
The bathroom was an equal washout. Nothing secreted in the back of the toilet, hidden among the color-coordinated towels, concealed in the extra roll of toilet paper. There was one advantage to the demented neatness, Ferris conceded. It made searching surprisingly easy.
“Any luck?” Blackheart appeared in the doorway, and Ferris told herself she could see the pleasure and excitement jumping in his veins.
“Nothing. Except I can’t open that door.” She gestured toward the locked door hidden beneath a row of curtains.
He gave it a critical look. “Piece of cake. Does Olivia have anything as mundane as a nail cleaner?”
“Olivia’s nails don’t get dirty,” she said dourly. “Will this do?” It was a narrow emery board, and he nodded his approval.
“Go to it, kid.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Blackheart. We don’t have time for games.”
“This is a learning experience. You can do it, Francesca. And we’re staying right here until you try,” he said blandly, leaning against the doorway.
And she’d thought she was over being scared for the night. Gracing him with an obscenity she seldom used, she set to work, jabbing at the keyhole in a fine temper.
“Don’t be so rough,” Blackheart advised. “You have to coax a lock to open, tease it open. Treat it like a lover, talk to it.”
“Go to hell, Blackheart!”
“Of course, since that happens to be the way you talk to your lovers, it might be better if—”
“Oh, my God, I did it,” Ferris breathed, sitting back on her heels in amazement as the knob turned with a well-oiled click.