Beyond the Rules

by Doranna Durgin

  “Probably,” Owen agreed. “The question is, under what circumstances? When he left here, he seemed to think his troubles were over. I’m not sure events support that belief.”

  “Just because his troubles slopped over to us doesn’t mean he wasn’t right,” Kimmer said. “You can’t believe he’d hesitate even for a second if, for instance, Hammy Hands sidled up to him and wanted my phone number.”

  But Owen shook his head. “Too many loose ends on this one. Why the story about a nonexistent recording? Whatever’s going on, it’s more than we first thought. Wolchoski hails from Pittsburgh—no doubt the other two came up with him. He certainly didn’t acquire them in this area.”

  “Or maybe we’re overreacting.” Kimmer shrugged. “Wolchoski is fine and I’ve gotten nothing but a lame threatening phone call. There’s no question Hank didn’t tell us everything…but that doesn’t mean it’s a big deal. Hank is a coward at heart, like all bullies. He’s not the sort to pal around with anyone but other insignificant bullies.”

  Rio touched a hand to his battered face, his expression troubled. He hesitated on the words, but finally said, “He’s your brother.”

  She knew what he meant, knew he couldn’t understand how she could walk away without knowing for sure. After a moment and a glance at Owen, she said, “I’ll give him a call. I honestly don’t see him as being involved in anything heavy and I don’t think our Pittsburgh goonboys expected anything near the resistance they’ve encountered.”

  Owen gave her one of those tight smiles. “I’m absolutely certain of that. However, I do think there are enough inconsistencies that we should follow through. We need to catch these guys if they’re still in the area, and we need to know we’ve gotten to the bottom of whatever’s happening.”

  “If only so we can stop looking over our shoulders,” Kimmer agreed.

  Owen cleared his throat. “About Shara Ingleswood—”

  Kimmer shook her head, wishing she could be entirely dismissive. “Not about to see the big picture. I rattled her cage a little, but I’m not sure it was enough.”

  Rio said, “She still has to get her story past her producer and the station manager. And she doesn’t have anything other than the initial film—already old news.”

  “We won’t assume,” Owen said dryly. He flipped the folder closed, glancing at Kimmer. “You’ve got your copy of this. I’ll keep you updated. Frankly, I think we can best make use of you at this point by dangling you out as bait.”

  Rio’s voice turned flat and disapproving. “You’re going to turn her into a stalking goat.”

  A what? This from Mr. Crossword Lover? Kimmer giggled, breaking the tension of the moment. At Rio’s startled look, she clapped a hand over her mouth. From behind it, she said, “Stalking horse. Or scapegoat. Take your pick.”

  “If it gets a giggle out of you, I think I’ll stick with stalking goat.” He looked at her as though Owen weren’t right there, amusement in his almond eyes.

  Kimmer wrinkled her nose. “Baa-aaa.”

  “That’s a sheep,” Rio observed as he pulled his feet back and stood up. “It’s more like beh-ehh.”

  “And you know this because you’ve been around so many goats?”

  “No.” He looked down at her, and his expression went from lighthearted to serious in a heartbeat. “I know this because I’m usually the stalking goat.”

  And now Kimmer was the stalking goat. Rio just wished she’d take it more seriously. He wished she’d take it all more seriously, including the potential danger to her brother. She wanted to believe the latest round of threats and goonboys weren’t as much trouble as they thought they were. She wanted to believe her brother too shallow and ineffective to have gotten caught up in anything serious.

  To believe otherwise was to face too many hard things. How she felt about her family. How she felt about herself for feeling that way.

  At least she’d taken the lead in searching the house when they returned to it, checking both exterior and interior for signs of incursion before putting her SIG away to hunt up Hank’s phone number while Rio pestered OldCat in the kitchen. The house itself hadn’t even been locked, a decision Rio couldn’t disagree with. The old house had nothing but deadbolts that Kimmer rarely used in this neighborly rural area. If the BGs wanted in, they’d get in. There was no point in forcing them to break a window or a doorjamb. Now that they were home, those deadbolts were slammed home. The BGs could still get in—but by the time they did, they’d have a welcoming committee.

  Odd how things worked out. Here he was, sliding into the old CIA frame of mind—working out contingencies on a moment-to-moment basis, trying to think one step ahead of the BGs without having a handle on their precise motive, trusting no one. Behind that casual conversation in Owen Hunter’s office, the CIA part of Rio had been eyeing Kimmer’s boss with perfectly hidden distrust, wondering what he wasn’t telling Kimmer and just how high he’d dangle Chimera in front of the BGs.

  Okay, he hadn’t previously thought of them as BGs. That was Kimmer’s doing, one of her smart-ass all-purpose nicknames for the bad guys.

  But other than that, it didn’t seem like much had changed. He hadn’t planned to be back in the case-officer frame of mind—ever—but with Kimmer in his life, the change had been worth it. The thing was…

  He wasn’t sure just how much Kimmer was in his life after all. He wasn’t sure she was ready, no matter how she tried.

  Gah. He needed to do a crossword puzzle.

  After this phone call.

  Rio turned OldCat upside down and patted his pouchy old cat belly—quickly, so the animal wouldn’t have the time to consider his dignity—and then put him gently on the floor as Kimmer’s phone call went through to Hank’s household, a number she’d no doubt never expected to use. With poise he thought remarkable given how tightly her white-knuckled fingers gripped the phone, she identified herself and asked for Hank, putting her spine against the kitchen counter.

  Earlier she’d offered Rio the extension. He’d declined, figuring he could follow the conversation from the outside in. It didn’t turn out to be hard.

  “When do you expect him back?” A mild eye roll for his benefit, to indicate the person on the other end of the phone didn’t know. “Is this Susan?” Hank’s wife, seldom mentioned during his time here other than the moments he had tried to trowel guilt on Kimmer for her complete absence from their lives. “Yes, this is Kimmer. Hank’s sister. I just wanted to make sure…everything’s okay there? No, no reason it shouldn’t be. I just thought…Hank seemed worried about some things when he was visiting this last week and I thought…no? Nothing?” A long pause. “No…no, I’m not trying to poke my nose in—” She’d forgotten Rio was there, now, her voice growing hard in spite of her obvious effort to remain light. “I just wanted to be sure…yes, I’m sure you have plenty to worry about already…no, no message.” Another brief moment passed. Her hand tightened another notch around the phone and Rio began to fear for it. “You do as you choose. I can’t imagine why he came up to visit me, either.” And for a sign-off she used a rude phrase in Japanese that she’d somehow picked up from Rio.

  Hmm. He thought he’d been careful about that one.

  Carefully, so very carefully, she thumbed the off button and set the phone on the kitchen counter. She picked up her bottled Frappuccino, took a long gulp and deliberately returned it to the counter. “Well,” she said, her voice remarkably even, “my knack doesn’t work so well over the phone, but I’d say that woman is more worried about protecting her happy little family from my influence than any trouble Hank might be in.”

  Rio made a cage of his arms, a hand on the counter on either side of her. Not that he’d ever consider Kimmer truly caged…but she let him, and she sighed as he put his cheek next to hers, a touch she leaned in to. “I’m sorry,” he said, even as he greedily inhaled whatever spicy, luxurious thing she’d used to tame her hair this time. And there was her ear. So close. Such a perfect little curv
e.

  But Kimmer’s mind was on other things altogether. “No surprise that Hank married someone as unpleasant as he is.” She took a deep breath. “But we know what we needed to know. He’s not missing, he’s not hiding in the basement, and whatever’s going on up here doesn’t seem to have any ripple effect down there. Nothing makes any more sense than it did, but I don’t see any reason to change our plans.”

  Very close to her ear, Rio murmured, “Beh-ehh.”

  In the next few days Kimmer and Rio managed to dine out at least once a day. They went to Geneva and took in a movie, and then they hung around in the video rental store having long discussions about which movie to rent. They kept an eye out for any sign of Shara Ingleswood’s story, and they toured the Fox Run and Torrey Ridge vineyards and tasted good wine. They made sure Kimmer was visible and apparently carefree. They also made sure her S&W snub nose, her war club and a variety of knives were always at hand, and always undetectable.

  No one came after them as they walked the vineyards. No one accosted them outside the various eating establishments they chose. No one chased after Kimmer on her early morning run and no one followed them into the drugstore—although that, Kimmer told Rio, was perfectly understandable. No self-respecting goonboy would hang out by the tampons.

  Her house was searched not once but twice. Kimmer took advantage of the mess to weed out some underwear that no longer suited her and to donate books to the library. Rio bought a new puzzle book to replace the one the intruders had ripped to pieces.

  No one bothered OldCat.

  And now they sat outside the ice-cream shop on a spring day that had started beautifully but had dull, hazy clouds piling up, contemplating the situation and their next steps. Kimmer sat at the bench of the picnic table provided there and Rio plunked his butt down on the tabletop, his feet resting on the bench beside her.

  “Maybe,” Rio said, licking wildly colored sherbet from the side of his waffle cone with enough of a gaze directed her way to let her know he’d seen her watching, “you should head down to—”

  “No!” Kimmer startled even herself with her vehement reaction. She nibbled a careful bite of cold pralines ’n’ cream and pressed it up to the roof of her mouth, letting the ice cream melt while the praline chunks remained behind. Once she’d chewed them, she turned back to Rio. “I checked, remember? Everything’s fine down there.”

  Rio’s response was mild, as he might well keep it given the smudge of bright green sherbet along his bottom lip. Yeah, kissable. She wondered if he did that on purpose. The breeze stirred his startlingly fair hair, threatening to whisk their napkins away from the picnic table. Rio snatched them, weighing them down with his wallet. “It’s worth a try. You might see something that Hank and his wife don’t. Or you might stir things up, push them into making some sort of move.”

  And if she hadn’t wanted to avoid that area so badly, it might even have made good sense. But…

  She didn’t.

  “It’s been quiet for days,” she told him. “They’ve given up. I’m beginning to think we were right all along. We didn’t underestimate these guys. We overestimated them. That Hank is still alive and kicking pretty much proves the point. It’s obvious there are more than just the two dead guys involved, but if they were truly bad-ass BGs, Hank would have been gone the minute his SUV waddled back home.”

  “There’s one way to make sure,” Rio suggested, not bothering to be subtle about it.

  “There are plenty of ways to make sure,” Kimmer shot back at him. She bit off more of the ice cream than she’d meant to, and struggled with a surge of brain freeze. Dammit. “I’m tired of the whole goat role, that’s for sure. It’s gotten boring, and boring is dangerous. How’s Wolchoski doing in county, anyway? Might be it’s time for another visit. He might be bored, too. Might feel like talking.” It was time to stir the pot…or walk away from it and put herself in the roster for another assignment. She often had periods of inactivity—Owen tended to hold her aside for those times when her knack of reading people would be truly crucial—but the circumstances of this one had made her antsy.

  But when Rio nodded, his expression had grown more distant. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking…didn’t have a clue. Only that it made her uneasy. It finally occurred to her to ask. “What?”

  And he looked at her with that heartbreakingly honest matter-of-fact way he had and said, “I’m having a hard time with the intensely ironic juxtaposition of your reluctance to connect with your family when it’s killing me to stay away from mine.”

  Pow. Kimmer’s gut flinched from those words, feeling them like a physical blow. She fought to swallow the dab of ice cream in her mouth and somehow managed. Finally managed, too, a few paltry words of understanding. “I’m sorry.”

  Not that she felt guilty over how she’d handled Hank. Not that she intended to do anything differently. But she understood, looking at his face, how truly different it was for him. Couldn’t imagine it, but understood that somehow it could be different. Rio looked back at her, his brows drawn enough to shadow troubled eyes.

  “Why don’t you call them?” Kimmer said. “It’s been days.”

  “Too many days,” Rio said, and finally noticed that a splotch of bright green sherbet had landed on the knee of his jeans. He scrubbed briefly at it with a finger and let it go. “They must be overwhelmed.”

  “They’d have called if there was more trouble?” Kimmer asked, uncertain. Nothing on which to base her guess but secondhand acquaintance and that brief glimpse of another way of life.

  Rio nodded. “I’d have heard. Caro again, probably. Dammit, I’ll bet they’re trying to protect me. Since I got back—”

  Kimmer looked askance at the thought of anyone feeling the need to protect Rio. Tall beyond tall, sturdy with his Danish genes, tempered by years in the CIA. He looked down from his perch on the table and saw her, gave a wry smile of acknowledgment. “They’re my parents,” he said. “And it hasn’t been so very long since they wondered if I wasn’t going to be anything more than a black star on the wall at Langley.”

  CIA officers killed in the line of duty and a wall of anonymous stars. Kimmer had been there once, with Owen. Briefly, as a visitor. But the wall had made an impression.

  “Even once they knew I’d live…I think it shook them up, seeing me like that.” Rio looked away from her, a rarity. “Rehab took a while. I wasn’t a pretty sight.”

  She snorted, unable to keep her natural irreverent humor from coming through. “I find that hard to believe.”

  That got him. He looked down at her with a flash of a grin. “Flattery will get you lots of places,” he said. “But you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “So call them,” she repeated.

  “Actually,” he said, watching her carefully enough so she knew he was waiting for her reaction, “I’m thinking about going home.”

  Chapter 8

  I think you should, she’d said. Never mind the fear that trickled through her at the thought. What if they decided they needed him? What if he decided they needed him? Or maybe he’d even find the contrast between his loving family and his loner girlfriend with her twisted sense of humor to be too great.

  What if he doesn’t come back?

  Not that he’d said any such thing. Not that he’d even earned that kind of distrust.

  But Kimmer had learned not to make assumptions.

  She heard the zip of his weekender bag. The flicker of relief that he’d packed such a small bag was short-lived; half his things were still in storage with his brother. Before she knew it she lingered in the doorway to the bedroom, watching him stuff a few last things into the side pocket of the carryon. He glanced up, saw her and straightened. “Hey,” he said, full of reassurance. “They said she’s doing fine. They’ve just been so busy…they can use another hand to get the household changes sorted out. And since my brother’s still trying to run a business…” He shrugged. “If nothing else I can get a few boats i
nto the water while he handles family stuff.”

  Kimmer stiffened her spine. She hadn’t meant for him to see that wistful look, but then, she’d never truly been able to hide herself from him. “Your grandmother lives with your parents,” she said, in the manner of someone repeating what they’ve been told but not truly believing it.

  Rio grinned. “Oh, yeah. For as long as I can remember. She’s got her own little section of the house and to us kids it was like an inner sanctum.” He finished stuffing something into his bag that probably shouldn’t have been stuffed at all and stopped again, this time his look more serious. “I wouldn’t be going if Owen didn’t agree with you. Whatever was happening here, it’s not happening anymore. The BGs convinced themselves that the keychain stick doesn’t exist.”

  “Either that or they decided I wasn’t going to do anything with it anyway.” Kimmer realized she’d crossed her arms over her stomach. Good God. The next step would be going fetal. None of that around here.

  With much determination she unfolded her arms and compromised by leaning on the doorjamb and crossing one ankle over the other. “He’s in agreement. Another discreet visit to Wolchoski, and Hunter is done with this. We know these guys are from Pittsburgh—no surprise since Hank is the connection—and we know they want a keychain stick that doesn’t exist. We don’t know to whom the damn recording was supposed to be a threat, and we’ll probably never find out.” She shrugged. “Well, we could find out, but Hunter’s not going to waste man hours on something that no longer poses a threat. They already sent all our info to Pittsburgh. Let them deal with their own dirt.”

  “And Hank?”

  Kimmer had that one ready. “I’ll call him this evening, after I see Wolchoski. His wife will blow me off again, but if things are still in the clear down there, I think we’re safe to walk away.” Hank might end up in trouble with the law, but he’d earned it. “Owen’s already got something else in mind for me.” And for you. But she didn’t say the words. She wanted him back down here on his own, not prodded into obligation.