“Kaylee din’t show for rehearsal again today, boss.”
Hector Sanchez placed a manicured fingertip on the liquor invoice to mark his place and looked up, directing his attention to the man who had spoken. Jimmy Chains stood in the doorway, resplendent in a custom-made summerweight suit, a shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, and a multitude of the various weight gold chains from which his nickname had derived. Hector reached out his free hand for the cigar that smoldered in the ashtray and brought it to his mouth, taking a satisfying drag. “If she misses this evening’s performance, that’ll make three nights in a row. We might as well put the word out that we need two new showgirls instead of just one, because Kaylee’s obviously skipped town. Angel told me about her arrest.”
“Yeah,” Chains agreed. “I heard about that, too. And I ain’t seen her since I ran into her in the hallway outside the girls’ dressin’ room Wednesday night.”
Hector slowly lowered his cigar. “Since you did what?”
“Din’t I tell ya, boss? I thought I told ya.”
“No,” Hector said through clenched teeth. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Oh. I coulda swore I did. In any case, I remember on account of our meetin’ Wednesday night. Hell, it couldn’ta been five minutes later that me ’n her practic’ly had a collision. I still ain’t sure how we avoided it, the way she came racin’ outta that dressing room like a bat outta hell. She was sure off to somewhere in a big damn hurry.”
The motel didn’t run to telephones in the rooms, which was why Sam found himself in the phone booth outside the office, dialing home and trying to forget the look on Catherine’s face when he’d snapped the handcuffs on her to secure her to the bed frame.
The receiver at the other end was picked up. “Yowser,” came the greeting in Gary’s distinctive raspy voice.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Sambo! Where the hell are ya, man?”
“Idaho. I’ve got this showgirl handcuffed to the motel-room bed whose—”
“Well, all right, Sam! I guess I can finally quit worryin’ about you, after all. Didn’t know you went in for that bondage stuff, but if it works for you, it works for me. Is she a blonde? I bet she’s a blonde.”
“No, she’s a redhead, but listen—”
“No shit? That’s even better than a blonde. I love redheads. She the kind with freckles all over her body?”
“No, she’s got skin so white, you can see her veins through it in places.” Sonofabitch! Sam scowled at the neon sign that blinked the motel’s name off and on. This conversation wasn’t going at all the way he’d intended. It was supposed to have taken his mind off Red’s body, not detail the highlights for Gary’s entertainment. He wondered if the motel office had a cigarette machine—he could sure use a smoke to settle his nerves.
“She’s cargo, Gare,” he insisted flatly. “Merchandise I’ve got to transport back to Miami. Her bond is gonna be our ticket to the lodge.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “Damn, boy, we gotta get you a life.”
“Hey, I’ve got a life!”
“No, you’ve got a job,” Gary disagreed. “You work like a dog, you fuss over me, and that’s about it. When’s the last time you had a date? I’ve got a healthier social life than you do. And it’s for damn sure my sex life is livelier.”
“Yeah, well, just as soon as I get us the lodge maybe I’ll find me a nice woman who bakes cookies and likes kids. Stranger things have happened.”
Once again silence filled the line. Then, “Wait a minute, let me see if I’ve got this straight.” Gary’s raspy voice was incredulous. “You’ve got a redheaded showgirl, who by definition probably has tits like torpedoes and legs up to here, chained to your bed. But you think, if you’re really lucky, that maybe somewhere down the road you’ll get to meet Betty Crocker? Well, yeah, sure, I can see where that’d be preferable.” Gary made a noise like a steam engine about to blow. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? Go for the showgirl!” A moment later he said quietly, “Or is she one of the violent ones? She do something really ugly?”
“Nah. She just thugged a car.”
“Then I don’t see the problem. Man, the first thing this kid’d do is let her know I can still get it up with the best of ’em, and she can ignore the wheelchair unless it’s to climb aboard. On second thought, go for Betty. Bring the redhead home for me.”
Sam made an involuntary sound of dissent, which, to his eternal disgust, Gary immediately latched on to.
“Ah. Like that, is it? I’d like to meet this woman. I say go for it, Sambo. For once in your life go for it. I’m not suggesting you have to marry the woman. Frankly though, bud, your criteria for what constitutes a good date is kinda skewed, if you ask me. Homemade cookies are overrated, man—trust me on this. You can find a decent bakery just about anywhere you go.”
7
BOBBY GENTLY RESEATED the telephone receiver and went in search of Kaylee. He found her in Catherine’s bedroom, giving herself a bikini wax. Wincing as he watched the wax strip get ripped away from the vulnerable area, he said, “You aren’t gonna believe what I just found out, baby.”
“What’s that?” She rent a second strip from the other thigh.
“How can you do that?” he demanded. His eyes watered just watching her, and he found himself pressing his thighs together and hunching over a bit. “Damn, Kaylee, doesn’t that hurt?”
“Not really. It’s kind of like plucking your eyebrows—it hurts the first few times you do it, but then it toughens right up.” She tossed the used wax strips into the bedside wastebasket and reached for some lotion to soothe the newly exfoliated area. Then she looked up at him. “What aren’t I going to believe?”
“Huh?” He forced his gaze from the spread of her smooth white thighs and the sweet, silk-covered delta at their apex. When his eyes finally rose all the way up to meet hers it was to find her watching him with a Don’t-even-think-about-it-Buster expression. Man, she could hold a grudge. “Oh. Scott called—my computer guy? You’re never going to believe how McKade and your sister are traveling back to Miami.”
“He found them?” Kaylee jumped up off the bed. “Where are they?”
“In Idaho.”
“Idaho?” Kaylee’s eyebrows drew together over her slender white nose. “What on earth are they doing in Idaho?”
“They’re traveling by—you’re gonna love this—Greyhound bus.”
Kaylee smacked his chest with the flat of her hand, shoving him back a step. “Dammit, Bobby, quit joking around! I’m worried about her.”
“I’m not kidding, baby. They’re on a Greyhound bus. Actually, this is their second bus—something happened to make them either miss or get kicked off the first one.”
“Catherine!” Forgetting for the moment that she was through with men in general and Bobby in particular, Kaylee reached out and squeezed his forearm. She laughed, that rich, deep-in-the-throat, tickled-to-death gurgle that never failed to elevate Bobby’s blood pressure. “She’s slowing him down. Cat’s really smart, and she thinks fast on her feet. She woulda made a great con artist if only she weren’t so damn determined to have a Brady Bunch life.” Kaylee shook her head, mourning her sister’s lost opportunities. “When we were kids she always came up with the most unique stuff to get us—well, me, mostly—outta trouble.” She grinned in remembrance. “I bet she’s pissed as all get out, and when Cat gets mad—look out.” Recalling herself, Kaylee let her hand slide away from Bobby’s arm, took a giant step backward, and gave him a look. “So what do we do next?”
“Catch the three o’clock puddle jumper at Boeing Field, rent a car in Pocatello, and track them down.”
Hector Sanchez hung up the phone and sat staring at it in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then he fished a cigar out of the humidor, clipped off its end, and lighted it. Muted laughter filtered through the office wall as this week’s headliner expertly worked the audience.
A bail enforcer named McKade had Kaylee in cust
ody and was bringing her back to Miami to stand trial on the auto-theft charge. Sanchez could make sense of that part, although he was frankly far from happy to hear it. But Greyhound? Why the fuck would the bounty hunter transport her by bus?
It was a question to which there might never be an answer, and Hector supposed it didn’t actually matter anyway, since in the long run it would undoubtedly work to his benefit. If McKade had done the normal thing and flown her back, most likely they would have arrived by now, which meant Kaylee would already be in the county jail. And the minute she was in the lockup, his own chances of getting to her were considerably diminished. This was not an acceptable possibility. Kaylee MacPherson was a question mark that needed to be erased. He had an excellent life going for him here, and he’d be damned if he’d allow some bimbo showgirl to screw it up for him. God only knew what song the worthless bitch would sing to the DA if she thought it would save her own sorry butt.
Well, it wasn’t a scenario worth considering, let alone expending perfectly good energy worrying about, because it was simply not going to happen. She was being transported cross-country by bus, and that opened a whole world of opportunities to remove once and for all the threat she represented.
He sure wished there was someone other than Chains to send, though. Jimmy Chains Slovak was dumb as a brick. As Tropicana’s head of security that was of no particular import—it had, in fact, a certain advantage. He was loyal and easily manipulated. Tell him what needed to be done and Chains did it without question. As an independent thinker, however, the man was a dead loss. Hector shuddered to think of all that could go wrong with Chains in command.
Any way he looked at it, though, Sanchez knew he didn’t have a helluva lot of choice. It wasn’t as if he had mob connections or could just go to the friggin ’ Yellow Pages and look under Hit Men when he wanted a job taken care of. And Jimmy had performed competently with the Alice Mayberry affair. Hector would simply have to trust he’d do equally well with the Kaylee MacPherson problem.
But this time Chains would be far away, beyond Hector’s ability to control, and solely dependent upon his own brainpower.
It was enough to scare the crap out of any right-thinking individual.
“You’re wearing those?” Sam watched in fascinated horror as Catherine stood on first one foot and then the other while she worked a pair of three-and-a-half-inch-stiletto-heeled shoes onto her feet. Jesus, it was bad enough when she’d walked out of the bathroom in that jade green spandex microdress; all it needed to make them totally conspicuous was the addition of a pair of glittering gold fuck-me shoes. When she didn’t so much as glance in his direction, he stepped closer and wished immediately that he hadn’t. She smelled great. “How come you’re not wearing your Keds?”
Catherine looked right through him as she brushed past to the suitcase on the bed. Rummaging through it, she pulled out the huge bag of toiletries.
Sam watched her every move. “Ah, I get it. The silent treatment, huh?”
She brushed by him once again to return to the bathroom. Since she didn’t bother to close the door, he followed in her wake and propped a shoulder against the jamb as he watched her lean into the sink. The skintight dress rode up the back of her thighs until it was just a hairbreadth this side of legal, and he didn’t have to stretch his imagination at all to visualize the little red tattoo on her ass. He resolutely blinked the apparition away while she shook a bottle of foundation and tipped some out onto a small sponge.
Sam watched in increasing dread as the war paint mounted up. When she flipped her hair upside down and started doing something to it that resulted, once she was right-side up again, in a sizable French-looking, I’ve-just-been-screwed hairdo with pieces tumbling free all over the place, he could no longer hold his tongue.
“This is because I cuffed you to the bed, isn’t it?” He shoved upright from the doorjamb. “Well, I’m sorry I had to do that, but it was necessary. Hell, I turned you loose the minute I got back.”
She blew by him again, and he slugged the doorframe in frustration, then shook out his fingers and swore. Sucking on a split knuckle, he glowered at her. Dammit, what was the matter with him anyway? He had nothing to apologize for. He was doing his job, and if Miz MacPherson didn’t like the way he did it, that was too damn bad. She was his prisoner, not his houseguest.
“Pack your suitcase,” he snapped, stepping back into the main body of the room and fumbling the fastenings closed on his own bag. He carried it to the motel-room door and impatiently waited as she slowly complied.
An hour and a half later they arrived at Darcy’s café. It was loud with conversation and clattering dishes, and Catherine blinked at the sudden onslaught of noise as she attempted to shrug out from under Sam’s proprietary arm. It was amazing how fast one grew accustomed to quiet surroundings.
She still hadn’t spoken one word more than necessary, and the café where he’d taken her for breakfast was a world removed in decibel level from Darcy’s. They’d eaten without speaking, their attention either directed at their plates or out the plate-glass window. And the silence that she’d instigated apparently seemed perfectly workable to Sam.
But from the moment they’d approached Darcy’s café, where they were to catch the bus, he had been acting like the soon-to-be-husband he’d yesterday convinced the café personnel that he was. He hugged her to his side and held her there with the casual splay of one big hand over her hip. Discreetly, she dug an elbow into his side in an attempt to gain herself a little space.
His arm tightened warningly. She left off trying to squirm free, but casually swung one of her spiked heels over his instep and bore down hard.
He bent his head and lovingly nuzzled her ear, lipping the lobe into his mouth and giving it a gentle tug with his teeth. “You don’t get that friggin’ thing outta my foot, Red,” he growled, “I’m gonna have to get mean.”
Catherine tried to crush his jaw by sharply hunching her shoulder to her ear. To her satisfaction his mouth moved away, but not without a final blast of warm breath and a quick flick of his tongue at her lobe.
“And this is supposed to be something new?” she demanded. She reluctantly removed the spiked heel from his instep, cursing her heightened awareness of him. By rights he should leave her stone cold. But except for the crop of goose bumps that rose all along her right side in response to the feel of his breath insinuating itself down the sensitive whorls of her ear, she was anything but. Nervously, she tried again to step away, but his grip merely tightened until she found herself plastered from shoulder to calf against unyielding, heat-producing muscle and bone.
He tilted down his chin to look at her, cupping hers in his free hand and watching with apparent fascination the contrast his dark-skinned thumb made as it rubbed back and forth against her pale flesh. “Honey, I’ve been a pussycat up until now. You don’t even want to make me mad.”
Catherine managed to keep her expression impassive. What she wanted was to hurt him. Badly. She longed to rake her nails down his arrogant face, to bite and punch and kick and scream until he begged for mercy. She had all this impotent rage bottled up inside of her, and it was making her feel slightly crazed.
“You realize this is war, don’t you, McKade?” For a couple of hours yesterday she had nearly forgotten that. The truth had been driven home like a stake through a vampire’s heart when he’d calmly produced his handcuffs and left her manacled to the bed frame while he’d gone out to make a phone call.
Sam pressed his thumb against her lower lip. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, MacPherson. Oh. Excuse me—Miz MacPherson, I mean.” His voice was a rough murmur, and Catherine could have ground her teeth right down to the gum line. She just knew that to an outsider he looked as if he were spouting sweet nothings in her ear.
She had never in her life experienced such a feeling of helplessness as when she was locked to that bed last night. She wasn’t accustomed to being without defenses—one way or another she had always managed to
take care of her own problems, and everyone else’s as well, and she knew herself to be a capable, competent woman. But with a single click of a chrome handcuff, she’d become completely vulnerable.
She wouldn’t forgive him for that.
She had donned Kaylee’s look-at-me apparel with definite defiance this morning. The shoes were killing her after that trek up and down the highway, and the makeup and big hair were embarrassing, to say the least, but she would live with it because she knew it made her increasingly conspicuous—if not stand out like a hooker at a Baptist wedding—which in turn drove Sam right up the wall. And that had become a reward all its own.
So, instead of responding to Sam’s insolence, she jerked her head away from his caressing fingers, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and turned as far away from him as his hold allowed. Pointedly ignoring him, she watched the crowd.
That’s when she saw the woman using American Sign.
Actually there were two of them, but a suitcase rested by one woman’s feet, which made Catherine believe she might be catching the same bus that they were. Reading their conversation, she soon saw that this was so. With a lift of her hopes, Catherine tried to decide how to use the woman’s knowledge of sign language to her own advantage.
She couldn’t tell from the hand conversation which of the women was deaf. Hopefully, the one traveling with them could speak; communication between the deaf and the hearing was difficult without the spoken word.
“Five minutes, folks,” the bus driver suddenly called out.
Once again Catherine tried to pull free of Sam’s grasp. “I have to use the bathroom.”
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