Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Hard to see someone like Socks having the contacts to steal the kind of high-end antiquities Smith-White sold us,” Risa said. Water gurgled lightly as she raised the bottle to drink. A lemony tang spread over her tongue. She gave Shane a grateful look and decided she might forgive him for being overly protective. “Where would Socks find that quality of goods? Ditto for Cherelle. What about Tim?”

  Niall grunted. “I doubt that Timothy Edgar Seton had them lying around the house. A really pretty face and a badly spotted soul. Underage drinking and gambling. Statutory rape and accessory to armed robbery. No high school graduation, but he went to the Gentleman’s Deal, an expensive training ground for casino dealers and ‘escorts.’ Dealt blackjack, slept with women who paid his bills, buddied around with the hard-asses. His mother is Miranda Caroline Seton, never married, lives at 113 Oasis Lane in a house registered to a rental company. Father not listed on birth certificate. No other relatives. Seton lists his mother’s place as his home address. Driver’s license. No car.”

  Ian made a sound of disgust. “I’m not seeing any road to gold in Tim’s background.”

  “Does credit count?” Niall asked. “Seton has four active credit cards. All maxed and late.”

  “I’m shocked,” Shane said. With a sharp motion he twisted off the top of another bottle of water. “Where are the bills sent?”

  “His mother’s place.”

  Shane took a long swallow of water. He was still trying to wash the taste of Shapiro’s apartment and Cline’s death out of his mouth. By tomorrow, cop reports would be entered on the central computer. Whatever the cops knew, Shane would know, thanks to a boyhood spent trying to please—and surpass—Bastard Merit, king of the hackers.

  “Cherelle Leticia Faulkner,” Niall said, picking up another sheet of paper. “She’s done a few nights with the county mounties for vagrancy, prostitution, shoplifting, petty grifting. The kind of childhood that a muckraking tabloid would love to cry croc tears over. Foster homes, abuse, more foster homes, suspected abuse, finally landed in an Arkansas trailer park and stuck for almost eight years. She ran away at seventeen with a drug salesman who sold illegal stuff along with the legal. After that she dropped off the scope. No marriage license. No known kids.”

  Risa didn’t realize she was rubbing her temples again until Shane stroked his hand over her hair. Listening to Niall’s deep, slightly rough voice recite the bare statistics of Cherelle’s life made Risa’s throat ache. Nowhere did she hear the laughter or see the sparkling mischief and lightning quickness of a much younger Cherelle.

  “I’ll go back to the Seton house at dark,” Ian said. “I don’t expect to find anything, but it’s a base we have to cover.”

  Niall looked at Shane, “You’re sure these three jokers were the source of your Druid gold?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it hold up in court?”

  “Not with Cline dead. But I’m sure.”

  Niall’s mouth turned down. Things that go bump in the night. He had learned not to question them. “Right. So we’re sitting here with four gold pieces the Brits are screaming at Uncle Sam to hand over.”

  “What’s their proof of ownership?” Risa asked.

  “They’re cobbling it together as fast as they can.”

  “They better cobble up a beaut,” Shane said. “In the absence of clear provenance, possession counts for a lot.”

  “I’ll let you explain that to April Joy.”

  Shane’s dark eyebrows went up. April Joy was one of Uncle Sam’s up-and-comers in the murky sphere of geopolitics. She was intelligent, pragmatic, beautiful, and utterly ruthless when the job required it. Given the people she played with, that was most of the time. A few months ago she had tried to recruit him for a sting against the Red Phoenix triad that involved using Tannahill Inc. as a laundry for dirty money. He had declined. She hadn’t liked it, but she didn’t have any leverage on him, so she’d taken his refusal like an adult.

  “I thought she was working on Asian gangs that were penetrating the U.S.,” Shane said.

  “She is.”

  “What does that have to do with Celtic gold?”

  “Good question,” Niall said. “Be sure to ask her if you see her.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Shane said. “I’m not getting in that tiger’s face unless she gets in mine first.”

  “Your mother didn’t raise any dumb ones,” Niall said, grinning.

  “Actually, it was my father who taught me how the world really works.”

  The careful neutrality of Shane’s voice made Risa wince. She had always felt she’d missed something by not knowing her parents. Then again, from what she’d heard about Shane’s father, maybe she was better off.

  “What’s the basis of the British claim on the gold artifacts we bought?” Risa asked.

  “Probability,” Niall said. “For damn sure they didn’t originate in, say, Africa.”

  “If origin was the only requirement for ownership, the contents of the world’s museums would undergo massive redistribution,” Risa said.

  “That’s why we have politicians and bureaucrats—they swap favors and tell us peons where to send the goodies.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Shane said. “I’m not sending that gold anywhere on the say-so of some D.C. political hack who wants a free tour of London in return for sticking it to me over the gold.”

  “That’s why you wanted me to bring the goodies back, isn’t it?” Niall asked, smiling.

  Shane’s answering smile would have looked good on a crocodile with a full belly. “From time to time Rarities Unlimited has to trade favors with governments in order to survive. I don’t.”

  “Sure you do, boyo. You just haven’t been brought to it yet. Hell, even your old man finally learned to bend his knee to Uncle Sam.”

  “I’ll savor that image all the way to Sedona.”

  Risa sat up suddenly. “Sedona? I’m going with you.”

  “I never doubted it.” Shane’s mouth turned down. He didn’t want her to go, but his instincts said not only that she would go but that she should.

  “What’s in Sedona?” Ian asked.

  “The last known address for Cherelle Leticia Faulkner.”

  Chapter 46

  Sedona

  November 4

  Evening

  From the air, Sedona looked like a jeweled spiderweb flung across the black velvet land. The small airport was on top of a mesa, connected to the town by a steep, zigzagging road. While Shane discovered the limits of the local cellular connections, Risa drove the rental car—truck, actually—down the narrow road to the main highway.

  “Right,” Shane said into his cell phone/computer. “We’re on our way to Camp Verde. No lights followed us down from the airport.”

  “Keep looking, boyo,” Niall said. “I don’t want a second dead body to turn up with your name on it.”

  “I’m touched. Is Ian checking out the Oasis address?”

  “Been there. Done that. Nobody home. He vetted the place from stem to stern. Nothing except signs that she left in a big hurry.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Cesar Firenze Marquez, aka Socks, is the lead on everyone’s news show. The TV folks are especially proud of their footage.”

  “Why do you think I had the copies made?” Shane asked. “TV news would lead with a dead cow rotting if they had film of it.”

  Niall laughed. “The cops are getting calls right and left from people claiming they saw Socks. If our boy is still in town, he’ll be walking real small to avoid attention.”

  “What’s the official police take on Cline’s death?”

  “Officially they’re exploring all leads with great diligence.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “They wouldn’t give a shit if a TV crew hadn’t been there to record the body,” Niall said. “Cline wasn’t on the cops’ Ten Most Loved list.”

  “Do you want me to send the plane back to Vegas?”

/>   “No. Dana said to pull out all the stops on this one. Having a pilot and plane at your beck and call is just one of the stops.”

  Shane grunted. “Good thing I can afford it.”

  Niall’s laughter was clear in his voice, “We’re keeping that in mind.”

  With a flick of his thumb, Shane disconnected. Another flick shifted his unit to computer function. He pulled a slender stylus from a clip on the side of the unit and went to work on the information that Rarities, via Factoid, was funneling into his computer as fast as they uncovered new data.

  “I didn’t know you were allergic to goldenrod,” Shane said after a moment.

  Risa gave him a slanting sideways look that told him to go to hell.

  He grinned. “And scallops.”

  She stomped down on the accelerator to pass a polished new SUV whose driver still hadn’t figured out where the metal monster began and ended.

  “You’re behind on your lockjaw vaccination,” he continued, scrolling through whatever forbidden records Factoid had found.

  “If you access my yearly gyn exams, you’re limping back to the plane alone.”

  Laughing, Shane ran his fingertips over Risa’s cheek and brushed the corner of her mouth. “Your teeth are in fine order, too.”

  She showed him a double row of perfection as she nipped at a fingertip that kept trying to burrow into her smile. He threaded his fingers through her short hair, safely out of reach of her teeth.

  “You’re distracting the driver,” she said.

  He caressed her ear, felt her shiver.

  “Really distracting,” she added.

  Reluctantly he shifted his attention back to the computer. In silence he read computer files while the town’s colored lights slid over the windshield and left bright reflections on the computer’s small screen. He sensed the darting glances Risa gave him, but she didn’t disturb his concentration by asking questions before he had a chance to discover the answers.

  The colored lights ended when the highway wound through a stretch of national forest. A faded ribbon of red hung just above the rugged western horizon, silent testament to the sun’s dying power. The waning moon was a radiant white force against the blue-black sky. Stars shimmered, but only where night lay thickly beyond the reach of sun or moon.

  The village of Oak Creek slid by on either side of the car in a flurry of lights clustered along the highway. Beyond the lights, night waited darkly, patient as night is always patient. Soon darkness ruled but for the sword beams of cars whipping over black pavement.

  Risa followed the sign for getting on the interstate and romped down on the gas pedal to match the ambient speed of the Arizona freeways—eighty miles per hour in the slow lane. When she cracked the window a bit, air as cold and perfect as a high mountain stream rushed around her. She drank it in, better than water, more vivid.

  “Want me to drive?” Shane asked without looking up from the screen.

  “I’m fine. I just wanted to find out if the air was as clean as it looked. It is.”

  “Yeah, I keep forgetting how beautiful the red-rock and cedar desert can be.”

  “I’ve never been here before tonight, so I have nothing to remember or forget.”

  He looked up from the computer. In the light reflected from the dashboard, her eyes were gleaming, mysterious, beautiful enough to squeeze his heart. “You don’t get out often enough.”

  “I work for a slave driver.”

  “Remind me to thump on him for you.”

  “How about I thump on him instead?”

  Shane grinned. “You must have mistaken me for my stupid twin.”

  “No way I’d ever suspect you of being stupid, despite your million-dollar looks,” she said.

  “Darling, I’m worth more than a million.”

  His expectant expression said that he was waiting for her to cut him off at the knees. She opened her mouth to oblige, only to be distracted by someone who was passing her as though she had her foot on the brake.

  “Idiot,” she muttered. “What does he think that piece of crap is, a fighter jet?”

  The ponderous RV wallowed as its owner dragged the vehicle back over into the slow lane.

  “Hope the tires are up to the driver’s ambition,” Shane said.

  “Whatever. As long as he augers into the landscape well away from me.”

  Shane noticed her constant glances into the rear and side mirrors. “Anybody following?”

  “If they are, they’re staying far enough back that their lights blend with other traffic.”

  The sign for Camp Verde loomed out of the night. Risa didn’t bother with a turn signal. She simply whipped over to the off-ramp, hoping to catch any follower by surprise. Just after the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp, she pulled way to the side of the road, shut off the lights, and watched the mirrors.

  Nobody turned off for Camp Verde.

  Nobody passed them.

  Nobody cared.

  “Wanna neck?” Shane said.

  “Sure. You strip first.”

  He laughed out loud and thought how comfortable he was with her, how right it felt to have her within reach. “You make me wish I was good at the one-on-one thing.”

  “Is this where I tell you that you’re better than good at the one-on-one thing?”

  “Not sex. Relationships.”

  “Oh. That. I haven’t had much luck in that department either. Guys seem to cramp my possibilities rather than expand them.” She looked in the rearview mirror. “I suppose I do the same to them.”

  “So far you’ve been running away too hard to cramp anything but my ego.”

  She gave him a disbelieving look. “What are you talking about? I tripped you and beat you to the floor.”

  “Is that what happened? I thought I cornered you and jumped you.”

  She tried not to grin, then gave up and laughed. “It was . . . something. Each time. Every time.”

  Shane’s eyelids lowered and his eyes gleamed.

  Random sparks of memory sent heat through Risa’s belly. She wanted to crawl into Shane’s lap and start licking just to see if he tasted as good as she remembered. She blew out her breath and started up the truck before temptation got the better of her.

  “You sure?” he asked huskily, watching her lush mouth.

  She groaned. “Do you harbor a secret desire to be arrested for lewd and dissolute conduct in a public place?”

  “Not until I met you.”

  “Shane.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up.”

  He was still laughing when she turned onto a surface street.

  The Cedars Motel was just off the main street and looked older than the bluffs rising against the stars. A tired neon sign blinked and sputtered, advertising rooms by the night, week, or month. Though the word below said vacancy, the office was closed. It looked like it had been for a long time. A handprinted card stuck inside the window told anyone who really cared about a room to call a local number and inquire about rentals.

  There were twelve units and two cars. Each car was parked in the center of its half of the dirt parking lot, as if afraid that the other patron might be contagious. Two units showed a knife edge of light behind tightly drawn curtains.

  “Friendly place,” Shane said.

  “You sure this is it?”

  “The reverse directory pegged Cherelle’s phone to this address. The map I pulled off the Net led us right here.”

  “I thought cops and emergency services were the only ones with access to the reverse directory.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  Risa drummed her fingers lightly on the steering wheel. “Which unit?”

  “Lucky number seven.”

  She grimaced. If unit number seven represented luck, she would stick with hard work. “No car. No lights.”

  “No key.”

  “No problem.”

  Shane’s eyebrows lifted. “Is my upright, uptight curator suggesting a bit of
breaking and entering?”

  “No need. Cherelle always stashed keys all around, so when she forgot one—and she always did—she wouldn’t have to break a window to get in.”

  “Damn. And here I was going to shock you with my black-bag technique. I get hot when you go all starchy on me.”

  She started to ask if he would really have burgled his way in. Then she decided she didn’t want to know.

  “Starch does it for you, huh?” she asked instead.

  “Every time.”

  With a roll of her eyes she got out and started prowling for likely hiding places for a key. It took her about twenty seconds to find the key beneath a broken chunk of concrete on what passed for the walkway from parking lot to the entrance of number seven.

  Shane took the key. “I’ll go in first.”

  “Why? Do you think she’s—”

  He bent and cut off Risa’s words with a quick, hard kiss. “I think I’m bigger than you, that’s all. Wait until I give the all clear, okay?”

  “No.” She rubbed her arms against the biting night air. “But I’ll do it. This time.”

  The key was gritty with dirt and worked just fine.

  Shane stepped into the dark room and drew a cautious breath. Stale smoke. Something bitter. Dust. Unwashed clothes.

  Old smells, not new. Not ripe.

  Not death.

  “Shane?” Risa asked softly.

  “So far, so good. Shut the door behind you.”

  The first thing they saw was an old wooden box. Shane sat on his heels near it and started memorizing addresses.