Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Can you prove that?” April asked.

  “Cline didn’t keep records, and Shapiro claims his computer ate his homework,” Shane said.

  Her black eyes narrowed. “Keep talking.”

  “The only real question left is why Morrison waited in a parking lot to blow Socks apart.”

  “You’re not buying the white knight bit?” April asked.

  “Are you?” Shane asked.

  “Not unless I have to.”

  “The other question is why a limo hauled Miranda and her shot-to-pieces son off into the night to a place where he could be treated without being reported to the cops.” Shane looked at Ian. “Did you get into her house?”

  Ian nodded. “My hat’s off to you, Tannahill. You hit it right the first time.”

  “What?” April said, turning on Ian like a tiger. “Spit it out, slick.”

  Ian’s smile was all edges and silence.

  “I have something you want,” Shane said to April. “You have something I want. That’s the traditional basis for making a deal.”

  Without missing a beat she switched gears, turned her back on Ian, and asked, “What do I have that you want?”

  “Druid gold.”

  “And you have for me . . . ?”

  “A pipeline to the Red Phoenix triad that’s better than I ever could be. Interested?”

  “Keep talking, you’ll get there.”

  Shane looked at Dana.

  “Ms. Joy has made deals with many people,” Dana said. “She keeps her end of any bargain she makes.”

  “Do we have a deal?” he asked April.

  “How did you find out that Uncle had already claimed the gold from Faulkner’s motel room?” April asked idly, but she was thinking at the speed of light.

  Shane didn’t answer.

  She hadn’t really expected him to. “I’ll see that you get custody of the gold. What’s the pipeline?”

  “Gail Silverado will deny it to the last breath, but she finally told me that Rich Morrison is behind the attempt to make me look like a laundry. Morrison is in bed with the Red Phoenix. If you take apart his computers, I’ll bet you find their fingerprints all over the laundry arrangements. I know Red Phoenix is the group that hacked into my computer and left damning trails leading to money I never took from offshore accounts I never created.”

  There was silence for the space of one breath, two, three.

  “Interesting,” April murmured. “If true.”

  “Talk to Miranda Seton. She called the Shamrock when her son showed up bleeding on her doorstep.”

  “How long have you known that?” April demanded.

  “Since I told Ian to go to the Seton house and hit redial,” Shane said. “Seton’s last call was to the Shamrock. Very quickly a black limousine pulled up and hauled her and her son away.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Even a cursory background check showed that Miranda is no more a widow than I am,” Shane said. “She hasn’t worked since her son was born and receives regular fat deposits into her account, deposits I’m still trying to trace. I would put money on Morrison being the father of Tim Seton and the source of Miranda’s money. Now, you can blow a perfectly useful pipeline apart trying to prove all the linkages I’ve outlined, or you can use what you don’t need to prove as a twist to turn the ever-heroic Morrison into a patriotic mole snitching off the Red Phoenix to Uncle. And if you need any help in the twist department, you might try Miranda Seton. I’ve got a cast-iron hunch that the lady has something on her former lover.”

  For a moment there was only silence and waiting.

  Then April’s smile flashed at Shane. “I like the way you think.”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “In my dreams,” she retorted. “It’s a deal, Tannahill.”

  Chapter 73

  Las Vegas

  November 19

  Evening

  The golden dagger’s blade was as long as Shane’s hand. Ancient symbols that began with the wheel of the sun and ended with the Christian cross marched down the blade. Balanced on her palms, Risa held the gold sheath with its mesmerizing red inlay defining a three-part design. Originally the design had been picked out in pearls, but the soft gold indentations that had once held the gems were all that remained. The dagger was the most modern of the artifacts, for gems came into favor only after the Romans occupied Britain.

  “What a pity that pearls are too fragile to survive being buried for centuries,” Risa said.

  “Tears of the moon,” Shane said softly. “Whether the ground is wet or dry, they don’t survive the centuries.”

  “The good news is that the residue of soil we found embedded in the deeper etched lines of every artifact is the same. All twenty-seven pieces were part of the same hoard.”

  “The really good news is that there wasn’t enough soil to place the artifacts exactly, even in the ground around O’Conner’s house.”

  Risa’s mouth thinned with reflexive pain. Thinking of O’Conner made her think of his killer—Cherelle Faulkner. Risa didn’t want to believe it even now, but she did. Miranda Seton didn’t have any reason to lie to the feds in order to protect her son. Tim was as dead as Cherelle. As dead as Socks.

  If Miranda felt any guilt about blackmailing her former lover into killing Socks, she didn’t show it.

  “There were some similarities with a cross-section of British soils,” Shane continued, “but nothing identical by any stretch.”

  “And the Brits,” Risa said dryly, “were willing to stretch whatever they could get their hands on. Too bad that silica is such a common part of dirt. It would have been remarkable only if it had been absent from the artifacts.”

  “Do you blame them for trying?” Shane asked with a rakish smile. “I sure don’t.”

  “Nope. And I’m glad you agreed to loan the artifacts to the British Museum for study.”

  “After New Year’s Eve.”

  Blade slid into sheath with barely a whisper of sound.

  As he lifted the sheath from her palm, Risa’s breath caught at the glide of skin over skin. She wondered if she would ever get used to being Shane’s lover. It was as astonishing to her as the fact that she would be married on New Year’s Eve, wearing a Celtic ring as old as Shane’s.

  “Do you think Niall will find any close relatives of Virgil O’Conner?” Risa asked huskily.

  “I doubt it. He never married. He had no siblings. Not even any half siblings.” Shane placed the dagger and sheath in a display case that had more locks and alarms than met the eye. “Besides, there’s nothing beyond circumstantial proof that he even had the gold in the first place.”

  “But we know the gold was there, at his house.”

  “That’s proof from the gut. Doesn’t work in a court of law.”

  “We know Virgil was sent to an air base in Britain during World War Two,” she said. “Niall has his service record.”

  Shane nodded and picked up the bent, totemic artifact that Risa said was the equivalent of a bishop’s crosier—the solid gold head of a ceremonial staff. The wood inside the gold was oak. Carbon dating placed it in the fourth century, plus or minus some years.

  “And we assume,” Shane said, “that O’Conner dug up the hoard during the chaos after the Allied victory in Europe.”

  “He dug it up in Wales. Gut knowledge,” she conceded quickly, “not court of law.”

  Smiling, Shane brushed his lips over hers. “Then he shipped it home along with his other stuff in empty ammunition boxes. Nobody was checking incoming soldiers very closely. We were too damn glad to have them back.”

  She thought of Cherelle, who was never coming back.

  “Don’t, darling,” he said, kissing her again. “You did everything you could for her. You can’t save people from their own mistakes.”

  Risa breathed in the warmth of him. “Do you really read minds?”

  “Just yours. It’s those telltale eyes. And that mouth. Ought to be a law agai
nst it.”

  Her smile turned upside down. “Speaking of laws, there ought to be a law against getting away with murder.”

  His lips waited a breath from hers. “Morrison?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t get away with it.”

  “Like hell he didn’t,” she retorted. “First he sics good old Socks on Cherelle, and then he kills Socks. Now he’s a bloody hero. Just read the Vegas papers!”

  “Morrison’s lawyers would have gotten him off with probation and community service. This way he’s a federal snitch who goes to bed every night sweating at the thought of waking up and seeing April Joy the next day. And someday, not too far down the road, he’ll come face-to-face with the Red Phoenix triad he’s betraying as fast as he can talk. Then he’ll wake up dead.”

  Shane’s smile made Risa glad she was his lover rather than his enemy. “In the meantime . . .”

  “In the meantime?” she asked.

  “We have a wedding to plan.”

  She tried not to smile. She didn’t succeed. “I don’t remember officially saying yes.”

  “I’m a mind reader, remember?”

  She thought of her earlier vision of him as a Celtic warrior wearing blue paint and not much else. “I’ll say yes officially right now, but only if you wear Druid gold down the aisle.”

  He looked both amused and wary. “Are we talking blue paint?”

  “Blue paint is optional. Clothes aren’t.”

  “In that case we’ll invite witnesses.”

  PerfectBound e-book extra

  Popular Fiction: Why We Read It, Why We Write It

  My life’s work has been popular fiction. Writing alone and with Evan, I have published more than sixty books. They range from general fiction to historical and contemporary romances, from science fiction to mystery, from nonfiction to highly fictional thrillers.

  Through the years, I’ve discovered that most publishers talk highly of literary fiction and make money on popular fiction; yet asking them to describe the difference between literary and popular fiction is like asking when white becomes gray becomes black.

  Some people maintain that, by definition, literary fiction cannot be popular, because literary equals difficult and inaccessible. Rather like avant-garde art: if you can identify what it is, it ain’t art. Rather than argue such slippery issues as taste and fashion, I’ll simply say that there are exceptions to every rule; that’s how you recognize both the rule and the exceptions. As a rule, accessibility is one of the hallmarks of popular fiction.

  In literary fiction, the author is often judged by critics on his or her grasp of the scope and nuance of the English language, and on the lack of predictability of the narrative itself. The amount of effort readers put into this fiction can be almost on a par with that of the authors themselves. In order for an author to be successful in literary fiction, positive reviews from important critics are absolutely vital. Indeed, in a very real sense, the critics are the only audience that matters, which explains why literary fiction often pays badly: critics get their books for free.

  In popular fiction, the only critics who really matter are the readers who pay money to buy books of their own choice. Reviews are irrelevant to sales. Readers of popular fiction judge an author by his or her ability to make the common language u

  ncommonly meaningful, and to make an often-told tale freshly exciting. The amount of effort a reader puts into this fiction is minimal. That, after all, is the whole point: to entertain readers rather than to exercise them.

  Critics are human. They don’t like being irrelevant. They dismiss popular fiction as “formulaic escapism” that has nothing to do with reality. From this, I’m forced to conclude that critics view life (and literary fiction) as a kind of nonlinear prison.

  This would certainly explain why the underlying philosophy in much literary fiction is pessimistic: Marx, Freud, and Sartre are the Muses of modernism. Life is seen as fundamentally absurd. No matter how an individual strives, nothing significant will change. Or, in more accessible language, you can’t win for losing.

  The underlying philosophy of much popular fiction is more optimistic: the human condition might indeed be deplorable, but individuals can make a positive difference in their own and others’ lives. The Muses of popular fiction are Zoroaster and Jung, the philosophy more classical than modern. Popular fiction is a continuation of and an embroidery upon ancient myths and archetypes; popular fiction is good against evil, Prometheus against the uncaring gods, Persephone emerging from hell with the seeds of spring in her hands, Adam discovering Eve.

  In a word, popular fiction is heroic and transcendent at a time when heroism and transcendence are out of intellectual favor. Publishers, whose job is to make money by predicting the size of the market for a piece of fiction, are constantly trying guess where a manuscript falls on the scale of white to gray to black. Publishers want to understand why readers read the books they do. Marketers give tests, conduct surveys, consult oracles, etc., and constantly rediscover a simple fact: people read fiction that reinforces their often inarticulate beliefs about society, life, and fate.

  People who believe that life’s problems can be solved through intelligence and effort are often attracted to crime fiction, which centers around the logical solution of various problems. People who believe along with Shakespeare that there are more things on heaven and earth than we dream, are attracted to science fiction of various kinds.

  People who believe that a good relationship between a man and a woman can be the core of life are attracted to romances.

  People who believe that absolute evil lurks just beneath the surface of the ordinary are attracted to horror. And so on.

  Think about that the next time you hear someone dismiss what they (or usually other folks!) read as “escapism.” Existentialists escape into their fictional world. We escape into ours. The fact that our world feels good and theirs feels bad doesn’t mean theirs is always more valuable, much less more intelligent: I have known many intelligent people who need to be reminded of the possibility of joy; I have known no intelligent people who need to be reminded of the reality of despair.

  Some things are worth escaping from. Despair is definitely one of them.

  So much for escapism. What about the charge that popular fiction is formulaic?

  The concept of formula has an interesting history as first a literary device and then a literary putdown. The Greeks divided literature into tragedy and comedy. A tragedy had a political, masculine theme and ended in death. A comedy had a social, often feminine theme and ended in marriage, the union of male and female from which all life comes. We have kept the scope of tragedy, of death and despair, but we have reduced the concept of comedy to a potty-mouthed nightclub act. Perhaps that is why critics of popular fiction reserve their most priapic scorn for the stories called romances. Romances follow the ancient Greek formula for comedy: they celebrate life rather than anticipate death. In addition to being almost exclusively female in their audience and authorship, romances address timeless female concerns of union and regeneration. The demand for romances is feminine, deep, and apparently universal. Harlequin/Silhouette has an enormously profitable romance publishing empire in which the majority of the money is earned outside of the American market, in more countries and languages than I can name.

  Even worse than their roots in ancient feminine concerns, romances irritate critics because they often have a subtext of mythic archetypes rather than modernist, smaller-than-life characters.

  I have heard mystery authors complain that they don’t get any respect from critics. As a mystery author, I agree. I have heard science fiction authors complain that they don’t get any respect. As a science fiction author, I agree. But as a romance author, I have experienced amazing intellectual bigotry.

  For example, mysteries, like romances, were once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. Then, about seventy years ago, the idea of class warfare cam
e into intellectual vogue. Mysteries, particularly American mysteries, came to be viewed as politically correct (and therefore) well-written metaphors of class warfare: the down-and-out detective bringing justice to the little guy in a society that cares only for privilege and wealth.

  That’s a pretty heavy load to lay on Lew Archer’s modernist shoulders, but I suspect the male academic types were tired of getting their thrills reading by flashlight in a closet. The fact that mysteries at the time were written by men for men did not hurt the genre’s status at all.

  Yet many authors continued to write mysteries in which brains, bravery and brawn mattered more than political commentary; these books were roundly disdained by critics... and avidly bought by readers. The division between mythic and politically correct mysteries still exists. You can usually tell which is which by the tone of the review.

  Science fiction, like romance, was once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. Then, in the nineteen fifties, there was a rash of After-the-Bomb science fiction books. Either directly or indirectly, these books criticized the course of modern civilization. Their stories predicted disaster for the human race. Endlessly.

  Voila. The genre of science fiction became politically and intellectually correct, a well-written body of literature with a proper appreciation of man’s raging greed, stupidity, and futility. Gone were the garish covers of little green men hauling busty blondes off to far corners of the galaxy for an eternity of slap and tickle. Gone were the heroic rescuers of said blondes. In their place were caring and despairing antiheroes who tried and tried and tried to make things right, only to finally fail, going down the tubes with a suitable Existential whimper.

  The critics loved it.

  The fact that science fiction at that time was largely written by men for men did not hurt the genre’s status one bit. The retrograde authors who continued to write rousing galactic adventures in which bravery, brains and brawn saved the day were roundly disdained by critics...and avidly purchased by readers. Again, the tone of the reviews told you which was which.