But as he narrowed the gap between them to plant the kiss that would be the first act of mind-blowing makeup sex, Heat turned away. Rook’s lips ended up colliding with her ear. And not the soft, sensuous, fleshy lobe underneath. The hard cartilaginous top part.
“Oh,” he said, after his mouth bounced off the side of her head. “Ouch.”
Still, Rook was not deterred. He had lured Heat out of bad moods with his playful man-child charm many times. And, with his typical confidence, he seemed sure he could do it again.
“Sorry. It’s the lights, isn’t it? Too much light,” he said, walking over toward the switch. “Rookie mistake. But do you mind if I leave on the one in the bathroom? You know I like to be able to watch you—”
“Rook. Stop,” she managed.
This was no mere mood. And after so many years of being in love with her, Rook didn’t need a secret decoder ring to be able to read it.
“Hey,” he said, recrossing the room, trying to take her hands. She wouldn’t let him. She was looking away.
“Hey,” he tried again. “It’s me. Come on. What’s going on?”
“Rook, just go,” she said.
“No. Sorry, Captain Heat. I’ll do anything you want. Except that. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I shouldn’t have left your office this morning. You’re not getting rid of me that easily tonight.”
“It’s too dangerous for you to stay.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“And I appreciate that. But, look, do you know what’s more important to me in this world than you?”
She looked at him expectantly. He waited. It was, for Rook—a man not long on patience—a considerable wait.
“Nothing,” he said finally. “Nothing is more important. I would have thought you knew that by now, but maybe I need to say it again. Look, living without you, it’s not even living. So if the choice is safety or you, I’ll take you every time. I decided that a long, long time ago. I haven’t regretted it for one second since then, and even if staying with you meant this was my last night alive, I still wouldn’t regret it.”
His eyes were wide and his gaze was so penetrating, she felt like he could see her soul. It was so intense, she had to look away.
“Do you know when I knew that?” he said. She wasn’t answering, so he continued: “Well, probably the first second I ever saw you. But that makes me seem shallow, so I’ll give you another time. I don’t know if you remember it, but we had just started dating. We had a special night out for our one-month anniversary and—”
“Joie de Vivre,” she said.
“Yes. We had a reservation—”
“For seven o’clock.”
“Right. And I was sitting at the bar, waiting for you. Seven. Seven-oh-five. Seven-fifteen. The maître d’ kept wanting to give away the table, but I told him the most incredible woman in the world was going to be coming through the door any moment. Eventually he said he had to either seat me or let it go, so I sat there, by myself, for an hour. I could see everyone in the restaurant looking at me while trying to pretend they weren’t looking at me. There was even an item in the gossip column of the Ledger the next day about Jameson Rook being stood up.
“And there was a point where I can remember thinking, ‘Why am I not mad right now? I should be mad. Look at me, I’m Jameson Rook. I’ve made all those ridiculous Most Eligible Bachelor lists. There are thousands of women who would love to be at this table right now. I should call one of them and have a great time. Why am I waiting for this chick?’ And that’s when I realized I was going to do whatever it took to be with you. Then. And always.”
“Even walking twenty-six blocks in the rain with a takeout bag and two stinky candles?” Heat said. She was facing him now.
“I can never smell the unforgettable combination of kiwi and maple syrup without becoming instantly aroused,” he said in a low growl.
And there. That did it. Much to her astonishment, Heat actually smiled.
“There’s my Nikki,” he said softly. “I knew she was in there.”
The smile got just a little wider. The way Rook was looking at her— with total love—she just couldn’t help it.
“So, really, what’s going on?” he asked. “I’m not going away, so you might as well tell me and then let me help.”
She recounted all that had happened over the last day, ever since she had left him alone in his Tribeca loft. When she finished, she expected him to come up with one of his usual wacky theories— about how the Shanghai Seven were really aliens there to provoke a war among humans by creating a massive trade imbalance, or something similarly absurd. Instead, the first sentence out of his mouth was remarkably cogent:
“George is the key,” he said. “He knows where those bills are. And he wants to tell you. I know he wants to tell you. I’ll bet you anything he had a crush on your mother, so he wants to see her again, too. He just needs a little more . . . inducement.”
“What kind of ‘inducement’ did you have in mind?”
“I was just going to talk to him.”
“I already tried that. What makes you think you’ll have any more success?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to mention this, lest I seem immodest, but he is a fan.”
Of course George was a fan of Jameson Rook. George and the rest of the literate world.
“I’m willing to bet he’ll come around,” Rook said. “In fact, he might even come around if we don’t talk to him. George is the kind of guy who needs some time to absorb things. But once he does, he’ll see turning over those bills is the best thing for everyone.”
“Do you want to go over there now? I don’t think his shift ends until midnight.”
“No, no. It’s only been a few hours since you talked to him. Give it a little more time. It’ll be more effective tomorrow.”
Heat knew Rook’s insights into these sorts of things were often uncannily accurate. “Okay,” she said. “If you think so.”
“I do. Now promise me you won’t get impatient and run off in the middle of the night.”
“I would never do that.”
“Yes, you would.”
She thought about it for a moment. “That’s true. But in this case I’m not going to. Because I have a big problem.”
“Oh?”
She was again smiling coquettishly. “Yes. It’s just you and me, alone in this small hotel room with this large bed,” she said. “Whatever will we do to fill the time?”
“Well,” Rook said. “Since I am in such mortal danger, and since this might well be my last night alive . . .”
Rook’s hands found her ass. Heat felt a flush coming to her face. “Yes?”
He went to kiss her ear. And this time, he managed to get the soft, fleshy part gently between his teeth. “You wouldn’t deny a dying man his last request, would you?”
She would not.
Nor did he deny hers.
Multiple times.
EIGHTEEN
STORM
At sixteen thousand acres, the Prince William Forest Park was the largest protected natural area in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
From high in the air, which would have been Jones’s vantage point of it, it was the first significant chunk of solid greenery as you headed south from the nation’s capital.
Except not now. Now it was just gray. A cool fog had rolled in, blanketing the Potomac River valley in a fine mist. Between that and the trees, Derrick Storm was sure he had confounded Jones’s satellites. Even geothermal couldn’t penetrate that kind of soup.
Derrick could imagine the rueful, dour countenances the nerds wore as they told Jones they had lost their quarry; he could see Jones, always unflappable, tugging at his collar, which was about as demonstrative as he ever got. He could practically hear them admitting defeat.
That thought warmed Derrick. Little else about their surroundings did. The broken back window of the Buick allowed the damp, chilly night air to pour i
n. They had turned off the engine to save what little gas they had left. The $9.57 Derrick now had in his pocket wouldn’t get them very far once they needed more.
Having gone as deep into the forest as they could, they had finally pulled off the main road. They were sitting in the middle of a narrow dirt service road used by the park rangers and perhaps the occasional hiker who was looking for a shortcut back to asphalt. They didn’t know where the road led, or how it ended—or if it ended at all. But it was, they deemed, a safe spot to ride out the night—or at least as safe as they could get under the circumstances.
Carl Storm had moved to the backseat, where he was lying uncomfortably on his side. Much like Carl himself, the cushioning under the Buick’s cloth seats had grown stiff with age.
His son was in the passenger seat, which he had reclined as far as it would go. He crossed his arms inside his T-shirt, which made him a little warmer. But only by so much.
Neither bothered complaining. And even though they had their eyes shut, neither was sleeping, either. Their ears were tuned to the sounds of the forest, which was—save for the occasional hooting of an owl bragging to his girlfriend that he had caught dinner—silent.
It was for this reason they were able to hear the hum of an engine in the distance. Derrick was the first to sit up and turn toward the sound. His movement made Carl do the same.
The vehicle was still a ways off. But it sounded like it was getting closer.
“Okay, I am sure I didn’t order pizza this time,” Carl said. “You?”
“Definitely not,” Derrick said, already shifting to the front seat.
He started the Buick, wishing it were quieter, hoping the fog and the sound of the other engine would dampen their noise. He kept the lights off as he began rolling forward over the rugged road.
“Okay, how did they find us this time?” Carl asked, now turning and looking out the glassless back window.
“They didn’t,” Derrick said. “It’s not them. It can’t be. There’s no way they could get eyes on us in this pea soup.”
“Just like there was no way they could find us at the no-tell motel,” Carl said.
“It could be a park ranger.”
“Out for a little jaunt in the middle of the night?”
“Well, then it’s kids looking for a place to do whatever it is kids like to do in the forest after dark.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Carl said. “Let’s play a game where we pretend it’s them until we know otherwise.”
“Good game. What are the rules?”
“Rule one: Get us the hell out of here. I’ll come up with the rest of the rules after that.”
“Good rule,” Derrick said. “Let me see if I can play along.”
Derrick squinted into the fog and darkness as he brought the Buick up to perhaps twenty-five miles per hour, which was as fast as he dared go. There was almost no ambient light. He was relying on his eyes being well adjusted to the gloom. Now and then, he’d feel one side of the Buick or the other scraping against underbrush. That was his sign to tug the steering wheel in the opposite direction, to keep them from going off the road. The ruts helped, too.
The Buick’s ancient suspension groaned as it lurched over bumps and through potholes. The other vehicle’s engine was definitely coming closer. Derrick guessed it was going perhaps forty or forty-five. It sounded more like a truck. Not diesel—it didn’t have that diesel rumble to it—but definitely eight-cylinder.
He pressed down on the accelerator a little more, easing them up to thirty, not daring to go too much faster with the lights off. All it would take was one sudden bend in the road and they’d plow into a pine tree. Then they’d be in even more trouble.
The road continued sloping upward. It wasn’t a mountain—there weren’t any of those in that part of Virginia—but more like a small hill.
Then they reached the top. Derrick had the sense they had entered a clearing roughly the length and width of a football field. There were no longer trees looming overhead. Just mist.
They passed an area with picnic benches and a fire pit just off to their left.
“You gonna turn the lights on so we can see where we’re going?” Carl asked.
“No. Shhh,” said Derrick, who had been using a kind of echolocation to find his way, counting on the sound waves bouncing back him to tell him if he was about to hit something.
“Look, these guys are getting closer. Are you really going to let them get on top of us? Why don’t you just turn the lights on and floor it?”
“Because I don’t even know where this road goes. I think we might have reached the end. Now shhh and let me concen—”
Then he slammed on the brakes. A log cabin, complete with notched corner joints and rough-hewn windows, had jumped out at them from the darkness. The Buick stopped inches short of one of the logs, which was even more solid than that steel 1985 bumper.
Derrick put the car in reverse and eased away from the cabin, just so he could drive around to the other side of it. Then he shut off the Buick’s engine.
“Okay,” Derrick said. “This is where we make our stand.”
“In a log cabin,” Carl said. “Definitely old school. I like it.”
The Storm boys quickly scrambled out. The back door to the cabin had a padlock across it, but it was really only a deterrent to the most law-abiding of trespassers. The lock was attached to a flimsy metal hasp. Gripping Dirty Harry firmly, Derrick had it loosened after just two ferocious downward chops. Then, using the gun like a crowbar, he pried it off.
They entered the cabin, which had a plastic folding table inside the main living area, a small kitchen off to the left, and a loft up top. Derrick scrambled up the ladder to the loft, and using Dirty Harry like a hammer, he bashed one pane of glass away from the window so he’d have a clean shot should he decide to take one.
He had just cleared away the last glass shards when the headlights from their pursuers burst into the clearing, cutting through the fog. The lights were higher than a standard sedan. It was an SUV, and not one issued by the National Park Service. It was dark. The windows were tinted.
A black SUV. The vehicle of choice of discerning bad guys everywhere.
Now that the clearing was better illuminated, Derrick could see that it was, in fact, the end of the road. The driver could clearly see that, too, because the SUV was coming to a halt, roughly two hundred feet short of the cabin, near the fire pit.
Carl had joined Derrick up in the loft.
“All right, so what do we got here?” he asked his son in a hushed voice. He was breathing a bit more heavily from the climb up the ladder than Derrick was.
“Not hikers, that’s for sure,” Derrick whispered back.
“Yeah, but are they hostile?”
“I don’t know.”
The SUV was just sitting there, idling. The driver had shifted into park. Derrick could make out the dim blue glow of an electronic device—a laptop? an iPad? something of that nature—being used inside.
In that low light, and from that distance in the fog, Derrick couldn’t say whether he was seeing one of the Shanghai Seven’s men or a group of kids who liked geocaching at night. He hadn’t exactly had time to imprint the faces of any of the men who had been chasing him before he shot at them.
The blue glow vanished just as the backup lights of the SUV flickered briefly, the driver putting the car back in drive. Then, ominously, the SUV began making a slow counterclockwise circle around the edge of the clearing, maintaining a distance of several hundred feet from the cabin.
“Yeah, I’m thinking they’re hostile,” Carl said.
“And pretty soon they’re going to know we’re in here,” Derrick said. “They’ll see the Buick parked behind the house.”
Derrick followed the progress of the SUV as it rolled around the outskirts of the clearing.
“You gonna use that shiny gun of yours, or is it just there for show?” Carl asked.
“Harry only has six rounds
, and I’ve already used two of them. I’m waiting until I actually have something to shoot at.”
The men in the SUV were not going to be quite as sparing with their ammunition. When they reached roughly six o’clock in their circumnavigation of the clearing, the passenger side window lowered. The barrel of a rifle emerged, and suddenly the rapid muzzle flashes of an automatic weapon were filling the night.
Both Storms hid behind the thick wooden walls of the cabin. But it soon became clear the shooter’s target wasn’t human. It was vehicular. Carl Storm’s 1985 Buick was under assault like nothing it had ever been designed to sustain, and it was quickly debilitated. Its tires were shredded. The windows were reduced to pebbles of glass on the ground. The doors on the driver’s side, which were exposed to the fire, soon became riddled with bullet holes.
Derrick thought about aiming a potshot in the direction of the window. But he knew it would likely be a waste of precious ammo. The .44 Magnum Stealth Hunter is a terrific short-range weapon. At that distance, and without a scope, he’d just be guessing.
Besides, he didn’t want to give away their position. Not until he needed to. He was fairly certain he’d be facing two assailants—the only two left alive from the original five after the first two encounters. He wanted to be able to take one out before the other knew where the Storms were hiding.
The thug emptied an entire thirty-round magazine into the car, stopped to reload, then did it again, filling the air with a fiery racket and battering the Buick to where it was unsalvageable. Carl’s face was stricken the entire time. A car that had been faithful to him for the last thirty-two years of his life had been decimated in about thirty-two seconds.
Finally, there was silence.
“Bastards,” Carl whispered. “I was just about to flip the odometer for the fifth time. I was going to celebrate with new floor mats.”
“This is war now,” Derrick said.
The SUV got back under way until it completed its journey around the clearing, then came to a stop roughly in the same spot it had the last time, with its front grill toward the cabin.
Then there came a shout.
Heat Storm (Castle) Page 17