by Nora Roberts
She blew out a breath, tried to suck another in, but he was crushing her lungs. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
He pulled the papers out of his pocket, shoved them in front of her face. “M. J. O’Leary, assault with a deadly, malicious wounding, and blah-blah. Ralph’s real disappointed in you, sugar. He’s a trusting man and didn’t expect a nice woman like you to try to skip out on the ten-K bond.”
“This is a crock.” She could see her name and some downtown address on what appeared to be some kind of arrest warrant. “You’ve got the wrong person. I didn’t post bail for anything. I haven’t been arrested, and I live here. Idiot cops,” she muttered, and tried to buck him off again. “Call in to your sergeant, or whatever. Straighten this out. And when you do, I’m suing.”
“Nice try. And I suppose you’ve never heard of George MacDonald.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then it was really rude of you to shoot him.” He eased up just enough to flip her face up, then caught both of her hands at the wrist. She’d lost her glasses, he noted, and her eyes were neither moss nor emerald, he decided—they were dark shady-river green. And, just now, full of fury. “Look, you want to have a hot affair with your accountant, sister, it’s no skin off my nose. You want to shoot him, I don’t particularly care. But you skip bond, and it ticks me off.”
She could breathe slightly easier now, but his hands were like steel bands at her wrists. “My accountant’s name is Holly Bergman, and we haven’t had a hot affair. I haven’t shot anyone, and I haven’t skipped bond because I haven’t posted bond. I want to see your ID, ace.”
He thought it took a lot of nerve to make demands in her current position. “My name’s Dakota, Jack Dakota. I’m a skip tracer.”
Her eyes narrowed as they skimmed over his face. She thought he looked like something out of the gritty side of a western. A cold-eyed gunslinger, a tough-talking gambler. Or…
“A bounty hunter. Well, there’s no bounty here, jerk.” It wasn’t rape, and it wasn’t a mugging. The fear that had iced her heart thawed into fresh temper. “You son of a bitch. You break in here, tear up my things, ruin twenty bucks’ worth of produce, and all because you can’t follow the right trail? Your butt’s in a sling, I promise you. When I’m done, you won’t be able to trace your own name with a stencil. You won’t—” She broke off when he stuck a photo in her face.
It was her face, and the photograph might have been taken yesterday.
“Got a twin, O’Leary? One who drives a ’68 MG, license plate SLAINTE, and is currently shacked up with some guy named Bailey James.”
“Bailey’s a woman,” she murmured, staring at her own face while new worries raced in her head. Was this about Bailey, about what Bailey had sent her? What kind of trouble could her friend be in? “And this isn’t her apartment, it’s mine. I don’t have a twin.” She looked up into his eyes again. “What’s going on? Is Bailey all right? Where’s Bailey?”
Under his clamped hands, her pulse had spiked. She was struggling again, with a fresh and vicious energy he knew was brought on by fear. And he was dead certain it wasn’t fear for herself.
“I don’t know anything about this Bailey except this address is listed under her name on the paperwork.”
But he was beginning to smell something, and he didn’t like it. He was no longer thinking M. J. O’Leary was dumb as a post. A woman with any brains wouldn’t have left herself with so many avenues to be tracked if she was on the run.
Ralph, Jack mused, frowning down into M.J.’s face. Why were you so jumpy this morning?
“If you’re being straight with me, we can confirm it quick enough. Maybe it was a clerical mix-up.” But he didn’t think so. No indeed. And there was an itching at the base of his spine. “Listen,” he began, just as the door broke open and the giant roared in.
“You were supposed to bring her out,” the giant said, and waved an impressive .357 Magnum. “You’re talking too much. He’s waiting.”
Jack didn’t have much time to decide how to play it. The big man was a stranger to him, but he recognized the type. It looked like all bulk and no brains, with the huge bullet head, small eyes and massive shoulders. The gun was big as a cannon and looked like a toy in the ham-size hands.
“Sorry.” He gave M.J.’s wrist a quick squeeze, hoping she’d understand it as a sign of reassurance and remain still and quiet. “I was having a little trouble here.”
“Just a woman. You were supposed to just bring the woman out.”
“Yeah, I was working on it.” Jack tried a friendly smile. “Ralph send you to back me up?”
“Come on, up. Up now. We’re going.”
“Sure. No problem. You won’t need the gun now. I’ve got her under control.” But the gun continued to point, its barrel as wide as Montana, at his head.
“Just her.” And the giant smiled, floppy lips peeling back over huge teeth. “We don’t need you now.”
“Fine. I guess you want the paperwork.” For lack of anything better, Jack snagged a can of tomato sauce on his way up and winged it. It made a satisfactory crunching sound on the big man’s nose. Ducking, Jack rushed forward like a battering ram. It felt a great deal like beating his head against a brick wall, but the force took them both tumbling backward and over a ladder-back chair.
The gun went off, putting a fist-size hole in the ceiling before it flew across the room.
She thought about running. She could have been out of the door and away before either of them untangled. But she thought about Bailey, about what she had weighing down her shoulder bag. About the mess she’d somehow stepped in. And was too mad to run.
She went for the gun and ended up falling backward as Jack flew into her. She cushioned his fall, and he was up fast, springing into the air and landing a double-footed kick in the big man’s midsection.
Nice form, M.J. thought, and scrambled to her own feet. She snagged her shoulder bag, spun it over her head and cracked it hard over the sleek, bullet-shaped head.
He went down hard on the sofa, snapping the springs.
“You’re wrecking my place!” she shouted, and smacked Jack in the side, simply because she could reach him.
“Sue me.”
He dodged a fist the size of a steamship and went in low. Pain sang through every bone as his opponent slammed him into a wall. Pictures fell, glass shattering on the floor. Through his blurred vision he saw the woman charge, a redheaded fireball that flew up and latched like a plague of wasps on the man’s enormous back. She used her fists, pounding the sides of his face as he spun wildly and struggled to grab her.
“Hold him still!” Jack shouted. “Damn it, just hold him for a minute!”
Spotting an opening, he grabbed what was left of a table leg and rushed in. He checked his first swing as the duo spun like a mad two-headed top. If he followed through, he might have cracked the back of M.J.’s head open like a melon.
“I said hold him still!”
“You want me to paint a bull’s-eye on his face while I’m at it?” With a guttural snarl, she hooked her arms around the man’s throat, clamped her thighs like a vise around his wide steel beam of a torso and screamed, “Hit him, for God’s sake. Stop dancing around and hit him.”
Jack cocked back like a batter with two strikes already on his record and swung full out. The table leg splintered like a toothpick, blood gushed like water in a fountain. M.J. had just enough time to jump clear as the man toppled like a redwood.
She stayed on her hands and knees a minute, gasping for air. “What’s going on? What the hell’s going on?”
“No time to worry about it.” Self-preservation on his mind, Jack grabbed her hand, hauled her to her feet. “This type doesn’t usually travel alone. Let’s go.”
“Go?” She snagged the strap of her purse as he pulled her toward the door. “Where?”
“Away. He’s going to be mean when he wakes up, and if he’s got a friend, we’re not going to be
so lucky next time.”
“Lucky, my butt.” But she was running with him, driven by a pure instinct that matched Jack’s. “You son of a bitch. You come busting into my place, push me around, wreck my home, nearly get me shot.”
“I saved your butt.”
“I saved yours!” She shouted it at him, cursing viciously as they thudded down the stairs. “And when I get a minute to catch my breath, I’m going to take you apart, piece by piece.”
They rounded the landing and nearly ran over one of her neighbors. The woman, with helmet hair and bunny slippers, cowered, back against the wall, hands pressed to her deeply rouged cheeks.
“M.J., what in the world—? Were those gunshots?”
“Mrs. Weathers—”
“No time.” Jack all but jerked her off her feet as he headed down the next flight.
“Don’t you shout at me, you jerk. I’m making you pay for every grape that got smashed, every lamp, every—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. Where’s the back door?” When M.J. pointed down the corridor, he gave a nod and they both slid outside, then around the corner of the building. Screened by some bushes in the front, Jack darted a gaze up and down the street. There was a windowless van less than half a block down, and a small, chicken-faced man in a bad suit dancing beside it. “Stay low,” Jack ordered, thankful he’d parked right out front as they ran down the walkway and he all but threw M.J. into the front seat of his car.
“My God, what the hell is this?” She shoved at the can she’d sat on, kicked at the wrappers littering the floor, then joined them when Jack put a hand behind her head and shoved.
“Low!” he repeated in a snarl, and gunned the engine. The faint ping told him the man with the chicken face was using the silenced automatic he’d pulled out.
Jack’s car screamed away from the curb, and he two-wheeled it around the corner and shot down the street like a rocket. Tossed like eggs in a broken carton, M.J. rapped her head on the dash, cursed, and struggled to balance herself as Jack maneuvered the huge boat of a car down side streets.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your butt again, sugar.” His eyes flicked to the rearview as he took a hard, tire-squealing right turn. A couple of kids riding bikes on the sidewalk lifted their fists and cheered the maneuver. In instant reaction, Jack flashed a grin.
“Slow this junk heap down.” M.J. had to crawl back onto the seat and clutch the chicken stick for balance. “And let me out before you run over some kid walking his dog.”
“I’m not going to run over anybody, and you’re staying put.” He spared her a quick glance. “In case you didn’t notice, the guy with the van was shooting at us. And as soon as I make sure we’ve lost him and find someplace quiet to hole up, you’re going to tell me what the hell’s going on.”
“I don’t know what’s going on.”
He shot her a look. “That’s bull.”
Because he was sure it was, he took a chance. He swung to the curb again, reached under his seat and came up with spare cuffs. Before she could do more than blink, he had her locked by the wrist to the door handle. No way was she skipping out on him until he knew why he’d just been tossed around by a three-hundred-pound gorilla.
To block out her shouting, and her increasingly imaginative threats and curses, Jack turned up his stereo and drowned her out.
Chapter 2
At the very first opportunity, she was going to kill him. Brutally, M.J. decided. Mercilessly. Two hours before this, she’d been happy, free, wandering around the grocery store like any normal person on a Saturday, squeezing tomatoes. True, she’d been weighed down with curiosity about what she carried in the bottom of her purse, but she’d been sure Bailey had a good reason—and a logical explanation—for sending it to her.
Bailey James always had good reasons and logical explanations for everything. That was only one of the aspects about her that M.J. loved.
But now she was worried—worried that the package Bailey had shipped to her by courier the day before was not only at the bottom of her purse, but also at the bottom of her current situation.
She preferred blaming Jack Dakota.
He’d pushed his way into her apartment and attacked her. Okay, so maybe she’d attacked first, but it was a natural reaction when some jerk tried to muscle you. At least it was M.J.’s natural reaction. She was an ace student in the school of punch first, ask questions later.
It was humiliating that he’d been able to take her down. She had a lot of notches on her fifth-degree black belt, and she didn’t like to lose a match.
But she’d pay him back for that later.
All she knew for certain was that he seemed to be at the root of it all. Because of him, her apartment was wrecked, her things tossed every which way. Now they’d gone, leaving the front door open, the lock broken. She didn’t form close attachments to things, but that wasn’t the point. They were her things, and thanks to him, she was going to have to waste time shopping for replacements.
Which was almost as bad as having some gunwielding punk the size of Texas busting down her door, having to run for her life from her own home, and being shot at.
But all of that, all of it, paled next to one infuriating fact—she was handcuffed to the door handle of an Oldsmobile.
Jack Dakota had to die for that.
Who the hell was he? she asked herself. Bounty hunter, excellent hand-to-hand fighter, slob—she added as she pushed candy wrappers and paper cups around with her foot—and nerveless driver. Under different circumstances, she’d have been impressed by the way he handled the tank of a car, swinging it around curves, screaming around corners, whipping it through yellow lights and zipping onto the Washington Beltway like the leader in a Grand Prix event.
If he’d walked into her bar, she’d have looked twice, she admitted grudgingly. Running a pub in a major city meant more than being able to mix drinks and work the books. It meant being able to size people up quickly, tell the troublemakers from the lonely hearts. And know how to deal with both.
She’d have tagged him as a tough customer. It was in his face. A damn good face, all in all, hard and handsome. Yeah, she’d have looked twice, M.J. thought, teeth gritted, as she looked out the window of the speeding car. Pretty boys didn’t interest her much. She preferred a man who looked as though he’d lived, crossed a few lines and would cross a few more.
Jack Dakota fit that bill. She’d gotten a good close look into those eyes—granite gray—and knew that he wasn’t one to let a few rules get in his way.
Just what would a man like him do if he knew she was carrying a king’s ransom in her battered leather purse?
Damn it, Bailey. Damn it. M.J. fisted her free hand and tapped it restlessly on her knee. Why did you send me the diamond, and where are the other two?
She cursed herself, as well, for not going directly to Bailey’s door after she came home from closing M.J.’s the night before. But she’d been tired, and she’d figured Bailey was sound asleep. And as her friend was the steadiest, most practical person M.J. knew, she’d simply decided to wait for what she was certain would be a very practical, sensible reason.
Stupid, she told herself now. Why had she assumed Bailey had sent the stone to her simply because she knew M.J. would be home in the middle of the day and around to receive the package? Why had she assumed the rock was a fake, a copy, even though the note that accompanied it asked M.J. to keep it with her at all times?
Because Bailey just wasn’t the kind of woman to ship off a blue diamond worth more than a million with no warnings or explanations. She was a gemologist, dedicated, brilliant, and patient as Job. How else could she continue to work for the creeps who masqueraded as her family?
M.J.’s mouth tightened as she thought of Bailey’s stepbrothers. The Salvini twins had always treated Bailey as though she were an inconvenience, something they were stuck with because their father had left her a percentage of the business in his will. And, bli
ndly loyal to family, Bailey had always found excuses for them.
Now M.J. wondered if they were part of the reason. Had they tried to pull something? She wouldn’t put it past them, no indeed. But it was hard to believe Timothy and Thomas Salvini would be stupid enough to try something fancy with the Three Stars of Mithra.
That was what Bailey had called them, and she’d had a dreamy look in her eyes. Three priceless blue diamonds, in a golden triangle that had once been held in the open hands of a statue of the god Mithra, and now property of the Smithsonian. Salvini, with Bailey’s reputation behind it, was to assess, verify and appraise the stones.
What if the creeps had gotten it into their heads to keep them?
No, it was too wild, M.J. decided. Better to believe this whole mess was some sort of mix-up, a mistaken identity tangle.
Much better to concentrate on how she would repay Jack Dakota for ruining her afternoon off.
“You are a dead man.” She said it calmly, relishing the words.
“Yeah, well, everybody dies sooner or later.” He was heading south on 95, and he was grateful she’d stopped swearing at him long enough to let him think.
“It’s going to be sooner in your case, Jack. Lots sooner.” The traffic was thick, thanks to the Fourth of July holiday weekend, but it was fast.
How humiliating would it be, she wondered, to stick her head out the window and scream for help? Mortifying, she supposed, but she might have tried it if she’d believed it would work. Better if they could just run into one of the inexplicable traffic snags that stopped cars dead for miles.
Where the hell were the road crews and the rubberneckers who loved them when she needed them?
Seeing nothing but clear sailing for miles, she told herself to deal with Jack “The Idiot” Dakota herself. “If you want to live to see another sunrise, pull this excuse for a car over, uncuff me and let me go.”
“Go where?” He flicked his eyes from the road long enough to glance at her. “Back to your apartment?”
“That’s my problem, not yours.”
“Not anymore, sister. I take it personal, real personal, when someone shoots at me. Since you seem to be the reason why, I’ll be keeping you for a while.”