Lethal

by Sandra Brown

  They would kiss. Erotically. Her mouth would be so damn enticing, he’d dip into it again and again to gather the taste that was now familiar to him. He would touch his tongue to her nipples, and she’d rub her thumb around the tip of his cock and feel that he was about to burst, and then he’d be inside her, moving.

  Or maybe not. Maybe he would do something he’d never done with a woman. Maybe he would just… be. Be still. No movement except their heartbeats. Not working toward something so it would be over with and he could move on to the next thing, physically sated maybe, but unaffected.

  No, maybe this time, he would just savor being joined to another person as tightly as two people could be. He would savor being joined with Honor.

  Maybe, while they were fitted together like that, he would kiss her. And if she kissed him the way she usually did, he would probably lose it. He’d have to move. He’d have no choice.

  Afterward, he would tease her about how easy she was, and she would pretend to take exception. He would tease her about her tattoo, so wickedly positioned between twin dimples just above her shapely ass.

  He’d say the tattoo artist had been one lucky son of a bitch to have had that luscious view while he plied his trade. I’ll bet he took his sweet time, he’d say. Then he’d tell her that’s what his vocation would be in his next life. He would be a tattoo artist who specialized in primary school teachers who went on Hurricane binges and got tattooed in places that weren’t—

  Seen by just anybody.

  His lazy train of thought suddenly derailed.

  He pushed her off him and leaped from the bed. “Honor, wake up!”

  Startled out of her deep sleep, she came up on her elbows and shaded her eyes against the glare when he turned on the ceiling light. “What’s the matter? Is someone here?”

  “No. Turn over.”

  “What?”

  “Get on your stomach.” He planted his knee beside her on the bed and flipped her facedown.

  “Coburn!”

  “You said ‘persuaded.’ ”

  “What? Let me up.”

  He placed his wide hand over her bottom and held her down. “Your tattoo. You said you got tipsy and were easily persuaded. Persuaded to get tattooed?”

  “Yes. I didn’t take to the idea at first, but Eddie—”

  “Insisted?”

  “Eddie never insisted I do anything.”

  “Okay, he persisted.”

  “Sort of. He double-dog dared me. I finally gave in.”

  Coburn was on his knees beside her, examining the intricate design. “And he chose the spot.”

  “He said it was sexy.”

  “It is. Sexy as all get out. But I don’t think that’s why he wanted it here.” Coburn squinted down at the swirling pattern while tracing it with his fingertip. “What does it say?”

  “It doesn’t say anything.” She was watching him from over her shoulder. “I told you, it’s a Chinese symbol of some kind.”

  “It’s gotta mean something or else why’d you choose it?”

  “I didn’t. Eddie did. In fact he—”

  Coburn’s head came up.

  Her eyes connected with his. “He designed it.”

  They stared at one another for several seconds, then Coburn said, “We just found the treasure map.”

  For the umpteenth time Tori considered her empty cell phone. And for the umpteenth time she was sorely tempted to replace the battery and call Bonnell. She longed to talk to him. So what if he wasn’t extraordinarily handsome and well built? He wasn’t an ogre. She liked him. She knew his adoration for her was genuine and might have advanced from infatuation into—dare she think it?—full-blown love. He would be concerned over her sudden departure, wondering why she’d taken off to parts unknown without an explanation, why she wasn’t answering the calls he was surely placing.

  If he’d put two and two together, he would have figured out that her leaving town was connected to the friend she’d told him about, the one who’d been kidnapped. Maybe he had late-breaking news regarding Honor and the search for her and Emily.

  After sending the one short text to Bonnell informing him that she was leaving town, she had heeded Coburn’s instructions to the letter, even though she’d questioned the necessity of taking such precautions. A half hour after arriving at the house, she and Emily were making mud pies on a playground near the lakeshore. She’d been enjoying herself so much that it was easy to forget for short periods of time why the two of them were on this excursion.

  But whenever she was reminded of the grim circumstances, she experienced a pang of longing for Bonnell’s solid presence. She also felt a touch of resentment for Coburn and his strict orders. Tori had an innate aversion to rules and had spent most of her life defying them.

  Her resentment had mounted with each passing hour, until now, lying alone in bed and wishing for Bonnell’s raunchy company, she decided that no harm could come from one short conversation just to assure him that she was all right, as horny as ever, and desperately missing him.

  She sat up and was about to reach for her phone on the nightstand. Instead she screamed.

  A man wearing a ski mask was standing at the foot of her bed.

  He lunged and clamped his gloved hand over her mouth, trapping her scream. She fought him like a swamp panther, shaking his hand off her face, then baring teeth and nails as she went on the offensive. Her incredibly muscled and toned body wasn’t just for show. She was as strong as most men and had the reflexes to utilize that strength effectively. Her attacker narrowly escaped a heel aimed at his testicles with the impetus of a pile driver.

  She tried to yank the ski mask off his face, but he got his fingers around her wrist and jerked it so hard she heard bones snap. In spite of herself, she screamed in pain.

  Then he knocked her in the temple with his pistol grip. Darkness descended like a velvet blanket. Her last thought was of Emily and Honor and how miserably she had failed them.

  Doral whipped off his mask and bent over Tori’s sprawled form, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath and sniff back the blood dripping from his nose. The bitch had landed at least one good punch.

  He would show her the stuff he was made of. He would show her that he wasn’t the kind of man who’d take crap like that from a woman. He still owed her for that time in high school when she had not only turned him down, but had done so laughing at his fumbling attempts to seduce her.

  The thought of finally teaching her a lesson delighted him and got him hard. He reached for the fly of his pants.

  However, even as he grappled with his zipper, he stopped and reconsidered. The Bookkeeper wouldn’t like it. Not because of scruples, but because of the timing.

  The Bookkeeper was impatiently waiting for his call, and this time the news had to be good.

  The car bomb had failed to dispense with either Coburn or Honor. The Bookkeeper had received that bad news with even more fury than Doral had anticipated, and he’d anticipated something along the lines of Hitler getting news of the Third Reich’s defeat.

  “You goddamn idiot! You told me he was there.”

  “He was. I saw him myself.”

  “Then how could he have got away?”

  “I don’t—”

  “And why didn’t you check to make sure he was dead before you left?”

  “The car was in flames. There was no way to—”

  “I’m sick of your excuses, Doral.”

  It had continued that way for several minutes. But Doral preferred the ranting to the cool, distant tone of The Bookkeeper’s final words. “If you can’t do any better than this, I don’t need you, do I?”

  In that moment Doral realized that unless he delivered Coburn and Honor, he was a dead man.

  Or.

  It occurred to him that he did indeed have another option. He could kill The Bookkeeper.

  That treasonous thought had wormed its way into his mind and coiled around his imagination. He fantasized about i
t and found the prospect enormously appealing. Why not?

  The main why not? was because the end of The Bookkeeper would spell the end of his livelihood. But who was to say that he couldn’t take over the whole operation, now that the groundwork had been so meticulously laid?

  In the interest of time, Doral decided to shelve that enticing thought for future consideration and, in the meantime, to find Honor and Coburn. He wanted that asshole dead whether The Bookkeeper had ordered it or not.

  With that goal in mind, he had called Amber, the airheaded receptionist at Tori’s fitness center. He reintroduced himself as the guy she’d met at the sandwich shop the day before and had asked her out for a drink.

  She’d played hard to get. It was after eleven o’clock, she’d said peevishly. Why had he waited so late to call? She had to open the center at six a.m.

  Doral had said the first thing that popped into his mind. “I just hate to see a good kid like you get blindsided.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tori is interviewing other girls for your position.”

  The plausible lie had worked like a magic wand. He was invited to come to her place for a nightcap, and all it took was two vodka tonics for her to start enumerating all the advantages that Tori Shirah had over her, including a house on Lake Pontchartrain that she’d cheated an exhusband out of.

  He left Amber with a promise for dinner at Commander’s Palace soon and immediately reported his findings to The Bookkeeper. Laying it on real thick, he had volunteered to personally drive to Tori’s house on the lake and check it out.

  His efforts had paid off. Big-time. He hadn’t located Coburn or Honor, but he’d discovered Emily sleeping in one of the guest bedrooms, and that was almost as good. The sooner he reported something positive to The Bookkeeper, the better the working climate, and the healthier for everybody.

  Cursing his own sound judgment, which was preventing him from sampling what he’d lusted after since adolescence, he zipped up, then bent down and whispered, “Your pussy will never know what it missed.”

  He backed away and aimed the pistol down at Tori’s head.

  Hamilton’s jet set down at Lafayette Aero at 03:40 Central time, gaining him an hour. The FBO was virtually shut down at that hour of the morning, so the only personnel there were the ground crew.

  Hamilton was the first off the aircraft. He pleasantly greeted the man with the chocks and told him that they were an advance team sent by the State Department to set up security for the upcoming visit of a government dignitary.

  “Really, who? The president?”

  “I’m not allowed to say,” Hamilton replied, smiling genially. “We don’t know how long our errand will take. Our pilots will stay with the plane.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Meanwhile the six men who had disembarked with Hamilton unloaded their gear and stowed it in the two black Suburbans with the darkly tinted windows that Hamilton had requested to be waiting for them on the tarmac.

  If the young man wondered why an envoy from the State Department required automatic weapons and S.W.A.T. gear, he wisely contained his curiosity.

  Within minutes of the jet’s landing, the team was speeding away in the Suburbans. Hamilton gave his driver the VanAllens’ home address, and he programmed it into the built-in GPS. Hamilton wanted to stop there first and pay his respects to Tom’s widow. He owed it to Tom. He owed it to her. After all, it was he who had sent Tom to that meeting on the abandoned railroad tracks.

  It was incredibly presumptive to call at this hour of the night, but hopefully she would be up, surrounded by friends, neighbors, and kinfolk, who had rushed to her in response to the news of Tom’s death.

  What he feared, however, was that he would find her alone. Their son’s circumstances had been extremely isolating for the couple, and in large part that isolation had been self-inflicted. Based on what Hamilton knew of Janice, it wouldn’t be out of character for her to withdraw from society completely now that Tom was dead.

  The agents from Tom’s office who had delivered the tragic news had reported to Hamilton that they’d been asked to leave shortly after their grim duty was dispatched.

  Agents sent to question her in connection to the murder of her husband had emailed him afterward that Mrs. VanAllen had been cooperative in answering all their questions but had shown them to the door as soon as they concluded the interview and had refused offers of a chaplain or grief counselor to stay with her overnight.

  She had rebuffed Hamilton by cursing him and then flatly refusing to speak to him when he called a second time. He strongly suspected that all extensions of consolation had been similarly rejected.

  He hoped he was wrong. He hoped he would find her house filled with people, making this meeting between them less awkward, less conspicuous, and his purpose less obvious.

  Because, although his main reason for coming was to pay his respects, he also had an ulterior motive. Call it a fishing expedition.

  There was an outside chance that Janice knew something about The Bookkeeper, even if it was tidbits of information that Tom had scattered and that, over time, she’d picked up and put together as one does the spilled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Even accidentally, pieces got linked together to form at least a partial picture.

  Hamilton needed to know what Janice VanAllen was privy to.

  Meanwhile, he didn’t waste the travel time in the van. He placed a call to the sheriff’s office in Tambour and demanded that he be connected to Deputy Crawford. He was told that Crawford was in the temporary command center but had gone down the hall to use the john.

  “When he comes back, tell him to call me. This number.”

  He disconnected and checked his phone yet again to see if Coburn had tried to reach him. Nothing. Two minutes later the phone vibrated in his hand. He answered curtly, “Hamilton.”

  “This is Deputy Crawford. You asked me to call. Who are you?”

  Hamilton identified himself. “The bureau lost a man down there tonight. My man.”

  “Tom VanAllen. My condolences.”

  “Are you investigating the case?”

  “I was initially. Once VanAllen was IDed, your guys took over. Why aren’t you talking to them?”

  “I have been. But I think there’s something you should know since it relates to your other cases.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Tom VanAllen went to that abandoned train track tonight with the sole purpose of picking up Mrs. Gillette and bringing her into protective custody.”

  Crawford took a moment to assimilate that, then asked, “How do you know?”

  “Because I brokered the deal with Lee Coburn.”

  “I see.”

  “I doubt it,” Hamilton said. “No offense.”

  The deputy was quiet for several moments, but whether because of pique or concentration, Hamilton didn’t know. Nor did he care.

  Crawford said, “We’ve only got one body in the morgue. So what happened to Mrs. Gillette?”

  “Excellent question, Deputy.”

  “Did Coburn set up VanAllen?”

  Hamilton chuckled. “If Coburn had wanted VanAllen dead, he wouldn’t have troubled himself to use a bomb.”

  “Then what are you telling me, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “Somebody besides Coburn and me knew about that meeting, and whoever it was wanted Mrs. Gillette dead. Somebody planted that car bomb expecting to get two birds with one stone, a cop’s widow and a local FBI agent. Somebody was made awfully nervous by that pairing, so they acted swiftly and lethally to prevent it.”

  “ ‘Somebody.’ Any idea who?”

  “Whoever is listening in on this conversation.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Like hell you don’t. Your department is a freaking sieve. So is the P.D., and I sadly suspect Tom’s office, too.” He paused to let the deputy dispute that. It was telling that he didn’t. Whether Crawford was dirty or not, he must not have seen the point in denying the
allegation. “I’m not telling you how to do your job, Deputy—”

  “But?”

  “But unless you want a higher body count than you’ve already got, double your efforts and manpower to find Mrs. Gillette and Coburn.”

  “Is she with him voluntarily?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. Does Coburn work for you?”

  Hamilton said nothing.

  “Did Coburn, I don’t know, recruit her for some reason? That’s what it looks like to me. What are they on to that’s got people wanting them dead?”

  Hamilton didn’t answer that one either.

  The deputy sighed. Hamilton could imagine him running his fingers through his hair. If he had hair. “They’ve successfully stayed under the radar for three days, Mr. Hamilton. I don’t know what else I can do, especially since, as you say, other forces always seem to be several steps ahead of me. But if I get lucky and manage to flush them out, what then?”

  Hamilton said tersely, “I’m the first person you call.”

  Chapter 42

  When Coburn pulled the car to a stop at the curb in front of Stan Gillette’s house, Honor said, “I envisioned us sneaking in like we did this afternoon.”

  “I’m tired of dicking around. It’s time he and I had a face-to-face.”

  As they moved up the front walkway, she looked at him nervously. “What are you going to do?”

  “You ring the doorbell. I’ll take it from there.”

  He could tell she was conflicted about what they had to do, but she resolutely stepped onto the porch and rang the doorbell. They heard it chiming inside the house. Coburn pressed his back to the wall adjacent to the door.

  Honor saw him slip the pistol from his waistband, and that alarmed her. “What are you doing with that?”

  “He may not welcome our company.”

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  “Not unless he forces me to.”

  “He takes medication for high blood pressure.”

  “Then I hope he thinks twice before doing something stupid.”

  Hearing approaching footsteps, he sliced the air with his free hand. The door was opened, then several things happened in rapid succession.