Walking After Midnight

by Karen Robards

  She took a step closer to Steve, so that her shoulder just brushed his hard bicep, and smiled into his eyes. She would have taken his hand if Corey had not been present, but instinct told her to go slowly around Corey: Young girls were notoriously jealous of their fathers’ affections.

  Steve’s eyes crinkled in response, and Summer knew that for her there was no contest at all. No matter how physically breathtaking Mitch was, he could not, in her estimation, compete with the uncompromising masculinity that Steve exuded. The one man was a beautiful object to be admired; the other exuded raw sex appeal.

  Mitch was a young girl’s dream; Steve was a grown woman’s.

  Les Carter came up to them and looked at Corey.

  “Your mom’s out front in a patrol car. We’re going to put you and her up in a hotel here in town for the night. Are you ready to go?”

  “Is my mom okay?” Corey voiced the question that, from his expression, Steve hadn’t quite dared to put into words.

  “She’s fine. Nobody hurt her. She was real worried about you, though. I think once she sees that you’re okay she’ll be as good as new.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Steve said to Corey, putting his arm around his daughter’s shoulders. He glanced at Summer, “Be back in a minute,” he mouthed. The three of them, Steve, Corey, and Les Carter, headed outside.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Corey pulled away from Steve and ran back to Summer, Muffy cuddled against her chest. “I guess I better give you your dog back.”

  Summer looked into Corey’s face. If she tried, she could see traces of Steve’s features, softened and feminized in Corey. “Would you like to keep her for the night? She’s my mother’s really, not mine, and she’d probably be just as happy with you as with me.”

  “Oh, could I?” Corey smiled dazzlingly. “I’ll take good care of her. Thanks, Summer.”

  And she ran back to join her father and Les Carter.

  Steve sent Summer a look over Corey’s head. Summer grinned at him. At least his ex-wife was a woman. Muffy wouldn’t relieve herself on her foot.

  “I’ve got to go see what I can do about locating that van. Are you sure you and Calhoun left it here?” Kendrick asked Summer.

  “One hundred percent positive.”

  Shaking his head thoughtfully, Kendrick walked away. Summer was left alone with Mitch. Steve’s Mitch. Deedee’s Mitch. She had heard so much about him, knew so many intimate details about his life, that for one of the few times in her life she found herself tongue-tied. She could not think of one single thing to say.

  Mitch solved her dilemma by speaking first. “You and Steve have had yourselves quite an adventure,” he said, smiling at her. “Suppose we all three go grab a pizza and you all tell me all about it?”

  The very thought of a pizza made Summer salivate. She was starving—which, she thought, was getting to be quite a usual state with her. She had just opened her mouth to thank Mitch very much and agree when Sammy and Les Carter rejoined them.

  Sammy looked at Summer. “I had to twist their arms, but I finally got Carter here and Kendrick to agree to let you eat and get a good night’s sleep before they start in on you.

  “We’ve got you and Calhoun hotel rooms for the night.” Les Carter sounded less jovial than Sammy. “In the morning, we’ll want to get your statements.”

  “What about supper?” Summer said plaintively, as Mitch, with a nod at the other two men, seemed to melt away. There went her pizza, she thought, gazing after him.

  “We’ll provide that, too.” Les Carter relaxed enough to smile at her. “Miss McAfee, are you sure that this is the place where you all left that van?”

  “Yes,” Summer said, growing tired of the whole topic. The location of the van did not interest her very much at the moment. Supper and a bed did.

  “I told you, you’re going to have to wait and badger her in the morning,” Sammy said firmly. “Come on, Summer, I’ll treat you and Calhoun to supper and drop you off at the hotel. We’ve got all of y’all separate rooms.”

  Sammy’s slight emphasis on separate was not lost on Summer, but she hoped it went over Les Carter’s head.

  They met Steve coming back in on their way out, and the three of them went out to dinner, just making it past the TV crew that had pulled up with a screech of brakes. A young black woman jumped out of the WTES van, and Steve dodged behind Sammy.

  As Sammy said, tomorrow would be soon enough to give a statement to the press.

  At nine-thirty at night, in the small town of Cedar Lake, there wasn’t a huge choice of restaurants. It was just getting full dark, and Summer was glad. She looked a mess, she knew, and Steve was positively disreputable. But she was so hungry, she didn’t much care how she looked, and she had a hunch Steve felt the same way.

  Steve was strangely preoccupied all through supper. They ate at Sally’s Diner, which was, from the looks of it, a chain restaurant such as a Frisch’s or a Jerry’s that had fallen on hard times and been purchased by a local entrepreneur. At any rate, except for a pizza carry-out it was the only restaurant open in town. Seated on a carved wooden bench in front of a large plate-glass window, Summer tucked into an inch-thick charcoal-grilled sirloin steak, baked potato bursting with butter and sour cream, and salad loaded with croutons and Italian dressing, and tried not to mind that Steve spent most of the meal staring abstractedly out into the firefly-lit night beyond the window. She gave Sammy a heavily censored account of what had befallen her and Steve, leaving out pertinent details such as Steve’s state of undress when they met and exactly how close they had subsequently grown. Sammy listened, puffing on his cigar and shooting occasional shrewd glances at her from under bushy white brows. She had a feeling that there was little he didn’t know.

  “It’s a ring of rogue cops,” Sammy said to Steve as the three sipped coffee after the meal. “We’ve identified about a dozen—six of them my boys. There are more, but we’re not sure how many, or who they are. We’re working on that. It’s a drug network, and it’s not just in this state, by the way. It stretches all across the South through Georgia and the Carolinas and Florida, and it involves politicians and businessmen as well as cops. We’ll find out who they are, too. It’s just a matter of doing some grunt work now. From what we’ve been able to piece together, a drug cartel out of Colombia provides the drugs—cocaine, mostly—and it gets to this country any which way it can: private planes, couriers bringing it through customs, illegal runs across the Mexican border, you name it. Haiti’s a big jumping-off point right now. That’s where the bodies in that lost van of yours were headed, by the way: Haiti. Apparently the ring had a deal with Harmon Brothers to store drugs in their vaults and to provide them with bodies when needed. From what I’ve been told, it’s easy to get drugs into this country. It’s hard to get cash out. So, when necessary, bodies and coffins were provided by Harmon Brothers, stuffed with cash and sent home to their grieving relatives’ in other countries. Customs never looks too hard at corpses, apparently.”

  “So Harmon Brothers knew what was going on.” Summer cast a sideways look at Steve, who was frowning down at his coffee. She had never, in the admittedly brief but intense time she had known him, seen him so morose.

  “They knew. At least, some of the higher-ups in the company knew. Exactly who was involved and how deeply, I couldn’t tell you at this point. It’s getting kind of murky the deeper we get into it, but well get it sorted out.”

  “I suppose you know that there are DEA and CIA fingerprints all over this thing.” Steve looked up at last. “I caught on to that when I was investigating three years ago. I just never got the chance to pinpoint the details.”

  “Had a little interruption in your career, didn’t you?” Sammy gave a sympathetic chuckle. “So what exactly did you find out?”

  “Nothing too specific, at least nothing that I could take to a prosecutor and they could prove in court. But apparently the CIA made a deal with the DEA to let drug deals go down in return for intelligence
information on the countries where the deals were spawned. Latin American countries, mostly.”

  “You mean the government is using drug dealers for spies?” Summer gasped.

  Steve gave her a crooked smile. “Something like that. I don’t think we’ll ever get completely to the bottom of it. What we’ve uncovered here is just the tip of the iceberg. Some of these dudes—they call ’em ‘assets’ but what they are is a bunch of drug smugglers and mercenaries—are actually paid by the CIA to infiltrate these drug rings. In return for information, they’re allowed to pretty much do their own thing without interference.”

  “There’s big money in drugs,” Sammy observed, with a glinting, under-the-brow glance at Steve. Then the waitress brought their check, and the talk turned to more general topics.

  An hour later, Summer stepped into a tub of the hottest water she’d been able to coax from the ancient faucets of her hotel bathroom. She was ensconced for the night at the Dew Drop Inn, a fifties-era motel that offered necessities rather than luxuries. The room was small, with a bath room that was smaller, but it sported a standard double bed that was going to feel like nirvana compared to the surfaces she’d slept on lately, as well as a toilet and a bathtub with a shower. It even had mini bottles of shampoo and moisturizer and mouthwash on the chipped Formica vanity. Summer, having already washed her hair and wrapped it in a towel, felt positively blissful as she sank chin-deep into the water that was hot enough to turn her skin instantly pink.

  The only fly in her ointment was that she missed Steve. But Sammy had very firmly escorted her to her own room, while Steve had been left to find his way alone to his. Watching him go, Summer had been amused to note that Steve’s room was at the far end of the long, rambling, single-story motel where the accommodations had more the flavor of connecting cabins than hotel rooms.

  Sammy was very protective of her, just as he had always been. She hadn’t had the heart to remind him that she was thirty-six years old, no longer married to his son, and perfectly capable of deciding whether or not she wanted to sleep alone. Instead, she had regretfully watched Steve vanish into his room and kissed Sammy’s cheek by way of good night.

  “See you in the morning,” he said gruffly as he turned away from her door. The first thing she had done was run herself a steaming-hot bath.

  Then she had called her mother.

  Soaping her legs, sparing a fleeting regret for the absence of a razor, Summer thought back on that conversation with her parent. It had been all she could do to dissuade her mother—and her sisters—from rushing from their hotel instantly to her side.

  “I’m fine, Muffy’s fine, we’ll both see you tomorrow,” she had concluded firmly. “And I’ll tell you everything then.”

  She might tell them a little more than she had told Sammy, Summer decided, leaning forward to rub suds into her toes, but she wasn’t going to tell them everything.

  Some things they didn’t need to know. Though, being women and her relatives, they would probably guess.

  A drop of cold water splashed onto her spine.

  Startled, Summer spun her head around so fast that she nearly gave herself whiplash.

  41

  “Hi.” Steve, still clad in the orange Nike shirt and cutoffs, was leaning against the bathroom door grinning at her. She was sitting with her back to him and her knees bent because of the small size of the tub, so not an awful lot of her person was on view, but his eyes gleamed appreciatively over as much of her as he could see.

  “How did you get in here?” Summer gasped, instinctively clapping the washcloth she’d been using over her bosom. The washcloth was small, and thin, and didn’t cover much, but that didn’t matter. It was the thought that counted.

  “Cheap lock. I used the laminated list of motel rules that I found on my bedside table to jimmy it. Next time, put the chain on.” Steve straightened away from the door-jamb, and held up a brown paper bag. “I brought you a present. Toothpaste, toothbrush, a comb and a lipstick. Courtesy of the last of Renfro’s money and what passes for the hotel gift shop.”

  “A toothbrush?” Summer reached eagerly for the bag. He grinned and drew it back out of her reach.

  “Come and get it.”

  “Steve Calhoun, a toothbrush and toothpaste are too important to kid around about! Put that bag down on the counter and get out of this bathroom! I’ll be finished in a minute.”

  “Okay,” Steve said obligingly. Setting the bag on the counter, he withdrew, pulling the door shut behind him. Summer was too eager to get hold of the toothbrush and paste to question his apparent willingness to oblige. Giving in without an argument wasn’t like Steve—but she didn’t think of that.

  Stark naked except for the towel wrapped around her head, and dripping wet, Summer stood in front of the sink watching herself in the mirror as she scrubbed her teeth when Steve opened the door and walked back in.

  He was naked, too. Her glance absorbed the details: He was broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, liberally gifted with luxuriant black body hair in all the right places—and extremely well endowed.

  “Get out of here!” Summer ordered around a mouthful of toothpaste, scandalized on principle alone. Despite the fact that he was her lover and her love, she felt suddenly, ridiculously shy. New settings came complete with new rules: she’d never been alone with him in a motel room before.

  “You’re not turning modest on me all of a sudden, are you?” he asked with a lopsided grin that nevertheless missed nothing of her body. “With an ass and tits like yours, you don’t have any reason in the world to be shy.”

  “You sweet-talker, you,” Summer said with bite as soon as she had rinsed out her mouth.

  “It’s a compliment. I swear.” His eyes twinkled at her, and he awarded the ass in question an approving swat.

  Then, without another word, he stepped into her tub.

  “I’m taking a bath,” Summer protested as soon as she had recovered from the smack. Was she really going to be able to make a life with a man who smacked her bottom? “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Joining you.” He was leaning back in the tub, rubbing the soap in lazy circles over his shoulders and chest and arms. The contrast between bronzed skin and white tile and suds and soap was striking. His legs were bent sharply at the knees, his wide shoulders cleared the water by a good six inches, and his head rested against the chipped tile wall rather than the rolled rim of the tub. But he looked supremely content. And very cute. Summer decided to forgive him that chauvinistic swat. Once he was hers, he could always be retrained.…

  “Joining me?” Her voice was indignant. “I’m not in there.”

  “Get in.” The invitation was accompanied by a seductive grin. It was amazing, Summer thought, just how sexy a man could look with two black eyes, a scabbed-over cut on one cheek, and enough assorted bruises to keep a doctor happy for days.

  “There’s not room.”

  “We’ll make room.” He reached out, grabbed her hand—and before Summer knew it she was being partly dragged, partly coaxed into the tub. She collapsed chest-down in a heap on his stomach, her legs caught between his and bent at the knee so that her calves climbed the tile wall.

  “You’re right,” Steve said as if making a great discovery. “There’s not room.”

  Sliding her to one side, he stood up with a great squelching sound. Summer had just an instant to admire his body—she really did admire his body—before he bent, stuck his shoulder in her stomach, and stood up with her.

  Summer shrieked, and immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected the walls were thin.

  Hanging over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, the towel around her head falling loose to be left behind on the floor, Summer gritted her teeth to keep from yelling and pounded his back with her fists. He paid not a bit of attention as he stepped from the tub with her and carried her into the bedroom.

  “Put me down, you …” she growled threateningly, giving h
im a particularly solid whack between the shoulder blades.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The teasing note in his voice should have warned her.

  But still she wasn’t prepared as he collapsed on the bed with her. She shrieked again as she landed on her back, bouncing on the soft mattress.

  This time he clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shhh! Somebody might call the police.”

  Oh, ha-ha. Very funny. But before she could tell him what she thought of his jokes Summer thought of something. “Steve, no! We’ll get the bed soaked!”

  “Do you care?”

  If Summer had had a chance to think about it, the answer to that would have been no, she did not care. But she didn’t have a chance to think about it, because he was sliding up her body and she was scowling at him and he was kissing her and loving her and she couldn’t think about anything at all but him.

  Much, much later, they headed for Steve’s room to spend what was left of the night because Summer’s bed had, indeed, gotten very wet. Snickering behind their hands like schoolchildren, they crept along the yellow-lighted sidewalk in front of the rooms. It must have been about midnight, but except for the moths fluttering around the small sconces outside each door not a creature stirred.

  As they reached the door to his room Steve swung her around into his arms and kissed her.

  “Hey,” she protested playfully when she could talk again. “Haven’t you had enough of that yet?”

  “Nope.” He kissed her again, lingeringly, smiling as he lifted his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of that as long as I live. It’s one of those forever kind of things.”

  “Is it?” She leaned against his chest, hands curled around the straps of his muscle shirt as her lips formed a secret little smile.

  “Isn’t it?”

  He felt very big and solid against her, and his eyes as they met her gaze were no longer dead and hopeless-looking as they had once been, but warm and bright and almost carefree. Summer looked up into that unhandsome but powerfully magnetic face and had her answer.