Night of the Hawk (LS 767)

by Victoria Leigh

  WHEN A PSYCHIC ON A RADIO CALL-IN SHOW PROMISES TO REVEAL THE PERFECT WOMAN FOR THE MAN WHO WON'T COMMIT, WILL FOUR CONFIRMED BACHELORS SURRENDER TO THE TEMPTATION OF LOVE?

  HAWK— A RUGGED WARRIOR WHOSE KISS BRANDED HER DANGER'S PRIZE— AND HIS...

  She'd pointed a gun at his head, yet never fired the weapon—but Hawk believed the woman must have been hired to kill him! Angela Ferguson bravely insisted she knew nothing, no matter how dark his threats, but even her innocence wouldn't save her from the violence that shadowed his haunted eyes. If no escape was possible, could she keep her brave renegade from trading his life for revenge?

  NIGHT OF THE HAWK

  by VICTORIA LEIGH

  PROLOGUE

  "I don't know what it is that you want me to do, Caroline."

  "I want you to tell me whether or not I'm Gary's ideal mate." The female voice that reached Fiona through the headset was young and petulant.

  Fiona threw an exasperated look across the table to where Austin McEver, deejay and ninety-nine-percent-of-the-time believer, was avoiding her gaze by fiddling with a lever on the control panel. Realizing no help would be forthcoming from that quarter, she glared at the microphone and wished this particular call had been screened more thoroughly. She was supposed to be finding mates for confirmed bachelors, not handing out advice for the lovelorn.

  Unrequited love was not, after all, the theme of tonight's program. More to the point, Fiona was a psychic, not a psychologist—which might have been more appropriate with this particular caller. Still, Fiona didn't have the heart to give her the bad news—she'd known right away that Gary and Caroline weren't destined to share their futures—so she approached the issue from another angle.

  "Caroline, I'm not certain that it's fair to describe a twenty-year-old archaeology student with two part-time jobs and a passion for rock climbing as a confirmed bachelor. Have you ever considered that Gary might simply be too busy or, perhaps, too young to commit himself to you?"

  Caroline responded so quickly that Fiona knew the young woman hadn't listened to her words of reluctant counsel. "If he loved me, he would spend more time doing things I like."

  "You might have a point there, Caroline. I'd think about it if I were you. Thank you so much for calling 'Fiona's Forum.'" Fiona made a cutting motion across her throat, but she needn't have bothered. The deejay was already flicking buttons and leaning toward the microphone.

  "This is WRDY radio out of Pine Forest, North Carolina, and you're listening to 'Fiona's Forum' on Austin in the Evening. Tonight's subject is men who won't commit to a relationship." Austin took a quick breath and grinned across the table. "Fiona Alexander, world-class psychic and hopeless romantic, believes it's not so much a problem of commitment as it is of finding the right woman . . . and she's here to do just that. Give us a first name, tell us a little about this confirmed bachelor, and Fiona will do her thing. Before you know it, Technicolor fireworks will fill the skies and wedding bells will ring all across the nation—"

  Fiona leaned toward her microphone and inserted, "Don't get too carried away, Austin. I only promise to produce the perfect mate. The end result of any relationship is a matter best left to the people involved."

  Austin's eyebrows rose inquiringly. "You're saying that not even the perfect mate will be a guarantee of happy-ever-after?"

  "A lasting relationship takes more than a mere introduction," Fiona said, resting her chin on her palm. "Much more.

  The engineer behind the glass cued another call, and Fiona took it before Austin could draw her any deeper into the subject of love and its disparate denouements. It wasn't that she was insensitive to the end result of her psychic matchmaking. On the contrary, Fiona found it incredibly frustrating to see two people botch up a relationship she'd had a finger in engineering.

  Her attention swung to the new caller, who had the voice of a woman to whom menopause was a distant memory.

  "My name is Mrs.—"

  "First names only, please," Austin cut in.

  There was a pause, then she began again. "My name is Sara. It's my neighbor I'm calling about, you see, a very nice young man—although I suppose young is a relative term. Frankly anyone under sixty looks young to me."

  "How old is this man?" Fiona asked.

  "Around forty, I suspect. Of course, I wouldn't dream of asking, because then he'd think I'm nosy. It's just that when I heard you could find the perfect mate, I decided I had to call because some woman out there is missing out on a good thing. I mean, it's not that he's gorgeous or anything prissy like that. Bob—that's his name—is more the rugged sort, real tall with wonderful broad shoulders and the kind of face that only a very strong woman would think was attractive."

  Fiona choked back a giggle, and in a separate corner of her mind made note of the fact that the name Bob didn't feel right. It wasn't because the neighbor had made it up to protect his privacy, she sensed. More likely, Bob wasn't his name, and the elderly woman simply didn't know that.

  A hawk circled lazily in the stormy skies above, waiting for its prey with the kind of patience that was bred, not learned. . . .

  The image was vivid and momentary, gone before she could get a sense of where it had come from. She avoided jumping to the conclusion that it had anything to do with Bob because it could so easily have been "fallout" from any one of the dozen people inside the station as well as other callers waiting on hold.

  Returning to the "rugged not prissy" routine, she prompted Sara. "A woman has to be strong to look at Bob?"

  "Don't be silly. What I meant was that it would take a very special kind of woman to see beyond the harshness in his features. His eyes too. They're so dark and unreadable, mysterious like I told my friend Edna, with little smile lines shooting out from them. Edna says those lines are from squinting at the sun and that Bob scares her when he smiles —which he doesn't do very often on account of the pain, I suppose."

  "What pain?" Fiona thought she heard the words some psychic across the telephone line, but dismissed it as static and rubbed the back of her right hand to relieve a strange prickling sensation. It didn't go away, though, and her fingers lingered on the spot.

  "He was injured," Sara said, "about six months ago, I suppose. That's when he came to live here, just across the hall from me—after the accident. He said he needed peace and quiet to heal." She gave a sigh that couldn't be interpreted as anything less than compassion. "Such a shame, too, that scar on the back of his hand, the right one. He says it happened years ago, but I can tell it still hurts, even now when his other injuries have mostly healed."

  Fiona's gaze was riveted to her right hand, where she'd been massaging the odd sensation. She knew what it was now, the tingling. There was a strong connection between herself and this Bob person, a man she'd never met, yet one whose own psychic powers had a physical impact on her. Despite several years of experience with this kind of phenomenon, she couldn't help the mild panic brought on by the rush of awareness.

  She began, "A scar on—"

  The elderly caller continued as though Fiona hadn't spoken. "It was why he took up needlepoint—for the exercise therapy, you know, to get his fingers working again. Bob does such beautiful work too. He made me a new cover for my footstool last month, a roadrunner it was. Such a thoughtful man."

  She paused, but not long enough for Fiona to get a word in edgewise. "I'm quite worried about him, you see."

  The woman hesitated then, and Fiona prompted her to continue. "Because he's single?" she asked.

  "Of course that's why I'm worried. I wouldn't have called you otherwise." Without saying it aloud, Sara managed to convey her disapproval of the previous caller's deviation from the theme. "Bob is a lovely man, and I'
ve never once seen him with a woman—or anyone else for that matter," she added, just in case Fiona and the rest of the North American continent got the wrong impression.

  "Does Bob talk to you about this?" Fiona asked.

  "If you mean does he bend my ear about how lonely he is, then you've got him all wrong. A body has to work very hard to get any information out of Bob about anything, and men he'll only say as little as he thinks he can get away with." The elderly woman's sniff of disapproval was clear, and it was directed at Fiona, not her neighbor's reluctance to share confidences. "I'd think you would sense that Bob wouldn't talk about himself like that. Are you sure you're a psychic?"

  "Yes, I am a psychic," Fiona returned, grinning at Austin. "I don't, however, claim to be omniscient."

  "Well, that's all right, then." Sara didn't sound convinced, not to Fiona, not even to Austin, who looked more skeptical than she'd ever seen him.

  "Tell me a little more about Bob," Fiona said, absently stroking the back of her hand.

  "Well, he admits that he sees women away from his apartment—I got that out of him one day over tea and his favorite gingerbread cookies—but if that's the case, they're no one he cares about, because he'd bring them home then, wouldn't he? I mean, he has a perfectly nice apartment here in San Rafael, a bit light on the personal touch but nothing to be ashamed of. I gave him a plant a few months ago—a simply beautiful African violet that I picked up at the Sausa-lito flea market. Anyway, I'd hoped he might get the hint and do up the place a bit, but I guess he prefers the Spartan look. Still, he keeps it meticulously clean—now that's something a woman would like in a man, isn't it? He even polished my parquet floor for me last month, a blessing because it's been twenty years since my knees worked that way and the lady who cleans for me always leaves streaks."

  Fiona broke in before the woman could tell the world what chemicals Bob recommended for cleaning toilets. "Thank you for sharing all that with us, Sara. Your neighbor sounds like a very, er, unique man. In fact, I'd say you're a little in love with him yourself."

  "Everyone from my dentist to the grocery delivery boy has said more or less the same thing, and none of them are psychics. I'm beginning to think I should have asked one of them to help me find Bob a woman."

  Fiona almost wished she had, wincing as the tingling in her hand increased to a dull throb. She shook her hand from the wrist in an effort to dislodge the psychic scar, and when that didn't work she made an effort to do something about Bob's love life. If nothing else, breaking the connection with Bob's well-meaning neighbor was certain to ease the discomfort.

  She said, "Bob is going to meet his perfect mate sometime in the next few days."

  "What is she like?" Abundant skepticism laced Sara's question, but Fiona was in no doubt that the caller was paying very close attention. She had to work hard to focus on the image that was no more than a blur, a casualty, she assumed, of the more dominant phenomenon of the scar. Normally, she could see so clearly. . . .

  "Well?" The elderly voice demanded attention, and even Austin was looking at Fiona with noticeable impatience.

  "She's about medium height, five five or six, with long thick hair hanging down her back. Red, I think—I'm not sure about that, though. It's hard to tell. She's standing somewhere dark, somewhere without windows." The image sharpened for a brief moment, then disappeared, leaving Fiona with one last impression.

  Her breath was a sudden hiss that had the engineer behind the glass panel frowning his disapproval, but Fiona didn't care. All that mattered was that she tell Sara exactly what she'd seen.

  "The woman Bob is destined to fall in love with is holding a gun," she said, then closed her eyes to the open-mouthed deejay across the table in an effort to recall the image.

  "You see a gun," Sara asked, "but you can't be certain if her hair is red?"

  "Sometimes it works like that," Fiona said.

  "You're sure it's not one of those fancy corkscrews? I've got a friend who bought one for her nephew when we went shopping last summer, and I made her wait for me outside the bank when I went in to cash my Social Security because I was afraid someone would see it and get us both shot."

  "I really think it was a gun."

  "A corkscrew would make more sense. Bob sometimes drinks a glass of wine when he sits on the porch in the evening." After a pause she added, "Is this woman aiming the thing at Bob?"

  Fiona hesitated, then shook her head in silent defeat. "I hope not."

  "I'd hate to think this is her way of telling Bob she's not interested in him."

  Fiona couldn't help a tiny smile. "Perhaps Bob respects a woman who has strong opinions."

  Approximately one million listeners—a number tallied or inflated by those dreamers in the marketing office—were treated to Austin's near-hysterical cackle before he clapped a hand over his mouth. Fiona tried her best to ignore him.

  Sara's dissatisfaction with the results of her call was clear in her voice. "To be honest, Fiona, if a gunslinging babe is your idea of a perfect mate for my sweet neighbor, then I'm glad I didn't ask you to find one for me. At my age, I get all the excitement I need playing canasta with Mr. Tompkins who lives upstairs. And before you ask, yes, he's a confirmed bachelor, too, but I don't need a psychic to predict he'll settle down with me once he gets to the point where he can't climb all those stairs any longer."

  Fiona swallowed her own laughter. "I'm sure you're right about that, Sara. Thank you for calling 'Fiona's Forum.' "

  "And for tuning in to Austin in the Evening," Austin said on cue, then gave the station's call sign and phone number before moving on to plug the sponsor's product.

  Tuning out the deejay, Fiona replayed the conversation with Bob's neighbor in her head. It sounded just as absurd the second time around. She was fairly certain that prophesying gun-toting soul mates wasn't exactly what Austin had had in mind when he'd proposed the theme of that night's show. But then, she hadn't imagined she'd stumble across a situation this explosive.

  If she didn't take steps, it was likely to blow up right in Bob's face. She wasn't sure it wasn't already too late.

  Music had replaced the deejay's voice, and Fiona looked up to meet Austin's questioning gaze. "I assume you have that woman's phone number," she said.

  "Of course. We won't put through a call over the air without it."

  There were various reasons for that safeguard, none of them important to Fiona except for the fact that they could reach Bob. By calling the woman back, they could get her address. Fiona swallowed hard and tried to give an appearance of calm. "Please arrange for a tape of Bob's part of the program to be sent to him. Express."

  "You're afraid Bob's perfect mate is going to do something unromantic with that gun?" Austin asked, his expression a blend of disbelief and curiosity.

  She smiled, grateful that his belief in her psychic powers had survived the last few minutes more or less intact. "I'm not sure it's the woman that Bob needs to be concerned about."

  "So why send the tape?"

  "Because I owe him a warning."

  "About the gun?"

  Another smile. "If that's how he interprets it, then yes, that too."

  The engineer waved to signal a call, and Fiona realized as she leaned toward the microphone that the psychic scar on her hand no longer tingled. The connection between herself and Bob—or whatever his name was—had been broken. It was a shame, she often thought, that her powers allowed only glimpses, not complete stories.

  Sometimes, like now, she felt a little cheated.

  ONE

  The parking place Hawk found across from the dry cleaners was tight, but he managed it with a three-point maneuver that wouldn't have worked if the curb had been a couple of inches higher. His car was a blue hatchback of indeterminate age, a minimal sort of car that suited him because of the anonymity it afforded. It had the added advantage of being cheap—not worth stealing but easy to replace if someone did.

  He got out, grabbed his sports bag from the b
ackseat, and locked the car before heading over to the fast-food restaurant on the corner. Inside, he paid for a cup of coffee and sat where he could see the door and the street outside as he drank it. The coffee was hot and black and far inferior to anything he could have brewed in his apartment just two blocks south, but he hadn't wanted anything to eat, and the soft drinks in this place were typically low on carbonation and high on syrup. So here he was, drinking bad coffee and watching his back trail just in case he'd been followed from the small valley airport.

  Just because the San Francisco Bay Area was the last place anyone would think to look for him—being, as it was, virtually on the doorstep of the men hunting for him— didn't mean he could afford to get sloppy. There were too many people out there who wanted his head, although after eight months he figured the number of those actively committed to finding him had diminished. Still, all it would take was a chance sighting to put the hounds on his trail, and this time he might not get away.

  Even if he was the only one who thought so, he figured his life was worth a cup or two of lousy coffee.

  Ten minutes later Hawk walked out of the restaurant with the sports bag in his left hand and his brown leather bomber jacket open in case he needed the gun tucked into his shoulder holster. Rounding the corner and heading west, he took a circuitous route to his apartment, noting the cars and other pedestrians who passed him in the gathering dusk. He walked steadily, but not so fast as to draw attention to himself, the stiffness in his left shoulder easing now that he was no longer stuck in the cramped Cessna or behind the wheel of the hatchback.

  The bullet wound in that shoulder had been the worst of his injuries, and it was the only one that still gave him any trouble. Another month, give or take, and he figured it wouldn't bother him any more than the back of his right hand, where a junkie had cut a tliree-inch gash during a raid almost six years earlier. Hawk had learned to live with the occasional twinge or ache, preferring that to the numbness the surgeon had prognosticated after he'd done all he could to repair the damaged tendons.

  Physical therapy and sheer bloody-mindedness had helped him regain full use of his hand. He was confident the same would be the case with his shoulder.