To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  It would be an ideal place for a hit. Few witnesses. Easy access to the expressway. Just pull up beside her and blam, blow her away.

  Mac’s blood ran cold at the thought.

  Up ahead, Julie turned the corner, still running at a steady pace and sticking to the sidewalk. He eyed her slender figure with growing wrath. She hadn’t betrayed the least awareness of him, and as he got a good view of her profile—delicate features, swinging ponytail, bouncing breasts, long, limber legs—he saw why: She was wearing a Walkman.

  An army division could have been running behind her in full combat gear and she wouldn’t have heard. To a professional killer with a job to finish, taking her out would be a piece of cake.

  Disgusted, he decided to show her just how vulnerable to a surprise attack she was. He increased his pace until he was right behind her and gave her ponytail a tug.

  She spun, screeching, and thrust her hand in his direction as she danced backward. Before he realized what was happening, he found himself on the business end of a can of—was it Mace?

  It was. Before he could react, the mist hit his eyes like a flamethrower. The instant burning made him think of hell-fire. He bellowed in surprise and pain, clawing at his face, his eyes, bending double, scrubbing at his face with the end of his shirt, all to no avail.

  He was going to be burned, scarred, blinded for life. At least, that was how it felt. He knew, knew, that Mace hurt like hell but left no permanent aftereffects. There was faint comfort in the knowledge when his face felt like it was melting and his eyes felt like someone had stuck hot pokers deep in the sockets.

  “Damn it, Julie!” It was a groan of agony.

  “Mac! Oh, Mac! Oh, Mac!” Her hand was on his shoulder, the top of his head, his arm. He got the impression that she was bending over him, peering into his face, but he couldn’t be sure because he couldn’t see. “I’m so sorry! I thought you were the hit man.”

  Then the horror in her voice gave way to—was it a giggle? Yes, it was. A whole infuriating string of them. Seconds later she was talking through them to someone—he couldn’t quite make out what was being said, or who the newcomer was, although the voice sounded male. Still bent almost double, staggering around like a blind, drunken hunchback, Mac felt stark fear override even the pain. She had rendered him—her supposed protector—all but helpless, and now, right at the worst possible moment, here came some unknown guy. Was it the hit man? Not likely. If it had been, she would have been dead by now, and so probably would he. Professional killers didn’t usually hang about exchanging conversation with their giggling victims. Desperate to see who had accosted her, Mac scrubbed at his face with a different portion of his shirt, and managed to open his swollen, burning eyes a slit.

  Just in time to get hit in the face with a burst of cold water so strong it could have been shot from a cannon. Julie had found a hose, complete with water and a little old man who had apparently brought it to her, and turned it on him.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Stumbling backward, Mac tried to protect his face as the water caused the burning to intensify exponentially.

  “Here, you do it,” Julie said, thrusting the hose into his hand. “I want to finish my run.”

  “You stay right here. Do you hear me?” It was a barked order, uttered as his fingers closed blindly around the pulsing rubber tube. He grabbed for her with his free hand, but couldn’t find her. But at least she was nearby. He could hear her still chuckling at his plight. Did she have no clue as to how much danger she was in? Obviously not. If he could just get the stuff out of his eyes, he thought frantically, they’d be all right. Remembering his police training on Mace—no matter how much it hurt, water was the preferred vehicle for flushing it from the eyes—he tried angling the hose up so that the onslaught would not be as extreme and pulling his lids apart with his free hand at the same time so that the falling water could run into them, and groaned as he succeeded. Cold torrent or no, his eyes burned like be-damned.

  “I saw how this fellow was chasing you before you squirted him. You want I should call the police?” The old guy was brandishing a cell phone and talking to Julie, and from his tone Mac supposed he should consider himself lucky the guy didn’t have his own can of Mace.

  Mac managed another look to find that the man, who appeared to be about as old as Methuselah, was wearing belted, baggy shorts that ended just above his knobby knees, a striped, tucked-in sport shirt, black socks, and dress shoes. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Julie, phone at the ready. Both of them were watching Mac’s suffering without a trace of sympathy that he could detect, although his vision was admittedly still pretty blurry.

  “No. Oh, no.” Julie laughed again—thus dispelling Mac’s last hope that maybe there was some sympathy there he just was not picking up on—as Mac soaked the end of his shirt and scrubbed it one more time over his burning face. “I’m sure he’s learned his lesson. Thanks for your help.”

  Then, to Mac’s combined horror and disbelief, she turned on her heel and took off again, continuing her run with the same blithe disregard for her continued existence that had caused the whole fiasco in the first place.

  “Damn it, Julie, come back here!” he yelled after her, blinking and squinting at her retreating figure, knowing that he was in no condition to follow. But, except for an airy wave that was scarcely more than a blur to his traumatized eyes, she paid no attention at all. Instead, she restored the headphones to their previous position over her ears and picked up the pace until she turned another corner and disappeared from sight.

  “Damn it to hell.” But there was no help for it. He couldn’t see well enough to go chasing after her. She was on her own.

  By the time he made it back to the Blazer some fifteen minutes later, he was having waking nightmares about what might have befallen her. To add to the fun, his face and eyes felt like they’d been stung by about a thousand jellyfish, his clothes were dripping wet and icy cold, and he was being harangued from behind by Julie’s would-be protector, who had followed him suspiciously all the way back to the car. As a consequence, he was mad as hell.

  He was also just in time to watch Julie sprint up the steps of her mother’s house and disappear safely inside. At that point, he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. If the hit man had taken her out, at least he would have been saved the trouble of later wringing her neck.

  The old man’s cell phone started ringing, distracting him from his determined pursuit. Mac took advantage of the opportunity to jerk open the driver’s door, meaning to collapse on the front seat and close and lock the door before the old guy could start in on him again. To his amazement, a snarling Josephine leaped past him like a fuzzy white missile and proceeded to commit felonious assault upon the now screaming old gentleman’s bare, bony shin.

  It cost him five hundred dollars, a look at Josephine’s license—thank God the pink collar to which it was attached was still in the backseat—and a couple of Band-Aids from the glove compartment to make that go away.

  Hanging grimly on to Josephine, wondering if she was (a) rabid despite having been vaccinated, or (b) just plain insane, Mac at last got rid of the now-raving old man and sank down in the Blazer’s front seat for a badly needed period of R and R.

  “What were you thinking?” This he addressed to Josephine, who was now sitting in the passenger seat beside him, once again daintily feminine in her favorite pink-and-rhinestone collar. She wagged her tail and looked innocent, clearly hoping to convince the unwary that she hadn’t just tried to chew off a helpless old man’s leg. Mac thanked God that she was a seven-pound poodle instead of a rottweiler, realized that he was talking to the dog as if she could understand him and, furthermore, reply, and dropped his head back against the seat in despair. He was the one who was losing his marbles, he decided. No, not losing. Had lost.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw a white blur drive past. A horn honked. A hand waved.

  Julie.

  He sat up in time to watch the white I
nfiniti disappear around the corner.

  Swearing a blue streak, he started the Blazer, did a one-eighty, and took off after her, despite a sudden, fleeting temptation just to leave her to the tender mercies of the hit man he was pretty damn sure was out there.

  Not much to his surprise, she drove into Summerville and pulled up in the parking lot behind the strip mall that housed her shop. The one in which people who were not trying to keep their presence in her life a secret generally parked.

  To hell with it. He figured that cat was out of the bag with a vengeance now anyway. As he slammed to a halt beside the Infiniti, he watched her walk across the parking lot toward one of the brown metal doors set into the back of the low brick building. She looked cool and beautiful—hell, when did she ever not?—in a snug black T-shirt and a teensy white skirt with her hair falling loose around her shoulders. There were a few other people in the lot—a man heading toward another of the metal doors, a woman carrying a garbage bag toward the Dumpster—but to all intents and purposes she was alone.

  If he were a hit man, she’d be toast.

  Fortunately for her, he was not. He grabbed Josephine—it was already too hot to leave her in the car with the motor turned off—tucked her football-style under his arm, and sprinted across the parking lot after Julie.

  He reached her just as she was inserting her key into the lock of the metal door. The tension in her stance told him that she’d seen him coming. The tilt of her head told him that she didn’t like it.

  “What are you, a slow learner?” She gave him an evil look that was mitigated somewhat by the sheer beauty of those long-lashed Bambi eyes. “Leave me alone.” Her gaze flicked down to the poodle, which was wriggling with pleasure at seeing her. “Hello, Josephine.”

  Josephine yapped excitedly and tried beating him to death with her tail.

  “You two should be buddies,” Mac said sourly. “You’re both major pains in the ass. Now that you’ve had your fun for the morning, you feel like listening to my side of the story?”

  “Take a hike.” She got the door open, stepped inside, and tried closing it in his face. He snorted and strong-armed his way through.

  “Okay, forget it. I lied to you and I used you. If that’s going to be the bottom line for you, it’s fine by me.”

  He was standing in an office, he discovered as he set Josephine down on the carpeted floor, that was dark and pleasant-smelling and approximately as cold as Antartica in winter. Julie’s face tightened as she looked at him, but she seemed to realize, rightly, that ordering him out would be a waste of breath because she closed and locked the door again, then turned to glare at him.

  “Good. Then we’re both happy. Or at least, I would be if you’d get the hell out of my shop.”

  “Not happening.”

  Mac walked a couple of paces into the room, casting wary looks around. Mirrors everywhere. A shiny black desk with nothing on it except a desk set and a telephone. A silver rack half-full of dresses. A gray flannel couch.

  “It’s freezing in here.”

  “If you’re cold, it’s probably because you’re all wet.” Her tone gave that a double meaning which she obviously relished.

  He returned from a quick inspection of the bathroom that opened off the office to look at her.

  “And I would be all wet because somebody Maced me.”

  Julie gave an unrepentant laugh as she crossed to her desk. “You shouldn’t have scared me.”

  “Listen, Miss America, can you say hit man?” Her cavalier attitude was really beginning to irk him.

  “No, but I can say bullshit.” She straightened up from tucking her purse under the desk and gave him a great big go-to-hell smile. “And that’s what I do say: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

  “You willing to bet your life you’re right?” Now that her office had been awarded the all-clear, Mac glanced around for the thermostat. If he didn’t get that air-conditioner shut off soon, it was going to kill him. “Remember the guy who broke into your house? Remember the girl who got hit by a car while wearing your dress in front of your store last night? What are they, figments of my imagination?”

  There was a pause. Julie stared at him without speaking. Then her lips pursed, and she glanced away.

  Hah, Mac thought. He was finally getting through. He spotted the thermostat on the wall nearby and stepped over to it, turning the little knob until the blast of arctic air abruptly stopped.

  “Leave the air-conditioning alone,” Julie said, coming up behind him and smacking his hand away from the control, then turning the knob the other way again so that refrigerator-caliber air once again blasted from the vents. “I have clients coming. If you’re cold, I have a simple remedy for you: leave.”

  “Keep sweet-talking me like that, and you may never get rid of me.” He abandoned his surreptitious repeat attack on the knob to grab her around the waist and swing her back behind him when she would have walked out into the main area of the store. “Hold it right there.”

  “Let go of me! What do you think you’re doing?” She glared at him as she whisked herself free of his hold.

  “Besides forming icicles?” Drawing his gun from its berth in the small of his back—which was, thankfully, one of the few remaining dry areas on his body—he moved into the large, elegant room ahead of her, scanning it for any sign of disturbance or unauthorized occupancy, checking behind racks of dresses and a large potted palm and a pair of gray flannel chairs for an intruder. “Doing my best to keep you alive. Without any noticeable help from you, I might add. Is that front door locked?”

  “Of course it’s locked. I haven’t opened up yet.”

  “Keep it that way. Only open it to people you know.”

  A beat passed during which she just looked at him.

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  Without answering, he headed toward the back rooms—fitting rooms, he discovered, three of them, large and elegantly appointed and paneled in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Julie, with Josephine at her heels, followed. Both watched his efforts with heads cocked in a way that was purely feminine.

  “No hit man?” Julie’s voice was sardonic as he emerged from the last of the fitting rooms.

  “Not so far.”

  “I can’t tell you how much that relieves my mind.” She glared at him. “Now that you’ve made sure there’s no bogeyman under the bed, you can get out of my shop. I have a business to run here, and you are in the way.”

  “What I can’t understand,” Mac said, ignoring that last speech entirely as he moved back into the main room where the blast from the air-conditioning was at least distributed over a larger area, somewhat lessening its effect, “is why you’re here today at all. Shouldn’t you close up shop for a while as a sign of respect to the dearly departed?”

  Julie’s brow wrinkled, and a flash of pain darkened her eyes. “I thought about closing, but I talked to the Miss Southern Beauty officials last night. The pageant will go ahead as scheduled. They mean to have a moment of silence during the opening ceremony tomorrow to honor Carlene, but otherwise there’s no change. And I’m dressing seven other girls. Five of them are scheduled to come in for final wardrobe fittings today. If the pageant’s on, I have no choice but to be here.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Trying not to shiver, Mac shook his head in complete and total frustration. “I’m talking about somebody trying to kill you here, and you’re talking about a beauty pageant. Let’s try to get a handle on our priorities, shall we? What we need to do is get you the hell out of Dodge. Lie low somewhere out of state, maybe, until we get some answers. Forget the damned beauty pageant.”

  “No,” Julie said, fists on hips as she scowled at him. “I won’t forget it. This is my business. And those girls are counting on me. Anyway, please explain to me exactly why I need you, because I don’t have a clue. Let’s just say, for a moment, that you’re right about this hit-man thing. If I really thought I was in danger, I’d run to the police so fast you wouldn’
t see me for the blur.”

  “And they’d be real polite, and write up a nice little report, and that would be that.” Mac’s voice was flat. “Until you were dead. Then they might start an investigation. But, oopsy, too late for you.”

  Julie’s eyes shot sparks at that. Mac supposed that his words hadn’t been all that tactful, but he was tired and wet and cold and his eyes burned and her attitude was not only driving him totally around the bend, it was dangerous. For her.

  And it bothered him a whole hell of a lot to realize that anything that was dangerous for her scared the socks off him.

  “You know what?” she said with that little clenched-teeth smile he was beginning to know way better than he wanted to. “I’m prepared to take my chances. So you can just go away. You know, leave. Vamoose. Scram. Shoo. Whichever one of those works for you.”

  He returned her unflinching stare for unflinching stare, then took a calming minute to return his gun to its accustomed position inside his waistband. She could lose her temper all she wanted to, he told himself. He was going to keep his.

  Then at least one of them would be operating with a full order of french fries. “Give it up, Julie,” he said tiredly. “I’m not going anywhere. At least, not without you. You want to know why you need me? Because, whether you believe it or not, I’m pretty sure your life is in danger here. Which means you need somebody watching out for you, and from where I’m standing, darlin’, it looks like I’m all you’ve got.”

  27

  BY SEVEN P.M., JULIE WAS SO TIRED her eyes felt grainy. Tara Lumley was the last of her clients, and her handler had wanted some eleventh-hour beading added to her aqua evening gown. With Carlene out of the picture—a fact every single girl had bemoaned, right down to the shedding of tears, even while they schemed how best to take advantage of the loss of the widely acknowledged favorite—the pageant had been blown wide open. It was a free-for-all, and Tara wanted to do everything she could to catch the judges’ eyes. They all did.