After leaving Sullivan Barnett’s beach house, she’d gone home, changed and collapsed into sleep. Later she’d awakened abruptly, with her heart pounding and her mouth dry. Unable to go back to sleep, she’d gone, as she had every day for the past month since she’d been back on duty, to a public range. Going to different ones, she’d hoped to avoid seeing anyone she knew. Before she showed up for her qualifying test, she had to get back to her normal self, whatever that was.
She hadn’t told Royal about her forays into the pistol ranges around the county.
He would have helped her. She could have told him everything.
But she hadn’t.
With two weeks until she had to qualify officially, she would make herself get over the shakes. One more challenge to face.
She didn’t want to think about the stressful night shoot she’d have to endure. That would come later. First things first.
And she couldn’t think about the situation with Sullivan Barnett. At a very basic level she’d known that he could get to her. She should have handled that situation better, too. She’d been off balance, though, the entire time—her fault for drifting up onto his deck and going inside. She could have prevented everything that had followed.
Foolish, impulsive, dangerous.
Her whole life was sliding through her fingers and she couldn’t get a firm grip on anything.
She swept her palms down her sides again and picked up the semiautomatic. The four-inch barrel vibrated like a dowsing rod. All she had to do was touch the thing and the shaking started.
Putting the gun down, she bent forward at the waist, stretching the tight muscles of her back and neck, her hair falling forward and catching in her mouth. She puffed the strands away and stared at her sneakered feet. Anything to keep from picking up the pistol again.
The concrete floor inches in front of her nose was a lovely gray. The angled pit that trapped the bullets down at the end of the range was a lovely gray. The pitted cement walls in back of the target were also gray and lovely. Very muted and tasteful. Really, Taggart should recommend his interior decorator. Designer ranges for the upscale shooter.
Okay. She took five slow breaths and stood up. She could do this.
She adjusted the safety goggles and ear protectors and reached for the 459. The checkered high-impact nylon stock fit smoothly into her slick palm. Her thumb slid into the curved rest. She picked up the clip. Eleven shots left. No problemo. With the heel of her hand she inserted the magazine, flicked off the safety catch. The red button popped out, taunting her: ready, aim…
Twenty-eight ounces of metal alloy and plastic; such a small object to shake her from head to toe. She couldn’t line up the sights, for the square of the rear notch was bobbing like a rowboat in a storm. She blinked the sweat from her eyes and stared out at the gently swaying outline of a paper man.
Concentrating so hard she blocked out the thuds around her, she extended her arms and levered the hammer back with her thumb. In the tunnel of silence enveloping her, she fired. Pulled the trigger again and fired. Again and again.
Seven to go. Hammer flipping back automatically after each shot. Fire.
Through the sweat dripping into her eyes and blinding her, she aimed and fired. Not until the sound of the trigger clicking uselessly on the empty pistol registered did she stop.
Flipping out the clip, she lined up the two empty magazines and brought out one more. In the relative privacy of the alley, separated from the shooter to her left by thick concrete, she took off her safety goggles, lifted the edge of her shirt and dried her throat and face. Her stomach was shiny with perspiration, and she fanned it, too, resignation settling on her shoulders.
At the last, she hadn’t been able to see the target. She’d gone as still inside as she could and simply fired—all she’d been capable of doing at that point.
She grabbed the handle of the pulley and wheeled the target in. All fourteen shots were perfectly placed in a tight pattern. If all she had to do to qualify was show the target, she’d be in like Flynn. Unfortunately, a sweating, wild-eyed cop wouldn’t pass, no matter how high the score. She traced one of the holes with her finger. It was so small. The exit wound would be big, ragged at the edges.
Working methodically from left to right, she marked the fourteen holes, the orange stickers glowing like some kind of weird skin disease on the figure. Reattaching the target to the frame with squeeze clamps, she cranked the figure back to the ready position.
One more dip and she could go home. Go home to an apartment that felt empty and alien. Not home anymore.
Leaning against the partition and lifting the edge of her shirt once more to dry her face, Maggie froze with her shirt still gripped in her hands, her heart accelerating with anxiety.
Barnett was here. Off to the side and slightly behind her, he nodded once to her and then settled against the wall away from the alleys, as if he had all the time in the world. Like her, he wore headgear-type ear protectors. A pair of safety goggles dangled from his fingers.
Lightheaded with dread, Maggie swung back to face the target, but she could feel Sullivan’s intense gaze on her back. Her skin prickled all over with awareness of him behind her, watching, judging, knowing. All those questions she’d avoided answering and now he was here, and he would know that, no matter how she’d lied last night, she was still trapped in a rainy November night.
She rubbed the sweat away from her eyes and slipped the goggles on. They fogged up immediately and she took them off. Emptying her mind of everything except the mundane task in front of her, and forcing herself to move slowly, she cleaned the goggles and repositioned them, picked up the pistol, butting the clip in.
Her knees buckled with the effort of ignoring Sullivan.
Ready. Gripping the handle so hard she knew she’d leave the imprint of the checkered design on her palm, she lifted the Smith and Wesson and pointed it downrange, her teeth chattering so much that she wondered for one wild moment if Sullivan could hear them. She could sense his attention as strongly as if he were at her elbow.
Aim. She pulled back the hammer.
Fire. Dead center, the bullet slammed into the cement wall behind the target and fell harmlessly into the 30° angled trap. The gun was greasy in her slippery fingers, and she couldn’t get a firm grip. She wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger, firing until the clip was empty.
Even as she took a shaky breath and started to squeeze the trigger, pride and the promise she’d made herself stopped her. That would be cheating. Trying not to think about Sullivan behind her, Maggie repeated her ritual. This time she scrubbed her hands so hard against her jeans that her palms burned.
No matter what, she wouldn’t stop. If she put the gun down one more time, she’d never pick it up again. Even with Sullivan Barnett in back of her, reaching his own conclusions, she couldn’t stop.
Not if she ever wanted to be a cop again.
And she did. She wanted her life back the way it had been. She wanted to be comfortable in her own skin again, not feeling this sense of dislocation that left her uneasy all the time, a stranger to herself. Damn Sullivan Barnett.
Orange dots mixed with the sweat in her eyes. The silhouette fluttered in an errant breeze, seemed to turn toward her. Was that what she’d seen at the Quik-Deli? That flutter of movement? Through her blurred vision, Maggie saw for a brief second the serrated ramp of the front sight on the pistol. Gripping the pistol with outstretched hands, she fired in that one instant. Wobbling in front of her sweat-blurred eyes, the pistol sketched an ever widening circle on the target. She couldn’t keep it steady enough to aim accurately.
Extended, her arms were rigid. She couldn’t command her muscles to relax and lower. She couldn’t move her thumb to the hammer to pull it back. Locked in a death grip on the gun, her fingers hurt, and she was shaking too hard to turn the gun loose safely.
She felt as if she’d never fired a gun before in her life.
A faint whimper escaped her.<
br />
In her panic, and with her ear protectors on, she didn’t hear Sullivan step up behind her. He was there suddenly, his long arms over hers, bracing her hands until the gun leveled again. One of his fingers edged hers free of the trigger, taking its place.
With his palms swallowing her hands, the gun seemed a toy as he pulled the trigger smoothly and steadily, one shot after another, the 459 cracking out thirteen shots. The gun never jumped once in his firm grip, and his hard chest was so tight against her damp back that his strength and calm flowed into her. A pattern smaller and tighter than her orange stickers blossomed in the silhouette’s torso.
On the last shot, the slide locked open on the empty gun.
His arms stayed around her, the gun still pointing toward the target. He stepped back as he released her hands, but she didn’t turn around. She slid the clip out, the slide forward, and released the hammer to the Safe position. Picking up the clip and never looking at Sullivan, she stashed it in her purse.
Even when she rolled in the target, he never spoke.
The pattern of his shots was better than hers. Maybe tighter than Royal’s when they’d competed against each other, but Sullivan had shot without seeming to take aim. He’d been fast, incredibly accurate.
Not able to look at him, she unclipped the target and showed it to him. “Nice shooting, Mr. Barnett. You want to keep this?”
“A trophy, you mean?”
At that, she looked up at him. She’d expected derision, mockery, scorn, something other than compassion in his blue eves.
Maggie didn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t helped her. She’d failed. All her old sureness and reliable instincts had vanished in the Quik-Deli.
Nothing in her life made sense any more.
She was coming apart at the seams, shattering into jagged splinters.
And in that moment she hated Sullivan Barnett for knowing her weakness, hated him with a fierce passion for the curious and unwanted glint of pity in his beautiful blue eyes.
*
Chapter 5
« ^ »
“Here.” In the noisy parking lot of Taggart’s, Sullivan’s voice was a low burr, rough against Maggie’s throbbing eardrums.
She squinted at the red-and-white can gripped in his long fingers and appearing as if by magic under her bowed head. When she didn’t move, Sullivan ripped open the pull tab with an abruptness that flustered her. Her stomach churning sickly inside, Maggie surveyed him through strands of hair hanging limply in front of her face. Even her hair was wet with sweat.
“Drink it.” He held the can to her mouth.
Some of the cola dribbled onto her chin as she sputtered, “I don’t want—”
“You need it.” Standing with one foot propped next to her on the cement steps where she’d collapsed, he bent forward, wiped the stickiness away and pushed back the curtain of hair hiding her face. Awkwardly brushing it behind her ears, he tried to anchor the strands, which curled forward as fast as he worked against them.
His preoccupation with tidying her flyaway curls stunned Maggie into immobility. His careful touch quelled her restless twisting. She opened her mouth to tell him he was wasting his time and closed it as the stroke of his hands behind her ears and against her damp hair slowed and settled the churning, lulling her into a singular stillness where traffic noises disappeared. There was only the rhythmic stroking of Sullivan’s hand against her, the strength in his fingers coursing through each strand of her hair and down her body, a languid tide flowing from his hands into her, floating her away to some far shore where she glimpsed shapes and shadows in a half-remembered landscape.
Drifting in the utter rightness of the moment, Maggie watched him through half-closed eyes, her lids growing heavier with each careful nudge of his long hands against the weight of her hair.
He should have had bags under red-rimmed eyes, but the only evidence of his alcohol-soaked night was the slightly weary tension in their deep blue depths.
She saw understanding and pain of his own in those eyes, and noticed a loneliness there, too, that she hadn’t seen before. Behind it all, his acute intelligence was piercing the private space where she’d huddled for nine months, faking her make-believe life.
“C’mon, sugar-buns. Bottoms up.” He tapped the bottom of the can. A male trait, that kind of teasing. She recognized that jab-jabbing. Cops were good at it, too, but the hostility was momentarily absent from Sullivan’s grainy voice, and the imperceptible lift of one eyebrow invited her to smile.
Maggie wished she could.
At least he wasn’t grating her raw nerve endings with idle conversation.
“I swear I didn’t dump a cup of arsenic in it. It’s safe to drink.”
She wrapped her fingers around the Coca-Cola can Sullivan handed her. The thank-you she owed him stuck in her throat. Instead, she nodded, looking at the cars rushing past on the Tumiami Trail, looking everywhere but at him. Safer that way.
With the memory of her failure still weighing her down, she couldn’t handle his keen scrutiny. He’d calmed the seismic uproar inside her, but she would never forget for as long as she lived her inability to stop her trembling. Her shaking had led to an irresponsible breach of safety in her handling of a once-familiar tool.
She sloshed the cola around in the can. That was the way she’d felt in those moments. Even the way her thumb rested on the thumb groove had been alien in those frightening seconds.
“You looking for peanuts to drop in? That your style?”
“Not since—” Since when? She couldn’t remember. Some of the cola slopped onto the steps in a dark line.
“Go ahead, drink. I’ll make you pay me back later.”
Still not able to speak, Maggie nodded again and stared at the ground. Today he was wearing black boots. She noticed in her swift glance, too, the worn fly where frayed threads separated faded denim from the metal zipper teeth less than a foot away from her nose.
“Seventy-five cents on your tab. I wouldn’t want to be accused of trying to bribe a cop.” A trace of amusement rippled through his words.
Coming from anyone else it would have been a joke, but Maggie didn’t think Sullivan made jokes. Especially after his comments the night before, this offhanded remark sounded barbed, the amusement at her expense. She couldn’t tell for sure. She hadn’t the slightest clue how his mind worked.
Tilting her head back and staring up through the dull green leaves of a moss-heavy live oak, Maggie gulped down the carbonated sweetness and let her mind float free in the wide sweep of a sky bleached from blue to white by late-summer heat.
In the blistering humidity of midday, she was cooler than she’d been inside Taggart’s, even with the big exhaust fans sucking out the smell of cordite and powder. The rivulet of sweat down her back had dried the minute she’d walked outside, Sullivan close at her heels, a line of darkness in her peripheral vision.
An avenging angel. The thought popped out of nowhere. Maggie set the can next to her. Rubbing her hands on her knees, she winced.
Faster than she could yank her hands free, Sullivan turned her palms over. Blisters already bubbled white against the raw redness.
“Not a pretty sight, Detective.”
Collecting the shreds of her dignity, Maggie loosely fisted her palms and shrugged. “Hazards of the job.”
“Yeah. I noticed.” He still held her hands, his fingers coarse against hers and oddly gentle, his thumbs curled over hers. “Rough, huh, Maggie? Has it been like this since the shooting?”
“Push, push, push.” Hating him for seeing her weakness, but still caught in the spell of their fragile harmony, she found peace in the linking of their hands, the comfort of connection with another human, one she didn’t have to pretend with.
“Only way I operate.”
“Like leopards, reporters never change their spots. I should have known.” Drawn by the spilled pop, a line of red ants divided the step between her feet and Sullivan’s booted toe. She g
rimaced as his thumb brushed the largest blister. “And here I thought you might go five minutes without meddling in someone else’s business.”
“Not in my nature. But don’t give up. Hope springs eternal and all that, Detective.” He hesitated, then rocked forward, resting their joined hands carefully on his bent knee. Haloed by his scraped-back hair, his thin face blocked her view of the parking lot. Slanted toward her, Sullivan had isolated them within the shelter of his body. Shrunken by too much time in an overheated drier, a clean but wrinkled blue T-shirt hung to the top of his jeans. Royal would have tucked in his T-shirt. And worn a belt, Maggie thought as her gaze slid toward that threadbare placket between empty belt loops.
Minutes earlier, his solid presence at her back had stilled the shudders ripping her apart. Now, as he slouched over her, his hands cupping hers were unexpectedly comforting, and, even as she regretted her weakness, Maggie yielded and let his strength seep into her.
She’d been running on empty for so long.
Shielded by his tall form, she was safe from the casually inquisitive glances of Taggart’s clientele. An avenging angel or the devil himself, who Sullivan was didn’t matter as long as no one knew what she’d been doing here.
Winging on that thought came a second. “Where did you come from?”
“I reckon my dear departed momma could answer that better than I could.” He’d straightened, removing the umbrella of his protective posture.
She struggled to her feet, her knees still wobbly. “You know what I mean. What are you doing at Taggart’s?”
His expression went blank and he paused.
She thought he might be working on a credible lie. “Don’t tell me you were in the neighborhood.”
Looking around at the cement-blanketed strip malls and fast-food joints, he shrugged. His shirt rode up over his waist on his flat, smooth belly. “No neighborhood here, is there? For me to be in the vicinity of?” He pointed at the silver-and-black motorcycle parked away from the lot in the shade of a row of passion-pink oleanders. “Would you believe me if I said I was tooling around, looking for fun in the summer sun?” There was sardonic humor in his alert face, and his eyes were those of a cat batting a toy mouse playfully, a threat implicit.
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