Out of Nowhere

by Rebecca York

  No, she was willing to take risks that might be unacceptable. His fingers clenched on the fork he was washing, and he deliberately eased up on the pressure.

  Her stubborn bravery was making him want to help her. But that wasn’t the reason he was in Hermosa Harbor. He had a job to do. He was investigating a murder, and he had a woman on his boat he couldn’t trust. He’d better remember both those facts.

  So had she been playacting during the kiss? He might be out of practice, but he still believed he could tell the real thing. Annie had responded to him. He’d felt the heat coming off her, felt the way she’d gone all boneless and pliant in his arms. Heard her indrawn breath when he’d splayed his hands against her silky skin.

  Just thinking about it had made him hard again. Cursing, he rinsed the cutlery and clattered it into the dish drainer, then spilled the soapy water from the dishpan into the sink and turned to stare out into the darkness of the marina. Her response to the kiss was beside the point. And he’d better keep that in mind. He’d also best remember that no matter what inappropriate emotions he felt for this woman, she could be dangerous.

  CHARLES RELAXED on the motel-room bed with the remote, flipping through the channels on the television. All he could find was crap, but what had he expected, here in the middle of Florida vacation land? Hell, anywhere in the good old U.S. of A., for that matter. The society was a mess. The culture was a mess. The government was a mess. But he planned to fix all that.

  Setting down the remote, he picked up the dessert he’d brought home from his restaurant dinner. Apple pie. The first bite told him it was the kind he liked, with slightly tart fruit and a flaky crust. He began to eat, thinking that he was getting close to his last meal. But he was ready for that. It was one of the conditions he’d accepted.

  He fluffed up the pillows and lay back on the bed without bothering to take off his shoes. He had paid for the motel room with a credit card—with the new name he had been using since last week. Actually, he had changed his name many times in the past few years. He had a new identity now. Even a new face. Once he had been a guest of the U.S. government, and they had taken his picture—from the front and from the side. Well, the face they had photographed didn’t exist anymore. Even his fingerprints had been planed off. The new identity was courtesy of some friends who were willing to finance his project. They had their reasons. He had let them think his were the same. But he had his own agenda.

  While he ate the pie, he got out a map of the kill zone and began to study it. Really, he’d already memorized the details. But it never hurt to take extra precautions—especially when you were planning to take terrorism to a new level.

  THE SUIT ANNIE had worn was still in the head. She took it back to her room, along with the salve Max had given her. After smoothing more of the cream on her chest, she rolled up the near-dry suit and stuffed it in a corner in a bag. Then she turned in a circle, giving herself a full view of the room.

  It was small but nice. Cozy. When she pressed on the mattress, it felt thick and springy.

  She had said she was tired. But that wasn’t the reason she wanted to go off by herself. She needed to get away from the intensity of Max’s gaze. Well, not just his gaze. From the intensity of the man. And the feelings he called forth from some deep, hidden part of her.

  Lifting her hand, she pressed it against her lips, lightly rubbing her sensitive skin, caught by the memory of the heat and pressure of his mouth on hers.

  The kiss had felt wonderful. Like the pressure of his hands against her skin. She closed her eyes, unable to stop the remembered sensations from washing over her. She had wanted more. She still wanted more.

  Yet, she had made him stop. She remembered why she had pushed him away. Snatching her hand from her lips, she reached under her shirt and found the place she’d been afraid he’d touch. The tattoo. The scared, vulnerable part of her had wanted the mark to be a figment of her imagination. But it was still there. She could feel it.

  She pressed her fingers hard against it and felt a small burst of pain. The sensation was enough to bring her mind back to where it should be.

  She had to figure out who she was. Where she was. Why she was in this particular place of all places on earth. Because she felt the pressure of some monumental disaster constricting her chest, making it almost impossible to breathe.

  Deliberately, she dragged in a lungful of air, then let it out slowly as she took stock of the little room. There were two portholes in the far wall, but she was pretty sure they were too small for her to climb through.

  The door was the only way out. It wasn’t her preference, but there was nothing she could do about it. She moved to the small desk against the wall and began opening drawers. In the middle one, she found a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen, which she set on the desktop.

  Then she poked through some of the other drawers. She found a woman’s yellow bathing-suit top, a navy-blue sock made out of some silky material and a box with a picture of a man and a woman embracing on the front. The way she and Max had been embracing. Close and intimate. Inside were half-a-dozen foil packets.

  Condoms. And she knew what they were used for, too. Sexual intercourse.

  Because she’d used them with a man? In her mind, she tried to take the heated scene with Max further. But she couldn’t do it—at least not from any personal experience she remembered.

  Putting the box back, she dug for more buried treasure and found a stiff piece of paper with a picture of a sailboat. Below it was a calendar. As she looked at the year, her throat tightened. She didn’t know whether the calendar was current or if it had been shoved into the drawer because it was out-of-date.

  A shiver went through her.

  She was so out of touch that she didn’t even know the year. That was bad enough, yet something else teased at the edge of her mind—something she should know.

  Something so frightening that it threatened to choke off her breath again.

  Going back to the drawers, she dragged out a stack of shiny pieces of paper held together at the folded edge with two small metal strips. On the front was the picture of a grim looking white-haired man. Above him was the word Newsweek in white letters on a red background strip.

  Her fingers clenched on the paper. Newsweek. A magazine with the week’s events. Her heart was pounding as she searched the cover for a date and found it under the title. It was for April 20. In the year after the calendar.

  That meant she still had time. The thought flickered in her head, but she didn’t know what it meant. Time for what?

  And as with the calendar, she didn’t even know how long the magazine had been in the drawer. Maybe her time was already up.

  She unclenched her fingers from around the paper, then began to page through the magazine. She saw a map. A tall building. A man talking on the telephone.

  On the next page was a dog leaping in the air to catch a flat circle in its mouth. A Frisbee. She knew the word. But except on a computer screen, she was sure that she had never seen one. Or a dog, for that matter.

  The colored pictures made her head swim. She’d been uncertain of herself earlier. Looking at the photographs made her feel as if she’d dropped into the water from an alien spaceship.

  Quickly she flipped the page again and found herself staring down at another photograph, of a building reduced to rubble. Sitting in front of it was a little girl clutching a rag doll.

  A sound rose in her throat. A sound of grief impossible to hold back.

  Details came at her like a bombardment of stones. The child had blond hair and blue eyes. She looked about five years old. Her face and clothing were dirty, and she was clutching the doll as though it was her only friend in the world.

  For a moment Annie was that child, lost and alone. Everything safe and familiar had been ripped away, and she was adrift in the rubble of her young life.

  The picture blurred, and she knew she was crying. She was sure she hadn’t cried in a long time. But now tears welled in he
r eyes and flowed freely down her cheeks.

  She stretched out her hand toward the picture, aching to comfort the child. She felt the need with an all-consuming desperation.

  She had to help her, and she had to help herself, too. If she knew anything in the world, she knew that much.

  Gently she closed the magazine and laid it back in the drawer, which she carefully shut. Then she picked up the pen she had left on the desk and began drawing something.

  When she finished, she stared at what she had done. It looked like the same symbol she had found tattooed under her arm. She had no idea what it meant. She only knew she had to wrap the sheet of paper in plastic and put it in a certain place in a certain building. Someplace in the downtown area. An image of the structure came to her. She didn’t know where it was but she knew she had to find it.

  But not now. Not yet. Not until Max was out of the way. With a sigh she eased onto the bottom bunk, then lay there tensely listening for him and listening to the sound of the water slapping against the sides of the boat.

  MAX WAITED on the main deck until he had heard no sounds from Annie’s cabin for half an hour. Then he carefully transferred the fingerprints from the glass she had used to a special piece of tape, which he took down to his room and scanned into a computer file. He sent the image off to Randolph Security over the encrypted computer line. They handled a lot of background details for the Light Street Detective Agency, and he knew that through them, he could tap into the FBI fingerprint database.

  Hunter Kelley, who was on duty that evening, received the message and accessed the government criminal-identification system.

  While Max waited for Annie’s prints to be compared to the millions on file, he stopped in the head and looked for the suit she’d been wearing. But she’d taken it away, and he wasn’t going to barge into her cabin to find it.

  The conversation with her at dinner had made him think about himself, about how he had gotten here. He’d been an idealistic kid. Idealistic enough to believe he could make a difference in the struggle of good—meaning the United States—against the bad guys, like the terrorists who wanted to wreck the American way of life. He was more cynical now. Harder. He’d lost many of his illusions in the first few years as a spook. The rest of them had died with Steph.

  He wasn’t really surprised fifteen minutes later, when Hunter’s message told him there was no match in the database.

  Presumably, then, the woman he called Annie Oakley was not a known criminal. And she hadn’t worked at a job requiring her to be fingerprinted.

  “You have a lead on the Jacobson murder?” Hunter asked in a secure instant message.

  Max hesitated for a moment before typing a reply. “No lead. Just a suspicious individual,” he answered, knowing he was being evasive with a colleague who trusted him.

  “Keep us posted.”

  “Will do.” He pushed away from the desk. Damn. He was in a very sticky situation. What if Annie’s interests were different from Light Street’s interests? Which way would he jump?

  Merely considering the question shocked him. He knew what the answer had to be. He was being paid to do a job. More than that, the Light Street group in Baltimore had thrown him a lifeline when he’d been drowning.

  All of that was true. So why wasn’t he sure he would do the right thing?

  Chapter Six

  Priorities.

  Max sighed. In the end, he knew his priorities.

  Meanwhile he’d have to persuade Annie that it was to her advantage to let Uncle Max help her get out of trouble. Uncle Max! Who was he kidding? That wasn’t the relationship he wanted with her.

  Would he find anything more on her in law-enforcement databases? Though he hoped not, he felt duty bound to try. After signing off with Light Street, he tapped into the Florida State Troopers hot line. There was no missing-persons report that matched his visitor’s description. He extended the search to Georgia, then other East Coast states. He even checked in with the California system, each time reinforcing his conviction that as far as the police were concerned, she didn’t exist.

  He’d bet that she wasn’t born in the U.S. and that she hadn’t been here long. But she was missing from somewhere. Either nobody knew she was gone, they didn’t care or they assumed she had died when she’d gone into the water.

  He sat for several minutes contemplating that last cheery thought. Then he turned off the computer, stood up and stretched cramped muscles. After slipping off his shoes and socks, he padded down the hall and listened at the door to the smaller cabin. He heard nothing, and he was tempted to open the door and see if she was asleep. What would she be wearing? He had no trouble picturing her naked. Not after seeing her in that second-skin suit. He clenched his jaw, then turned and went into the head. After using the facilities and brushing his teeth, he made his way back to his room, thinking that he’d better get some sleep. He had the feeling he was going to need it.

  He shucked off his pants and Hawaiian shirt, then climbed into bed in his briefs and closed his eyes.

  For a while he dozed, then he was back in the nightmare that had taken over his life in San Marcos. He hadn’t dreamed about Stephanie in a long time. Now, once again, he was in the mountains of a Latin American country, hiding in the darkness of a cave.

  As they had so many times, he and Stephanie were arguing about the assignment. He couldn’t see her face, because it was too dangerous to switch on a light. But he could hear the steel in her voice.

  Six years earlier, they had been in basic training in the Peregrine Connection together. They had been drawn to each other, and both had been happy about getting their dual assignments.

  He had liked the way her philosophy matched his—live for the moment. That had been one of the things that made her a wonderful lover. In bed, her total concentration was on the pleasure they gave each other. And on leave, she threw herself into adventures like white-water rafting and hang gliding with the enthusiasm of a kid.

  When they’d gotten married, he wanted more. He wanted to settle down and start a family. But every time he brought it up, she’d tell him they’d do it after one more mission—then one more.

  So they’d ended up tracking rebels in San Marcos and in deep trouble, because a chance encounter with the wrong troop had gotten their radio destroyed, and she wanted to go down into the village where the rebels were hiding to use their communications equipment.

  “It’s too dangerous. We need to get out of here.”

  “Are you chicken?” she asked, tossing the question at him as though he were a raw recruit.

  “No, I’m a realist. We already got creamed by the bad guys. We can’t take on a whole squad of them by ourselves.”

  “I think we can. And if you don’t want to help me, I’ll do it by myself.”

  He had no choice. He couldn’t let her go alone. So he went with her down the trail. The rebels were waiting for them about a quarter mile from the village. Suddenly they were in the middle of a hail of bullets.

  Stephanie’s scream echoed in his ears, getting louder…shriller…

  Until Max sat bolt upright in bed, mercifully ending the sound. But not the reality.

  His wife was dead and somehow he’d survived. Somehow he’d crawled away into the bushes and made it to the river with a bullet in his leg. From there he’d let the current take him downstream, into safe territory. But into the heartache that had become life without Stephanie.

  A SMILE FLICKERED on Nicki Armstrong’s face as she surveyed her domain from a private table in the corner of the nightclub.

  It was after midnight, but red, blue and yellow lights alternated across the ceiling, casting their beams on about fifty men and women—mostly young and well dressed—enjoying the jumping atmosphere of Nicki’s Paradise. Some were out on the dance floor gyrating to the pulsing disco beat, the standard weeknight music option. Others were at the bar or the small tables ringing the wooden dance floor.

  In about an hour, the crowd would star
t to thin. But now the club was still full of revelers, because anyone who wanted to have a good time in Hermosa Harbor knew that Nicki’s Paradise was the place to be.

  It wasn’t the part of her business empire that brought in the most money. But it was certainly the most fun. She liked being the queen of her own realm, and she liked keeping her finger on every aspect of the operation—from the kinds of liquor she stocked to the kind of handgun her bartender kept out of sight under the counter and the size of the payoff she handed the local cops every two weeks.

  Above the sound of the music, a noise at the other side of the room snagged her attention. Two young men were spoiling for a fight.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the tall, muscular bouncer amble across the dance floor toward them. When Paul reached them, his tree-trunk arms hanging easily at his sides, he asked if there was a problem, or words to that effect. Over the sound of the dance music, she couldn’t hear what her bouncer was saying. But she knew that Paul would take care of the problem.

  Her attention switched again as she saw Hap Henderson step through the silvery curtain at the entrance and look around before weaving his way through the tables to the bar. Dave, who was on duty, glanced in her direction. When she nodded, he fixed Hap his usual planter’s punch. Too bad the man had expensive taste in rum. He insisted on a brand from the Cayman Islands that cost the earth.

  Turning, Hap leaned against the bar and sipped his drink, watching her across the crowded room with a speculative gaze. He’d already spoken to her on the phone and told her about Max’s visitor. Now she wondered what else he was planning to spring on her. As he watched, she swept her long, red hair back over her shoulder and recrossed her legs, secure in the knowledge that her thighs were tanned and firm, taunting Hap with what he couldn’t have.