The bathroom door opened, and her heart began to pound as her mouth went dry and then suddenly wet. A long brown arm and hand stacked a fresh T-shirt and a pair of boxers where the towel had sat. “Thanks,” she managed. Maybe if she was lucky, he’d think her voice was so husky from the smoke. Yeah. Right.
“We should try to get a couple hours’ sleep,” he said as she stepped through the door. “I’ll take the couch, just in case.”
Disappointment slapped at her. She wanted his arms around her again, wanted the warmth—okay, the heat. Probably not the best idea, all things considered, she conceded as she lay down and pulled up the light fleece blanket.
Chapter Twelve
Brady had probably done his best with the clothes. Gemma pinned up the shorts he’d lent her and tucked in six inches of T-shirt with still enough to blouse over her makeshift tailoring job at the waistband. She borrowed his comb to unsnarl her hair and plaited it into a quick French braid.
Shoes were a problem, but Brady rummaged in a trunk and came up with a pair of old moccasins. They were stiff with age, and worn nearly through in spots. The seams had been re-sewn here and there, but the beadwork on the front was a twining of stems and flowers that still somehow managed to be totally masculine.
Gemma turned them over, admiring the exquisite beads that reflected sparkles of light from tiny cut surfaces. “These are lovely.”
Dark hair had fallen forward over his forehead as he dug through the footlocker. He looked up to answer her, and his eyes looked soft for an instant, as if he were focused in the far distance. “One of my aunts made them for me when I was a kid, for when I grew up. She didn’t know how big I was going to get.” His smile was wistful, and something twisted in Gemma’s chest. She put out a hand to touch him, but he had pulled back from whatever he was seeing, whatever he’d been feeling, into the brisker present. The moment passed.
“Get your shoes on, Lucy,” he said with a half-smile.
She blinked.
“We definitely have to work on your education, my girl,” he said, rocking back onto his heels. “You obviously aren’t versed in the arcana of bluegrass.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use ‘bluegrass’ and ‘arcana’ in the same sentence,” she said.
Brady grinned. “Here’s your first lesson. ‘Git your shoes on, Lucy, you’re a big girl, now,’” he sang in a twangy baritone.
Laughter bubbled out before she could stop it. “Oh, no! You’re one of those!”
He tipped his head and raised an eyebrow, but she saw a slight defensive tightening.
“Mike knows about every silly song ever written,” she said, pretending she hadn’t noticed. “No matter what the occasion, he can come up with something about Jesse James or Moses’s feet.”
Brady’s face relaxed. “Yeah, but he doesn’t know the good stuff.”
“Good stuff? Like Lucy’s shoes?”
“Oh, yew pore thang, yew have so much to learn,” he pontificated as he shooed her gently out of the way.
He opened a floor safe and took out more money than Gemma had ever seen in one place before, singing, “...he robbed the Glendale train...” From another cache in the bedroom wall, he took two automatic pistols, extra magazines and a box of hollow-point ammunition, and several disposable cell phones. He started putting it all into a half-filled backpack. He wasn’t singing any more.
“You shoot?” he asked. His expression was polite, as if he were just asking her as a matter of courtesy.
“Sure. The H&K nine millimeter will do for me,” she said in her best Catholic-schoolgirl voice, and laughed at his expression. She picked the pistol up from the top of the pile and worked the slide with a comfortable familiarity. “My dad was a Navy cop, remember? Mike and I both learned to shoot as soon as we could hold a target .22. I was a pretty good shot, once upon a time. It’s been awhile, but it won’t take long to get it back.”
Brady stared at her, and a bubble of laughter lifted her ribcage. Gotcha!
* * *
Gemma pulled her plate out of the shaft of sunlight that spread through the windows of the Breakfast Boutique. As far as she could tell, the small, retro establishment off Pine Street was populated entirely by locals. She and Brady seemed to be the only people there who weren’t on a first-name basis with the server. She swallowed another bite of her omelet. The golden crust was nearly bursting with spinach and sautéed mushrooms and creamy sauce. She couldn’t remember ever tasting anything more scrumptious. “This is really good. How did you ever find this place?”
“A friend brought me.”
A surprising little stab of jealousy immediately had her trying to picture the sort of woman Brady would have breakfast with.
“He won’t be here for a few minutes yet, so don’t rush. Mike told you something about my background?”
“A little.” She nodded, aware of the people seated all around them. “You used to be in the Navy, and you do computer security work now with your own company.”
“Between those two shots, I did some work in Southeast Asia. I was a sort of...liaison between agencies of their governments and ours.”
Gemma nodded again. The little hesitation had said volumes. “That ties in with what Mike said. That’s the cop part, right?”
He grinned. “Part of it, anyway.”
She lowered her gaze and sat back against the solid frame of the chair. “What are we doing here, Brady?”
“Waiting.”
“No, I mean why are we here? Why are we running?”
He took a sip of coffee. “Because somebody has murdered two people who were involved with Ned, and because last night somebody tossed a couple of Molotovs into the house you’d just moved into, and you, I and the dog were within a minute of becoming three, four and four-and-a half.”
“Mike—”
Brady shook his head. “Mike’s was the next logical target. But nothing happened there.”
“Thank God.”
“Agreed. But that means whoever it was knew where you’d gone. Followed you, maybe. But you didn’t die the way you were supposed to. That means you’re still their focus. It’s not random, and it’s not blind lashing out. So we need to get you out of sight until we can get some kind of handle on what’s happening.”
The door opened with a little chiming of brass bells, and a slender Asian man in his late thirties scanned the room professionally as he came straight toward their table. Brady nodded at him, and he took a seat facing the window.
“Gemma Cavanagh, Tran Nguyen,” Brady said. He nodded briefly at Tran and turned back to Gemma. “Tran used to work with me. He knows a lot more people than I do in this area, and he may have some idea what happened to Ned.”
Tran gave a jerky little nod. “What can I do, Brady?” He leaned back in his chair and lifted his hand in a two-finger wave, and the server brought him a cup and set a pot of fresh coffee on the table.
When they were alone again, Brady said, “You know about the guy they found in the cabin.”
“Yeah,” Tran said. “The whole thing sounds off, Brady. For one thing, the women in the photos—the ones anyone would identify, at any rate, were professionals, and are still alive. The cops have interviewed a few of them, but they’re not very talkative.” His smile was sour. “Most have disappeared, probably because they were illegal and can’t afford to get involved with the police. So, I don’t buy a revenge scenario. From what I heard, they—”
“Let’s not do that,”
Brady interrupted with a quick look at Gemma.
Tran’s eyes followed his. “She’s a relative?”
“His wife.”
Gemma was beginning to feel invisible, but the little interchange reminded her of Ned, “cut to pieces,” and her stomach flipped. The mushroom-and-spinach omelet that had been so delicious a few minutes ago hardened into a sodden lump halfway to her throat, and she swallowed several times to keep it down.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Tran said blandly and turned back to Brady. “I’ve got some feelers out, like you asked, and a couple of leads. Nothing solid, yet. Give me a day.”
Gemma had the strong impression of something left unsaid and wondered what he was holding back.
“Appreciate it,” Brady said. “We’re going to be out of touch until then. I need you to call Mike Cavanagh,” he repeated Mike’s office and home numbers and Tran nodded, but didn’t write anything down. “Tell him ‘06 dot 11 Go Navy.’ And I need a car.”
Tran nodded again and handed Brady the keys from his pocket. “Green Civic three spaces left. My place, fourteen-hundred tomorrow.”
Gemma watched as the two men gripped hands, and Tran walked into the growing morning to the sound of little brass bells.
“You speak Vietnamese?” she asked.
“That’s debatable.” He grinned. “I doubt Tran thinks so. Do you?”
She shook her head. “He has a Vietnamese name.”
“Ready? We need to move.”
“Where are we going?”
“To a good hotel, where we can get some rest.”
* * *
“Remind me never to believe a thing you say,” Gemma said as she hammered a yellow plastic tent peg into the soft earth.
“Not in public, anyway,” Brady answered, watching her. A confusing woman. Full of surprising facets he realized he was hungry to explore. In the past week, he’d seen her terrified, furious, humiliated, numb with grief, raging with temper and blind with passion. Now here she was setting up camp and organizing supplies like a seasoned outdoorsman—outdoors-person, he amended. No complaints, no whining, no grousing about broken nails or lack of a hair dryer. He’d given himself some stern admonitions about being careful, keeping a professional distance, but he knew it was already too late. Besides, no matter how bad the timing might be, he wasn’t about to let someone so right for him slip away. He cleared his throat and pretended it was only from the dust. “You know your way around a campsite.”
The choice sites along the riverbanks on either side of the campground were occupied in spite of the severe drought conditions, but Brady and Gemma had found an idyllic clearing near the center, ringed with pine and vine maple that cast deep shade over their tent and the picnic table in the heat of the day.
“I love camping,” Gemma said. “We used to camp all the time when we were kids, until Dad died. By then Mike and I were in college, and we just never seemed to be able to put it together. I think I could stay outdoors forever. It’s too bad there’s no way to bring the outside into a house,” she added as she tightened the tension on a guy line.
They’d used some of the cash at a Kmart in Renton, where she left him to pick out camping gear and a couple of changes of clothes while she filled half a basket with food and essentials such as toothpaste and toilet paper, a first-aid kit, water and batteries and ketchup.
On the way toward I-90 Brady filled the tank and got a map at a Citgo station.
“It’s ten cents cheaper at the AM-PM across the street,” she said.
“Maybe. My contribution to the peace effort. The refineries that supply these guys don’t use Middle Eastern oil. Not so much, anyway.” He popped the top on a diet cola, handed it to her, and started the car.
She had asked no questions as they drove out I-90 into the Cascades, until he asked her to pick a number from one to seven. “Three,” she said.
“Okay. Third exit to the left.” They’d repeated the exercise twice more, and ended at a campground north of Roslyn called “Salmon la Sac,” which he informed her meant something like “Salmon the bag” in ungrammatical French.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she protested.
“Hey, don’t tell me. Besides, why does it have to? Nothing else has so far.”
* * *
Gemma watched Brady settle into a comfortable-looking position on the ground with his back against a large pine log. He opened an energy drink, took a long sip and set the can in the dust beside him, twisting it back and forth as if he were clearing a hole under it. He smelled like musk and moss and sandalwood and warm male skin.
“Okay,” he said, staring out into the trees. Laughter floated across the campground from an RV parked at a site near the water. He relaxed.
“There was a doe here a little while ago,” Gemma said. “She just picked her way into the clearing, so graceful. So alert. She poked around for a few minutes and then some kids came by and she bounded off.” She focused and smiled at him. “It’s peaceful here.”
One side of his mouth quirked up. “Seems to be.” He shifted his shoulders slightly against the log. “Do you still have the map?”
She pulled it out of the big half purse, half backpack she had scored at K-Mart and handed it across to him. Gemma smiled at the distinctive noises of the road map crackling as Brady spread it on the ground, then brushed it with the side of his hand to flatten it still more. He took a cell phone and steadied the GPS against the log, stared at it a few seconds, and turned off the phone.
“You still have your cell phone?” she asked, surprised. She was missing hers badly. She pictured it as a melted lump in the ashes of the mushroom house. She’d never bothered to memorize most of the numbers once they were programmed into her phone, so they were gone, too. She wasn’t even sure she knew Mike’s number off the top of her head. He had been at Speed Dial #3 as far back as she could remember.
“Yeah. It was still in my pocket. Can you reach the backpack?”
She tossed it to him and he pulled out one of the disposable phones and dialed. “Mike? 06-11 plus 3.42 and 7.91.” He shut off the phone and turned to her.
“06-11 were the numbers you gave Tran,” she said.
“Last June, Mike and I spent a weekend a few miles from here, smoking cigars and swapping lies.” He grinned. “Damned if it didn’t hail on us. Good thing we hadn’t planned to go fishing.” He looked up into the sky. “It can’t be much past noon. We’ve got a couple of hours, yet.”
Her mouth grew moist and her mind blanked out, and her center grew heavy and wet. Just looking at him could do the most amazing things to her body, and she couldn’t wait to find out what it would be like to have him inside her, filling her, blending with her into something new and—she swallowed and turned her head away.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said, “but there hasn’t been time.”
Gemma heard the smile in his voice, and looked back at him. She was only a little disappointed. And that was unusual, she realized with surprise. The idea of spending time with this sexy, totally attractive male was almost as exciting to her as making love to him all afternoon. Almost. “Do we have time now?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He quartered the area again with flat, wary eyes, but he smiled when he turned back to her. “We didn’t really get much talking done last night.”
There it was again. She felt herself opening, a tingling ache growing as she remembered the taste of his mouth, the feel of his hands on
her body. She looked up slantwise and caught his eye, then focused again on the trees and the sound of the rivers rushing toward their collision a few hundred yards beyond the campground.
“I’d like to get some idea of this filing thing you do,” Brady said.
She took a deep breath and a minute to clear her head. “Mike and I used to talk about it, and we tried to convince ourselves we were the next steps in human evolution. Talk about hubris! But it was very satisfying. And of course, we had to keep it a total secret, because everybody knows the ‘Next Steps’ get persecuted by the ‘Normals.’” She laughed. “We had this whole vocabulary worked out, and everything. Then his abilities went away when he hit puberty. We haven’t seen anything in Timmy, so I don’t know if it’s been passed down after us.”
“But you’ve always had extra abilities?”
“Pretty much. We used it a lot when we were kids—he’d knock my blocks over and I’d disappear his GI Joes. If he was being bratty, I’d unfile them someplace we weren’t supposed to go—like Dad’s study or the china cabinet with Mom’s German figurines.” She chuckled as she picked up a twig and began to doodle in the thick, powdery dirt. “Mom finally figured it out, though, and then I’d get in trouble for it instead of Mike.”
Brady laughed, and took another long drink. Gemma watched the muscles work in his throat and cleared her own. “How about you? Is your family gifted, too?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know them very well. My dad was from Chicago, and he didn’t have any family left alive. All my mother’s relatives are in Canada. He came up and took me away from them when my mom died, and never looked back. I was seven.”
Now You See It Page 17