“Yeah,” Roberta said, “but by the time you identify that face in a photo, the real face may be safely across the border.” Her forefinger nudged her slipping glasses back up onto the bridge of her bulbous nose. “Then what?”
Janet glanced at Jack, who, lost in thought, was rubbing his mustache. “Then we follow the money,” she said.
Now Jack’s gaze locked on hers. “Meaning what?”
Thanks be to heaven, she had seen this side of him or she might have fallen really badly for this steel-hearted, handsome hard-ass. Intellectuals like him who were so certain their way was the only way pissed her off. “We go where money goes. Always to one of three places.”
Martin blinked his hooded eyes. “Well, if I had known where any of those places were, I would have applied there for a job a long ago. Where?
Janet’s Cheshire smile tilted her crescent scar. “The three largest corporate conglomerates in the world. Energy, insurance, pharmaceuticals. And pharmaceuticals includes the subheading of drugs. Street drugs.”
* * * * *
Wes found a lead an hour and a half later. “There’s been a murder – early this morning, just after midnight, in Chicago.”
“Chicago?” Janet cradled her cell phone between her ear and her shoulder and signaled Jack for a pen and a clean sheet of paper. The kitchen table was place-matted with notes.
“Yeah. On the Airport’s MetroLink rail car. The victim was on some kind of advisory board for none other than Peabody Energy.”
She scribbled out the words Peabody Energy and murdered Chicago exec. She circled the word Energy and added an exclamation point, turning the paper for Jack to see. He bent over her, his palms straddling either side of her on the table. His subliminal carnality ravaged her senses, and she struggled to marshal her thoughts. “Any clue to the murderer’s whereabouts, Wes?”
“Airport security is checking all departing flights within the last twelve hours.”
“What if he’s left the country? I could ID his passport photo.”
“Unless he’s wearing a disguise.”
“The rail car must have had a security camera!”
“Snipped with wire cutters. This man is a professional.”
This was a fight she would not back away from. But something else troubled her more. “Wes . . . any word on Molly’s condition?” She hadn’t realized her voice sounded so raw.
A hesitation, then, “The Feds passed along the doctor’s report about a half hour ago. She’s still on the ventilator.” His gravelly voice rushed on, “But she’s holding her own, Janet.”
Her shoulders sagged then bunched up like a boxer waiting for the bell.
Bring it on.
CHAPTER SIX
Craig poured the can of chilled Draught Guinness in one smooth action into his tulip-shaped pint glass. With satisfaction, he observed the creamy head mount to the rim. Like the Guinness ad campaign proclaimed, “Good things come to those who wait.”
Now his $750,000 waited patiently for him in an offshore numbered account. And, rolling the toothpick between his lips, he waited patiently for the middle-aged blonde to make her way to his table. Dressed in designer jeans and a creamy silk blouse beneath a tailored jacket, she exuded pheromones. They signaled a slight aggressiveness and, if he was right, a sexuality too long repressed. In response he could feel himself hardening.
The eye candy had been in first class with him on his transatlantic flight from Chicago and conveniently sat across from him in Heathrow’s faux Irish pub. He had nine hours to kill in the airport before his connecting flight.
He had been trained to focus one-hundred percent on his objective. For months that objective had been the Holy Stone. The culmination of uniting the Holy Stone with its ultimate power grid still remained; but he could allow his attention to refocus elsewhere, if only momentarily. Like the blonde, and he knew he was right about her, he had been too long without sex.
She paused before his pizza-pan-size tabletop. “Mind some company? You sat across from me on the Chicago flight. I’ve a nine-hour layover, and I’m bored out of my skull.”
He stood and pulled out the table’s only other bar stool. “Nine hours? You’re bound for Sao Paulo, then, or Cairo?”
Her asymmetrical lips, the top one thinner, curved in a lazy smile. “The flight board – you’ve a photographic memory?”
“Just good with numbers. And names. You’re Anne Greeley.”
Her hazel eyes, banked by pale brown lashes, flared. “And you knew this how?”
He shrugged. “The flight attendant – when she took your drink order – she marked it on her passenger list.”
The marionette lines around Anne’s mouth eased somewhat. A friendly smile welcomed him into her fold. And that’s where he planned to spend the next eight hours, his mouth, his fingers, and his cock buried in her folds.
* * * * *
Anne gasped when Craig Scudder flipped her over onto her stomach and slammed into her from behind. He was rough. But then that was how she liked it. Too bad, she was going to have to nail his ass afterwards.
Each time he plowed into her, her grunts of pain and pleasure were muffled by the rumpled bed sheets. One of his hands grabbed her wrists and pinned them together above her, near the hotel bed’s headboard; his other slid beneath her, grabbing her breast for better anchorage as he rammed into her again. She was nearing the edge, that delicious precipice where one momentarily lost all focus, all responsibility, all ought-to’s and freefell into momentarily spasming oblivion.
Abruptly, Craig Scudder stopped, pulled out of her. He leaned near her ear. “Beg for it, bitch.”
How could he know her so well after only a few hours? “Please, please. . . I need more. I need to . . . .”
“To come,” he finished for her and buried his huge organ inside, deep, deep, deep inside her.
“Agghhhhh,” she cried out and let go of the ledge, tumbling into the sweet agony of release.
He fell atop her, spurting inside her, rigid and gasping along with her. Her head lolled to one side, seeking sweet restorative air.
After a few minutes, he whispered softly, “You’re good, Anne Greely.” His fingers coaxed the tousled hair from her cheek. “Lie still while I get you a washcloth.”
As if she could move even if her life depended on it. Her body was thoroughly, most pleasurably, spent. She hurt so good. From the bathroom, she heard him running the water. What a paradox, this man. Both gentle and violent. Still, like other secretive spooks, his eyes harbored something strange that she could never identify and never liked. Perhaps a humanness that seemed to be fading.
He returned and lathed her thighs, her crevice, with the warm, damp cloth. “Yes, you’re goo-good, Anne. But not – not that go—good.”
Strange, she had not noticed his stuttering before. It should have been a red flag for her. The Agent 1811 badge he flipped before her dazed vision was. Her jacket – with her passport and badge -- left in the bathroom closet!
By that time it was too late. The badge was dropped on the sheet. Her skull was caught up between his powerful hands. At the same time, his knee anchored her back. She knew what was coming and tried to scream. That final snap of her cervical column sent her freefalling again.
For the last time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It had been, what, five years since Linda’s death? Jack rubbed his temples as the Boeing’s cabin lights flickered on, signaling descent. Jet lag must be getting to him, if he couldn’t pinpoint that heart-ripping loss in his life. He could pinpoint something else he didn’t need. That was drama. And the spitfire sitting next to him sure served it up.
She stirred from sleep, stretching like a small lioness – a lioness without her mane. “Heathrow?” Her voice had that lilting whispery quality peculiar to her tribe.
“The Metropolitan Police of London will already have been all over the room,” he grumbled, buckling his seatbelt. “Don’t see how you’ll find anything – if we can eve
n get past the checkpoints and guards.”
She slid off the denim jacket, covering her like a blanket, and shrugged into its sleeves. “No problemo.” Lacing up her high-top leather boots, the left one more loosely at its top, she said, “Wes will get us help from our field agents here. And you underestimate me.”
Dawn’s filtered light streaming from the small convex window played tricks of illusion on her face. The hazy light obliterated the cheekbone’s delineating scar and softened the harsh angles of her face’s square contours to a childlike quality. No hair, all eyes. But he knew that with the harsh light of day, those almond eyes burned fiercely, unforgiving, in that bare face. “I’ve got a job to do here, sweetheart. Connect the dots.”
She tugged her Dallas Cowboys cap from her canvas backpack stowed beneath the seat and adjusted the bill low. “My job is not to underestimate the killer’s ability nor overestimate yours.”
He flashed a wounded smile. “You’re all heart.” He buckled her seatbelt for landing, loving the rare restraint over her he allowed himself. Right now, he knew her better than she knew herself. How, he didn’t know. But he knew, no sensed, the feelings at war within her. The fury and the fear. Did that fear extend to himself? His gut instinct was so reliable on electromagnetic field equations, but in the past when it came to understanding women he had been lost in space. Yet, with her, especially lately, he could read every X chromosome in her DNA helix. He knew she wanted him, wanted something safe, something bigger, something solid, to lean on . . . knew that she desired him, desired him in her, filling her, and around her . . . and knew she had every intention of not letting him past her fence built by the scars of pain, both physical, emotional.
Well, everyone had scars, but most of the time those scars weren’t worth the effort of battling through. If only his weakness was not this inexplicable white-hot wanting of her. Since that night, the only time, they had made love, sublime love, not the couple of times since when he had taken advantage of a few moments without children and taken advantage of her, he could think of little more than bedding her again. “Just keep in mind we’re on the same team sweetheart.”
“For the time being. Then it’s every man for himself.”
At that, he grinned. “You’re forgetting you’re a woman.”
Her inky glare impaled him, her words breathed in a rusky whisper. “You’re the one who needs to forget I am woman. We’re just two people working a case together, got it?”
He didn’t like her tone, as if she were putting him on probation. “Yeah, I’ve got it – and you’ve got a smart mouth, Woman-yes-to-you.”
“Better than a smartass, CSD.”
* * * * *
With the help of a doddering looking scholar in glasses, an M-15 agent, Janet and Jack bypassed Customs and were whisked by electric cart to Terminal 5’s Hotel Sofitel. The five-hundred-a-night hotel room was apparently getting an industrious going over
“Geoffrey Moore, SO18 Inspector,” the M-15 agent introduced the reedy, balding special ops.
He glanced up as she entered, and his pale, lashless eyes fixed her with a narrowed, questioning stare.
“ICE.” She flashed her badge from beneath her denim jacket collar. Okay, so she had never bothered to turn it in after she walked off the tracking job for Customs. At the time, she thought it’d make a good bottle opener. Good she’d given up the Bud not too long afterward, or the dented credential would have lost its street market value. Geez, sometime she missed her windbreaker with its BP patch and on one sleeve and DHS on the other. It had been so easy to toss in the dryer, yank out unwrinkled, and then impress scumbags.
Beside her, the M-15 agent raised grizzled brows in bemusement, but he nodded at the ramrod-stiff SO Inspector Moore in confirmation of her identity.
Moore’s scrutinizing glance shifted to Jack.
“Team assistant,” she said. She went over to the rumpled bed. For her, instinct meant being open at the top of her head, listening for that which was inaudible. On the job, the only time she kept the door to her emotions open was when she needed to feel the emotion of the being she was tracking. And, even then, she would quickly close that door again. Instinct for a tracker went far beyond a hunch; instinct compelled her to become what she was tracking – and most of the time that meant something that had lost its humanness.
She paused, her gaze snail worming over the soiled sheets. What?
The crime scene had already been stripped bare of evidence by the U.K.’s various agencies nine hours earlier, after a maid had grown suspicious of the Do Not Disturb Sign. Anne Greeley, the deader-than-dead 1811 Hopi reservation agent for the FBI, had been trailing someone with a passport now identified as false, a man going by the name of Roger Anthony.
“Interpol, Scotland Yard, CIA,” the inspector was saying in a crisply, stilted British, “No demographics, no fingerprints to identify the killer. Only some hair strands and such. We’ll get an ID on him sooner or later.”
Jack smiled politely. “Later might be too late. The man could have taken on a new identity. Be anywhere in the world. Any Roger Anthony on outbound passenger lists?”
Moore’s thin lips thinned even more. Obviously, he did not like his authority being questioned by a greenhorn. “Of course, we’ve already checked that out. Most likely he has ditched that passport for another.”
She was more concerned on how much of a head start Nuke had. “When did the murder occur?” she asked.
"Within the last fifteen hours.”
She bent from the waist, hovering over the bed, sniffing.
Behind her, Jack demanded of the inspector, “Are you sure about that?”
Irritation iced the inspector’s reply. “Rigor mortis acts upon legs and feet last. It causes board-like stiffness and can take as long as twelve to fifteen hours. When the body was bagged, the lower extremities were still flexible.”
She glanced from the sheets to Jack. “Her secretion . . . his ejaculation.” Did Jack and she give of that erotic scent the two, no three times, they had made love? Surely even someone with sinusitis could still sense the currents humming between them like static electricity.
Jack’s shrugged his yard-wide shoulders, as if to say, ‘so what? The bed reeks of their sex. Anyone can smell that.’
“It’s him. I smell his sweat, as well. I’d know it anywhere. It’s the gunman who shot Molly.”
“Then we’re on the right trail.”
“Then it’s your time to connect the dots.”
* * * * *
Exasperated, Janet pocketed her cell phone in her denim jacket. Once again, her call to the hospital had been relayed to a voice messaging loop. Interference by the Feds? And, damn’t nothing from Wes. Molly could be . . . Janet couldn’t let that train of thought chug any farther.
She and Jack sat as far back in the terminal’s Irish pub as possible. It was late evening, and most of the outbound international flights had boarded, with only a few inbound yet due to arrive. Jack was completely oblivious to her. Between sips of warm, stale ale, he doodled on a napkin. Or appeared to doodle. She knew he was brainstorming, using his analytical left brained superiority to connect the dots in his head with the dots on Heathrow’s outbound flights in the last twelve hours.
She toyed with her cranberry juice, only occasionally tasting it. She’d much prefer something strong enough to induce a two month heart-numbing drunk. That wallowing and binging grief she would partake in once she had hacked Nuke’s testicles from his torso and nailed them to the Sunlight Methodist Church bulletin board.
A gory sentiment for a pleasant place like the pub. The cool stupor of bars were the best, she thought. The anonymous ambience, the familiar scent of beer and fried food, the camaraderie, the opportunity for unanticipated meetings, the assortment of people. She sighed. “I sure could use a Salty Dog right now.”
“How’d you like to try the real thing?” Jack offered smugly.
She made a gagging “Uuggh. Please. Spare me. Go back to
your ponderings.”
His crooked grin tugged his mustache upward on one side. “You’ll miss me.” But he did just that, scribbling, crossing off, drawing arrows.
Damn’t, he had a mouth that could seduce a saint. She took another swallow of the juice, not really tasting its tartness. With few distractions that time of night, she narrowed all her senses to tracking her prey. Her senses at high alert, she watched and listened to the comings and goings within the international terminal. Her emotions threatened to erupt with such intensity overload that she could feel heat radiating off her skin. As Jack most likely could, as well.
She and Jack were playing a deadly chess game with the killer. The ancient game of life and death, hunter and hunted. And the hunted always had the advantage.
Nuke was an efficient killer with collateral damage. He wasn’t stupid; a stupid man would not have lived this long in his profession. Plus she and Jack had to contend against the various agencies, including Scotland Yard now, in a race to take Nuke down – and, more importantly, claim the chip.
She had to think like Nuke and as a tracker had to become him. The one advantage she had was that Nuke lacked the skill to enter her mind. He did not know the spiritual world. If he suspected a spiritual world existed, he wouldn’t be able to justify his actions as a soldier of fortune or an assassin.
Her element, though, was the raw wilderness, and in any city her tracking ability was greatly diminished. The loss of her hair just about rendered her inoperative. Fear hovered around her like a fiendish ghost. Had she peaked at thirty-nine? Had she seen her better days?
Scanning the list of flights, Jack muttered, “This guy – ”
“Nuke.”
“He might not even have taken a flight out of Heathrow. He could be laying low somewhere in the United Kingdom. Maybe catch a later flight out of Glasgow or Dublin.”
Go home!
She shook her head, rolled her eyes. Go home?
“What?” Jack asked, nonplussed by her exasperated expression.
“Nothing.” She stared into Jack’s richer than emeralds eyes. Eyes that had the power to send thermo-nuclear charges to the nether regions of her body if she allowed her defenses to weaken, however slightly. Even females in the terminal eyed the handsome rogue wearing the pirate-like black bandana. He was hotter than Captain Jack Sperry because he was pure male chromosomes. “Just trying to puzzle this out.”
Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Page 4