by Linda Turner
Molly was thrilled, too, when she heard the news, but reopening wasn’t quite as simple as turning the Closed sign on the front door to Open. There were supplies to be ordered, deliveries to talk suppliers into making that afternoon, the dining area to get ready. Tables and chairs that had been stored in the back while the whole place was painted had to be carted to the front of the café, and customers from nearby businesses had to be notified that Heavenly Scents would be open regular hours tomorrow.
Molly was so happy about the opening she would have been willing to stay up all night if necessary, but with her help and Rosa’s—and the cooperation of the suppliers, thank God—they had just about everything in place by eight o’clock that evening.
“Well, that’s just about it,” Jennifer told the others as the last table was set in place. “I want to get everything organized in the pantry, but you guys don’t need to hang around for that.”
“Are you sure?” Molly asked, frowning. “I don’t mind staying.”
“I know you don’t, but there’s no need. I can handle the rest. Once the word gets out that we’re open, we’re going to have our hands full, so go home and get some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”
No one could argue with that, and because Jennifer had only a little left to do, Molly and Rosa left her to it, locking the door behind them as they let themselves out. Humming to herself, Jennifer turned back to the pantry. Ten minutes, tops, she decided, and she could close up and go upstairs to her apartment. As exhausted as she was, she’d be lucky if she even heard the alarm when it went off at four-thirty.
So tired she could hardly think, she never noticed when the scene before her eyes began to change. One second she was arranging spices, and the next she found herself looking at the interior of a convenience store. It was one that belonged to a national chain, and the clerk behind the counter was pale as a ghost as she raked the contents of the cash register into a paper bag. A masked man was holding a gun on her. Just as the trembling clerk started to hand him the bulging bag, Sam walked through the front door.
As quickly as the vision appeared, it vanished, and she was once again staring at the contents of the café pantry. Blinking, she gasped. “Oh, God. No!”
Horror chilling her blood, she stumbled out of the pantry into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. Before she thought, she punched in 911, only to slam the phone down again. No! What was she thinking? She needed the police department itself, not the emergency operator, and she didn’t have a clue what the number was. Snatching up the phone again, her fingers shaking so badly she could hardly hold the receiver, she dialed information.
“Please, please, let him be there,” she prayed when she finally got the number and punched it in.
But it seemed to take forever for anyone to answer in the squad room. It rang and rang, and with every ring, her panic grew. When someone finally answered, she was almost in tears.
“I need to talk to Detective Kelly,” she said quickly. “Please, it’s an emergency. Is he there?”
“He was a few minutes ago, but I think he was on his way out on a call. Hang on, and let me see if he’s still here.”
A clunk echoed in her ear as the phone was thrown down on a desk. Terrified she’d missed him, she was wondering how she was going to reach him when he came on the line twenty seconds later. “This is Kelly.”
“Sam! Thank God! I was afraid I’d missed you and I didn’t know what to do—”
“Jennifer?” he asked sharply. “What is it? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him, ignoring the headache already pounding at her temples. “It’s you I’m worried about. I had a vision.” After quickly telling him about the robbery she’d seen, she said, “I know you have a hard time accepting this kind of thing, but please be careful! The convenience store has a poster for an upcoming charity dinner for the Hispanic College Fund in the window—it’s right by the front door. Don’t go in there, Sam. Please! If you do, the robber won’t even think twice about shooting you.”
“Nobody’s going to shoot me, honey. I never go into convenience stores. You’re worrying about nothing.”
His tone was calm and soothing and logical, and it grated on her nerves like sandpaper. He didn’t believe her! Agitated, she said, “Dammit, Sam, you have to listen to me! I know what I saw, and it’s going to happen if you’re not very very careful!”
She was so desperate to make him believe her that if she’d been there at the station, she would have shaken him until every tooth in his head rattled. And something of her desperation must have finally reached him.
“I’m always careful,” he said soberly. “I have to be or I wouldn’t have survived my rookie year, but I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and watch what I’m walking into for the next couple of days. Okay?”
It was the best she could hope for, but the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t go away. “Just be ready for anything,” she said huskily. “If you don’t, you could be in trouble before you even realize anything’s wrong.”
“Believe me,” he said dryly. “I don’t make a habit of letting people with guns surprise me. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Not sure if he’d completely reassured her when he hung up a few minutes later, he almost called her back just to hear the sound of her voice. God, he’d missed her! And it was killing him, dammit! She was all he thought of, dreamed of. If he could just see her... But he wouldn’t be able to do that without touching her, and if he ever got his hands on her again, he didn’t know if he’d be able to let her go.
“Sam? Was that Jennifer?”
Glancing up to find Tanner frowning at him, Sam nodded. “She had another vision. She saw me walk into the middle of a holdup at a convenience store and get shot.”
Arching an eyebrow at that, Tanner said seriously, “I hope you listened to her. So far she’s been batting a thousand when it comes to those visions of hers. I don’t know how she does it, but it’s pretty damn impressive.”
Long since past the point where he needed to be convinced of Jennifer’s psychic abilities, Sam had to agree with him. “You heard me tell her I’d keep an eye open, but this time I think she missed the mark. I can’t remember the last time I stopped at one of those places,”
Tanner knew his habits as well as his own and had to agree with him. “Just the same, watch yourself,” he said stubbornly. “The lady saw something, and after the way she saved old man Stubbings’s life, only a fool would ignore one of her warnings.”
“I’m not ignoring anything,” Sam growled. “I just don’t think anything’s going to happen. But I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said quickly before Tanner could nag him again. Changing the subject, he said, “So what’s this tip someone called in about a coin collection? Any chance it’s Stubbings’s?”
“Probably not. Some lady on the west side was visiting her boyfriend and caught a glimpse of some coins in a desk drawer before he put them away. Apparently he’s a shady character and she wouldn’t put much past him. She saw the reward Mr. Stubbings is offering and decided to give us a call.”
Sam groaned. The reward the old man had posted had been both a godsend and a curse. People were scouring the city, looking for those damn coins, and they’d gotten a ton of calls about them. But most of them were false alarms. He and Tanner had checked out everything from a pile of loose change on a bedside table to buried treasure in some kid’s backyard. And so far they’d turned up nothing.
And this time was no different. The coins the girl saw at her boyfriend’s house turned out to be quarters, not the silver dollars and gold pieces Mr. Stubbings collected, and the only reason the guy hid them from her was that he was afraid she’d get her hands on them and spend them.
He and Tanner laughed about it as they left the house, but it was getting to be damn frustrating. Where the hell was the rest of Agatha Elliot’s jewelry and that damn coin collection? The items should have surfaced by now, but they hadn’t, an
d there’d been no more robberies. Even the slip of paper that was found with Mr. Stubbings’s security code turned out to have nothing but his fingerprints on it. And things weren’t going any better in the investigation of the fire at Jennifer’s apartment. No witnesses had come forward and no one had recognized the composite sketch of the suspect he and Tanner had shown around the area. They’d talked to every informant they had, and no one knew anything.
Disgusted, wondering when they were ever going to get a break, Sam took the wheel as they headed back to the station, taking one of the main thoroughfares into downtown, instead of the interstate. He never had a clue anything was wrong with the car until steam started pouring out from underneath the hood.
“What the hell!” Caught in the inside lane of a four-lane avenue, he swore, checked his mirror to make sure no one was coming up on his right and swung into the first driveway he came to. It wasn’t until he braked to a stop and cut the engine that he realized he’d pulled into the parking lot of a small convenience store.
Tanner, however, noticed right away. “Speak of the devil.” He whistled softly. “Ain’t this interesting.”
“It’s just a damn coincidence,” Sam snapped. “I wouldn’t even have pulled in here if I hadn’t been forced to.”
“So? Jennifer didn’t say why you stopped at a convenience store, did she? What exactly did she say, anyway? You never said, except that she saw you getting shot when you interrupted a holdup.”
“That was about it,” Sam replied, glaring at the small store in front of them. “And if I wasn’t careful, I’d be in. trouble before I realized it. There was a poster for some kind of dinner for the Hispanic College Fund in the window....”
Even as the words left his mouth, he spied the poster wedged in a corner of the store’s wide plate-glass window. Beside him, Tanner swore. “I don’t know about you, buddy, but this is close enough for me. You want to take the back door or the front?”
Not convinced yet there was a problem, Sam studied the store’s only two occupants through the window. The clerk, a small skinny woman who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, stood behind the counter talking to a customer. The man had his back to the window and his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked harmless enough, but there was something about the way he was hiding his hands that raised the fine hairs on the back of Sam’s neck. That was all he needed to warn him that something was wrong.
“The front,” he said, drawing his gun. “When you kick in the back door, I’ll make my move.”
Tanner, his own gun already in his hand, nodded. “Since he’s got his back to us, I should be able to slip around the side of the building without him seeing me. Give me till the count of ten.”
They’d worked together too many years for Sam to make his move too soon. Adrenaline pumping through him, he quietly slipped out of the car as Tanner disappeared around the corner of the building. The count slow and measured in his head, he approached the front door and just had time to wonder what he and Tanner were going to say if they’d misjudged the situation when he ran out of time.
Tanner kicked in the back door, startling both occupants of the store. The clerk screamed and dropped behind the counter just as the lone customer pulled a .38 from his pocket and whirled to face the opening that led to the back storage area. He didn’t see Sam slip through the front door.
“Freeze!” Sam yelled, pointing his service revolver right at the middle of the robber’s back just as Tanner burst in from the back yelling, “Police.”
“You even look like you’re going to squeeze that trigger, and you’re dead meat, pal,” Sam snarled. “Drop it.”
Still on the floor behind the counter, the clerk began to sob. “Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
His gun still trained on the robber, Sam never spared her a glance. He couldn’t. Not when the bastard had Tanner in his sights and was just itching to shoot him. Sam could see the temptation in the way he hesitated, and he knew what the guy was thinking as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud: he could drop them both if he moved fast enough.
“You’re not that fast, cowboy,” he said silkily. “We were first and second in marksmanship at the academy. You might get one of us, but not both, not without taking a bullet in the heart. You don’t believe me, you just try it.”
For a second he thought he was actually going to have to shoot the idiot. The man hesitated, his fingers tightening on the .38. Then with a muttered curse, he dropped it. Before he could lift his hands into the air, Sam was on him, kicking the gun out of reach, then forcing him up against the wall to search him. The entire procedure had taken no more than sixty seconds.
It took well over an hour for them to tie up loose ends and get back to the station. They had to wait for backup, then call for a tow truck when they discovered they’d blown a radiator hose in their unmarked car. And all the while Tanner badgered Sam to call Jennifer.
“It’s the least you can do,” he told him for what seemed like the tenth time when they strode into the detectives’ squad room. “Dammit, she saved your life. Mine, too! If she hadn’t warned you, we’d have walked into that store to get something to eat while we waited for a tow truck and gotten our heads blown off. You owe her a thank-you, if nothing else.”
“I know that,” Sam said curtly. “And one of these days I’ll find a way to do that. But right now, I think it’s better if we keep our distance.”
“You’re making a mistake, man. Can’t you see you’re miserable? And you’re making me miserable, too, walking around with a long face all the time. Quit being so damn stubborn and call her!”
His jaw set in granite, Sam said tightly, “Stay out of this, Tanner. I know what I’m doing.”
“The hell you do. You wouldn’t know a good thing if you tripped over it. Jennifer Hart is a damn fine woman and you know it. You’re just running scared because of what Patricia did to you, and there’s no reason for it.”
His mouth compressed in a flat line, Sam refused to even discuss it. Wanting to bust him one, Tanner made a snap decision and grabbed the phone. “Then if you won’t call her, I will. What’s Alice’s number?”
“I’m not talking to her.”
“Nobody asked you to. Give me the damn number!”
Swearing, Sam gave it to him, then sat at his desk, stone-faced, as his partner made the call. He’d rather not have listened, but he didn’t have much choice when Tanner sat right there and glared at him as he spoke into the phone. “Hey, Alice,” he said when the old lady came on the line. “Tanner Bennigan, here. Can I speak to Jennifer for a minute?”
Knowing Alice, Sam expected her to chat awhile with Tanner before handing the phone over to Jennifer, but seconds later Tanner hung up. Surprised, he said, “That was fast. What’s the matter? She already in bed?”
“Nope. She’s not there,” he retorted. “Alice said she moved back to her apartment this morning.”
Chapter 12
It was the pounding at her front door that woke her. Groggy, her head thick, she fumbled for her alarm clock, squinting at it in the dark. One o‘clock! God, who would bang on her door at o’clock in the morning? But even as she asked herself the question, she knew. Sam. Somehow he’d discovered she’d left Alice’s, and judging from the force of his blows against her new steel door, he was more than a little miffed that she hadn’t consulted him first.
Go away! she wanted to shout at him. She wasn’t in any shape to deal with him tonight—she was tired, and moving back into the apartment, seeing again everything she’d lost, had been an emotional roller coaster for her. But she knew Sam. He wasn’t going to go away until he spoke to her.
Grabbing her robe, she struggled into it on the way to the door. “Hold your horses,” she grumbled. “I’m coming, dammit!”
Checking the peephole to make sure it was him, she released the dead bolt and slid the safety chain free, then jerked the door open to find him glaring down at her in the dark. She barely had time to step back before he was
surging inside. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She didn’t so much as blink at his angry greeting. All innocence, she looked up at him with drowsy eyes. “The same thing most people are doing at this time of the night,” she answered sassily in a voice that was still husky from sleep. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to it. I’ve got to be up at four-thirty to fire up the ovens and start the morning baking.”
As far as hints went, she couldn’t have gotten much blunter. But he didn’t budge. His eyes as dark as midnight, he looked her up and down, then growled, “Go pack your clothes. You’re going back to Alice’s.”
“Oh, no, I’m not! In case you hadn’t noticed, this place is back to normal, so there’s no reason for me to impose on Alice.”
“Think again, sweetheart,” he retorted. “Whoever threw that firebomb through your front window is still walking around free, and we’re no closer to catching him now than we were the night he burned you out. He could have killed you. There’s nothing to say he won’t come back and try to finish the job if he finds out you’re here alone.”
“And chance getting caught? I don’t think so. Only an idiot would try something when there’s a cop sitting across the street twenty-four hours a day, and this guy’s no idiot.”
“No, he’s been pretty damn smart up to now,” Sam agreed. “But you’re a threat to him, and he knows you didn’t die in the fire. He’s got to be getting desperate, wondering when those little voices in your head are going to tell you something about him we can use to identify him. And that makes him twice as dangerous. A desperate man doesn’t always use his brain. So get your keys. You’re staying at Alice’s until he’s caught.”
“I am not. I won’t be driven from my home by a piece of trash who hasn’t got the guts to come out of the darkness and do his dirty work in the light of day. He’s a coward, and if you really think he’s going to come after me, then put another watchdog in the alley. But I’m not leaving and you can’t make me!”