“Harry, I love you. I...I know it’s too soon for commitments and promises and almost-anythings between us, but I—”
He cut off her disjointed declaration with a swift, hard, soul-shattering kiss.
“I love you, too. I suspected it this morning, when all I could think about was getting back to you. I knew it this afternoon, when we found your car.” His jaw worked. “I don’t ever want to go through that again, so let’s get you the hell out of here. Now!”
They almost made it.
Her heart singing, Sheryl started for the window once more. Broken glass crunched under her feet and almost covered the sound of the door opening behind them.
“What the hell...?”
Harry spun around, yanking her behind him. Off balance and flailing for a hold, Sheryl didn’t see him reach for his gun. Broken Nose did, though.
“Don’t do it!” he shouted. Desperation added an octave to his high-pitched whine. “Your hand moves another inch and I swear to God, I’ll put one of these hot slugs through you and the bitch both!”
Harry froze. A single glance at the oversized barrel on the weapon in the man’s hand confirmed that it was engineered to fire uranium-tipped cop-killer bullets. The same kind of bullets that had ripped right through his best friend’s body armor. Harry was willing to stop a bullet to protect Sheryl, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, take the chance that it might plow right through him and into her, as well.
His pulse hammering, he lifted both hands clear of his sides. His Smith & Wesson sat like a dead weight in its holster just under his armpit.
“Yeah, yeah! That’s better.”
Even in the dim moonglow, Harry recognized the man whose flattened nose and jet-black hair he’d memorized from a mug shot less than an hour ago.
“All right, D’Agustino. Don’t get crazy here and maybe we can work a deal.”
“Jesus! You know who I am?”
“You and your partner both. You might as well give it up now. We’ve got this place surrounded.”
“I knew it! I knew them guys in the coveralls weren’t no wrench benders, not with them bulges under their arms. That’s why I come running back for the broad. She’s my ticket outta here.”
Harry felt Sheryl go rigid against his back. Her fingers gripped his shirt. The image of her pinned helplessly against this killer raised a red haze in front of his eyes. Coldly, he blinked it away.
“She’s not going anywhere with you, D’Agustino.”
“Oh, yeah! Guess again.”
The snick of a hammer cocking back added emphasis to the sneering reply.
Harry started to speak, and almost strangled on an indrawn breath. His whole body stiffened at the feel of a hand sliding around his rib cage. Without seeming to move, he brought his arms in just enough to cover Sheryl’s reach for his holstered weapon.
Sweat rolled down his temples as her fingers slid under his arm. Sheryl hated guns! They made her nervous. She’d told him so more than once. She probably didn’t have the faintest idea how to use one!
At that moment, Harry figured he had two options. He could throw himself at D’Agustino and hope to beat a bullet to the punch, or he could trust the woman behind him to figure out which end of a .357 was which.
It didn’t even come close to a choice. He’d take his chances with Sheryl over this punk any day.
“Think about it D’Agustino,” he said, trying desperately to buy her some time. “We know who you are. We know you’ve been working with Paul Gunderson. I have two dozen men waiting to greet him when his plane touches down a few minutes from now.”
“Yeah, well, me and Sheryl ain’t waiting around for that. Get over here, bitch!”
Harry could smell the man’s fear. Hear it in his high, grating whine.
“You might get away this time, but we’ll come after you. All of us. The FBI. The U.S. Marshals Service. Customs. Better give yourself up now. Talk to us.”
“Don’t you understand! I’m a dead man if Big Jake hears I cut a deal with the feds!”
“You’re a dead man if you don’t.”
“No! No, I ain’t!”
He knew the instant D’Agustino’s gun came up that time had just run out.
He dived across the room.
A shot exploded an inch from his ear.
Sheryl didn’t kill the little bastard. She didn’t even wound him. But she startled him just enough to throw off his aim.
His gun barrel spit red flame. A finger of fire seared across Harry’s cheek. The wild shot ricocheted off a pipe and gouged into the ceiling at precisely the same instant his fist smashed into an already flattened nose with a satisfying, bone-crunching force.
D’Agustino reared back, howling. A bruising left fist followed the right. The man crumpled like a sack of stones.
His chest heaving, Harry reached down and jerked the specially crafted .45 out of his hand. Although the thug showed no signs of moving any time soon, he kept the gun trained at his heart. Over the prone body, his anxious gaze found Sheryl.
“You okay?”
She nodded, her face paper white in the dimness. Then, incredibly, she produced a shaky, strained smile.
“You’d better cuff him or...or do whatever it is you marshals do. We’ve got a plane to meet.”
Chapter 14
“I’m not leaving.”
Sheryl folded arms encased in the too-long sleeves of a black windbreaker and glared at Deputy Marshal Ev Sloan. He fired back with an equally stubborn look.
“It could get nasty around here. Nastier,” he amended with a glance at the two men huddled back to back on the asphalt a few yards away, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Fay and another officer stood over them, reading them their rights.
“I want to stay,” Sheryl insisted. “I need to see this.”
“This isn’t any place for civilians. We don’t have time to—”
“It’s okay, Ev.”
Harry nodded his thanks to the medic who’d just taped a gauze bandage on his upper cheek. He crossed the asphalt to the task force command vehicle, his gaze on the woman hunched in the front seat.
“She’s part of the team.”
His quiet words dissolved the last of Sheryl’s own secret doubts. She couldn’t quite believe that she was sitting in a truck that bristled with more antennas than a porcupine on a bad-quill day, watching while an army of law enforcement agencies checked their weapons and coordinated last-minute details for the takedown of a smuggler and suspected killer. Or that she’d pulled out a .357 Magnum and squeezed a trigger herself mere moments ago. Until Harry MacMillan had charged into her life, she’d only experienced this kind of Ramboesque excitement through movies and TV.
This wasn’t a movie, though. She had the bruises and the bunched-up knot of fear in her stomach to prove it. This was real. This was life or death, and Harry was right in the middle of it. There was no way Sheryl was going to leave, as Ev insisted, while Harry calmly walked right back into the line of fire.
Besides, she and Harry had a conversation to finish. They’d tossed around a few words such as “love” and “commitment” and “promises” in that dark, dirty storeroom. Sheryl wanted more than words.
She wouldn’t get them any time soon, she saw. Having assured himself she’d sustained no serious injury, and having had the powder burn on his cheek attended to, the marshal was ready for action. More than ready. In the glow from the command vehicle’s overhead light, his whiskey-gold eyes gleamed with barely restrained impatience. He paused before her, holding himself in check long enough to brush a knuckle down her cheek.
“I don’t want to worry about you any more than I already have today. Promise me that you’ll stay in the command vehicle.”
“I promise.”
“Ev told you that we have a U.S. Marshals Service plane standing by. If Paul Gunderson’s aboard the incoming aircraft and we take him down...”
“You will!” Sheryl said fiercely. “I know you will!”
&
nbsp; His knuckle stilled. The glint in his eyes turned feral. “Yes, I will.”
She bit down her lower lip, waiting for him to come back to her. A moment later, the back of his hand resumed its slow stroke.
“I might not get a chance to talk to you after the bust. I’ll have to bundle Gunderson aboard our plane and get him and his two pals back to Washington for arraignment.”
“I know.”
Cupping her chin, he turned her face a few more degrees into the light. He stared down at her, as if imprinting her features on his memory.
Sheryl could have wished for a better image for him to take with him. Her cheeks still carried traces of the rust and squashed bugs that had rained down on her from the overhead pipes during her desperate escape attempt. Her hair frizzed all over her head. If she’d had on a lick of makeup when she’d left her apartment so many hours ago, she’d long since chewed or rubbed or cried it off.
Harry didn’t seem to mind the bugs or frizz or total lack of color on her face. His thumb traced a slow path across her lower lip.
“I’ll be back. I promise.”
Turning her head, Sheryl pressed a kiss to his palm. Her smile was a little ragged around the edges, but she got it into place.
“I’ll be waiting.”
His hand dropped. A moment later, he disappeared, one of many shadows that melted into the darkness.
Even Ev Sloan deserted Sheryl, vowing that he wasn’t going to miss out on the action again. Another deputy marshal took his place in the command vehicle. He introduced himself with a nod, then gave the bank of radios mounted under the dash his total concentration.
Sheryl huddled in her borrowed windbreaker. For some foolish reason, she’d believed that she could never again experience the sick terror that had gripped her those awful hours with Broken Nose and Slick Hair. Now she realized that listening helplessly while the man she loved put his life on the line bred its own brand of terror.
Her heart in her throat, she followed every play in Harry’s deadly game.
The game ended less than half an hour later.
To Sheryl’s immense relief, the man subsequently identified as Richard Johnson-Paul Gunderson stepped off the cargo plane, tossed up an arm to shield his eyes from a blinding flood of light and promptly threw himself face down on the concrete parking apron.
As a jubilant Ev related to Sheryl, the bastard was brave enough with his mob connections backing him up. Without them, he wet his pants at the first warning shout.
Literally.
“Harry had to scrounge up a clean pair of jeans before he could hustle the bastard aboard our plane,” Ev reported gleefully. “The government will probably have to foot the bill for them, but what the hell! We got him, Sher! We got him!”
Grinning from ear to ear, he unbuckled his body armor and tossed it into his gear bag. His webbed belt with its assortment of canisters and ammo clips followed.
“I would’ve left him to stew in his own juice, so to speak, but then I didn’t have to handcuff myself to the man and sit next to him in a small aircraft for the next five or six hours the way Harry did.”
“I can see how that would make a difference,” Sheryl concurred, her eyes on the twin-engine jet revving up at the end of the runway.
Ev’s gear bag hit the back of the command vehicle with a thunk.
“Harry told me to take you home. Fay has to hang around until the Nuclear Regulatory folks finish decertifying the canisters. I told her I’d come back to help with the disposition. You ready to go?”
The small plane with U.S. Marshals Service markings roared down the runway. Sheryl followed its blinking red and white lights until they disappeared into a bank of black clouds.
“I’m ready.”
Ev traded places with the marshal who’d manned the command vehicle. He twisted the key in the ignition, then shoved the truck into gear.
“We have to swing by the federal building to pick up the mutt.”
“Button?”
Ev’s teeth showed white in the airport exit lights. “Harry left him with the security guards when we came chasing out here. As obnoxious as that mutt is, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the guards hasn’t skinned him by now and nailed his hide over the front door.”
They soon discovered that Button was still in one piece, although the same couldn’t be said for the security guards. One sported a long tear in his uniform sleeve. The other pointed out the neat pattern of teeth marks in his leather brogans.
Sheryl apologized profusely and retrieved the indignant animal from the lidded trash can where the guards had stashed him. Button huffed and snuffled and ruffled up his fur, but let himself be carried from the federal building with only a few parting snarls at the guards. After a few greeting snarls at Ev, he settled down on Sheryl’s chest.
She buried her nose in his soft, silky fur. The lights of Old Town, only a few blocks from the federal building, sped by unnoticed. The bright wash of stars overhead didn’t draw her eyes. Even Ev’s excited recounting of the night’s tumultuous events barely penetrated. In her mind, she followed the flight of a small silver jet over the Sandias and across New Mexico’s wide, flat plains.
He’d be back. He’d promised.
But when?
“Looks like it’s going to be next week before Gunderson’s arraignment.”
Turning her back on the noise of the lively group who’d just arrived at her apartment to celebrate young Master Brian Hart’s christening, Sheryl strained to hear Harry’s recorded message.
“You have my office number. They can reach me anytime, night or day, if you have an emergency. I’ll talk to you soon.”
The recorder clicked off.
Frustrated, she hit the repeat button. Except for one short call soon after Harry had arrived in D.C., he and Sheryl had been playing telephone tag for almost three days now. From what she’d gleaned through his brief messages, the man she now thought of as Richard Johnson had held out longer than anyone had expected before finally breaking his stubborn silence. Once the dam gave, the assistant DA working the case had kept Harry busy helping with the briefs for the grand jury. Now, it appeared, he’d have to stay in D.C. until next week’s arraignment.
“Sheryl, where are the pretzels? I can’t—Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know you were on the phone.”
Replacing the receiver, Sheryl pasted on a smile and turned to face her mother. “I’m not. I was just checking my messages.”
“Well? Did he call?”
“Yes, he called.”
“Where is he?”
“Still in Washington.”
“I want to meet this man. When is he coming back to Albuquerque?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Her mother’s thin, still-attractive face took on the pinched look that Sheryl had seen all too often in her youth. Joan Hancock wanted to say more. That much was obvious from the way she bit down on her lower lip.
Thankfully, she refrained.
She had driven up to Albuquerque from Las Cruces three days ago, after Elise’s frantic call informing her that her daughter was missing. She’d stayed through the rest of the weekend, demanding to know every detail about Sheryl’s involvement in a search for a dangerous fugitive.
Needless to say, the cautious bits her daughter let drop about the deputy marshal who’d swept in and out of her life hadn’t pleased Joan any more than observing Brian Mitchell’s growing attachment to his namesake...and his namesake’s mother.
The christening ceremony tonight had only added to her disgruntlement. Sheryl and Brian had stood as godparents to the baby. Seeing them together at the altar had rekindled Joan Hancock’s grievances against Elise. She was still convinced that the new mother had schemed to steal Sheryl’s boyfriend right out from under her nose.
“Just look at her,” she griped, pressing the pretzel bowl against the front of the pale-gray silk dress she’d worn to the church. “The way she’s making those goo-goo eyes at Brian, you’d thin
k he’d fathered her child instead of her shiftless ex-husband.”
Sheryl’s gaze settled on the scene in the living room. Elise had anchored the baby’s carrier in a corner of the sofa, where it couldn’t be jostled by her two lively boys. They were showing off their baby brother to the assembled crowd with patented propriety. Brian leaned against the arm of the sofa, one finger unconsciously stroking the baby’s feathery red curls while he chatted with Elise. Even Button had gotten into the act. Perched on the back of the sofa, he waved his silky tail back and forth and guarded the baby with the regal hauteur that had made the shih tzu so prized by the emperors of China.
It was a picture-perfect family tableau. With all her heart, Sheryl wished everyone in the picture happiness.
She’d told Elise so when the two friends had snatched a half hour alone yesterday. Even now, she had to smile at the emotions that had chased across Elise’s face, one after another, like tumbleweeds blown by a high wind. Pain for Sheryl over her break with Brian. Guilty relief that he was free. Disbelief that her friend had fallen for Harry so hard, so fast. Worry that she was in for some hurting times ahead.
Like Joan, Elise couldn’t quite believe that her friend had opted to settle for a life of loneliness, broken by days or weeks or even months of companionship. Sheryl couldn’t quite believe it, either, but sometime in the past few days, she had.
Joan gave a long, wistful sigh. “Are you sure you and Brian can’t patch things up?”
“I’m sure.”
Her gaze left the group on the sofa and settled on her daughter’s face. “Oh, Sherrie, I hoped you’d do better than I did.”
Sheryl’s smile softened. “You did fine, Mom.”
A haze of tears silvered Joan’s green eyes, so like her daughter’s. “I wanted you to find someone steady and reliable. Someone who’d be there when you needed him to kiss away your hurts and share your laughter and fix the leaky faucets.”
“You taught me to be pretty handy with a wrench,” Sheryl replied gently. “And Harry was there when I needed him.”
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