The Bliss Factor

by Penny McCall

  They slalomed around tables and booths, back through the restaurant and out into the mall, Conn feeling like he was in one of his nightly memory flashes, still not remembering everything, but also not stopping to think. He stepped onto the moving stairway, taking the steps two at a time and boosting Rae up in front of him, scanning their surroundings.

  The Somerset Collection offered everything the high-end shopper could want: valet parking, three levels of stores that sold everything from caramel apples to shirts with strange and disturbing messages blazoned across them. Options for people being chased by potential murderers were few and far between.

  “Any ideas?” he said to Rae as they hit the top of the stairway and started off at a fast walk.

  “Moe and Larry don’t seem to care if they catch us in here,” she said, sounding worried.

  “Moe and Larry?”

  “Stooges,” she said with a slight smile, “for lack of better names to call them.”

  “Moe and Harry,” Conn said as if he understood a tenth of what she’d said. “One of them is named Harry.”

  “They’re keeping up but not closing in.”

  “Yeah,” Conn said, sounding grim, even to his own ears. If he’d been alone, he would have confronted the threat and eliminated it. If he’d been sure he was the only target. He couldn’t take the chance they’d kidnap Rae to get to him, and he didn’t ask himself how he knew that. It was what men had done to women since the world began. “We need to lose them, find a place to hide until they get tired of looking. Is there a way out up here?”

  “I’m not that familiar with the mall.”

  “We can’t go out the door we came in, not with the third Stooge waiting for us.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Rae said. “But maybe we should concentrate on the two guys coming up the escalator behind us.”

  They took off again, up the next escalator, which seemed to lead onto a floor of small food purveyors, kind of like the stalls at the faire, but a definite step up in variety and quality. There weren’t any turkey legs in sight, for one thing, which meant no smoke, so he could smell everything else. His mouth began to water.

  But Moe and Harry were right behind them, coming up the stairway.

  Conn forgot about food completely, picking a direction at random and heading that way, staying behind Rae as much as possible without letting her know he was doing it. She might be a stranger to this kind of danger, but she was too quick-witted to miss the implications of his behavior, and too independent-minded to allow it. But he’d be damned if she got hurt on his account.

  At least their pursuers seemed disinclined to pull weapons, which meant all he had to do was get away from them long enough to get back to the car. Easier said than done. They were in a well-lighted place, too sparsely occupied to provide them cover, so no ducking into one of the shiny, glass-fronted stores and hiding until the bad guys passed them by. And then it got worse.

  A skinny man, a kid really, in a dark blue outfit fell in behind their pursuers, lifting a small device to his mouth and talking into it.

  “Mall cop,” Rae said.

  Conn heard the word cop, remembered her using it as a substitute for sheriff and poured on the speed, dragging her along behind him, heading toward a big store that seemed to take up one whole end of the mall. There had to be a way to get lost in there.

  “Wait,” Rae shouted, tugging on his arm with both hands, “this way.”

  Conn didn’t question her decision. She had to know more about the place than he did, so he followed her down the moving stairway again, pursued by two men who were probably responsible for his memory loss, a low budget sheriff, and a couple of kids with saggy black pants, silver rings through various facial features, and a boatload of curiosity. All they needed was a queen and a couple of courtiers and they’d have a decent parade.

  He was still looking over his shoulder when Rae changed direction again. He turned back around just in time to nearly run face-first into the corner of a wall, ducking his head just in time to take the glancing blow on his temple. His ears rang and his vision blurred, but he shook it off, especially since the wall turned out to be the side of the glass walkway he’d seen from the road below.

  “It’s really too bad a good conk on the head doesn’t solve your problem,” Rae said.

  Conn just aimed her forward and gave her a light shove. The walkway was a wide, brightly lit, sparsely traveled thoroughfare with moving sidewalks on either side. They ran down the center, nowhere to hide and no way out except the twin building at the opposite end. Conn blocked Rae as much as he could, and not just from attack. He didn’t want the guys chasing them to see her face and connect her with Annie and Nelson. She thought she couldn’t be found, but he wasn’t willing to risk it.

  “There has to be an exit here somewhere,” she said when they came out the other end of the walkway into the south section of the mall. “All we have to do is find it.”

  Conn shook his head. “There doesn’t seem to be much chance we’ll lose these guys.”

  “If we can get back to the Hummer, they’re toast.”

  “Toast?” Conn repeated, momentarily sidetracked by his grumbling belly.

  “Run now, eat later,” Rae yelled at him, glancing behind her. “Run now or you may not get to eat later.”

  “Thanks, I needed that motivation,” Conn said. “I wasn’t really taking these guys seriously.”

  “They don’t have swords or guns, or a car, for that matter,” Rae said, “but they’re persistent. And they could sic the mall cop on us as a last resort.”

  “What can the mall cop do?”

  “He can call the real cops.”

  Now that, Conn thought, was a motivator. He still didn’t understand why the Blisses were so adamant about not wanting the police involved, but he agreed with them on a level that went beyond the memory problem. Sort of like the way he knew the sun was shining, even though there were clouds in the sky.

  “He was talking into something,” Conn said, remembering that first glimpse, right before he’d run into the wall. Which still hurt.

  “Who?” Rae asked him, sounding breathless now that he’d picked up the pace. “Talking into what?”

  “The kid in blue, and I don’t know.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Conn moved to block her again.

  “You keep doing that. Why?”

  “Chivalry,” he said, which was nothing but the truth, and whether she chose to believe it or not, Rae opted not to quibble.

  “There’s a parking structure on this side, too,” she said, pausing at a lighted monolith that said INFORMATION at the top of it. She consulted it for a moment, but what really caught her attention was the fact that Harry and Moe had stopped a short distance away. “They’re playing cat and mouse. They don’t want an altercation in here with witnesses.”

  “They’d prefer to get us outside.”

  “Well, we can’t stay in here,” Rae said. “That thing the mall cop was talking into was a radio. If the real police aren’t already here they’re coming.”

  “Where’s the exit?” Conn said, taking her by the hand with a renewed sense of urgency.

  Rae pulled him off in a new direction. “They’re just going to follow us.”

  Conn didn’t figure he needed to comment on that. “Okay,” she said, “but I don’t get it. Once we’re outside, they’re not going to play nice anymore.”

  “How fast can you run?”

  Rae looked down at her shoes, which were some sort of shiny brown leather, but at least they were flat. “As fast as I have to,” she said, meeting his eyes with determination.

  “Good, then run,” he said, taking her by the hand and pulling her through the exit door, which led onto the roof of a parking structure, a concrete monstrosity like the one where she worked. This one was packed with rows of vehicles along the same line as the Hummer, but a bit smaller. Great cover, unlike the ramp curving down to the next level.

&nbs
p; As soon as they cleared the door, Conn headed straight for the ramp, making it to the bend just as Harry and Moe slammed out of the mall. “Stop,” one of them yelled, squeezing off a shot that whizzed by just as they rounded the corner. The bullet thunked into the concrete wall.

  “They shot at us,” Rae said, breathless and wide-eyed.

  Conn didn’t waste his energy on talk, pulling her between two parked cars and slipping through the iron railings in front of them. They ended up on another sloped ramp, Harry and Moe’s pounding footsteps echoing off the concrete close behind them.

  The Stooges didn’t seem to be in very good physical condition, but Rae wasn’t exactly making the pursuit a challenge. Not her fault, Conn reminded himself as they worked their way down to the ground floor of the structure, unable to put any real distance between themselves and death. She couldn’t possibly be prepared for this kind of footrace, not to mention she seemed to be having trouble with her footwear.

  She slipped again; Conn dragged her upright. She hesitated for a second, then kicked her shoes off, hopping on one foot then the other until she was down to blue socks with little clocks on them.

  “Those were Rockports,” she said forlornly.

  “Those were useless,” Conn said, “at least for running.”

  “They were slip-ons,” she protested breathlessly. “Brand-new, stiff ones. It wasn’t their fault.”

  “They’re just shoes.”

  She sent him a look meant to promise retribution. It only made him smile. “I’ll buy you another pair.”

  “With what?”

  That question stopped him, at least mentally. His feet kept moving, but it took a second for his brain to catch up. “I’ll make you another pair.”

  “How about we get across the road in one piece first,” she said, and when she would have stopped at the edge of the six-lane divided highway that separated the two sides of the mall, Conn took one assessing look at traffic and dragged her straight out into it. Cars swerved around them or jerked to a stop with a shriek of brakes and rubber, then they were across the east-bound lanes and on the grass-covered median.

  Rae was tearing at the hand he had locked around her wrist, but she couldn’t pry him loose. He dragged her into the west-bound lanes, but there didn’t seem to be any traffic, the cars all pulling over before they got close. Conn heard a wailing noise, growing steadily louder.

  “Siren,” Rae gasped out, one hand on her side, stopping to bend at the waist as they made it to the other side of the road, right about where she’d driven the Hummer into the mall when they’d first arrived. “Fire truck.” She pointed down the road and there was a huge red vehicle turning at the cross street that ran beside the mall. “Bad guys.”

  Conn looked over his shoulder. Harry and Moe were finally making it across the east-bound side of Big Beaver, having stopped at the curb and waited for traffic to clear.

  “We’re almost there,” he said, breathing hard himself but nowhere near played out. He let go of Rae’s wrist and wrapped his arm around her waist instead, running flat out even though he had to practically carry her at that speed.

  Instead of following the road around the mall as they had in the Hummer, Rae pointed to the main entrance. Conn took her that way, slamming through the heavy door without slowing, running around a fountain that consisted of a huge ball slowly rotating on a thin layer of water. Any other time Conn would have stopped to examine the fountain, but he could only marvel at it as they raced by, dodging women with strollers, slow-moving shoppers on cell phones, and groups of youngsters wandering around with no discernible destination. In less than a minute they ran by the pizza restaurant, patrons and employees streaming through the entrance and into the mall to mill around in little knots, staring at the smoke pouring out at ceiling level.

  Conn pushed through the heavy exit doors and saw the fire truck pull up, the shrieking of the siren nearly deafening under the concrete parking deck before it cut off. A cloud of greasy black smoke rolled along the cement ceiling, but it wasn’t curiosity that brought Conn to a halt. Rae elbowed him in the side. It surprised him, and he was just out of breath enough to stop and let her go.

  “The pizza restaurant is on fire,” she said. “It’s our fault.”

  She drew close to his side, an instinctive gesture that made Conn want to put his arm around her again. He didn’t. Maybe if they hadn’t been in jeopardy he would have allowed himself to comfort her. In his current frame of mind, protecting her physically was his responsibility. Letting her depend on him emotionally seemed as dangerous to his welfare as the men chasing them—men who came out of the mall just then.

  “It’s their fault,” Conn said, just as Harry and Moe spied them on the other side of the drive. They started across, but the sound of shattering glass brought them up short.

  Conn searched for the origin of the sound, but all he saw was a crowd of men in bulky yellow and black jackets milling around. Them and the front of a light blue car. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked Rae.

  “It is if you think the firemen are jamming their hose through the Honda’s front seat windows because it’s blocking the door to the restaurant.”

  Sure enough a hose with a big metal end appeared out of the driver’s-side window, two firemen pulling it into the restaurant while the big guy who’d been driving the Honda stood to one side, rocking nervously from foot to foot. He saw his cohorts and raced over.

  Harry looked over at them, meeting Conn’s eyes for a long minute—there was a promise in his gaze. “Stay with them, Joe,” he said to his partner, then he turned back to the Honda. A police officer stopped him before he could get in the way of the firemen.

  “This your car?” Conn heard the officer say.

  “Shouldn’ta parked it here,” one of the hose jockeys yelled.

  The officer pulled out his ticket pad. “What’s your name?”

  “Harry Mosconi” was all Conn caught, because he saw the second pursuer heading in their direction, the driver lumbering along behind him.

  Conn put Rae behind him again, waiting for them to cross the street.

  “You couldn’t best me with swords,” Conn said when they were close enough so he didn’t have to speak loud enough for the nearby gawkers to overhear. “Do you think to fare better with bare fists?”

  Joe stopped a couple yards away, inching to one side in an attempt to get a look at Rae.

  Conn locked her behind him with one arm, despite her protests and struggles. “If I let her go, it will be to deal with you.”

  Joe thought about that for all of a second before he backed off, snagging his friend by the collar and pulling him toward the Honda.

  Rae shoved at Conn, and when he let her go and turned around, she was glaring daggers at him.

  “What was that all about?”

  Conn herded her toward the Hummer. “I thought it best they not see your face,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Because no one seeing her could mistake her relationship to Annie Bliss, and if they determined that much they might be able to find her. He should have known she’d already reasoned it out. Thankfully she failed to make the connection to her parents, likely because she’d done such a good job distancing herself from them.

  “It’s not like they can identify me just by seeing my face,” she said. “I’m not famous—or infamous. I don’t have a mug shot or anything.”

  “Mug shot?”

  “Mug shot,” she repeated. “Mug is slang for face, I have no idea why, and cameras shoot pictures, so mug shot is what they call the pictures they take of criminals when they’re arrested. So they have a picture to identify them with. Hey, maybe you have a mug shot somewhere.”

  “You think I’m a criminal?”

  “Since you don’t know who you are, you have to admit it’s a possibility. Although it doesn’t help. Even if you have a mug shot there’s no telling where it is. And if it’s federal we can’t get to it at all.”

  �
��Don’t sound so disheartened,” Conn said.

  “Disheartened? I’m hoping you’ll turn out to be Public Enemy Number One, so the FBI will ride in on their white horses and take you off my hands.”

  She climbed into the driver’s seat of the Hummer, looking like she couldn’t wait to be rid of him, while Conn . . . had no idea who he was or what kind of man he might be. Unless his dreams were memory flashes, and then he was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the man he was.

  Neither would he.

  chapter 10

  “HOW DID THEY FIND US?” RAE ASKED CONN when they were out of the parking lot and on their way back to safe territory. At least she hoped it was safe territory. “They don’t know who I am. If they did they’d have come after us at my house. And if they don’t know who I am or where I live, they can’t possibly know where I work, which means they couldn’t have been lying in wait for me to show up there.”

  Conn stared out the window. Not exactly the help she was hoping for.

  “Feel free to chime in anytime,” she prompted.

  Still nothing. Back to floater mentality.

  “Come on, I need some help here. Tap into that guy you are when we’re in danger. You know—driven, decisive, suspicious. That guy doesn’t just know how to deal with trouble, he anticipates it.”

  “You seem to have considered all the possibilities.”

  “No, I don’t think I have. That’s what I need you for.”

  “If I thought they knew who you were I would not have gone to such lengths to keep your face hidden,” he explained with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. “And I agree with the rest of your reasoning, except—”

  Rae’s cell phone chimed. “Hold that thought,” she said to Conn, digging her phone out and looking at the display. She considered letting it go to voice mail, but her mother would only keep calling until she got an answer. And Rae didn’t appreciate being patronized by a delusional gypsy.