NIGHT WATCH

by Carla Neggers

  “Don’t you answer your door?” he asked.

  She looked annoyed. “I just did.”

  “It took six rings.”

  “No, only three. I counted.”

  Her and numbers. “Nope. Six. I did the ringing.”

  She frowned. “I must not have heard...” She trailed off, pursing her lips, apparently deciding what she had heard and hadn’t heard was none of his business. “What do you want?”

  Joe hooked a thumb on a belt loop of his jeans and tried to look as if he dealt with eccentric geniuses every day. Beautiful eccentric geniuses. Funny how Hank had neglected to mention Rowena Willow’s looks in his briefing.

  “Is this how you always treat visitors?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Ask a question, he thought, get an answer. “I’m—”

  “You’re the police officer who has been on a stakeout on my street for the past four days. I spoke to your boss yesterday.”

  “Hank’s not my boss,” Joe said, maintaining his good humor despite how much it rankled him that she’d spotted him. He had underestimated Rowena Willow. “And I wasn’t on a ‘stakeout.’ Mind if I come in a minute?”

  She sighed, not pleased. “Since you’ve already blown my concentration—it’ll take me hours to get back to where I was—” She stopped herself again, and breathed, “I still need to see some identification.”

  “Some I.D.,” he repeated. “What, when you’re not in front of a computer, are you in front of a TV?”

  Her lips pursed, and she didn’t answer. Her hair, a rich, deep, unusual gold color, was piled up on her head; Joe counted three cloisonné combs and a half-dozen bobby pins at least. Her skin was smooth, flawless, pale. He wondered if it had ever been exposed to the sun. She had a straight nose and those incredible eyes, and a chin that maybe was too strong to put her on a magazine cover. Otherwise she was a classic beauty, tall—almost as tall as he was—and slender. She had on a flowing, azure caftan over cropped black leggings and little tapestry flats.

  Joe produced his badge and said, “Name’s Scarlatti. Sergeant Joe Scarlatti.”

  “You’re a sergeant?” She sounded dubious. “I would have thought a sergeant would have been more circumspect.”

  Rub it in, toots, Joe thought. Go right ahead. He was a pro. He could take her contempt. What did he care if Rowena Willow figured she was smarter than he was? Hell, it might be something he could use later on.

  She gestured for him to go in ahead of her, which he did. The temperature dropped and the light dimmed; the enormous entry was downright medieval. An open staircase of some dark wood zigzagged up all three floors; a person could fall a long way. The walls were done in some kind of straw matting, and the floor was a dark hardwood with a patterned deep red Persian runner that was so long it would run right out of Joe’s place above Mario’s Bar & Grill.

  A nasty-looking suit of medieval armor complete with spear stood in one corner and an armless statue of some poor bastard stood in another.

  “A regular house of horrors,” Joe muttered. He should bring Hank for a look-see; maybe he’d quit worrying about what Eliot Tyhurst would do to helpless Rowena Willow.

  “We’ll talk in the drawing room,” she said, opening a set of double doors across the entry from the stairs. “I would offer you something to drink, but five minutes doesn’t give us enough time.”

  Joe started through the door. “What do you have in here,” he said, “poison darts and a couple of mummies?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind.”

  There was no point, he realized as he crossed the threshold. She wouldn’t get his sardonic humor. She’d just take his question seriously, tell him the poison darts and mummies were in another room. This room was reserved for stuffed animals. Not the cute, cuddly kind grandmas and grandpas bought for their little grandkids, either. Rowena Willow’s stuffed animals—there were dozens of them—had been alive at one time.

  “Quaint,” Joe said. He walked over to a curio cabinet of stuffed birds, some ordinary, some rare. There were other cabinets and stands and shelves of larger animals—a raccoon, weasel, gopher, red fox. A few heads—deer, antelope, buffalo—adorned the walls. “Is this what you do with your old boyfriends?”

  Rowena Willow eyed him from the middle of the room. “Sergeant, I fail to see your humor.”

  “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “My great-grandfather was a noted taxidermist.”

  And you, Joe thought, deliberately use this room to scare off unwanted company.

  “You’re wasting your five minutes on trivialities,” she pointed out coolly.

  He wondered how long her hair was. Midback at least. Did she ever get the urge to pull out all the pins and combs and shake it loose?

  “Sergeant,” she prompted.

  Probably not.

  “Just Joe is fine. I’m not here on official business.”

  That got her interest. She stood next to a small table displaying a single, brightly plumed dead bird. “You’re not?”

  “Nope. A friend asked me to keep an eye on you in case Eliot Tyhurst decides to exact a little revenge.”

  It only took a few seconds for his words to sink in. “This friend—you mean Sergeant Ryan?”

  Joe shrugged, letting her come to her own conclusions. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to rat out Hank, not that his friend didn’t deserve it.

  “Why would anyone care?” She paused and twisted her fingers together—a gesture of frustration, Joe suspected. He noted the fat sapphire ring on her right hand. There was no engagement ring, no wedding band. “Eliot Tyhurst has made no threats against me. He’s served his prison sentence. I don’t qualify for police protection.”

  “Hence, yours truly. I’m on leave from the department—”

  “Why?”

  A direct woman, but Joe didn’t squirm. He pushed back the creeping self-hatred, the memories he had been fighting for too many long months. “Personal reasons.”

  He waited a moment, giving her a chance to challenge him, press for a better answer, but she didn’t, just twisted those fingers together. He had no idea if she understood that he’d said all he planned to say on the subject or if that straight-A mind of hers had figured out that his leave of absence had nothing to do with her case.

  “My friend’s a good cop,” he went on. “He operates a lot on instinct, and his instinct says there could be trouble between you and Tyhurst. He asked me to keep watch, just in case. I’ve been out here every day for the past four days. I’m not on a twenty-four-hour watch at this point, but I’d guess nothing’s happened. Am I right? Tyhurst hasn’t been in touch?”

  She nodded tightly, then inhaled, tossing her head back, fastening those gorgeous blue eyes on him. Joe let himself notice the soft swell of her breasts under the satiny fabric of her caftan, the pulse beating in her pale throat. Her sensuality was unexpected, overpowering. So was his reaction to it. He had to turn his head, focus on the snarl of the stuffed red fox on a stand beside him. There wasn’t a sound in the room. They might have been on the moon, not in the heart of a busy city, atop Telegraph Hill, one of San Francisco’s most prestigious and picturesque neighborhoods.

  “I gather,” Rowena Willow said in a steady voice, “no one thought to ask me what I wanted.”

  “Like I said, it was all very unofficial.”

  Acknowledging his words with a curt nod, she folded her arms under her breasts and walked slowly over to an enormous window, hung with dark, heavy drapes right out of a Vincent Price movie. With her back to him, she drew the drapes aside and looked out at the street. “You’re parked in front of a fire hydrant.”

  “The privileges of the badge. I’ll move if there’s a fire, trust me.”

  “It’s your truck—you own it. The other vehicles were borrowed.”

  “Yep. Hank said you memorized the license plate numbers.”

  “I wouldn’t say I deliberately memorized
them. I just made a point of remembering them.”

  Horsefeathers. She was just trying to intimidate him. “Go ahead,” Joe said, “impress me.”

  She looked around at him, frowning, not one hair out of place.

  His attention to every physical detail about her bothered and surprised him. It wasn’t professional. It wasn’t objective. It wasn’t clinical. He didn’t do this sort of thing with every woman he met.

  “I will do no such thing,” she replied stonily.

  “Can’t remember ’em, huh?” He was being obnoxious and he knew it—but, he told himself, the cop that was still rooted somewhere deep inside him needed to see how Rowena Willow would react.

  Not very well. She said calmly, “Your five minutes are up, Sergeant Scarlatti. Have a good morning.”

  “We didn’t finish.”

  “But we did.”

  “I haven’t gotten to the part about my moving into your little house of horrors here and keeping an eye out on your behalf. It’d be a hell of a lot easier on both of us. I’d have a comfortable place to sit, a kitchen and a bathroom handy. You wouldn’t have to stare at parked cars and try to figure out which one’s mine.”

  Color flashed in her milky cheeks. So, he thought, Ms. Weirdo Willow’s veins ran with real blood, not ice water. “We don’t need to get to that part, Sergeant.”

  “Are you rejecting my services, ma’am?”

  If his sarcasm registered, he couldn’t see it. She said, “I don’t ever want to see you on this street again unless I call 911 and you’re required to come.”

  “What’ll you do if I ignore your wishes?”

  “I’ll—” She pursed her lips, apparently a habit with her. He wondered if she realized that it made him think about kissing her. Probably not. Not that he would kiss her or even wanted to be thinking about doing such a thing, but there it was.

  She recovered and went on, “I’ll report you to your superiors.”

  “That’ll be fun. You know what they’ll tell you?”

  “Sergeant—”

  “They’ll tell you I’ve got an authority problem. Besides, I don’t think I have any superiors. I don’t listen to anyone. And like I said, I’m not on active duty.” He headed toward the double doors. “You decide you need me, give me a buzz at Mario’s Bar & Grill on the waterfront.”

  “I won’t need you.”

  She said it through clenched teeth. Joe grinned. He had gotten to her.

  “I’ll let myself out.” He glanced back at her, standing rigid and deliciously beautiful, and nodded to the taxidermy display. “Bet you’re wishing these critters could bite. Nice meeting you, Ms. Willow. Mario’s Bar & Grill. Got it? Or don’t you ever need anything repeated?”

  She refused to answer.

  Stubborn. But stubbornness—and a distaste for authority—could sometimes get in the way of good judgment. It could even get a person killed, Joe thought. And not always just yourself. He pushed the thought aside as the heavy door thudded behind him. Now wasn’t the time for dwelling on past mistakes but considering how the hell not to make new ones.

  He was afraid he already had.

  * * *

  Only once before had Rowena been too distracted to work. It was the day Eliot Tyhurst’s case had gone to the jury for a verdict. She had wandered and paced in her house until she could stand the tension no longer and had gone down to the courthouse.

  Now it was the thought—just the very notion—that she had been the target of Sergeant Scarlatti’s stakeout that had her too rattled to work. He had been watching her. Protecting her. For four days. Such a prospect had never even occurred to her, even after she had learned Tyhurst was back in San Francisco.

  She felt as if Joe Scarlatti had outwitted her just by knowing something she didn’t know. It was, she thought, how he would think.

  How much did he know about her life?

  About her?

  She felt the rushing heat of embarrassment—and pure, unadulterated, unwelcome sexual awareness. It was elemental, primitive, surprising, a challenge to her self-control as well as her concentration. And it was unavoidable. Joe Scarlatti was a thickset, compact, physical man who radiated sexuality. Wouldn’t any reasonable woman be attracted to him? She knew he’d been attracted to her, if only fleetingly. His appraisal of her had not been from the point of view of a professional, but from that of a man. Had he wondered what she was like in bed? Speculated on her love life?

  Her office long abandoned, she heated a bowl of canned vegetable soup—she rarely bothered with lunch—and ate it standing up in the kitchen, trying to regroup.

  Would Joe Scarlatti take no for an answer?

  No, he wouldn’t. He was someone who couldn’t resist defying the odds. It was entirely possible she had only succeeded in ensuring he would stay on her case, watching her, waiting for something to happen.

  But nothing would, she told herself.

  Who, she wondered, was she trying to convince?

  Her telephone rang, startling her so severely she jumped, spilling a few drops of hot soup onto her hand. She set the bowl down on the counter, still shaking. It was always like that when she was disturbed while she was concentrating—even if on the wrong things. She would be unaware of what was going on around her.

  She almost let her machine take the call, as was her general practice during the day, but at the last possible moment she snatched up the wall phone in the kitchen. “Yes?”

  “Rowena Willow,” a man’s silken voice, oddly familiar, said. “Did I get you up from your infamous computer?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you might recognize my voice. It’s Eliot, Rowena. Eliot Tyhurst.”

  She forced an inner calm over herself. She couldn’t allow a tremor or tightness in her voice to betray her apprehension. “I read that you were in San Francisco. I wish you well, Mr. Tyhurst. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I’d like to come by and see you.”

  “I’m very busy.”

  “I want to thank you, Rowena. Without you, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I wouldn’t have seen I was on the wrong path. I grew and changed because of you. I’m a better person because of your courage.”

  He sounded so sincere. She remembered how polished and deceptively handsome he’d been. Had prison changed him?

  “There’s no need to thank me,” she said quickly. Her stomach had begun to hurt. “I wish you the best, that’s all.”

  “Let me take you to dinner tonight.”

  “No, I couldn’t—”

  “Rowena, I need to thank you. I need you to believe me. It’s important to my total recuperation, my redemption.”

  She bit down on her lower lip, feeling her rising tension, knowing he would sense it. “Mr. Tyhurst, please understand how difficult this is for me. I don’t want to see you.”

  “I do understand. That’s the whole point. And call me Eliot, please. Rowena, how can I convince you I’m a new man? How can I convince anyone if not you?”

  Rowena twisted the phone cord, wondering what Joe Scarlatti would have her do if he were here. Turn the phone over to him? Let him handle Eliot Tyhurst?

  She handled her own life, her own problems. It had always been that way for her.

  Her hesitation provided the former banker his opening. “Then you do understand. I’ll pick you up at seven.” And he added matter-of-factly, “I know where you live.”

  * * *

  Joe met Hank for a hot dog and soda at a street vendor’s in front of Eliot Tyhurst’s old savings and loan downtown. It was located in a flashy modern building famous on San Francisco’s skyline.

  “I want everything we’ve got on that SOB,” Joe said. “Whatever you can get me, I want.”

  “Will do.”

  “Unofficially.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I’m not saying I’m really on this case.”

  “There is no case,” Hank said.

  “Right.” Joe squirted
mustard over his sauerkraut. “One more thing.”

  Hank, the turncoat, was grinning, having sucked Joe Scarlatti back into the world he had been trying for six months to leave behind. “What’s that, Joe?”

  “I’m going to stay on Rowena Willow,” he said, “and if she catches me this time, I’ll turn in my badge for good and become partners with Mario and serve drinks and greasy sandwiches for the next forty years.”

  “I won’t hold you to that.”

  “What, you have no faith in me?”

  “No, Joe, I’ve got all the faith in the world in you, but Rowena Willow—she rooted out Tyhurst, didn’t she? What makes you think she won’t root out a burnt-out cop she’s met, decided she doesn’t like, doesn’t trust and wants out of her life?”

  Joe stuffed a few strands of loose sauerkraut back into his hot-dog bun. “You just watch me.”

  Three

  Two hours after Eliot Tyhurst had called, Rowena ducked through her back door and courtyard and slipped through a wrought-iron gate to a side alley, her usual shortcut around the block. The scent of roses lingered. Aunt Adelaide had planted scores of them in the little courtyard, and Rowena felt a rush of nostalgia and pain. Her aunt had done her best in difficult circumstances, raising a child long, long after she herself had chosen to have no children. If Rowena’s parents had lived... if Aunt Adelaide had been less eccentric, more social, even understood the basic needs of an extraordinarily bright, lonely, grieving little girl... if Rowena had been less inwardly drawn herself...

  But that was all in the past. Aunt Adelaide was gone, and her parents were gone. Rowena had forgiven her, and them, and even herself.

  Did she now owe Tyhurst her forgiveness?

  Was it hers to offer? He hadn’t fleeced her of a single cent, and she believed people deserved a second chance. A judicial system couldn’t work properly if society didn’t allow ex-convicts an opportunity for a fresh start.

  And yet that was so much easier to believe in principle than to act upon in real life.