by Alyssa Kress
When Kerrin's father had first informed her of the DWP's plans to hire a felon and put him in Freedom, she'd thought her problems were bad enough. But when the officials at the DWP had made the threat of building a new plant elsewhere, Kerrin had known she must do everything within her power to keep that from happening, including letting a prison convict into her town.
Assuming, that was, the prison convict wanted to come.
"So you understand that I can't challenge them," Kerrin pointed out to Gary. Slowly, she added, "But you can."
He tilted his head, questioning.
"You have a choice," Kerrin reminded him. "They told me so, that you didn't have to take the job, that it's voluntary." This was her only hope, the last possibility of preserving the safety and security of her home town.
"I don't have to take it," Gary confirmed. There was suspicion in his tone. Languid before, he went positively motionless now. The smoke slowly curled up from his cigarette.
"Well." There was a chance, a slim one, that Kerrin wouldn't even have to work to convince him, that he'd decided on his own not to cooperate. She took a deep breath. "Are you taking it?"
For one unbearably long moment he simply looked at her. His dark eyes were completely unreadable as they focused on her face. "Yes," he said at last. "I'm taking it."
Marty stirred in his seat and Gary spared him a brief, quelling regard.
Kerrin barely noticed this little exchange as the floor seemed to drop out from under her. She hadn't realized how much she'd been counting on his refusal, ridiculous as that hope had been. Oh, good Lord, what am I supposed to do now? She felt herself sway.
"Sit down."
Kerrin blinked at the softly given command. Gary Sullivan was watching her with a frown. "Sit down. Marty won't be any good if you faint on him."
"Oh, dear me, do sit down," Marty put in, half rising from his chair. "Do you need something to drink? Are you all right?"
"I'm all right," Kerrin claimed. She moved forward to take one of the metal chairs, blinking at the tone she'd just heard in the convict's voice. Had that been concern?
"Frankly, I don't see why it's such a big surprise to you," Gary said. Whatever caring emotion Kerrin might have heard in his voice was gone. Carefully gone, as though he hadn't meant her to hear it in the first place. "Didn't they tell you the deal?" Glancing away, he knocked some ash to the floor.
"Deal?" Kerrin repeated stupidly. "What deal?"
His eyes shot to hers. "Ten years."
"I'm sorry. Ten ‑‑ ?"
"Ten years off my sentence."
Kerrin had to lick lips that had suddenly gone dry. "Ahem. Ten years off of what, Mr. Sullivan?"
He raised his brows. "Life."
She stared at him. Life? This man had committed a deed worthy of life in prison?!
"That means twenty-five years," Marty put in. He threw a scowl Gary's way. "On his third felony conviction the judge didn't have a choice."
"Yeah," Gary drawled. "It's called 'three strikes you're out.' Cute, huh?"
There was no real answer to that.
"So, I'm 'out,'" he went on, leaning back. "I'm staring another twenty years in the face here. 'Cuz Marty won't put in a good word for me with the parole board a minute before then." He tilted his head toward his parole officer. "Would you, Marty?"
"Well, I ‑‑ " Marty's face went red. "No."
"So you see how this job makes sense to me. A lot of sense." His eyes were dark on hers. "Wouldn't it make sense to you?"
Ten years. Kerrin had no idea what ten years would be like in a place like this. Even ten minutes seemed like forever. She knew this man was an incorrigible thief. She knew the warden thought he had remarkably low potential for rehabilitation. But in that moment of holding his eyes she also knew that even to a man like this, twenty years in prison seemed a harsh and unusual punishment.
"I think you understand," he softly stated.
Kerrin didn't say a word.
"Now, I've answered your question," Gary went on. "It's only fair you answer one of mine."
Kerrin blinked in surprise. "You have a question for me?"
He leaned his elbows on the chair back, his bound wrists over his chest. The ghost of a smile hovered over his lips. "Sure."
"All right." Kerrin had to clear her throat. "I suppose that's fair."
"I should warn you." The smile became less of an illusion. "This isn't a question most women want to answer."
Dismay curled within her. There were an awful lot of questions that, as a woman, she wouldn't care to answer. But she'd promised, and she wasn't going to show him weakness ‑‑ or at least, not much of it. "Go on."
"Fine. I'll ask." The smile completely faded. His gaze narrowed. "Ms. Horton. Lady Mayor. How the hell old are you?"
Kerrin stared at him, utterly confused, both by the question and by the belligerent tone in which it was uttered. "I'm twenty-seven."
He stared right back at her, apparently shocked, himself. Kerrin knew her answer would have been more believable had she knocked six or eight years off the number.
"Jesus," he breathed, closing his eyes. When he opened them again, his expression was oddly bleak. "Doesn't matter," he muttered. "It's still about a hundred years."
Then he stood, his manacled hands awkward in front of himself. Kerrin was surprised to find he was shorter than she'd imagined. Not that his lack of height detracted one ounce from his masculine strength. No, Kerrin couldn't get past her abiding impression of Gary Sullivan as a man. His masculinity, raw, unrefined, and unapologetic, pulled at her in ways she didn't understand.
Facing Marty, Gary pressed his lips together. "I'm outta here. She's seen all she needs to."
Marty opened his mouth and then closed it again. The gesture seemed to be habitual for him. Then he stood, went to a door in the wall, and knocked.
A male guard opened the door. His gaze went to the prisoner then flicked past him to Kerrin, who'd also risen from her seat. The guard's blatant once-over was much worse than Sullivan's had been. He baldly leered.
"Once you get your tongue out from between your feet," Sullivan drawled at him, decidedly challenging, "you could take me back home."
Kerrin had the sudden, panicked impression that the guard was about to strike the handcuffed man. She caught Sullivan preparing for a blow, too, his frame tensing. A hollow, frightened place opened in her stomach. But the guard merely scowled and then motioned the prisoner through the door.
It shut with a steel and permanent clang.
With her nerves jumping inside her like popcorn, Kerrin dragged her eyes away. She hadn't made any headway. That man was still coming to Freedom. And he was an even worse character than she'd imagined.
She turned to find Marty smiling at her with a rueful, amused expression.
"Please, have a seat." Marty gestured with his hand across the table.
Not knowing what else to do, and feeling a little weak besides, Kerrin sat.
Marty took a seat at the table opposite her and sighed down at his folded hands. "Ms. Horton, perhaps I should explain something. The men here ‑‑ you can't take them at face value."
Her brows drew together. "I'm not sure I follow."
Marty shook his head. "Gary Sullivan was playing a game with you."
"A game?"
"He deliberately led you to believe he was some kind of desperado killer."
Kerrin's heart thumped in her chest. "Isn't he?"
Marty gave a short laugh. "Hardly. Well, now don't get me wrong. He's no pussycat. When push comes to shove he knows how to take care of himself ‑‑ else he wouldn't have survived five years on Level Four. And he could steal the clothes off your back before you can blink an eye ‑‑ But the truth is he wouldn't hurt a fly."
Kerrin stared at Gary Sullivan's parole officer. He looked right back at her with a wry and frank honesty.
"But...maximum security," Kerrin reminded him. "Why ‑‑ ?"
"Gary's an expert at getting arou
nd security systems. That's why the DWP wants him. His first month at Chino he escaped from Level One. They had to move him here."
"Escaped!" Kerrin hiccupped.
"Oh, that was just to demonstrate he could." Marty waved a hand. "He's quite the showman. For example, those cuffs? He didn't have to wear them in here. That was an act. Gary's idea."
Kerrin could only stare at him, totally bewildered.
Marty leaned back in his chair and regarded Kerrin as though assessing her ability to understand a difficult concept. "The fact is Gary's scared of you, Ms. Horton."
"What? Of me?" She was astonished.
"That's right. He's doing twenty-five to life. He knows I'm not going to back him up when he goes before the parole board. The only chance he has of getting out of prison before he's an old man is doing this job for the Department of Water and Power." Marty paused, shaking his head. "Gary hasn't had much success in his life. The only thing he's ever been any good at is stealing ‑‑ "
"At which he's been very good indeed."
"In a manner of speaking." One side of Marty's mouth lifted. "He hasn't been so good at avoiding getting caught. At any rate, he has no idea if he's going to be able to do what the DWP wants. He doesn't even know if you'll let him try. The stakes are high and his record is lousy. So yes, Ms. Horton, Gary Sullivan is scared. He's scared of you, himself, the world. He is scared ‑‑ if you will pardon the expression ‑‑ shitless."
Kerrin was amazed, though she didn't know how Gary's alleged fear was going to help her. Ten years. Scared or not, Gary Sullivan was planning on coming to Freedom.
She gave Marty a polite smile and stood. "Thank you for explaining that to me, Mr. Simmons ‑‑ "
"Marty." Sullivan's parole officer gave a resigned little sigh. "We probably ought to cut to first names, seeing as how we'll be working together now."
Kerrin halted on her way to the outer hall door. "Pardon me?"
Marty stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. "Well, yeah. I can't exactly go to Freedom, and you didn't think Gary was going to ride off on this jaunt with no supervision whatsoever, did you?"
Kerrin blinked. "I'm afraid...I don't understand." But she did, even before Marty opened his mouth to explain. She understood only too well.
"You see, Ms. Horton ‑‑ Kerrin ‑‑ you're going to have to be Gary's parole officer, so to speak, while he's in Freedom."
Kerrin closed her eyes. No, this wasn't happening. She couldn't have made matters worse. But when she opened her eyes again Marty was still standing there. And she was still within the rough prison walls with the one-way mirror and the heavily fortified doors. Gary Sullivan, she reflected grimly as she was escorted from the room, was not the only one scared ‑‑ if one would pardon the expression ‑‑ shitless.
~~~
Behind the one-way mirrored glass that Kerrin had earlier disdained, a man with close-cropped white hair studied the reaction of the town mayor of Freedom. He watched as she shook hands with the parole officer. Only after she'd left the room did he rise to open the door. His expression when he let Marty in was bland, betraying no emotion.
"So," the white-haired man asked Gary's parole officer, "what do you think?"
Marty tapped out a cigarette from the pack he had earlier handed to Gary. His hands were shaking as he attempted to light a match to one end. "Don't worry. She bought it."
"And what about Sullivan?"
Marty left off trying to light the cigarette. He fixed the other man with a dark look. "I told Gary the straight scoop."
The white-haired man narrowed his eyes. "That wasn't the plan."
"No shit."
"You may have ruined everything."
Marty pointed his unlit cigarette at the other man's chest. "I could care less. Oh sure, Gary Sullivan is the worst case I've ever handled. He's violated more parole orders than anyone I know, made me look like a fool every time I stuck my neck out for him, and been a general pain in the ass." Marty switched his irate gaze to the cigarette, now bent by the force of his grip. He threw the ruined thing to the floor. "He's still one of my boys and he deserves to know what he's really getting into."
The bland-faced man folded his fingers together and pressed his thumbs to the underside of his chin. His gaze went over Marty's shoulder, reflective. "You told the woman that Sullivan is scared."
"Sure he's scared." Marty glared at the other man, a hint of fatherly pride in his voice. "But that's never stopped Gary."
CHAPTER THREE
Matt leaped a fallen log and raced headlong down the forest path, dodging low-growing shrubs and boulders. His lungs burned from his speed and the bullet he'd taken in the shoulder was sapping the last of his strength. Still he pressed on at a breakneck pace. He had to catch the madman before he made it to the bomb's detonator...
The sound of the telephone ringing its birdlike chirp brought Matt up short. He turned his head to glare at the closed bedroom door, waiting for someone else to pick it up. No one else did. Of course not.
With a shove of his hand, he sent his wheelchair rolling to the door. Sighing, he opened it and then sped down the hall to the kitchen. He managed to pick up the receiver on the tenth ring. Everyone knew to let the phone ring lots of times when calling the Horton's. Allyce and Tom Horton were likely to be up at their observatory, Kerrin was likely to be out to lunch, and Matt, the only one of the lot with a lick of sense, couldn't always get to the phone that fast.
"'Lo, Horton residence," Matt said.
"Right. Hello." The voice on the other end of the line was male, forceful, and slightly rasping. He was nobody Matt recognized. Matt sat up straighter in his chair. Anybody unfamiliar was mighty rare in Freedom.
The unknown man on the other end of the line hesitated before asking. "Is Kerrin Horton there?"
Matt's eyebrows shot up his forehead. A man was calling Kerrin? A real, live man? "Just a minute, I'll get her. Oh, and by the way I'm, uh, Kerrin's brother," he added hurriedly. It wouldn't do for the man to get the wrong idea. Hell no.
Grinning, Matt put the receiver down and rolled to the hallway. "Ker-rin! Telephone!"
Kerrin appeared at her bedroom door. She looked like a long-legged doe that'd got caught in someone's headlights.
"The phone?" she repeated weakly. "For me?"
"Yeah." Matt's grin grew wider. "It's a guy."
Matt didn't know if he could stand the nervous way his sister's face paled right then. She'd been up to more than a job interview in L.A., he'd bet. A hell of a lot more. Kerrin only got this nervous when it involved something male and attractive.
"Hang up," Kerrin said, looking like it was the Holiday Bomber calling, instead of a potential boyfriend. But that was Kerrin. She was pathologically shy when it came to men. "I'll take it in Dad's office."
Matt obediently hung up the phone. He wasn't into imposing on his sister's privacy, and besides he didn't need to listen in to know what was what. Matt swung his chair into a tight wheelie circle, whispering a private whoop of triumph. Now, if he could only stop Kerrin from blowing it, everything would be great.
~~~
The road from Freedom to the larger metropolis of Bishop was a nearly straight line running north against the southerly flow of the Owens River. The journey took a little over an hour in a decent car and pushing the outer limits of the speed law. Kerrin had a weak Toyota of elderly vintage and she never pushed speed limits. Besides, she was in absolutely no hurry to get to Bishop.
The open windows of her car allowed the desert breeze to destroy the complicated arrangement of bobby pins Matt had insisted she use to try controlling her hair. Kerrin had balked, though, at changing into a halter top dress, as Matt had begged her to do. Instead she'd thrown on a pair of jeans and a conservative plaid shirt, nothing to show much skin. Matt had looked absolutely stricken when Kerrin had informed him that this was not ‑‑ definitely not ‑‑ a date. Once again she'd been obliged to trot out her white lie: she was going to speak with an applicant for the
position of summer school teacher.
She'd recognized Gary Sullivan's voice immediately. Its vibrations over the phone wires had an immediate quality, almost as if they could touch her.
"I'm in room 204 of the Mountain View Hotel," Sullivan had informed her. It was, Kerrin's overactive imagination had supplied, the way a woman's longtime lover would summon her, brusquely and with a good dose of impatience. "If you want this talk it had better be now. How soon can you get here?"
Although Kerrin had requested a meeting before the thief hit town, nothing in the world would have induced her to actually meet Sullivan, alone, in his hotel room. It was only after Marty Simmons had gotten on the line and she'd realized she'd have a chaperon that Kerrin had agreed to drive over.
The state highway went from a two-lane speedway to a four-lane city street once it hit the town of Bishop. Kerrin found the correct side street and turned into an asphalt lot surrounding a small blue swimming pool. As she closed and carefully locked her car doors ‑‑ unlike Freedom, one had to lock doors in Bishop ‑‑ Kerrin looked around the U-shaped two-story motel building. She felt like a criminal herself as she picked out a beige door with the number 204 painted on it. The curtains over the window were drawn closed.
This is so not me. Kerrin didn't meet convicted felons in out-of-the-way motel rooms. She lived a quiet, uneventful life, one which didn't cause her heart to pound like she was headed for a myocardial infarction as she started up the exterior stair.
Pulling her purse strap over her shoulder, Kerrin reminded herself that Gary Sullivan was not a dangerous man. Marty Simmons had said so. She tried to believe this, breathing in deeply before raising her fist to knock on the door. Gary Sullivan wouldn't hurt a fly. Not a fly.
He opened the door before her knuckles had a chance to connect. All Kerrin could do was stand there, her fist raised in the air, and stare at him.
She kept her eyes riveted to his face because in that first instant she'd seen that his shirt was open. She caught a fleeting glimpse of tanned, sculpted muscles under a field of bronze-colored curls before jerking her eyes up and away.
"It took you long enough." Frowning, Sullivan turned on his heel. "Come on in. We don't have all night."
