Night's Landing

by Carla Neggers

It was the first time he’d managed to speak to her. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Rob—oh, God, Rob, you’ve been through absolute hell, haven’t you? But your doctors say you’re doing well.”

  “Yeah.” He moved his fingers, and she took his hand, his skin moist and pale. His eyes fluttered open—they were bloodshot, glassy looking—but the effort was too much and he shut them again. “Sarah, listen to me…”

  “Sure, Rob. What can I do for you?”

  “You’re on vacation.” He coughed, and she noticed spots of some kind of brownish ointment on his gown, the fresh bandage on his abdomen. He was weak, heavily medicated, exhausted. His attempt to talk—to make sense—had to be a struggle. “I don’t want you here if I’ve got someone shooting at me.”

  It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. “Just relax, okay? It’ll be all right.”

  “If this guy sees you…”

  “Nobody’s going to see me.” She tried to sound cheerful, but his fear was palpable, unnerving. “Rob, please don’t worry—just concentrate on getting better.”

  His eyes still closed, he mustered his energy and squeezed her hand. His hair was matted, dirty. “You’re too trusting.”

  She wanted to reassure him, but she had no intention of going back to Tennessee, not until he was more himself. “I’ll go home. Of course I will. I can’t wait to go home. After I know you’re better.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s a little after nine in the morning. You were injured yesterday around lunchtime.”

  “Tonight. You can catch a flight back to Nashville tonight. Promise me.”

  She didn’t know if he was entirely lucid or if the trauma of his injury, the lifesaving surgery and the medications he was on were making him a little crazy. Paranoid. She had a friend whose father, suffering complications after heart surgery, kept insisting he saw waiters in tuxedos delivering him pheasant under glass in the I.C.U.

  Or was her brother simply projecting his own fears onto her? If she were drinking tea on the front porch at home in Night’s Landing, he’d feel safer.

  “I don’t…” His voice was barely a rasping whisper now. “I don’t remember anything.”

  He looked so vulnerable, so out of his element. Sarah could picture him yesterday in Central Park—strong, vital, a professional but also a man with a sense of fun. Why would someone shoot him? Who would do something like that? She’d lain awake much of the night on the futon in Juliet Longstreet’s, surrounded by plants and fish tanks as the questions repeated themselves. And over and over, until she finally gave up on sleeping at all, she kept hearing Rob on the phone, telling her he’d been shot.

  She found herself having to choke back tears. “I’ll let you sleep. I’ll see you soon.”

  But her twin brother had already drifted off.

  Brushing her tears off her cheeks with her fingertips, Sarah stepped backward toward the exit and stumbled on someone’s feet. Before she could fall flat on her face, a firm hand caught her by the elbow, steadying her.

  “Whoa, there. Easy.”

  She spun around, straight into Nate Winter, the deputy who’d been shot with her brother. She recognized him from the photo they’d shown on TV. He was tall, lean, his dark hair softened with just a hint of auburn, and he had, Sarah thought, the most incisive, the most no-nonsense blue eyes she’d ever seen. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt under a dark plaid flannel shirt and scuffed running shoes.

  The blue eyes settled on her. “Sarah Dunnemore, right?”

  She nodded. “Deputy Winter—I hope I didn’t hurt your arm.”

  She realized she was about to cry. She’d held her tears in check since the marshals had arrived in Night’s Landing yesterday, but now, with her brother lying a few feet away from her, hurting, begging her to go home, with the lingering sting of Juliet’s words, she couldn’t hold back. “I should go.”

  Nate Winter didn’t say a word, didn’t try to stop her as she pushed past him and ran out of the I.C.U. into the hall, sobbing, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t bring herself under control. She hated crying in front of anyone.

  Juliet shot out of the waiting room. “Sarah—wait.”

  Sarah broke into a run, charging past startled law enforcement officers. She squeezed by doctors and nurses getting off and onto an elevator and pushed her way to the back wall, sinking against it, bracing her knees as she focused on her breathing in an attempt to calm herself.

  Nate Winter had been shot yesterday, and he was a rock. Steady, unemotional.

  She had no business falling apart.

  “You’re too trusting.”

  Maybe. Maybe she shouldn’t have told the truth about who’d called last night. Maybe she shouldn’t have let Juliet Longstreet insist on moving her out of the hotel.

  Maybe she shouldn’t trust her brother’s colleagues to have her best interests at heart.

  They were all in shock themselves. They wanted to find a sniper, not be burdened with a wounded deputy’s archaeologist sister.

  She had to get a grip.

  Had Winter overheard her brother urging her to go home? Would he take it as his duty to put her on a plane back to Nashville?

  She didn’t like the idea of being a nuisance, having these people think they were responsible for her. Before her flight to New York, her deputy escorts had offered to arrange for a counselor to be with her, but she’d turned them down. Maybe if her brother had been killed.

  But he was alive. He’d be all right. She’d been so determined not to tempt fate by agreeing prematurely to counseling. She just had an ordeal to get through.

  She hadn’t expected, though, that Rob wouldn’t want her in New York.

  The elevator doors shut. An elderly doctor frowned at her in concern. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  She nodded and brushed at her tears, relieved to be getting off Rob’s floor, away from the able-bodied deputies. She needed something to eat, a break. She didn’t want to feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t the one lying in the I.C.U. And what kind of compassion did she expect from a bunch of armed federal law enforcement officers? They were doing the best they could.

  The elevator doors opened again, suddenly, and Juliet Longstreet stepped in. She put up a hand to Sarah, stopping her before she could get started. “I’m a jerk. I’m sorry. What I said in the waiting room—it was stupid.”

  The older doctor moved to the front of the elevator car, letting Juliet take his spot. Sarah felt an immediate urge to ease some of Juliet’s obvious guilt. “It’s a difficult time for everyone.”

  But Juliet refused to cut herself any slack. “For you. You’re Rob’s twin sister. I’m only a colleague.” She didn’t mention their past relationship. “I was just trying to look tough in front of Nate. I’m sorry I mouthed off at your expense.”

  “No harm done.”

  “Sure there was. You must have felt like the kid sister at the big kids’ party.” She smiled crookedly. “I’d say belt me one, but you’d probably have a half-dozen marshals jump on the elevator and pin you against the wall in two seconds flat. We’re all in rotten moods. But, hey, you see some of those guys? Very buff.”

  Sarah fought a smile of her own, her first, she thought, in many hours. “Nate Winter—I just met him.”

  “Yeah. I can tell. Most people run when they meet him. You’re not the first. He’s a total hard-ass.”

  “You’re very irreverent, aren’t you?”

  Juliet smiled, relaxing some. “Helps in dealing with things like two marshals getting shot in Central Park. At least the news on Rob is positive. Barring complications, he should be back on the streets before too long.”

  Sarah tried to let Juliet’s optimism sink into her psyche, tried to visualize Rob back on his feet, with that lazy grin of his, that way he had of making people think he was a hundred percent on their side. “What about Deputy Winter?” she asked. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’d lik
e to get his hands around the neck of whoever shot him.”

  “But physically?”

  “Just enough of a wound to piss him off.”

  The medical personnel all got off at the cafeteria floor, leaving Sarah and Juliet alone in the elevator. “I keep picturing the two of them leaving the news conference yesterday and walking into the park,” Sarah said. “Why did they do that? Do you know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The news conference—did a lot of people know about it in advance?”

  “The world. That was the whole idea. It wasn’t thrown together at the last second.” Juliet frowned at her, then smiled gently. “Now, come on, don’t you start. The best investigators in the country are on this thing. In fact, Joe Collins called me while you were in with your brother. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you kidding? After the bombshell you dropped?”

  Sarah winced. “President Poe was calling as a friend—”

  “Exactly.”

  “I almost wish I’d told you it was another Wes on the line.”

  “Nah. It’s better this way. Get it out in the open. Your relationship with the president isn’t something you’d want Joe Collins stumbling over on his own. He’s in a private meeting room down the hall from your brother. He’ll have food. Collins always has food.” Juliet hit the button for Rob’s floor and sighed. “And you look as if you could use something to eat.”

  Neither of them had been in the mood to eat that morning at Juliet’s apartment—actually, an apartment she was borrowing from a well-heeled friend, because, she’d explained, even as small as it was, she couldn’t afford Manhattan’s upper west side on her government salary.

  “All right,” Sarah said. “I’ll talk to Agent Collins. Then, please, go back to your normal duties. I can book a room at the hotel where we were last night. Tell your boss it’s what I want.”

  “You just don’t like my plants and my fish.”

  Juliet hadn’t exaggerated—her apartment was a jungle of plants and had at least four fish tanks. But Sarah shook her head. “Your apartment’s great. I’m just used to being on my own.”

  “Now that I understand.”

  She sank back against the cool wall of the elevator and closed her eyes. “I don’t want you here if I’ve got someone shooting at me.”

  But how could she go home? She imagined herself on her front porch, drinking her sweet tea punch and feeling the soft breeze as if nothing had happened.

  Given her family’s predilection for not leading quiet lives, she’d been prepared for anything when she returned to Night’s Landing—but not this, she thought. Not her brother getting shot in Central Park. Not the possibility that he could become another Dunnemore who died an early, tragic death.

  She stopped her negative thinking in its tracks.

  Stay positive.

  The elevator opened on Rob’s floor. “Come on,” Juliet said. “Let’s go see Special Agent Joe and talk to him about your Tennessee neighbor.”

  Nate didn’t follow Rob’s sister, but he was tempted—and duty and chivalry had nothing to do with it. The feel of her slim waist when he’d grabbed her, the blond hair, the gray eyes, the tears.

  Damn.

  He stood next to Rob’s bed. “Your sister’s prettier than you are.”

  He was awake, but not by much. “Smarter, too. What time is it?”

  “About nine in the morning the day after the shooting.” Which Sarah Dunnemore had told him before she’d stepped on Nate’s toes and ran off crying.

  “I don’t…” Rob’s red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes tried to focus. “I don’t remember.”

  The doctors had warned Nate that Rob might never remember the shooting. His body had poured all its energy into keeping him alive, not in remembering what had happened. “That’s normal. How’re you feeling?”

  “Like shit.”

  “The nurses are going to get you up today if they can. They like to do that.”

  He wasn’t paying attention. “Sarah should go back home.” He coughed, shuddering in agony, his voice weaker, raspier, when he resumed. “She doesn’t belong here.”

  His concern for his sister was palpable. “She’s with Juliet right now.” Nate assumed Longstreet would be trying to make amends for her ill-advised remark. “Just because you were shot doesn’t mean she’s in any danger.”

  “It wasn’t random. The shooting. I was the target. He was after me.”

  “Rob—”

  “I know it. I have…this certainty.” He shut his eyes, and he seemed to sink deeper into the bed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Get some rest. Don’t worry about anything.”

  Rob was done for. His mouth opened slightly as he fell back to sleep. He looked dead lying there in the bed. Nate checked the monitors, just to be sure. He glanced at the stone-faced guard, felt the dull ache in his arm where he’d been shot. He could have been the one shot in the gut.

  But he wasn’t. Rob, just four months in New York, was.

  Nate had to stifle a wave of guilt and regret—he should have prevented this. Somehow, some way. He should have kept his and Rob’s presence at the news conference quiet. They shouldn’t have gone at all. He should have seen something in the park, sensed it, known they were in danger.

  Dead-end thinking.

  Better to concentrate on his anger. It was sharp, focused, explosive, not a slow burn, not a simmering kind of fury—and yet there wasn’t a damn thing he could do with it, except go home to Cold Ridge and climb mountains and eat Gus’s orange eggs.

  He thought instead he’d check on the gray-eyed sister and see if she’d forgiven Longstreet for being such an ass.

  Seven

  Betsy Dunnemore’s daughter was attractive, but she, the mother, was beautiful—and she always had been. As he sipped his espresso and watched her coming up the cobblestone Amsterdam street, Nicholas Janssen remembered the day he met her more than thirty years ago, when they were both freshmen at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She was beautiful, shy and nervous, although the campus was less than ten miles from her home in Belle Meade.

  It was all such a lifetime ago.

  She was pale now, clutching her red leather handbag as she threaded her way among the scatter of tables at the streetside café. She’d tied a red silk scarf over her hair and secured it with a knot to one side of her throat, and she wore black pants and a lightweight black-and-white sweater.

  Every man at Vanderbilt had wanted her. Nicholas had been just one among many. They’d never dated, had only attended a few classes together before he’d had to leave in the middle of his sophomore year. Family problems, he’d told people, but that wasn’t the reason. Money was. Always money.

  When he’d transferred, everyone still assumed that Betsy Quinlan would end up marrying handsome, likable John Wesley Poe, who wasn’t the best student or the worst but was, by far, the most ambitious. Instead, a month after graduation, Betsy married brilliant, eccentric Stuart Dunnemore, a childless widower twenty-two years her senior.

  She inhaled sharply when she saw Nicholas and almost stumbled backward. He had deliberately chosen her favorite café not far from the apartment she and her husband had shared since agreeing to participate in a special commission at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

  For a moment, Nicholas thought Betsy would run in the opposite direction, but she regained her composure and proceeded to his table.

  She sat across from him and looked at him as if she might have just found a disagreeable insect on her table. But he could see the fear in her gray eyes, the strain of the past twenty-four hours. Amsterdam was six hours ahead of New York—it was late afternoon now. This time yesterday, she would have been just getting the news of the shooting in Central Park.

  “Did you have anything to do with what happened to my son?” she asked, her voice low, intense, accusatory.

  “Betsy. How could you think—”

  She didn’t b
ack off. “Did you?”

  Nicholas sipped his espresso and took a small bite of the cookie that came with it. It was a cool, windy afternoon. The café was uncrowded, although bicycles and people moved about in the streets. He was dressed casually in a brown silk sweater and trousers, trying not to call attention to himself, although he doubted a federal agent would jump out of an alley and kidnap him back to the United States. They had bigger fish to fry. Or so they believed.

  People often underestimated Betsy Dunnemore. Because she’d married a man so much older, because she’d devoted herself to him and to raising her children. An educated housewife, an amateur art historian. The condescension had to be hard for her to take at times. But Nicholas had known her at eighteen, and he had never underestimated her—her intelligence, her determination, her grit. It was her steady devotion to her aging husband that had taken him by surprise. He’d seen it when he’d first contacted her last fall—another “chance” meeting—with the hope of maneuvering himself into her circle, the dream, even, of having an affair.

  He remembered how much he’d wanted her at eighteen.

  “I had nothing to do with the shooting.” He kept his tone mild. “I’ve made my share of mistakes, but I’m not a violent man. You’re upset. I understand that.”

  “Don’t patronize me. Don’t.” She didn’t yell, but she was tight with anger, an easier emotion for her, he thought, than fear. “You should turn yourself in to U.S. authorities and go home to stand trial. You’re a fugitive, Nicholas. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “My status is a complicated legal matter.”

  “It’s not complicated. You’re charged with felony tax evasion. You were supposed to appear for trial in a U.S. court of law. Instead you fled.” She looked away from him, her lower lip quivering, a weakness she wouldn’t want him to see. “You slipped out of the country to Switzerland—”

  “I have a home there.”

  “You knew it would be difficult if not impossible for you to be extradited for tax evasion. I don’t know about the Netherlands.” She shifted, her gray eyes on him. “Is it safe for you here?”