by Kit Frazier
“Who in the hell were they?”
“I told you, Cauley. There are dangerous men about.”
Like that explained anything. “Shouldn’t we at least call the police?”
“Do you want them to know you were with me on a federal investigation?”
We roared down the winding road, where tidy homes with manicured lawns zipped by in my peripheral vision. Inside, people were settling down for the night, watching the ten o’clock news. Probably none of them were worrying about earless bald guys slicing them into tiny pieces.
Suddenly, I was aware of a warm hand on my knee.
“You all right?” Fiennes said.
I stared through the windshield beyond the beam of the headlights into the overwhelming darkness and wondered what Tom Logan was doing tonight. Probably out doing what he did best. His job.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m as okay as I’m ever going to be.
I’d left the living room light on and I could see Marlowe and Muse standing on the back of the sofa, staring out the wide front window.
“Your dog is still inside,” Fiennes said, tugging his leather bag from the cargo area of my Jeep. “Glad to see you are taking my advice.”
“He’s not my dog.” I slipped the key in the lock and swung into the house, Fiennes right behind me.
Marlowe did his growling-snuffling routine while Muse streaked beneath the sofa. With attack animals like these, it was a good thing Fiennes wasn’t some hardened criminal hell-bent on stealing whatever was left of my virtue.
I tossed my purse on the counter and the floor seemed to shift as the events of the evening caught up with me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.
“You all right?”
“I don’t know. We broke into Scooter’s office,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice.
“Come here,” he said, and pulled me close. “You did good.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure either one of us had done a good thing.
Tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear, he said, “Well, Mrs. Peel. You must go change your clothes. You will feel much better. Can I get you something to drink?”
I nodded and walked woodenly down the hall, through the bedroom to the back bathroom, where I splashed cold water on my face. Leaning over the sink, I took a good long look in the mirror.
“What in the hell are you doing?” I said to my reflection. “You just ransacked the office of your dead friend, probably committed at least three felonies and now there’s a hot Customs Agent is sitting in your living room and your adrenaline is thumping like double-struck lightning. No good can come of this.”
My reflection had no answer.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re going to finish this, and with the day I’ve had, I just don’t care.”
I dried my face, shook my hair out of the ponytail and stripped, changing into a comfortable old football jersey and a pair of shorts. Taking a deep breath, I psyched myself up to get down to business.
So what if John Fiennes was in my living room, and every time I was around him it felt like the air was on fire? I could be calm. Casual. This was really no big deal.
I heard Marlowe growl. In the foyer, Fiennes was at the door where a young, blond guy with a body like a gymnast handed him a set of keys. I stared at the younger man.
Please God, don’t let Fiennes be gay.
“Friend of yours?” I said as the guy did a crisp, military turn and disappeared.
“He brought me my car.” Fiennes turned to look at me as I padded down the hall. “Nice shirt. From a boyfriend?”
I pulled at the fraying hem of the jersey. “Yeah, but it’s old.”
“Perhaps you should get a new boyfriend.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble just to get a new shirt.”
Fiennes chuckled, taking the Desert Eagle from his waistband to lay it on the end table. He retrieved a bottle of wine from his bag.
I stared at him. “Mr. Bond, is there anything you’re not prepared for?”
“Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer. And please, call me John.”
I took the bottle to the kitchen and poured two glasses of the rich, red wine while he extracted the pirated disk from his pocket.
I held the glass out to him. He held the crystal by the stem, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He looked very suave, unlike Diego DeLeon, who looked very stupid.
John set the glass on the end table next to his gun and pulled a black case the size of a trade paperback out of his bag.
“If that’s one of those new laptops, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“No,” I said. “If someone wants to kill me they’re going to have to bring they’re own gun.”
“In that case, it’s better than a laptop. It’s a portable.”
“With a satellite uplink?”
He grinned. “Maybe if you’re a good girl Santa will bring you one for Christmas.”
I was dead tired with all the adrenaline ebbing out of my body, but I couldn’t help smiling back. “I’ve never been that good. Here. Hold this,” I said, handing him my wineglass.
I headed to my little library to get the big white envelope and files I’d gathered that afternoon, then brought them back and dumped them on the living room floor. “I didn’t have time to organize these.”
“I see that.”
“I reconstructed the file that was stolen when those bastards broke into my house as best I could.” I stared down at the pile. “It includes some information I didn’t have before.”
John offered me my wineglass. “All right, then,” he said, gently pulling my hand so that I sank down next to him. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The wind had picked up and lightning crackled on the horizon. Two and a half glasses of wine later, I was feeling much better, despite the fact that my cheeks were numb and I couldn’t feel my ears.
“Here’s what we have,” I said. John and I were camped out on my living room floor where I organized copies, news clippings, Post It notes and scraps of paper while he fiddled with his uber-computer.
“I’ve arranged it all by timeline, just for organizational purposes,” I went on, ignoring the frown on his face and his increasing agitation with his computer.
I got up for a legal pad, then dropped down beside him, thinking aloud as I jotted notes of dates and descriptions in my own illegible brand of shorthand.
“High school football, his scholarship records. Transcripts from U.T., his short-lived contract with the Cowboys, along with the papers they’d filed when they let him go. I laid out documents on his marriage to Selena, medical records on his knee injury, financial information on the pet store, and the news clippings on the revamping of said pet store,” I said, looking at Scooter’s life, which was spread out on my living room floor. I wondered what my life would look like, spread out on little scraps of paper like that.
“Damn it,” John swore and I thought he was going to throw his little computer across the room. “The file is locked.”
“We just copied that file,” I said. “How could we copy a locked file?”
“We had a security disk when we copied it.”
“Which we left in the computer to erase the hard drive. Y’all have software that’ll copy locked files and erase an entire hard drive?”
“I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.”
I looked at him to make sure he was kidding as he double-clicked the Hawaii icon. A password screen popped up on the monitor.
“If we’d had more time I could have copied the key codes,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, scooting closer to him. “Can I see that for a second?”
John handed me the computer, a little more roughly than necessary, I thought. I typed in Selena and got squat. I typed in Obregon, Golly and Coach. I typed in Dallas and Cowboys and the number “24,” Scooter’s jers
ey number, as well as all sorts of variations, all with the same results. Squat. I thought about the things that were important to Scooter, the things that were bothering him…
Closing my eyes, I replayed that day in my mind, from the moment I’d crawled into the shed.
Did you know miners used to take birds with them down into mine shafts?
“Sam,” I said aloud. “No way. It can’t be that easy.” But then, as much as I liked him, Scooter was no Mensa candidate.
“What?” Fiennes said.
“We’re still sharing information, right?”
“Of course,” he said, and I moved little closer.
“Sam,” I said again, and typed in the name of the bird.
The computer made a cartoonish wilting noise and the screen went blank.
John stared at me. “You broke my computer?”
I gaped at the blank screen. Oh dear God! I broke a piece of government property in front of a government agent.
I jumped when a high-pitched squeal emitted from the hard drive. The screen saver went into a psychedelic cyber-spin. An image of Sam appeared, his blue wings spread wide, and it morphed into a photo of Selena at the Miss Texas Pageant. A recorded version of Sam’s shriek filled the room, and Marlowe leapt to his feet.
“What the hell?” John said.
“I think we found our password,” I said.
“Clever girl,” he said. “Cauley, I could kiss you.”
I nearly fell over when he did.
It was a friendly little kiss, but it brushed my cheek near my ear and sent sparks skittering to some under-used parts of my body.
Marlowe let out a low growl.
“Oh, hush,” I said.
The dog cast a disgusted look at both of us, then padded down the hall and into the bedroom, grumbling all the way.
“Cauley, you’re a genius,” he said, and I sat, synapses misfiring as he turned back to his computer.
I cleared my throat. “Find anything interesting?”
“Zorrita,” he said, and I moved closer. He double-clicked the file inside the file.
“It means little fox,” I said.
“In this case I believe it means Vixen,” he said.
“Vixen?” I said, my brain stammering around the word. I looked at John. “Spanish is one of your five languages. But did you know that was Scooter’s nickname for Selena?”
John’s hands stilled over the keyboard and he looked at me. “That I did not know.”
His fingers flew across the small keyboard and we watched as PDF files popped up on screen in rapid succession.
“Foreign bills of lading,” he said.
I squinted at the small print. “Are all those from Buenos Aires?”
“It would appear so. Notice the signature?”
“Selena,” I said on a breath.
John nodded and dumped the domestic bills of lading he’d appropriated from Scooter’s office onto the floor. Selena had signed none.
“Wait a minute,” I said, rifling through the Business pile of my notes.
“I think I have something.” Tearing though the notes, I got that sinking feeling you get when you can’t find something you know you’ve got, when I remembered it was in the pocket of the jeans I’d worn earlier in the day.
Scrambling into my bedroom I fished the photocopy out of my pocket and handed it to John, then grabbed another photocopy from the file I’d put together at the office.
He stared down at the paper, which was a page of the Sentinel, reduced so it would fit on legal paper.
“What am I looking at?”
“This is the business article from the grand opening of Scooter’s pet store, and this is the article from the grand reopening.”
John looked more closely at the photographs that accompanied the articles.
“Selena wasn’t at the first grand opening,” I said, pointing at the aristocratic couple flanking Selena in the photo of the grand reopening. “Neither were her parents.”
I pointed to her parents, and John looked at me.
“Selena is first generation American she’s naturalized,” I said. “Her folks are from Argentina and when they reopened the pet shop, it specialized in exotic animals. See? Selena and her mother.”
“They are very beautiful women,” John said, looking closely at the photo.
“They’re all right,” I said, snatching the article out of his hands. The cutline under the photo read “Selenas Go Wild Over Exotic Animals.”
I winced at the word play. “There’s a special place in hell for people who write cutesy cutlines,” I said.
“Selenas?” John said.
“Selena was named for her mother. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
John raised a brow. “Men are named for the father’s all the time,” he said. “And didn’t you tell me you were named for your mother?”
“Her last name, not her first,” I grumbled. “It’s not the same.”
“I see,” he said. Grinning, he dumped a pile of inter-company sales receipts on the floor. “According to these bills of lading, the pets were either bred in the United States or imported from ‘
“South America,” I finished for him. “And if the photo of the grand opening is any indication, Selena didn’t get involved with the pet shop until they started importing exotic animals.”
I stared at the pile of papers we’d pilfered from Scooter’s office.
“Smuggling,” I said. Something about the search of Scooter’s office bumped the back of my brain. “Do you remember that book about moving to Buenos Aires on Scooter’s bookshelf,” I said slowly. “Do you think Selena could be smuggling something from Argentina for El Patron, and that something is what everyone is looking for?”
I stared at the grand reopening photo, and my eyes wandered down the page.
“Wait,” I said, a tiny bubble of excitement forming in my stomach. “Look at this.”
John peered over my shoulder.
“In the Business Digest,” I said, pointing to the column that ran the length of the business page. “CenTex Distribution Service sells to International Enterprises in surprise deal.”
John stared at me as I snatched up a bill of lading from a nearby pile of papers and pointed to the logo at the top.
“CenTex. That’s the shipping company the Blue Parrot used to transport most of their exotic animals from Argentina where Selena’s family is from!”
“So?”
“One of the reporters downtown told me he’d traced CenTex to El Patron, but he thought it was for money laundering,” I said, the bubble expanding. “But CenTex wasn’t purchased to clean money it was to smuggle something in with the animals. Something from Argentina. And I think I know what it was.”
I snatched up the article Ryder had given me on the Anschluss Eagle.
“The Eagle,” I said triumphantly.
John stared at me, and I moved closer, a bubble of excitement growing in the pit of my stomach. “Don’t you see? That’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Scooter gave me a coin to give to Selena that day in the shed. He said it was for luck, but it looked just like this only worn and kind of faded.”
John went very still. “Where is the coin now?”
“At the bottom of Lake Austin.”
His jaw muscles tightened . “Did he say he had more? Did he say where they were?”
“No, he was just really upset about Selena. But that’s it, isn’t it?”
John’s green eyes narrowed and he looked at me intently. “Clever girl,” he said.
Still looking at me, he reached over and picked up the pieces of paper I’d laid in a connected line. “Very clever. You have quite an imagination. You should write crime novels. Don’t you think we’ve already exhausted that possibility?”
My bubble popped so loud I could hear it in my head.
“Now,” he said, tapping the papers into a neat stack and setting them aside. “Let’s get back to the task at hand, Cauley, and not chase afte
r some phantom connection with your El Patron people, or whatever you call them.”
“Wait a minute, when you say y’all have exhausted that possibility, what do you mean? Exactly what did you exhaust?”
John’s gaze went very cold and for a moment, I got a terrible chill, the kind that makes you stop and look behind you when you’re walking alone down a deserted street at night.
I swallowed hard. “I just thought…”
“And I thought you were trying to discover whether or not your friend committed suicide, and if he did not commit suicide, the cause of his death.”
I stared at the stack of papers. He’d tossed near his gun on the end table and sighed. “You really think somebody killed Scooter?”
“There is a high probability.”
“But we can’t prove it.”
John smiled and his face was kind again. “We haven’t proved it, yet.”
“You’re going to help me?” I said, thinking of my promise to Scooter’s parents.
“As much as I can,” he said. He was looking at my lips.
He took the glass of wine from me and set it on the end table. He leaned closer, and he kissed me.
My eyes went wide and my stomach fluttered and every cell in my body went on red alert. Wasn’t this what I’d wanted from the moment I’d met him? I’d wondered what it would feel like, his lips on mine, his hands on my body. And now I knew.
His lips were soft and warm and went hard and hot in a flash of pure lust. He felt fierce and dangerous and very close, and I leaned into him, putting my arms around his neck, pressing hard against him so I could feel his whole body with mine.
“I want you,” he said, and his voice was as low and sexy as anything I’d ever heard. “I want you, right here, right now.”
“Oh,” I said. Brilliant. Cauley MacKinnon, Mistress of pillow talk.
John leaned in, this time the kiss was hard, and I could hear papers rustling beneath me as his body met mine. His breath came harder, and I could feel his heart hammering against mine.
“John,” I said, wanting to tell him this was a big deal for me.
“Sh-h-h,” he whispered.
