Hunting Houston

by Sandy Steen

  “That’s some carrot you’re waving under my nose.”

  “Is it working?”

  She grinned. “You knew it would.”

  Brax grinned back. “Yeah.”

  Secretly he heaved a huge sigh of relief. To be honest, he had been scared to death that her experience with that sleazebag, Waterston, would stop her from ever taking on this kind of undercover investigation again. She had good cause to be leery of anything that put her in close contact with slick-talking, smooth-operating scam artists who knew every woman’s secret fantasy, and played on them like Van Cliburn on a baby grand. She wasn’t obligated to accept this assignment, and Brax wouldn’t have thought any less of her if she had turned it down. The fact that she didn’t reassured him. Abby might still be nursing a bruised heart, but she damned well wasn’t going to let it ruin her career or her life.

  “So when do I leave?”

  “You’re booked on a 6:52 flight tomorrow morning. A tourist out to enjoy her well-earned annual vacation.”

  “Sure of yourself, weren’t you?”

  He hedged the truth. “No. But I was sure of you.”

  “Well, let’s just hope your instincts about this case are as reliable.”

  Long after Brax left her office Abby thought about this second chance she had just been given. A chance to do it right. To regain some of what she had lost. To use the lessons she had learned. Or relearned, to be more accurate.

  This wasn’t new ground for her. It was, in fact, a lesson learned from the first charming man in her life.

  Her father.

  Adam Douglass had been every little girl’s dream. When he was home. Which was seldom. As a band manager he was always on the road. Always a long-distance daddy. Oh, but when he returned! Abby could still recall wonderful outings to the zoo, carnivals and picnics in the park. And the compliments. Her father never failed to tell her how smart she was. How beautiful. How proud he was of her.

  Her mother came to life during those times. She smiled and laughed. Those were the happy times, happy days. The happiest of Abby’s life.

  And when he was gone, which was more often than not, Abby held tight to her memories. They sustained her from one homecoming to the next. Her mother, on the other hand, withered.

  It was the only word Abby had ever found to successfully describe the transformation that occurred in her mother whenever her father left to go back on the road. It wasn’t that Samantha Douglass wasn’t a good mother. She was. She held down a low-paying but steady job as a clerk in a department store. She kept her only child clean and as well-fed as possible. Taught her right from wrong and the Ten Commandments.

  But she was only going through the motions of living—merely surviving—without her husband. Samantha Douglass hung on his every spellbinding word. He was not only her lover and mate, he was her guide and counselor. In many ways he was as much her parent as he was Abby’s. She viewed life apart from him as not only colorless, but frightening.

  When Abby was fifteen, her father died of an unexpected heart attack. But she buried her mother. Emotionally, at least.

  Adam Douglass had left the two women in his life two very different legacies. For Samantha, it was life without color or direction.

  For Abby, it was happy memories of a doting father. And the certain knowledge that charming men were transient. They came and they went. But they never stayed.

  For years after her father’s death, Abby tried to bring some sparkle into her mother’s life. She worked hard to be the brightest, the smartest—the best at everything. But it didn’t work. It was only after she was old enough to fall in love for the first time that Abby realized that her mother wasn’t grieving; she had given up. Everything in her mother’s life had revolved around her father. Without him, she didn’t have a life.

  Abby made a promise to herself that no man, captivating or not, would ever control her life that way.

  Riley Waterston and his devastating charm had come close to making her forget that promise. And had made her break the rules.

  There were certain unwritten rules that went with her job. Certain rules every investigator acknowledged. Rules designed to protect people like Abby—good at their job because they knew how to play the games required to catch liars, thieves, arsonists, extortionists and even murderers.

  In the world of lawyers and courts, suspects were presumed innocent until proved guilty. In Abby’s world, none of the suspects was presumed innocent until each one was systematically eliminated, leaving the last person guilty—with plenty of hard evidence as proof—standing alone to face the consequences.

  The rules were simple.

  Never trust a suspect until he or she is duly eliminated.

  Never assume any piece of evidence, no matter how small, is inconsequential.

  Never count on a piece of evidence without adequate verification.

  Never forget your loyalty is to the company.

  And never, never lose your objectivity.

  Abby broke the rules. Specifically, two.

  She had trusted Riley Waterston too quickly. And she had lost her objectivity.

  Abby could remember all too well how easy it had been to break those rules. How easily she had fallen into his well-placed trap.

  He’d told her what she wanted to hear. What every woman wanted to hear. But not the usual compliments on her beauty, grace and charm. Oh, no, Riley was far too clever to be so mundane. He told her she was smart, and talented. All the wonderful words her father had always used. Words she couldn’t resist. But most of all he praised her ability to be a hard-working, intelligent woman while still retaining every bit of her femininity. He told her that he admired her, and that she touched him as no woman ever had.

  What woman wouldn’t go for that like a cat goes for cream?

  But Abby knew it was much more than falling under the influence of some pretty words. Riley Waterston was good at beguiling and spellbinding; maybe the best she had ever seen. And she had fallen like a ripe plum. But what worried Abby was not that she had fallen, but that she had fallen so hard and completely, and in the process had lost all her objectivity.

  The loss of her objectivity—not merely succumbing to soft-spoken words—frightened her, rocked her to her foundation.

  She had been attracted to investigation targets before. After all, she wasn’t made of marble. But none of them had gotten to her the way Riley had. He had a knack for finding out her heart’s desire, then holding out that very desire to her like some shining golden dream that was hers for the taking. And she had taken the bait like a big fat bass after spinner bait, swallowing it, hook, line and sinker. He had kept her on the hook, never completely reeling her in. He had fed her one false lead after another, all designed to make her believe his cooperation stemmed from an honest desire to help her find the guilty party.

  Riley Waterston had assaulted her, professionally and personally, as surely as if he had used his fists.

  Professionally, he had made her someone to be pitied. It had taken her long months of doing her job better than anyone in the department, of putting on a smile when she felt like crying, to overcome the damage left in Riley’s wake.

  Personally, he had wounded her spirit as surely as if he had taken a knife to her heart—the heart she wasn’t supposed to have.

  Abby had a near miss with Riley and now she was being handed a second chance. She couldn’t afford to make the same mistake twice.

  Chapter 2

  Hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans, his face to the wind, Houston Sinclair watched the sun rise over the water, and a yearning so deep, so bittersweet, pierced his heart that his breath caught. Lahaina’s small boat harbor was teeming with life even at this early hour, and he longed to be a part of the activity. But longing, no matter how earnest, didn’t always ensure reality. For Houston reality was standing onshore and watching. Only watching.

  He couldn’t go back in—or on—the water.

  Heaving a soul-weary sigh
, he wondered if his particular reality would ever change.

  Almost nine months had passed since the Coast Guard had hauled him out of the Pacific, unconscious, feverish and delirious.

  And alone.

  He had put his life back in order as best as he could. He had even been semisuccessful at pretending that this fear—no, this gut-level, unadulterated terror—wasn’t gnawing at his insides like some flesh-eating insect. Nine months. And a lot of that time had been spent very much the same way he was spending this morning: feeling tense and haunted.

  These post-dawn watches were always the result of a sleepless night. But when he did sleep, the nightmares robbed him of even that freedom from torment. Tortured dreams in which he relived the explosion. Relived his only clear pieces of memory.

  Two pieces. They were short; only seconds, really. In the first, he heard Shelley call out for him and he turned from her voice. In the second, he helplessly watched the Two of a Kind sink.

  But nightmares notwithstanding, even his dreams weren’t peaceful. Often in his dreams he saved his best friend’s wife only to lose her to sharks, or, as in one bizarre dream segment, she simply slipped over the side and swam away, finally disappearing with a gentle wave of her hand. In all the dreams, all the nightmares, the end result was the same—he was alone, and Shelley was dead.

  He could deal with the dreams, even the nightmares, but not the memories. Memories that crept to the edge of his mind like morning fog over San Francisco Bay, then clung to his subconscious, never fully realized. Memories always just out of reach, tucked away in the darkness, waiting. Did they hold absolution? Or confirmation of his cowardice?

  “Traumatic memory loss,” the doctor who had treated him had called it, assuring him that in time he would remember. The problem was, Houston didn’t want to remember. Even the bits and pieces of memory he could claim ripped at his guilt, his sanity.

  If it had not been for Gil…

  Gil. His friend. His lifeline.

  The first person he saw when he opened his eyes after the ordeal was Gil, teary-eyed, saying everything was going to be all right. Saying he knew Houston had done everything in his power to save Shelley. Gil, saying over and over how glad he was to still have his best friend. Gil, watching over him, sticking by him.

  Forgiving him.

  And it was the forgiveness Houston couldn’t live with, because he didn’t deserve it.

  No matter how many times Gil insisted that what had happened was a freak accident, totally out of anyone’s control, Houston knew the truth.

  It was his fault.

  Shelley was dead because he was a coward.

  If he had gone for her first. If only…

  He closed his eyes. The if onlys were driving him to the brink of insanity.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes and glanced down, half expecting to see the toes of his shoes sticking over the edge of some black abyss. Or half disappointed? He couldn’t deny that once in a while the idea of stepping over the mental edge sounded almost comforting. A tight laugh tangled with a sigh of relief when he realized the absurd bent his imagination had taken. He kicked at a pebble. It rolled across the wooden dock and over the edge, and plopped into the water.

  No, there was no way to avoid the responsibility of what he had done. The biggest question in Houston’s mind was not how to avoid it, but how to live with it. For three days he had drifted in the Pacific like so much flotsam and jetsam. Three days in the water, waiting to die, expecting to die. But he hadn’t.

  Now he had to live with his shame.

  Ever since the accident he had tried with only moderate success to steer his life into the wind, back on course. Out there in the ocean he had been physically adrift. Now he was emotionally adrift, as well.

  Houston turned his back on the ocean he loved so much, and headed toward Front Street.

  The moment he unlocked the back door to Lone Star Dive Shop & Tours he smelled fresh coffee brewing. “Gil?” he called out, pocketing his key.

  “Yo!” came the response from the upstairs office.

  Houston climbed the narrow stairs to find his partner bent over an open accounts ledger. “You know, if you’d cook those damned books,” he teased, pouring himself a cup of the steaming brew, “you wouldn’t have to work so hard.”

  “Hey, it’s hard enough to keep one set balanced. I’m not smart enough to cheat.” Gil Leland eyed the dark circles under Houston’s eyes and didn’t have to make much of an educated guess about where he had been.

  “Been down by the harbor again?”

  Houston nodded, giving the act of sipping his coffee more attention than it deserved.

  “I think you ought to stay away from there.”

  When Houston laughed out loud, Gil realized the irony of his statement. “Look, you’ll get past this. It may take some time, but you will make it through to the other side.”

  “And in the meantime you and Stuart have got to handle all the dives and whale watches. All the sunset cruises, all the charters…” He pointed to the ledger. “And you’re still doing the accounts, just like always. It’s not fair, Gil.”

  “What the hell does ‘fair’ have to do with anything? What’s fair about any of this?”

  Houston turned to face his partner. “How do you do it?”

  “What? Make it through the day without crying? Keep on going when sometimes I’d like to find a deep hole somewhere, and jump in?”

  “Yeah.”

  Their discussions about the accident, and how each of them was dealing with their grief were cyclical. When one of them was down, the other always seemed to be up enough to help. Despite the doctor’s recommendation that Houston see a psychotherapist, Gil was the only person he had been able to talk to about what had happened.

  “I couldn’t do it without you,” Gil said softly.

  “Me? Hell, I’m an albatross around your neck. I’m-”

  “Just knock it off, Sinclair.”

  Houston’s mouth opened to say something, then he thought better of it. Whenever Gil referred to him as “Sinclair,” he knew the ex-cop had something serious to say.

  “Last week you found me crying in my beer. Literally. You told me Shelley would have been hopping mad to see me that way, and you were right. Well, right back atcha. You know what she would say if she were standing here now? She’d put her hands on her hips, and take that now-you-listen-here-buster stance that told you you were about to get both barrels of whatever she was unloading. Remember?”

  Houston couldn’t help but grin, remembering Shelley’s spitfire personality and envisioning the exact pose Gil had just described so accurately.

  “Then she’d crank up her Alabama accent a couple of notches, and tell you to get that ‘hangdawg look off your face,’ or she was ‘gonna box your ears.’ And I believe,” Gil said, closing the ledger, “that’s a direct quote.”

  “I believe you’re right.”

  “My point,” Gil offered, rising from the desk with his coffee cup in his hand, “is that she wouldn’t want you turning yourself inside out over something that wasn’t your fault. Neither do I.” He held up his hand to forestall the rebuttal he knew was on the tip of Houston’s tongue. “And before you comment about those minor repairs on the boat, don’t forget that I knew about them, too. I could have insisted they be fixed. I didn’t because they were minor. Minor. Nobody, and I mean nobody, had any way of knowing the damn propane fuel line had a leak.” Gil poured himself more coffee.

  “We don’t know that’s what caused the explosion,” Houston commented, even though result, not reason, was what mattered to him.

  “What else could it have been? At sunset Shelley went down to the galley to make a pot of coffee. It was sort of a tradition with her. Anytime she was on the boat at that hour, she made coffee.”

  “If only I hadn’t-”

  “If, if, if. You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself. To both of us,” Gil added after a long pause.

  “I’m sorry,” Ho
uston said, feeling more guilt and shame than ever for not setting Gil straight about why he blamed himself. A week before the accident some minor repairs had needed to be made, but hadn’t been done. Then Shelley had insisted on coming along at the last minute. And finally, a young couple having trouble with the motor on their sailboat had waved them down for assistance. If they hadn’t stopped to help, the Two of a Kind would have been docked in Hilo before sunset, and Shelley wouldn’t have gone below to make coffee.

  All of which was true. All of which didn’t matter when stacked up against the fact that his shame was made twofold by allowing Gil to believe a lie.

  “Hey,” Gil said, trying to lighten the mood. “Stuart tells me he’s got an all-female snorkel-and-dive set up this morning. Taking all six of them out to Molokini.”

  “Probably middle-aged, old-maid schoolteachers looking for some—” Houston raised the first two fingers of each hand and made quotes in the air “—’real adventure.’ “

  Gil laughed.

  “By the way,” Houston said, grateful for the change of subject, “I owe you an apology about Stuart. You know I wasn’t much in favor of hiring him at first, but I was wrong. He’s good help.”

  “See there, slick,” he said, referring to the tag hung on Houston during their high-school days when he had been one of the smoothest, slickest receivers in the state. “I told you my instincts about him were right on the money.”

  “But even you have to admit, trusting your instincts without doing much checking into his background is not the ideal way to hire someone.”

  “Worked out, didn’t it? Stuart’s a little moody now and then, and he damned sure isn’t much of a conversationalist, but he knows the business, and he’s steady.”

  “Agreed. You were right, and I was wrong.”

  “Aha. Music to my ears.” Gil slapped Houston on the back. “Let’s go down and see if Stuart’s schoolmarms have arrived. Betcha five dollars there’s not one out of the six under forty or without glasses.”