Cornered

by Turner, Linda; Weaver, Ingrid; Miller, Julie

  “How about that?” Max muttered. “It looks like you’re telling the truth.” He withdrew his hand from her blouse. He hesitated for a beat, then refastened her buttons.

  Erika exhaled slowly. Considering the way Max had grabbed her breast before, she was surprised he hadn’t lingered. With his body blocking the view of the other men in the room, he could have taken advantage of the situation by copping a few more cheap feels.

  Wait. Was that why he hadn’t? Because the others couldn’t see? It was almost as if his initial crudeness had been for show…

  She frowned. What was she doing? Trying to make excuses for him so she could justify this mindless response of her body?

  Max’s knuckles skimmed the side of her neck as he brushed a lock of hair behind her shoulder. He stroked the pad of his thumb over the place where Wates had jammed his pistol. “This boyfriend of yours can’t be much of a cop if he sent you here without a wire.”

  “I didn’t need one. He knows where I am.”

  “How?”

  “Sloan and I are a team. We share everything.”

  “Uh-huh. So where is he now?”

  “Closer than you think.”

  He snorted. “Screaming his name when I came in was another bluff, wasn’t it? Great performance, Red.”

  “You’d better check her for weapons, too, Max,” Wates said. “Dick might have missed something.”

  “Sure.” The sides of his raincoat folded against the floor as he squatted in front of her. He ran his hands down her jacket sleeves, squeezing lightly every few inches. “Are you packing heat, baby?”

  “I’m not armed.”

  Max skimmed his palms along her hips. “What’s this?” he asked, patting the side of her jacket. He fumbled at her pocket. “Was this your lunch?”

  He must have found what was left of the Hershey’s bar, she thought. “There’re some used tissues in the other pocket,” she said. “Want to check them out too?”

  He progressed to her thighs. Instead of pushing up her skirt, he explored the contours of her legs through the fabric. He moved more quickly than before, as if he didn’t want to prolong this additional search any more than she did.

  “If I had a weapon and had been able to reach it,” she muttered, “don’t you think I would have used it already?”

  “Aw, you said you didn’t like it rough.” He slid his hands over her knees to her shins. “Sexy boots, Red. You got a whip to go with them?”

  Angling her head to one side, she was able to see his hands as he felt her calves through the supple leather of her boots. His fingers were long and had the same shape as Sloan’s. Dark hair sprinkled the backs of his hands, shifting as his skin stretched over his lean tendons, also like Sloan’s. He wore no rings, but the gold band of a watch glinted from his left wrist where the sleeve of his raincoat had pulled back. He wore the watch with the face turned to the underside of his wrist the same way Sloan used to.

  Great. More coincidences to mess with her mind.

  Max reached the blisters that had formed on her heels. She tried to mask her start of pain by jerking her feet out of his grasp.

  Max unfolded from his crouch and backed up. “She’s clean, John. No wire, no weapons.”

  “No cops, then,” Wates said.

  “We still can’t be sure.” Max resumed his perch on the corner of the table. “Did she have anything with her besides that bag, Leavish?”

  “No, Mr. Tanner,” he replied.

  Max’s legs shifted, as if he twisted to look behind him. There was the sound of something being dragged across the table. A moment later, several objects clattered to its surface. He must have emptied her bag.

  “That camera had some shots of us,” Wates said. “I erased them. Her ID’s in that yellow folder.”

  “What about that phone?”

  “The last number she dialed was just some bar. It’s closed. All I got was a recording.”

  “Which bar?”

  “The Cherry on Top.”

  “I’ve heard of the place,” Max said. “It’s a cop hangout in Queens. That supports her story, John.”

  Erika wondered fleetingly how Max would have known about her uncle’s bar. Then again, criminals probably made it their business to know where they would be more likely to run into cops.

  Wates drummed his fingers on the table. “Fine. I’ll send someone to check out the addresses on her ID. They’ll see if there’s anything at her home or her office to confirm what she told us.”

  “Good idea,” Max commented. “If she’s on the level, we might be able to use her as a hostage.”

  The tension in Erika’s shoulders went down a notch. Okay. She’d bought another few minutes. Now all she had to do was figure a way out of this before—

  “What’s that paper?” Wates asked suddenly. His chair creaked. “It fell out of the folder with her ID.”

  Erika did a mental inventory of her bag. What could he be talking about? A receipt? A business card?

  “It looks like a newspaper clipping,” Max said.

  Oh, no. Why had she saved that? She should have gotten rid of it long ago.

  She could only hope that the clipping was too tattered to read by now. Maybe the tear stains had made the ink run. She didn’t know what kind of condition it was in, since she hadn’t unfolded it for months. She took it out mainly to touch it, to have a concrete focus for the grief that had no other outlet.

  It was a link to Sloan that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to break. Throwing it away would have seemed too final.

  Paper crackled. Max whistled softly and got to his feet. “Hey, sweet cheeks. You and that boyfriend must be kinkier than I thought. You always go on dates with dead guys?”

  It was no use. It looked as if everyone was right after all: her inability to let go of the past might wind up costing her her future.

  “What are you talking about?” Wates demanded.

  “This is an obituary,” Max said. “For Detective Sloan Patrick Morrissey.”

  Chapter 4

  The funeral had been a blur. Erika hadn’t wanted to attend—how could they bury Sloan without his body? Yet everyone had agreed that there was no hope of recovering him alive. The Riki B. had been found drifting off Montauk, her hold awash from the waves that had broken over the deck and flowed through the sloop’s open hatch. There had been empty beer cans on the floor of the cabin and an open bag of Doritos on the bunk, along with the running shoes Sloan had been wearing when he’d slammed out of the apartment.

  That final fight had been a bad one.

  But Erika had never dealt well with ultimatums. That was one way in which she and Sloan were too much alike.

  I’m sorry, Sloan. You know I’ll always love you, don’t you? I would take every word back if I could.

  Yet she couldn’t take back the words. They were chiseled into her memory like dates on granite.

  “You’re analyzing everything to death, Riki. Let’s just get married.”

  “We’ve got a good thing going between us, Sloan. We need more time to be sure we want to take the next step.”

  “Time isn’t going to change how I feel about you.”

  “I’m trying to be practical. Right now I’ve got too many cases on the go. Wait a few more months until things settle down and—”

  “That’s what you said last month and the month before. You’re using your work as an excuse. What are you so scared of?”

  “You’re the one who’s scared. You want to wrap me up in cotton and keep me safe on a shelf somewhere.”

  “I can’t help worrying about you, Riki. I don’t want to lose you to some punk with a gun.”

  “I don’t want to lose you either, Sloan, but I wouldn’t expect you to walk away from any of your investigations just to prove your feelings for me.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “What I’m asking for is a reason to stay.”

  “Are you t
hreatening to leave?”

  “If that’s what it takes. We’ve been dancing around this for three years and I’m out of patience. I want it all.”

  “Sloan—”

  “All or nothing, Riki. You decide.”

  It had taken her almost three weeks to find the ring again. She’d thrown it at him so hard before he’d left, it had bounced off his chest, ricocheted from the wall behind the bed and rolled beneath the dresser.

  After the funeral, she’d gone over every inch of the bedroom and had been starting to fear that Rufus had sniffed out the ring and swallowed it, but she’d been determined not to give up. It had been on the nineteenth day when she’d been flat on her belly, with her chin on the floor and a flashlight gripped in her hand, that she’d finally spotted the glint of the diamond. Somehow it had become wedged into the crack between the floor and the baseboard.

  Her hands had been shaking so hard, it had taken an hour to slip the ring on her finger. She hadn’t removed it since.

  It had been forty-three days before she’d changed the sheets. Her reluctance hadn’t been because of her dislike of doing laundry, it was because Sloan’s pillowcase had smelled like the back of his neck. Burying her face in his pillow had been the only way she’d been able to fall asleep alone. After she’d washed his scent out, she’d had to resort to liquor.

  They had said that Sloan had been drunk the night he’d died. The empty beer cans in the Riki B.’s cabin had borne only his prints. He’d gone out on his boat to drink beer, eat chips and sulk about the argument. Not prudent, not sensible, but exactly what a stubborn, proud guy’s guy like Sloan would do.

  The official police report had called it an accident. A combination of tragic circumstances. Sloan had likely been too annoyed to remember that the head in the sloop had been out of commission when he’d set sail, so after he’d downed his beers and started into his chips, he’d gone out on the pitching deck in his sock feet in the rain to answer nature’s call. Then he’d slipped and fallen overboard.

  That was the theory, anyway. In honor of his memory, Sloan’s colleagues had kept those particular details away from the public. They had decided that for a detective who had survived the worst that the streets of New York could throw at him for twelve years, it would have been the ultimate humiliation if news got around that he’d bought it when he’d been taking a leak.

  But Sloan would have appreciated the absurdity of it all. He probably would have curved his lips into that lopsided grin that brought out his dimple and remarked that he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. Sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do.

  “It says here he died in a boating accident,” Max said. “A year ago tonight.”

  “The cop is dead?” Wates asked.

  “Left a grieving mother, four younger sisters and a fiancée,” Max continued. “Father was a cop, too. Sounds like a good Irish Catholic boy. How did he hook up with a hot babe like you, Red?”

  How? At the Cherry on Top. Her uncle had introduced them at the bar’s annual St. Patrick’s Day party.

  “The important question here, Max, is why did she lie?” Wates’s chair scraped. He paced around the table and grabbed Erika by the back of her head, twisting her hair along with the knot of the blindfold. He gave her a shake that made her eyes water. “Do you think I’m a fool, Miss Balough?”

  “Whoa, John.” Max stepped forward. The pressure on Erika’s scalp immediately eased. “I’ll handle this.”

  “Take your hands off me, Tanner.”

  “Sure, as soon as you put away that gun.”

  “Don’t you give me orders.”

  “I’ll do whatever the hell I have to.” Max’s voice hardened. “We have a deal, John. I’ve got as much invested in this as you do, so I’m not going to stand by and watch you screw it up by getting trigger-happy.”

  For a moment, neither man spoke. Tension coiled between them, with Erika caught smack in the middle.

  She tried to remain as motionless as possible, in spite of the moisture that was trickling from the corners of her eyes. Wates’s rough treatment had ripped out the hair at her temples by its roots, but there was more than pain behind these tears. There was stark, edge-of-panic fear.

  Wates had taken out his gun. Erika hadn’t seen it or felt it since the last time he’d jammed it under her ear, but she knew instinctively that the 9 mm Heckler & Koch was pointed at her head.

  Part of her, the sane and logical part, realized that her odds of seeing another day were next to nothing. But the rest of her, that stubborn, irrational core that for weeks had kept clinging to the possibility that Sloan had survived, wasn’t ready to accept her own death, either. No matter how hopeless the situation seemed, she couldn’t give up yet. Dear God, she wanted to live.

  “Damn it, Max,” Wates muttered. “We can’t afford complications like this woman.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. But we still need to find out who sent her.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Sloan Morrissey….” Wates paused. “Morrissey,” he repeated. “That obituary said his father was a cop, too.”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  Wates stepped back. “Never mind,” he snapped. “Ancient history. It’s got nothing to do with the Stingers.”

  Stingers? Erika thought. Oh, God. He meant Stinger missiles. That’s what was in those long, heavy crates. She’d guessed they contained weapons, but this was far worse than she’d imagined. Her mind reeled as she thought of the destruction that could be done if just one of those missiles got into the wrong hands.

  And they had truckloads. A ship full.

  “Give me until we’re ready to weigh anchor,” Max said. “I’ll get the truth from her.”

  “You’d better. I don’t want any surprises when we meet your people.”

  “You see to your end and get the cargo on board. I’ll make sure nothing interferes with the rendezvous.” Max moved beside Erika and put his hand under her elbow. “We’re going back to the hold, sweet cheeks. And then we’re going to finish our chat.”

  Her stomach knotted at the ice in his tone. She didn’t want to think about how he intended to “get the truth” from her. She couldn’t let Max’s resemblance to Sloan cloud her judgment—the switchblade he carried would be just as deadly as Wates’s pistol.

  Still, she didn’t resist as he helped her to her feet. One-on-one gave her better odds of escape than three-on-one.

  “Leavish, keep an eye on them,” Wates said, snapping his fingers. “We wouldn’t want Mr. Tanner to lose his way and slip over a railing the way Dick did.”

  Max’s fingers manacled Erika’s upper arm. “Absolutely, John,” he drawled. “Another accident is the last thing I’d want.”

  The fog had thickened since the last time Erika had been outside. She could feel drops of water burst on her cheeks as she moved through the mist. Cold air prickled against her nose and the back of her throat, helping to clear her head and focus her thoughts.

  It wasn’t that difficult, because there was only one thought. Survive. That was it. Amazing how simple things got when it came down to the crunch.

  A foghorn droned somewhere to her right, the mournful tone raising goose bumps on her arms. Good. Since the foghorn was to her right, the shore must be to her left. At least she knew which way to run if she got the chance.

  Not if. When. She had heard Wates dispatch someone to check out her office and her apartment. No matter what kind of lie she tried to spin for Max in the meantime, he and Wates would eventually realize her only open case was her search for Hartwell’s appliance thief. She had to make use of this opportunity. Once she was back in the hold, she probably wouldn’t leave it alive.

  She replayed the route she had memorized on the way up. So far, they had followed it exactly. Any second now they would get to the first of the staircases she had noted. That would take them to the main deck. There would have to be a way to get off the ship from there, right?

  As he had when he’d brought
her to Wates, Leavish was leading the way. He stayed no more than two steps in front of her, close enough for her to glimpse the backs of his heels. Like the late Dick, he wore work boots, but they were several sizes smaller than Dick’s had been, so he was likely shorter than the other men she’d encountered.

  Erika decided that if she kicked out when they were on the staircase, she should be able to knock Leavish down the steps. She was in better shape for an escape attempt now that the tape that had bound her arms was gone—although her wrists were still stuck together, her balance was less impeded and she did have some use of her hands. She would have the element of surprise in her favor, plus the cover of the fog, so with the right timing, she might be able to make a break for it while Max was still caught on the stairs behind her.

  As plans went, it sucked big-time, but Erika didn’t have any other options. It would be better to go down swinging than to be led like a lamb to the slaughter. And there was no telling how many other people would be slaughtered if this load of missiles wasn’t stopped. She had to get away and warn someone.

  It wouldn’t be easy. Max’s grip on her arm was like a set of handcuffs, not pressing into her flesh but enclosing her in a circle of steel. He would have to shift his grip when they started down the stairs. She had to be ready to move when he did.

  She was vividly conscious of how close he walked. She could also smell his aftershave and hear the solid thud of his boots, both of which kept setting off jabs of recognition and adrenaline and stupid, pathetic spurts of longing. All those dormant nerve endings in her skin that he’d awakened when he’d searched her continued to spark. Try as she might, she couldn’t quell the reaction.

  Yet these reminders of Sloan were good. They energized her. They were something familiar to hang on to in this nightmare, as comforting as the taste of chocolate.

  On her next step, she intentionally caught her heel on a rivet in the deck plating. Stumbling sideways, she ducked her head and lifted her hands, as if bracing for a fall. She had just hooked one thumb under the edge of her blindfold when Max pulled her back.