For a moment, as she pulled onto her street, Maddie thought that she’d lost the van. Or perhaps they had decided not to follow her after all. Because they weren’t there in her rearview mirror when she glanced back.
But by the time she drove into the lot behind the house in which her apartment was located, she’d caught sight of it again. They were just turning onto her street, so far back that she wasn’t even sure they could still see her car. Maybe she had lost them? Almost? Then it occurred to her that they didn’t have to follow her all that closely. They were the FBI, after all. She was willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that they already knew precisely where she lived.
And with that, she remembered just exactly why she experienced fear and loathing every time she thought of the FBI.
Her apartment was on the third floor of a big old Arts and Crafts-style house that had been converted into multiple units years before. The third floor, with its dormer windows and odd angles, was the smallest, and she had it all to herself. The house itself was a homey-looking place, all deep brown siding and covered porches and gables. The front yard was the size of a postage stamp, and the backyard had been converted into a parking lot, but honeysuckle bushes grew riotously around the front entrance and had tangled themselves into a thick hedge behind the parking area, and tall old oaks and elms shaded the fresh new asphalt. Maddie knew she would be enfolded by the intoxicating scent of the honeysuckles as soon as she stepped out of the car. It was one of the reasons she loved living there. It was one of those little somethings that made a place feel like home.
It also didn’t hurt that the rent was very reasonable.
Only June Matthews’s green PT Cruiser was parked in the shadowy lot, Maddie saw as she cast a quick glance around. A divorced middle-school teacher, June rented one of the two apartments on the second floor. The other tenants, a young couple and a single woman lawyer in each of the two first-floor apartments and a pair of sixtyish sisters who shared the other second-floor apartment, didn’t appear to be home. At least, their cars weren’t home.
Maddie nosed the Camry into her designated spot beside the walkway to the back porch. Actually, her lease allotted her two—each apartment came with two parking spaces, for a total of ten—but she never used the other one, so it had been designated the guest spot by common consent. She braked, put the transmission into park, and slewed around to look for the van. By now she should be able to see its lights.
This was private property. She was a little hazy on the laws, but she didn’t think that they had any right to follow her here.
Of course, in practical terms, the FBI was pretty much like the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla. It could do anything it ...
Something stung her left shoulder, and both the front and rear windshields shattered with a thunderclap-loud boom, all at approximately the same instant. BBs of glass blew inward, showering her with what felt like an explosion of hail. Reflexively closing her eyes, still registering the unexpected burning heat of the sting, she reopened them almost instantly and turned back around to gape in blank incomprehension at the open hole where the windshield had been. Then she felt something—a bee?—whiz past her left cheek.
Not a bee. A bullet.
Oh, God, someone was shooting at her. That sting—it was a bullet. She’d been shot.
Making the connection, Maddie threw herself across the seat. At a minimum, survival meant getting down below the level of the dashboard.
The sound of squealing brakes and slamming doors somewhere close at hand was followed almost instantly by the thud of running feet. Someone wrenched open the driver’s-side door. The interior light blinked on. Maddie screamed—the sound was shrill and high, like an infant’s wail—and recoiled from the man who crouched there, doing her best to scramble over the console in a frantic, instinct-fueled attempt to escape.
“Stay down!”
McCabe. She recognized him with a great rush of relief as he pushed her down again, then threw what felt like his entire body on top of her. As his weight crushed her against the hard plastic casing of the console between the seats, she cried out, instinctively shifting onto her stomach a little to ease the pressure, but she didn’t even think about trying to push him off. He was putting himself between her and the next bullet, putting his life on the line to keep her alive.
Another shot could come at any second. It could penetrate the car’s thin aluminum skin, hit him, tear through his flesh, then bury itself in hers.
Maddie realized that she was trembling. Her stomach roiled. Her heart raced like a runaway train. Terror swirled over her skin like an icy wind. Every tiny hair on her body sprang to prickling life.
Please, God, keep us safe. Both of us.
What could have been seconds or minutes or hours later, she felt him shift. He started to ease off her. Maddie’s lips parted and she sucked in much-needed air as she clutched him, caught his shoulder, his arm, his hand, and held on.
“Don’t leave me,” she said. Her voice sounded like nothing she had ever heard emerge from her throat before. Their gazes met. He loomed above her, his eyes black and hard and alive with some emotion she couldn’t quite name. His expression was grim.
“I’m not leaving you,” he promised, but still her cold fingers twined with his warm ones and clung with every bit of strength they possessed to make sure he kept his word. He slid out of the car then, and when she tried to follow he freed his hand to catch her hipbones and pull her out after him. She ended up sitting flat on her bottom on the warm asphalt with her back against the rear door of her car and her knees bent. Little chunks of glass from her windshield littered the pavement all around her. McCabe crouched in front of her, his shoulders blocking most of her view of their surroundings, and she realized that he was once again placing himself between her and possible danger. Behind him, at a little distance, she thought she saw the bulk of the white van. To her right, the open door provided more protection. The dim glow of the car’s interior light illuminated them both clearly but made everything beyond their small circle look hazy and dark.
The shooter could be anywhere.
At the thought, Maddie sucked in air, looking all around, desperately trying to see through the darkness. Van and door notwithstanding, the pool of light they were in made her feel as though they were easy targets.
They needed to run.
“It’s all right. By now he’ll be long gone,” McCabe said in the calmest of voices, apparently correctly interpreting the abortive attempt she made to get her legs beneath her. It didn’t work. She was still too shaken, and her muscles seemed to have a mind of their own.
So she sat and breathed, and kept her eyes fixed on him because he was the only thing within view that didn’t scare her senseless. He looked big and tough and comfortingly capable of fending off all comers. Her eyes widened as she realized that he was holding a gun.
Probably a good thing, but, looking at it, she started to shake all over again.
He cast a quick, seemingly calculating look around, and then the gun disappeared behind his back as he thrust it somewhere out of sight. When his hand reappeared, he rested it gently on her arm. Her left arm. The one that, she saw as she glanced down at his hand, was covered with blood.
Oh, God, she’d been shot. She’d been shot, and the funny thing was, it didn’t even really hurt.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. Everything—McCabe, the parking lot, the rustling bushes beyond it—began to dissolve.
“Don’t faint on me,” he said, and she guessed she must have been in the process of turning a whiter shade of pale because he slid a hand around the nape of her neck and pushed her head down between her raised knees.
“I’ve never fainted in my life.” Her voice was faint, distant-sounding, but gritty. Clenching her teeth, Maddie fought the dizziness that threatened to whirl her away with it. She could feel the hard heat of his hand on her bloodied arm, feel his long fingers delvi
ng cautiously beneath the hem of her sleeve. It created an island of warmth in the sea of ice that seemed to be slowly swallowing her up.
“My shoulder.” She remembered the sting. “I think it hit the back of my shoulder.”
If she hadn’t turned at that precise moment to look for his van, the bullet wouldn’t have slammed into her shoulder. It would have—it was an effort to rerun the sequence of events in her mind to arrive at the exact position she’d been in just seconds before she’d been hit—struck her in the approximate vicinity of her heart.
She felt faint all over again.
McCabe withdrew his hand from her sleeve and touched her neck. The solid warmth of his hand sliding down the sensitive chord that ran from ear to shoulder was welcome, comforting, distracting even, and she was sorry when it was withdrawn. She only realized that he was cautiously lifting the back of her T-shirt away from her body when she felt the painful stab of cloth being pulled out of what she realized must be her wound.
“Ouch,” she said.
He let go of her shirt. “Sorry. You got anything on you I can use to staunch the bleeding?”
“A couple of tissues—in my pocket.” Maddie slowly and deliberately breathed in and out, trying to regain some measure of composure as he made a disgusted sound under his breath to indicate what he thought of her offering. “How bad is it?”
“Not bad, as bullet wounds go. About three inches long, looks like more of a graze than anything. But it’s bleeding pretty good.”
She could feel him moving, hear what sounded like the slither of cloth over flesh. Lifting her head, she was just in time to watch McCabe pull his T-shirt over his head. Having a very masculine-looking chest suddenly appear at eye level was a surprise, and she blinked. His shoulders were broad and heavy with muscle, his chest wide and adorned with a nice amount of black hair. As he stripped his shirt the rest of the way off, she watched the play of muscles under his skin with a kind of detached interest. His biceps flexed as he lowered his arms, holding his crumpled shirt in one hand. Her eyes slid lower, to discover that he had a nice six-pack disappearing into his jeans.
“What are you doing?” she asked, still processing assorted thoughts, feelings, and concerns in connection with that chest.
“It’s called administering first aid.” He wadded the shirt up into a ball and flattened a hand on the back of her head, pushing her head down between her knees again.
As he leaned over her to press his shirt firmly against the wound in her shoulder, Maddie winced. Some of the numbness—the shock—was starting to wear off, and the wound throbbed and burned. He was very close to her now; she could feel the sinewy strength of his forearm pressing against her upper arm. Her fingertips—her hands were resting on her knees—brushed his chest. She curled her hands into fists to escape the contact, but not before she registered the crispness of his chest hair, and the firm, smooth warmth of the flesh beneath. But what she could not avoid even with her eyes closed and her fists clenched was his body heat, which made her want to scoot closer, and the distinctively masculine scent of him. It was like aromatherapy for the traumatized, she thought; simply breathing it in made her feel safer. He made her feel safer, and aware of him in a way she didn’t want to be. Which was not a good thing, she realized with dismay. With any other man, under any other circumstances, she would have labeled what she was experiencing here as serious attraction.
The sheer surprise of it caused her head to lift again.
“Hold still,” McCabe said irritably, the pressure he was putting on her wound keeping her shoulder horizontal even as their gazes met. “You’ll make it bleed worse.”
“She okay?” The voice belonged to Wynne, and it came from behind McCabe. Wynne stood just outside the circle of light, and, although in her current position she couldn’t see him, Maddie could feel his eyes on her. He seemed to be panting slightly. She couldn’t be sure, but she had the hazy impression that he—and whoever else had been in the van—had gone running past her car, toward the honeysuckle hedge and beyond, while McCabe had stopped to tend to her.
“Flesh wound. Across the shoulder blade.” McCabe’s tone changed as he added, “Anything?”
“Nothing. Gardner and the others are still out there looking, though. Think he made us?”
“Maybe.”
As they continued to talk above her, Maddie quit listening and rested her head on her knees. Taking a deep breath replete with eau de man, she pondered the situation. The first conclusion she reached was that she was going to live. That being the case, she had to decide what to do. If the deal she’d made with her friend Bob had been bogus, just a sop to keep her happy until they could try again to kill her, then she was faced with a choice: She could run again, with no turning back this time, or she could turn herself, along with everything she knew, over to the FBI. Which, as she knew from experience, would probably be a huge mistake, and one that she never before would have even contemplated. So why now? She grimaced and realized that the answer lay about six inches from the tip of her nose. Another sneaking glance at McCabe confirmed it: He was the only reason she was even considering such a thing. Almost against her will, she was beginning to think she might be able to trust him. And if nothing else, he—they—would keep her alive.
For a while, at least.
But then again, McCabe’s hunkiness quotient—and she had to admit that crouched all shirtless and buff beside her, he was looking pretty good—might be clouding her judgment. And, like running, spilling all to the FBI would be the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on her life: When the smoke cleared, nothing recognizable would be left.
Including Creative Partners. Including the Brehmer account.
Yes, she wanted to live. But she also wanted her life.
Anyway, the FBI couldn’t keep her alive forever. Sooner or later, they would get everything they wanted out of her and she would cease being the flavor of the month. Then she would be left to manage on her own—and the Mob would be waiting.
The Mob was like an elephant—it never forgot.
Before she did anything, anything at all, Maddie decided, she needed to get on the phone and call her good friend Bob and see what the hell was going on. Not that he would tell her if he had been lying, of course. But it was possible—maybe even likely—that the word to back off had not yet filtered down through the ranks to the hit man.
If that was the case, she meant to make sure it did. Pronto.
The wail of a siren made her lift her head again.
“Here comes the cavalry,” McCabe said on a note of extreme irony, looking in the direction of the sound, which seemed to be growing louder by the second. Maddie realized that they were all gathered around her now: Wynne, Gomez, Gardner, and Hendricks. And, like her, they were all looking down the street, where flashing blue lights were just coming into view.
As suspected, the lights were headed their way.
Just what she needed, Maddie thought dismally: more cops.
BY THE TIME the local police had left, along with the ambulance whose crew had treated Maddie’s wound when she had declined to be taken to the hospital, it was full morning. The heat was starting to get oppressive. A dog barked in the distance. A motorcycle roared past on the street. Maddie was safely tucked away in her apartment with Gardner playing guard dog. Now wearing a white T-shirt he had pulled out of his bag in the back of the van, and his jeans, McCabe watched the last police car drive away, then turned in time to catch the eye of the thin, fortyish, dried-up looking woman who had popped out of the house briefly earlier, wearing her robe, to say something to Maddie, then popped back in again, and was at that moment walking down the back steps, eyeing him with obvious reservations. A neighbor, McCabe assumed. She had short blond hair and a long nose, and was now dressed in floral capris, a white blouse, and sandals. McCabe endured the nervous glance she gave him as she passed stoically.
At one point, drawn by the police car and ambulance, quite a few neighbors had crowded around, bu
t when nothing more of interest had happened, they’d dispersed by ones and twos to go to jobs or whatever until there was no one left. Except the woman who was now getting into her PT Cruiser, of course.
“No way that was random,” Wynne said, coming up beside him. Wynne was chewing his gum again, and the smell of grape Dubble Bubble combined with the scent of honeysuckle from the hedges, which was particularly strong now that they’d been disturbed by being thoroughly searched, was an unfortunate mix in the ovenlike heat. Along with Gomez and Hendricks, Wynne had been scouring neighboring yards for evidence. So far nothing had turned up, not an indentation in the grass to show where the shooter had lain in wait, not a bullet lodged in a tree, nothing. Of course, the fact that they were all so tired by now that they were practically out on their feet might have something to do with it. The way he, personally, was feeling, he was pretty sure that he couldn’t find a whale in a bathroom.
“Possible, of course, but I don’t think so.” A random gunshot—apparently such happenings weren’t unknown in the area—had been the local yokels’ preferred explanation. Sam understood, of course. As a solution, it involved a hell of a lot less paperwork. But he didn’t believe it. If nothing else, it was too much of a coincidence, and he had stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago.
“You think he’ll be back?” Wynne had a twig caught in his hair, Sam noticed, and his shorts and hula-girl shirt looked like he’d slept in them for a week. The whites of his eyes pretty much matched the red of his shirt, and for the first time since Sam had known him, he was able to see the beginnings of curly, gold fuzz on Wynne’s chin. Since Wynne rarely had to shave, that was significant. It told him they’d been working flat-out for a hell of a long time.
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