Don't Look Down

by Jennifer Crusie

  J. T. Damn, she thought. I had him right here and didn't ask him his first name. And there had been that one moment when she was pretty sure she could have gotten his name, his rank, his serial number, his sun sign, his baseball card collection, and his Jeep if she'd just asked.

  Of course, at that point she'd have given him anything he'd asked for, too. Actually, she had given him everything he'd asked for. She grinned to herself against the pillows and then started when somebody knocked on the door.

  Oh goody, he'd changed his mind and come back.

  She grabbed her shirt from the floor and buttoned it up as she went to the door. No sense in looking easy. No sense in putting underwear or pants on either, but definitely the shirt. To show that he was going to have to work at least five seconds to get her.

  She threw open the door and said, "Okay, what's your-"

  "Swear to me you didn't cancel that net," Nash said, his face pale.

  Lucy backed up a step. "I didn't cancel the net. I have no reason to cancel the net. Whatever you're doing, just do it and get out of my life without hurting anybody."

  "You-" He broke off, looking at her for the first time. "Where's Wilder?"

  "He's not here." Lucy tried to close the door but he blocked it with his shoulder.

  "He was here, though," Nash said, meeting her eyes. "I know you, Luce. I know what it takes to make you look like this."

  "Just go," Lucy said.

  "I don't get it," he said, and there was real hurt in his eyes. "That guy, he's just like me. You want that, why not come back to me? I'll give you everything you've ever wanted, Lucy. After tonight…"

  "He's not you," Lucy said, so sure now that she wondered how she could ever have thought they were the same. "He's not a liar. He's not a cheat. He cares about people. He's a real hero, not a Hollywood fast-draw fake."

  Nash shoved the door open and came in, slamming it behind him. "Of course he's a fake, Jesus, Lucy, you think he just happened to get this movie gig? He's working for somebody. He's conning you just-"

  "I know who he's working for," Lucy said, backing up. "Now get out."

  "Oh, no, I don't give up that easy." He came toward her and she scrambled to put the bed between them, ending up on the opposite side, facing him down.

  "Get out,'" she said.

  "Come on, Luce," he said, detouring around the bed. "Cut the crap. This is me. This is us. You know…"

  She yanked her bag open and took out the Beretta J.T. had given her, fumbling it out of the holster to point it at him. "I'll shoot you," she said, gripping the gun with both hands to keep it from shaking.

  Adrenaline was making her dizzy. "I will shoot you where you stand if you try to touch me."

  "No, you won't," he said, and she knew he was right, she couldn't shoot anybody. "But I love your spirit, babe. I always have." He sounded almost sad, and she relaxed a little. "God, Lucy, I wish it didn't have to be like this. If things were different-"

  "Things are like this because of you," she said, tensing again. "You're the one who set this all up, you're the one who talked Daisy into this and sabotaged that rope, you're the one who sent somebody after Stephanie, so don't even pretend this is some really sad twist of fate. You're getting exactly what you deserve."

  He drew back. "Okay, then. So who's your hero working for?"

  "Get out." She held the gun in one hand and reached for the phone. "Get out or I call security and have you arrested. You can't be on the bridge tonight if you're in jail, Nash."

  "Nash?" he said, trying to smile. "Hey, what happened to 'Connor'?"

  "I think he died," she said, phone in hand. "I think something awful happened to him because all that's left is you, and you're nothing."

  He flinched.

  "Just get out," she said, and let the gun drop. "Please, just go. Do whatever it is you have to do and don't ever come near me or Daisy or Pepper again."

  Nash looked at her, his eyes bleak. "Okay, then," he said, sounding defeated. "Stay out of my way tonight and tell your hero to do the same. Especially him. Tell him to keep his distance or he'll be a dead man."

  "Just go," Lucy said, suddenly tired.

  He went out, closing the door behind him, and she put the gun on the bedside table.

  I'm a mess in an emergency, she thought. Thank God J.T. knows how to do this stuff.

  She went to throw the deadbolt and then she went back to the phone.

  She trusted J.T., but it was time to call in her backup.

  ***

  Fast exits were good, Wilder thought as he checked the GPS tracker. If he'd hung around in Lucys room much longer, he'd never have left. And meanwhile, Finnegan was moving north, about three miles ahead of Wilder's position on Route 17. Wilder glanced at the MP-5 submachine gun resting on the passenger seat. He'd taken valuable time to recover it from the cache under the bridge. It was most definitely time for heavier firepower.

  The sun was about down, hanging just above the low-country vista. Wilder took his eyes from the road to absorb the beauty, wondering, not for the first time, if this would be his last sunset. He wasn't fatalistic, just realistic. He had loaded weapons in the Jeep, he was following a rogue moneyman, a Russian mobster with a very bad reputation was lurking around somewhere, and the CIA was trying to play the whole mess from the outside. Wilder's experiences were that the CIA wasn't good at playing anything. But if this was his last sunset, it was a great one, made all the better because of the past twenty-four hours with Lucy Armstrong.

  Lucy. If something happened to him… He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number.

  LaFavre answered on the second ring. "Swamp Rat Air-"

  "Rene," Wilder said.

  LaFavre stopped cold. "Yeah?"

  "Need a favor if things don't go well tonight."

  "What are you talkin' about, boy?"

  "Lucy Armstrong. If something happens to me, you look out for her."

  "Right," LaFavre said. "Maybe better if I come join you, make sure nothing happens to you."

  "Nope," Wilder said. "Just take care of Lucy if I can't."

  "You got it."

  Wilder clicked off the phone and then snapped his eyes back to the road as an eighteen-wheeler roared toward him along the narrow two-lane highway and passed with a blast of wind. He glanced at the tracker. Finnegan's dot was curving around, which meant that once more, Wilder was driving along the route they had taken this morning looping back toward east Savannah and the airport. It seemed as if everything bad had happened in this area: the stunt going wrong, Stephanie's accident, the Finnegan meeting.

  "Fuck," Wilder said as he saw the dot turn left into the Wildlife Refuge. Who was Finnegan meeting? He pulled the Jeep over to the narrow strip of grass on the side of the road. It was getting dark now, night falling fast. He twisted in the seat and spun the combination on the lock securing the footlocker in the back of the Jeep, then reached in and pulled out a set of night-vision goggles. He put the NVGs on his head, but kept them resting on his forehead, not covering his eyes. Not yet.

  He watched the small screen and saw Finnegan's dot come to a halt. Looking at the terrain features on the map, Wilder realized Finnegan was in the exact same spot where he and Lucy had met him earlier in the day. He smiled grimly. First mistake. Violating one of Rogers' Rules of Rangering, formulated in 1759: Don't ever go back over the same trail.

  Wilder pulled back onto the road and headed south. Checking the GPS one last time, he pulled the goggles down over his eyes when he was about a half mile from the exit gate and turned them on at the same time he turned off the headlights of the Jeep.

  His world went green as the device amplified the ambient light. He drove to the exit gate at moderate speed. It was shut. Wilder went slightly past it, then pulled to the other side of the road. He parked the Jeep, grabbed the MP-5, and got out. Looking left and right, he didn't see the glow of oncoming headlights. He loped across the road, hopped the metal bar, and continued down the gravel road at a steady
jog for a bit. Then he lay down on his stomach, peering to the south. The grove trees where Finnegan was hidden was directly across the swamp from him.

  According to Rogers' Rules of Rangering, coming up on the site along the road was not a good idea. Wilder gave a small sigh, knowing he could not disappoint the long-departed Rogers, then slithered down the embankment into the black water. The cool water penetrated his clothes and he shivered. He untied the camouflage scarf that he had used to blindfold Lucy from around his neck-he was never going to look at that scarf the same way again-and dipped it in the water, then draped it over his head. It would diffuse the apparent outline of his head, a trick he'd learned from the Navy SEALs. Wilder moved forward, keeping his head and the goggles and the MP-5 above the water's surface as he pressed forward, watching everything through the open mesh of the scarf.

  Tyler could see through his thermal scope that the Irishman's two security people, the ones he thought of as Football Player and Weight Lifter, were in the exact same places they had been for the afternoon meeting. Obviously they had never had a gunnery sergeant screaming at them for months on end that you never, never, never, occupied the same position twice. Never. The Corps had been big on repetition.

  Weight Lifter was just inside the bar gate giving access to the refuge. He had it open, and if he followed form, he would shut it when the Irishman's visitor arrived. Football Player was forty feet down the road from the Irishman's position, sitting uncomfortably- based on his constant shifting-in a clump of palmetto bushes with a submachine gun across his knees. The Irishman was sitting on the front hood of his car. All three of them were waiting for a meeting that wasn't going to happen. Well, not with who they wanted to meet or in a way that was going to make any of them very happy.

  Tyler reconsidered that as he centered the thermal sight on Weight Lifter's head. The man seemed uncomfortable and Tyler wanted to help with that.

  Tyler breathed out very slowly and, when his lungs were empty, waited for that pause between heartbeats and the blood surge in his veins. He pulled the trigger back, a lover's caress, and the subsonic round raced down the barrel, out the suppressor, and hit Weight Lifter in the head less than a second later.

  Two heartbeats after his first shot, he fired the second. Football Player's head slammed forward, chin bouncing off his chest, and then hung limply.

  Time to get up close and personal.

  Tyler put the rifle down and went into the water, sliding down his night-vision goggles as he headed toward the Irishman.

  "So what's up?" Gloom said when he met Lucy on the bridge, keeping an eye out for traffic as the wind picked up.

  "The jig," Lucy said.

  "What jig?" Pepper said, and they both looked down at the little girl, shielded from the wind by Lucy's body, decked out in newly laundered WonderWear topped with a white cardigan and her jeans, plus LaFavre's mirrored sunglasses.

  "It means we're almost finished,' Lucy said, looking down at her double reflection. Then she looked at Gloom, dropping her voice so that Pepper couldn't hear. "Tonight, Nash is going to take the helicopter during the stunt and go pick up an Irish crook who is going to meet a Russian mobster to give him fifty million dollars worth of Pre-Columbian porn."

  Gloom was silent for a moment and then he said, "Okay."

  "The theory is that no one will get hurt since the last thing they want is cops on takeoff."

  "It's a theory," Gloom said.

  "But I don't like it, so I want as many people off this bridge as possible." Lucy nodded down the almost deserted span. "We don't need to actually film it, so we don't need makeup, we don't need sound. Just enough so that to the uneducated eye, it looks like we're filming a movie."

  "Okay," Gloom said.

  "How many people is that?"

  Gloom thought about it. "The lighting guys can set up the lights and go back to base camp. We'll put the camera on a truck bed. I'll handle the camera and the clapper. You direct."

  "What about me?" Pepper said. "Aunt Lucy needs me to bring apples and water."

  "Thank you very much," Lucy said. "But tonight, there's no eating on the set. Not during stunts. It's too dangerous."

  "Okay," Pepper said, looking unconvinced.

  "And I suppose we need stunt crew," Gloom said.

  "Count on it," Lucy said. "Nash, Doc, Karen, they're all in-"

  "Hey, look," Pepper said, peering around Lucy's legs.

  "Evenin', ma'am," somebody said from behind her, and she turned to see LaFavre, tipping his hat to her.

  "Major LaFavre," she said, not sure what the hell he was doing there.

  "They said down in base camp that y'all were up here," he said, and then he looked down to where Pepper was tugging on his pants leg.

  "Thank you for my sunglasses," she said. "They're very cool."

  "You look quite fetching in them, my dear," he said to her and then smiled at Lucy, but his voice was level and serious, not flirting at all. "You wouldn't happen to know where my buddy J. T. Wilder is now, would you?"

  "Not exactly," Lucy said, feeling a flare of alarm. "He was going to meet someone."

  "He appears to be concerned for your safety," LaFavre said.

  "I'm concerned for my safety, too." Lucy relaxed a little. "Hell, I'm concerned for everybody's safety."

  LaFavre looked down again at Pepper, who was yanking on his pants leg again.

  "I cannot see," she said, hemmed in by six adult legs.

  LaFavre reached down and picked her up effortlessly and set her on his shoulders.

  "Cool," she said and wrapped her arms around his head, knocking his pilot's cap askew.

  "Is this where the trouble's going to be?" LaFavre said, squinting up at the bridge.

  "That's our guess." Lucy took a deep breath. "They're going to bring a helicopter in with a cargo net…" She stopped when he shook his head, making Pepper giggle.

  "Too much wind. Damn near impossible to do it in no wind. With this…" He shook his head again. "Never gonna happen."

  "Then where?" Lucy looked around. "We're shooting here. This is where they wanted it set up. This bridge, right here."

  "I don't know." LaFavre looked around again. "Hard place to get off of. Block both ends, you got yourself a trap. Only way off is up in chopper-which I doubt your stunt pilot can do-or over the rail with a rope."

  Lucy looked at Gloom.

  "No idea," Gloom said. "Okay, you directing, me on camera, Nash, Karen, and Doc on stunts."

  "And J.T.," Lucy said.

  "Plus Bryce."

  "No," Lucy said.

  "That'll be the giveaway," Gloom said. "Unless you're going to tell Bryce that we're not really shooting the last stunts, he's going to throw a fit. And then if he knows you're not shooting the stunts, he's gonna throw a fit. So basically, he throws a fit-"

  "Oh, hell," Lucy said.

  "-And everybody will know in five minutes."

  "Bryce then, but not Aether."

  "Would Althea be the young lady in Blow Me Down?" LaFavre said.

  "Uh," Lucy said, not sure what he was talking about.

  "Yes," Gloom said.

  "Very talented.' LaFavre reached into his jacket and pulled out a card, which he gave to Lucy. "Should anything untoward happen this evening, you can reach me at that number."

  "Thank you," she said, even more confused.

  "And should you need assistance at any time afterward," he said, his voice kind, "I will be at your service."

  "Thank you," she said, really confused now but even more touched. "Uh, Major LaFavre, do you know something I don't know?"

  "We take care of our own, my dear." He looked up at Pepper, who was still hanging on to his cap. "Would you like to return to base camp, young lady?"

  "Yes, please," Pepper said. "It's very windy."

  "Yes, it is," Lucy said, looking out over the river.

  "I'll tell everybody else to stay in base camp tonight," Gloom said, as LaFavre tipped his hat and started down the bridge with
Pepper on his shoulders. "Pack up now so we can get out of here early tomorrow."

  "That's good," Lucy said and thought, Where is J. T.? And what had happened that he'd sent his best friend to watch out for her?

  "You okay?" Gloom said.

  "Nope," Lucy said and followed LaFavre off the bridge.

  Wilder saw a light glow directly ahead, which went out after a few seconds. Finnegan and his damn cigar. Stupid. As he moved through the chilly water, watching out for gators and other nasty critters, he hoped the asshole was enjoying his smoke.

  I hen he froze.

  There was someone or something else out here. He couldn't say how he knew that, but he for damn sure knew it. The last time he'd felt this, he'd been on his way to Baghdad International when he'd ordered the driver of his Up-Armor Humvee to slam on the brakes. Fifty feet short of an improvised explosive device waiting to blow them to hell.

  Wilder's nostrils flared as he slowly looked left, then right, searching. He caught a faint whiff of Finnegan's cigar.

  Darkness was for predators. That had been true of every place around the globe Wilder had ever gone. But was this predator human or animal?

  Movement to his right. Wilder had the stock of the MP-5 tight into his shoulder, the weapon just above the black mirror of the water's surface. A ripple, a wake, something moving. Wilder slowly let the air out of his lungs as he spotted the small dark spots of the alligator's snout and eyes. Not far away and moving south, just like him. Finnegan was drawing the predators in.

  Wilder continued forward, the submachine gun at the ready.

  He had halved the distance to Finnegan, but the going was slow. He could clearly see the red glow of the tip of Finnegan's cigar. Who was he waiting for? Nash?

  He glanced right. The damn gator was keeping pace.

  But so was something else. Wilder blinked as he swiveled his head back to the front and then went a quarter turn back right. What the hell? A dark blob was farther away than the gator, also in the water, moving in a line toward Finnegan. Wilder strained to see through the goggles. Not another gator.