The Huntress

by Dorothy McFalls

Consciousness hung by a thin thread by the time she reached the hospital, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing. Both Jack and Dr. Kilpatrick chewed her ears off for leaving the hospital without permission or anyone’s knowledge.

  “I could sedate her until she’s ready to go home, if you’d like.” Dr. Kilpatrick offered while tying a stitch in Vega’s thankfully anesthetized shoulder.

  Jack considered the idea for far too long.

  “What about Walker?” Vega slurred the question. Couldn’t hurt to try and change the subject. The pick-on-Vega-and-tell-her-how-stupid-she’s-acted discussion had been done to death.

  “What about him? He’s not your concern. He wasn’t your assignment anymore when you chased after him from this hospital bed,” Jack barked back.

  “You aren’t letting Fiona go after him? He’s too dangerous.”

  Jack fell silent, which worried her more than anything else did. “Fiona’s okay,” he said at long last. “I put her on a plane to Atlanta yesterday afternoon.”

  She batted Dr. Kilpatrick’s hands away from her shoulder and jolted up. “You did what?”

  “I could still sedate her,” Dr. Kilpatrick said, struggling to force Vega back down to the metal table.

  She wasn’t ready to be so easily cowed. “Fiona’s green, Jack. She can’t go after that guy. Hell, I’m lucky to have survived, and I know how to take care of myself.”

  “She’s strong, I give you that,” Dr. Kilpatrick said, still straining against Vega’s immoveable chest.

  Jack nudged the doctor out of the way and glared at Vega using the same angry look her father had perfected years ago as a way to control his spirited daughters. Seeing her father’s expression appear so suddenly on Jack’s face was like bumping into a ghost.

  “Lie back down and stop giving the doctor a hard time.” Like an echo from the past, her father might have well appeared in the room.

  “Yes sir,” she answered, automatically. She’d been too well-trained by her police chief father to do anything but obey.

  Jack winked at Dr. Kilpatrick.

  “Atlanta?” Vega mumbled.

  “Fiona’s better trained than you think. Don’t worry. I haven’t given her the authority to do anything other than field research. She’s on a simple job of reconnaissance, questioning every person who’d ever had contact with Walker. She doesn’t have authorization to apprehend anyone.”

  “Pig-headed Fiona who is dying to prove herself to you, Jack?”

  Jack mumbled something under his breath about pots and black kettles. “Don’t worry about Fiona. I can generally handle my employees. Besides, Walker wouldn’t dare go anywhere near Atlanta.”

  Chapter Seven

  Vega woke up panting and completely entangled in her sheets. She’d had the dream again.

  Two and a half weeks since Jack ordered her home to Detroit to heal and Grayson’s searing kiss still hadn’t melted into an unpleasant memory. Something about it had made him seem so...vulnerable. Damn.

  Her mind was wrapped around Grayson as tightly as her sheets had cinched up between her overheated legs. Her nipples puckered as she imagined just what kind of lover he would make.

  She had to be out of her mind. Sex with him would be dangerous—crazy. Even so, the air in her dark, lonely bedroom was so heavy with lust it threatened to suffocate her.

  She should call Butch.

  During the day, she worried about Fiona traipsing through Atlanta in search of a murderer. At night, Grayson slipped into her dreams like a thief, caressing her with his gentle hands until he provoked her into a distressing pique of frustration.

  She always woke up overheated.

  She definitely should call Butch.

  She punched her pillow a couple of times as if wounding a stuffed fabric square could solve anything. What she needed was satisfaction.

  Not even Butch’s skillful attentions could help her with this one, damn it. If she were to ask a shrink, he’d tell her she was frustrated over losing to Grayson. Her dreams were no more than a manifestation of that frustration. She knew all that.

  She untangled herself from the sheets and climbed out of bed. Four-twenty, the clock read. Sleep wouldn’t return again for a while and the dojo opened at five. She might as well get up.

  Besides, some extra time spent training might help chase away her demons.

  * * * *

  “Let me get back on that horse, Jack.” Vega planted herself in middle of her uncle’s office, refusing to budge until he said the words she wanted to hear.

  The low afternoon sun blared through his windows. The weeklong arctic blast had finally blown itself out, but not even the return of daylight lightened her cagey nerves.

  Spending the entire day in the dojo, getting her butt kicked by the master, only added to her frustration. She needed to get back to work. She needed to prove to everyone, herself included, that failing to apprehend Grayson didn’t necessarily brand her a failure. Hell, bounty hunters were lucky to have a fifty-percent success rate. Her determination had led her to an unprecedented one hundred percent capture rate. Her perfect record could survive one blemish. Couldn’t it?

  “You were supposed to spend the day with your mother.” Jack leaned back in his chair and gave her a chilling glare. “Gillie called five times looking for you. Five times I had to listen to how I nearly got you killed.”

  Damn. She’d forgotten all about her mother’s plans to drag her to every fashionable-clothing store in Detroit. Her mother called it “Step One” in reforming Vega’s wardrobe. “I’ll call her tonight and apologize.”

  “You do that.” Jack flipped open a file folder on his desk and began reading.

  She refused to take the hint and leave. “An assignment, Jack. I’m crawling out of my mind from boredom.”

  “No.” His eyes stayed glued to that file in front of him.

  “Why?”

  “You’re not giving yourself time to heal. How many hours a day are you spending training?” Jack picked up a pen and tapped an angry beat on the top of his desk. “How many, Vega?”

  “No more than four.”

  Jack raised a brow.

  “Five at the most.” Her doctors were amazed at the progress of her recovery. Her training partner complained she was holding back, taking too long. She tended to agree with her training partner. Her mind wasn’t injured—just a couple of body parts. Though devilish pains still wracked her shoulder and bothered her head; that was no excuse for losing her edge.

  “Throw me a bone, Jack. I can’t rest.”

  “Can’t?” Jack’s pen tapping picked up speed.

  “Right. Can’t. Not while Fiona is in Atlanta with her neck exposed and Grayson’s on the loose.”

  “Fiona’s okay.”

  “Then let me go to Atlanta and see for myself.”

  “No.”

  She still refused to budge.

  Jack sighed deeply and grabbed a folder from a pile on his desk. “Here.” He pushed the folder to her. “This one.”

  She snatched it up and dashed away before he changed his mind.

  Five minutes later, she slammed the door closed to her office before letting loose a string of colorful curses. What a fool not to ask a few questions before jumping at an opportunity. Jack, that old dog, had tricked her but good.

  Brian Wright, a stockbroker living in the posh suburb of Grosse Pointe, failed to appear at his pretrial hearing last week. A freaking snob, too ashamed to show his face in a grimy public courthouse after being accused of embezzling a small fortune from his firm. He was probably more worried about losing his membership to his prestigious yacht club than any threat of jail time. These rich guys seldom went to jail.

  And going after him just wasn’t worth her time. He wasn’t the slightest bit dangerous. The bond on him was tiny, a mere two thousand. Bringing him to the local police would earn her the usual bounty of ten percent—two hundred dollars, hardly enough to pay for her new leather jacket.

  Jack gave his rooki
es piss-ant assignments like Brian Wright to cut their teeth on. The fact that he expected her to waste her time on this one was a blow. A real kick in the face.

  She scribbled a bunch of notes into her small notebook and got ready to spend the next several hours making the tedious phone calls that any bounty hunter—despite the importance of the pickup—would be required to make. She jabbed her pen repeatedly on her desktop and scanned the rest of Brian Wright’s file. Her gaze strayed to a thick file sitting off to one side on her desk. She absently flipped through the other file folder.

  She’d show Jack. She wasn’t ready to give up searching for Grayson yet.

  * * * *

  Oh hell, Jack gave her a job and she’d be damned if she didn’t do it. The sun was dying in the late afternoon sky as she went out on the hunt for Brian Wright. The foreshortened winter days were just about the only thing Vega disliked about the season. Cold, she could enjoy. The lack of adequate sunlight had begun to leave her as irritable and impatient as nearly everyone else in the city on this blustery and darkening winter day.

  It couldn’t have been her imagination making her think that everyone was scowling worse than usual as she approached a brick and steel low-rise building, could it? Brian and his partner, Guy Pollock, kept an office in the new building out in the posh suburb of Grosse Pointe along with about twenty other small businesses, mostly investment and law offices.

  Ah well, she could understand the city’s collective bad mood. Her day hadn’t been a stellar one, what with finding herself creeping out to the tamer section of the city to track down a bail jumper who was more likely than not hiding out at his girlfriend’s and scared shitless about the prospect of spending a little time in jail.

  When she found him, Vega intended to show Brian the problem with that kind of thinking. Running always made matters worse. She only ran when her life depended on it, and even then, it was sometimes hard to make her feet move.

  So, she figured, if she could be out on the streets facing her failures and working through them, her preppy bail jumper could do the same. Her pace picked up as her frustrations grew. Grayson Walker had caused this trouble. She’d make him…

  Like a whisper in the middle of a deep sleep, a small man appeared at her side.

  She jumped. Her hand instinctively moved to where her gun should have been holstered if Grayson hadn’t stolen it. Not that she needed to rely on a gun for her safety. She didn’t.

  “Shit, Monroe,” she said, turning on her heel. “Don’t do that.”

  Monroe hobbled closer. He was wearing a faded wool coat with an oversized fur collar. Put him in a pair of leather boots, the kind with heels that zip up on the side, and he’d look like a down-on-his-luck pimp. His eyes were glassy, his pupils too large.

  Monroe’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, holding it with a vise-like grip. “Don’t go after this guy,” he said, talking much faster than usual. His twitchiness was flaring up, too. “You’ve already pissed off the big bad in this city by going after that Walker fellow in the swampy south.”

  She peeled his grimy, but at least warmly gloved hand from her new leather jacket. “What are you talking about, Monroe? And what the hell are you doing all the way out here? This isn’t your kind of neighborhood.”

  “Ain’t yours either.” She couldn’t argue with that. The people rushed by as if they wore blinders. All wore neatly tailor suits and tried to pretend that people like Monroe and her didn’t exist in their world. “You’ve stepped into someone else’s nightmare, Vega. When you hunted Grayson Walker, you pulled enough strings to make even Detroit growl. Don’t go after this new guy of yours, like everyone else in this city with dirty fingers, he’s tied to the same shit.”

  Monroe wove a little. Whatever he’d taken, it had sent him flying into outer space. Vega didn’t know whether he knew what he was talking about or not. He usually turned mute after clocking out on such a heavy trip.

  “Come on, Monroe. I’ve just started work on this new assignment Jack’s punishing me with. There’s no way you know what I’m working on. Word on the street doesn’t move that fast.”

  “Brian Wright,” Monroe said, sounding unusually sober.

  How the hell did he know? The cords in her shoulders stiffened. She had to work to keep her expression neutral. “Who doesn’t want me to find Brian Wright?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  He tilted his head like an attentive puppy. “There’s lust in your eyes. It flared when I mentioned that slippery Walker. He shot you, and you’re not done with him yet. That’s what they’re worried about. You’re just about the only one who could catch up to him and expose it all.”

  “What all?” She didn’t like the sound of that. Falling blindly into what sounded like a pit of vipers was something she tried to avoid. She’d much rather peer over the edge and count heads before jumping in.

  She grabbed his arm before he could slip away. “Give me details. Who’s this new boogeyman I should be afraid of?”

  Monroe shook his head violently and jerked away from her. “Did my duty and warned you,” he grumbled, “made everyone happy.”

  Her gaze shifted from the retreating Monroe, back to the office building in front of her. She knew better than to try and shake information out of Monroe when his veins were swimming in a cocktail of drugs.

  But if there was any truth to what Monroe was telling her, she’d wager Brian Wright’s partner, Guy Pollock, would know a little something about this invisible danger gnashing its teeth behind her back.

  Guy looked exactly like he sounded on the phone. Slick. Heavily perfumed pomade greased his thinning, unnaturally dark hair back like a cresting ocean wave. His polyester suit not only screamed for a fashion updating, it was so worn that the pants shined like a mirror in the seat.

  It looked as if their investment business hadn’t been as successful as Brian’s wife had made it sound over the phone.

  Guy Pollock had met Vega outside the office door on the third floor. An hour earlier, with a simple threat of calling a friend who worked for the IRS, she’d convince Guy to cooperate. He fiddled with the lock and grumbled something under his breath before pushing the door open.

  Armed with nothing more than two pairs of handcuffs and a bottle of mace, she followed Guy into a cozy suite of offices. No obvious clues could be found in the reception area or in the adjoining two offices. She poked around Brian’s desk and even searched his trash.

  Nothing.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Guy said. “The police took anything that looked important and they can’t find him.”

  “They’re not searching for him like I am.” She picked up a framed picture of Lake St. Clair taken from a fairly high angle. “His wife said the club is really important to Brian.”

  “It was. They’re going to revoke his membership at the next meeting. He groaned on and on about it to me on the phone...” Guy’s gaze lingered on Vega for a moment and he licked his lips. It looked as if he was imagining licking every inch of her body, the creep. “He didn’t come from money like you and me. He fought for every dollar he made, stupid bastard.”

  She set the photograph of the lake aside and left Brian’s picked-over office. She plunked herself down at the receptionist’s desk and flipped through the appointment book, worming herself into her prey’s head.

  No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Monroe’s warning out of her head. And Guy, though not the most trustworthy of fellows, didn’t seem to have a clue about any big bad ugly scaring the city. A slightly confused, vacant stare had given her more proof of his ignorance than anything he’d said. Maybe he knew but didn’t know what the hell he was dealing with. People in way over their head often proved the most ignorant.

  Or maybe she was a fool for listening to Monroe.

  Her cell phone chirped, cutting short that line of thinking.

  “Yep?” she said, and rolled the chair off to the side to f
ind a little privacy. Guy had enough decency to pretend to be flipping through papers in a filing cabinet on the other side of the room.

  “I’m not interrupting anything am I?” It was Fiona.

  Vega’s heartbeat picked up its pace.

  “Nope. I’m working a cakewalk assignment. What’s up?” Fiona was exactly where Vega wanted to be, hunting Grayson Walker, not playing round up to some greedy little bastard who’d gotten himself in over his head.

  “I need your guidance. Actually, I need your research.”

  “Sorry, Fiona, no can do. You were the one who wanted to test your wings in Atlanta.” Vega couldn’t leave her sister hanging completely, though. “What have you found out so far?” she asked. “Maybe I can point you in a new direction.”

  A safe one.

  “Well, his mother and father are dead, so no help there. The third partner, a...” Vega heard pages being flipped in the background, “Joshua Whitfield won’t return my calls, and won’t give me access to any of the Six-Star Enterprises files.”

  “Hmmm...What else?”

  “What else?” The strain in Fiona’s voice came through loud and clear. “I’ve been banging my head against every wall in Atlanta with no visible success, that’s what.”

  “Okay, okay.” Vega thought quickly, trying to decide on the safest course of action. If her going after Grayson was making someone in Detroit edgy, she certainly didn’t want to send Fiona in a direction that might have her stumbling into a situation that could turn that edginess into a full-blown and dangerous temper tantrum. “Try going to his old neighborhood, the one where he grew up. Interview any neighbors that might have known him or his family.”

  Fiona huffed. “I guess I could do that.”

  “That’s what bounty hunting is about, Fiona—grunt work.”

  “Be easier if you’d just shoot more of your computer files to me. You must have a detailed picture of our fugitive? I know you. Just because Jack has pulled you back, you haven’t stopped working on finding him.”

  “Who me?”

  “Yes, you.” Fiona’s voice grew strained. “Let me help you.”

  “Sorry, Fiona. Not this time.”