No Safe Place

by JoAnn Ross

  "Right now, I just want to sit here and sip my brandy and pretend that we're simply two people sharing a nightcap after a lovely dinner. Which seems a lifetime ago."

  "Getting shot at does have a way of changing things."

  "Tell me about it."

  He hit the remote, turning on the CD player. Then groaned inwardly when the vampy voice of jazz great Shirley Horn singing "Soothe Me" came out of the wall speakers.

  "Good timing." Kate nodded her approval. "Was that choice just luck? Or do you have the song set up for whenever women visit?"

  "Pure luck of the shuffle." No way, in this situation, would he have chosen what was, hands down, the most erotic song he'd ever heard. "I can change it." He reached for the remote again.

  "No, don't. I like it." She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and fell silent. But he knew she was still awake when she took a sip of brandy.

  "Soothe me," Shirley was crooning to some unseen lover.

  When just watching this woman swallow made him want to press his mouth against her throat, Nick knew he had now officially stumbled into some very deep quicksand.

  She reached up and unfastened the clip at the nape of her neck, then ran her fingers through her hair in some female way that caused it to surround her face in a glorious halo of fiery curls.

  "Mellow me way down inside," the jazz singer invited.

  Nick wanted to be deep inside, all right. But there was nothing mellow about how he wanted to make Detective Kate Delaney feel.

  "I was working the OCIU—organized crime intelligonce unit." Her tone was flat, almost detached. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Nick figured it was easier for her that way.

  Dragging his dirty male mind away from a fantasy of those red silk spiral curls skimming down his body, following the hot, wet path her mouth was making, he forced himself to focus on her story.

  "It was part of the terrorist information division, a top-secret division created after 9/11," Kate said. "In the beginning, I was so excited when I won the promotion."

  She opened her eyes again. They shone as she thought back on that day.

  Do not freaking think about this woman getting excited.

  "The unit's mandate was to unearth secrets. And keep them."

  "Something, given how you said you and your sister grew up, you were probably real good at," he guessed.

  "Yeah. I was."

  She was absently smoothing her fingers up and down her throat, a gesture that had Nick wanting to run his tongue along that same path.

  "We started out looking for ties to terrorist cells, but within the first six months, we'd begun keeping files on every mover and shaker and politician in the city."

  As Nick's gaze followed those slender fingers into the V of the silk blouse's opening, he mentally unbuttoned one more button.

  "And you were surprised by this why?"

  "How about because I believed we were supposed to be the good guys?" she said in a flare of heat.

  "It'd be a lot easier if white was on one side of the line, black on the other," he said. "Good guys versus bad guys, like those spies in Mad magazine."

  "I was uncomfortable with the situation. So I went to I my lieutenant."

  "Who treated you to a lecture explaining that we're in a war, the terrorists don't fight fair, and between the damn activist courts and the pinkos in the leftist liberal press, the only way your side had a fair shot to counter the balance and keep America safe was by extralegal means."

  "That's exactly what he said. In the beginning, it wasn't all that different from what cops have been doing forever. Like pulling over a gang member you knew was dirty to search his car, and worrying about finding probable cause after the fact.

  "I'd never liked that, and refused to do it myself when I was on patrol. But I could certainly understand the theory that a lot of cops believed, that sometimes you just knew that if a guy wasn't guilty for one thing, he'd done something else. And would do a lot worse later on."

  "Might as well get a conviction and get the scumbag off the streets."

  "That was always the argument."

  "Thus making those same streets safe for women and children," he said dryly.

  Cops took a lot of crap. Day in and day out. Nick could understand how it'd get old real fast and how a lot of starry-eyed idealists would soon start believing that if they gave some crap back, eventually it'd all even out.

  "That's the kind of thinking that can become a problem if the guys at the top of the food chain let it get out ol hand," he said. "Which I guess is what happened to your covert unit?"

  "It didn't take long for things to go spiraling way out of control," she agreed. "If you were connected with the right people, harmful facts were deleted. Even falsified. II you were seen as an enemy, the opposite happened."

  "You could've quit."

  "I know. And I probably should have. No, strike that. I definitely should have. But I didn't want to let them drive me out of a career I'd worked so hard at."

  She took another sip. "There was this mob lawyer we couldn't quite nail. So one of the guys went to his wife with pictures of him having sex with one of his string of girlfriends. She divorced him, got a generous cash settlement, which she immediately hid away in some offshore banks, then turned him in to the IRS."

  Kate frowned at the memory as she ran a short buffed nail around the rim of the crystal glass. "Mission accomplished. When I complained about the tactics, the captain told me if I made waves, I'd be back to chasing down rats on the waterfront and arresting transients for pissing against buildings."

  "But despite that threat, you still went to the feds?"

  "We were fishing for online predators and got a high-rolling political donor caught in our net. He'd been talking dirty to teenage girls in chat rooms. And presumably, if the conversations were any indication, doing a lot more.

  "I wanted to do a sting. At least put a tail on him. Catch him at the girl's house, or a motel. But the file mysteriously disappeared one night and he suddenly stopped going online. It was like he'd been tipped off. That went way too far over the line for me, so yeah. I went to the feds. With the copies of the emails I'd downloaded onto a flash drive."

  "Thus ending your police career."

  "But I wasn't the one in the wrong."

  "Doesn't matter. You crossed that thin blue line, sugar. Broke the unwritten law about cops not ratting out other cops."

  "Even when those cops are breaking the very laws they've sworn to protect?" she asked on a short, hot flare of indignation.

  Aw, hell. She still didn't get it. "You're not saying you're planning to go back?"

  Didn't the lady cop realize that the odds of her surviving there would be along the lines of bin Laden joining the U.S. Special Forces?

  "I want to. I thought I could, in the beginning. The Justice Department attorney assured me that by getting rid of those few bad apples, I could make the department strong again. Stronger, even, than it had been before."

  "Wonder Woman lives."

  "What's wrong with wanting to make things better? To fix things? That's what cops are supposed to do."

  "And you couldn't let the bad guys drive you out. Because then they'd win."

  "That's exactly why I wanted to stay." She looked surprised that he'd understand. "But I'll admit it's not real encouraging when you start getting death threats on your answering machine and your picture is put on targets on the police firing range."

  "Better your picture getting shot at than your body. Which, need I remind you, was exactly what happened earlier this evening."

  She opened her luscious mouth. Closed it again. Then polished off the last of her brandy

  "Surely you don't think someone would come all the way to Louisiana to make good on one of those threats?"

  "Anything's possible."

  He'd thought that shooter might have targeted her because she'd hit town and begun making waves about her sister's death. Or maybe even because LeBlanc's goons had
n't gotten the word Tara was dead and had mistaken Kate for her twin.

  But this news flash about death threats from Chicago cops definitely added a new wrinkle. Especially knowing that Dubois had found out about her testimony.

  The guy was incompetent.

  He was also as crooked a cop as Nick had ever met.

  Could he have come up with a payback plan for her with those corrupt cops back in Chicago?

  If there was money in it?

  Abso-fucking-lutely.

  19

  "GOD, I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING. I'm thirty-one years old." She rubbed her temples again. "I've been a cop for ten years, and until I landed in the OCIU, I thought of myself as one of the good guys. Every day I strapped on a pistol, put on my white hat, and walked out my door like goddamn Rebecca of Sunnyside Farm, out to protect and serve."

  "Sunnybrook."

  "What?"

  "Though I don't think she ever packed a pistol, it's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

  "How would a big manly guy like you know a thing like that?"

  "Hannah—the librarian sister?—read it so many times the pages started falling out. My dad was a Vietnam vet who came back from in-country with what people these days would call issues. It wasn't always easy around our house, and I always had the feeling she was trying to beam herself into the story."

  "That's tough."

  Something like compassion moved across her tired eyes. He wasn't surprised when she shook it off, like a batter shaking off a wild pitch. Compassion tended to appeal to a person's better angels, and when that happened, you could go soft.

  Which was the one thing the lady didn't need right now.

  "Sunnyside, Sunnybrook, whatever." She pressed on. "My point is that until all this shit hit the fan, I'd begin each morning fooling myself into believing that I might make a difference.

  "Oh, I knew people don't naturally feel all warm and fuzzy toward cops. When I was assigned to a patrol car, people hated to see me in their rearview mirrors because they figured I had nothing better to do than ruin their day by giving them a ticket. If I walked into a Krispy Kreme and ordered a cup of coffee, right away people'd start making lazy-cop and donut jokes."

  "I'm amazed they dared," he murmured.

  "They might not have said anything to my face," she allowed. "But I could feel them thinking it. There was this one time I was on patrol along Lakeshore and pulled into the parking lot of the aquarium, and this woman with a kid waved me down."

  She was on a roll now, getting all caught up in the frustration of her situation. Nick figured she had another five minutes, tops, before she crashed.

  "The kid was about three, maybe four, and pitching a hissy fit because his mother wouldn't buy him a stuffed toy shark. Know what the woman told her son?"

  "That if he didn't shut up and behave, she was going to have you arrest him and take him away to jail?"

  "Yeah," She shoved her hand beneath her bangs, lifted her hair. "How did you know that?"

  He shrugged. "I suppose it goes with the territory."

  "But why? Kids are supposed to know that if they get in trouble, they can call a cop. But that little boy was looking at me like I was the Wicked Witch of the West. It's no wonder kids buck authority, with parents telling them shit like that."

  Personally, Nick thought kids bucked authority because it was their nature, and part of the growing-up process.

  "Helluva life we've chosen for ourselves, huh, Broussard? Even though you've gone private, you're still spending your days hanging out with the lowlifes and the scum of the gene pool."

  "It's not written in stone, you know. We could always do something else."

  "Sure. I hear the city's short on doctors. You can start doing heart transplants and I'll become a brain surgeon."

  "That may be a bit more of a change than I had in mind. Ever think of taking some time off?"

  "In case you weren't paying attention to Dubois, I just happen to be on administrative leave."

  "That's not time off when you're down here digging into a case that'll probably come back a suicide."

  "Like you wouldn't do the same for one of your sisters."

  "Mais, yeah, I sure as hell would. But maybe, once we figure out what happened, you should just get away somewhere for a few weeks to unwind."

  "Unwind? Like a vacation?"

  She made it sound like a dirty word.

  "Got something against vacations?"

  "How about they sound boring?"

  "Depends on the company. I picked The Hoo-yah up for a song from this surgeon who moved to Arizona, where he wouldn't have to worry about any more hurricanes. I'll hoist anchor and by this time tomorrow well be off to Alaska. What do you say, chère? We'll watch glaciers crash into ice-blue waters, visit some old gold-rush towns, have some hot sex, check out some totem poles, have more hot sex. Watch whales. Maybe have sex while watching whales."

  "You're kidding, right?"

  "Okay. We can skip the totem poles."

  She was having trouble holding that frown.

  "Given that I hate cold weather, I think I'll pass on any state with glaciers."

  She did not, Nick noted, discount the hot-sex part of the suggestion. He also figured that her dislike of cold could be another reason, along with the fact that her cop career there was toast, for her not to be in any hurry to go back to Chicago.

  "No problem. We'll sail down to Cozumel, then through the Panama Canal, where we can kick back on deck and watch the rain forest go by, have some hot sex, then head up the coast, maybe find a fiesta in Acapulco, and after I rub sunscreen into every luscious pore, we'll let the cliff divers wow us in Mazatlan."

  "What are you doing here when you could be sailing the world?"

  "Maybe I was waiting for a first mate. And maybe the timing wasn't right."

  As she took that in, Kate rubbed a fingertip on the dirty thigh of those ugly black slacks he was going to be glad to see her get rid of.

  "Timingis everything," she murmured. "Or so they say."

  She wasn't going to ask. But she wws curious. He was beginning to read her tells, those little giveaway signs that let him know what she was thinking.

  Not that she had that many. The lady was good. But Nick, whose life had for the past fifteen years depended on the ability to know what his enemy was up to, was better.

  "My dad ate his gun a few months ago," he said after he'd let the silence spin out for a couple minutes. "He left me with some business to clear up."

  "And have you? Cleared it up?"

  "Just about. I'm working on tying up a few loose ends."

  Her remarkable eyes narrowed as, like any good cop would do, she latched onto what he hadn't said. "Was the case cut-and-dried?"

  "It closed the same day."

  He could see the wheels turning in her head. "But you have doubts."

  He shrugged, finding it ironic they'd have this in common. What were the odds of two suspicious suicides in nix months? Both somehow connected to Leon LeBlanc?

  Slim, but not impossible. Especially since, as he'd told her, in many ways New Orleans was a small town.

  "My old man was a marine back in the sixties and curly seventies. He saw a lot of combat. In 'Nam, then later as a cop, here on the streets. Streets that can, at times, define mean. New Orleans was, after all, the murder capital of the world for most of his years on the force. Big Antoine also had himself a fondness for Jack Daniel's, he, so I suppose anything's possible."

  "You don't believe he committed suicide."

  "No. I don't."

  She no longer looked exhausted. In fact, she reminded him of his old bird dog, Laffite, when the blue-tick hound had been flushing out a covey of quail. Her eyes, lit with interest, were as bright as emeralds, and if the lady had had a tail, it'd be wagging.

  "Maybe, since you're helping me find out about Tara, I could help you investigate your father's death," she suggested. "Tit for tat, so to speak,"

  Despite the fact
that his father was his least favorite subject, Nick couldn't help laughing. "There's nothing I'd love better than to play with your tits, chére."

  The surprised laugh that burst out of her was rich and warm and sexy as hell. Nick had always preferred women who could laugh in bed. Then reminded himself that he was a professional.

  And professionals didn't go to bed with clients.

  Well, okay, maybe Sam Spade had. And Philip Marlowe. And a lot of those other guys from those cool old

  black-and-white film noir flicks. Usually the PI was played by Bogie. Of course, the client was always some glamorous dame who was setting him up for the fatal fall.

  Which, in this case, just might be worth the risk.

  "Oh, hell," she said.

  Everycell in his body went on red alert. "What's wrong?"

  "I'm about ready to crash."

  It was like watching a brightly colored balloon de-i flate. He'd seen the same thing happen in BUD/S training, when a gung-ho wannabe would suddenly hit the wall and end up ringing out.

  "Let's put you to bed."

  "Why am I not surprised you'd suggest that?"

  The fact that she didn't protest when he took hold of her arm and hauled her off the couch revealed how exhausted she was.

  "I meant alone. As delectable as you may be, even when you're about as wrung out as a wet dishrag, it could do irreparable damage to my ego if you were to fall asleep while I was making love to you."

  "I don't think anyone could dent your ego with a jack-hammer." She was weaving on her feet, like a drunken sailor on shore leave. "A mortar."

  Also like a drunk, she was concentrating mightily on putting one foot in front of the other.

  Step. Sway. Focus.

  "Want some help?"

  "This boat, as lovely as it is, isn't exactly the Queen Mary," she said. "What is it, a fifty-footer?"

  "Fifty-eight."

  "So, are you suggesting I'm not capable of walking less than sixty damn feet?"

  "No. I'm suggesting you look ready to fall on your face."

  "If that's your idea of flattering a woman, Broussard, I'm amazed you ever get laid."