Whirlpool

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Shooting people wasn’t as easy as the media made it look. It sure as hell wasn’t as neat.

  He worked the slide of the pistol and locked it in the open position. He reversed the pistol and stared down the muzzle, turning it until the light on the worktable poured through the open receiver.

  “Dirty,” he said, squinting down the muzzle again. “Didn’t your father teach you how to clean it?”

  Numbly Laurel watched him handle the heavy pistol. It seemed utterly ordinary in his hands, like a carpenter’s plane or a jewelry maker’s chasing tool.

  “That gun is cleaner than the day it came from the factory,” she said. “Why is your client afraid to call the police?”

  He lowered the gun, picked up the magazine from the table, and slapped it expertly into the handle.

  “You’re very quick,” he said, “but you’re playing a game whose rules and penalties you can’t even begin to guess.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. Just the truth. I can accept your decision not to betray your father. I can even admire it, though I know you’re wrong. And if you keep going the way you have, you’ll be dead wrong.” He shrugged. “I can’t let you do that, any more than you can betray Jamie Swann.”

  The hair at the base of Laurel’s skull rippled in primal response to Cruz’s tone. He wasn’t using his richly masculine voice to persuade her. There was no lilt, no shading, no dramatic pauses, no sensuous hush of darkness and velvet. The words came out flat and matter-of-fact.

  “You can’t stop me,” she said. But her voice, unlike his, had shades of uneasiness in it.

  “I could take you with me.”

  She glanced at the pistol in his hand. Her pistol.

  “At gunpoint?” she asked acidly.

  His mouth kicked up at one corner in an odd little smile. “I think I’ll just throw you over my shoulder and carry you off to my desert hideaway. I’ve always wanted to do that to a beautiful woman.”

  “You’re retrograde,” Laurel said, but there was a shadow of laughter in her voice.

  “Thank you.”

  “Besides, private investigators don’t have desert hideaways.”

  “No?”

  “They have cheesy little offices with secondhand desks and the kind of old telephone you see in film noir.”

  He laughed out loud. “And you call me retrograde.”

  She found herself smiling, pleased that she had removed the ice and distance from his eyes.

  “I’m a different kind of private eye entirely,” he said. “All our phones are cellular. We have a worldwide radio system to keep in touch with our operatives.”

  “Pagers too?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to flush the damned thing.” He looked again at the heavy, old-fashioned, and still quite deadly pistol in his hands. “You might like the desert. You’d certainly enjoy Cassandra.”

  Laurel’s expression became wary. “Wife, girlfriend, or pet iguana?”

  “None of the above. She’s my boss, Cassandra Redpath.”

  “The Cassandra Redpath? Ambassador, professor, historian?” Laurel asked, startled.

  “You left out analyst for the CIA and the State Department.”

  “It wasn’t mentioned on the book flaps.”

  Cruz looked at Laurel with an intense personal interest he could barely veil.

  “Books, huh?” he asked softly. “You actually read her?”

  “Actually, I devour her. Dr. Redpath is the only historian I’ve ever discovered who understands art as fully as she does politics. That’s probably because she’s a woman.”

  Cruz looked pained. Another female chauvinist. Cassandra will love her.

  He slipped the slide release on the pistol and let the action snap closed. Then he set the safety, laid the gun on the worktable, and looked at Laurel expectantly.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Better get going. We don’t have much time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Go pack your things. Or do you want to travel light?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Sure you are,” he said, smiling.

  But his eyes were deadly serious again.

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be retrograde, honey, but it’s either off to the desert with me—”

  “That’s kidnapping.”

  “—or I call in an operative to live in your hip pocket until this is over.” Deliberately his glance lingered over the flare of her hips. “On second thought, I might volunteer for that duty myself.”

  “Retrograde is too nice a word. Now get out of here before I—”

  “Call the cops?” he interrupted, deadpan.

  Fear, anger, and frustration warred within Laurel. She was boxed. Cruz knew it as well as she did. Better. He was the man hammering down the nails.

  “While you’re thinking of all the ways I’m a mean, nasty, brutish son of a bitch,” he said gently, “go pack.”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She’d never have guessed that a man his size could move so quickly. Before she realized what was happening, he’d grabbed her and lifted her across his chest like a child.

  “Damn you,” she said, struggling. “Put me down!”

  “Fight me or scream and I’ll knock you out cold.”

  Behind Cruz the door vanished with a blunt, shattering sound. He’d heard those sounds before. Without looking he knew that a shaped charge had just blown a man-sized hole in the door between the workroom and the garage.

  He dumped Laurel back onto her feet and whirled to grab the pistol on the worktable.

  “Get down!” he shouted to her as he snapped off the safety and cocked the gun.

  Dazed, she simply stared as two dark figures leaped into the room. Both of them carried guns. The muzzles swept the room, looking for targets.

  Cruz kicked Laurel’s feet out from under her and took her down to the floor, covering her body with his own. As they fell, he brought her gun up, twisting to face the men.

  She would have screamed but she didn’t have the breath. Cruz’s forearm was barred across her back, holding her flat on the cement floor. Her face was turned toward the intruders. She heard two odd, coughing sounds followed by a pair of flat, slapping sounds, like a baseball bat hitting flesh.

  Cruz jerked. The sharp, rolling thunder of two shots burst from Laurel’s pistol.

  One bullet struck an intruder in the shoulder, knocking him off balance and flinging him against the wall. His gun went flying as he screamed in pain.

  Before that gun hit the ground, Cruz fired again.

  Twice.

  The second intruder clutched his wrist and screamed. His gun hit the floor and skidded. When he bent to pick up his weapon, Cruz sent two quick shots after him. Bullets whined off concrete and vanished into the darkness outside.

  Suddenly the two men retreated, running raggedly from the room, leaving their guns behind.

  Cruz came to his feet in a crouch, aiming the pistol with both hands, watching the empty doorway into the garage with an intensity that seemed to throw light into the darkest corner of the room.

  Nothing moved outside. No sounds came but the rapidly fading steps of the retreating men.

  “Are y-you—” Laurel began.

  “Quiet.” Though softly spoken, his command cut off her shaky question.

  Silence echoed.

  He waited for the space of five long breaths. Nothing happened to disturb the returning peace of the night.

  Without moving his eyes from the doorway, he reached behind him with his free hand until his fingers found Laurel’s arm. He squeezed once, firmly, and motioned for her to stay where she was.

  Her cold fingers curled around his hand and pressed once in acknowledgment.

  With the lethal grace of a hunting cat, he stalked silently toward the door. An intruder’s gun lay in plain sight. A glance told him that the gun was a heavy-caliber semiautomatic p
istol with a sausage-sized silencer screwed onto the muzzle.

  Professional talent, professionally equipped, he thought with the cold part of his mind.

  He looked more closely at the assassin’s gun. Where the serial numbers should have been, there were fresh marks left by a steel file.

  Thoroughly professional and squeaky clean. Pretty good, too.

  Meat hunters.

  They had put two of their four shots into the space between Cruz’s belt buckle and his rib cage. His mind knew it, but his body was slow to get the message. Adrenaline made a fine anesthetic.

  Until the crisis passed.

  He bit back a sound as pain finally lanced through his system. Though he told himself to walk to the door and pick up the second gun, all he could do was sink slowly to one knee. A groan came from between his clenched teeth as he fought to stand.

  He lost.

  Laurel appeared suddenly beside him, bracing him. He looked at her, faintly surprised and a bit groggy. He saw her beautiful golden eyes widen with horror as they focused on two gaping holes in the fabric of his dark sweater.

  “No worries,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “If you believe that, you have the IQ of nail polish.”

  She bent to see his wound. He fastened his fingers in her hair and dragged her head upright.

  “No time for that. Not if you want to live.”

  “Me? What about you?”

  “They were after you. I was just in the way.”

  Her eyelids flinched. She didn’t want to believe him. “Will they be back?”

  “I would.”

  She looked into Cruz’s clear, savage eyes. Distantly she knew she should be terrified of him. And she would have been, but for one thing.

  He’d taken the bullets meant for her.

  21

  Cambria

  Monday night

  Laurel shook her head roughly, trying to stop the savage ringing in her ears. The motion made the ringing worse, but she shook her head again anyway, trying to make something return to normal.

  The world had been kicked out from under her feet.

  She could still see her pistol spitting orange fire, feel concussions of sound that were like being hit with fists, hear a man’s scream, guttural words, two dark figures lurching off into the night, and Cruz crouched like a hunter looking for prey.

  It had happened in less time than it took Laurel to run through it in her mind. But even more stunning was the fact that someone wanted her dead. At least, that’s what Cruz believed.

  She still couldn’t.

  “Cruz?” Laurel whispered.

  “Go pack your things. Now.”

  The dark, angular face of the man who had saved her life was drawn with pain. He locked his left elbow against his side and got to his feet. Then he leaned heavily against her worktable. The big black gun was still trapped in his hand like a toy.

  But it wasn’t a toy.

  “Move,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “You can’t go anywhere. You’re wounded.”

  “Banged up real good, but not wounded.”

  “I felt you flinch when the shots hit. I felt it!”

  “So did I. Believe me.”

  He smiled grimly as he put the safety on the pistol and set it on the worktable. Then he tried to get out of his sweater and shirt without moving his left arm.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Stripping. Want to help or do you just want to stand around and tuck dollar bills in my jockstrap?”

  Laurel muttered something that sounded like retrograde macho son of a bitch and reached for his sweater.

  “Jesus, take it easy,” he said, biting back a groan.

  Her hands froze in the act of pulling his sweater up his chest. Close up, she couldn’t see any sign of blood.

  Thank God. The bullets must not have hit him after all.

  But his skin was the color of salt.

  “Cruz?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Still here. Wait. Don’t—move.”

  She heard his breath whistling in and out between clenched teeth. Then came a low sound that could have been a groan as he gave up trying to work his right arm free of the sweater sleeve.

  “All right,” he said, breathing hard. “Pull it off. Gently.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Yeah. Take it off the right arm first.”

  Hesitantly she began dragging the sweater off his right arm, then over his head. When she eased the knit down over his left shoulder, he sucked in his breath hard.

  “Cruz…”

  “Just take the goddamn thing off,” he said through his teeth.

  She pulled the sweater free and threw it on the table. Her hands were shaking. Looking at his closed eyes, pale face, and pain-sharpened features didn’t help to calm her.

  “Now the shirt,” he said.

  “I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

  His eyes opened. He looked at her, saw that she meant it, and smiled crookedly.

  “It’s okay,” he said, touching her cheek gently. “Next time I get shot, I’ll be damned sure not to wear a sweater.”

  She wanted to shout at him for wisecracking about something so serious, but she was standing so close to him that she could see every sign of pain on his face. If he’d rather joke than moan, then she’d just have to suck it up and pretend along with him.

  “Okay,” she said. “No sign of blood so far. Where does it hurt the most?”

  “Left side. Pull the shirttail out first. Then unbutton it.”

  Laurel would have gone around and tugged the cloth loose from the back, but Cruz had his hips braced on the worktable. Awkwardly she reached around him with one hand, avoiding his left side. Leaning her cheek against the right side of his chest, she grabbed a bunch of cloth. It was warm.

  So was he.

  “You smell good,” he said.

  “You don’t. Sweat and cordite.”

  He started to laugh, then swore. “Don’t make me laugh, honey.”

  The midnight-and-velvet voice was back again. Warily, she looked up at him as she tugged on the cloth.

  Looking at him was a mistake. His eyes were like Brazilian aquamarine, clear and crystalline and brilliant, watching her. She’d seen nothing so starkly beautiful as the contrast between his silver-blue eyes and his dense black eyelashes.

  She ducked her head. “It only hurts when you laugh, right?”

  “Wrong. It hurts all the time.”

  “This shirt of yours must hang to your ankles,” she muttered, pulling gingerly at the cloth.

  “Use both hands.”

  “What about your left side?”

  “Just stay away from the ribs.”

  Taking a deep breath, she bent over, put her arms around his lean hips, and reached up to pull gently on the shirttail. To her relief it went much quicker with both hands. Having his belt buckle cool against her cheek was doing unnerving things to her. Not to mention the vital muscular heat of him radiating into her hands, her arms, her face.

  “Laurel?”

  She glanced up just as the shirttail came free. What she saw made her forget to breathe. The expression on his face was a mixture of pain and humor and intelligence.

  And desire. Unmistakably.

  That was when she realized that his belt buckle wasn’t all she had her cheek against. She straightened so fast she nearly fell.

  “Easy, honey,” he said soothingly. “It’s just the adrenaline. Best aphrodisiac on earth.”

  She hoped the light from the staircase was too dim to show the scarlet on her cheeks. “Don’t worry. I won’t faint on you.”

  “Good. I’d have a hell of a time carrying you out to my car.”

  Rather than start an argument over where she was—or wasn’t—going with him, she went to work on his shirt buttons. The fact that he watched each tremor of her fingers with interest didn’t help calm her down.

  �
�Close your eyes,” she said as she fumbled over the last button.

  “Why? I’ve seen myself without a shirt before.”

  She laughed almost helplessly. Then she took a breath that wanted to turn into a sob. Grimly she clamped down on her unruly emotions, pushed the final button free of its hole, and concentrated on getting Cruz out of his shirt without hurting him any more.

  Slipping the dark shirt off his right shoulder wasn’t difficult. Pulling it off the left one made Laurel bite her lip until she left marks. It was no easier on Cruz. Despite his effort not to, he groaned low and deep when he had to lift his left arm.

  To her dismay, beneath his shirt there was yet another layer of clothing to remove, a singlet of dark cloth. It was thick but not bulky.

  “That’s why there’s no blood,” he said.

  Frowning, she noticed a pair of deep furrows in the cloth over his ribs. She bent down and peered more closely, still expecting to see blood. He was right. There wasn’t any.

  Very carefully she touched the furrows. Just beneath the surface of one she felt a hard object the size of a marble.

  “What in the world?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, Cruz probed the cloth for a moment. After a heartfelt curse, he pulled out a bright, shiny slug.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said.

  She did. The hard, smooth weight of the bullet hit the center of her palm. The metal was unpleasantly warm, like a piece of cast gold that hadn’t been allowed to cool long enough before she broke the mold.

  Laurel stared at the bullet and then at the singlet covering Cruz’s chest.

  “What are you, some kind of robot?” she asked, unnerved.

  “Just your average knight in matte black armor,” he said, biting back a groan.

  With a grimace he peeled two Velcro tabs at one edge of the singlet. The front half of the garment lifted off his chest in a piece. Beneath it, he was naked.

  “Soft body armor,” he explained. “Courtesy of the British Special Air Services.”

  Speechless, she simply shook her head, unable to believe that he’d caught a bullet and wasn’t covered in gore. Given the absence of blood, she’d assumed the worst he’d suffered was a flesh burn from a near miss.

  But he’d taken at least one direct hit.