by Jayne Castle
“Am I calling in a favor? Guess you could say that. You’re right, you do owe me. If I hadn’t covered for you and Lorraine that afternoon…well, I don’t think we need to go into that, do we?”
There was another short pause. Then Lydia grinned. She gave Emmett a thumbs-up signal.
“Thanks, Sid,” she said. “I appreciate it. I really can’t afford to lose this new client. That’s okay, take your time. I’ll be at this number all evening.”
She hung up the phone and looked at Emmett. “Mission accomplished.”
“Who’s Sid?” Emmett crossed the room and sat down on the sofa. He put both plates on the table. “And why does he owe you?”
“Sid’s a lab tech.” She reached for a slice of pizza. “A year ago he and Ryan’s secretary, Lorraine, had a mad, passionate affair. They got a little carried away one after noon. I walked into Ryan’s office and found them on top of the desk.”
“I take it they were not reading the minutes of the last departmental meeting?”
“Nope. I covered for them. Stalled Ryan out in the hall with some dumb questions until they had a chance to get dressed and Lorraine could take her place at her own desk.”
“What would Kelso have done if he’d found them screwing on his desk?”
“Probably fired them both.”
“Kelso’s a real stickler for appropriate behavior in the office?”
She smiled slowly. “Not exactly. Ryan was sleeping with Lorraine himself at the time. Everyone knew it. He’d have been furious if he’d discovered that she was two-timing him with a lowly lab tech.”
“And here I thought academics were a dull, staid lot. Talk about your shattered illusions.”
“We have our moments.”
He munched pizza while he pondered the details of the conversation he had overheard.
“About that story you used with your friend Sid,” he said after a while.
She licked up a long thread of melted cheese that dangled from her slice of pizza. “The one about my being worried that Ryan was trying to steal my client away from me?”
“I believe your exact words were that you were afraid Kelso was trying to steal your client out from under you.”
“So?”
“I’d just like to clarify one point.”
“What point?”
“Assuming you were referring to me, let me assure you that I have no intention of being stolen out from under you. In fact, I can’t imagine anyplace I’d rather be than under you. Unless maybe on top of you.”
She paused in mid-chew. Her eyes widened. Then she swallowed convulsively. “Uh—”
“Sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it, you know.”
“What? Talk about what?” she demanded.
“You. Me. Us.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. We have a business association. Nothing more.”
“I thought it was men who were supposed to have a hard time with relationship discussions.” He shrugged. “It can wait, if that’s the way you want to handle it. But you can’t avoid the subject forever.”
“Wanna bet?” She started to reach for another slice of pizza.
The phone rang. She dropped the pizza and grabbed the receiver.
“This is Lydia. Yeah, hi, Sid. What have you got?”
Emmett watched the intense concentration gather on her intelligent face as she listened to her friend. He wondered if she knew how incredibly sexy she was when she became so utterly focused.
She waved her hand wildly. It dawned on him that she was signaling for paper and pen. He saw both on the end table, scooped them up, and handed them to her.
Lydia went very still, pen poised over the paper. Then she frowned. “Is that all you’ve got, Sid? Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s better than nothing. Didn’t Lorraine have any idea of who called?”
Whatever Sid had to say was apparently not entirely satisfying. Lydia tossed the pen down. “If that’s all you’ve got, it’s all you’ve got. Do me a favor, don’t mention this to anyone around the lab, okay? I still entertain a few vague hopes of getting my old job back one of these days. What’s that? Right. We’ll have drinks after work sometime soon.”
She dropped the phone into its cradle and looked at Emmett with a combination of triumph and frustration.
“What did you get?” he asked.
“Sid says he checked with Lorraine. There’s nothing on Ryan’s schedule that’s not routine. But she told him that late yesterday afternoon she answered a call in the office. The man didn’t identify himself to her, just asked to speak with Ryan. When he finished the call, Ryan seemed very excited. He came out into the office and asked her for my new phone number.”
“Did she give it to him?”
“Yes. Lorraine, figuring there was some hot-and-heavy gossip going down, listened in on Ryan’s next call, which was to me. But I wasn’t home. Today Ryan was out of the office most of the day. He called in once or twice asking if I had called. When she told him no, he seemed well and truly pissed.”
“Pissed, huh?”
“Yeah. I often have that effect on men.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“At any rate,” Lydia continued, “she took another call for Ryan just as she was getting ready to leave the office today. It was the same man who had called yesterday. She recognized the voice. She was just about to tell him that Ryan wasn’t there when Ryan stormed back into the office.”
“Fresh from having just been to see you at Shrimpton’s,” Emmett observed.
“No doubt. Made exceedingly curious by this exciting turn of events, Lorraine delayed her departure from the office long enough to listen at Ryan’s door while he took the call. She heard him agree to meet the caller later tonight. Apparently Ryan was less than thrilled about the location of the rendezvous, however. Lorraine told Sid that Ryan tried to argue about it, but in the end he agreed to meet there.”
Emmett glanced at the blank pad of paper. “I assume Lorraine did not get the name of the meeting place?”
“Unfortunately, no.” She picked up the pen and irritably tapped the point against the paper. “But I’ve got an idea.”
Emmett helped himself to another slice of pizza. “You want to stake out Kelso’s place and see where he goes tonight.”
She looked at him. “How did you guess?”
“It just came to me in a blinding flash of the obvious.”
Her brows rose. “You mean you were thinking the same thing.”
“Right. A case of great minds resonating together, I guess.”
22
SOMEWHERE AROUND TEN-THIRTY Lydia tried to stretch in the close confines of the Slider’s front seat. “If Ryan doesn’t do anything exciting soon, I’m going to have to knock on his front door and ask to use the bathroom.”
“I tried to talk you out of coming with me tonight,” Emmett said with no sign of sympathy.
“Just because you don’t mind using the bushes in the park—” She broke off abruptly as the front door of Ryan’s condo opened. “There he is.”
She leaned forward, excitement bubbling inside her. She could see Ryan very clearly in the streetlights as he walked to his Coaster, parked at the curb.
“There he goes,” she whispered.
There was no need to keep her voice pitched low. The Slider’s front seat afforded ample privacy, parked halfway down the block in the shadow of a large tree. There was no way Ryan could see, let alone hear, her. But the sheer drama of following Ryan to his mysterious appointment had gotten to her. She realized that the rush was not unlike what she experienced when she tangled with an illusion trap.
“I see him,” Emmett said.
She heard the edge in his voice and knew that she was not the only one who was feeling the adrenaline.
“I wonder if we made poor career choices somewhere along the line,” she said. “Maybe we should have become private investigators or something.”
He glanced at her with amuseme
nt as he rezzed the ignition. “I’m told the work is not usually this interesting. Most private investigators spend their time getting evidence of adultery to be used in Covenent Marriage dissolution cases.”
“Depressing. Guess I’ll stick with my job at Shrimpton’s.”
Emmett waited until Ryan pulled away from the curb, then eased the Slider out from the dark shadows beneath the tree. Lydia listened to the soft, hungry whine of the engine and willed Ryan not to look in his rearview mirror.
Kelso drove at a slow, cautious pace, as though he was not particularly eager to get to his destination.
“Probably doesn’t want to have to explain to his client that he failed to get me to cooperate,” Lydia said. “I hope the guy fires him on the spot tonight. Serve him right.”
“I detect a degree of personal animosity, possibly even vengeance, in your tone,” Emmett said.
“Yeah.”
Ryan cruised sedately along the broad avenues of the university district, past elegantly maintained lawns and harmonically proportioned homes and condominiums.
When he left the neighborhood he turned left and started toward the Old Quarter.
“Well, well, well,” Lydia said.
“My sentiments exactly.”
A few minutes later Ryan reached the Quarter and drove even more slowly into the maze of narrow streets that bordered the east wall of the Dead City. Some areas of the neighborhood, those that catered to tourists, were reasonably well lit. But the rest of the Quarter existed in a pervasive gloom.
A block away from the main drag, the tiny, twisted lanes and alleys depended on the weak, erratic glow that spilled from the windows of the area’s taverns and clubs.
“Be careful,” Lydia said. “It would be easy to lose him here. Some of these alleys aren’t even on the city maps.”
“I won’t lose him,” Emmett promised softly.
There was a new quality in his voice. The edge was still present, but now there was something else, something almost feral. She studied him covertly. His expression was unreadable in the shadows, but she sensed the predatory anticipation in him.
A small shiver went through her. Energy leaking from the Dead City, she thought. They were very near the wall.
But she knew that what she felt had nothing to do with stray frissons of ambient psi energy in the area. Her senses were rezzed, and they were vibrating in response to the core of power that resonated deep within Emmett, power that was at once very male and very dangerous. It was as though he was readying himself for hand-to-hand combat. But that made no sense, she thought. They were only here to observe Ryan’s meeting with his client. Why was Emmett radiating such intense energy?
She opened her mouth to ask him if something was wrong. But at that moment she saw Ryan’s car pull over and park at the curb. She peered through the windshield and saw the dim glow of a tavern sign.
“Good grief,” she muttered. “I think he’s headed for the Green Wall Tavern. No wonder he tried to talk his client out of meeting him here.”
“Not an upscale, trendy kind of place, I take it?”
“It’s a bottom-of-the-barrel dive. Makes you wonder what kind of lowlife Ryan is working for. He’s got a lot of nerve bad-mouthing you for being involved with the Guild when his client schedules meetings in a joint like the Green Wall.”
“Nice to know I’m a step up,” Emmet said humbly.
Lydia was grateful for the dark shadows of the front seat. She knew she had gone very red.
She watched Ryan climb out of the Coaster, lock it carefully, and then glance around uneasily.
“He doesn’t like the looks of the neighborhood,” Emmett remarked as he angled the Slider into a space at the curb.
“I don’t blame him.”
Ryan started down the sidewalk toward the Green Wall Tavern. He glanced back at the Coaster several times.
“He’s afraid that when he returns, he’s going to find his windows smashed and his car stripped,” Lydia said. It belatedly occurred to her that the Slider made an even more tempting target for street vandals than Ryan’s Coaster. “And the same thing might happen to your car, Emmett. Maybe we should park somewhere else.”
“Don’t worry about the Slider.” He cracked the door and got out. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”
Unconvinced, Lydia scrambled out of her side and looked at him over the top of the vehicle. “This is one of the worst sections of the Old Quarter in Cadence.”
“The car will be okay.” Emmett came around the front of the Slider and took her arm. “I’ve got insurance.”
“Even so, if we come back here and find the Slider’s been stripped we’ll be stuck.” She peered worriedly back over her shoulder, much as Ryan had done a moment ago.
She caught a glint of green.
She stopped in her tracks and turned fully around to stare at the parked car. There was a very faint but unmistakable acid-green glow hovering around the license plate of the Slider.
Emmett stopped beside her and glanced casually back at the glowing license plate. “I told you, I have insurance.”
“Whew! You can say that again. No car prowler with an eighth of a brain would touch the car of a ghost-hunter strong enough to leave a small ghost hanging around. How did you do that?”
“No big deal. There’s plenty of stray psi energy around here. More than enough for me to anchor a little of it to the car for a while.”
If Emmett could summon even a tiny ghost and leave it attached to his car while he was halfway down the street, she mused, he was much more powerful than she had guessed.
Not that the news should have come as a major surprise, she thought. Weak ghost-hunters probably did not rise to the top in the Guild’s hierarchy. All the same…
“Sheesh,” she muttered.
“Come on.” He took her arm again and tugged her away from the glowing license plate. “We don’t want to lose Kelso.”
There would be time enough later to sweat out the implications of doing business with a hunter who could set a ghost to guard his car in a bad neighborhood, Lydia thought. She forced herself back to the problem of Ryan’s anonymous client.
“We can’t follow Ryan into the tavern,” she said. “He’ll see us.”
“So what? We just want to identify his client. Once we see who it is he’s meeting, it won’t matter if he spots us.”
His logic made sense, but it did nothing to quiet her growing unease. On the other hand, she reminded herself, she was in no position to argue. Following Ryan had been her idea.
Mute, she allowed Emmett to guide her into the synch-smoke-and-gloom-filled interior of the Green Wall. She saw at once that the place was several rungs lower on the tavern evolutionary scale than the Surreal Lounge. Whereas the Surreal exuded a kind of cheerful seediness, the Green Wall was a rough-and-ready, serious drinking place—the clientele had no doubt been asked to leave the premises of other, more upwardly mobile establishments.
Her fears of being seen by Ryan faded swiftly. In places like this, people tended to avoid eye contact. Besides, Ryan was bound to be more nervous than anyone else here. The last thing he was likely to do was look for someone he might recognize.
Emmett found a small booth on the side, and Lydia slipped into the corner. A waitress appeared to take their orders. Emmett sent her away with a request for two beers.
Lydia leaned forward. “Do you see Ryan?”
“He’s at the bar. Alone.”
“Any chance that he spotted us when we came in?”
Emmett shook his head. “He’s got his head down, nursing a beer. I don’t think he wants to be seen here any more than we want him to see us.”
“Hmm. Maybe his big-time client stood him up.” That possibility amused her. “He won’t like that. Ryan’s used to people worrying about keeping him waiting.”
The beers arrived a few minutes later. Lydia peered cautiously toward the bar. She managed to catch a glimpse of Ryan, who looked as if he wished he
was invisible. He was definitely not having a good time, she thought.
“Looks like he’s been stood up, all right,” Emmett said thoughtfully. “Interesting.”
There was another small break in the crowd. Lydia saw the bartender move down the bar to where Ryan was hunched over his beer. The man must have said something, because Ryan’s head came up swiftly.
“We’ve got a problem.” Emmett was on his feet. “Stay here. Whatever you do, don’t go back to the car alone. Got that?”
“I’ve got absolutely no intention of leaving without you. What’s going on? Where are you going?”
“The bartender just handed Kelso a note. I don’t think it was a thank-you from the mystery client. I’ll be right back.”
He turned and started toward the bar. Lydia gave him a minute, during which a sense of impending disaster settled on her. Emmett was walking into trouble. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name.
She put down the beer, grabbed her purse, and slid out of the booth. Plunging through the crowd, she made her way toward the bar, arriving just in time to see Ryan slinking uncomfortably toward the dark hallway marked REST ROOMS. Emmett was hard on his heels, gliding through the throng like a shark through the water.
Both men disappeared into the shadowy passageway. Panic wafted through her. Something was going very wrong here.
Clutching her purse tightly, she pushed her way through the tangle of people gathered around the bar. The synch-smoke was so thick she had to wave her hand in front of her face to clear the air.
She paused in mid-wave when she saw the huge man with hot, bleary eyes looming in front of her. He wore badly stained ghost-hunter khakis and leathers. His hair had even more grease on it than his clothes did. The smell of alcohol on his breath was so strong she was tempted to stop breathing.
“Hey, there, you’re a cute little thing.” He gave her what was no doubt meant to be a devilishly sexy grin, but it fell short and landed somewhere in the vicinity of a drunken leer. “You all alone, honey?”
“No,” she said coldly. “I’m with someone. Please let me pass.”
“Who is he?” The man swayed slightly as he surveyed the crowd behind her. “Point him out. I’ll bet I can convince him to let you go home with me.”
