Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero
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“Mighty hot today, to be sitting inside a vehicle like that, with the window only half down,” the small-town Georgia policeman said to the dangerous Kazbekistani terrorist tied up in the backseat of Meg’s car.
“I am used to the heat,” Razeen said in his heavily accented English. He’d gotten awfully lucid awfully fast. He must’ve been playing at being out of it when they’d first gotten out of the car, Meg realized. “Everything is fine. My young friends were having a lover’s quarrel. We all thought it best not to continue it while on the highway. We’ll be back on the road in no time, of this I am sure.”
Meg looked at John. What the hell was going on? Why didn’t the cop see Razeen’s handcuffs? And why wasn’t Razeen screaming his head off that he was being kidnapped?
She met John’s eyes. I love you. If he’d been looking for a diversion, that had worked. She’d been ready to pull out her gun, but his words—as untruthful as they were—had made her hesitate just a moment. Just long enough for Razeen to start talking.
Why wasn’t he giving them up?
“He figures he’ll have a better chance getting away from us,” John said, low enough so the cop couldn’t overhear him. “If he sounds an alarm, he’ll be taken into custody. And then he’s really screwed.”
“Where you folks from?” the cop asked Razeen in his thick drawl. “What’s that accent you got there? French?”
“French, yes. Oui,” Razeen lied. “I am from France. My friends, of course, are American.”
“Heading down to Florida?” Apparently, to this cop, a foreigner was a foreigner was a foreigner. “This time of year, we get a lot of tourist traffic just passing on through.”
“Tourists, that is right,” Razeen replied. “My friends are taking me to see your fabulous Disney World. I have heard it is not to be missed.”
The cop seemed satisfied that they wouldn’t be staying in his jurisdiction for long. “You be sure to enjoy Mickey Mouse, you hear?”
“I will, of that I am most certain.”
The cop straightened up and looked at Meg carefully. She knew her eyes were red and her hair looked like hell. He looked from her to John Nilsson and back. He may not have known a Frenchman when he saw one, but he knew the signs of domestic trouble. “Everything all right, ma’am?”
Heart in her throat, she nodded. “Yes, thank you.”
He gestured with his head back behind them, toward the fence. “That old factory back there’s private property. You best get going as soon as possible. The owner don’t like folks hanging about out here.”
“I think we’re ready to hit the road.” John headed around, past the cop, to the driver’s side of the car. “Honey, you got the keys?”
He knew damn well that she had the keys. As Meg watched, unable to stop him, he climbed in behind the wheel.
With the cop standing there, there was nothing she could do but get into the car and hand John those keys.
His eyes were apologetic—no doubt because her own were shooting fire. “I’m going to do whatever I have to, to stick close to you,” he told her quietly. In Welsh.
I love you. No doubt he’d been doing “what he’d had to” when he’d said that to her. It was no more real than her kissing him to get the car keys had been. She knew that. She’d known it the moment the words had left his lips.
It was stupid the way her heart had leapt so crazily when he’d said it.
As Meg clenched her teeth, John started the car. He did a three-point turn under the cop’s watchful eye and headed back toward the interstate.
I love you.
Right. She wanted to cry.
This was just another game they were playing—a life and death game this time. And Meg had just lost this round.
In every way imaginable.
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Sixteen
LOCKE WAS WELL on her way to being skunked.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much to drink.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a drink, singular.
She couldn’t remember why she’d ever had such an aversion to Ens. Sam Starrett. Ens. Roger Starrett. That was the man’s real name. Roger not Sam.
Roger-not-Sam was one unbelievably gorgeous man.
Provided, of course, that a woman went for tall, big-muscled, macho cowboy rednecks with long legs, perfect, perfect asses, sky blue eyes, and solid senses of humor.
Funny how she’d never particularly noticed his sense of humor before. Right now, she couldn’t stop laughing at damn near everything he said.
“Roger.” Locke laughed, and he laughed with her. He was nearly as skunked as she was.
“You know, it really used to piss me off when you called me that,” he said in his good old boy drawl that used to piss her off, but now flowed past her like warm honey, “but right now I don’t mind it at all. What’dya know?”
“If your name’s Roger,” she asked, propping her chin up in her hand on the bar, “why does everyone call you Sam? Or sometimes Bob. I’ve heard Stan Wolchonok call you Bob. Sam, Bob, anything but Roger.”
He laughed, and she made herself frown at him. She was serious. She really wanted to know.
“Bob is from some book,” he told her. “I don’t remember—you’ll have to ask the senior chief. He’s always reading something or another, and I think there was some book he read with some guy named Bob Starrett.” He poured her another drink. “Sam comes from Houston. You know, Sam Houston, famous Texan? The guys started calling me Houston, and the next thing I knew, I was Sam.”
Locke tried to get it straight. “They called you Houston because you came from Houston?”
“No, because my name was Roger, and I was from Texas, and you know, Roger, Houston? You know, like NASA?”
“Got it.” Roger, Houston was what the astronauts said over the radio when they spoke to the NASA base in Houston from outer space. The fact that his first name was Roger had given him the nickname Houston. And once everyone started calling him Houston, the nickname Sam came out of that.
It made sense in a too-skunked sort of way.
Locke sighed and took a sip of her whiskey. It no longer had much of a taste. “Nobody ever gave me a nickname.”
“Not true.”
She looked at him, sitting there smiling at her, like some kind of cowgirl’s fantasy. “Sweet thing isn’t a nickname, Rog. It’s an insult. It’s objectifying. You know, all those generic so-called terms of endearment do nothing more than take away a woman’s individuality. You call me sweet thing and I’m one of two thousand nameless, faceless women you’ve encountered in your life. You call me Locke, I know without a doubt that you know who I am.”
“Fair enough. Although two thousand might be a little high.”
“What if I called you Cute Ass?” she said. “How would that make you feel?”
Sam threw his head back and laughed. “Pretty damn good, actually.”
“No, it would not.”
“Hell, yes, it would. It would mean that maybe you spent some time checking me out. Because I know for a fact that I do have a particularly cute ass.” He topped off her drink again.
“Trust me, it might be amusing for a while, but eventually it would make you feel as if you had no real value as a human being, and—” Locke stopped. Looked at her full glass. Looked at the bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty. Looked at his glass. Tried to remember when the last time was he’d picked it up and taken a drink. Couldn’t.
As an experiment, she picked up her glass, took a healthy swallow, and set it back down on the bar.
“How about if I call you Alyssa and you call me Sam?” he said. “No sweet thing, no cute ass, no Roger. That sound fair?”
“But your name is Roger.”
“I could argue that you are one very sweet thing,” Starrett replied. He laughed at the look on her face. “But I wouldn’t dare.”
“You are!” she exclaimed. “You’re trying to get me drunk, aren’t you? You son of a—”
“Whoa.” He put the bottle down. “I am not. I mean, yes, I am helping you forget your troubles, and frankly,” he said with a laugh, “I think I’ve already done a damn fine job of it, but I promise, my motives here are completely pure. No ulterior motives. Really. I’m not doing anything I didn’t do when WildCard had his meltdown a few months ago. I’m just . . . I’m trying to make sure you relax tonight.”
He was protesting just a little too much. Locke narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you’re trying to get me drunk because you’ve got a meeting planned later with John Nilsson, and you want to make sure I can’t follow you.”
He snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
But that was exactly what he would do and say if she were right and he was trying to throw her off course.
“No, it’s not. And, guess what? I can still follow you.”
She stood up, just to prove her point. The world wobbled, but she wouldn’t let herself teeter. She lifted her chin defiantly at Starrett. See?
He laughed again. “Yeah, right. Siddown, Locke, before you fall on your face.”
“I can. Go ahead.” She motioned toward the door. “Leave. I’ll follow you.”
He was sitting on the bar stool, one elbow on the bar, the other on the back of his seat, just looking at her, something dangerous in his eyes.
“Well, now,” he finally said. “As lovely as that sounds, you don’t need to follow me. My big plans for tonight include going back to the hotel and scoring some dinner, maybe watching a movie on pay-per-view while I try to rehydrate just a touch, then sleeping this off for about twelve hours straight.”
Locke was searching her jeans pockets for her car keys. She had a pair of handcuffs in her back pocket—useful if she ran into public enemy number one, maybe on her way to the ladies’ room—but no keys. “I can follow you, and I will.”
“Come on, I thought we were friends now. And I’m telling you, friend to friend, that I’m not going anywhere tonight—”
“We’re not friends, Starrett, we’re nemeses who just had a few too many drinks together. Friendship is built on trust. And I trust you about as far as I can throw up.” She looked up from her search for her keys. That hadn’t come out right. “Throw you.”
He was laughing again. “I like the first one better.”
She refused to be distracted by his sparkly eyes, white teeth, and that dimple that appeared alongside his mouth. He had a nice mouth, a great smile and— No, no!
She focused on his forehead. “I’m being very, very serious here. I don’t trust you, Starrett. I’m not going to trust you and—”
“Okay, fine,” he said, giving up. “You don’t have to trust me. You can come back to the hotel with me and watch me like a hawk all night long. Be my guest.”
Locke finally found the key to her car stuck inside several folded five-dollar bills in the front pocket of her jeans. She’d forgotten—she wasn’t carrying her usual twenty pound key ring. She’d taken her car key from the ring and tossed the rest of them into her fanny pack, in the trunk of her car. She just had this one little key with her right now.
Starrett swiftly scooped it from her hands.
“Hey!” She glared at him.
“Nemeses don’t let nemeses drive drunk.”
She had to laugh at that one. “I’m not drunk.” She corrected herself. “Okay, I’m a little drunk. I shouldn’t drive, I won’t drive, but neither should you.”
“This is exactly why God invented taxicabs.” He stood up and pocketed her key. “Look, I really was just planning to get room service and kick back tonight—I mean, that’s what I planned before getting sidetracked by Uncle Jack. Years of heavy drinking’s taught me to go home after getting a buzz on instead of walking the streets and looking to pick a fight. So I’m not going to fight with you, Ms. Nemesis. I’m going home—or at least to the nearest semblance of home that I’ve got right now, which happens to be an enormous two room suite in the Marriott. If you want to baby-sit me, I’m fine with that. You can come on up. You can even sleep on the couch if you want. That way you’ll know where I’ve been all night, and I won’t have to worry about you, shit-faced and alone—”
“I am not shit-faced, thank you very much—”
“And pretending that you’re not shit-faced when you damn well are, lurking in the hall outside my hotel room, attracting God only knows what kind of attention from whatever lowlifes wander those unprotected halls.”
“You mean Karmody and O’Leary?” she asked.
He grinned. “I love it that you just made a joke about two of my best friends. If someone had told me four hours ago that I’d be in a bar laughing at a joke Alyssa Locke made after helping me polish off nearly an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I’d’ve laughed in their face.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Let’s find us a cab.” He headed for the door, looking back to ask, “You following me?”
As Locke went out into the still warm night, it occurred to her that going back to Starrett’s hotel room with him was probably a really bad idea.
But the idea of dinner sounded good, and the thought of lurking in the hall outside of Starrett’s room all night when she was already exhausted and at least partially inebriated—yes, it was true—sounded even worse.
Besides, she certainly had a better shot at keeping an eye on Starrett if she were right there in his room, didn’t she?
It wasn’t as if she were going to do something really stupid, like sleep with the man.
No, she was just a little drunk, she wasn’t stupid.
Locke followed Sam Starrett’s perfect ass right into a cab.
“Meg’s got her weapon pointed right at you,” John said to Razeen as they headed toward the highway. “She’ll shoot you right through the back of the seat if you so much as move a muscle.”
He gave her a look, and Meg quickly took out her gun, angling slightly in her seat so that she could see Razeen.
He’d pulled the blanket over himself—that’s why the cop hadn’t seen that he was cuffed and tied.
“How much longer until we get to Disney World, Mom?” Razeen looked her dead in the eye.
Meg tried not to react. That was the second time he’d mentioned Disney World. Did he somehow know that her drop off point was in Orlando?
Maybe the Kazbekistani Extremists had some kind of home base there and Razeen knew about it. But if Razeen knew it, wasn’t it likely that the FBI knew, too? God, if she was going to come all this way only to walk straight into the FBI’s waiting arms . . .
She couldn’t think about that right now. “How long have you been awake?” she asked Razeen.
“A few hours,” he told her. “I would greatly appreciate something to drink.”
“Don’t get close to him,” John warned her sharply. “Don’t hold a soda for him, don’t reach over the back of that seat—don’t even think about it, Meg.”
She looked at him in exasperation. “He’s thirsty. What am I supposed to do? Ignore him? I hope that wherever Amy and my grandma are, someone’s kind enough to give them water if they’re thirsty.”
John glanced up from the road, and although he didn’t say anything, she knew he didn’t think her daughter needed water anymore.
He thought Amy and Eve were dead.
God damn him.
Fighting tears, Meg gathered up all the straws, both used and unused, that they’d gotten from their fast-food drive through excursions. There had been nowhere to ditch their garbage, so she had six of them all together. She set to work attaching them, one inside the very edge of the other—no easy task while she still held the gun.
“You need not worry. I am no longer trying to escape,” Razeen volunteered.
“I’m
sure you’ll understand if I don’t just take your word for that,” John countered.
“My reaction in the motel was . . . what is the expression? Knee jerk.” Razeen looked earnestly into the rearview mirror at John. “I have been thinking, and I believe there are worse things than becoming a martyr for my cause by dying at the hands of the Extremists.”
He met Meg’s eyes. “Better yet even would be death by an American. Such an event might even make the news on CNN, bringing the world’s attention to the story of my people’s struggle with a government that works methodically to wipe us out. Although CNN will probably carry it just for one day.” He smiled—that same funny, crooked smile that she’d noticed in the photo the Extremist had shown her. “So, you see, your threats that you will shoot me through the back of the seat do little to alarm me.”