“All right.” She wended her way around to the side of the stage and walked up the makeshift steps.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked the clown.
For the next few minutes, Dianna laughed with the crowd below the stage as she was the brunt of the clown’s tricks—unable to open the stick into a bouquet until he tapped her lightly on the shoulder. Opening her mouth at his request, only to have him appear to extract a series of hardboiled eggs.
Fun stuff.
Dianna got into the act, bantering along with him.
She glanced down and gave Julie a wink. Only then did she notice Travis stood beside Flynn and the child. Why was he there instead of at the crime scene?
She had no time to ponder that, for the clown started to juggle a couple of medium-sized balls, tossing them slowly at first. “Here, catch.” He threw one toward Dianna, and she caught it. It had the feel of a water balloon. “Don’t be selfish. Throw it back.”
She complied but said, “I think you’ve got the wrong person for this. There are some real jugglers around who—”
“Oh, no. I’ve definitely got the right person.” His voice, not fed into the microphone, was suddenly hard, no humor in it at all. And then he pulled a larger ball from somewhere inside his voluminous clothes and lobbed it at Dianna. Fast. Right toward her face.
Instinctively, she raised her hands to shield herself.
She felt the missile hit her with a force she hadn’t anticipated.
With a loud pop, it exploded.
Pain rocked through Dianna, even as she felt wetness. She looked down and found herself covered in red dampness. Blood.
Only vaguely aware of the screams and panic around her, she slid to the stage.
Chapter Twelve
Travis leaped onto the stage. “Stay there,” he commanded the shrieking Julie. “Dianna will be fine.”
He hoped. And he wanted more than he wanted to breathe to check on her. But he couldn’t do that yet.
Not without making sure that Farley, the SOB who’d hurt her, wasn’t about to do something even worse—to her or to the onlookers. Like explode another, bigger bomb, or do something else to finish Dianna off…assuming she was still alive.
“Damn you,” Travis muttered at the bastard he intended to subdue as painfully as possible. He shouldn’t have trusted Flynn to keep her safe. If he’d been there, he wouldn’t have let her on stage, an easy target for anyone hiding in the crowd to see.
Only it wasn’t someone in the crowd who’d harmed her. Farley had been brazen enough to perform in front of everyone, to leave himself open to capture….
Strange. Farley wasn’t moving. He looked frozen as he stared down at the limp heap upon the platform that was Dianna.
Travis forced himself not to stare at her, too. So much blood…
“Call 9-1-1,” he cried generally into the panicking crowd as he grabbed the clown and wrestled him down onto his stomach.
“I didn’t mean it,” his unresisting captive said over and over.
“Yeah,” Travis said, cuffing the guy’s bony wrists behind his back. “Like you didn’t mean to kill Wally.”
“What? I didn’t kill anyone!”
A couple of Travis’s platoon members who’d been working the crowd undercover leapt onto the stage. “Take care of him,” Travis commanded as the two cops pulled the guy none too gently to his feet.
Then Travis bent over Dianna. He almost sank to his knees in relief, for she was sitting up. Julie, who’d not listened to him, knelt beside her.
“It’s okay, honey,” Dianna said to Julie. “I’m fine.”
Sure she was, with dripping blood turning her soft blond hair into a congealing red mass, her hands raw and…
He didn’t smell the metallic stench of blood. And the color of the thick ooze on her and all over the stage, though close to the redness of blood, was a bit too bright.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded anyway, too roughly. He wasn’t about to believe she was unharmed. Not with the way his gut had been eviscerated by the thought that he’d lost her.
He’d failed another person he was supposed to protect. And not just any person.
Dianna.
“I… I think it was just a balloon full of red paint, and it exploded,” she said. She looked up, her expression almost serene as she made a valiant effort to appear reassuring. But her blue eyes were huge and terrified.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Looks that way.”
He reached down, intending only to help her to her feet. But he couldn’t help it. He pulled her tightly into his arms and held her against him.
“You’ll get paint on you,” she protested, but not too strongly, for she held onto him as if she’d been tossed from the roof of Englander Center and he held the only rope that could save her.
As if.
She was hanging onto the wrong lifeline, if she was relying on him. But he couldn’t bring himself to let her go. Not when she felt so good—so alive—in his arms.
Besides, he told himself, he was helping to restore his cover. He was supposed to be a street performer, not a cop who’d go after the bad guys. But part of that cover was that he was trying his damnedest to seduce Dianna so she’d hire his buddies for the anniversary festivities.
Since most performers were already on board, he could be continuing the seduction for hedonistic reasons. Why not? She was a pretty lady. He was a red-blooded man. End of cover story.
Except that the red blood had been paint…this time. And it had wound up all over Dianna.
It had been his fault. Though the call from his boss, Captain Hayden Lee, had been important, they could have talked later. He shouldn’t have been stupid enough to trust Flynn to keep her safe. The fool had let her up on stage.
Had indirectly let Farley get to her.
With a growl of fury, he gently pulled away from her. “Glad you’re okay,” he said, barely sparing a glance for the red paint now smeared on his dark T-shirt and jeans. “I need to talk to our friend with the exploding paint balloon.”
He motioned to Snail, who had joined them. He must have been summoned when word of what had happened had circulated at the crime scene in Englander Center.
“Keep close watch on her,” Travis told him. Unlike Flynn, he could trust Snail. He’d handpicked the guy to be on his platoon.
The clown had been led by the arresting officers along the promenade to the Van Nuys Police Station. Convenient. As one of the primary LAPD stations in The Valley, it had more than just a series of holding tanks. It actually held a jail.
The clown was already in the compact booking area, his vital information being fed into the computer, when Travis caught up with him.
“My name really is John Smith,” the guy whined to the officer questioning him. “I’m not in your system because I’ve never been arrested. It was a joke, man. Just a joke.”
“Yeah, funny,” Travis said, towering over the guy, who sat in a chair. He looked grotesque, as sweat had caused his clown makeup to run in ruts down his face. “You think blowing up a member of your audience is a big laugh, do you?”
“No, of course not. But the guy who gave me that ball described that lady, said he was her boyfriend and he wanted to play a trick on her. Gave me twenty bucks to say what he told me, then throw the ball like that. ’Course I knew it’d make some noise and mess up her outfit, but I didn’t now she’d get so scared she’d faint. Was it because the paint looked like blood?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Travis said. He wasn’t about to give this guy the whole story.
And he was very much afraid this John Smith was telling the truth. They’d know more after his prints were taken and that ugly, running makeup was removed.
But Travis was all but certain that this was not Glen Farley. He had gotten away again.
GLEN FARLEY LAUGHED.
He covered his mouth with a ratty sleeve and turned the sound into a cough. The damn denim jacket he wore smelled of cigarettes
, and he didn’t smoke. How ironic that the guy he’d lifted it from at the restaurant had left it untended when he’d gone out for a couple of drags. Finders, keepers.
Farley stood in the middle of the mall’s jabbering crowd that had fled the stage when the balloon filled with paint came apart. Nice touch, adding one of those poppers like kids used at New Year’s and the Fourth of July. Made it sound like a small explosion. The people around wouldn’t recognize him for the genius he was. They wouldn’t recognize him at all.
But he wouldn’t laugh among them. He didn’t want anyone to remember some crazy guy in their midst who laughed when everyone else was crying.
No, for the police would be asking for people to step forward with anything that would lead to apprehension of the nut who’d played such a nasty trick.
Fools. Sure, they thought him insane. That was part of his plan.
It was almost cool here, in the shadow of the puny library branch in the Van Nuys Civic Center. But the body heat of all the people surrounding him made him itch.
Too bad it hadn’t been a real bomb. This time.
This time, no one had gotten hurt. But he’d scared that bitch Dianna Englander again. She deserved it, damn her.
Almost unconsciously, he again fingered the scab that ran down the side of his face, thanks to the key she’d cut him with. Good thing he knew how to use stage makeup. No one who looked at him knew it was there. But he knew it.
The crowd began to disperse. No wonder. There wasn’t much left to see, since the cops had stopped the rest of the guys and gals from doing tricks on those stupid little stages. And the one Dianna had been on was surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape.
She should be grateful to him. She’d stayed alive more than two years after that hypocrite of a husband of hers had sucked in the shots Farley had fired. Once, he’d only wanted to keep on scaring her. He’d planned, then, to let her live. Until he’d been given a nice, lucrative motive otherwise.
So, her reprieve was nearly over. He wanted her to know it.
That was why he’d slipped that ridiculous clown a twenty, along with the paint balloon and instructions about how to spot Dianna and, then, what to do with her.
He’d had different makeup on then. It had made him look thirty years older. And not a clown. Definitely not a clown.
Oh, how he loved disguises!
Though they might suspect who’d set Dianna up this time, they wouldn’t have an accurate description of him.
Not many people besides Dianna knew what he looked like.
Wally Sellers had known. He’d seen him.
Killing Wally had been a stroke of genius.
But Wally’s death wasn’t the end of it. Not by a long shot.
Farley laughed aloud again once more. Feeling eyes on him, he sobered damn quick and aimed his most bite-me glare at a fat lady who stared at him, pushed against him in the crowd.
She turned away fast. Probably would remember him. But maybe he’d scared her enough that she’d keep it to herself.
If not, so what?
Not even the feds had been able to find him before, thanks to his ingenuity and enterprise.
And now Dianna had her own personalized watchdogs. Undercover? Not hardly.
He had his sources.
No one, not Dianna and certainly not the local cops, would be able to stop him now.
TRAVIS HELD Dianna tightly at his side as they strolled toward Englander Center. She snugged against him, as if she belonged there. Her soft curves meshed all too well with the lines of his body. It felt good. Too good.
He’d have liked to step up the pace so he could let go of her. Fast. Before he considered making it even more of a habit. But they had to keep it slow, for, as she leaned on him for support, she was wobbly.
So was he, though he wouldn’t let on how he was consciously fighting his limp. When he let emotions get the better of him, his weak leg always gimped up on him.
Emotional? Hell, he was furious. He should take a lesson from Dianna, one brave lady. She kept her chin up despite the streaks of paint on it and on her cheeks. Her eyes stayed straight ahead, except when she looked down at Julie Alberts, who held her hand on the other side.
He felt proud of her. As if you have a right to, Dumbo.
“You’re sure your friend didn’t mind your taking this shirt?” Dianna asked him.
He’d wrapped her in an oversized San Diego Chargers sweatshirt lifted from one of the guys in his platoon. It covered most of the red paint spattered all over her nice beige pantsuit.
Didn’t help to cover the blotches on her face that he hadn’t been able to wipe away with tissues, nor the garish streaks in her light hair.
Even with all that, her femininity showed through.
“Nah, he didn’t mind,” Travis replied to her question. Didn’t have a choice. Travis had made handing it over an order.
He’d buy it from the guy, though, since the red paint was unlikely to come out.
A couple of teens in baggy pants turned to look at Dianna. Travis stared them down, and they backed off. He had an urge to challenge them anyway but swallowed it. Their curiosity was normal, under these bizarre circumstances.
Besides, it was Farley he wanted to squash. Now.
They reached the sidewalk outside the Center. Manny, who’d been serving a kid a frozen fruit bar, hurried over. “What happened?” he asked. “Are you all right, Dianna?”
“Sure, but boy, is my face red,” she quipped.
Travis laughed with the others. Almost without thinking, he hugged her closer. She looked up at him, gratitude—and something else—shining in her eyes.
He didn’t want to identify that other thing, for if it was desire, it just might collide with his own and create an explosion neither of them wanted.
One that would do more to them than loosen a little paint.
Bad idea.
They were right outside Englander Center now. Travis could see the security guys inside. Cal Flynn wasn’t with them. He was still being questioned by police about what he saw. Which was undoubtedly zilch. The guy could have been asleep and done a better job of protecting Dianna.
Not that Travis had done any better.
Swallowing his self-disgust, he nevertheless released Dianna from his grip. “Take Julie and go up to your office,” he said. He pretended not to see the hurt in her eyes as she reacted to his gruffness. Still, more gently, he added, “Soon as I check on what the techs learned today about the…about Wally Sellers, I’ll join you.”
“No need,” she said, though the rough way she swallowed told him that returning to the scene of that crime would be hard on her. Especially after the sneaky way she’d been attacked. “I have to clean up,” she continued. “Julie can help. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You will. I’ll see to it.”
TRAVIS WASN’T about to follow Dianna into the ladies’ room, no matter how much he wanted to attach himself to her. So, while she cleaned up, he walked into what was left of Wally Sellers’ office and surveyed the scene.
The techs had put it back, more or less, though he could still see a dusting of black fingerprint powder on a lot of surfaces. And there were a few things missing, like the area rug beneath the desk, some stacks of paper on top of it…most stuff that had probably absorbed Wally’s blood.
“What happened to Dianna?” Jeremy Alberts huffed into the room and glared at Travis. How could he stand having his tie so tight at his neck? It made his white shirt collar look stiff and uncomfortable, too. “Beth told me that when you all came through the reception area, Dianna looked as if she was covered in blood, but she claimed it was paint and she should have ducked. What’s that about, Bronson?”
Jeremy’s reaction was even more proof that his interest in Dianna was more than a boss’s. More than avuncular. Probably a lot more than being in the market for a brand new mom for Julie.
He wanted her.
Join the club. The developer was probably mor
e Dianna’s type, though. An executive who didn’t work the streets or get his hands dirty. As a building developer, all he’d do was supervise the grunts who did the construction.
A better match for the widow of a U.S. Representative than a juggling cop who too often bungled missions involving keeping a subject safe. Like Dianna.
Jeremy, glaring, obviously expected an answer. Travis figured he owed the man that. He described what he’d found when he reached the plaza, saw Jeremy’s prize security chief twiddling his thumbs while Dianna played into Farley’s hands on stage. The way the fall-guy clown threw the balloon at her, the way it exploded and showered her with red paint. Travis had bought the performer’s story, though he would convict the guy of terminal stupidity for agreeing to play such an ugly joke for twenty bucks.
“I’d suggest you fire Flynn, get his butt out of here,” Travis concluded. “I told him to keep an eye on Dianna, and look what happened.”
“Would you have done any better, Bronson? Would you have prevented her from going up on that stage?”
Hell yes, Travis was about to say, when a sweetly feminine, but highly determined voice rang out from behind him.
“Of course not,” Dianna said. “It was my decision, not Flynn’s or Travis’s or even Julie’s.” She smiled down at the child who stood beside her, obviously absorbing every word. Most of the red paint was gone from her face and hair, though she still wore the sweatshirt, over darker slacks than she’d been wearing before.
Alberts was going to have one heck of a time with his daughter as she got older, for the kid clearly was looking up to Dianna as a role model. A damn fine role model, in most ways. But one with a mind of her own, no matter what the circumstances.
No matter what the danger… He swallowed the demands that sprang to his lips. Instead, he said, “You’re right, Dianna. But Flynn and I have something in common. We want to make sure you’re safe. And for us to do our jobs, we really need for you to cooperate. Got it?” He looked at her long and hard.
Her eyes, that stunning shade of cool blue, seemed to take on an even more determined expression. “You seem to forget—” she began.
“He forgot to say please,” piped in Julie.
Guardian of Her Heart Page 15
