The 14th... And Forever

by Merline Lovelace

  A steady of stream of vehicles rumbled by in the southbound lanes. Angela swept them with a lightning-like glance. At first she didn’t see anything to alarm her. Then, in one of those nightmarish half seconds that seem to last a lifetime, she caught a glimpse of a pale face peering from an open car window. Just below the white blur, a few inches of blue-black barrel protruded through the open window.

  “Oh, my God!”

  Her heart and her lungs and her fists all squeezed shut. The pastry in her hand disintegrated into mush. With whipped cream flying in all directions, she launched herself off the fender and hit Merritt squarely in the chest. He staggered back, taking her with him.

  “What the—?”

  “Get down!”

  She buckled her knees and dropped like a bag of stones in his arms. She didn’t know whether it was her dead weight or Merritt’s recognition of the danger that did the trick, but suddenly his body came crashing down atop hers. What little air was left in her lungs departed with a whump.

  The same instant her face pressed into the pavement, another crack split the air. The Chrysler’s rear passenger windows exploded. Razor-edged shards of safety glass rained down all around them. A startled shout came from just behind their vehicle. A woman screamed.

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Angela buried her face in goo-filled palms. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Didn’t try to do either. Her blood roared in her ears, so loudly she barely heard the third, then fourth, pop that signaled that the shooter was speeding south.

  As quickly as it had erupted, the violence ended. All that remained was a chorus of shouts and screams coming from somewhere behind them, and Merritt’s rock-solid weight pinning her to the pavement. Angela felt his breath, hot and fast, on her cheek. One of his knees dug into the back of her calf.

  She burrowed under his protective shield for several long seconds before her starved lungs demanded air. Squirming, she tried to shift his bulk.

  At her movement, Merritt levered himself off her prone body. Sucking in quick, relieved breaths, Angela wedged herself up on one elbow and shoved her hair out of her eyes. She expected to find the face so close to hers tight with shock or anger. Even fear. The Lord knew her heart was still thundering in her chest!

  If Jack Merritt felt any of those emotions, however, he didn’t show them. Much. Only the pulsing tic on one side of his jaw and the razor-sharp edge to his voice betrayed his inner state.

  “Are you all right?” He rapped out the question.

  “I...I think so. You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  When he started to rise, Angela grabbed at his arm and gasped out a warning.

  “Careful! You’ve got glass in your hair.”

  Leaning away from her, he shook his head. The movement dislodged a small shower of silvery shards. They hit the pavement with a joyful tinkle that sounded obscene in the circumstances. Then he eased himself up on one knee and curled a hand under her arm to help her.

  Wary of the broken glass, Angela got to her feet. For a few seconds, she experienced the oddest sense of disorientation. The February sun still sparkled on the Potomac. Cars still whizzed by on the opposite bridge span. In the distance, gulls swooped and chattered above the Tidal Basin.

  Yet the narrow slice of world contained on the northbound span had spilled into chaos. Car doors slammed all along the rows of stalled traffic. People poured out of their vehicles, shouting, exclaiming, assuring each other that they weren’t hurt. A baby screeched in the arms of a hysterical mother. An army officer stood beside a black sports car, staring in disbelief at a starburst in the windshield. Some distance behind him, two women were waving and pointing at what Angela guessed was a bullet hole in the rear fender of their car.

  She didn’t need to see a hole to know what had just happened. She had ample proof close at hand. Both of the Chrysler’s rear windows were shattered. Jagged shards edged the chrome frame of the window closest to her, looking much like shark’s teeth in a gaping maw.

  She clenched her fists, unmindful of the whipped cream that squished through her fingers. Anger seared through her, hot and scorching.

  She wasn’t naive. She knew that mindless violence could spark anywhere, at any time, over something as trivial as a kid’s jacket or a wrong turn down a one-way street. She also understood danger. She’d spent summers and weekends at racetracks where men pushed the limits of machines, and death was only a heartbeat away. Her soul splintering, she’d watched sheets of flame engulf her brother’s car.

  She accepted risk. Understood that danger was a part of life. Yet, somehow, she wasn’t prepared for the raw fury this wanton, random act generated. Her whole body quivered with the force of it.

  “Here, put this on.”

  She flung her head up and caught the sharp concern in her passenger’s face as he draped his trench coat around her shoulders.

  “I’m not cold!”

  “You’re shaking,” he said tersely. “You could be going into shock.”

  “What I’m going into is total, one hundred percent—” she searched the air with her hands for a word to describe her feelings “—outrage! Look what they did!”

  Her anger boiled over as she surveyed her wounded car.

  “I’ve read about people getting caught in drive-by shootings,” she ground out through clenched teeth. “But until something like that happens to you, you never realize how...how furious it makes you!”

  “Is that what you think happened? A drive-by shooting?”

  Her head snapped up. “Of course! What else?”

  Jack wasn’t ready to answer that one. Not when his pulse was still pounding and cold sweat was drying on the back of his neck.

  “I don’t know.”

  She dismissed his disclaimer with a short, choppy wave. Spinning on her heel, she crunched through the glass. “I’m going to call 911.”

  While she made the call, Jack stared at the shattered windows. His logical, orderly mind tried to accept the idea of random violence, to anchor it in reality by calculating the probability factor.

  What were the. odds of a trigger-happy goon or hopped-up gang member driving by this particular spot at this particular time and deciding to take potshots at stalled traffic? What were the chances that he and Angela Paretti would be among the stranded motorists? One in a million? One in ten million? Grimly, Jack decided that there were too many variables involved for him to work the equation right now. And too many unknowns.

  Like why six lanes of traffic had come to a screeching halt.

  And why the Chrysler seemed to have taken most of the hits.

  And why the senator had sent Angela Paretti to meet him at the airport in the first place.

  His gaze sliced to the woman standing a few feet away, her face smeared with cream and her slender frame enveloped in his trench coat. Her free hand punctuated the air as she described the shooting to the police dispatcher. Listening to her account, Jack replayed the sequence of events in his mind.

  Once again, he heard the sharp, distinctive report of a high-powered rifle. Saw the dark cloud of Angela’s hair as she whipped her head around. Felt the impact of her body as she threw herself against him.

  His jaw locked. Whatever the variables, whatever the unknowns, there was one absolute in the equation. Angela had pulled him down, out of harm’s way. Jack owed her for that, and he was a man who believed in balancing his debits and credits.

  Shoving his balled fists into his pants pockets, he waited while she finished the call and made another, lengthier one to her office. She replaced the phone on its mount a few moments later, grimacing at the smears she left on its casing. With a muttered exclamation, she dug into a side pocket in the door and pulled out a tissue. A few swipes got rid of most of the cream.

  “The senator’s on the floor for a roll-call vote,” she told Jack tersely, the tissue shredding as she scrubbed at her hands. “His aide promised to get word to him right away.”

  “Looks like our meeting wi
ll have to wait a while longer.”

  Her forehead folded into the beginnings of a frown that got sidetracked into another grimace. Wadding the tissue, she dabbed at her temple.

  “Yech! I’ve got cream all over my face. I feel it, even if I can’t see it.”

  “I can.” He reached into his suit coat and pulled out a folded handkerchief. “Here, I’ll get it.”

  She hesitated, then tipped her chin to his waiting hands.

  This was how he’d first seen her, Jack thought as he curled one hand around her chin and cleaned the cream from her forehead and cheeks. With her face to the sun and her hair spilling down her back. A small shock rippled through him when he realized he’d caught his first glimpse of Angela Paretti less than twenty minutes ago.

  It seemed longer. A lot longer. As though it had occurred in a different life. Somehow, a few seconds of shared danger had divided time into two halves. Before the shots, and after. Before Angela had thrown herself into his arms, and after. Before a bond had been forged between him and this woman, and after.

  He studied her face while he worked, pondering the new set of unknowns that suddenly engaged his mind. Like the complexity of a woman who quivered with barely suppressed fury over an incident like this, instead of shaking with shock or fear. And the feel of her warm flesh beneath his fingertips. And his sudden desire to lick away the dollop of cream decorating her left earlobe.

  “You’re pretty calm,” she mumbled, “considering that someone was taking potshots at us a few minutes ago.”

  “I don’t like it any more than you did.”

  “You don’t show it.”

  “I don’t show a lot of things.”

  She gave a huff of derision. “Do they teach you that in Accounting I? Never show any emotion, or your clients might make the mistake of thinking you’re human?”

  Jack paused in his self-appointed task. “Have you dealt with a lot of accountants, human or otherwise?”

  “I’ve dealt with a few,” she shot back.

  “Some of us experience a basic emotion or two on occasion.”

  “Ha! That I’d have to see to believe.”

  He couldn’t have resisted the challenge if he wanted to, which he didn’t. Intellectually he understood that she was just venting the simmering emotion spawned by the shooting. He also understood that there was more to her apparent aversion to members of his profession than he grasped at this moment. But for all his rigid control, for all his rational explanation of her anger, Jack’s blood still pounded through his veins. And her mouth was too close to his.

  “Then keep your eyes open, Angela.”

  He lowered his head slowly, deliberately, giving her time to pull away. Her face registered a startled surprise that quickly escalated into a glower, but she stood her ground. Satisfaction arrowed through him at her stubborn refusal to give an inch. Then he covered her mouth with his, and satisfaction vaulted into hunger.

  He tasted whipped cream and warm flesh and woman. No, not just woman. This woman. She had a flavor all her own, one that came through the traces of vanilla and cream clinging to her lips. Jack’s senses recorded her taste, her scent, her feel, and demanded more. His hand slid from her chin to her throat. His other hand curled into a fist to keep from burying his fingers in her hair and tipping her head back to explore the dark, satiny depths of her mouth.

  That would come. Later. He hoped.

  When he lifted his head, he was breathing as hard and fast as she was. Hiding a smile at the emotions chasing across her expressive face, he stepped back and waited for the explosion.

  Angela wasn’t sure what shocked her more. The fact that Jack Merritt had kissed her, or that she’d let him.

  He was the goat, for heaven’s sake! The senator’s next victim in his crusade to reform health care. More to the point, he was the walking, talking personification of a system that had almost ground her family into the dust!

  She couldn’t believe she’d just stood here, heart hammering and eyes open as he’d instructed, and let him kiss her! Or that the mere touch of his mouth on hers could ignite sparks hotter and faster than the power combustion-control unit Tony had installed in his Monte Carlo the week before he won at Daytona.

  It was the violence that had held her motionless, she decided breathlessly. The anger that still sizzled her nerves and fueled her emotions. Not the way his broad shoulders blocked everything from her view. Or the warmth of his hand on her chin. Or the scent of fine wool and tangy after-shave that enveloped her.

  She dragged in a swift, sharp breath. “If that little demonstration was supposed to prove something, you missed the mark. Big-time.”

  “Did I? Maybe I should try again.”

  Her eyes flashed a warning. “Maybe you shouldn’t. In fact, maybe you should just—”

  The distant wail of sirens stopped her just in time. With a look that let her passenger know he’d been saved by the bell, she yanked his coat from around her shoulders.

  “Thanks for the loan,” she said acidly.

  “Any time.”

  Folding her arms, Angela propped her hips against the front fender and tried to shift her pulse back into low gear. It wasn’t easy, with Merritt leaning against the same fender, his thigh too close to hers.

  The squads of officers who converged on the scene worked their way methodically through the maze of stalled vehicles and excited motorists. Finally, a uniformed D.C. police officer approached the Chrysler.

  Short and stubby, she wore a Sam Browne belt around her waist and a bulky, bulletproof vest under her blue uniform shirt and jacket. A metal nameplate identified her as L. Hemmingway. Surveying the broken windows and shards of glass on the pavement, she flipped to a clean page in her notebook and addressed Merritt—the obvious authority figure, Angela thought with a stab of impatience.

  “We’ve had reports of shots fired from a passing vehicle. Is that what caused the damage to this car?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Did you see the car the shots came from?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  She turned to Angela, her expression polite but evincing little expectation of success. “How about you, ma’am? Did you see a vehicle that might have—”

  “I saw it.”

  “You did?” Cautious hope flared on the officer’s face. “Can you describe it? The color? Whether it had two or four doors?”

  Angela prayed for patience. She was used to dealing with men who considered females complete airheads when it came to anything and everything on wheels, bust she expected better from another woman.

  “It was a ’93 Pontiac Grand Prix,” she stated flatly. “Metallic gray, with red pinstriping on the front fenders and oversize Michelin tires on the rear axle that elevated it into what the kids on the street call a California rake. I couldn’t see the plates, but from the smoke trail that sucker was laying down, I could see that it needed a ring job. Badly.”

  The officer gaped at her. “Are you sure about these details, Ms.—?”

  “Paretti. Angela Paretti. And I’m sure.”

  “Paretti,” the officer mumbled, scribbling down the name. When she looked up again, a layer of official courtesy almost covered her skepticism. “The suspect vehicle had to be moving pretty fast. How did you happen to catch so much detail?”

  Angela gave her a pitying look. “If I could learn to read my brother’s hand signals as he drove by the pit at a hundred and ninety miles an hour, I could hardly miss the details of a Grand Prix slugging along at fifty or sixty.”

  “Your brother drove by at a hundred and ninety miles an hour?” Hemmingway gasped as enlightenment dawned. “Hey, is your brother Tony Paretti?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw him on TV a couple of weeks ago.” A dreamy expression drifted across the pudgy officer’s face for a second or two. Then she recalled herself with a little shake. “Okay, so let me get this down. You saw the car—”

  “And the shooter.”

&
nbsp; Hemmingway’s pencil skittered. Excitement lit her pale blue eyes. “You saw the shooter? Can you describe him?”

  Angela summoned a mental image. “He was a Caucasian male, late teens or early twenties, I’d guess. He had a thin, kind of longish face. Oh, and he was wearing a sweater or a sweatshirt in sort of a putrid green.”

  “Green!” Disgust flitted across the officer’s plump face. “That sounds like the Horsemen. Those punks wear a green jacket. This could’ve been one of their damned initiation rites.”

  She jotted down the details in her notebook, then flipped it shut. “It sounds like you got a pretty good look at him, good enough to describe him to a composite artist. I’ll have to ask you to come with me, ma’am.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. It’s important that you work with an artist while the details are still fresh in your mind. I’ll call ahead and have one of the computer composite techs waiting at our district headquarters.”

  “Can’t we delay that for an hour or so?” Angela protested. “Dr. Merritt has an appointment with Senator Claiborne. I need to get him there as soon as this logjam clears.”

  At the mention of the senator’s name, Hemmingway’s ruddy complexion paled. Crunching through the broken glass, she peered at the Chrysler’s license plate. When she spotted the metal congressional emblem in one corner, she gave a low groan.

  “Oh, no! This is Coon Dog Claiborne’s car? The mayor’s not going to like this.”

  Angela understood the officer’s dismay. Henry Claiborne had voiced his dissatisfaction on more than one occasion with the crime plaguing the nation’s capital. And when one of his constituents was mugged within shouting distance of the Russell Building, the outraged legislator had zinged off a scorching letter that made the front page of the Washington Post.

  Since the senator also happened to chair the committee that appropriated funds for D.C.’s annual operating budget each year, the mayor had hastily put together a sweeping anticrime program. Not quite sweeping enough, evidently.

  L. Hemmingway settled her holster on her hips with a nervous twitch. “I’m afraid I have to insist that you come with me, Ms. Paretti. We need you to do that composite and, uh, talk to the detective who’ll work this case. We’ll get Dr....”