Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  It was the least she could do, since she was terribly afraid that Rosalia’s problems were Tam’s own goddamn fault anyhow.

  She came out into the kitchen again. Rosalia waited, clutching her purse with white-knuckled hands. Tam held out the wads of cash.

  “Take this,” she said brusquely. “It might help. Bail, and all.”

  Rosalia took it and hefted it gingerly, her eyes big. “This . . . this is clean money?” she asked timidly.

  Hmph. Rosalia was no fool. She had a nose for anything outlaw, despite the language barrier. “Clean enough,” she assured the older woman. “I didn’t steal it. I earned it with my jewelry business. I even paid taxes on it, wonder of wonders. Go on, get out of here, and go see to your boys. I’ll call you to see how it’s going.”

  Rosalia shoved the money into her purse and grabbed Tam in a tight, impetuous hug. Tam stiffened, unprepared for it, but Rosalia didn’t care. She just chucked her on the chin, gave the whimpering Rachel a fervent kiss, and scurried down the stairs.

  Her exit was another upset to Rachel’s already precarious emotional balance. It touched off a brand-new screaming, flailing fit. The kid had supernatural endurance and vocal technique that would put a Wagnerian opera diva to shame. An hour went by, and her wails were still so loud Tam didn’t even hear her alarm. Only the red strobing light over the doors informed her that there was a breach of security.

  She’d installed the system so she could keep an eye on her domain while rocking out at high volume on headphones, never thinking she’d need it for dealing with a three-year-old’s high decibel tantrums. Life was funny that way.

  She carried the shrieking child over to the security monitor and stared at it, a sour, sinking feeling in her belly. A police cruiser idled outside the apparently falling-down barn that camoflauged the entrance to her driveway. Two men were inside. One lifted a cell phone to his ear and talked into it, scowling. A bad sign, that they had found her at all. Someone had blown her cover. Her teeth gritted.

  That filthy rat bastard. Fucking with her. Again.

  She chewed her lip, barely hearing Rachel’s shrieks. If she ignored them, they would get huffy, go away, and come back in force. A siege she definitely did not need. That was a game she could not win.

  She hit the button that activated the intercom hidden in a hollow tree right next to the police cruiser and typed one-handed, changing the audio settings so their responses would be loud enough to hear over Rachel’s noise. “Good evening, officers,” she said into the mike. “What can I do for you?”

  The guy behind the wheel, the beefier one, jumped hearing her voice and Rachel’s coming out of nowhere. His window buzzed down, and he leaned out the window, scowling. “Ms. Steele? Is that you?”

  So they knew her name, too. Worse and worse. “Yes, I’m Tam Steele,” she said. “May I ask what this is about?”

  “May we come up to the house?” the man asked. “We’d like to speak to you.”

  Shit, shit, shit. “May I ask what it’s about?” she asked again.

  “Ms. Steele, may we come up to the house and speak to you?” the man repeated doggedly.

  She mouthed a vicious curse against Val Janos’s ancestors back to the seventh generation and hit the buttons that would open up the barn passage. So much for her clever, costly camo job. It would be a public sideshow from now on. She might as well call Seth’s workmen to come and dismantle the fucking thing. What a pain in the ass.

  Maybe she could sell it. Right. At an assassin’s garage sale.

  She used the few minutes of grace that she had before they reached the house to dress the wiggling, shrieking Rachel in a coat and shoes, and she was waiting for them with the toddler wailing on her hip as the cruiser pulled up to the garage. A grizzled, burly older man and a skinny younger one got out, looking avidly around.

  “Good evening, officers,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Good evening, Ms. Steele. I’m Sheriff Meechum, and this is Deputy Licht,” said the older man. “Can we come in?”

  She considered asking if they had a search warrant, just out of principle, but decided on the spot that it would be counterproductive. Besides, they would never find anything incriminating. She was careful that way. “Certainly,” she said, resigned. “Follow me.”

  It irritated the shit out of her, being bullied into letting strange men into her private space when she and Rachel were alone. She was reasonably sure she would be a match for the two of them, even armed as they were, but not one-handed, with Rachel clinging to her neck.

  Rachel changed everything. All her formulas, all her rules.

  Rachel was redoubling her efforts. She always flipped out in the presence of strangers, men in particular. It had taken her many months to get used to the McCloud Crowd’s male contingent, and she was letting it be loudly known that those policemen were not on her security list. The noise grated on Tam’s sanity. She was good at blocking out unwanted sensory data. She’d had intensive training in biofeedback, but Rachel’s fits challenged her skills to the utmost.

  She led them through the security room, up the stairs and into the kitchen. Between shrieks, she heard the TV. Winnie the Pooh singing about how much he loved honey.

  Rosalia had left a pot of coffee, bless her. “May I offer you some coffee, officers? Cookies?” she asked politely.

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” Meechum said. “We’ll get right to the point. We’ve received a tip that you are using controlled substances here. Making illegal weaponry. Drugs, explosives and . . . whatnot.”

  Tam widened her eyes in feigned shock and shook her head, switching the flailing Rachel from her exhausted right arm to the left and hoisting her higher. “No, I’m just a jewelry designer,” she said.

  The guy cleared his throat. “Hmph. Well. Can you think of any reason why this accusation might have been made against you?”

  “I’d better look over my list of jealous ex-lovers,” she said. “Their wives, too. You never know. The green-eyed monster.”

  The officer grunted and eyed Rachel. “Ma’am, is there by any chance someone else who can look after the kid while we have this conversation? It’s, uh, hard to talk over this racket.”

  “No,” Tam said. “There’s no one.”

  The two men shot each other pained glances. “Couldn’t you just, you know, put her in a playpen in the other room, or something?” the younger one suggested hopefully.

  As if. She’d tried that only once, and learned her lesson but good. In fact, once she thought it through, she’d felt like an insensitive idiot for trying it. Like she could put Rachel in a pen and leave her alone. A flipped-out, scared little kid who’d spent the first two and a half years of her life locked in a fucking cage.

  Not in this lifetime, buddy boy. Certainly not for your convenience.

  She gave them a big smile. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Licht blushed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and his eyes slid wildly away. They darted around to try and find a place to rest, always drawn back to her face. She let him flop on his hook for a few seconds and decided that this stupid sideshow was too fucking tedious to prolong.

  Best to make it mercifully quick. She sighed. “Care to come up and see my laboratory?” she asked.

  The two men stumped heavily up the stairs after her. There was nothing for them to object to. The questionable substances she had on the premises were hidden in such a way that the house would have to be knocked down to get at them, or she herself drugged or tortured to reveal their locations. Meechum and Licht didn’t look like they were up to electrodes or waterboarding.

  There wasn’t much of the stuff, in any case. Just a little stash for her own personal emergency use. She did not arm the needles, sprays, daggers, grenades, or bomblets before she sold them. It was too risky. Too much exposure, too much accountability. The most she did was to post recommendations for arming them in a private, password-protected place on the Internet. The rest was up to the bu
yer.

  No doubt disseminating even that much deadly information was illegal, but what the hell. Her conscience was a calloused, leathery one. It had seen some hard use in its time.

  Fortunately, she had an innocuous dummy line of jewelry without any hidden weapons to show, if necessary. The wearable weaponry pieces were kept in the safes camo’d into the walls.

  Tam juggled, coaxed, and vainly cuddled Rachel while the two policemen poked around her laboratory. They squinted at the dummy pieces laid out on the display table for their benefit, poking gingerly as if they expected them to bite, and examined the heavy equipment, looking bewildered. Men usually were when they dealt with her. What a bore.

  They were soon ready to leave, having found no plastic bags filled with pills or powder, no bricks of hashish or explosives. Just a working studio. She politely gave each of them one of her Deadly Beauty business cards. Meechum stared at it.

  “Why the ‘deadly’ part?” he demanded.

  She gave him her most mysterious, lash-fluttering smile. “Oh, that’s just a little inside joke I had with an old lover, years ago,” she said, throatily. “It was his nickname for me.”

  Licht chortled a little too loudly. “Must’ve been a real interesting relationship,” he blurted.

  She turned a wide-open, limpid gaze on him. “Oh, yes. It was.”

  He blushed, and started the squirrelly eye dance again. She had to force herself not to groan and roll her eyes. Callow twit.

  “Hmph. Well, then. Please don’t take any long trips. You’ll be hearing from us again, Ms. Steele,” Meechum said.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she said.

  She and Rachel saw them out. The men climbed into their squad car with an air of relief. Thrilled to get away from the human ambulance siren, Tam reflected glumly as she watched their taillights recede into the night. Lucky them.

  It took the better part of an hour to get Rachel calmed down, into pajamas, and cuddled to sleep. At that point, Tam was too tired even to work up another fit of righteous anger at Janos’s malicious meddling.

  What a cruel joke. Whenever she let down her guard, she got screwed. But did she learn? Never.

  Seldom did any of her lovers crack through her armor and startle her into genuine excitement—and not surprisingly, every single time it had happened, it had proven to be a disaster.

  The last time had been with Victor Lazar, Raine’s uncle. He’d at least been as fucked up as she herself, and every bit as shady, but so strong. He had radiated strength . . . like Janos did. That was the attraction, she reflected. Janos was right. She liked strength. A lot.

  But Lazar had gotten himself killed before she even had a chance to enjoy him. Deservedly so, but still, it hurt. She’d wanted to punish his killer. Which was what had gotten her mixed up with Kurt Novak.

  She shuddered. She’d considered herself up for anything, but that guy had been way over her head. Brilliant, sadistic, psychotic. Then there was Georg to add yet another flesh-creeping element to the mix.

  Stop. She had more than enough fodder for nightmares in her head without dwelling on those guys.

  She went down to the kitchen with a vague plan to stare out the window at the dark while sipping a shot of single malt when she noticed the light flashing on the answering machine. A rare occurrence, considering how few people had the number. She stabbed “play.”

  “Ms. Steele? This is Emma Carew from the adoption agency. There’s been a hitch in the adoption proceedings. We really must talk about this in person, but I’m afraid that we may have to review the case. I’m not sure I should be calling you like this, but after all our conversations, I feel I owe you a personal explanation before we have to . . . well, this is terribly embarrassing, but we’ve received some alarming information regarding possible criminal activity in your household, and, er, your own unstable psychological condition. It may be necessary for us to take Rachel into protective custody pending a full investigation and psych evaluation for you, just until we can clarify that this—”

  Rip. Tam yanked the machine right out of the wall. She flung it at the blank brick wall across the room. Crash, it fell to the ground in pieces. She stared at it, face red, heart revving.

  Yes, very nice, Tamar. Lovely demonstration of your maturity, your fitness for parenting, lectured a dry, academic voice in her head. All ready for your psych evaluation, aren’t you?

  It was her mother’s voice. It gave her a pang. She hadn’t thought or even dreamed in that language for years. Hadn’t known that she still remembered the sound of it. She hadn’t heard it since she was fifteen.

  Certainly not. How could you, knowing exactly what I would say about your carryings-on? For the love of God, Tamar. Really.

  Oh, shut up, she silently said back. The voice did. Another one of her mother’s dirty tricks. Haughty retreat. The silent treatment.

  She instantly regretted having banished the internalized ghost, snippy though it was. The room seemed so empty without it.

  She’d never suffered from loneliness before. She’d never minded solitude at all. On the contrary, aloneness meant safety, quiet, peace from the greedy, grabbing demands of other people. Aloneness meant cleanliness, freedom. She craved it.

  That was why she loved working with metal and gemstones, beyond the natural love she had inherited from her goldsmith father. They were hard, shining, nonporous substances, impervious to stain. They did not absorb filth, they did not rot or corrupt. They were clean, stark, inviolable. She loved that. Longed for it.

  Janos had guessed it. He’d put his finger right on it. And yet, he was the one who they sent to pimp her out to that scum Georg. He was the one charged with the task of throwing her back into the sewer.

  Bastard. Putting Rachel’s safety at risk. She would pulverize him, eviscerate him, iron-maiden him. She punched in his number.

  He picked up swiftly, even at this late hour. “Ms. Steele?”

  “Don’t you Ms. Steele me, you stinking turd,” she hissed in Italian. “How dare you?”

  “Ms. Steele.” The velvety amusement in his voice infuriated her. “I’m pleased to hear from you again so soon—”

  “Shut up,” she snarled. “Mess with me and my daughter again, and I will annihilate you.”

  A thoughtful pause on the other end. “Try to calm down,” he said gently in Italian. “Let’s meet and talk about this like two reasonable—”

  “Fuck you,” she snarled. “You make me sick.”

  She hung up on him and burst into tears.

  Chapter 9

  Tam raced feverishly through the house. No time for blubbering or second thoughts. She’d practiced this routine in her mind hundreds of times until it was as automatic as a martial arts kata.

  First, the big suitcase that was always packed, and updated every single week on Sunday evening after Rachel was in bed, inventoried to make sure it was up to date on Rachel’s constantly changing survival gear. The nose aspirator, the aerosol machine, the cortisone drops, the emergency antibiotics, the Tylenol syrup, the allergy ointments, the wipes, soaps, and anti-allergenic toiletries. Changes of clothes, diapers, underthings. A few bare essentials for herself tucked in around the corners. She pulled it out into the hall.

  Then it was off to the kitchen, to grab some kiddie snacks. Crackers, carrot sticks, yogurts, cheese sticks, boxed fruit juices. The pantry safe, to yank out all the money and the envelope of bearer bonds. Her stash of passports. She thumbed through them, picked out her favorites, sealed the rest in the bag, and took them too. A tiptoeing pass through her bedroom to gather up emotional survival items: pink fuzzy blanket, curly-haired Sveti bear, battered blue binkie.

  That son of a bitch. Her Rachel would never see her beloved Sveti again because of that meddling scum. She was alarmed to notice that tears were streaming down her face. She hadn’t known how much she valued what she had built here. Her comfortable house that felt almost safe. Her drop-dead beautiful view of the Pacific. Her beach access to a s
ecluded cove that no one else could reach except by boat. The outrageous sunsets she could see from her kitchen, living room, studio and bedroom windows. Her fabulously equipped studio, the best she’d ever had. Her work, which she loved.

  And her friends, too. No matter how much they irritated her, it hurt to let go of that sense of almost belonging. A group of people who knew her more or less for what she was and still accepted her—she wasn’t going to find that again, not in this lifetime. She mourned it even more for Rachel’s sake. All those aunts and uncles and cousins, lost.

  Goddamn him. But she had no time for this. She knew when she’d been outmaneuvered. Poor little Rachel, who counted so heavily on habit for her emotional equilibrium. She had to give up her home, her name, her nanny, maybe even her language, depending on where they ended up. And dragging a three-year-old on a high-stress, illegal cross-continental adventure was not going to be fun.

  But she had no one to blame but herself for complicating her life beyond all reason. Enough bitching.

  She packed as many of her Deadly Beauty designs as would fit into the carrying case she’d taken to Shibumi. Not that she would be able to sell them again, not without announcing her location to her enemies with a trumpet fanfare. She had the time it would take to drive to the airport to think of a brilliant plan to dispose of them. She couldn’t risk trying to carry them onto an airplane, at least the ones with hidden blades. If she put them in a checked bag, they would go through X-rays too, and a possible inspection by some airline employee would be too dangerous.

  She threw her own personal favorites into her travel carrying case, sorting out and discarding the ones with explosives. Bad mix, airports and explosives. Just soporifics, and a couple of poison needle and spray pieces, for her physical person. The amount of dangerous substances in their reservoirs were small enough to risk going through airport security with them. She’d designed them that way on purpose.