Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  She bowed her head a moment.

  "The more violent and devastated and hysterical you manage to come across over those listening devices, the better. You're a hostage to lunatics who've just ripped your child out of your arms." He gave a half smile, a bittersweet incarnation of a smile she hadn't seen yet.

  "Can you do it?"

  She heard only concern for her, no real doubt in his question. She nodded.

  "For what it's worth, Kirsten, Christo will be long gone, so he doesn't have to hear any of that." He looked at her, seeming to look inside her, again as if he should know her.

  The look finally ebbed; the creases in his forehead eased.

  "Anyway.

  You'll be made to understand that we intend to hold Christo hostage until you hand over to us whatever it is you've got on Loehman. When you do, you'll get Christo back, everybody lives happily ever after.

  Meanwhile, Loehman can't afford to wait this out with surveillance trying to figure out what you and Rawlings are up to. His back will be up against a wall. He will have to do something to force Rawlings's hand now. "

  "And when he does?"

  "We'll be there. I promise you, I'll do everything in my power." He let a shoulder rise and fall. A shoulder she'd once seen bared, once clung to, once clutched in the heat of the sexual release that made it possible for her to endure the loneliness, the night.

  Her darkest night.

  The same act in which Christo had been conceived.

  "Chances are," he offered, "no real action will ever come close to you. The thing is, we won't know that until we know what it is that's already got Loehman nervous enough to be monitoring your house.

  Everything you do. Everywhere you go. " He watched Christo playing tug-of-war with Wag over the Frisbee.

  "From now on, one of us will be with you twenty-four-seven."

  Her hands fluttered. Her nerve, so numbed now for all these hours, began to flag.

  "Will Guiliani still be at my place when Christo and I get back?"

  "Is that a problem?"

  "Only that I have to tell Christo something. Otherwise he'll be full of questions, jabbering his head off. He will anyway, but if they're listening" -- "Yeah." He exhaled sharply, considering. One thing out of the ordinary, even a little thing, might be enough to tip off whoever was at the other end of the listening devices in her house. Guili had to get out. They'd have to maintain their own surveillance from behind the house for at least the next several hours.

  He stood. Christo came charging back and took his hand.

  "Can you an' Wag come over to our house?" He looked to Kirsten.

  "Can he, Mom?"

  "Christo! What are you" -Her small lecture died in her throat. She'd just spent the last half hour talking to Garrett Weisz. What was she thinking, how could she possibly expect Christo to treat him as a stranger to be avoided?

  Watching her reaction, Garrett dropped to one knee. Christo fit as naturally there as he had in Ginny's lap, as he would in Kirsten's own embrace. Garrett appeared to be less at ease. "You like Wag, huh?"

  Christo pulled a well-duh look.

  "Can he come over, Mom? It would be just for tonight."

  "Wag can't come right now, Christo," his unwitting father answered.

  "But you'll get to see him again. That's a promise."

  "An' do you keep promises, mister?" Christo demanded.

  Garrett picked up Christo's hand, and with it, crossed his own heart.

  Kirsten sent Christo off to collect the trash. Garrett stood again, and she got up, intending to tell him he had no business making promises to Christo.

  Before she could say anything, Garrett cut her off.

  "The dog is Guiliani's. Wag is going to go with Christo."

  Tears sprang instantly to her eyes. The kindness unraveled her more efficiently than any threat or danger or intimidation would ever accomplish.

  "That's not necessary, really" -- "Don't."

  She thought for one wildly confused instant that he was going to scold her, to say he would do anything for his son, Wag being the least of it. but it was to her he was so attuned, so focused. He searched her face, but then his hungry gaze settled, fixing on her lips. His own lips parted.

  Her heart began to pound. She saw from the corner of her eye his hand approaching her shoulder, but then instead it was her face, then his fingers drawing aside the strands of her hair blowing around on currents of air.

  Ducks quacked and geese honked overhead, Wag barked and Christo giggled and hollered delight, but what she heard was her own breath, arresting because her baby's father was touching her like a man who loved his woman.

  She stood transfixed by his fingers cradling her nape, his thumb tracing the shape of her lower lip. Her own hand came naturally up to touch his wrist, but then his look, for long seconds more so achingly tender she thought she would die, darkened.

  She broke off and let her hand fall away.

  He stared at the ground.

  She started to say his name, and broke off again.

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. There was no hint of a battle being waged inside him, but she knew, somehow.

  When he spoke, it was as if he had read her mind.

  "Don't make the mistake of confusing me with a soft touch, Kirsten." In his eyes she found a cold, dangerous wealth of warning, another person. He was an undercover cop, a man with his own agenda and he would do what was expedient to his purposes. Nothing less.

  Nor anything more.

  He pulled up his hood and whistled for Wag.

  "On your way back to the car, remind Christo it isn't safe to talk to strangers."

  Chapter Five

  Missing his usual rambunctious reunion with Wag the dog, Matt Guiliani departed the lot of the downtown Seattle police station and drove to the nearest Pacific Gas & Electric substation where he signed off on the necessary paperwork and co-opted a service truck.

  Whistling softly, thinking with his typical lightning speed, moving to create exactly the opposite illusion, he transferred a bunch of contraband electronic equipment from the trunk of the beat-up old Dodge to the bed of a pickup.

  By the time he arrived on Kirsten McCourt's street on Queen Anne Hill, the power to the houses opposite her, where they suspected the watchers were operating, was going to go mysteriously dead.

  He wanted a look inside that house before he started setting up at Kirsten's place. A lot of sheer speculation had gone into their planning and preparation. He needed to confirm for the record, for their operation, and for purposes of getting the emergency wiretap order, that the house was being used as a stakeout.

  He parked on the street in front of the tall, narrow house opposite hers, threw on a tool belt and wandered south one narrow lot, then up stairs.

  Drapes blocked the front windows, shades the windows of the upper floors. He'd have preferred to see the telltale glint of a high-powered telescope poking through, but no such luck.

  He rang the bell, then banged on the front door when that brought no one, identifying himself as an employee of Pacific G&E.

  A lot of shuffling around happened before an unshaven guy dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans opened the door, already moaning about the blankety-blank service. Matt pasted on his unflappable expression and bulled his way inside. Another guy tossed down a newspaper and headed upstairs.

  Matt watched him go. "Anyway, whole doggone street's got no juice.

  I've got it narrowed down to a circuit somewhere inside this house. "

  Safe bet. Amidst half a dozen pizza boxes, the refuse of several Chinese take-out meals and empty beer cans, several heavy-duty extension cords lay hastily kicked under tables.

  "Looks to me you're puttin' more demand on the breakers than they can handle."

  One leg of a tripod stuck out a closet door-whether it boosted a camera or telescope he couldn't tell. And a box beneath the coffee table strewn with ashtrays and old coffee cups contained a small
arsenal of cell phones.

  He had enough. What he'd already seen in this house met the threshold for obtaining a tap. All he had to do was send a silent signal from his pager to the attorneys standing by outside Judge Schumann's chambers, but he held off. Patience was, he'd found, inevitably rewarded.

  He made his way toward the back of the house where his reward came sooner than later. On the kitchen table half buried beneath newspapers, Matt spotted a very interesting beige metal box. A phone line was plugged into it, which could only mean one thing. The calls in were being de scrambled the calls out, scrambled.

  A routine wiretap executed by the phone company was going to be of no use at all. Instead, Matt Would have to tap into the calls at the point of coding technology.

  Always one more wrinkle, he thought. One more escape hatch, loophole or vulnerability in the system to be exploited. Crooks were always going to find a way around the technology designed to catch them, always one step ahead. They just didn't know who they were dealing with. Yet.

  On his way through the house, he'd already planted a couple of bugs himself. His own design. He thumped the metal box.

  "You running some kinda illicit phone operation here?

  "Cuz I'm obligated to report what I see" -- "Hold on." T-shirt pulled out a business-use permit for the house address.

  Matt looked at the permit.

  "All fresh an' new, huh? Audio engineers.

  Boys in the band. " He was annoyed with himself that he hadn't thought of pulling business permits earlier.

  He let it go. No harm, no foul.

  Turning the corner by the back door, he limped down the cellar stairs to the ancient breaker box. T-shirt followed close behind. Matt reset switches that didn't need resetting and frowned when that didn't work.

  When his increasingly agitated host trudged back up the stairs, he pulled out a credit-card-size receiver-transmitter, which he thought of as the equivalent of a magic decoder ring, that tuned into frequencies much as any television or CD remote control would do.

  By the time he was finished, he'd locked onto the precise radio frequency that transmitted unscrambled dialogue from the kitchen table de scrambling device to the stash of cell phones in the box upstairs.

  Short-range, powerfully protected, carefully calibrated--it was unlikely in the extreme that signals passing between the descrambler and the cell phones could be picked up without a similarly calibrated cell phone. Now they would have one, too. A block party.

  Matt grinned to himself. The boys in the band could not be faulted for their care. They'd been busted by a baby monitor.

  Who knew?

  It took him half an hour to leave the utility- company truck parked beside a fast-food stand and then hike back up to Kirsten McCourt's yard. She had a back door and a gated, chain-link fence thick with vines, impossible to open. When they took Christo out, it would be through the back door where the boys in the band had no surveillance capability, over the fence and back out onto the streets.

  He let himself in the back door with the key Kirsten had given them and moved soundlessly through the house. A veteran of more stakeouts than he cared to remember, he gauged the angle in Kirsten's house and the viewpoint from the front window to the house across the street. The so-called audio engineers had a clean view of the north side of the living room.

  Based on what he'd seen, he knew that the spooks were only interested in watching who came and went from Kirsten McCourt's house, and what was said.

  He scoped out the upstairs as well.

  Christo's room, with the teepee and the murals, stopped him short. It was incredible. He found himself liking Kirsten a lot.

  In the room that held her computer, which from this moment would be Command Central, he plugged in his favorite toy--not counting the magic- decoder-ring device. This one created a sound barrier, a kind of white noise that rendered bugs useless, giving them one room in the house for conversations they didn't want overheard.

  As much to satisfy his curiosity as anything, he swept the room as he had all the others, and located the neat round disk of a bug concealed on the back of Kirsten's high-tech printer.

  He left the bug in place. Almost as an afterthought, he picked up the single sheet of paper from her printer.

  His heartbeat slowed. His thoughts sped. He stood there and stared at the picture-perfect image of Garrett Weisz for a good thirty seconds, raking through and discarding explanations, one after another after another.

  When no marginally valid excuse remained for the photo of an undercover cop she'd supposedly never met to be sitting on Kirsten McCourt's printer, Matt had to wonder if he might not have to rethink liking her so much.

  all the way to the car, Kirsten played out the warning to Christo.

  The advice wasn't idle; she suspected Garrett Weisz was not a man of idle gestures or warnings. Even before she and Christo had started back across the lawn, she saw Ann Calder driving off, which left the guy from the white van watching her every move again.

  How could she have failed to notice anyone following her for so long?

  Maybe they didn't always use the van. Maybe they hadn't always followed her every move. Still, it wouldn't hurt her facade of ignorance if, as they passed within earshot, she put on a show of warning Christo against strangers.

  "Especially strangers with nice dogs, Christo," she said, holding his hand on the walk to the car. She watched his little face darkening, too, and though it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before in her son, she saw now the stunning resemblance to Garrett Weisz.

  To his father.

  "But you" -- Christo stopped mid-sentence, looking confused.

  It wasn't fair, when she'd obviously spoken at length with the stranger, and Christo wasn't having it. But before he could put his resentment into words of his own, she warned him again in a voice he knew better than to dispute.

  "Not another word, Christo.

  Not until we get into the car. "

  Safely inside the car, he started in. She apologized.

  "You're right, Christo. It isn't fair. I was there doing a lot of talking myself. But just in case I'm not around, you have to remember" -- "Okay, Mom. But how'm I going to see Wag again? And how come" -- "Christo, you will. You just will," she interrupted as she pulled into traffic and drove home. She had to get him off the subject.

  "It'll be like a birthday wish when you blow out the candles" -- "An' you can't tell anyone what you wished for or it won't come true?"

  His eyes lit up.

  "Like that?"

  "Right." She pulled into her driveway.

  "From right now, it has to be a special secret and we won't say a word, or it won't come true."

  "Well, the house doesn't 'exactly have ears, ya know."

  "And your ears, little monster-mash," she said, turning toward him in a mock threat, "are going to be pinned back really tight really, really soon!"

  His hair was soaked from somersaulting all over the place with Wag the dog, plastered against his skull. He fell into more fits of little-boy giggles. If anything happened to him, her heart would wither and die.

  The hours left seemed at once to crawl by, and vanish into thin air.

  Christo was used to entertaining himself between the time they usually came home from his day care, and dinner.

  Today, after a warm bath spent drawing on the wall with soapy bath crayons, he headed for the TV.

  "Christo-man, don't you want to read with Mommy instead?"

  "Nope. I read all day." He flipped through the channels to his shows, already an expert with the remote.

  "You were late, ya know."

  "Well, then sit with me at least?" But he was in no mood to cuddle.

  She felt empty, unable to hold him. Incapable of sitting there listening to the Rug- rats, she decided to just confront head-on packing clothes he would need at Ginny and Sam's.

  "I'm heading upstairs, then, to put away laundry and stuff."

  Glued to the television,
Christo was only half listening, but he thought of a question.

  "Can that doggy in the" -But just then he broke off, clapping a hand over his mouth, remembering about keeping the secret like birthday wishes.

  For an instant more she held a Yorefinger to her lips, then covered Christo's verbal tracks, repeating the tune the boy had heard on "Nick- at-Night." '"How much is that doggy in the window?"

  " She sang the words for him, cupping her hands as though they were telling secrets. "