Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  "I don't even know what you want from me. How will you know," she asked softly, scribbling How will they know, "when you've got what you want so I can have my son back?"

  She had no idea how he could both follow what he was hearing through the earphones and her exchange with J. D. " but Matt answered her question.

  "If it comes from Rawlings, it's what we want."

  Nodding, J. D. agreed.

  "How do you know that? How could you possibly know that Burton Rawlings has anything you want?"

  J. D. sighed heavily.

  "Lady, will you just shut your yap? Trust me on this. When we've got what we want, we'll know it." Meanwhile, J. D. sketched himself with a Schwarzenegger body, lantern jaw, pea brain.

  She nearly laughed aloud. You're good.

  Artist? Nah.

  Her throat tightened. The air seemed too thick to breathe, too choked with hidden meaning, lies, outright deception, clever half-truths, but for just that second, J. D. "s caricature had eased her heart.

  Company, I meant. Tears blurred her vision. Good company.

  J. D. tilted his head back and forth, no big deal. Thanks.

  She felt suddenly spent, finally at the end of her rope.

  "I'm going to bed. If that's all right with you."

  "You do that. But take my advice. Don't lie awake trying to figure out a way to double-cross us."

  "With my son's life at stake?"

  J. D. shrugged.

  "I'm just saying."

  Looking steadily at her, Matt took the headset off.

  "Sweet dreams." No wink, no encouraging nod. Just. sweet dreams.

  J. D. scribbled that they would let her know when the call came in from her friends, and she nodded. But Matt's refusal to temper his words with the smallest gesture of kindness filled her with unease.

  Telling herself to ignore it, she went upstairs and climbed into bed still wearing jeans and a sweater.

  The clock on the nightstand, where Christo's baby monitor was missing, read 1:40 and she didn't know where her little boy was.

  Chapter Seven

  Flying eastbound, their course taking them over some of the world's most spectacular mountain ranges in the dark of night, Garrett had little to do save examine his state of mind. Christo had not awakened even in the transfer from Guiliani's car to the jet, or during the takeoff. With Wag tight up against the sleeping bag and zonked himself, Christo still slept peacefully.

  Snow Dancer.

  For some reason, images of the carousel horses in Spokane resided in Garrett's own memory. He had never been there, never had a sunny, carefree afternoon with any child in a park of any description. The twenty minutes he'd spent with Kirsten in the park while Wag and Christo played was the sum total of his experience. But at some time or other he must have seen photographs of the carousel horses in a newspaper or on a billboard.

  The detail was a wildly extraneous one. What was the use of knowing how he knew about carousel horses?

  But he couldn't help chewing on the likelihood that at some point in time he had also mistakenly dismissed as irrelevant critical information concerning Christo McCourt's mother.

  He'd been over it a hundred times, over her employment dossier till he knew it by heart.

  He knew the day Lane Montgomery died.

  He knew her birth date and Christo's, her professional history and contacts, her personal friends, her job, Christo's immunization record and the one trip to the E. R. to stitch up a cut under his chin.

  Acquainted with more details, in possession of more real substance than he believed necessary to add two and two together and come up with four, Garrett was at a loss.

  At some point, crossing the Rockies, watching Kirsten's irrepressible, handsome little boy sleeping in light reflected from the moon and again off the clouds, Garrett came back around to the explanation that fit the facts.

  He and Kirsten McCourt had met before. Not only met, but made love.

  Standing in the dark with her holding her son between them, it had to have been the reverberations of that meeting, whenever it had been, whatever the reason, however it had happened, pounding through him.

  He'd known before she ever uttered the name of the Mercury that it had been no random meeting between them in the course of investigations shared by the U. S. Attorney's office and the naval intelligence liaison task force, no casual encounter reaching for the same newspaper, that Kirsten was not some girl he'd stood up somewhere along the line. In fact, he knew there was sex involved.

  In all the time since that night, working with J. D. and Matt, Garrett was the one steadfastly, inhumanly aloof to the wiles of females.

  Come-on-proof.

  Inside twelve hours, no, inside a single hour, exhibiting no feminine wiles and the polar opposite of a come-on, Kirsten McCourt had ended all that. He was attracted to her, by her, on every level, and J. D. had seen it.

  There was sex, all right, but there was more. Far more, and Garrett only glimpsed how bad it was when he found himself thinking that when this was all over, he would take Christo and his mother east to Spokane to visit Snow Dancer. Maybe north, too, because he knew there was another restored carousel somewhere outside Victoria.

  In all his life, he'd never imagined such an outing. Not even in the time of Margo. Even then he'd understood he loved her too much, too hard, too hot. Plagued from the first with the notion that Margo, well-bred, high-born trust-fund baby that she was, had been slumming with him, he'd convinced himself the marriage would last anyway. There was slumming, and then there was slumming.

  He was an officer and a gentleman, highly decorated.

  But he suspected now that with Margo, trips to the park to feed the ducks or visit the carousel horses would have been parceled out to the resident nanny.

  The copilot stuck his head into the cabin and advised they'd be landing within ten minutes. He kept his voice low for the sake of the sleeping child.

  "Weather advisories are poor. There's a blizzard coming down out of Canada. You'll only have an hour, maybe ninety minutes if we're lucky, before we have to get out."

  Garrett nodded.

  "I assume there's ground transportation waiting?" It would take every available moment to drive Christo to the Wilders' and make the return trip.

  "Yes. The state highway patrol, an unmarked four-wheel drive."

  Christo stirred twice in the next hour, once meeting the icy cold blast of wind as Garrett carried him off the jet, then again, as Garrett trekked through six inches of snow already fallen in the starkly moonlit mountain meadow where Sam and Ginny Wilder now lived.

  He carried Kirsten's sleeping son through the darkened house up to the spare bedroom. Ginny Wilder had turned the covers aside, but Garrett laid Christo down on the bed still in his sleeping bag. Christo stretched and sighed, scrubbing in his sleep at his nose with a small fist, then stuck the tiny thumb in his mouth.

  In the silence, watching Christo by the dim light from the hallway, Garrett heard the sweet small sucking noises. He sank down, mesmerized by the sound of it and the image that came out of no experience he knew of the infant Christo suckling at Kirsten's breast.

  Against a fierce arousal, another regret for which he had no name laid itself up in his heart.

  He rose and pushed past Ginny Wilder and took the stairs down two at a time. Her husband was letting Wag inside. Garrett pulled a digital phone from the pocket of his parka and gave it to Sam, briefly explaining from some distant, separate self what was going on, and that they should use the digital cell to call Kirsten.

  In their good-hearted, lined and weary faces he found deep anxiety for Kirsten's life.

  "I won't insult your intelligence with half-baked reassurances," he told them.

  "Kirsten is in real danger, but we're doing everything we can. You have my word on that."

  On the treacherous drive back down the mountain, he had a conversation with the state highway patrolman at the wheel.

  A talk that m
ade his blood run as cold as the air fronting the Arctic storm.

  Despite the protection of the feds, the wife of the sheriff who'd busted up the illegal assembly of Truth Sayers not a hundred miles from the Wilders', lay close to death in the hospital. Her back was broken when her car was forced off the road and into a ravine of a thousand feet and only a few sparse lodgepole pine.

  The federal agent assigned to the sheriff's wife was dead on impact.

  Loehman, Garrett thought, choosing his venue, thumbing his nose, upping the stakes.

  Destroying people's lives.

  But the inescapable truth of his own besotted, dishonorable behavior on that cold winter's night nearly five years ago blotted even Loehman's crimes from Garrett's mind.

  just over three hundred miles to the north, Chet Loehman would never conceive of what he was about in such terms. He understood that the ignorant and the misguided, along with an ever-shrinking number of men and women in law enforcement, believed such rubbish, but he was about the people's business, pure and simple, whether they were capable of appreciating the fact or not.

  He puttered around a bit in his kitchen, pouring a brandy, choosing a shortbread cookie for accompaniment, the food he ate and the drink he drank as unembellished as his philosophy.

  Freedom should be that simple. Abuse it, lose it.

  Justice should be just that unfettered. Swift, deliberate, uncomplicated. That was what the country needed.

  How many more times did the system have to fail so spectacularly to convict blatant, unrepentant, swaggering murderers before the masses awoke?

  He bit into the cookie, but along with the anger slowly ebbing out of his system, his guard let down as well. The toothache he'd been nursing for weeks at the hands of an inept dentist sent waves of pain shooting through the right half of his jaw, and all his resentments came rushing right back.

  As it had turned out, he should have ordered the sudden and unexpected demise of Burton Rawlings when the worm first stumbled over his find.

  It infuriated Loehman that the swift and certain justice he championed would have stamped Paid to the Montgomery debacle. The man was a conniving liar, playing both ends against the middle such that even now his treachery threatened everything Loehman had worked for over thirty years to build.

  How could he have known? He couldn't.

  But now he would have to let the play unfold to its lumbering and far less certain end. There was nothing else to do.

  He had to deal not only with this threat, but with the would-be kings who thought they could run his organization better. Then he must return to the business of bringing the country back to its senses. Law enforcement wasn't even stemming the tide of crime, never mind turning it back.

  Vigilante justice, the justice of the common man, was the only real justice to be had at the dawn of the new millennium.

  He hurled the remainder of the shortbread cookie into the wastebasket, then swallowed the contents of his snifter. As the brandy burned its way down his gullet, it lit other old resentments.

  Kirsten McCourt, God love her.

  He'd cut her every imaginable slack though she was the one most responsible for the evidence against him five years ago. Still, she was only a female, and he'd allowed her to live and now she was right back in the thick of Rawlings's plot to destroy him.

  He wasn't deeply worried, only powerfully offended by her staggering ingratitude. He had friends in high places, but he could only go to certain wells so many times before they ran dry.

  Kirsten McCourt must learn, once and for all time, exactly what it meant to her to cross him.

  when garrett got back from Wyoming, Kirsten was sleeping. He'd caught a little shut-eye on the return trip, damned little. Not enough. He needed a coffee, a shower, a shave and a reprieve in that order, but when he came through the front door as if he owned the place, he changed his mind, snagged Matt's attention with a jerk of his head and went back out onto the porch.

  "How'd it go?" Matt asked.

  "Without a hitch." Garrett sat down on the top step.

  "That's good." Matt sat down beside him.

  "Isn't that good?"

  "Yeah. That's good."

  "So... what's not so good?"

  Garrett squinted off into the distance.

  He wanted Loehman badly enough that in the last hour or so, Garrett had come to the conclusion that he had to step aside. His objectivity was shot to kingdom come, and if by some slipup, some miscue, some poor call he made because he was thinking of Kirsten McCourt or her small son ahead of the job, he wouldn't be able to live with himself.

  So he looked his best friend in the eye and told him, "I have to take myself off the case."

  Matt stared at him slack-jawed.

  "What's this about, Garrett?"

  He gave a scoff.

  "Fitness for duty."

  "You're right. You've lost it." Matt frowned.

  "Tell me this isn't about Kirsten." He'd heard the gist of the story driving Garrett and Christo and Wag the dog to the airport.

  "I'm serious, pais an

  "So am I," Matt snapped.

  "Think again. Go ahead. Take your time. Just think again and then forget it."

  "I am thinking. I know it's not quite up to your speed"

  Matt swore succinctly.

  "Whatever you call what you're doing, it's not thinking. Wallowing, maybe. What is it with you? We are closer to nailing Loch- man than we've ever been" -- "We aren't even in the neighborhood, Matt" -- "-- and you're telling me you're ready to take yourself out of the game over lust for Kirsten McCourt?"

  He'd clenched his teeth for so many hours, his jaw ached. He focused through the trees and over the slanting roofs of houses till he could glimpse sunlight reflecting off the surface of Lake Union.

  "That's what I'm telling you."

  "I've never heard anything half so chickenhearted in my entire misbegotten life."

  "I'm not telling you I'm pulling the plug. I'm telling you I'm not the one who should be running the show."

  "Please. Spare me the subtle distinctions. The two are one and the same, and you know it. We'll lose any edge we have if we have to gear down long enough to bring someone else up to speed, so if you want my advice you'll suck it up and do what you have to do."

  "This is what I have to do."

  "No. This is a cop-out. So what if Kirsten McCourt had herself a roll in the hay one night five years ago and you were there. So what? You want to try explaining to me how some one-night stand you don't even remember compromises your ability to run this operation?"

  "If a one-night stand wasn't poor judgment enough to convince you by itself, bud, I don't know what will." But he felt a nasty twist occurring in his gut. Even as he mocked his own poor judgment, he knew that what he'd taken away from that night was insight that had turned his life inside out.

  He'd loved his wife, head over heels, but he'd never gotten from her in all the years of their marriage what he got from Kirsten in a few hours in the dark of night.

  Matt swore softly.

  "Garrett, it was five years ago. But just for argument's sake, call it five days ago. Say you're besotted. Say you've really gone round the bend for her. What would it change? How would this go down any different? Just say it all comes down to saving Kirsten's life or bringing Loehman in. There isn't even a debate.

  Loehman walks. Every one of us would make that choice. That's what separates us from him, right? What makes us the guys in the white hats? We do the right thing, even when it costs us the whole enchilada.

  "Besides," he cracked, grinning, shoving Garrett with his elbow, "objectivity is highly overrated."

  Garrett said nothing, only sat staring at his hands, still offended at his own behavior. Where was the honor in him, to have let himself take a woman to bed whose name he didn't even know?

  "So am I preaching to the choir, here, or just to myself?"

  Garrett shook his head.

  "I can't risk it, Guili
. I won't."

  Matt's complexion darkened in a way only anger caused.

  "Okay. Put this into your pity pipe and smoke it, then. If you pull out, Weisz, I quit."

  Garrett stiffened, his tone unbending, his eyes firing back.

  "Don't threaten me, Guili."

  Matt shook his head. "That was no threat, pais an That is a fact."