by Jenna Ryan
Kate studied it across the tomb. “Why would you think we’d recognize it?”
Crucible’s dark eyes glinted. “One of the officers who responded to the attack on you in Chinatown discovered this card on the ground next to the lamppost where the gunman’s first shots were fired. It was relatively dry, so we know it hadn’t been there for any length of time. We don’t know if it was dropped accidentally or not.”
Tendrils of white crept along the stone floor. Beyond the entrance, the grave markers seemed to drift closer. “Any idea which one of us the shooter was after?” Nolan asked. “Or why?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Kate resumed her pacing. “No offense, Crucible, but you don’t seem to know a great deal of anything where tonight’s attack is concerned.”
He made a gesture of easy acknowledgment. “It sounds that way, doesn’t it? What I can tell you is that the man responsible for what happened to you isn’t necessarily the man who pulled the trigger. We thought we had a line on him last summer, but we were wrong. Oh, we apprehended one of his hired players, and we feel certain the man we got was responsible for at least three of six deaths, however, more killings have occurred since he was removed from the mix. More killings in tandem with more silhouette calling cards.”
Nolan digested that before asking, “How many more?”
“Two that we know of. Add in three of the first six, and you have a total of five murders not committed by last summer’s unfortunately now-deceased hit man.
“And it’s your belief that whoever hired the hit man has reason to want Nolan and/or me dead.” Kate released a long breath. “That’s a lot to take in given that until eight hours ago, we were—or at least I was—leading a perfectly normal life.”
“I’m sorry to say that situation is about to change quite radically, Kate.” At Nolan’s dark look, Crucible shook his head. “There are only so many details I can reveal, you know that. People are dead, and in each case cards were left at the scene. We have a connection or two between the victims—a pair of elderly sisters from the Louisiana bayou being the strongest—but nothing that binds all eight of these people together. Prior to her death, one of the bayou sisters made reference to a man she called Leshad. We can’t be certain she was talking about our phantom, but as it’s the best we’ve gotten to date, we’ve taken to using the name.”
“So what you really have,” Nolan said, “is a phantom shadow you’re calling Leshad who hires professionals to commit his murders. Doesn’t sound overly mysterious to me, certainly not unusual enough to warrant the involvement of a counter shadow like you.”
“Counter shadows,” Crucible corrected. “Plural. The four directors and me, their shadow leader.”
A leader who was more of a shadow within a shadow, Nolan was tempted to think, but he wasn’t in the mood for word games. Instead, he shifted his gaze and watched the fog crawl. “As shadow leader, I assume you’re going to ask us to help you capture this phantom.”
The other man’s teeth flashed in the dim light. “Stick to Crucible, Nolan. I was only clarifying my position.”
“Your position being that of a messenger,” Kate remarked. “You want us to be the cheese in the mousetrap, don’t you? Or should I call it a rattrap? Phantom rat hides away in his deep dark hole and gets worker rats to do his bidding. As the victims’ bodies multiply, phantom rat celebrates while you and your shadowy team of directors scramble for answers.” She reached to rub the back of her neck. “Can I assume the last victim lived in San Francisco, and that’s why you just happen to be in the city?”
“The last victim lived and died in Dallas, Texas. I’m in San Francisco because a woman named Phoebe Lessard—who, as far as we know, isn’t dead— somehow got hold of a silhouette card. She was injured, shot twice in the stomach. Police found her unconscious in an alley in Haight-Ashbury. The card was tucked into her bra. We intended to question her, but shortly after her surgery, she vanished.”
“Okay, that’s it. I want to leave the Twilight Zone now.” A fatalistic smile crossed Kate’s lips. “I know who Phoebe Lessard is, Crucible. I did the surgery on her, as I’m sure you’re well aware.”
“You saved her life.”
“Yes, I do that from time to time.” Her expression told Nolan she was going back to that night. “Phoebe was under heavy guard at the hospital. We weren’t told why. Three days after the surgery, there was a storm and a subsequent eight-car, two-bus pileup on one of the freeways. We took the overflow from General. The hospital went dark ninety minutes in, but the ambulances just kept on coming. We were running on auxiliary power, most of us doing back to backs. It took hours for the blood and smoke to clear. When it did, Phoebe was gone. We helped the people guarding her search every inch of the hospital. We even checked the cold storage down in the basement. There was no sign of her. That was ten days ago.”
Crucible nodded. “I don’t suppose you can recall any small detail that might have slipped your mind when you spoke to the authorities.”
Nolan wished quite badly that a bottle of whiskey would appear in his hands. However, since that was unlikely even in the Zone, he settled for replying, “You heard Kate say back to backs, right? We were swamped that night, Crucible. Phoebe Lessard could have tap-danced naked out of the hospital and not a doctor, not a nurse, not even many of the care attendants would have noticed.” On the other hand, he reflected, if Kate had been the one tap-dancing naked…
He shoved the image away before it could develop and only allowed himself a brief look at her from under his lashes. Reminder to self, he thought, tall, leggy blondes with a slam-you-in-the-gut beauty reminiscent of Grace Kelly, a body made in heaven and a brain that wowed men and women alike were definitely not for him.
He let himself steal another glimpse but shut it down fast when he realized he was getting hard. Annoyed with his reaction, he tuned back in to the conversation.
“We can’t rule Alistair Perradine out of the equation completely,” Crucible was saying to Kate. “But if you were to ask me, I’d say he’s not Leshad.”
Kate’s gaze strayed to the graveyard. “Why would anyone other than Anna Perradine want me or even Nolan dead?”
Nolan rested his head on the wall. “I’ll ignore how that sounded and suggest that whoever sent the Chinatown shooter might be afraid that Phoebe Lessard said something to one of us, either before or after her surgery. I checked on her in post-op,” he added with a shrug. “The gunshot wounds to her abdomen were a tricky fix. You did good work there, Kate.”
“He says thirteen days after the fact.”
“You’re welcome.” Deciding it was time, Nolan pushed out of his slouch. “So what’s the bottom line here, Crucible? We agree to bait your trap, and you promise to make a sizable donation to the hospital foundation when your phantom rat slips one of his sharpshooting workers through an overlooked crack and offs us?”
Crucible didn’t appear offended. “Like that, only without the offing you part.” His expression intensified. “We have to stop Leshad, Nolan. Maybe in this case and with this particular phantom, step by hired step is the only way we’ll get him, but I’d prefer it if another eight people didn’t wind up dead before we do. It could also be that even with your help we’ll only climb one more rung on Leshad’s twisted ladder, but mistakes happen and so does luck. We need your cooperation.”
The fact that he directed the last part of the appeal at Kate made sense to Nolan. Crucible hadn’t achieved the position of shadow leader without learning where to aim his best emotional bullets. Not that Kate was an easy mark, but she cared and, damn it, that’s exactly what Crucible had been counting on.
Feeling pissed off and God knew what else, Nolan shoved himself up to his feet. “You already know we’ll cooperate,” he said, “but I want a guarantee.” He nodded out into the tattered graveyard. “When the landmine you’re tossing us onto blows up and I’m dead, don’t bury me in this shitty corner of hell.”
* * *
&n
bsp; The man who sat in his sumptuous New Orleans home office wanted to be sure he had a tight rein on his temper before he responded to his employee in San Francisco. Setting his fingertips on the polished edge of his desk, he counted to five and then directed a chilly smile at the computer screen.
“You missed.” The words came out cool, clipped and thankfully devoid of the tremors that lurked just below his anger. “You assured me this would be an easy in and out.”
In a cocky gesture, the man onscreen shouldered his weapon. “You assured me she’d be an easy hit. Instead, the guy she was with shot his great big handgun into the air and woke up half of Chinatown.”
“Damn it, Hazzard, you should have killed them both.”
“Back off, Jimmy. One of my bullets blew up her fucking car.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t in it. Next time you blow something up make sure she’s inside. You were sent by…” He couldn’t say the name, just couldn’t. “Well, that’s not important. What matters is that you were sent to help me with a situation. I’m only the middleman here. The person we both essentially work for doesn’t have my patience. Bear that in mind before you do anything rash. Believe me when I tell you, if I go down, you go down. And I guarantee it won’t be pretty for either of us. Don’t disappoint me again.”
Jimmy blanked the screen with a perfectly manicured finger that did him proud and remained rock steady despite his mounting fear of a deadly shadow he had no desire to meet. A shadow with no face or form, merely a name assumed for reasons unknown to all except the person who’d been amused enough by the connotations to take it on.
Jimmy’s rock-steady finger began to shake as that name took shape in his mind.
Fear the shadows, past and present, he thought and fought a wave of sickness in his belly. Fear far more a phantom called Leshad.
* * *
At Crucible’s direction, they traded the old graveyard with its untended headstones and ankle-grabbing weeds for a hideous midcentury apartment building in the Mission District. A seedy massage parlor took up the entire ground floor. Fake ferns as tall as Kate sprouted from every visible corner and the ugliest brown carpet in creation covered the floor from the dreary entrance to a front desk shaped like a reclining mermaid.
A woman wearing a floral muumuu pointed a finger at the ceiling before returning to her erotic paperback.
“May says they’re set upstairs,” Crucible translated. “The parlor will be closing down in fifteen minutes. You’re in apartment 203. You have squatters on both sides of you as well as directly above. They look like ghosts from Yasgur’s farm. They’re not. You’ll smell pot smoke in the hall. Don’t let it bother you. Sleep as well as you can for as long as you need to, and we’ll talk more about Leshad and what we believe his superstitious idiosyncrasies might entail tomorrow.”
Too tired to search for her own, Kate plucked Nolan’s iPhone from the back pocket of his jeans.
“You need my thumb to unlock it, Dodger,” he said over his shoulder. “If you want the time, it’s 4:45 a.m.”
She returned the phone to his pocket. “I am so not a night person. I like to run at dawn, Crucible. Do any of your not-from-Yasgur’s-farm ghosts do that?”
Nolan regarded the stained walls and water damaged ceiling. “The idea, Kate, is for us to draw the hired gun out, not to become life-size bull’s-eyes.”
“The key word for me being ‘life.’” She turned a walking circle. “I feel as though we’ve just stepped into the Hotel California. We can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.”
Nolan said nothing, and Crucible merely flashed his teeth.
Kate wished she could make herself care, but truthfully, all she wanted right then was a horizontal surface soft enough to cushion the blow when she fell facedown onto it.
Distorted work schedules wound through the black fog in her head. She saw shift times and surgeries stamped on cracked headstones and Anna Perradine stumbling toward her through a field of dead weeds.
Dead like her son, Kate thought. And wasn’t that where this whole nightmare had started?
The apartment Crucible ushered them into had about as much appeal as Shanghai Lily’s bar. Three or four hippie-like people drifted past. One of them, a pale, middle-aged man, smiled and patted her arm. Then he opened his fringed vest and showed her an arsenal of weapons.
Somewhere in the background, she heard Nolan say, “Bed’s yours, Kate. I’ll take the pull out in the living room.”
She didn’t actually fall onto the mattress, but she didn’t remember stripping off her clothes, either.
She woke up a little when one of the hippie women came in carrying a voluminous white nightgown that smelled like peppermint. She tripped over the hem twice between the bathroom and the big bed Nolan had so graciously offered to her. However, when she sat to test the mattress, she changed the word ‘graciously’ to ‘purposely.’ A mortuary slab would have been softer. Talk about rats.
She slept regardless, and although she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, she dreamed vivid dreams about Nolan. About his silver eyes, his amazing surgeon’s hands and of course his mouth.
It hardly surprised her that a nightmare would slither in and take over with Crucible, fog and a faceless woman in a veil copping center stage. But she drew the line at having her hair pulled by Anna Perradine dressed in a bloodstained rat suit at Shanghai Lily’s bar.
She woke with a gasp and a jolt to blackness so suffocating, she thought for a moment Anna’s rat-claw fingernails had gouged her eyes out. Instead, she discovered that the nightgown had wrapped itself around her throat and was currently cinched across her windpipe.
“Kate?” Nolan’s voice reached her a split second before he thrust the bedroom door open. “Are you all right?”
She had to untangle herself to answer. “I’m awake, if that’s what you mean. Otherwise, I don’t know what I am. Is it morning?” Then her vision cleared and she gave the gown an exasperated yank. “Nolan, you’re half-naked. Put some clothes on.”
He looked down. “I’m wearing jeans.”
“No, you’re not.”
Holding her gaze, he zipped the fly. “Better?”
She sighed. “You’d think. Why are you here?”
“You shouted and woke me up.”
“Why would I shout? No, never mind. Hotel California via the Twilight Zone. Anna Perradine in a rat suit. Who wouldn’t shout?” She reached for a bottle of orange juice on the nightstand and took a long drink. “Where’s Crucible, I’m half-afraid to ask?”
“I mentioned just waking up, right?”
“What, night surgeons need sleep? I thought that was a myth.” Recapping the bottle, she set it aside. “What time is it?”
“It’s 9:20.”
She glanced at the blackout curtains. “Are you telling me I’ve only been asleep for four hours?”
“Sixteen hours. It’s 9:20 p.m.”
“No, it’s not.” Because that was even more preposterous.
Rather than argue, he came into the room, pulled the phone from his back pocket and bent to show her the screen. “Yes, it is. Your untimely shout interrupted a hot dream I was having about you and me alone in Shanghai Lily’s.” He cocked an arrogant brow. “We were playing strip poker, and you were losing your shirt. Among other things. All you had left were your boots. Those ones that come up past your knees and have six-inch spiky heels.”
She pushed the phone and his hand away. “I don’t have any…” She hesitated, visualized. “Oh, those boots.”
“Black leather.” He dropped his hand but didn’t straighten or back off. “They look great on you, Kate. You have amazing legs.”
She’d keep breathing, she promised herself. She would not fall victim to the sexy surgeon’s half-naked body, his long hair, his liquid silver eyes or his mouth, which was less than one spiky boot heel away from hers.
With her eyes firmly fixed on his, she said, “Go away, Nolan. This nightgown’s falling off, and you are n
ot a safe man.”
“I’m not a nice one either. We did this dance last night, remember? Shove me away.”
“Do I have to shove you to make you leave?”
“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed on hers. “I think you do.”
“In that case.” She didn’t hesitate, and she certainly didn’t think. She simply reached up and pulled him down until his mouth was crushed onto hers.
CHAPTER SIX
It was supposed to be an experiment, a chemistry test that would either fizzle and disappoint them or blast their senses so wide apart that Nolan wouldn’t come within twenty feet of her again.
Why, Kate managed to wonder as her mind took an exhilarating sideways plunge, did nothing in life ever go as planned?
She felt like a woman who’d just knocked back three fingers of Jack Black. Her heart shot from the center of her chest straight to her knees. Then Nolan changed the angle of the kiss and took the dive from wild to insane.
Every stunned nerve in her body caught fire as he explored her mouth. Her heart raced, her pulse stuttered and what few thoughts remained turned to dust and blew away.
Heat and hunger fused into a sharp thrust of need. He tasted like the night, like darkness and fog and the kind of danger she shouldn’t want but strangely did. She wanted to run her hands over his naked torso, to tug off his partly fastened jeans and drag him onto the bed with her. She wanted him to strip away the white nightgown, toss it aside then roll her over on the sheets so she could straddle him. So they could…
Whoa, wait, stop, she ordered herself. Stop all of it right now. She was asking far too much from a first kiss. An only kiss, if she was smart.
Kate slid her hands from his back to his shoulders but couldn’t bring herself to push him away. “This is off-the-scale weird,” she murmured. “We’re polar opposites, you and me. Night, day, moody, not.”
His lips curved against hers. “Like hell, Kate. You have moods. I’ve seen them.”
“Not black ones.”
“You taste like Napoleon brandy.”
