Worth the Trip

by Penny McCall

  “And all you had to do was agree with me.” She pulled him to his feet and unsnapped his pants. The thigh of his jeans was stiff with dried blood, the whole thing stuck to his injured leg. She dumped out the first aid supplies and found the small, cheap scissors she’d bought, cutting around the wound. Then she pulled him into the bathroom.

  “A bath would be better,” she said, “but there’s no telling what’s in that tub.”

  “You, if I’m lucky.”

  She might have taken him seriously if he hadn’t been too tired to put much heat behind that suggestion—and if she hadn’t been so freaked out at the idea that he’d actually been shot. She went to gather up the bandages and tape, and by the time she returned he was out of the shower and half-dressed.

  Norah pushed him down on the closed toilet and took a good look at the wound, now minus its denim bandage.

  “It’s just a graze,” Trip said.

  Norah shot him a look, studying the two-inch long furrow on his thigh. It might be a graze, but his face was drawn with pain and he’d lost a fair amount of blood. “It’s pretty clean,” she said. “You could use some stitches, but—”

  “There’s a law. They have to report bullet wounds.”

  “Then I guess you’re stuck with me.” She slathered on antiseptic cream.

  He sucked in a breath.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, laying gauze over the wound and taping it down on all four sides. “We’ll have to keep an eye on it, make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  She started to get up, saw that big red heart, and smiled.

  “Impressive, huh?” Trip said with a ghost of his usual devilment.

  “It’s not you, it’s those boxers. I’ll have to use them in my next book.”

  “They weren’t my idea,” he reminded her.

  They were every man’s idea, Norah thought as she left him to finish dressing. It was an instinctual thing, and that heart sitting right over his testicles said it all. Men reproduced. Women nurtured. Both genders confused sex with love in different ways. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t a condemnation of either men or women, and it wasn’t to say they didn’t love. But those boxers were a pretty spot-on illustration of the differences between them. Nor was it something she should forget. It was too late to keep herself from getting emotionally hooked, but she couldn’t let her emotions put up a smoke screen for her intellect. Trip would go on his way when the loot was found, and while she’d been focusing on what that meant for her father, she needed to remember what it would mean for her.

  He came up behind her and reached over her shoulder into her shirt. She smacked his hand away, and not because she thought he was overcome by her charms. He was after the clue.

  She collected the new clothes she’d bought for herself and headed for the bathroom. “I’m taking a shower, and I’m keeping this”—she held up the plastic bag they’d retrieved from Waugoshance Lighthouse—“until I’m done. We’ll look at it together.”

  “You’re lucky I’m too tired and hungry to take offense.”

  She snorted softly. “It’s not like you can chase me down, especially since I have the key to the bike. And your wallet.”

  “And I have your dad.”

  “He’s not going to tell you anything.”

  “He’s not going to tell you anything, either, as long as you can’t get to him.”

  “So you’ve been holding him all this time in case you needed to keep me in line?”

  “No, we’ve kept him in custody according to the terms of his sentence, at a secret location so he’ll be protected while he heals. Using him as blackmail is strictly a bonus.”

  “The FBI doesn’t do things by accident.” She closed the bathroom door behind her and shot the bolt home.

  “If I wanted to come in there, do you think a locked door would stop me?”

  “Not if the loot was in here.”

  IF HIS LEG HADN’T BEEN THROBBING LIKE THE heartbeat of Satan, Trip would have been up and pacing the room. Instead, he had to sit there, burning—and not in a good way—as he listened to the water run while Norah showered. He wanted to join her. After last night he wouldn’t have hesitated. If not for her parting shot.

  She came out, cool, calm, keeping her distance—despite a T-shirt that read Too Sexy For My Clothes— and letting him know it. She’d been holding a part of herself back anyway. He’d resented it even as he’d acknowledged he was doing the same. Now she was back to the woman he’d met a few days ago, not trusting him, although he had to admit she had cause. The FBI would use whoever they wanted by whatever means were handy with no regard for the consequences to anyone but the Bureau.

  The part she’d overlooked was that he was a tool, too. Then again, he’d chosen his path. He’d been fine with it, too, until now. Maybe it was the first time he’d been faced with a truly innocent person caught up in a criminal enterprise. Maybe, he allowed, it was Norah.

  Trip took that idea out for a spin, looked at it from every angle he could think of, then put it away, into a little box in his mind. A man in his position didn’t have the right to think in emotional terms, and a man who might have to use another person to complete a job had to know he was poisoning the well before he ever dipped into it. She was right to freeze him out. As long as she didn’t shut him out where the Gold Coast Robbery was concerned.

  “Let’s get something straight,” he said, “you’re not going to work against me, right?”

  “You have my father in custody.” Her voice was even, matter-of-fact, but she wasn’t looking at him.

  He couldn’t let it matter. “I’ll tell you where he is right now, if you ask me.”

  “Because I’m the key to finding the loot.”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes lifted to his. He held her gaze for a moment that felt like an eternity roasting over hot coals. Then she nodded and looked away.

  “I appreciate the truth.”

  But she didn’t answer his question. She didn’t ask where her father was, either, so Trip decided to take it as progress toward closing his case and getting back to Washington, and eventually moving on to the next job. And if there wasn’t the same sense of anticipation and exhilaration he usually felt, he’d deal with that when he had to.

  Norah dug into the food bag, pulling out sandwiches and soup containers and sliding one of each across the table to Trip.

  Trip cracked the lid on the soup. The scent of chicken noodle wafted out, lukewarm, but he was starving and hurting, and it was just like Norah to provide the kind of food that would satisfy every kind of hunger, both the physical and the emotional.

  She ignored the food altogether and pulled out the clue bag, still pissed but keeping her word. She opened the small plastic bag and pulled out the paper inside. When she unfolded the paper a piece of jade, wafer thin, about three inches long and intricately carved into a flat elephant, fell out, along with some unset gems.

  Trip flattened out the white plastic takeout bag, put the jewels and elephant on it, and took out his cell phone. “The jade piece is easily identifiable,” he said as he snapped pictures. “My guess is it will be traced back to the robbery. My handler will verify it.” He sent the pictures to Mike and snapped his phone closed.

  “Gems are a compact, easy way to stash money, which means they wouldn’t have been reported, and they were loose in one of the safe-deposit boxes.”

  “Are you sure they weren’t broken down from one of the other pieces of jewelry?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken that long. Gold is pretty soft.”

  “There’s a bigger question we need to think about.”

  She looked up, both of them speaking at the same time, Norah saying, “There’s a fifth partner.”

  “We’re being conned” was Trip’s take on the situation, and then he said, “The FBI would have known if there was another partner.”

  “How?” Norah demanded.
“Their shoot first and ask questions later approach? My father was the only survivor, and he hasn’t exactly been a font of information.”

  “Until now. Why do you think that is?”

  “He’s not running a con,” Norah insisted. “Not on me.”

  “If you don’t believe he’d use you to put one over on the FBI, you’re seriously delusional.”

  Norah slapped both hands on the table and got to her feet. “After five minutes with you I can understand what he’s got against the FBI.”

  “There’s no reason to make this personal.”

  “You just did.”

  Trip stopped, took a deep breath, and tried to see around his frustration. “He’s your father, Norah. There’s no way to keep this from being personal to you.”

  She sighed and sank back into her chair. “You’re right, and he’s had a long time to resent the FBI. But you don’t know him like I do. He wants to return the stolen items to their rightful owners. He wants to atone for what he did.”

  Trip shook his head. “I realize you haven’t had contact with him in fifteen years, but people don’t change that much.”

  “Yes, they do. There are actual studies.”

  “Like we’ve both pointed out, he’s your father. You can’t help but see his actions through a filter of emotion, but you can’t ignore reality, Norah. Your father is running a con.”

  “I’m not ignoring reality. I don’t believe it.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to convince you.”

  She thought about that for a minute. “How?”

  “Simple,” Trip said, amazed. Not many people were able to face life, especially the unpleasant parts, without flinching. Norah met life head-on, dared it to kick her in the teeth. The problem was, sometimes life wore steel-toed boots. “Puff wasn’t involved in the actual robbery. It only took us a day to get to the lighthouse. He had three days before he was caught.”

  “But why would he leave a trail of breadcrumbs for himself?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.” He glanced at the note from the clue bag, still lying on Norah’s side of the table.

  She opened it, read it, then held it out.

  Trip took the note from her, more interested in its content than its style. “From water to land, ice to sand, tropical, arboreal and seasonal at hand,” he read out loud. “Endangered and rare, common and spare, north of the border, your destination’s there.”

  He met Norah’s eyes. “The Detroit Zoo.”

  “Should you be jumping like that with a leg wound?”

  “Water, land, arboreal,” he repeated from the clue, “you’ve got habitats. Endangered, rare, common, you’ve got plants and animals. Has to be a zoo. North of the border. What else could Lucius mean but Detroit?”

  “It’s not my father’s handwriting, and it’s definitely not something Lucius would write. He has a contempt for rhymes. He says it’s like putting the imagination in prison. Unless it’s an Irish poet, then he tolerates it.”

  “This”—he picked up the elephant and the note—“has Lucius written all over it. The bits of treasure, the possibility there’s a fifth man, the scavenger hunt aspect to keep it entertaining. It’s just enough to whet your appetite and suck you in. You know you’re being conned, but he makes it impossible to walk away.”

  “I don’t think I’m being conned,” she reminded him.

  “It would be helpful if you kept an open mind.” Not to mention losing the attitude. “We know Lucius left the other conspirators for three days; we know the loot wasn’t at the hideout where they were killed and he was arrested. The assumption has always been that Lucius took the loot and hid it somewhere. You want me to prove I’m right? I say we follow the breadcrumbs and see where they lead us. If we don’t find the main cache in three days we go see your father again.”

  “But what is he getting out of it? What’s the point of all this?”

  Trip shrugged. “He strikes me as a man with a sense of humor.”

  “He has plans for the loot. We aren’t going to find the big payday this way.”

  “Maybe not, but we’ll recover some of the stolen goods.”

  “And your job is to recover everything.”

  “We can call him if it will make you feel better. Maybe he’ll tell you what this is about.”

  “Not over the phone.” Norah smiled. “But he’d get a kick out of it, and I hear laughter is the best medicine.”

  chapter 15

  THE SKY WAS A PUFFY MASS OF CLOUDS WHEN they left the motel room the next morning, the air was so crisp it nearly crackled, and the Harley was gone. What surprised Norah the most was that she didn’t even blink, just looked at the silver car in the space where the Harley had been parked and thought, Oh good, heat. Not being curled around Trip was a plus, too, considering the state of their relationship, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, nonexistent, except where the robbery was concerned. Which was exactly as it should be, she reminded herself, and let it go . . . Okay, what she actually did was suppress it, but it amounted to the same thing with the caveat that there’d be a reckoning later. But Trip would be gone by then, so he wouldn’t have to pay for her lack of perspective, and she’d be able to handle it without him around to pity her. Pity would make it so much worse.

  When they got to the car, she held her hand out for the keys. Trip gave them to her without resistance, which was kind of disappointing since she’d had all her arguments lined up, and now she wouldn’t get to demonstrate how firmly grounded she was in the case, and that she hadn’t spent a miserable night pretending to sleep while she was really concentrating on staying on her side of the bed so she didn’t inadvertently brush his wound and cause him more pain.

  “You’d think the FBI could do better,” she said as she climbed into the driver’s seat of the late model silver sedan. “I’m going to have to memorize the license plate if we park it anywhere more crowded than this.”

  “Not being noticed is the point here,” Trip said from the passenger seat, “and anyway, it’s what’s under the hood that counts.”

  She nodded, ejecting the image of those heart-studded boxers from her brain, then giving her nerve endings a stern talking-to. Those boxers are a slippery slope, she told them, one that would start with mind-blowing pleasure and end up dropping her right into the emotional muddle she’d just worked her way out of. Trip was not part of the ADVENTURE anymore, at least not in that way.

  She started up the sedan and directed it out of the parking space at the back of the motel lot toward the road at the front, the driveway taking her past the office. The manager came racing out, a small, round woman in her fifties, who might have been moderately pretty without the panic on her face.

  Norah jammed on the brakes, Trip rolled down the passenger window, and the manager hurried around to his side of the car.

  “How was your stay?” she said, definitely not what they’d been expecting. Arson, violence, even potential murder, but a status report with that expression?

  Trip put his hand over the manager’s, and looked deep into her eyes. “Talk to Kizi lately?” he asked her, and when her mouth dropped open, he turned to Norah. “Go,” he said, which was all the impetus she needed. She pulled up to the road, and he said, “Right,” before she could even look both ways or remark that there was a lot of traffic for such a small town.

  Right took her in the opposite direction from most of the traffic, at first, anyway, since at least four vehicles made U-turns and came after them. Norah stomped on the gas pedal, the car leapt ahead, the engine roaring. “You weren’t kidding,” she said, easing off.

  “We’re up against people who know this area like the back of their hand,” he said, apparently a bad news first kind of guy. “We’re going to need all the speed we can get, but at least the roads are two-lane. That’ll work in our favor.”

  “You think Kizi called the manager.”

  “I think somebody instilled the fear of whatever gods the Ottawa pray
to in her.”

  “Some sort of nature religion, maybe an Earth Mother type of belief system.”

  “Yeah, that’s the important thing here.”

  “I’m trying to be calm,” she snapped at him.

  “Calm is good,” Trip said, no doubt flashing back to her climbing out of the driver’s seat last time they were in a fix like this, which had been bad enough in her Escape but would be impossible in the sedan. Not to mention his wounded leg would present a problem. “We weren’t on the news last night,” he continued, keeping his voice to a quiet, even level.

  “You’re not talking to a mental patient.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve spent the last few days with you,” Norah shot back, which, as far as she was concerned, explained her slipping hold on sanity. “Can we get back to the confirmed lunatics?”

  “Those guys knew they winged me, and we weren’t going far,” he said, sounding disgruntled now. “They probably reached out to everyone they know, and it spread from there.”

  “Seven degrees of separation?”

  “Let’s hope not. That would mean Hollie and those guys who followed us in Chicago know where we are.”

  It wasn’t a stretch to think Hollie might know, considering she was probably still in the state. “Maybe I should worry about these guys first,” she said, watching them in the rearview mirror, a caravan of trucks, cars, and SUVs, none of them new, all of them wobbling in and out of the line, jockeying for position. Then most of them peeled off, leaving three vehicles behind the sedan.

  “Want some more bad news?” she said to Trip. “They seem to be communicating with each other.”

  “There’s a shocker.” He twisted around and looked out the back window. “They’re going for a squeeze maneuver. One of them will stay behind us, one of them will get in front, and the third will come up alongside us in the other lane and force us off the road.”

  “I wouldn’t enjoy that.”

  “Definitely not since I doubt they’d be as focused on me this time.”

  “You think they’ll hold a grudge?”

  “They seem like the type.”