Читать книгу The Passionate G-Man - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 7

One

Lyon hobbled away from the truck stop with as much haste and dignity as he could muster, leaving the waitress staring after him, her tired blue eyes filled with sympathy. By all rights she should have clobbered him. Instead, she’d taken one look at his stricken face, another at his cane, and started in with the, “Oh, you poor man” routine.

Levering himself into the driver’s seat, he brushed a crumb of fried oyster off his sleeve and shifted until he found a position that was bearable. He’d been warned against driving at all, much less driving for hours at a stretch.

Needless to say, he’d ignored the warning.

Dammit, he’d tried to apologize to the woman. It wasn’t her fault he’d been in the process of extracting himself from the cramped booth just as she passed by with two big seafood platters.

Lyon was no good with apologies. Never had been.

He’d wanted to help her clean up the mess, but he knew better than to try, so he’d done the next best thing. He’d crammed a fistful of bills in her apron pocket and got the hell out of there, red face, grease-stained shoulders and all.

At least, with the help of a back brace, a knee brace and a cane, he could do that much. Walk away. There was damned little he was good at anymore, but he’d always been good at walking away.

Five weeks ago he had walked away from an explosion that had killed two other agents and three civilians. Crawled away, actually, after being blown clear. Miraculously, he’d suffered only minor burns, but he’d been thrown against the side of the surveillance van, injuring his back and one knee.

At least he’d survived.

Five days ago he had walked away from the hospital. He’d had a choice of lying there taped up like a mummy, waiting either to mend or to croak from sheer boredom—or for the bad guys to find him and put a permanent end to his career—or get the hell out.

He’d got out. Walked away. Because if the bad guys hadn’t got to him first, the boredom would’ve done him in.

Although there’d been a couple of nurses who’d done their best to relieve it. One, a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman, had joked about adopting him.

Another one had been more interested in seducing him.

He might even have considered it—the seduction—if only to prove to himself that he still had a few working body parts, but the last thing he needed was to get involved with a woman.

It had been Lyon’s experience that men and women viewed sex from widely different perspectives. Women—at least the few he’d been involved with for any length of time—used sex the same way he used the tools of his trade. As a means of achieving an end.

To all but one or two of the women he’d known, sex was bait. The female of the species was programmed by nature to latch onto the richest mate available. His old man had drummed that lesson into his head before he’d cleaned out the cash drawer where he worked and disappeared, leaving behind a bitter wife and an angry twelve-year-old son.

Lyon hadn’t learned much from his father, but he’d heard that little homily repeated too often ever to forget it.

Cautious by nature, he’d learned to be even more cautious, both in his work and in his relationships with women. Not all women were dishonest. Not all of them were looking for commitment, but enough of them were so that he didn’t care to take chances.

To a man, sex was relief. A basic requirement, like food and water and a couple of hours sleep out of every twenty-four or thirty-six hours, conditions permitting. For a man in his position, it didn’t pay to think beyond that.

Back on the highway, Lyon tuned to a country music station and set his mind on automatic. There were too many things it didn’t pay to think about. Not yet. Not until he was fully recovered, had a few answers and was ready to go back and deal with them.

He spotted the patrol car in plenty of time to ease his speed back to a safe and legal seventy. Not that he was afraid of getting pulled over. His ID, if he cared to use it, would get him past any branch of law enforcement. It was more a matter of common sense.

A matter of survival.

Common sense told him that a man in his condition had no business being on the highway at all. A well-honed sense of survival—which, admittedly had taken a beaten lately—told him that driving like a bat out of Daytona wasn’t particularly smart, either. Especially as he’d quit cold turkey taking painkillers and muscle relaxants three days ago. As a result, he was hurting. As a result of something else, although probably not the pills, he was jittery.

The smoky lost interest. Lyon breathed a sigh of relief. Near the Virginia-North Carolina border he pulled into the visitors’ center, parked and scanned the immediate surroundings out of habit. It was called situation awareness.

He took his time getting out of the pickup, not that he had an option. By the time he’d done three slow laps around the parking area, his muscles had loosened up enough so that he barely limped, even without the cane.

Mind over matter. His body might have been screwed over pretty thoroughly, but his mind was still in first-class working order.

Although there’d been some argument over that when he’d signed himself out of the hospital.

Following the road map, he left the interstate at Roanoke Rapids and took an east-southeasterly course, using two lanes and what was euphemistically called “other roads.” There was no deadline. He had three months before he had to make up his mind whether to put in for early retirement or go back on line.

At least where he was headed there wouldn’t be any reporters. Or any drug-runners, terrorists, or survivalists, any one of which was bad enough. When the territories started overlapping, things got spooky.

And when there was a leak from somewhere in the chain of command, things got even spookier. The wrong people started dying.

“How’d you want your burger, hon? We can’t fry ‘em rare no more, gov’ment rules. We got sweet onions up from Georgia, though. A thick slice, and even shoe leather’d taste good.”

Lyon ordered two burgers, well-done with extra onion, extra cheese and a quart of coffee. When the waitress leaned across in front of him to realign the salt and pepper shakers, offering him a front-row seat in her balcony if he was interested, he said, “To go, please. And could you give me directions to—”

“Any old where, darlin’, you name it. You here for the huntin’ or the fishin’? I could show you some real good places.”

“Yeah, both,” he muttered. I’ll just bet you could, sugar, and I’d probably enjoy them all, but not today, thanks. “Could you point me in the direction of the nearest hardware store, supermarket and the local tax office?”

Jasmine was depressed. All the way across the country she’d been pumping up her expectations. She’d managed to keep them high during the long drive from the airport to the nursing home, but there they’d collapsed like a wet souffle.

Her grandmother didn’t know her. Her only living relative, whom she hadn’t seen since she’d moved with her mother from Oklahoma to California eighteen and a half years ago, didn’t know her from Adam.

Make that Eve.

And the worst part of it was, Hattie Clancy wasn’t interested in knowing her. She was sweet and polite and a little vague—well, a lot vague, actually—but Jasmine could tell right off that she was more interested in playing cards with her friends and watching her favorite soaps and game shows than she was in getting to know the granddaughter who had flown all the way from the West Coast to see her.

Jasmine told herself it was probably for the best. Why get attached to someone who lives thousands of miles away, someone who’s old and might die—someone who’s probably set in her ways and wouldn’t be interested in moving to L.A., even if Jasmine could afford to move her there?

All the same, it would have been nice...

She shook off the sense of depression. It hadn’t been a total waste. She’d met her only living relative, after all. Now when she sent snapshots and letters and greeting cards, she’d have a face to attach to the name and address she’d found among her father’s papers after he’d died.

Having barely known the man before he turned up one day on her doorstep, sick and broke, she’d been surprised to learn that his mother—her own grandmother—was still living, much less living in North Carolina. She would have thought Oklahoma if she’d thought at all, because that’s where her parents had parted company.

Jasmine had written to Hattie Clancy immediately. She hadn’t heard back, but she’d continued to write. For an actress who was unemployed more often than not, she’d been too busy trying to pay off her father’s medical bills, along with her own living expenses, to have much free time, but she’d made time to send cards and brief notes, and sometimes a clipping when she happened to land a part and her name was mentioned in a review.

Which was practically never.

To make ends meet she’d done a few commercials and taken a fill-in job in a dress shop. It paid minimum wage, plus a tiny discount on clothes she couldn’t afford to buy anyway.

And now she’d spent money she didn’t have to fly east to see a grandmother who didn’t know her and didn’t seem particularly interested in getting acquainted. She might as well have stayed home. It had been a total waste of time and money.

No, it hadn’t. She’d earned herself a vacation. The last one had been—

Yes, well...that was another reason she’d needed to get away. Her last vacation had been with Eric. A week after they’d come back from Tahoe, Eric had started seeing her best friend. Jasmine had made excuses for him at first. She was good at that.

What was that popular song? Cleopatra, Queen of Denial?

Boy, was she ever. Her friends said she was easygoing. Laid-back. Which meant more or less the same thing—that she didn’t blow her stack at the least little thing, which was a definite advantage in the dog-eat-dog world of acting.

All the same, she hadn’t felt very laid-back when Cynthia had breezed into the shop one day last week and said, “Guess what! Eric and I are getting married. You’ve got to be our maid of honor, you’ve simply got to! After all, if you hadn’t introduced us, it never would have happened.”

Right. Smartest thing she ever did. Introduce the man she was in love with to her best friend, who was blond and beautiful and had a continuing, if minor, role in Wilde’s Children.

“When?” she’d managed to ask. Actually, it had sounded more like a whine, but Cyn had been so wrapped up in her own euphoria she hadn’t noticed.

“Valentine’s Day. Isn’t that just too, too perfect?”

Jasmine had agreed that it was just too, too perfect. And then she’d come up with the too-too perfect excuse. “Oh, but my grandmother—it’s her seventy-ninth birthday. Actually, her birthday’s on the fifteenth, but I promised to help her celebrate. You wouldn’t want to wait until next year, would you?”

They couldn’t possibly wait, and so Jasmine had been stuck with her excuse. She’d told herself it would be a lovely thing to do, to surprise her grandmother—her only living relative, unless her father had taken a few more secrets to the grave—and so she’d flown all the way across the country on a ticket she couldn’t afford, and gone still deeper in debt renting a car to drive to the nursing home, which was hours away from the airport.

And now, here she was at loose ends for a whole week. She’d planned to stay near the nursing home, only there wasn’t really any place to stay—at least no place she could afford. She’d asked for a weekly rate on her car, and planned to drive her grandmother around, just the two of them, and talk about her father and her grandfather, and any aunts or uncles and cousins she might have.

Family things. Things like, who else in the family had kinky maroon hair and legs that went all the way up to her armpits?

Things like who else in the family loved animals, hated insects and was allergic to cantaloups?

Things that would have taken her mind off the fact that Cyn and Eric were at this very moment honeymooning in Cancún.

Instead, she’d spent a day at the nursing home, looking at pictures of grandchildren of people she didn’t even know, watching soaps and seeıng a few people she did know, but not Cyn, thank goodness—and being largely ignored by her own grandmother.

She.’d played cards with three lovely old ladies, gradually coming to realize that they weren’t all playing with a full deck. She’d strolled around the grounds once the rain had let up, exclaiming over straggly little flowers and squishıng through the mud to pick a bunch of red berries for one of the residents who admired them.

She’d had to battle great swags of Spanish moss and several thick, hairy vines to get to the things, but when her grandmother had asked for some, too, she had gladly waded into the jungle again to oblige her.

What else were granddaughters for?

Feeling lost, rootless, she’d woken up the next morning and considered her options. If she went back now—that’s if she could even exchange her tickets—she’d have to pay the daily rate for her car instead of the cheaper weekly rate.

Of course, she would save on her motel bill, but money wasn’t her only problem, or even her biggest one. Eric and Cynthia would be back on Friday. Cynthia would insist on giving her a detailed description of the honeymoon. Cynthia insisted on giving anyone who would listen a detailed description of her entire life. It was one of her charms—her breezy openness.

And Eric, blast his gorgeous hide, would gaze adoringly into his bride’s eyes the way Jasmine had dreamed of his gazing into her own eyes, only he never had, and she’d probably throw up or something equally embarrassing.

Dammit, he knew she loved him! She hadn’t even tried to hide it. They’d met thirteen and a half months ago at a New Year’s Eve party and it had been one of those magical, magnetic moments that come once in a lifetime.

They had everything in common. They’d both grown up in the Midwest in single-parent households, but they’d been happy, comfortable households. They both believed in love at first sight, in fate. They both liked vinegar on their french fries.

The first time they’d gone away for a long weekend together, Jasmine had thought of it as a honeymoon. She’d been waiting ever since for a proposal, being just old-fashioned enough to believe it was the man’s prerogative. Which was a hoot considering she was an actress who had lived in L.A. for nearly five years.

And then she’d made the fatal mistake of introducing Eric to Cynthia.

After driving aimlessly for hours, she pulled into a service station, filled her tank, hoping her credit card wasn’t maxed out, and splurged on a candy bar and a diet cola. Savoring the unfamiliar aroma of nature in the raw mingled with diesel oil, she studied the map in search of anything of interest between where she was and the airport.

She’d had to ask the attendant where she was. It seemed she was somewhere in the vicinity of Frying Pan Landing, not too far from Gum Neck, smack dab in the middle of that part of the map labeled Eastern Dismal Swamp.

Dismal. If she’d been looking for something that suited her mood, she couldn’t have found a better place.

“I don’t suppose there are any hotels around here?” she said hopefully. It was getting late. She’d been driving more or less aimlessly all day, trying to make her up mind what to do.

The motel catered to fishermen and hunters. The bed was more like a hammock, but it was clean and cheap, and Clemmie, the woman in the office, told her that the café next door opened at five every morning for breakfast and closed about dark.

Jasmine managed to stay awake long enough to eat a bowl of clam chowder before she fell into bed, too tired to think about tomorrow. A pale sun was shining in through the one small window when she opened her eyes the next morning. She stretched, scratched her left cheek and yawned. And then she scratched again.

Shower. Breakfast. Then maybe spend another day looking around before she went home. As long as she’d come this far, it would be a shame to go back without seeing anything other than a nursing home, a gas station and a cheap motel. She might as well soak up a little atmosphere as long as she’d spent money she couldn’t afford to spend just to get here.

Jasmine had never been farther east than Tulsa. There was a different feel to North Carolina. For one thing, it was quieter. Unnaturally quiet, in fact. But that could be because, according to the map, the nearest city was miles away. Or maybe because it was the dead of winter, and here where they had real seasons, things like that made a difference.

By the time she had rinsed off under a trickle of lukewarm water, she felt marginally better. She might even write about it, she thought, idly scratching her face. She hadn’t written anything in years, even though she had a perfectly good degree in journalism.

The Further Adventures of Jasmine Clancy. A Thousand Miles From Heartbreak? In Search of Family Ties?

Her stomach growled. How about in search of breakfast?

She was hungry, which was a good sign. Even heartbroken and suffering from acute disappointment, she wasn’t bothered by a lack of appetite. In fact, she felt surprisingly good.

That is, she felt good until she looked in the mirror.

“For Pete’s sake, what happened to you?” she whispered, touching her red, swollen face, which instantly began to itch like crazy.

Clemmie was alone in the office, thank goodness. The wife of the owner of the four-unit motel, she did the rooms, helped out in the café, and after one look at Jasmine, she told her to go back to her room.

Twenty minutes later she brought her a breakfast tray of scrambled eggs, sausage and hash browns, with a side order of calamine lotion and a handful of tourist brochures.

“We got these things—mostly nobody ever wants ’em, but since you’re not from around here, it might give you something to do. Sort of take your mind off your troubles. If you don’t think about it too much, you forget to scratch.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jasmine wailed. “I haven’t had poison ivy since I was a child.”

“I used to get it real bad, every summer. My mama used to threaten to make me wear boxing gloves to keep me from scratching.”

“But it’s February!”

“Poison ivy don’t die, it just hides out over the winter. Gets you just as bad, though. Now don’t scratch, you hear?”

He’d been there for one full week. The first few days he’d nearly gone nuts without his cell phone, his laptop and all the other accoutrements of civilized living he’d grown used to.

Daniel Lyon Lawless, chronological age thirty-seven, physiological age one hundred and seven, rolled over onto his back after the last push-up and stared at a pair of buzzards circling overhead. Maybe they knew something he didn’t.

“Not a happy thought,” he muttered just to hear the sound of a human voice.

Closing his eyes, he listened to the hollow echo of birds deep inside the boggy forest. Nearby, a frog tuned up. First one, then a dozen. He’d have thought, if he’d thought about frogs at all, they’d be buried in the mud this time of year, but then, what did he know about roughing it in the wilds of the great Dismal Swamp?

Not much. Enough to know that he’d been right to come here, though. In a place like this, away from all distractions, a man could think. If thinking got a little too uncomfortable, he could concentrate on more immediate things, such as keeping the damned bugs from eating him alive. Such as working out until he dropped from exhaustion. Such as wetting a hook in a black-water creek in hope of catching something to relieve a monotonous diet of tinned meat, tinned soup, stale crackers and black coffee.

He had a feeling it wasn’t a healthy diet. On the other hand, he’d shed his knee brace three days ago and his back brace the day before that. His cane was no good in this boggy terrain. No good for walking. He carried it anyway, because he felt naked without a weapon, and foolish carrying one here in the back of beyond, where the most dangerous critter he was apt to encounter was a damned mosquito.

He carried a knife, though. It was useful in whacking through vines and opening cans of Vienna sausage. And he walked. He counted it in hours, not miles. He’d done four hours yesterday, on top of six miles rowed back and forth on the nameless creek that bordered his campsite.

Tomorrow he was going to row in one direction until he was exhausted, then he’d go ashore, give his knee a workout and then row himself back to camp. It was a good system. It was working for him. Except for a few minor problems, he was in better shape now than he’d been before the explosion.

He was a hell of a lot more relaxed. Couple of days ago, he’d actually found himself whistling. Another few weeks and he might even find something to smile about.

He wondered what was going on back in Langley. Madden had promised to find out who’d been turned. Who had leaked names, times and places so that two of the best men in the unit had been taken out in one night. Lyon’s name would be on that list of expendables. Which was one more reason why he hadn’t cared to hang around the hospital like a sitting duck.

A duck on the wing had a far better chance of surviving.

A camcorder. Even a disposable camera. Jasmine would give anything for some way to record what she was seeing. No wonder half of Hollywood had moved to North Carolina, with scenery like this. Moody, spooky, fraught with atmosphere—not to mention the exotic noises and all the different odors. Perfect for a remake of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

At least there were plenty of black lagoons, if mercifully few creatures.

Away from the motel, there was practically no traffic. None at all once she’d left the narrow two-lane highway. Clemmie had told her about the old logging road, and she’d followed it, determined to stay out of public view until her face improved, but wanting to take something back with her after spending the better part of eight hundred dollars on a wild-goose chase.

She’d had sense enough to shove a notepad into her shoulder bag. Clemmie had provided that, too. Her writerly instincts had been stirring all morning. She was even considering doing a travel piece on spec to help pay her expenses.

She might even offer it to one of the two newspapers where she’d briefly worked as a special features writer before being laid-off, downsized or consolidated, depending on who was offering excuses.

At least it had led to her acting career, which paid at a better rate, only not nearly as regularly.

Fortunately, she was good at rolling with the punches. Going with the flow. Surviving.

The logging road ended at a hill, which turned out to be a mound of rotted sawdust, covered with creeping, crawling vines. Something was blooming somewhere nearby—something with a sweet, spicy scent.

There was enough high ground so that her feet didn’t sink in the mud, so she followed an all but imperceptible trail deeper and deeper into the woods.

Red berries beckoned from the wild tangle of vegetation. Gorgeous, big fat red berries, like the ones she had picked for her grandmother. Uh-uh. Not again.

She scratched her face, careful not to dig too hard because poison ivy was bad enough without scars. Her face, after all, was her fortune. At five foot ten, her height and her long legs helped, but mostly it was her face. She would like to believe it was her acting ability, because then a few scars might not matter too much, but she was realistic enough to know better.

She had a modest talent and the kind of looks that were just different enough to land her a few parts. Until another kind of look came into fashion, and then she’d do commercials or even catalog work, and maybe some modeling.

Not that modeling appealed to her. The few models she knew were obsessed by diets, cutaneous laser resurfacing, ultrasound liposuctioning. One of them was actually growing her own collagen for when she needed a major overhaul.

Jasmine would much rather settle into a comfortable, low-key life with Eric and their children, and maybe her grandmother living together in a little bungalow somewhere. Fashion was fleeting. Film fame was fleeting. Family was forever.

Oh, yeah? So what happened to all of yours?

Somewhere up ahead she heard a sound that didn’t belong in this mystical, moss-hung environment.

A splash. A bump, a yelp...

And then a groan.