Читать книгу The Quiet Seduction - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 9

Spence Harrison scanned the dial in search of a weather update while he drove, half his attention on the highway, half on the sky. He had enough on his mind without heading into a patch of nasty weather. In this section of South Texas, scattered showers might mean anything from a few tepid drops to baseball-size hail. Yesterday’s prediction of scattered showers had produced a deluge.

Luckily, traffic was light on the secondary highway. All he had to do was watch out for slow-moving tractors and a speeding ticket, as his foot tended to be heavier on the accelerator when he was under tension. For a district attorney on his way to the state prison to take an on-site deposition—one he didn’t trust anyone else to take—a speeding ticket would be embarrassing, to say the least.

Reaching up, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Damn, it was getting hot! He turned the air conditioner up another notch. Cutting back to a moderate sixty-five miles an hour, he tried to concentrate on the task ahead. The trouble came in trying to narrow his focus.

The last call he’d taken before leaving his office had had nothing to do with the murder trial he was preparing to prosecute, or even the information he was hoping to uncover from this particular witness. Instead it concerned Luke Callaghan, a good friend, Virginia Military Institute classmate and old marine corps buddy who had dropped off the radar screen after arriving in Central America. It had been more than a week since he’d reported in.

Considering his usual extravagant lifestyle, his disappearance would not have been surprising, but in this particular case it was definitely a cause for alarm. Luke was involved in a risky undercover rescue mission. Their former commander, Phillip Westin, had gone down somewhere in a Central American jungle—not a great place to go missing. Spence wasn’t privy to all the details, but from the few he did know he’d been able to extrapolate others with his well-honed power of deduction. A logical mind and the ability to reason were valuable tools in his particular line of work.

At the moment, however, those abilities were being stretched thin. As the miles sped past, Spence’s thoughts ricocheted back and forth between Luke’s situation and recent revelations on an entirely different front that made it imperative that he find out just which cops had gone rogue. It was hardly the thing a man could ask if he wanted to stay healthy. At this point, not even Internal Affairs was above suspicion.

Spence could count on the fingers of one hand the cops he could trust. It was a sad state of affairs, damned sad. Most were probably clean, but he couldn’t be sure. Not until he had enough evidence to trigger an outside investigation. He was counting on today’s deposition to add a few more parts to the puzzle.

It had been the murder of Judge Carl Bridges that had shaken things loose. The judge had been a powerful man in Lone Star County—a man who had influenced countless lives, Spence’s included. The two had met at a time when Spence had been headed down a dead-end road. He’d been no stranger to juvenile court. Thanks to Carl Bridges he had turned around, worked his tail off, and now, a couple of decades later, had a respectable career as a district attorney to show for it.

It was the judge’s recent murder that had driven Spence on a mission of his own. Alex Black’s finger-prints might have been all over the murder weapon, but someone else had to be pulling his strings. Black wasn’t bright enough to act on his own. Spence was all but certain the punk was being set up to take the fall. He had a pretty good idea who was behind it, but certainty wasn’t enough. He needed irrefutable evidence, and getting that evidence was not going to be easy. Under the circumstances, it might even be hazardous.

There had been a few questionable incidents recently that, taken singly, meant little. The car that had nearly run him off the road last week, he’d put down to a DUI. He’d immediately called the highway patrol, but by the time they’d arrived on the scene, the jerk had evidently gone to earth.

The hang-up calls he’d been receiving late at night he’d put down to kids’s pranks. Even taken together, the incidents weren’t conclusive-enough evidence that the mob wanted him out of the picture to put their own man in place. He happened to know, however, that they had their own candidate waiting in the wings should Spence decide to take early retirement.

On the surface Joe Ed Malone’s credentials were impeccable, educationally, socially and politically. Scratch the surface, though, and he was as corrupt as they came. The mob owned him, from his custom-made toupee right down to his bench-made boots. Spence had evidence in a hidden file, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it, as it implicated several prominent citizens.

God, it was getting hot! Was this the end of November or the Fourth of July? Setting the AC on Arctic Blast, he angled the vents to blow in his face. The fact that he was running late didn’t help. He should have taken the interstate, but he had some thinking to do and he couldn’t concentrate with a fleet of eighteen-wheelers bearing down on his rear bumper.

Once again he checked his watch, then glanced nervously at the sky. Was it only his imagination or was that cloud up ahead several degrees darker?

Sighting a gas station, he checked his fuel gauge. Better to stop now than wait until he was hovering at empty. He should’ve filled up before he’d left town, but he’d had his mind on how to go about extracting the information he needed from a guy who probably didn’t realize the significance of what he knew. Odds were better than even he wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but it was worth a try. When a man was on a rat hunt, he couldn’t afford to pass up a single dark hole.

After topping up his tank, Spence replaced his credit card in his wallet, slid the wallet back into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, then slung the coat onto the passenger seat atop his briefcase and portable tape recorder. Climbing back behind the wheel, he switched on the radio and hit the scan button, searching again for a weather forecast as he pulled back onto the highway.

Given a choice of farm reports, a cooking show or country music, he settled for Willie Nelson singing about an angel flying too close to the earth. There’d be break-in bulletins if any serious weather was headed this way.

He’d been driving less than five minutes when he noticed the ragged bottom of a particularly dark cloud rapidly moving toward him. Despite the heat, he felt a rash of cold prickles down his spine. Weather alert or no, he increased his speed. Not that he was all that eager to reach the state prison. He still hadn’t quite decided on the best tactic to employ, but if things were about to turn nasty, there was a lot more security to be found behind those thick walls than on a wide-open stretch of highway in the middle of cow country. Black skies were bad; greenish-black skies were about seventeen degrees worse.

“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered soulfully, glancing again through the side window. A moment later he began to swear in earnest as an all-too-familiar formation began to take shape. It was a funnel, all right. And unless one of them switched direction in the next few minutes, they were on a collision course.

It was then that Spence saw the boy on a bicycle a couple of hundred feet ahead. Poor kid was frozen, gawking at the twister racing toward him like steel to a magnet. Reflexes kicked in and Spence floored the accelerator, then slammed on the brakes. Not waiting for the car to stop fishtailing, he struggled to wrench open his door.

“Hit the dirt!” he screamed as he catapulted over the hood and dived at the figure standing immobile on the highway right-of-way. A chrome hubcap sailed out of nowhere, missing his head by inches. “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!” he screamed again, tackling the kid and carrying them both into the drainage ditch just as a blinding wall of sand struck him in the face.

The sudden darkness was suffocating. Unfocused pain splintered through him, then there was nothing but noise and darkness. His first thought was that he was blind. Only gradually did disjointed fragments of awareness begin to drift past.

A kid maybe eight or nine years old… A kid on a bike beside the highway…

Echoes of a nasal tenor voice singing about…

Singing about something or other.

Lying half submerged in a swollen stream of muddy water, he made no effort to hang on to the images, the impressions, dimly aware that sooner or later something would snag and he’d be able to use it to pull himself up and get started on his way to—

To wherever.

In the sudden stillness he heard the sound of a woman’s voice. She was shouting, crying.

Then something whimpered. A dog, maybe a kid.

Himself?

It sure as hell wasn’t Willie Nelson, because he remembered Willie’s voice. That was a start, wasn’t it?

Something raked over his face. It hurt, and he tried to turn away.

Angel flying too close to the earth…

“Wait until I wipe off some of the mud. Don’t try to open your eyes yet.”

He opened his eyes. Tears flushed away some of the grit and he blinked away the dirty film to stare up at the haggard-looking angel leaning over him. She was holding a filthy rag in one hand. “I told you not to open your eyes,” she scolded.

He tried to speak, grimaced and spat out whatever was in his mouth. More mud. He’d been lying on his side in a ditch.

In a ditch?

What the hell was he doing in a ditch?

A voice kept echoing in his head. Someone screaming, “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!”

Oh. That ditch. Evidently he’d hit it harder than intended. They both had. A kid on a bicycle had been under him, at least he remembered that much. The boy was now huddled a few feet away, pale as wet plaster except for the mud dripping off his hair, his face, his clothes. There was no sign of the bike, but a nice tubular aluminum chair lay on its side a few yards away, along with what looked like the remains of a bombed-out flea market.

Lying on his back, he gazed up at a woman who remained featureless, either because angels couldn’t be seen by mere mortals, or because he was seeing her silhouetted against the sky.

She jabbed at his head again with her rag. Wincing, he caught her arm and said, “What the devil are you trying to do? Damn it, that hurts!”

Major understatement. Various parts of his body were beginning to report in to command central. The message was pain. Agonizing, unfocused pain.

“Mom, what about the horses?” Kid’s voice.

“They’re fine.” Angel’s voice.

He wanted to hang on to both, hang on to something solid until his world settled down again. God, don’t let me throw up!

“Is he going to be all right, Mom?”

“I hope so, hon. Here, help me prop him up.”

“Do you think you can walk?” That was addressed to him, not to Hon, in a soft contralto voice he found oddly comforting.

He felt hands on his shoulders, then one slipped under his back. Something smelled like cinnamon, which was funny, because up until then all he could smell was mud and something green and faintly resinous.

He tried to shift to a sitting position and yelped as pain stabbed his left knee all the way up to his groin.

“Don’t touch him, hon. You might have to go for help.”

“But, Mama, my bike’s gone.”

“Then go home and call nine-one-one.”

“But, Mom—”

Mom the Angel sighed. “What am I thinking? The lines are probably down. I don’t even know if the town’s still there. Oh, God.”

He wanted to tell her to use his cell phone, but the impulse died as he realized the phone was in his car and at the moment, there was no vehicle in sight. Where the hell was his car? Did he even have one?

Well, sure he had one. Why else would he be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere? He’d been on his way to—

Where? Where the hell am I going? A sense of urgency overrode the pain and he struggled to get up.

Firm hands held him down. “Wait,” she said. “We don’t know yet if anything’s broken.”

Taking the line of least resistance, he closed his eyes again, releasing the vague feeling of urgency as pain rolled over him in shuddering waves. The woman leaned over and placed her hands on his sides, patting him down as if she were searching for weapons. “I’m just trying to see if anything’s noticeably out of place,” she said apologetically. “I took a course in first aid a few years ago.”

When she got as far as his knees, he began to curse, then bit it off. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Kids and angels don’t—”

“Shh, I’ve heard worse. Look, I didn’t find anything obviously broken, but your left knee feels swollen to me. Was it that way before—” She broke off, biting her lip. “Oh, lordy, I hope I didn’t do anything awful when I rolled you over onto your side. Pete was half under water. I had to pull him out from under you.”

“Give me a minute,” he growled. Carefully, he flexed his fingers, testing. So far, so good. Wrists still functioned, arms and elbows were still in working order. They hurt like the devil, but still obeyed his brain’s instructions.

The angel said something about rocks in the ditch, as if that might explain everything. Next time he took a header he’d make certain there were no rocks in the ditch first. “I think they’re just chunks of old culverts,” she said apologetically. “From when they replaced them along this stretch of highway winter before last.”

As if he gave a damn.

He moved his left leg and sucked air in through his teeth. Not a good sign. “Would you mind looking to see if there’s a bone poking through my skin?” he said through clenched jaws.

Tearfully—he could have sworn he saw tears streaking down her face—she leaned back and peered at the lower half of his body. If he was in bad enough shape to make an angel weep, he wasn’t too sure he cared to hear the details.

“I don’t think it’s broken, but you must have twisted it. There’s part of a pine tree lying over there—lots of junk everywhere. You probably tripped. I think your left ankle might be sprained, too, but I don’t think it’s broken. Is that your shoe caught under that branch over there? Pete, how about digging it out?”

“Left knee, left ankle.” His attempt at a smile was more of a grimace. “The good news is, I’ve still got one good limb, otherwise you’d have to shoot me.”

“Hush,” she said sternly. “Lie still a minute and let me think.”

He didn’t have a whole lot of choice. Aside from the injuries she’d mentioned, he’d already discovered a lump above his left temple that was roughly the size of a West Texas cantaloupe.

And then he lost it again. Flat out fainted. Later he had to wonder how they’d managed to get him up and moving. Angels, he figured, had their methods. He didn’t remember flying. Sure as hell didn’t remember any harp music. Remembered hearing a siren in the distance that wailed on and on and on until he felt like taking it out with a high-powered rifle. Somewhere a dog was barking. At least the kid had stopped whimpering. Now he couldn’t seem to shut up, chattering on and on about the noise, and how scared he was, and wow, look at all those broken trees.

By the time he was able to focus on anything besides his own pain, they had reached a shabby, two-story farmhouse neatly surrounded by two-thirds of a picket fence.

Working together to support his not-inconsiderable weight, the kid and the woman, who was a lot stronger than she looked, had managed to ease him onto the front porch. Somewhere during the painful journey he’d figured out that she was no angel. He remembered gazing up from his undignified position in the foul-smelling wheelbarrow they’d used to trundle him down a long, bumpy lane, to focus on her face. It was probably not the most beautiful face he’d ever seen, but he’d clung to the image, because he’d desperately needed to cling to something.

“Give me a minute,” he gasped. Seated on the porch floor, both hands gripping his swollen knee, he focused on riding over the pain. Breathe in, breathe out, slowly and deeply. Count off, count off, count off….

A glimpse of something vaguely familiar slipped in and out of his mind—a mind that admittedly wasn’t working too well at the moment. Uniforms…semi-automatic weapons…?

His head felt as if it had been shot out of a mortar.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman said.

Squinting through narrowed eyes, he sized her up when she came and knelt in front of him. She was soaking wet, dirty, but had all the right curves in all the right places. Oh, yeah—he’d have to be dead to miss that much. Green eyes, brown hair—nice, but nothing fancy. The kind of woman a man might have given a second look, but probably no more. And yet…

“Do I know you?” he asked cautiously. He felt the need to reach out and hold on to something—someone—familiar. At the same time he felt an unsettling need for caution.

Why?

Who knew?

“I don’t think so. I’m Ellen Wagner. The boy you saved is my son, Pete. I’ll never be able to repay you, Mr….?”

There was something at once earthy and ethereal about her. Thin face, hollow cheeks, haunting eyes—or maybe he meant haunted. Without being actually pretty, she was beautiful. She was obviously waiting for him to introduce himself. He ran a quick mental check before the walls slammed down.

It’ll come, he thought with growing desperation. This kind of thing happened in books and movies, not in real life. At least, not to him.

Whoever the hell he was.

By the time he woke up again, it was pitch-dark. There was a night-light on, one of those small, fake-candle things. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Nothing looked familiar. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but nothing about the room rang any bells. Evidently he wasn’t at home. He couldn’t quite remember what home looked like, but he’d lay odds this wasn’t it.

Cautiously sitting up, he began to swing his legs over the side of the bed. Pain slammed through him as it all came back.

Correction. The immediate past came back. For all he knew he could’ve been born in a ditch with a pale-faced angel for a midwife and a skinny wet kid for an assistant.

Hell of a thing. He was used to—

What? He didn’t know what he was used to; he only knew this wasn’t it.

“How long have I been out of it?” he asked as the woman came silently into the bedroom. Any minute now, he assured himself, things would begin to click into place.

She was barefoot. White robe, no halo, no wings. Avid for information, he latched onto the smallest detail. She glanced at her watch. A man’s watch, he noted, on a delicate wrist.

“It’s just past eleven now—p.m. They say the tornado struck at seven minutes to one this afternoon. I woke you up several times just to be sure you were all right, the way you’re supposed to with a head injury. Don’t you remember?”

“Lady, I don’t remember shi—anything.” Evidently he did remember how to talk to a lady.

“We’ll have to call you something. What comes to mind?”

“Bathroom. And no, I don’t want to be called John, but if you’ll point me in the right direction, I’d be much obliged.”

Seeing the smile that trembled on her lips, he’d have given anything to have met her under better circumstances.

She indicated a door across the hall and mentally he measured the distance. If he could grab a chair he could probably use it to lurch across the room.

“You really need to keep your left leg elevated as much as possible,” she told him.

“I can handle it.” He could handle the pain better than he could handle asking her to help with his more intimate needs.

“There was a crutch—I think I put it in the attic. If you’ll wait right here a minute, I’ll run see.”

“Take your time,” he said through a clenched jaw.

Evidently she recognized his most pressing problem at the moment. She was gone and back before he could decide whether to risk falling on his face or an even worse indignity.

“Here, I don’t know if it’s the right height. It was in the attic when we moved in. Thank goodness I never got around to clearing things out.”

She eased into position under his arm to help him up, and even in his battered condition, he recognized the smell of a woman fresh from her bath. At any other time he had a feeling he’d have responded to it.

She handed him the crutch and helped him position it before he embarrassed himself. It was short, but at least it allowed him some mobility. He thanked her and hobbled off to tend to nature’s call. And incidentally, to look in the mirror to see who the hell he was.

The face that stared back at him moments later would have looked right at home on any Wanted poster. A jaw that redefined the word stubborn. A largish nose that canted slightly to the southwest. High forehead, distorted at the moment by the large, discolored lump above his left temple. Nothing rang any bells, including the stubble, the mud-stiffened brown hair and the suspicious dark eyes. After staring for long moments at the mirror image, he felt like crying. Howling like a lovesick coyote.

If he’d ever before come face-to-face with the man in the mirror, he didn’t remember it.

He managed to wash up, even doused his head in the basin a few times to remove some of the mud. The rest he left behind on one of her pretty pink towels.

She was still there when he made it back to the room. Ms. Wagner. Mrs. Wagner. She had a son.

Think, man! Get it together!

How the devil could he get it together when his head felt like a filing cabinet that had been bludgeoned with a sledgehammer? The image of a silver-gray metal filing cabinet flickered in and out so fast he didn’t have time to latch on to any details.

“Are you hungry? We had supper hours ago, but I could heat you some soup. What about chicken noodle?”

“Coffee. Strong, black and sweet. I don’t usually take sugar, but I need the…” His voice trailed off as it occurred to him that things were starting to come back. Any minute now he’d remember who he was, and where he was supposed to be. According to the boy, he’d been in a hell of a hurry, but then, with a tornado bearing down on them, that was understandable.

Was anyone looking for him? A family? A wife? Chances were that whatever transportation had brought him this far was no longer available. Picturing the scene when he’d first looked around that ditch, he didn’t recall seeing anything resembling wheels. Not even the kid’s bike.

“What shall I call you?” She was waiting quietly. Patience was a quality he’d always admired, especially in a woman. Without knowing how he knew, he knew.

“Uh, might as well call me Storm.”

She had a way of tilting her head that spoke louder than words. You’re kidding, right?

“Look, I seem to have temporarily mislaid a few things. Like my long-term memory. Can we just make it easy until I get it back?”

“I’ll bring you the coffee, but you’d probably better eat something, too. The minute the lines are up I’ll call my doctor.”

“My cell phone—” He broke off, confused, frustrated—feeling helpless and somehow knowing it was not something he was accustomed to feeling.

“If you had one, it wasn’t on you when I found you.”

It was then he noticed for the first time that his shirt was striped cotton, and so were his drawstring pants. They were also too wide and too short.

“I never wear pajamas,” he said, oddly offended.

“You do now. No matter how sick you are, you’re not getting into my bed in those muddy rags you were wearing. I threw away your tie—it was hopeless. I washed your shirt and underwear. As for your pants, well, I sponged them, but I doubt if even a dry cleaner will be able to do much with them. I’m sorry. Pete went back and found your other shoe. I did the best I could, but I’m afraid they’ll never be the same. Cordovan leather doesn’t take kindly to being scrubbed inside and out, even with saddle soap.”

He took a moment to absorb the implications. There were several. There might be something in one of his pockets that would give him a clue as to his identity—even a monogram would help. Half joking, he said, “I don’t suppose you found a name, address and serial number among my effects, did you?”

“Serial number?”

Serial number? “I mean phone number. Hell, I don’t know, I’m just reaching here. Help me out, will you?”

“Sorry. You were wearing a nice wristwatch, but I’m afraid it didn’t survive. The crystal was broken and it was full of muddy water. You might be right about your name, though. There was a handkerchief in your hip pocket that had what looked like an H with an S in the middle—sort of a design, you know? Storm…hits? Storm Help? Harry Storm?”

“Nice try. Don’t worry, it’ll come. And tell your husband thanks for the use of his pajamas.”

“I’m a widow,” she said quietly. “I kept Jake’s things after he died because…well, just because, I guess.” Leaning her hips against the dresser, arms crossed over her breasts, she shrugged. “I’d better go heat some soup—I hope canned is okay. I’ll bring the coffee as soon as it’s made.”

“I see the power’s on.”

“Ours wasn’t off more than a few hours, but just up the road—you can see some of it from here—things are pretty torn up. A few miles south of here, two farms and a trailer park were completely wiped out. I’m not sure about the rest, I haven’t had time to watch much news.”

“Casualties?”

“None reported so far.”

“Do you have a radio I can borrow?”

“I can bring one in, but right now you probably need sleep more than you need news. If you can make it as far as the living room in the morning, you can eat breakfast while you watch the storm coverage on TV. Maybe something will ring a bell.”

She left then, and he sat for a moment longer and considered what he knew and what he didn’t.

What he knew was easy. He was alive. He’d been rescued by a widow with a kid named Pete, although he was usually called Hon. Her husband, Jake, had been shorter and broader. As for the widow herself, she had a surprisingly womanly body under the baggy clothes she’d been wearing when she’d found him in that ditch and the bathrobe she’d worn later.

Oh, yeah, he knew all that, all right. It was what he didn’t know that was giving him fits. Like who the devil he was.

Like where he’d been going in such a hell of a hurry. Like what he had been doing that had left this nagging sense of urgency inside him. Almost a sense of wariness.

Like what happened to his vehicle.

And which one of them—the woman or her son—had got him out of his clothes and into these striped pajamas.