Читать книгу The Liar’s Lullaby - Meg Gardiner - Страница 13

TANG DROPPED JO AT HER HOUSE ON RUSSIAN HILL. SHE HANDED over a thick manila envelope.

“The concert video, photos of the scene, witness statements from the stuntman and stage crew. And Tasia’s ‘in the event of my assassination’ recording.”

Jo paused. “Using her ex-husband’s gun is a huge statement.”

“No kidding, Sigmund.” Tang pointed at the envelope. “Figure out what she was saying.”

The car grumbled away.

The night air was cool. The cable car tracks hummed with the sound of gears and cables ringing beneath the road. Jo climbed her front steps.

Her small house sat across from a park, surrounded by grander, brighter homes painted building-block colors. Hers was a fine San Francisco Victorian with iron-red gables. The front yard was a spot of grass the size of a paperback book, bordered by gardenias and white lilacs. Inside, her Doc Martens sounded heavy on the hardwood floor. Her keys echoed when she dropped them on the hallway table.

Jo never would have chosen the house for herself. She would have struggled to afford it. But her husband had inherited the home from his grandparents. He and Jo had redone the place. Knocked out walls, sanded the floors, installed skylights.

When Daniel died, his absence from the house had been excruciating. Early on, Jo had moments when she was overcome with an urge to shatter the windows and shout, Come back to me. Daniel’s parents would have loved for her to sell it to them. But she’d made it her home, and now couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up.

She went to the kitchen and fixed coffee. The magnolia in the backyard was laden with flowers. Under the moon they shone like white fists. Music from a neighbor’s house floated to her, a Latin tune with sinuous horns. She felt jacked up, like she’d spent the evening strapped to a rocket sled.

She heard a sharp knock on the front door.

She answered it to find Gabe Quintana standing on the porch, hands in the pockets of his jeans. One look at her and his eyes turned wary.

“Maybe I should have called first, ” he said.

“The concert ended with the star and a stunt pilot dead, fans trampled, and me signing up for a case from one of the more exotic rings of hell.”

“Want me to come back another time?”

His black hair was close-cropped. His eyes had a low-burning glow. Right, Jo thought. He didn’t believe for a second that she’d kick him out.

“Some day I’ll actually say yes. Just to keep your self-confidence under control,” she said.

His smile was offhanded. “No, you won’t.”

Laugh lines etched his bronze skin. He leaned against the door frame, his gaze rakish.

Jo grabbed him by the collar of his Bay to Breakers T-shirt and yanked him through the doorway. She kicked the door closed and thrust him against the wall.

“Watch it. I can push your buttons and bring you to your knees”—she snapped her fingers—“like that.”

“Promise?”

She held him to the wall. “I haven’t seen you for twenty-four hours, and it’s your fault that twenty-four hours feels like a long time.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist. “My buttons. Yeah, I’m the one whose control panel is blowing up here.”

He kissed her.

Sometimes he seemed as still as a pool of water. Sometimes he seemed reserved to the point of invisibility. She knew that the surface reflected little of the turbulence beneath, that it hid his intensity and resolve. He was an illusionist, a master of emotional sleight of hand.

His cool served him perfectly as a PJ, a search and rescue expert for the Air National Guard. He came off as affable and reassuring. But sometimes, when he was challenged or threatened, his attitude changed, and Jo glimpsed the warrior he had been.

And was about to be again.

One day gone, eighty-seven left. Gabe had been called up to active duty. At the end of the summer, he and others from the 129th Rescue Wing had orders for a four-month deployment to Djibouti, to provide combat search and rescue support for the U.S. military’s Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. He’d be back at the end of January. After that he’d remain on active duty for another eight months, but thought it possible he would serve much of that time at the Wing’s headquarters, Moffett Field in Mountain View.

But as always when reservists were called up, Gabe’s life was getting blown to the wind. He wasn’t just a pararescueman; thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was also a graduate student at the University of San Francisco. Deployment was going to tear up his academic schedule. But his first priority was his ten-year-old daughter, Sophie. He was a single dad. His ex-girlfriend lived in the city but on the fringes of competence, and saw Sophie only twice a month. Gabe had gone to painful time and expense to modify his custody arrangement so that Sophie would live in San Francisco with his sister and her husband while he was deployed. Sophie wasn’t happy that he was going. But she knew it was his job. She’d been through it before.

Jo hadn’t. But, holding him, she set that aside. She tried to stop the ticking in her head.

He brushed her curls from her face. “You okay?”

“Once I saw Tina, I was great.”

His face looked sober. “It was only a close call. But I know that’s too close.”

She suppressed thoughts about any dangers involved in his deploying to the Horn of Africa. And she knew she was far more head over heels for this man than she could ever have imagined.

“What part of hell does your new case come from?” he said.

“I’m going to perform a psychological autopsy on Tasia McFarland. It seems I’m going to ride the tiger.”

His eyes widened. “Excited?”

She had to think about it a moment. “Yes.”

“Ready for the predators to come at you out of the tall grass?”

“Undoubtedly not.”

“You really are a thrill seeker, aren’t you?”

Sharp guy, Gabe Quintana. She put her hands on his shoulders. “I am. How long can you stay?”

He smiled and pulled her against him. And his cell phone rang.

Jo leaned back. He answered the call.

“Dave Rabin, what’s up?” he said, and within five seconds she knew that thrill seeking of a radically different kind was on his agenda.

“Sixty minutes. I’ll be there.” He flipped his phone off. “Merchant tanker five hundred miles off the coast, reports a fire in the engine room. They’re adrift and down at the stern. Multiple casualties.”

Jo reluctantly let him loose. A buzz seemed to radiate from him. He put a hand on her hip and kissed her again.

“Bring ‘em back,” she said. “Be safe.”

He ran down the steps toward his truck. She hung in the doorway and watched him go. She didn’t want to close the door, to turn back to Tasia McFarland and the unblinking certainties of death. She watched him go until he was out of sight.