Читать книгу High-Heeled Alibi - Sydney Ryan - Страница 8

“An APB, Arthur?” Mick asked. His last identity had been Michael James, but he had quickly become known as Mick and preferred it. Only Arthur insisted on the more formal name he’d last christened the man.

Arthur opened the white van’s side panel. The metallic sign on the driver’s door said Frieda’s House of Flora and Fauna. Arthur was a spare man, elegant in body and movement. Forbearance in his stance and natural expression, he stood by the openmouthed van and waited.

Mick’s gaze shifted from the black insides of the van to the tempered features of his mentor. “I need an explanation.”

“An explanation?” The older man employed the same economy of speech as he did in physical appearance.

“I wake up, not at the arranged location with instructions for my next assignment, but—” he gestured at the building behind them “—at a funeral fun house greeted by the beautiful Bitsy of the mortuary business and her glad bag of embalming tools.”

“Bitsy.” Arthur tested the name.

“You descend from Mount Olympus or whatever lofty peak Central occupies these days, complete with a chariot. Not to mention, thanks to San Francisco’s boys in blue, my identity has been compromised up and down the California coast.”

A siren wailed through the night.

Arthur looked at Mick. He smiled pleasantly. “Shall we go?”

“What’s going on, Arthur?”

The other man had rounded the front of the van and was climbing into the driver’s seat. He buckled and adjusted his seat belt, smoothed his pants’ creases and started the engine. He turned in the seat, and with genteel features and a civil smile, he looked at Mick. “Get in, Michael.”

Something was very wrong.

Mick climbed inside the back of the van, slamming the side door shut behind him. The van was dark, no overhead light, no seats in the back. Arthur waited until Mick arranged himself on the cool metal floor, then eased the van out from behind the funeral home’s storage shed.

Mick’s questions started immediately. “Did last night’s operation go down as planned?”

“Shh.” Arthur raised a tapered finger. “Let me have my Mel Gibson getaway moment here.”

Mick shook his head, a smile starting as the van smoothly accelerated to thirty miles per hour and held steady. “Yeah, you’re one big bad ass, Arthur.”

“Yes,” was all the other man would concede.

They drove in silence, away from the sirens. It was futile to ask any more questions. Arthur would give him the answers when he was ready. Mick saw Arthur touch the pearl-gray streak at his temple. Beneath that rakish silver wave, there was a scar. Beneath that a metal plate.

“Congressman Kittredge was shot this evening,” Arthur said.

Mick listened and waited. The old man had never uttered an unnecessary word in his life.

“He was leaving a late dinner at a Bay Area restaurant when a man wearing a Halloween mask approached. The valet saw the gun and pushed Kittredge out of the way. The bullet hit the congressman’s shoulder instead of his heart. The valet’s a hero. The assassin got away.”

The sheet was loosening about Mick’s body. He pulled it tighter. He could feel the texture of the road through the van’s bare floor.

“They’re going to say you did it,” Arthur told him.

Mick closed his eyes. There was a rolling, soothing movement to the blackness.

“I issued the APB, tipped off the locals about the location of the funeral home.”

Mick’s eyes opened.

“If the local police had found you sooner, it could’ve provided an alibi. At the very least, protection. Until I could get to you, you were safer in the company of the police than our own men.” The old man’s hands were steady on the wheel, his gaze aimed straight into the night.

“I didn’t mean to involve the woman. Bitsy.”

The name sounded across the empty van. Mick saw the woman in stilettos stomping around the room, brandishing a scalpel, spouting indignation.

“She’s an alibi for you. A liability for the Agency.”

Mick’s hand fisted, ached to slam against the floor. He resisted. The gesture was ineffectual. Unvented rage was not.

“I erased your identity,” Arthur continued.

“If the Agency is trying to get me killed, they won’t be too happy about that.”

“It’s to protect the Agency as much as you. When the feds or the locals look, they’ll find nothing, a man who never existed. Still they’ll have your name. Others will know it. Grainy photos, a crude sketch or two will follow. It’s out of my control now, Michael.”

Mick waited for Arthur to tell him more, to give him a rationale. The darkness and the silence became too much, so finally he asked, “Why?”

The other man’s eyes looked into the night. “There’s not always an explanation, Michael. Life is random. Hit or miss. You stepped into its path.”

“What about the raid on the arms smugglers last night?”

“They got seven arrests, little fish, some AK-47s.” Arthur’s voice was flat. “The operation was compromised. There was a leak. The key figures had got out of the U.S. and escaped back to the Far East by last night.”

Mick’s fingers remained furled into a tight ball. Since the first death, he’d held fast to his rage. “The operation was deliberately sabotaged.” His voice was as level as his mentor’s.

“An investigation on the incident will be conducted through the traditional channels,” Arthur said.

“It should’ve gone down as planned.”

“Life,” Arthur said. “Hit or miss.” He touched his temple.

Mick knew he wouldn’t get much more information. The Agency’s M.O. was maximum secrecy equated maximum security and efficiency. Agents reported to an assigned contact. They were given only the necessary information to carry out their assignments. Each agent knew if their cover was blown, they’d be abandoned. It was the sacrifice of one for the survival of many. If nothing went wrong, the system worked.

Something had gone wrong.

Mick looked at the man driving, the man who’d engineered his first death, and in doing so, had saved his life. Since that time, he’d died a hundred deaths, a hundred different ways, none of them real, all of them resulting in greater good…until now.

Mick looked at the man he loved. “Who ordered my setup?”

Quiet was the only answer. Mick’s words hovered in the silence.

“Kittredge, our own agents, an international arms ring… It’s someone big, isn’t it?” Mick said.

Arthur’s gaze stayed on the road. “Rot starts at the top.”

“Corbain.” Mick muttered the name of the outsider put in charge of the Agency after last year’s presidential election.

Arthur steered the van into the parking lot of a convenience store. The lot was empty except for a car parked to the far side and a pickup truck near the entrance. He pulled up to the pumps and turned off the engine.

“I’ve brought you as far as I can. I’ll fill the tank. There’s a change of clothes in the bag back there. Money, identification, a name and number on a card in the glove compartment. Friends of mine. They own a twenty-two-foot whaler that can get you across the Gulf.”

Mick looked at his oldest friend. “You didn’t have to do this. If they find out…”

Arthur looked at him for a moment, then said the words he’d said to Mick twelve years ago. “Everybody deserves a chance.” He opened the door.

“Arthur?” Mick placed his hand on the other man’s forearm. “Thank you.”

When the older man’s gaze met his own, Mick could almost read his thoughts. Arthur had had to make a choice once before. He feared he had chosen wrong.

“You’ll be on your own now,” Arthur said. “Stay alive.”

The driver’s door closed. Mick waited but didn’t hear the gas cap being unscrewed or the gurgle of gas into the tank. Rising to his knees behind the front seat, he saw large signs on the pumps instructing customers to pay inside before pumping. Arthur was walking toward the store. Only the streaks of gray at either temple revealed the years that had passed since he’d recruited Mick. Even then, the poreless skin had been fine-lined, the slants deep from nose to mouth.

Mick reached into the bag of clothes when he felt an unwelcome pressure against his bladder. He looked around the lot. There was a bathroom at the end of the building.

Mick scanned the lot once more. Inside the store, he could see Arthur standing before one of the candy bar displays. A man, mid-twenties, came out of the store, got in the pickup and drove off. Mick grabbed a pair of sweatpants, slipped on the running shoes, slid open the van door and, gathering the sheet tighter, stepped out.

The bathroom door was locked.

Behind the store, darkness almost hid a stand of trees. He headed toward them.

He moved behind a thick trunk, back far enough so he could see the lot, but no one could see him. A dark Chevy turned into the lot. It pulled up to the pumps, opposite the van, and parked.

Arthur had come out of the store and was walking toward the vehicle, a chocolate bar in his hand. He unwrapped the candy, broke off a square, put it into his mouth.

Mick finished and was pulling up the too-short sweatpants that ended several inches above his ankles. He scanned the lot. It was quiet. No one had gotten out of the dark sedan. Mick’s instinct of twelve years undercover awoke. His mouth was forming the word No as the sedan’s window lowered and a fat steel cylinder appeared. A muted pop-pop-pop… Arthur dropping. Several more pops and the sedan sped away, gone as if it’d never been.

Mick was running now. He reached Arthur and dragged his body away from the pumps. The clerk looked out the wide front windows.

“Call an ambulance,” Mick yelled. He looked down at the man in his arms. He’d been hit once in the heart, twice in the forehead. Execution-style.

Mick looked to the pumps, the van, saw the dark stream where shots had punctured the side of the vehicle, the half-empty gas tank with its lethal fumes. He felt the intuitive quiver, the anticipation of disaster, his muscles tightening. “Get out,” he yelled to the clerk coming out the door. “Get out of here!”

He covered Arthur’s body with his own. At first, the explosion was contained, almost anticlimactic. Then, the fuel tank ignited. Light flashed and noon changed places with the night. Mick felt the wave of heat roll over his body. He looked up. The clerk was running to his car parked at the far end of the lot. Mick rolled off Arthur and dragged him toward the woods.

Beneath the long shadows of the trees, Mick placed his mouth on Arthur’s and he breathed into the man, even knowing it was as useless as a fist slamming against metal. The sweet smell of chocolate met him. He checked Arthur’s neck, then the wrist above the hand that still clutched the half-wrapped Cadbury bar.

Mick looked back toward the van. A spark shot up, and in a blast of color and light, the gas pumps blew. The heat reached for the men. The California sky was fragmented, fluorescent.

The sedan had headed south, back toward Canaan. Mick stared into the heat and light. Cars from the highway were slowing down, stopping. Emergency vehicles would be here soon.

He worked quickly, drawing back Arthur’s linen sport coat, unfastening the holster that held the 9 mm, retrieved a leather wallet from the coat’s inside pocket. The wallet held only a few singles, a fake driver’s license and an American Express gold card in the same false name. Either item would only alert Mick’s enemies should he try to use them. He took out the singles, slipped them into the sweatpants’ pocket and shoved the wallet back into the jacket’s inside pocket.

A new siren pierced the night. Close by. Mick pulled up Arthur’s carefully creased right trouser leg, released the gun strapped to the ankle and wrapped it high on his own calf so the short sweatpants would conceal it. He straightened the trouser, smoothed the coat, aligning the gold buttons. The sirens sounded closer, were almost here.

He straightened the angle of Arthur’s head, folded his beautifully shaped hands into a position of peace across his chest. He leaned over, kissed the man, rose and walked into the night.

DAWN HAD BROKEN, spreading a surreal cast across the night sky as Grey Torre drove Bitsy back to Memorial Manor. His black Lexus pulled up smoothly beside Bitsy’s car, contrasting with the bright apple-green hatchback, a color everyone, including Bitsy, found nauseous, but had gotten Bitsy a great deal on the car.

“Thank you again for coming down to the station,” she told Grey.

“Damsels in distress are my specialty.” Grey gave her the infamous grin that had charmed females from the corner kiosk to the higher courts. Bitsy had known that irresistible smile since she used to challenge Grey two Scooter Pies she could climb to the top of ol’ lady Simone’s sycamore before he could. She’d won every time.

“I was only drinking a Corona, watching CNN,” Grey assured her. “Some nut tried to kill Congressman Kittredge last night. Damn crazies. One of my old buddies from Berkeley, Tim Stafford, works for Kittredge. Says he’s the real ticket—a politician who actually cares about his constituents.”

Grey looked pointedly at her. “The moral is ‘you can never be too careful.’ I’m thinking of having that tattooed on your beautiful backside.”

“Leave my beautiful backside out of this,” she warned him. “I don’t go around advertising for big bad bogeymen to come and take advantage of me.”

“And still, they seem to find you no matter how hard you hide.”

“I’m not hiding,” she insisted as she opened the car door. “I’m just…” Her words faltered as she turned to her friend. “I’m just…”

Grey’s voice softened. “I know, honey, I know. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.”

“Really I’m doing fine, Grey,” Bitsy assured him. He had draped his arm across her shoulders as they headed to her car, and she patted his hand and felt the pull of weariness.

“It’s your heart,” Grey decided. “It’s too big. It keeps getting stepped on.”

She yearned to lean on the welcome weight of her friend. While the puff of her pompadour had long surrendered, and she had a run in the left leg of her hose, Grey looked, as always, as if he’d just stepped from the pages of InStyle.

She straightened. A few hours sleep and her physical exhaustion would be remedied. Her shattered illusion of safety, however, wouldn’t be so easily restored. The man in the embalming room had dredged up old feelings, fears, everything she’d worked so hard to keep under control the last few months.

“The bum was probably past the county line before they even called for backup,” Grey said.

“Thanks to me.”

“It was an honest mistake, Bits. The fact is, more creeps than we want to consider get away without paying for their crimes. Look at your ex-husband.”

Grey had handled her divorce. He was one of California’s most successful divorce lawyers, his skill at securing his female clients generous settlements earning him the nickname the Spago Ladies’ Lawyer. Bitsy’s divorce hadn’t earned him his usual fabulous fees since she had wanted none of the Dumont fortune. Grey had also done his best to keep the entire affair out of the press, although most big-time divorce lawyers would have taken the case for the publicity alone. Even still, Jumpin’ Johnny Dumont, known for his lavish lifestyle and bad-boy antics, was a media favorite, and his divorce from his small-town Cinderella had made as good cover as when he’d married her eighteen months earlier in a whirlwind romance.

“They don’t put you behind bars for breaking hearts, Grey.”

He said nothing. He had mentioned the bruises only once. She had asked him never to mention them again.

“Come on.” Grey made his voice light. “I’ll buy you a tofu omelet.”

She made a face. “Bean curd isn’t my idea of comfort food.” She stopped a few steps from her car, turned and faced him. “Besides, I’m beat.”

“All right, I’ll accept that, but only because I’ve got some tax records to go over before I drive down to meet a client this morning.”

“Beverly Hills?” she guessed.

“Malibu,” Grey answered with a toothy smile. “I’m driving up to the lodge next weekend. You come, too. Try a little rock climbing.”

“Rock climbing?” She shook her head. “I like to keep my feet on the ground nowadays.”

Grey looked down at her. “That’s not my ‘two Scooter Pies’ Bitsy talking.”

She looked up at her friend. “No, it’s not.” Tiredness was tangible in her words.

“I’m calling you next week, and you better be ready to scale some peaks.”

She was too exhausted even to try to think of an excuse. She touched Grey’s arm. “Thank you again for coming.”

“No problem. It’ll give me an amusing story to tell in chambers.” He leaned down and gave her a light kiss on her forehead. “Go home. Get some sleep. Wash off that makeup. I keep waiting for you to say, ‘I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.’”

She smiled. “I love you, Grey.”

Grey straightened and regarded her with a similar smile. “Don’t think that’s going to scare me away. You know I don’t give up easily.”

“I’ve got the cavities to prove it.”

She went to her car, unlocked the door and slid into the driver’s seat. Through the side window, she watched Grey walk back to his car, turning his collar up against the early morning chill coming in from the coast. She started the engine and waved goodbye as he reached his own car. He was a good man. A lousy tree climber, but a good man.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward home, trying not to think about last night, trying not to think at all. The day’s light had erased the night, but, in her mind’s eye, she still saw the man with the slow smile and the eyes of a storm.

She’d been so careful this time. She’d arranged her life neatly, forced herself to stop and look before leaping. Truth be told, her current vampire vixen getup was the wildest thing she had allowed herself since her divorce. And considering it had been Halloween in Canaan, she had still been among the conservative faction of the town’s population.

For months, she had bitten her tongue, ignored desires, walked calmly away instead of rushing head-first into the flames. It hadn’t mattered. Michael James had made her realize what she’d feared deep down all along was true. She was not safe.

She shook her head to clear the man’s image from her mind, releasing a sigh of relief at her close call. The man was a criminal, for goodness sake, reaffirming her belief she couldn’t trust her own faculties of attraction. Desire clouded the mind, sent logic and common sense scurrying.

She took a deep breath, hands steady on the wheel, and moved the car forward at a reasonable speed. Her composed world had been threatened, but it wouldn’t be toppled by one smiling stiff. Last night was already on its way to becoming an anecdote for Grey’s colleagues. According to the police, Michael James was probably heading to the border. And she was on her way home to take a long, hot shower, crawl into bed with the latest Mary Higgins Clark novel and dismiss the brief, disturbing appearance of Michael James in her life.

She reached for the radio’s buttons, the quiet she usually sought seeming unnaturally still. As she clicked the radio’s on button, she heard a voice, but it did not come from the speakers. It came from directly behind her. A voice she’d heard before. A voice she’d never expected to hear again.

“Beautiful day to be alive, isn’t it, darling?” Michael James observed from the car’s backseat.