Ace Is Wild (16 page)

“A young, professional, unmarried woman buying fuckme pumps,” Daniel said, “who’d’ve thought.”

“I’ll mark that down under
not convinced
,” Vivi said, turning to survey the other nearby shoppers. She stopped a young mother pushing a stroller, an older child of about four holding her hand, begging intensely for a soda pop. “Your daughter is about to throw up.”

No sooner had the woman shifted her attention to the baby in the stroller than the four-year-old bent over and barfed at her feet.

Market workers converged on the scene of the toxic spill, and other shoppers detoured around the mess with varying degrees of disgust or sympathy. Vivi made a beeline for a jewelry store not far up the way, going in to stand beside a woman who was trying to decide between two diamond cocktail rings.

“Get the bigger one,” she suggested, “your husband is having an affair.”

“I knew it,” the woman said, storming out of the store, with the rings on either hand.

“Hold it!” the store manager yelled. “Security! Security!”

Daniel shook his head and followed Vivi out of the store.

“The bathroom’s that way,” she said to the first woman she came across. The woman thanked her and headed off in the direction Vivi was pointing.

“You can’t prove that one,” Daniel said when she turned to him, “and the others could have been good guesswork.”

“Okay, then you try it.”

Daniel wrestled with himself for a few seconds, but Vivi knew he wouldn’t back down from a challenge. He made a slow perusal of their surroundings, then spun on his heel and headed back toward Victoria’s Secret, stopping at the edge of the big front window where they could look in without being seen.

“Her,” he said, indicating a customer flipping through a rack of thong panties and bra sets. “She’s buying a gift.”

“Nope,” Vivi said.

“She’s at least seventy years old.”

“Yep.”>

The woman took the lingerie up to the sales counter, the clerk’s face going through a gamut of expressions, most of which centered around shock and dismay. She took the woman to a rack of white cotton, talked furiously for a moment, then gave up and led the way to the fitting room.

“Strike one,” Vivi said to Daniel.

“Okay.” He took her by the hand, their fingers twining for a split second before he dropped her like a hot potato and set off along the brick walkway.

Vivi caught up to him and fell into step—three of hers to every two of his.

“That guy over there,” he said, pointing to a potbellied man wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Food court.”

“Nope,” Vivi said. Sure enough, the man bypassed the food court and joined the queue of people lined up in the blistering sun for one of the hourly Boston city bus tours. “Strike two.”

Daniel stared down at her for a minute. His expression was inscrutable but his eyes were sparkling. He set off again, and since they went into Faneuil Hall she had no trouble keeping up with him this time. The problem was keeping her wits.

Faneuil Hall was crowded, to put it mildly, thronged with families and workers from the nearby buildings getting lunch, the single aisle bottlenecked around the lines at the ordering station of each food stall they passed. The noise level was out of control so there was no point talking, which was fortunate since Vivi couldn’t have formed a coherent sentence to save her own life. Because Daniel kept touching her—or she kept touching him, arms brushing or hands bumping.

She could have predicted the heat she felt each time they touched, the way her breath came short and she wanted to press herself to him, skin to skin, to feel him hard against her like last night, to imagine him hard in her . . . which was a fantasy she had to ignore because if she took it any further there was a real danger she’d jump Daniel, right there in public with half the tourist population of Boston looking on.

What surprised her was the companionship she felt toward him. He’d relaxed for the first time in her company, and if she was stupid enough to want him when he was being prickly, at least she didn’t have any illusions he’d want her back—in anything but the physical sense. This Daniel, though . . . she could build up real hopes about this relaxed and smiling man, and hope was just about the worst thing she could do to herself.

“No more predictions?” she said in an attempt to get them back on track.

“Devil worshipper,” Daniel said about the first of a trio of little old ladies chowing down at one of the tables set wherever there was a square foot of spare floor space. “Porn star,” he said, indicating the second elderly woman, “and that one is a dead ringer for J. Edgar Hoover.”

Vivi smiled. “You can’t prove any of those.”

“Exactly.”

Message received, she thought. She wanted Daniel to take her talent on faith, and she wanted it now. If he came to believe in her at all, it was going to take time, and no amount of pushing would get him there before he was ready.

“I’m hungry,” she said, stopping at the next food place they came to, ordering one of everything on the menu.

She took the tray of hot food that was handed over the counter a few minutes later, and Daniel collected a sack of subs, pretending to stagger under the weight.

“The sandwiches are for later,” she explained. “I never get to eat around you. I get to watch you eat, but somehow I keep missing meals.”

She followed him to a table in the courtyard outside, Daniel taking the seat that put his back to a nearby tree. Vivi sat across from him, but she kept her eyes on the crowd. “Can you shut it off?” he asked, pulling a vegetarian sub from the sack.

“At first I couldn’t, but I’ve learned how to control it, she said, digging into an order of nachos. “I can tap into it whenever I want to now.”

“Tap into what, exactly?”

“Mostly it’s feelings, like I told you before. When I’m doing a reading for one of my customers, I’ll do an astrological chart, read the tarot, and generally there are specific questions the subject wants answered, so I interpret whatever I’m feeling with what they’re asking.

“This kind of reading is more . . . You might call it a gut feeling but a lot stronger. Nausea when I looked at that little girl, suspicion and revenge with the woman buying the expensive jewelry . . .”

The old woman with the thong would have been the next logical part of that explanation, but Daniel didn’t ask Vivi what she’d been feeling then. And Vivi didn’t volunteer to tell him.

“That’s how you knew you were being watched?” Daniel asked her.

“Yes, and I’m not too happy that your agents were in my place. Not to mention my underwear drawer.”

Daniel refused to be sidetracked—except for a flashback to the lace panties hanging over the shower rod last night. She sounded convincing—she always managed to throw in an offhand little detail that made it seem like she actually had some sort of psychic ability. It was just as likely her shop was wired for audio, video, too, probably.

“You’re the first time I had an actual vision.”

“Of me dead,” Daniel said.

She nodded, pushing her food away. “After you escaped at the Oval Room I thought it would be over, but then I had another vision.”

“Me dead at Cohan’s. And at my house?”

“And at your house. They’re not going to stop.”

Her eyes rose to his, and for the first time he thought about how traumatic it must be for her to have scenes of death playing in her head. If he’d believed her.

“I know you can figure this out on your own, but you’ll get there faster with my help.”

That, at least, was the truth. “I’m willing to work with you until this thing is settled,” Daniel said, “but I’m asking you to respect some ground rules. No personal involvement being first and foremost. We aren’t going to be friends, we aren’t going to be compatriots, and there won’t be . . . anything else.”

“Maybe you should have that woven into a tie, Ace. Might save you from having to say it to every woman you meet.”

“And don’t call me Ace,” Daniel said, going back to his boundary-setting without breaking stride. “This is a working relationship. Your part of it is research only, for lack of a better description. As soon as we figure out who’s behind the contract, you take off and let me deal with it.”

“You don’t want me to testify?”

“Testify about what? Visions? Impressions? That kind of testimony would earn you a one-way ticket to the loony bin.” And make him the laughingstock of the federal justice system. It was bad enough to feel ineffectual without looking it, too. “You don’t want to testify anyway,” he reminded her.

“No, I don’t, and just for the record, I’m not interested in personal involvement.”

“Yes, you are.”

Vivi huffed out a slight, derogatory laugh. “Funny, I didn’t expect you to be self-delusional.”

“Maybe you should replay what happened in the motel lobby last night.”

“Maybe you should replay what happened in the room, Ace.”

Daniel didn’t have a comeback for that. But really, what could he say?

“I think I can keep my hands off you,” Vivi said. “And I’ll keep my demeanor purely professional.” Her gaze drifted down, below his waistband. “I wonder if you’ll be able to say the same thing when this is all over.”

Chapter 11

THEY LEFT THE MARKET AND DROVE STRAIGHT TO
Daniel’s house. It was still a crime scene, so he figured it would be safe. Vivi wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t argue with him since his purpose was to retrieve his files, which hopefully he would let her look at. And she was driving, so the minute she felt the slightest twinge of uneasiness she— and Maxine—would decide what they were going to do. Daniel wouldn’t like it, but what was new about that? He pretty much objected to everything she did.

Well, not everything. He’d seemed okay with her undieless state last night, judging by the way he’d looked at her. He’d looked at her like it wasn’t the absence of underwear he’d liked so much as the fact there’d be less clothes to work his way through—if he did more than look. She’d really wanted him to do more than look. Not a great memory to be replaying with him only inches away, but at least she was wearing her bra again. And she wasn’t a complete idiot.

Daniel hadn’t suddenly decided he could trust her. He was only going along with her for as long as it took to find out what she was up to. And she was using that. He thought he had the upper hand, but while he was delusional she intended to worm her way into his trust, save his life, and then get the hell back out of his life again. There was no way they could have any sort of relationship, because she did have a secret, and it was a secret that would be a deal breaker on the relationship front for Daniel. Unless the deal included her in jail.

Once her game plan was firmly outlined, she felt a little better. Then they pulled up in front of Daniel’s house and she could tell he was angry again, and the guilt came roaring back. “It’s not like I had a choice,” she said.

He glanced over at her. “I’m pissed at them, not you.”

“You’re a little pissed at me.”

He shrugged, one shouldered.

“There were two guys with guns and only one of me.”

“With no gun.”

“You had a gun,” Vivi reminded him.

“I was waiting for them to come in.”

“They weren’t coming in. They were making you into human kindling. You had two choices, come out and die or stay in and die. I gave you a third.”

“How about choice number four: Distract the guy at the front door and give me a chance to get out.
Without
crashing through the wall of my house,” he added, because the obvious comeback was that Maxine had distracted the hit man at the front door and supplied Daniel with an escape route at the same time.

Vivi considered asking Daniel how she was supposed to let him know about choice number four so he could escape once the gunman at the front door was distracted, but she couldn’t see that line of discourse going anywhere good. He’d get more annoyed than he already was, and then she’d get irritated and say something sarcastic, and then he’d call her Uri Geller or ask her when the Mother Ship was coming for her. There’d be more sarcasm from her, which would result in silence from Daniel. But he’d make damn sure she knew how cranky he was because that was what it all boiled down to—feelings, and how uncomfortable it made him to know that even if he tried to hide his they were no mystery to her.