All Jacked Up (4 page)

“Which I may have already forgotten.”

“That’s too bad, since I don’t think sociopathic criminals are any more familiar with that loophole than crazed Neanderthals.”

“Why don’t you go explain it to him? Let me know how it turns out.” She started for the door.

Jack didn’t budge. “Where are you going?”

She smiled sweetly at him. “I’d rather not tell you in case you’re captured and they torture it out of you.”

“Where do you think you’ll be safe?”

Sarcasm was just lost on some people. Hopefully logic was among his skills. “I’m going to disappear for a while, long enough for everyone to realize this is a mistake and leave me alone.”

“It’s not a mistake. Your name was on the tapes.” At her palms up he added, “Federal phone taps of known Corona associates. There’s a contract out on you—and before you tell me”—he shot her a look—“again—that you don’t know anything, yes, you do. We just don’t know what it is yet. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. Once a contract’s made it only ends one way.” He waited a beat, then said, “You’re thinking again.”

“What?” Aubrey looked up, caught the scowl on his face.

“You don’t need to think,” Jack said with a valiant effort at patience. “If you just do what I tell you, maybe we’ll both get out of this alive.”

“You’re kidding, right? Do I look like one of the women on those book covers?”

He pulled a paperback out, glanced at the heroine with her ample breasts spilling out of her bodice and sent a pointed look at Aubrey’s chest, his eyebrows inching up into his hairline.

“Trust you to miss the point,” Aubrey said, although she couldn’t quite stop herself from crossing her arms. She covered it by leaning back against the old desk and trying to look unconcerned. “I’m not going to cling to your arm and let you take care of me.”

“Then you won’t last the night.”

“Why not? If the Feds can get information
from
Corona, they can get information
to
Corona. I haven’t dated all those government stiffs for nothing. One of them has to be able to help me.”

“If you dated every government worker in the city, it wouldn’t do you any good. Hell, if you spent some quality time on your knees under the desk in the Oval Office, it wouldn’t be enough to get you out of this mess, unless the leader of the free world is willing to come over here and protect you from the thugs who are outside watching the house.”

She snorted softly, but her heart began to pound and she caught herself looking nervously over her shoulder at the single curtained window. “You’re making that up.”

“Am I?”

“If there are people watching the house, how did you get in here?”

“I made sure they didn’t see me. But even if they had, they’re not there to stop me from coming in. They’re there to kill you when you come out.”

“Then I won’t go out.”

“Eventually they’ll get tired of waiting and come in after you,” he said, “and don’t bother trying to call the police. Even if they’d believe you, your phone won’t work. Neither will your cell phone. By now somebody in Corona’s organization has had them cancelled.”

She picked up the extension phone on the desk. No dial tone. Her gaze slid to Jack and she stared at him, dumbstruck, disbelieving even when the look in his eyes said, “I told you so.” Worse, sarcasm deserted her, along with the sense of unreality that had lent a circus air to the whole situation. People were trying to kill her. All that stood in their way was Jack Mitchell, a hulk of a man with a perpetual five o’clock shadow, more muscles than brains, and a bullet wound he’d gotten saving her life. And before that mushy feeling in the pit of her stomach got too big for its britches, she needed to remember that his only interest in her was to save his own backside, and once he’d accomplished that, he’d probably drop her on hers, contract or no contract.

He leaned his uninjured shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest, smirking at her in the dim light of the desk lamp as she came to the only conclusion she could. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to blow up your house,” he said.

Her mouth dropped open—

“With us in it.”

“No,” Jack said, straightening away from the doorjamb.

“Is this because you had to search the bushes for your distributor cap?”

“This is about getting us out of here alive.” But he gave her a look that said he was keeping track of the other stuff. He flipped the light off and left the room, navigating every obstacle in the pitch-dark hallway like he’d been born there. With his black clothes and black hair he seemed to merge completely into the darkness. She couldn’t even hear him. It gave her the willies.

“So, let me get this straight,” she said, switching on the stove light because it was the dimmest in the kitchen. “You’re going to kill us to save our lives.”

“We’re not going to actually die, but it’ll look like it.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He glanced over at her, serious written all over his face.

“You are
not
going to blow up my house.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Not at the moment, but I’m sure I can come up with one.”

“In time to save our asses?” Jack waited a beat. “I didn’t think so.” He began to open drawers filled with cutlery, serving utensils, plastic lids, and a drawer full of wickedly sharp knives laid out in a way that would have thrilled a surgeon—or a serial killer. Librarians, he thought with a shake of his head. All that book learning must have crowded the normal right out of her. “Where is your junk drawer?”

She didn’t answer, so he looked up, but he could have saved himself the trouble of working up a glare. She was staring at the wall, a dazed and slightly sick look on her face. He understood how she was feeling. Just because he’d never had a place that meant more to him than somewhere to flop between assignments didn’t mean he couldn’t see how much this half-restored old house in an urban renewal neighborhood meant to her. He just didn’t care. She’d get over it—if she lived long enough. “Yo, Kodak.”

She looked up at him, that little furrow between her brows, still working on saving her house.

“I need you to focus here. Where is your junk drawer?”

“Oh, uh,” her brain kicked in with a visible little jolt. “I don’t have a junk drawer.”

“Everybody has a junk drawer.”

“Not everybody.”

“Then what’s this empty one?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Wooden matches, duct tape, sandpaper,” he said in the sullen tone that just naturally responded to that librarian purse to her mouth.

She narrowed her eyes at him, then disappeared back down the hall, returning with long wooden fireplace matches that came, he figured, from the parlor. Then she went into the laundry room for duct tape, then upstairs.

“A junk drawer would be easier,” he pointed out when she handed him her latest offering. “What are these?”

“Emery boards. The closest I can come to sandpaper without going out to the garage.”

Jack ran his finger over the thin cardboard, shaking his head at the grooming mysteries of women that made this kind of thing necessary. “They’ll do.” He scanned the kitchen until he located the phone, then grabbed the pencil off the pad next to it, mumbling, “Predictable.”

She watched him while he taped the pencil to the bottom of the door, opened it about two feet to scribe the swing arc on her beautifully refinished wood floor, then taped three emery boards along the penciled line. He taped a couple of wooden fireplace matches to the bottom of the door, grunting in satisfaction when he swung it in again and got the result he wanted.

“What are you doing?”

“Arranging a welcome for our friends out there.”

“You’re going to singe their toes?”

“It’s going to do a little more than that.” He went to the stove and looked it over. “This is an old stove, right?”

“It came with the house,” Aubrey said. “I haven’t had the time or money to replace it yet. Why?”

He turned on one of the burners, listened to the gas hissing for a second or two, then shut it off again. “No pilots.”

“No, I have to light it with . . . a . . . match . . .” Aubrey looked at the matches, poised to strike a spark the minute someone opened the door, then at the stove, then at Jack, her mouth dropping open.

He reached over and tapped it closed with one finger on the bottom of her chin. “Speechless. That would make a normal day complete.”

Aubrey made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a groan.

“That’s still not a word.” Jack turned on his heel and left the kitchen.

She ran after him, throwing herself between him and the front door. “This being a special day, you have to completely destroy everything I’ve worked for?” she said, arms outspread, feet braced on the granite flooring she’d lovingly installed—okay, a junior law partner with a tool belt labeled “Saturday” had installed it, but she’d made coffee. And ordered pizza.
And
turned down the inevitable proposition without completely ticking him off, which, him being a handyman, was way more important than a potential orgasm. “There has to be another way.”

Jack plucked her off the floor by her armpits and plunked her down at his side.

“You may not like my books,” she said as he inscribed the arc, this time stopping to mark an X on the highest point of the uneven floor, “but every page of every one is precious to me. Even the pornography.”

She might have known he’d hesitate at the word “pornography.” For one crazy minute she thought about shucking her clothes in hopes of putting him into a lust-induced state of cooperation. But the thought of him and her and lust in the same room made her want to blow the house up herself. Besides, he struck her as the kind of man who liked his women stacked and stupid. Aubrey could do stupid if she really tried, but stacked would require major surgery or a box of Kleenex—maybe two in Jack Mitchell’s case.

And while she’d been mulling over his sexual preferences, he’d already taped down the emery boards and the matches, and was straightening to swing the door and make his job-well-done caveman grunt.

Not if she had anything to say about it. By the time he got back to the kitchen, she was standing in front of the stove, determined to save her house. If only she could figure out how.

He brushed her aside again, this time not even bothering to be nice about it.

“Please, don’t do this.”

He looked over at her, one hand on the stove, surprise on his face. “You said ‘please.’”

And she was wringing her hands, too, Aubrey realized, disgusted at what he’d brought her to, but not idiotic enough to show it. “Did it work?”

“No.” He opened the oven door and turned on the gas.

She turned it off. “How are we going to get out of here? And how do you know they’ll come in after us? And what if they come in the front door and there isn’t enough gas out there to ignite?”

“We’re going out through the basement.”

“Have you seen the basement?” Aubrey pulled open the door and clomped down the creaking wooden steps, hoping, when she heard Jack behind her, they’d carry his weight and her own without collapsing and killing them both.

“What kind of basement is this?” he said when they reached the bottom.

Aubrey grinned at the sight of him, hunched over because the room height was barely six feet from dirt floor to cobwebbed rafters. The light of the single forty-watt bulb was just enough to show the fieldstone walls surrounding the cavernous space.

“It’s the kind of basement that came with houses about a hundred and fifty years ago—if there was a basement at all. I’ve been meaning to have it modernized, but there was always something upstairs I wanted to do more.”

Jack dug a little furrow in the floor with the toe of his scuffed black boot. “If they bring a shovel with them, they can bury us and save the police all those annoying questions they’ll feel obligated to ask.”

“At least it would be better than some poor slob collecting bits and pieces of us from all over the neighborhood.”

“I told you, we’re not going to be here when the house blows up.” He shook his head. “You have no imagination.”

“Sure, I do,” Aubrey said. She could imagine her house as a smoking pile of rubble when he got through with it. And she could imagine doing all sorts of painful and unpleasant things to him. If they survived it.

“There’s nothing down here but the furnace and hot water heater,” she said, walking over to the small square of concrete on which they huddled, surrounded by everything else it took to keep her house warmed, watered, and electrified.

“Windows?” Jack asked peering into the gloom.

“At either end.” By the time he’d got back to her, she was standing at the foot of the stairs, studying her manicure in the dim light.

“You could have told me they were too small to fit through.”

“Would you have believed me?” she said, smiling up at him. “Besides, Quasimodo, it was fun watching you crabwalk your way over there and back.”

His eyes narrowed on her face. “You’re up to something.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You look happy all of a sudden.”

Aubrey shrugged. “You’ve made up your mind. Whining about it won’t do me any good.”

“Now I’m really worried.”

She took a little gulp of air because he was staring in that suspicious, looking-below-the-surface way he had. Her impulse was to make a face back at him, but that wouldn’t be any fun unless she got to see his reaction, and she didn’t dare meet his eyes. “Is there another way out of this?” she asked.

“None that I can think of.” He turned around, taking the stairs two at a time.

Aubrey chased after him, out of breath by the time she caught up with him on the second floor.

“We’ll have to lure them into the house,” he said, grunting as he peered out her bedroom window. “One good thing about these old houses, they have lots of roof lines. That’ll make it easier.”

She didn’t bother to ask what he was talking about. The squishy feeling in her stomach told her all she needed to know. “I don’t like heights.”

“How about death?”

“I haven’t tried that yet.”

“Stay tuned, you may get the chance real soon.” He backed off from the window and stood there in the middle of the room. The look on his face told her he was thinking. Or constipated. Probably not a lot of difference where Jack was concerned.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“How are we going to lure them in?”

A muscle in his jaw ticked. He looked out the window again. Just when Aubrey was about to accuse him of not having a plan, he bent closer to the glass and said, “It doesn’t look like that’ll be a problem.”

She shot to his side and squeezed between him and the windowsill, peering into the stygian darkness of her unlit neighborhood.

“There,” he said, one arm pointing off toward the street, his breath warm on the side of her neck.

“I don’t see them,” she said, her voice creaking out in a soft wheeze because she’d just realized he was all but wrapped around her, a warm, solid, comforting hulk of a man who smelled like a man instead of a magazine ad for Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein. It was the first time she’d felt safe all day.

“Can you see them? One is circling around to the back, the other will take the front.”

Aubrey scooted away from Jack, helped by the fact that he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d jumped him right then and there. Or would he? He looked at her over his shoulder, his eyes glittering in the meager light from the hall.

“Uh . . . Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

“Yeah,” he said, on a rasp of sound that managed to convey a host of feelings—which for Jack would undoubtedly be physical—including that he blamed her for his current discomfort.

“Right,” she heard herself say. “There are two guys out there who want to kill me, but I thought we had time for a quickie.”

“I don’t think sex with you would be that easy,” he growled, brushing by her.

“I am too easy,” she said, racing after him. “I mean, I’m not easy, but if you know what you’re doing—”

The grin on his face was one of the things that stopped her. The fact that he was turning on the stove was the other.

She forgot all about sex and the probability she would never have it again, considering that she was spending the rest of her life with Jack Mitchell. “You’ll never have to worry about it,” she said, putting sarcasm in her voice as she snagged her backpack off the table with one hand and his arm with the other.

He resisted, listening for the hiss of the gas, nodding when he heard it.

“If you pass out, you’re on your own.”

“Nice to know you care,” he said, letting her drag him back to the stairs.

“I started caring right about the time I saw those guys outside.” She would have gone out her bedroom window immediately, but he drew her down the hall.

“If we go out the bedroom window, the guy coming in the front will hear us.” He looked in the bathroom door, grunted at the sight of the tiny window, then towed her into the small bedroom at the side of the house.