All Jacked Up (9 page)

Danny turned around and looked at the kid, no answer coming to mind.

Carlo collapsed back onto the bed, rolling immediately to his side with a grimace on his face. “You think she went back home?”

“She tried to blow her house up—”

“He tried to blow it up.”

“If she was willing to let him, then she knows it’s suicide to go back there.”

“So how’re we gonna find her?”

“We’ll have to call
him
.”

Carlo sat up, forgetting about his backside. “We can’t. He said not to call him until the job’s done.”

But Danny was already dialing. “No choice,” he said while the phone rang in his ear. “Either we find Aubrey Sullivan and silence her or we’ll be the ones facing a silencer.”

“Yeah, I know, and it’s all my fault.”

Danny would have been saying that himself if he’d had any spit left in his mouth. As it was, when the connection went through and a woman’s voice answered, it took him two tries to get the name out. She put him on hold, and that called for countermeasures so the stammer didn’t escalate. He flipped out his pocket-knife and cut the plastic tie on the minibar, downing a bottle of no-name whiskey, then another.

“Hey, gimme one of those.”

“You drink, you talk.”

Carlo put up both his hands and sidled back a couple of steps. “Talking don’t work so good for me.”

“Now you figure it out.” For two cents Danny would’ve walked away and come back later to collect the body, but then he’d catch hell from his mother, who’d raised Carlo after the kid’s parents got caught in a turf war. It was a close call as to who Danny feared the most—

“I told you not to call here until the job is finished.”

Okay, not such a close call. “Uhhhh . . .” All the breath rushed out of Danny’s lungs and his rectum puckered tighter than a drawstring purse in the hands of a miser. “We, ahhhh . . .”

“Failed.”

“Well, uh, I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. More like we were just . . . scoping out the situation.”

“The situation slipped out of D.C. right under your nose. The woman is only a librarian.”

“A pretty resourceful librarian.” And he was saddled with the human equivalent of a traffic jam, slow, stupid, and irritating as hell. Danny glanced over, watched as Carlo peeled his boxers halfway down and pointed his ass at the mirror so he could count the rock salt bruises. He was keeping track on his fingers.

“She is simply headstrong,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, “always making the wrong choices.”

“Not anymore. She’s not alone, and the guy she hooked up with seems to know what he’s doing.”

“He does.”

“And she’s not exactly the shrinking-violet type,” Danny said. She was more the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later type. Thank God she didn’t carry a gun because she was pretty dangerous when she improvised. “We know what to expect now. When we catch up with them, things’ll turn out differently. We, uh, just wondered if you might, uh, know which direction they went.”

There was silence from the other end of the line, the nail-biting kind of silence that came before the jury foreman speaks the verdict, and then, “I hear the Blue Ridge Parkway is nice this time of year.” The words were innocuous, pleasant even, but the tone was cold enough to chap Danny’s ear.

“We won’t lose her again.”

There was nothing but a click from the other end of the line, but it was a final sort of click, like the lid of a coffin settling gently closed.

He took one long wistful look at the nice, sunny dry land just steps away, then splashed back through the shallows and dove into near-freezing water. His momentum and a couple of breast-strokes took him to the edge of the main channel where the current swept him up and dragged him along. At the same speed as Aubrey. He sucked in some air and windmilled his arms, keeping his eyes on the waterfall’s horizon.

Aubrey’s feet were outlined by the clear blue sky, then her knees. Jack dug deep, giving it one last heroic effort. His fingertips just feathered through the ends of her hair as she floated calmly over the edge of the waterfall.

Jack put on the brakes. Really, he said to himself as he swam like hell back upstream, what good would it do him to go over just because Aubrey had? He’d probably fall on her and if she wasn’t already dead, finish the job. And if she wasn’t dead, just hurt, and if he didn’t fall on her, what good would he be to her if he broke a leg or something? Wouldn’t it be best to get to the riverbank and climb down to her?

Except the riverbank, despite his best efforts, seemed to be getting farther away. He put in a couple more halfhearted strokes before muscle cramps and the laws of physics made him give in to the inevitable. He turned downstream just in time to tumble over the edge of the waterfall and splat, spread-eagled face-first, about fifteen feet down. Thankfully, a bunch of rocks broke his fall, covered with just enough water to cushion the blow so he didn’t die, but not enough to keep him from getting up close and personal with the topography of the riverbed.

He lay there for a few seconds, taking mental inventory of the critical body parts, which seemed to be okay since he didn’t feel the need to curl into the fetal position, and the breakable body parts, which all seemed to be intact. The soft body parts would probably be turning some interesting colors before long, but nothing seemed to hurt too much at the moment. Or maybe he was just numb from the frigid water. His ears, however, were working fine.

“Are you all right, Jack?” he heard Aubrey ask. “Does it hurt?”

That was when his temper kicked in. He jumped to his feet—actually it was more like crawling, and he only made it to his hands and knees. But mentally he was upright and looming over Aubrey with a scowl on his face. “I just fell fifteen feet.”

“So did I.”

“At least you landed in the water.”

“Yippee for me.”

Jack twisted around, then grunted and groaned his way to vertical. She made such a pathetic picture sitting there in waist-deep water, shivering and blue-lipped, that some of his anger faded. He waded over to her, hooked the collar of her jacket and hauled her to her feet.

“I can make it myself.” She shoved him away, took two steps, and the bottom dropped out again.

Jack watched the water close over her head and contemplated the possibility of moving to eastern Europe and starting a whole new life—for all of ten seconds before he jumped in after her. He fished around in the vicinity of that damned floating backpack, found something that didn’t seem to be a rock or fish, and hauled it skyward.

Aubrey broke the surface in a geyser of water, still insisting she was perfectly fine without him. He ignored her, taking her into the classic lifesaving grip before stupidity and hypothermia solved her problems permanently. It wasn’t easy to get them both back to the shore, but at least he got to do it with his arm wrapped around her neck. “What the hell were you doing?” he asked as he let her go and she flopped like a ragdoll at the edge of the river.

“When you’re in rapids,” she said, her teeth chattering, “you shouldn’t fight the current, just point your feet downstream so you don’t hit your head on a rock, and ride it out.”

“You read that somewhere.”

“Yeah.”

“How about Isaac Newton? Gravity? Ever have an apple fall on your head?”

She stared up at him, her eyes narrowed.

“That wasn’t rapids, that was a waterfall.”

“Not a very high one.”

“It still hurts when you hit the bottom.”

“Well, where the heck were you?” she demanded, crawling over to a patch of sunlight and collapsing, looking like something the river had chewed up and spit out. “It wasn’t like I wanted to see how well I bounce, but I couldn’t get my arms to move. And I didn’t have enough breath left to yell for help. That water has to be just above freezing . . .”

“Too bad your mouth didn’t stop working,” Jack muttered, tuning her out. His gut was talking, too, telling him something wasn’t right, and given a choice he’d listen to his gut every time.

They stood on the east side of the river, the trees big and pretty far apart, nothing to keep the sun from shining on them like a big yellow spotlight. Jack shaded his eyes and peered into the gloom on the other side, just in time to catch sight of the man easing through the trees.

He clamped a hand over Aubrey’s mouth, but it was too late. The F-250 driver followed the sound of her voice, spotted them, and took aim. Jack hauled Aubrey off the ground by the front of her shirt, slung her, belly down, over his shoulder and hooked an arm behind her knees. She immediately started to wiggle around, yelling something about her backpack. He snagged it off the ground and took off running, but she kept thrashing around, demanding to be put down. She’d probably go one step and fall on her face, but she had enough energy to make his life difficult.

“Hold still,” he said, giving her a good wallop on the backside to make his point. She went stiff as a board, almost overbalancing them both. Okay, he thought, logic might work. “You can’t run with your legs half frozen,” he reminded her in as reasonable a voice as he could manage while he was doing just that, uphill, with a struggling woman—albeit a scrawny one—over his shoulder. “It’s too deep in places for him to cross there, and by the time he gets to someplace he can, we’ll be long gone.”

She reared up, braced both hands on his back, and tried to shimmy off his shoulder. “I don’t need to be carried.”

“He’s still shooting.” Two more shots rang out, proving his point and not deterring Aubrey one bit. She kept flopping around, throwing him off balance.

“You keep that up and I’ll break an ankle.”

“Put me down.”

He smacked her on the ass again. She made a sound that was pure outrage, and something that was probably her balled up fist hit him on the butt. He barely felt it, but she said, “Ouch,” still in that PMS tone of voice. She settled down, though, long enough for him to get over the crest of the hill where they were out of sight of the gunman and safe, at least for the moment.

He flipped Aubrey off his shoulder and immediately took a step back, which saved him from the kick she aimed in his direction, but wasn’t nearly far enough to get him out of range of her most effective weapon.

“That hurt,” she said, straightening her clothes. “My stomach is going to be bruised from bouncing around on that rock you call a shoulder, my face got whipped by weeds, and you hit me. Twice,” she added, rubbing her backside and aiming her best librarian glare in his direction. “And you’re not even winded.”

No, but his shoulder hurt like hell where he’d been shot, and the entire front of his body gave new meaning to the word sore. “Thank you for saving my life again, Jack,” he said, starting with under-the-breath mockery and ratcheting up to full-blown in-her-face anger. “I appreciate the fact that I’m still around to bitch about everything, Jack!”

She held his eyes for a minute, then turned away, sighing. “That used to make me feel better,” she said.

“Bitching?”

“Being alive.”

She did look pretty miserable, her short hair sticking out at all angles, including straight up, where it had started to dry while she’d been flung over his shoulder. Her clothes were still soaked, dripping at the bottom of her jeans and the hem of her T-shirt, plastered to her everywhere else . . .

He turned abruptly and walked off, the sound of her chattering teeth letting him know she’d fallen in behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder, giving her a quick once-over before his gaze came up to meet hers. “You need to get out of those wet clothes,” he said, his voice too gruff to pass the comment off as completely practical-minded.

Her cheeks pinked up, the rest of her expression going sullen. “In your dreams.”

“In my dreams your mouth is duct-taped shut and you’re blindfolded so you can’t look at me like that.” Jack faced front again and resumed the trek, but he could still feel her glaring at him. “And my memory of the last forty-eight hours is erased. And speaking of memory, start replaying yours because as soon as we stop for the night we’re going to play This Is Your Life and you get to be the guest of honor.” He looked over his shoulder again, confining his field of vision to her spiky-haired head and her unlined face. “You’re not thinking.”

“I thought that was your fantasy, Jack, me not thinking, following along three steps behind you like the good, obedient little woman.”

“It’s a nice change.” But he didn’t expect it to last. “The sooner we find out what you know, the sooner you”—and her eyes and her mouth—“can go far away from me. Like a different continent.”

“Why don’t you go on ahead?” she suggested. “Send me a postcard when you get there.”

“What cemetery should I address it to?”

By the time they’d been walking for a couple of hours, it felt like they ought to be on another continent. One in hell.

The forest Aubrey had thought so pretty and soothing this morning had turned into the Marquis de Sade’s playground. Her feet kept tangling in the thick, tough ferns or turning on tree roots, and if she wasn’t clambering over a deadfall, she was ducking under low-hanging branches. Or dodging the ones Jack pushed back and then let slap into her face. And it was all uphill.

Aubrey concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to think about the sun beating down on her skull, baking her brain. She managed it from time to time, usually whenever they hit a patch of shade. Then she thought about the mosquitoes trying to suck her dry and the cloud of gnats buzzing around her head.

And then there was Jack. He walked along in front of her, oblivious to the heat, impervious to the bugs, back straight, arms swinging, butt flexing. She tried to keep her eyes on the ground, but they kept inching back up to that butt. Of all the times she’d been following Jack, she’d never noticed what a great backside he had. Of course, he’d been trying to blow up her house, or people had been shooting at them those other times, so sightseeing hadn’t been a top priority. Not to mention Jack Mitchell was the last man whose butt she should find so appealing.

Thankfully his personality tipped the scales back toward intense dislike.

“Is there any chance we can stop for a rest?” she asked, about the time escaping Corona’s gunman started to feel like bad luck.

“No.”

“That’s it? Just no?”

“We have to keep moving.”

“My legs aren’t as long as yours,” Aubrey pointed out, trotting a little, as she had throughout the morning, in order to keep up with him. “I’m not made of muscle like you are. And I’m including your head.”

“No, you’re made of mouth.”

She chose to ignore that. “Do you even know which way we’re going?”

He looked up at the sky. “Southwest.”

“What’s southwest? The Gulf of Mexico? ’Cause it feels like we’re just about there.”

Jack didn’t say anything, but Aubrey got his message loud and clear. He was calling the shots and she was supposed to praise the lord and pass the ammunition like a good little soldier.

She gave it a couple of minutes, enough time for him to think she was doing just that, waited until she imagined she saw a little bit of an I-won-that-round swagger in his walk, then sat down on the next fallen log they came across. Jack kept walking for a few yards before there was a little hesitation in his step, which Aubrey took to mean he’d realized she wasn’t behind him anymore. He went a bit farther, then swung around, arms crossing over his chest, trying to glare her into submission.

“I’m not moving until I’ve had a chance to rest,” she said.

He held his ground.

Aubrey unzipped her backpack and took out a bottle of water. She watched him watch her open it and take a long drink. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down with a nearly audible drythroated rasp before he caved in and walked back to her. She handed him the bottle. She’d gotten what she wanted, why push her luck? “Where are we going?”

Jack took his time, draining half the bottle before he deigned to answer her. “This isn’t a democracy.”

Aubrey took the water away from him, wiped it on her shirt, and finished it off. “It isn’t the Marine Corps either.”

“I could toss you over my shoulder again.”

“Do you really think I’d make it that easy on you?”

He stared at her a second, clearly considering it.

“This time I’ll kick,” she said, her eyes dropping to just about where her feet would be if he made good on his threat.