Damon, Lee (41 page)

"I... I don't know what you're talking about." His voice couldn't quite hold steady and, almost against his will, his eyes flicked to Kitt and then quickly away. "I don't even know your sister. I'm on vacation. Nothin' wrong with that. Just been lookin' around the place."

Kitt, watching him from the security of O'Mara's arm, could feel his fear. In a way, she could almost feel sorry for him. Ez and O'Mara in an unfriendly mood would curdle the blood of a much stronger man than this one. Mentally shaking her head, she wondered how long he thought he could hold out against the two of them. She leaned against O'Mara, listening to the staccato rap of insistent questions and the stumbling, stammering answers, and knew that it was only going to be a matter of minutes before Portman broke. He was sweating now, his hands clenching the chair arms. Ez wasn't even holding him down anymore; he was standing off to the side alternating with O'Mara in the rapid-fire interrogation.

Suddenly, Portman dropped his head in his hands and screamed, "All right! All right! I'll tell you."

They stared at him for a few silent moments. He panted in harsh gasps, as if he'd been running. Finally, he slumped back in the chair, defeated, his wary eyes skittering from one face to another. He looks like a trapped rabbit, thought Kitt, even to the twitching nose. How could I have gotten so worked up over a weakling like that? Of course, even a weakling can turn on you if he's scared enough and cornered. On that thought, she turned in alarm toward O'Mara.

"Now what's boiling up in that overactive imagination of yours?" he teased in a low voice. "No, don't tell me. Just have faith, and stop worrying about everything. Don't you think I can take care of you?"

"Oh, yes, I
know
you can." Her answering grin was a bit wavery, but there was no sign of weakness in the hug she gave him as she reached to press her warm mouth to the hollow below his ear.

"First things first. I'll take care of you later," he whispered. His tender expression faded as he turned to Portman, and was replaced by a cool, controlled and quietly menacing demeanor. "All right, Portman, let's have it."

With a pathetic show of bravado, Portman attempted a sneer and glared weakly at O'Mara. "Your wife sent me!"

Three of his listeners looked startled. O'Mara merely lifted an eyebrow and stated, "Ex-wife, you mean. Why did she send you, Portman?"

"To watch her." He pointed at Kitt. "Laura—"

O'Mara cut him off. "Why you, in particular? How do you know Laura?"

"She's my cousin, second or third or something. Our mothers are good friends, and me and Laura always got along. So when she asked me to come up here and get evidence—"

"WHAT EVIDENCE?" O'Mara roared, startling everybody. He stepped away from Kitt and took two long strides toward Portman. The younger man cowered back from O'Mara's blackly threatening look and his menacing growl of, "What's that bitch up to, Portman? I told her she wasn't getting any more money out of me. Once was a favor, and that was IT."

"You owe her—"

"Nothing. Not one damn thing." O'Mara was towering over the cringing figure in the chair.

"B-but you w-won't even l-let her see h-her k-kid."

O'Mara leaned over the chair, braced with his hands on the arms, his blazing blue eyes practically blistering the terrified man's skin. "You listen carefully, you—Laura abandoned my son when he was less than a week old. She has never tried to see him, never asked about him, and doesn't give a damn about him. If you don't want to believe me, ask her own mother and father."

"But she said—" Portman began tentatively.

O'Mara cut him off with a seldom-heard gutter term and straightened up, pushing back his hair angrily. "I don't care a damn what she told you. She's lying. She's already tried to threaten me with a court action to get Gus. She doesn't stand a chance. Her own father is quite willing to testify as to her complete lack of interest in him for the past nine years."

"Uncle George would testify against Laura?!" Portman's voice rose to a squeal, and his shock at this revelation was evident.

"Damn right he would. Daughter or not, he has no use for her and the way she's been living. He's too upset over the effect on his wife to have any sympathy for Laura. She's really done a number on her mother, and her father isn't about to let her have a shot at messing up Gus. And believe me, neither am I. She's not going to get within a mile of him. Furthermore, she knows it. She's just out to try and cause me as much trouble as she can in the hope that I'll pay her off to shut her up."

Portman now looked totally abject and a bit sick. "Oh, God, you just might. You don't know what she's planning. She's going to make an awful stink and give your girlfriend there as much trouble as she can."

Both O'Mara and Ez moved toward the sorry figure drooping in the chair. Kitt stepped back, looking apprehensively from one man to another, asking uncertainly, "But what can she do to me?"

"Portman?" O'Mara snapped.

"L-Laura knows somebody up here, and she found out you were... were old friends with these Tates and y-you were spending all your t-time with her." He pointed a trembling finger at Kitt and quickly looked back at the big, threatening figures looming over him. "So she called a cousin of ours who works for the government and spun him some kind of story, and he checked them out. Mostly her. Then she asked me to come up here and watch her and make notes of how many times you visited her and how long you stayed and if she saw any other guys and—"

"And just what would that prove?" O'Mara demanded. "Kitt and I are both adults, and free to see each other whenever we please. What did Laura think she could do with that kind of information?"

"Yeah, well... she... ah... wanted me to get proof that you stayed overnight here or, better yet, that she stayed over at your place with you. Then Laura was going to tell you that she'd call the papers and tell them that you were carrying on with her in front of your kid."

"Unless, of course, I paid up and kept paying up? There's just one thing I don't understand about this, Portman," O'Mara drawled sarcastically. "Where's the threat? Why should she think the press would be interested beyond the gossip value of my name?"

"Don't you know?" Portman's pale eyes widened in surprise. He pointed at Kitt and cried excitedly, "Her name's not Tate. It's Darcy, and she killed her husband!"

For endless seconds, everyone but Portman stood as if turned to stone. Kitt's mind completely blanked out in shock, and she swayed on the point of unconsciousness until Ez's bellow jolted her back to alertness. And then, for a few minutes, everything moved so fast that there was no time for thought.

Ez's roar of rage would have put a bull elephant's maddened trumpeting to shame. It rattled every dish and window in the building and deafened everyone in the room. It even checked O'Mara's instantaneous reflexes for the two seconds it took Ez to leap for Portman and snatch him from the chair. By the time O'Mara moved, Portman was dangling a foot off the floor, with both of Ez's huge hands wrapped around his neck. Ez was shaking him like a big rag doll and yelling a steady stream of curses in half a dozen languages. The initial horror of Portman's accusation was forgotten by O'Mara, Kitt and Midge, who now had only one joint thought—to keep the berserk Ez from choking Portman to death in his blind rage.

Kitt and O'Mara lunged at Ez from either side, grabbing his wrists and trying to break his hold. All of them were shouting at him, but even O'Mara's deep voice couldn't be heard over Ez's continued bellows. Portman's face was rapidly darkening. O'Mara stepped back a pace and brought the edge of his hand down in two fast, hard karate chops on Ez's forearm, numbing it from elbow to fingertips. His right hand dropped away from Portman's neck, but in a blind reflex he swung from his unimpaired shoulder and knocked O'Mara halfway across the room. As soon as Ez's right hand had dropped, Kitt grabbed his left thumb with both hands, working her fingers between the rigid thumb and Portman's neck. Bracing her feet and leaning back, she used a combination of her weight and her considerable strength to loosen Ez's grip enough so that Portman could draw in gasping breaths. Simultaneously, O'Mara clamped Ez's right arm in a tight hold and fought to shift him off-balance. It was like trying to move Crest Rock. Ez's great muscles bulged and heaved as he tried to shake off Kitt and O'Mara.

Knowing the full horror of the true story, Ez had literally gone berserk at the incredible accusation from Portman, and he was in those minutes utterly blind and deaf to anything around him. Unaware of Kitt and O'Mara, his only reality was Portman and the need to destroy this threat to his twin.

In normal circumstances, O'Mara was just about an even match for Ez. Now, however, the conditions were definitely abnormal, and it took all of O'Mara's 200 pounds and well-developed muscle power just to hold onto Ez's right arm and keep himself on his feet. He didn't want to use any of the disabling blows that he knew, since in Ez's maddened state he would have to use so much force that broken bones and/or damaged nerves would be a distinct possibility. He couldn't believe that Ez could hold out much longer—he was already holding Portman's 150-odd pounds at arm's length with one hand, with most of Kitt's 135 pounds suspended from the same arm, while O'Mara was letting his other arm take most of his 200 pounds. How long it might have taken Kitt and O'Mara to wear Ez down they would never know, because at that point Midge finally managed to include herself in the action and, in her unique style, brought Ez back to his senses.

Although it seemed like an hour, it had been less than two minutes since Ez erupted. Midge had been darting around the struggling tangle of tall bodies, trying to find a way to help but knowing she was too small and light to make any impact. When he threw O'Mara off, she tried to grab Ez's flailing arm, but backed off when O'Mara yelled, "No, Midge!" Suddenly realizing how useless she was, she stopped, took a good look at the situation and made a quick decision.

Kicking off her sandals, she dodged around O'Mara's braced feet to come up behind Ez. She jumped, grabbed a fistful of shirt for leverage, and scaled his back until she was sitting on his shoulders with both thighs clamped tightly around his head. Shifting to get her balance, she simultaneously clapped one hand over his mouth, pinched his nose shut with the other hand and started drumming her bare heels vigorously against his chest.

Not even Ez in all his rage was immune to suffocation. For a few more seconds, muffled roars echoed from behind Midge's hand, but finally he opened his left hand to let Portman drop in a heap to the floor. As soon as they felt the tension leave his body, Kitt and O'Mara let go of his arms and dropped down onto the rug, panting and rubbing aching muscles.

Once his arms were free, Ez grabbed Midge's wrists and pulled her hands away from his face. He took a couple of deep breaths, tilted his head back against her stomach so he could look up into her face, and asked in a perfectly normal voice, "What do you think you're doing, wench? You almost smothered me."

"I was saving your children's lives," she said in a tone of sweet reasonableness. "If you had strangled that son of a sick flounder, you'd have spent the next ten years in prison, and how the hell do you think we'd have managed to have kids under those circumstances? By mail?"

Ez grinned at her, said "Stupid" fondly, then lifted and flipped her and set her on her feet in front of him. His eyes went over her head to rest on Portman, still crumpled in a heap on the floor and gasping for air. Midge's alarm bells started ringing at the look on Ez's face and, planting both small fists in his diaphragm, she pushed him slowly backward, step by step, until he was sitting on the breakfast bar. Scowling determinedly, she stepped between his outstretched legs, turned around to plaster her back against his chest and stomach, pulled his arms around her and said grimly, "There now, you'll damn well stay put or you'll have to knock me over. You just let O'Mara straighten him out."

O'Mara rose lithely to his feet and reached out a hand to Kitt to pull her up. As her eyes met his, Portman's last words boomed and echoed in her mind, slamming and battering at the impregnable wall sealing off that last unbearable memory. Wrenching pain jolted through her head as, cracking and crumbling, faster and faster, the wall came down and her mind filled with the spinning horror of Leon's death.

With a wordless, anguished, guttural sob, she lunged into O'Mara's arms, burying her face in his shoulder and wrapping her arms around him in a rib-cracking stranglehold. Terror consumed her as she felt her mind sliding from sanity into an airless limbo, and she clung with desperate arms to her only remaining reality while the unspeakable nightmare memory crashed through her.

Reacting instinctively to her panic and rising hysteria, O'Mara clamped strong arms around her in a tight hold, trying to absorb the shocks as deep, hard, dry sobs jolted through her body. Frantically, she turned her face against his shoulder, seeking the security of warm, living skin, and he felt her panting breath against his throat as she finally pushed his collar aside and pressed her face against his neck. He brought up a hand to brush her hair back and rubbed his cheek against hers, murmuring loving reassurances and encouragement. All of his mental forces were concentrated in trying to break through her surging terror and make an emotional-mental connection with her. He slid his hand under her hair and kneaded the knotted muscles at her nape, while the soothing murmur of his voice continued in her ear.

Finally, after long minutes, the healing tears started, pouring down her face and his neck, soaking his shirt collar and trickling down his chest. She took deep, shuddering breaths and felt the first easing of terrifying pressure in her mind. Life, pulsing, loving, warm life was moving through her. She could
feel
his skin against her face, his hand on her neck, the warmth and strength of his body against hers, and she could
hear
the words of love and reassurance he was speaking. And then, suddenly, as if circuit switches had been flipped, her linkage with him was
there.
Love, with all its soothing, calming, supporting strength, was flowing into her, crowding out the mind-bending terror, releasing the last bonds of nightmare memory, vanquishing once and for all the lingering effects of the past.