Kiss (37 page)

It must be ten thirty by now. She wondered where the keys to Miguel’s Jeep had gone. She wondered what had happened to his phone. Maybe they were still on the boat.

She needed dry clothes. She needed to get warm. Shauna pushed herself up onto her knees and crouched down to return to the boat. Her feet squished and slapped on the dock, one soggy sock to one limping boot, back down to the slip.

The air stung her sliced palms. Her fingers shook so badly from the cold that she nearly couldn’t pry the snaps off the canvas cover. Pain pierced her fingertips. If she wasn’t more careful she would tear them to bits before she was through. But she undid enough to roll into the boat, landing on a stiff object that poked her in the ribs. Her missing shoe. She gripped it and held it out in front of her to ward off the blackness.

Move, move, move. If she moved, she didn’t have to think. She stumbled into the cabin and found the light in the bathroom. Her breathing leveled out in the verifiably empty space. In minutes she had stripped and towel dried and donned her stale but dry clothes. Only the one boot that had gone overboard with her remained waterlogged.

Shauna was buttoning her blouse—she had needed to wait until her hands stopped quaking—when the phone rang.

Miguel’s phone.

They hadn’t thought to take it with them. Above. It was up on deck. She stumbled up, couldn’t see. The sound was coming from the cockpit, she thought. She crouched to get into it under the cover.

Two rings.

Her hands skimmed the surfaces and found everything but the cell.

Three rings. The noise bounced around under the canvas.

She cracked her shin on the swiveling helm seat. Blast!

Four rings. No, no, no.

The phone silenced.

She leaned over, holding herself up with two hands braced on the arms of the chair. Where was the phone? If she were Miguel, where would she have put it? Where would he have it close? Where would he not worry about it getting wet?

The dry box. She spread her fingers wide and reached out for the locker behind the seat. Fumbled the latch, flipped it open. “There!” She said the word aloud as her fingers closed around the beat-up black cell.

Her hand knocked something next to the phone, and she heard it slide off the stack of chamois cloths they rested on. Clattering into the bottom of the box, she knew. Keys. Miguel had emptied his pockets to sit more comfortably. Then dozed off.

She pressed a button on the side panel and used the LED as a flashlight to find the keys. They’d fallen down past a spare set of wetsuit booties, a laminated navigational map, and a braided line into the bottom of the box. Shifting the items around, she finally closed her fingers around the small ring and pulled it out.

And there was his wallet, with his driver’s license smiling at her through a plastic view pocket in the side. Man, that was a bad picture of him. But in the moment it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

She studied his squinty smile, hoping again that he was still—

The phone trilled in her hand, and she dropped it. Accidentally disconnected the call. Turned off the light.

Find the phone. Find it find it find it.

The phone rang again and lit up. She snatched it out. Private number. She pressed the talk button.

“Yes?” She was breathless. How could she be winded?

“I was starting to think you didn’t want to talk to me.”

Wayne. Her head filled with hate and fear in equal amounts.

“How did you get this number?”

“Oh, he gave it up easily enough. We just weren’t sure whether you were still in the area.”

Oh no. No no no.
She had to get out.

“Don’t worry, babe. I pulled my guys off your detail. I need their energies elsewhere right now.”

She pushed her wet hair off her forehead and stumbled out of the cock-pit, gripping his keys and wallet in her other hand. She tried to pinpoint the place she had entered and breathed heavily into the phone. It was so dark in here.

“Where’s Miguel?”

“On his way to spend some time with me.” She found the opening in the unsnapped canvas. “I like your taste, thought I’d try to figure out what it is you see in him.”

“I asked
where
he is.”

“Somewhere between you and Houston.”

“Is he alive?”

“You’re asking dumb questions, Shauna. Hasn’t the journalist taught you better?”

“What are you going to do to him?”

“We’re a little short on lab rats these days, so we thought we’d put him to work in that capacity. See if we can duplicate what we’ve created in you. On any level. The rest depends on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Really, am I going to have to spell this out for you? The next question should be,
What do you want me to do?
You’re going to have to be a quicker study than that if you want Miguel to stay alive.”

“What do you want me to do, you sick—?”

“I want you to come to Houston with us. Without any police.” Wayne’s voice smiled. As if he were inviting her on vacation. “It’ll be fun.”

Shauna rolled back out onto the deck and took a splinter in her thigh. She would deal with it later. She had to get out. Up on her knees, then her feet. She started to jog.

“Good idea. You hurry on down here now, fast as you can get here.”

She really should be less obvious. She turned her breathlessness into a moan. “I’m
hurt
, Wayne. You dog. I can’t even walk.”

Wayne sucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“I should send someone over to help you then.”

“You have the most demented concept of the word
help
.”

Shauna reached the security gate and pinched the phone between her ear and shoulder to open it up.

“Look, I’m not going to eat up minutes on our dear friend’s plan,” Wayne said. “I’ll cut to the chase. You be in Houston in four hours, all by your tall beautiful self, or Lopez won’t live through the night.”

Shauna’s stomach morphed into a brick. “Not possible,” she said. “I’m injured. I don’t have a car. And it’s three hours there without any of that going on.”

“Then I’ll arrange a ride for you in an ambulance.”

“I’d call for my father’s motorcade before I’d get in any ambulance you sent.”

“Bright girl! If anyone could find a way out of your predicament, I knew it would be you.”

“Five hours.”

“You’re not in a position to negotiate, Shauna, though I’m a good-natured fellow. Four hours is all I can offer.”

“I need a guarantee you won’t kill him when I get there.”

“The only guarantee you’ll get from me is that we’ll kill him if you don’t.”

Shauna stumbled into the parking lot.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and she started shouting.

“Where? Where should I go,
you animal?”

But Wayne had disconnected the call. She punched through the call log to find his number and call him back. Private number. She dialed *69 and got a recording. Shauna groaned at the sky.

She checked the phone’s digital clock. Ten fifty-six.

Shauna slid into Miguel’s Jeep, locked the doors, slipped the key into the ignition, and cranked the heat. Wayne’s phone call had undone her plans to go to Beeson. Wayne would kill Miguel if she went to the police. Even if he didn’t find out about her ratting him out, if she didn’t show up in Houston in four hours . . .

She would go after Miguel herself. Most likely, Wayne would wait until the last possible moment to let her know where to go. She had to outthink him. She had to unravel how he worked, stay a step ahead.

She needed help, the help of someone who knew Wayne better than she did. Knew his methods. Maybe even knew where he operated outside of MMV.

Someone who hadn’t been so easily duped as she. She was so angry at herself.

Trent Wilde. Leon Chalise. Not options.

Millie Harding. No idea where to find the good doctor at this time of night.

Wayne’s hired hand. The man she’d seen on so many occasions—the SUV, the park, the hotel. No idea where to find him either. Didn’t even have a name. Didn’t know if she could trust him.

Unless . . .

The man who drove the SUV was a witness listed in the accident report. It was still here on the floor of the car with the medications she had meant to take to Beeson. She held the report up to the dashboard under the lot light and flipped through the pages until she found his name.

Frank Danson.

And Frank Danson’s address.

Shauna rushed to open Miguel’s glove box, hoping he kept a street map in it. In fact, she found several, lined up like a stack of pillows under the pearl-handled knife Frank Danson had thrown into the hotel’s door frame.

She withdrew the Austin map, found the street, twenty minutes away. She looked at the dash clock. Eleven oh one.

What was the greater risk here? Going to Houston at Wayne’s mercy, blind, or going to Danson’s home with no guarantee that he would be there, or, if he was, that he wouldn’t kill her and haul her body off to Wayne to get this money that Wayne owed him? It wouldn’t be hard for him to do.

Miguel would have told her she was crazy. He would have told her to go directly to Beeson, and in lieu of that, to stay clear of
anyone
associated with Wayne.

She fingered his ring. Miguel would be of no help in this decision.

How had Wayne reacted to Frank’s failure to kill her that night in September? Add to that his failure to prevent her escape from the hotel . . .

They couldn’t possibly be on good terms. How much of a risk would she be taking to assume that Frank and Wayne were unhappy enough with each other that she could turn Frank against him?

A few moments later, Shauna decided to take the risk. Frank could possibly tell her how and where Wayne operated in Houston. He might even know what had happened to Miguel.

She could only hope that Frank Danson was still alive, and that he would talk to her.

Strike that last part. Shauna didn’t really need him to talk to her, not if his memory of working for Wayne Spade was still fully intact. She could use him if he never said a word. If she was careful.

Eleven oh four. She pulled Miguel’s truck out of the lot and sped toward the south side of town, one of the last places on earth she wanted to be.

34

Frank Danson kept a middle-class town house in a neighborhood that was slip-ping into lower-class disrepair. His was number 503, at the end of a row. Shauna pounded the door without letting up until she heard footsteps.

The door flew open. “What?” he complained. Then he saw Shauna and slammed the door on a stream of expletives.

Shauna pounded again. “Frank! You don’t want me to make a scene!”

Shauna shouted as loudly as she could. “You want to talk with me, Frank! You want to talk with me about why I shouldn’t call the police—” Stupid girl! If he was with Wayne on the abduction of Miguel, he would call her bluff. She winced, unable to turn back. “Why shouldn’t I tell them how you’re hooked up with Wayne, how you engineered the wreck—you and Wayne and Bond—what you did to me in Corpus Christi! You involved in the trafficking too?”

He yanked the door open again, then dragged her inside. “What the—
trafficking
? Drugs are
not
my area, so don’t you start.”

Frank shut the door behind her, gripping her upper arm.

“And I didn’t do
anything
to you in Corpus. How did you find this place?”

“Accident report. You didn’t use an alias?”

He turned the locks and then moved around the lower level of the town-home to close the window coverings, hauling her behind him. “I shouldn’t have had any reason to use one,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t have, if the job had been done right in the first place. That was Bond’s fault.”

He dragged her back into the living room. She had been crazy, coming here by herself. Crazy. The man was twice her size and would crush her. She pictured Miguel on the floor of Leon’s office, writhing. For her sake. She could do at least that much for him.

Frank was wearing a flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and on his chest was the largest, most ghastly bruise she had ever seen, a purple and green explosion across his ribs.

“What happened?”

Frank released her so roughly that she staggered. He buttoned his shirt to cover the bruise.

“Your sweetheart shot me.”

“Wayne?” This news encouraged her efforts.

“Who else?”

“You wore a vest?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you two have issues.”

“No, we understand each other. I understand I should always wear a vest in his company. Might get shot in the back.”

“Or the heart, I see. It’s a wonder he didn’t go for your head.”

“Looks like he went for yours.” Frank gestured to the bruise on Shauna’s cheekbone.

“That’s right.”

She raised her eyes to the side of his neck. Twin burn marks scored his skin like a snakebite.

“Wayne do that too?” She lifted her fingers to touch it. He slapped her hand away.

“Your boyfriend gets credit for that one.”

So that was how Miguel got into her hotel room.