No Time to Hide (14 page)

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Kerry believed him. She didn’t know if it was because she truly wanted to believe him more than anything or if it was the way he really felt.

“He was a rookie and had only been in the service for a few months. I always thought he was a bit of a hotshot. He was on Helen’s team on the last case.”

Kerry tried to let Cutter feel her support without speaking. Whatever else he told her, or didn’t, was completely up to him.

“Actually, he was her partner at the end. I didn’t like it, but Denver and the brains in Washington had pulled me from the field. They were getting ready to boot me upstairs. I was going to be head of the Western Region office.”

“You were going to be the boss?”

“One of them. That’s why they called me to Washington on the day everything went down. That’s why Johnson was Helen’s partner.”

And that’s why you still blame yourself for her death.
She kept the thought to herself. “Now you’re partnered with him?” she asked, instead.

Cutter shrugged. She felt the muscles in his arms flex with the movement and twined her fingers in the springy hair that covered his skin.

“Yeah. He’s not as bad as he was. I guess he grew up a little. He’s not as gung ho.”

Kerry didn’t say what she was thinking. There was no use. They rode without talking for a few miles. It was a comfortable silence. One she almost hated to break with questions about the present.

“What are we going to do now?” she asked. “We didn’t really find out anything we needed to help us.”

Cutter shook his head. “That’s not true. You remembered something that told us your Dad was probably working for somebody other than the Giancarlo family. That’s a lead. A tiny one, but a lead anyway. It’s a place to start.”

Kerry remembered what she’d been about to tell Cutter before Johnson interrupted them in Cutter’s office. “I remembered something else. Something my father told me years ago.”

“What is it?”

“Daddy told me if anything ever happened to him, I should go to Elmira, New York. He said he had friends there. He said, ‘You’ll find things their people need to know.’”

Monday, 12:10 A.M.

“When did you remember this?”

“When I was telling you about the day I bought my trousseau. I was about to tell you when we heard Johnson coming.” She chewed on her bottom lip nervously. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to say anything about it in front of him. I didn’t know who he was.”

She saw Cutter’s nod in the lights from the dashboard. “Not a bad idea, even though I don’t think he’s the leak. I don’t think he’s cunning enough, but you never know.”

“I know you were unsure if it was your boss or your partner who leaked the information about us. Now you’re sure?”

She could tell by the tensing of Cutter’s jaw that he wasn’t happy with his conclusion.

“Yeah. If it’d been Johnson, he wouldn’t have let us go tonight. He’d have stopped us. Hell, he should’ve stopped us.”

“Because he didn’t, you trust him?”

“Yeah, and because he doesn’t have any information. The person who has been making our lives a living hell the last four days has all the information in the world. Johnson didn’t even know about what was going on up on the reservation. He doesn’t have the kind of contacts necessary to know. He’s still just a kid.”

Kerry didn’t argue his assessment. He should know about his own partner. That didn’t mean she agreed with him.

“Oh, you don’t think a kid isn’t capable of pulling all this stuff together?” Kerry didn’t know why she was pursuing this. Cutter knew the players. She didn’t. But she did know Dom Giancarlo. She knew what he was capable of and what kind of men he liked to surround himself with. There’d been something in Johnson’s eyes that looked as if he’d never been a kid.

“No. Not at this level.”

“So, what’s the plan now?”

“We go to Elmira. If we find what your father wanted us to find, then we see what the next step is.”

Kerry still didn’t agree with Cutter’s notion about Johnson, but she was in one hundred percent agreement of doing whatever it took to end this. She wanted a life. She wanted her life. She wanted to give Cutter the chance at the new life he so richly deserved.

“Okay. How long until we get to Elmira?”

Cutter laughed. “We’ll be there in a little over three hours. What we find when we get there is anybody’s guess.”

***

Monday, 3:30 A.M.

Elmira, New York—the place where Samuel Clemens had met and married his wife. The place that had been nearly overwhelmed by flood waters from Hurricane Agnes in 1972. It was also home to two prisons. Cutter figured it was fitting Kerry’s father had sent her here.

This small city of roughly thirty thousand people, not counting the prison inmates, was sound asleep by the time Cutter and Kerry reached its outskirts. As they drove down quiet streets, he arched his back to ease the stiffness, trying to get comfortable on the ragged seat. He swore there was a spring that had been digging into his butt for the whole drive down from Buffalo.

When he braked at a stoplight, Kerry shifted from the position she had fallen into sometime during the drive. Moving slightly, she burrowed her head into his shoulder before shaking herself awake and sitting upright.

He immediately missed the feel of her against him.

“Sorry. How long have I been asleep?” she asked. Her hair was tousled and her blouse had pulled away from her pants, barring some of her midriff. She looked sleepy and warm. And terribly arousing.

“Not long,” he said on a grunt, as he shifted more fully this time. He had gotten used to the semi-aroused state he’d been in since she had fallen asleep against him. But now she was awake and his body wasn’t quite so eager to forget about its needs. “We’re in Elmira. What now?”

Kerry shifted around for her large purse on the backseat. When she lifted it over the back, the bottom of the bag brushed against his arm. “Ow. What are you carrying in there? It weighs a ton. And you’ve been lugging that with you the entire time? It’s a wonder you haven’t given yourself a hernia.”

Cutter knew he was being a bastard, but he couldn’t help it. It was either take his frustration out on her or pull the car into the first motel he found and have his way with her. Rationally, he knew these feelings came with the drop in adrenaline and the ragged edges of exhaustion. He’d been working on a razor blade’s edge nonstop for close to three days. He was getting too old for this stuff. There had been times in his career when he could have gone on like this for triple that amount of time. Times change, though.

He reminded himself he would be okay once he had a really good night’s sleep.

Unfortunately, he also knew that was not about to happen until this case was closed. Cutter also knew that time was working against them. So far they’d been lucky. But if what he now believed was true, the clock was ticking, and ticking fast. Giancarlo had money, power, and powerful people on the inside helping him. It was a combination that spelled k-a-b-o-o-m for people like Kerry.

He gritted his teeth. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Not now. Not ever.

When Kerry looked at him, her sleepy eyes a little wounded, he felt like cursing. If it had just been desire, need, he could have passed that off. She was a beautiful woman, a beautiful woman who needed him.

He was a man who needed to be needed. He was a man who had missed the comfort and touch of that special woman. He was a man who’d had that special relationship once only to louse it up. He remembered what Kerry had said about blaming himself. It had become a comfortable habit.

Throw in the constant and unknown danger they had faced with the constant stress of being on the run and he was primed for an explosion.

The analytical part of his brain knew these facts, and it kept repeating them over and over. But the other part of him, the part beginning to demand more and more control, didn’t care. That part was telling him no matter what happened, if they survived, Kerry would be a part of his life forever.

He turned his thoughts away from the future, away from giving in to the demands of his mind and body, and looked again at the woman beside him. She was digging through her purse intently.

“What are you looking for?”

“Do you know what the area code is for Elmira?”

Cutter was nonplussed. “Uh, 607, I think. Why?”

Kerry’s head and shoulders nearly disappeared in the large bag she always carried. She raised her head, a triumphant look on her face.

“I knew I had it somewhere.” She waved a smartphone in a case. She flicked open the cover, and powered it on. “I don’t have everything on here, but I think I have most of the important stuff they found when they went through my father’s private papers, they found in a safe deposit box at his bank. Except the stuff the government needed to make their case against Dom, of course.”

“You’ve had that the entire time?” he asked.

“Yes. Don’t worry. I bought it with cash and didn’t register it under my name,” Kerry said. “I also have a separate cloud account too. I also deactivated the GPS when I bought it.”

“Whose name did you put it under?” Cutter had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Sam I. Am,” she answered.

Cutter blinked. “You’ve got a phone registered to a Dr. Seuss character?”

Kerry smiled. “Yes. I have a picture id and PayPal account in that name as well.”

Cutter laughed in spite of himself. He had a feeling it was only the tip of the iceberg with this woman. “What else do you have that I should know about?”

“I carry three USB drives. One is for personal stuff. But the other two are a compilation of all the information I can remember and have gathered on the Giancarlos.”

“You’ve been investigating Giancarlo? And carrying that around with you everywhere?”

“Yes. I told you I carry all the important things with me. I never really had the time to go through all Dad’s files, though. But I had a lot of time on my hands. And I’m very good at research. People think they’re lives private but that’s really a myth. One of the things I’d planned to do Friday after I finished shopping was to go through this stuff again to see if I missed something.”

Cutter said, “Okay, then let’s find a place to buy a laptop or an Internet cafe. I’d prefer the laptop for privacy, but let’s find a hotel first and get something to eat.”

“Good idea. So where will that be?”

They rounded a bend in the road. As they did so, there was a small motel, one remarkably similar to the one Cutter had found near Batavia. He pulled the car into the circular driveway and opened the door. “I’ll be back in a second.”

He was true to his word and less than five minutes later they had the keys to a clean, but worn room with a small round table and two chairs. The overhead light was on, but Cutter wanted to keep the curtains closed. Kerry didn’t care, though couldn’t help wrinkling her nose at the slightly moldy smell of the room. At least it was better than the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

Since it was too early to go computer shopping, they pored over the documents she had on her phone. Moments later, Kerry exclaimed, “Look here!”

“What?”

“It’s a picture of my mother. Wasn’t she pretty?”

Cutter bit back a sigh. They didn’t have time for trips down memory lane. At the look on her face, though, he took the phone and looked at the picture. “Yes. But not as pretty as her daughter.”

Kerry laughed. It was a sound of carefree joy, and he wished he could give her the time and the freedom to laugh like that all the time.

“Now that wasn’t true, but it was a pretty compliment. Thank you. I do appreciate it. I also know we don’t have the time for this. It’s just that when Dom killed my father, the agents wouldn’t let me return home for anything. They said it wasn’t safe. I wasn’t able to get any of my pictures of her or Daddy. They told me later that someone had purposely planted the explosives and caused the fire that burned down the house. I thought they… Well, I thought everything personal was gone forever. I almost couldn’t bear not having any pictures of them. I drew some sketches, but it wasn’t the same thing.”

Cutter nodded and handed the picture back to her. “I understand. But I bet your sketches were great. You’re a wonderful artist.”

Kerry grinned as if he had just given her a great gift. “Thank you again. That’s another dream that’ll never come true, but it’s nice to know somebody likes my pictures.”

He watched as she stroked her fingers down the surface of the picture, as if she was somehow able to feel the textures of her mother’s face. Maybe she could, in her memory. Then she straightened her shoulders, put the picture to one side, and continued going through the stack of papers.

Cutter wanted, more than anything he had ever wanted in his life, to pull her into his arms. He wanted to take the pain he could feel radiating off her in waves into himself. He shook his head savagely. Now was not the time to lose focus. Now was definitely not the time to let his protective instincts take control.

As if she could read his mind, she spoke his thoughts aloud. “Would you mind…could you possibly hold me for a minute?

She didn’t give him a chance to respond, just moved from her chair and stood beside him. He opened his arms. The feel of her, the scent of her, the warmth of her acted like a bolt of lightning against the dry kindling of his desire that had been seeking a heat source from practically the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. When she burrowed her head into his chest, all the restraints he had managed to keep on himself flared like a wildfire.

He stood and picked her up into his arms, striding the short distance to the lone bed. “I need you,” he gritted out. “Now. If you’re going to say no, make it quick. Because there won’t be any stopping me in another thirty seconds.”

She looked up at him, and he was hit by the need and desire on her face. “I won’t stop you, Cutter. I need you just as much.”

Her words broke the tight rein of restraint he’d held on himself. He flung off his shirt and his pants, cursing a little when the legs caught on his shoes. Once the shoes hit the floor with a thud, he stood before her, clad only in his socks, with his desire a swelling testament to his need. He watched momentarily as she struggled out of her own clothes, stopping her after she had removed only her shoes.

“Let me,” he began. “This will be my great pleasure.”

He undressed her slowly, starting with the T-shirt he removed inch by inch up her torso. When he got his first glimpse of her navel, he stopped, taking the time to circle and lave it with his tongue.

Then he moved upward to the line of her ribcage, running kisses along the vertical edge before moving to the great prize of her small, neat breasts. With the shirt rolled above her cleavage and her bra opened, he spent time tracing, kissing, and biting all around the right nipple and then the left. By the time he unsnapped the front closure of her bra, her nipples were hard, pebbled gooseflesh that looked like ripe little berries. When he finally took her deeply into his mouth, she tensed. She was so responsive to him it was a heady sensation.

While he sucked one nipple, he moved his fingers over her other breast, keeping that nipple a tight hard bud as well.

With his body shaking like a leaf in a tornado, he quickly removed the remainder of her clothes. She was slim, almost boyish. Strange how the sight could make him so randy. The inviting blonde curls at the mound of her desire looked soft and sweet. Although his body demanded he stop the preliminaries and get down to business—immediately—he couldn’t resist the temptation of one taste. He scooted low on the bed and buried his face into her.