Running Hot (6 page)

“No, sir.”

“I love it when my agents call me sir. Almost forgot, there is one more thing that might help you identify Malone on sight.”

“Yes?”

“He’ll be on a cane.”

That stopped her cold. “You’ve assigned me a bodyguard who has to use a cane to get around?”

“He had a little accident a while back. Unfortunately, the doctors told him that the leg would never really be right. He’ll be on that cane for the rest of his life.”

“I see. Does Mr. Malone perhaps carry a gun?”

“Not since he left his job in the police department. He told me once that he’s not comfortable with guns. Between you and me, he was a lousy shot, anyway.”

Great. She was getting a bodyguard who couldn’t shoot straight and who relied on a cane.

“I have the impression that this mission isn’t exactly a high priority with J&J,” she said.

“No, it’s not.” Fallon exhaled heavily. “Don’t get me wrong. If Eubanks killed that young woman, I want him off the street. But essentially, this is a routine case. J&J handles dozens like it every year. Clients come to me and I hand them off to one or more of the agents on my list. It’s their job to bring in evidence that will stand up in court.”

“But you’ve got higher priorities?”

“Yes, Grace, I do.” Fallon sounded grim and oddly weary.

She wanted to ask what those other priorities were but she knew Fallon well enough to realize she probably wouldn’t get an answer if she asked the question. He could be maddeningly secretive.

“I understand, sir,” she said instead. “Are you sure that Mr. Malone is the right man for this mission, though? It sounds like he should be thinking about retirement.”

“Thing is, he’s right there on Oahu. Convenient. And he needs the money.”

“On top of everything else he’s broke?”

“Two divorces in four years will do that to a man. He’s been getting by tending bar in a little place called the Dark Rainbow.”

“I see. Well, I suppose there’s something to be said for the convenience factor.”

“Damn straight,” Fallon agreed. “Look, I gotta go. Got the new Master of the Society on the other line. Have fun on Maui.”

There was an odd chortling sound in Grace’s ear. It was immediately followed by a click as Fallon ended the call.

She closed the phone and contemplated it thoughtfully for a couple of seconds. Had she just heard the sound of Fallon Jones’s laughter?

Impossible. Everyone knew that Fallon Jones had no sense of humor.

She put the phone into her purse and went back to packing. The last thing she tucked into her carry-on was her computer. You never knew when you might have to do a little research while on a mission. She closed the lid and zipped the small suitcase closed.

After a year of hiding out and licking her wounds, she was ready to live again. The opportunity for an exciting adventure had been handed to her on a silver platter and, somewhat to her own amazement, she had seized it. Time to start living in the now.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER she emerged from the post office and walked quickly toward her car. An SUV painted camouflage green and brown wheeled into the parking lot. The door popped open. A spry-looking senior citizen climbed out. Her bubble of steel-gray hair was partially covered by a billed cap. She wore military-style fatigues and heavy black boots. Her eyes were shielded by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. The utility belt around her waist was studded with various and assorted implements including binoculars, a flashlight and a high-tech camera.

The look was Arizona Snow’s day uniform. At night when she went out on her endless reconnaissance patrols of Eclipse Bay, she switched to black trousers and pants and added a set of night-vision goggles to her ensemble.

“ ’Mornin’, Grace,” Arizona called. “Heard you’re fixin’ to go on a little vacation.”

Grace smiled. Arizona Snow was Eclipse Bay’s resident eccentric. She must have been in her early eighties but aside from some trouble with arthritis she showed no signs of slowing down. Her commitment to protecting the town from some mysterious, unnamed conspiracy that, as far as anyone knew existed only in her mind, never wavered.

“News travels fast,” Grace said, coming to a halt a short distance from Arizona.

“Not everything you hear around here is accurate,” Arizona muttered ominously. She took a notebook and pen out of one of the half-dozen pockets that festooned her fatigues. Flipping the notebook open, she clicked her pen. “Goin’ to Hawaii, eh?”

“That’s right.”

Arizona made a note. “Return date?”

“Well, I’m not sure yet. I probably won’t be gone long, though. A couple of days, maybe three at the most. Why?”

Arizona looked up, shaking her head at the naive question. “I need to know when you’ll be back so I can alert the chief in case you don’t return on time.”

Grace was touched. Arizona had taken a keen interest in her right from the start and had been happy to rent the cottage to her. As a rule, Arizona viewed every outsider in town with acute suspicion. But with Grace she had assumed an air of comradely understanding. It was as if she had concluded that the two of them had unspoken secrets in common.

That assumption was probably not too far from the truth, Grace thought. One thing she had discovered in the past few months was that, although Arizona had lived in Eclipse Bay for several years, no one seemed to recall exactly when she had moved into town and no one seemed to know where she had come from.

There were rumors about her, the most dramatic being that she had once worked for a mysterious government intelligence agency. The theory was that she had either resigned or been forced to retire when she became permanently lost in her own strange world.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to leave my return date open,” Grace said gently.

“Understood.” Arizona snapped the notebook closed and looked around, making certain there was no one in the vicinity who might be eavesdropping.

Satisfied that they had privacy, she edged a little closer, respectful, as always, of the distance that Grace preferred to keep between herself and others. Arizona was one of the few people Grace had met who seemed to sense intuitively that she did not like to be touched. The leather gloves offered a degree of protection but they were by no means foolproof. Touching the wrong individual, however fleetingly, could be an ordeal.

“So, the agency is finally sending you out on a field assignment,” Arizona said in low tones. “You be careful now, honey. From what I can tell, you’re an analyst, not a trained operative. I’ll bet your experience has all been at a desk with a computer. I hope they’re supplying some muscle to keep an eye on you.”

The irony of the situation made Grace smile. Arizona filtered everything through her skewed view of the world. Because of that, she was the only person in Eclipse Bay who had come close to guessing the truth. If Arizona ever found out that the Arcane Society existed and that it was a secretive, centuries-old organization devoted to research and study of the paranormal, she would have no problem weaving it into her own worldview.

“Don’t worry about me,” Grace said. “I’ll have a partner.”

“Someone with field experience.” Arizona nodded, satisfied. “Excellent. You tell him I said to take good care of you.”

“Okay.” Like heck she would tell Luther Malone that he was supposed to take care of her. She didn’t need any help in that department. She had been taking care of herself since the day her mother died.

“I’ll keep an eye on your cottage while you’re gone,” Arizona added. “Make sure the sons a bitches don’t try to get into your files.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Stay alert, stay alive,” Arizona said. She snapped off a quick salute and stalked off across the parking lot, heading for the glass doors of the post office.

Grace got into her car. She thought about her landlady as she drove out of the parking lot and turned toward the highway that would eventually take her to Portland.

Arizona was a powerful sensitive, although she was probably unaware of it. Her talent was similar to Fallon’s. She could see patterns in chaos. But somewhere along the line she had lost control of the paranormal side of her nature. Perhaps if she had been raised as a member of the Arcane Society community, things would have been different for her. Perhaps she could have been taught how to control her talent. Or maybe not.

There was no question but that it was far too late to intervene now. Arizona had gone too deep into her strange, private world. Now her talent controlled her.

Grace wondered if Fallon Jones ever worried that he, too, might someday get trapped forever in his own world of plots and counterplots, unable to find his way back to reality. He was trying to do too much, she thought. On several occasions during the past few months she had heard the exhaustion in his voice. Running the West Coast office of J&J was obviously too big a job for one person. He needed an assistant.

It started to rain. Fat drops spattered on the windshield. She turned on the wipers and wondered if it was raining in Hawaii. When she got bored thinking about the weather in the islands she wondered if she was pushing her luck by taking this assignment from J&J. The
what-ifs
loomed in her imagination. What if she couldn’t handle the mission? What if Luther Malone uncovered her secrets?

Don’t think like that,
she mentally scolded herself. How much trouble could a guy on a cane possibly be?
You’ve been hiding in Eclipse Bay long enough.

The courier
from the Arcane Society—a young man who seemed thrilled to be performing a role, however small, for the legendary firm of J&J—delivered the packet to Grace at the airport hotel. He handed it to her in the lobby, so close she could feel the pulse and power of his talent. A para-hunter, she thought. She didn’t have to jack up her own senses to know that he was strong.

“What’s your name?” she asked, automatically stepping back to put some distance between them.

“Sean Jones, ma’am,” he said.

Of course, she thought. The Jones family tree was filled with hunter talents of various kinds.

She thanked him and hurried back to the elevator, ripping open the sealed packet as soon as she reached the privacy of her room. The contents tumbled onto the table—Luther Malone’s phony driver’s license on top. She picked it up and studied the picture, consumed by a curiosity she could not explain.

Like most license photos, the shot was not intended to be flattering. It was possible that it was the lighting that made Malone look so hard but her intuition told her that the brutal planes and angles of his face would look just as austere in person. His dark hair was cut short. The note said his eyes were brown but in the picture they looked unreadable, the eyes of a lone wolf.

The picture should have been off-putting. Malone appeared to be stone cold. But for some reason she could not stop staring at the image.

Reluctantly she put the license down and reached for her plane ticket and the resort reservation.

Approximately sixty seconds later—the length of time it took her to get her shaking fingers under control—she dialed the now-familiar number in Scargill Cove.

“You didn’t tell me that Malone and I would be registering as Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs,” she said, her voice rising in spite of her determination to remain cool and professional. “There’s only one room.”

“Take it easy,” Fallon said, uncharacteristically soothing. “I made sure you got a suite. Take the bedroom. It has its own bath. Tell Malone he can have the pull-out bed in the living room.”

“I don’t know if I can do this, sir. You should have warned me.”

“I knew you’d panic if I told you that you and Malone would be checking in as husband and wife.” Fallon sounded aggrieved, the voice of a put-upon employer forced to work with a difficult, temperamental employee.

“You were right.”

“There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Malone is a pro. He’s there as your bodyguard and this is the only arrangement that will allow him to do his job.”

She swallowed hard. Fallon was right. Malone was a professional. She was the amateur. If she wanted to become a real agent for J&J, she had to start acting like one.

“Mr. Malone agreed to this plan?” she asked warily.

“He’ll be fine with it.”

“Wait a second, are you saying he doesn’t yet know that he and I are supposed to pose as a married couple on this assignment?”

“Thought I’d let you break it to him,” Fallon said.

“Oh, gee, thanks.”

For the first time in her association with Fallon Jones, she ended the call before he could cut the connection.

For a long time she stood there, looking at Malone’s phony driver’s license and the hotel registration.

Got to learn to live in the now.

FIVE

The concourse was crowded with tourists and business travelers from around the world. The planes landing and taking off on the runway bore the logos of nations from every part of the globe, including a few from countries that would have been unfamiliar to most people living outside the South Pacific. The warm, silken breeze carried the twin scents of jet fuel and the light mist that was sweeping down from the mountains.

Luther lounged against the wall, his hand wrapped around the handle of the cane, and watched the dark-haired woman walking toward him. She had come into view at the far end of the walkway a couple of minutes ago. For some reason, he found his attention shifting back to her again and again.

What the hell, he had a few minutes to kill. According to the monitors, Grace Renquist’s plane had landed on time a short while ago at the main terminal but it would take her a while to find her way to the interisland terminal. She was an elderly lady so she would probably wait for the Wiki-Wiki bus that connected the terminals rather than make the long hike along the concourse.

The dark-haired woman disappeared behind a large tour group of senior citizens heavily draped in leis. Anticipation zinged through him while he waited for her to reappear. When she popped back into view she was closer, still coming his way. He could see her more distinctly now. She was pulling a carry-on suitcase with one hand. Her stride was lithe and purposeful and somehow sexy. A frisson of excitement hummed through his senses,
all
his senses. That hadn’t happened in longer than he cared to think about.