The Heart Heist (9 page)

Just look at the facts. On New Year's Mr. Holiday had blown up a hydroelectric plant in Toronto. President's Day he'd bombed a canal somewhere near Detroit. Memorial Day that dam on the Columbia River.

Number one, the guy always chose some kind of man-made waterway and it was always something that had been, at least at one time, controversial.

Number two, he was moving south and west.

Maybe for the Fourth of July he'd take a shot at Hetch Hetchy, the dam up north near San Francisco. If so, he'd make a lot of environmentalists happy. As a matter of fact, everywhere Mr. Holiday struck, a small percentage of the population was secretly pleased. And so far he'd managed not to kill anyone -- although a guard had been injured in the Columbia Dam blast. Yes, to a certain segment of society, the Holiday Bomber was something of a folk hero.

But to Matt's mind the guy had to be caught. He was destructive and dangerous. One day he was going to wind up causing a true disaster.

It was hard to understand why the official agencies hadn't been able to catch him yet -- particularly since Matt had a good idea that the bomber was giving them advance warning of his plans.

After tomorrow, when he'd found out where the bomb had gone off, Matt would make more notes in the journal he'd been keeping. Okay, so he was no FBI agent, but they weren't doing so hot. Why shouldn't Matt take a stab at it?

~~~

Gary had been lucky to get a room at the inn with a private bath. At least Kerrin had been keen to point that out to him half an hour ago down at the front desk. Gary stood in that private bath now, wringing a washcloth out under some cold water. With the damp cloth, he went back into the bedroom and sank onto the worn quilt bedspread. Kerrin had felt obliged to point out the room's quaint, homespun qualities to him, standing on the edge of his threshold. Gary didn't know if she'd seen him up to his room with some notion of acting like his hostess in town, or because she'd wanted to make sure he didn't skip out altogether.

Now Gary heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh and placed the cool folded washcloth on his forehead. He closed his eyes against the splitting headache the afternoon's activities had given him. What kind of a damn fool had he turned into, agreeing to this wild scheme? But something happened to him whenever that woman looked up at him with her wide, amber-jade eyes.

Something stupid.

"Can't you be the summer school teacher, Gary?" she'd asked him with that sugar-soft voice of hers.

Gary groaned and pressed the washcloth harder against his aching head. Why hadn't he just told her the truth? Pride, that's why. Hell. As if he deserved a drop of that substance.

Now he was well and truly stuck. Once they'd come back from their little interview along the creek bed, Kerrin had strolled from one end of the picnic ground to the other with him. She'd introduced him to one and all as the new teacher for the summer session. Gary was a thief by nature, a creature who hunted by night and alone, never glimpsed by his victims. A con artist he was not. As one pair of bright and curious eyes after another had taken his measure, as one eager hand after another had pumped his with delight, as professions of pleasure and enthusiasm had greeted his name, he'd felt like more and more of a dirty fraud.

Never in his life had Gary met so many people universally pleased to make his acquaintance. Strike that. Never in his life had Gary met even one single person that happy to meet him.

All right, then. So instead of two months he had four days. He had four miserable days in which to find a way into that DWP facility. Because come Monday, Gary's ticket would be up. No way in hell he could handle a classroom.

A low booming sound rushed through the summer air. It rattled the double-paned windows and jerked Gary off the sagging mattress with his heart racing and adrenaline pumping.

Boom! There went another one, and a shower of red and yellow stars reflected off the dimpled old glass of the window.

Fireworks. Just fireworks. Jesus Christ. Gary ran a shaking hand through his hair and bent to pick the washcloth off the hardwood floor. Everybody had fireworks on the Fourth of July. Five years locked away from the real world and he'd forgotten something this basic.

Gary walked over to the window and, with a healthy shove, managed to open the double sash.

The window looked out onto the main street, which was filled with people. Some, with small children in tow, were leaving for home, others were hurrying down to the river for a better view of the fireworks display. By poking his head out and leaning his hip on the sill Gary could get a pretty good view of the show right from his room.

A globe of sapphire blue exploded into the night air. The location seemed to be a few miles away, on a foothill north of town. In fact, now Gary remembered someone mentioning that the fire department was setting up at a place called the "array," whatever that was.

Green burst into a cloud immediately followed by a shot of gold. It was rather pretty, but every thudding boom went right to his stomach. Explosions of any sort were not going to do much for his digestion tonight.

Four days -- five nights. It wasn't very long.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was about midnight when the phone rang. From the wall by the back kitchen door, it chirped just as cheerfully in the middle of the night as it did during the middle of the day. Kerrin, who hadn't been able to sleep anyway, jumped out of bed. Clad in a short nightdress, she raced down the hall to snatch the receiver off the hook. Some instinct told her she wanted to be the one to pick it up.

"Hello?" she gasped, out of breath from her swift sprint.

"That DWP plant's a
bitch
," a deep voice complained without a word of preamble. "They've got an electrified fence, with its own separate generator, infrared motion detectors -- God knows where's the power source for
that
." Gary paused and then continued without any apparent logical connection. "I'm going to need those books you were telling me about, the ones for the class."

"Um." Kerrin pressed a hand to her forehead. "Right now?"

"Yesterday. A week ago. Three years ago would have been better, but yes, right now."

Kerrin tried to think. Though she hadn't been asleep, she might have been in a state of heavy dreaminess, mostly concerning her white knight on his charger. His aristocratic, elegant features were a little blurred this evening, however, as though something had dropped into her brain to muddy the picture.

"The books aren't here, they're in my room at school."

"Fine. Just tell me where to find them and I'll get 'em myself. The school couldn't be more than a few blocks from my hotel."

"The school's on the corner of Elm and Cedar," Kerrin informed him. "My room is number four, but Gary, you can't just walk in. It's locked." Test papers and grades. She had to lock it up.

There was an expressive silence on the other end of the line. "That's okay," Gary spoke at last. "Just tell me what shelves to look on and what titles. Oh, and also those lesson plans you were telling me about."

A deep, instinctive fear flowered in Kerrin's breast. There was nothing valuable in her room at the school. That wasn't the point. The point was that it would be very wrong to allow Gary to break into it. No. To
make
him break into it. Every feminine fiber of her being told her so.

"No," she said.

"What?"

"No, you aren't going to pick the lock on my office door."

Gary sounded amused. "Who said anything about picking the lock? I'll bet a simple plastic card ought to do the trick." A low snicker followed this statement. "Don't know what's the point to most of the locks I've seen so far in this town."

Kerrin straightened in her bare feet on the slate kitchen floor. "No, I don't want you breaking into my room. You just wait there. I -- I'll let you in myself."

"Don't be ridiculous. It's the middle of the night -- "

"Wait!" Kerrin hissed as loudly as she dared, and then quietly cut the connection.

Fifteen minutes later, she pulled her Toyota in front of the little school. It was five miles from her parents' house into the town proper. For the first time in her life, Kerrin had pushed the speed limit -- had surpassed it, in fact, by at least twenty miles an hour. She simply had to get to her office before Gary got impatient and let himself in. That would be, she somehow knew, a personal disaster.

The hurried drive and her worry made her heart pound so hard she could hardly hear anything else as she clipped in her cowboy boots down the arcade that ran along the six upper-grade classrooms. A fluorescent security light gleamed off the wall of steel lockers, but left the area around the brick planters deep in shadow.

She hugged the arms of her cotton shirt, straining to see into the darkness. She'd been so focused on getting here fast, she hadn't considered until now that she was running out in the middle of the night to meet a man.

Was he there? Her throat felt too dry to call his name.

She stopped a few feet from her office door as an eerie sensation tingled up her back.

One of the shadows moved, rising like a specter from its position on a brick planter. The dark form came toward her.

"This was stupid."

His very male voice brushed against her already overwrought nerve endings.

"The last thing I wanted was you hauling around in that pitiful car of yours in the middle of the night."

From somewhere Kerrin found her voice. "For the last time, Gary, my car is totally reliable." She winced, remembering those hoses.

He released a deep, long-suffering sigh. "Anyway, you're here now. You may as well open the door."

"Fine." Kerrin slipped past him to do just that. A shiver of awareness crept along her arm where it brushed against his chest. Breathing past the sensation, she opened the door, propped it to with the kicker, and then switched on the lights. Gary followed her into the classroom combination office, blinking in the sudden brightness.

Yes, Kerrin thought, glancing back at him, he was definitely a creature of darkness, especially now, dressed as he was. He had on a black pair of jeans, black tee shirt and black tennis shoes. Wonder where he found the latter item. He didn't have a black ski cap on his head, for which Kerrin was grateful, and his burnished brown-gold hair gleamed under the lights.

"Jeez, do you think you could have made our presence here any more obvious?" he asked in a nasty tone as he looked about the cluttered classroom. "Not that it matters. The whole town's out like a light, including Freedom's finest, snoozing like a baby in his squad car down on Bay Street."

Kerrin sighed. "That would be Ray Connors. He has a problem sleeping days." She almost added that Ray Connors' ability to stay awake nights hadn't been particularly necessary before Gary Sullivan hit town. Freedom didn't have a crime problem. But something made her hold the insult back.

"It sounds like you've got the lay of the town already," she remarked instead, moving to a position of security behind her desk.

Gary shrugged. "It didn't take long. There couldn't be more than a dozen streets in the whole place." Strolling easily, he approached Kerrin's desk. His mere proximity destroyed it as a shield of security. To make matters worse, he parked one hip on the thing, folded his hands on his knee, and looked down at her, his dark-beer-colored eyes keen. "What are you doing here, Kerrin?"

"Why, I -- I'm here to get you the books you wanted." He was the criminal. She was the solid citizen. Why did he make her so nervous?

"I told you, I could have gotten them myself." His gaze intensified, as though she held an answer to some deeper question if he could only ferret it out.

Her blood pounded against her skull. A brain aneurysm. She was going to get one of those for sure. In the meantime, she tried to explain. "You couldn't have gotten them, not without compromising yourself."

His lids came down, hooding his eyes. "If I'd had your permission, then breaking into your office wouldn't have been wrong." He paused, reasoning. "No different from breaking into the DWP, really."

Kerrin twirled her chair and scooted it toward the filing cabinet to her right. "There's a difference," she claimed, pulling open the file drawer that held her lesson plans.

He waited while she drew out the file for the Health Education class, turned her chair, and held it out to him. Slowly, one might say reluctantly, he took the file. "Oh yeah?" he queried. "What's the difference?"

Kerrin folded both her hands on the edge of her desk and gave him a steady look. "It's called respect."

That got his attention. His eyes flicked from the file back toward her. But they were, as usual, solely investigative, revealing nothing.

Kerrin stood and moved toward the shelves, away from him. Still nervous, she spoke toward her books. "Whatever else you are, you're one of my teachers now, and I treat all of my teachers with respect."

He made no reply to this as she proceeded down the row of shelves. She picked out the textbook for the class and was wondering what other general texts on teaching to give him when he slid off his position on her desk. Kerrin braced herself as he moved toward her but he didn't come close enough to touch her.

"How about that one?" Gary asked, his voice deep and gravelly. He pointed to one of the thicker volumes on the shelf.

"
Basic Teaching Methods
? That's fairly comprehensive. You might be able to get away with one of these seminar workbooks." She pulled out a slim, paperback book and handed it to him.

He took it, and also pulled out the thick
Basic Teaching Methods
. Then he reached for one of Kerrin's perennial favorites,
Teaching for Teens
. The man had about a thousand pages of reading material in his hands -- more than he could possibly absorb in a few days, but Kerrin saw him scanning the shelves for more. To her relief, he gave up with a shrug. "I guess this ought to hold me."

Kerrin certainly hoped so. She followed as he ambled slowly to the door, still squinting back at her shelves. Lord, he looked like any bookworm, unable to tear his eyes away. "You can come back tomorrow morning," Kerrin assured him.