Unzipped (23 page)

“You thought what?” he asked and shook me a little. “You’d break into the Bomb’s house for a little evening entertainment?”

“This is not—” I began, but at that moment I saw a flicker of light behind him. I tried to speak, to tell him, but my life had become strangely surreal.

“Is it the diary?” he asked. “Is that what you’re looking for? What’s in the damn thing, McMullen?”

The light! It had shone in a window. I was sure of it. But it was gone. No. There. No. Gone.

I tried to pull out of his grip, straining to see through the darkness.

“What the devil did you do to make—”

“There’s a light!” I rasped.

“Will you shut up about the fucking—”

I yanked out of his grasp. “A light!” I hissed, my brain finally kicking in. “I didn’t break the window. I assume you didn’t.” I waved somewhat frenetically. “Someone did.”

He glanced at the house, then hissed low and shoved me into the bushes. “Stay there. Do you hear me? Don’t move. Don’t speak, and for God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid.”

I was trying to conjure up a sufficiently insulted rejoinder when he slipped away. In a heartbeat he was invisible. I couldn’t even hear him, at least not over the thumping of my own heart. But then I thought I heard a sound, something from inside the house. Someone was coming. Maybe they were searching for the very thing I wanted. Maybe they had it already.

Holding my breath, I sidled closer, skirting along the bushes with my knees rattling and my hand curled around my pepper spray. I missed my flashlight something fierce. It didn’t put out much light, but it was nice to have something in my left hand besides sweat. When I was just about even with the window I stopped. Crouching there like a cowed kitten, I waited, and sure enough, someone appeared in the window—just a block of blackness beneath the jagged shards of broken glass. My throat ached with tension. Where was Rivera?

Then suddenly a beam of light cut a swath through the darkness and across the window. “LAPD! Stay where you are.”

For one fragmented second I caught a glimpse of white skin and dark clothing, and then the figure leapt. I saw Rivera go down under the attack. The flashlight spun into the darkness. Someone grunted. Bone thumped against flesh. There was a rasped curse, and then, like a fleeing rabbit, the intruder lurched to his feet and bolted away.

Now, as I recall it, the encounter seemed as if it took place in slow motion. But in reality, everything happened in a heartbeat, in a breath of time. One moment there was someone perched in the window, and the next there were foot beats racing past me into the darkness.

Rivera coughed. I glanced frantically at him, then jerked my attention in the direction of the escapee. For one wild, inexplicable second I actually thought of racing after him. As I tell my clients, even the most lucid of us has bouts of insanity, but the lunacy quickly passed. Just as quickly, the black shape was gone, the racing footfalls disintegrating into silence.

Rivera cursed, making me wonder if I might be safer going after the window guy, but he coughed again and sat up and it didn’t seem like there was much I could do but approach him.

“Are you okay?”

He turned toward me. He hadn’t been Mr. Congeniality before. I doubted if he was going to qualify for the title at this late date. “Wanna tell me who that was?”

I was actually, physically, taken aback. “You think I know?”

He let loose a fluid string of obscenities that made me wonder where one quit and the next began. Impressive.

“You’re not making this easy on yourself. I’ll give you that,” he said, and seizing the escaped flashlight, he struggled to his feet. The beam of light wobbled. I realized it wasn’t my own. Apparently the LAPD really did spring for flashlights.

“Listen,” I said. My adrenaline rush had started to subside, leaving fatigue and irritation in its wake. “You think I’m dumb enough to tell you someone’s inside if I’m his damned accomplice?”

He looked at me as if thinking it over, but in a moment I realized he wasn’t thinking at all; he was sliding down the brick exterior toward the ground. I caught him just before he hit the rhododendrons. He wasn’t the featherweight Solberg was, and he wasn’t making my efforts any easier. He hit the ground. I did the same a second later. In fact, I may have landed on top of him because I heard a little
ummph
of pain. Not that I’m heavy.

Silence echoed around us. Fear zapped in. Maybe he was dead!

I put my hand on his chest and squinted into his face.

“Jesus!” he said. I realized somewhat belatedly that his eyes were open and his face intimately close to mine. Was he talking to God or just being blasphemous again? “Why the hell don’t you just cut my throat and get it over with?” Just as I suspected—he was too ornery to be dead.

“You’re blaming this on me?” I was immediately irritated, which is unlike me. Must have been caused by an influx of estrogen. “I didn’t ask you to—Oh, crap!” Even in the dark, I could see a dark streak creeping down his face. “You’re bleeding.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he said and wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Did you see which way he went?”

I watched the blood ooze onto his brow again “Who?”

He gave me a look I could have deciphered in a coal mine. “Our friend in the window. Which way did he go?”

“Oh. That way.” I motioned with my head.

He struggled, but seemed to have difficulty getting his feet under him.

“What are you doing?” I asked and leaned automatically against his chest.

“Get the hell off of me,” he growled, but I had dealt with illogical men since the day I was born. Granted, my brothers were generally drunk when they decided to do something obviously suicidal, but drunk and concussed seem to have the same effect on the male thinking apparatus. Actually, a lot of situations seem to have the same effect on the male thinking apparatus.

I leaned over him, applying weight to his chest. He struggled for a moment longer, then settled back into the rhododendrons. But I didn’t trust his capitulation and stayed where I was.

He dropped his head back against the bricks and coughed weakly. I eased up a little, but not too much, in case it was a trick.

“How the hell much do you weigh, McMullen?” he asked.

“Not . . .” I began, then, “It’s none of your damned business what I weigh.”

I thought I saw a flash of teeth in the darkness. Was it a smile? Was he delirious? I applied more of my nearly insignificant weight, just in case he’d lost his mind and was going to make a dash for it. He didn’t.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.

“Still proceeding on the asinine idea that I broke into the house?” I asked and tried not to look at the blood on his forehead or consider the idea that that was exactly what I had intended to do.

“Why else would you be here?”

“I was just curious . . . Bomstad turned my life upside down. You can’t blame me for trying to set things in order.” I shuffled my weight, settling a little more firmly against him. Rhododendrons may look just dandy in a hedgerow, but they’ll never sell as daybeds. A branch was goosing me with constant regularity. Randy little pervert.

“Is that why you keep coming back here?” he asked. “To set things in order?”

I zapped my gaze to his. “You’ve been following me?”

He snorted, but he neither agreed or disagreed. “What do you want, McMullen?” he asked. Beneath my hand, his chest felt as hard as the long arm of the law. And for a moment I considered telling him the truth. I’d really like to see him naked, not necessarily in the rhododendrons, but . . .

“Tell me your part in this,” he said. “I’d like to believe you’re innocent, but—”

“I am innocent,” I breathed, leaning closer.

“You’re making it hard,” he said.

“What?” I refused to glance down the length of his body, but my own tingled in anticipatory interaction.

“To believe,” he said. “You’re making it hard to believe.”

I felt my face flush, but if he could see it in the darkness, he said nothing. Instead, he grasped my wrists and, while I was distracted, shimmied up the wall behind him. In a moment we were standing against the bricks, albeit a bit unsteadily. He pulled me close, hip to hip, I assumed for support. His head wobbled a little. I wrapped an arm around his back. It seemed like the right thing to do.

“Did he go over the fence or back to the street?”

“What?” I staggered a little, trying to keep him upright.

“The intruder,” he said. “Which direction?”

“It’s dark. I couldn’t—”

“What did you hear? Think. Scrambling through bushes? Scraping over a fence?”

“I . . .” I shook my head. “You coughed,” I said. “I thought you were dying.”

He grunted. “You must have noticed something. You should have been able to see a silhouette from where I left you.”

I said nothing.

“You did stay there, didn’t you?”

“Of course.” I shifted my eyes away. “But I couldn’t see past the shrubs. Then it was just running feet.”

“Okay,” he said and wobbled as if to move away from the wall. I tightened my grip on his shirt.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“My job,” he said and stepped forward.

I pressed into him. “Is it your job to drop dead in an ex-tight end’s rhododendrons?”

He swayed.

“Because if it is,” I said, forcing him back up against the wall and supporting him with my infinitesimal weight, “I’d rather you didn’t do so with my flashlight in your pocket.” I could feel it pressing against my hip, though it seemed to move slightly even as I spoke. I raised my eyes to his and blinked with all the faux innocence a thirty-something ex-cocktail waitress could muster. “That
is
my flashlight, isn’t it?”

20

The theory of relativity don’t amount to a hill of beans when there’s a bonfire in your shorts.

—J.D. Solberg,
upon first seeing Chrissy McMullen in her Warthog uniform

H
IS TEETH GLIMMERED AGAIN, and he dropped his head back against the house. “Jesus,” he said, “you are a one-woman catastrophe.”

The “flashlight” moved again. Did that mean he liked one-woman catastrophes?

“I didn’t do anything,” I reminded him, but he shifted slightly so that my breast was pressed a little more firmly against his chest.

“Come on,” he said, gripping my waist as he stepped forward. “I’ll get you to your car.”

I complied, guiding him through the shrubbery and around the corner of the house, but the meaning of his words dawned on me in a moment. “Where are you going?”

“Hard to say, since you didn’t have the foresight to watch which way the suspect went.”

I snorted. Ladylike as always. Was he pressed a little tighter than necessary against my left breast? “You need your head examined.”

“Looking to drum up business?” he asked and stumbled a little.

I tightened my grip on his waist. Tight as a frickin’ yardarm. “I meant medical attention. But now that you mention it, I could suggest a good therapist.”

“You don’t consider yourself qualified?”

“I don’t like to waste my time on lost causes.”

We’d reached the fence. I looked at it, wondering how the hell I was going to get him over. Maybe I could just kick him in the shins and roll him underneath. He stumbled to a halt and gazed up at it.

“Shit,” he said. Eloquence was not his strong suit. Or diplomacy. But muscle tone . . .

“Yeah,” I said, and winced. “You going to need help?”

I thought I saw one eyebrow rise. He shifted his weight slightly so that I found my back against the wrought-iron railing. It felt cool even through the cotton sweater. I was sweating like a Percheron, and suddenly Rivera had me pinned against the metal, one hand on the bar on each side of me. His body felt hard and suspiciously strong against mine. Maybe he’d been supporting
me
. “You offering to give me a lift, McMullen?”

Sometime during our unsteady journey across Bomstad’s manicured lawn, he had slipped his flashlight into its holster at his side. Mine was still in his back pocket.

Which only left one option as to the identity of the hot weight that pressed against my belly. “Seems I already did that, Rivera,” I said.

He leaned closer. “Well, that’s a first,” he murmured. His voice was deep and low and did funny things to my already jittering nerve endings.

My heart was beating like a racehorse’s. “Been a while for you, has it?” I asked, trying to remember the exact phrase he’d used on me.

He grinned, actually grinned, full-blown. I felt a little light-headed. “That’s the first time you got my name right,” he explained. “You nervous, McMullen?”

“Nervous? I’m with an officer of the law. Why would I be nervous?”

“I don’t know. You seem to be breathing kind of hard.”

“I think I overdressed for the occasion.”

“Want to remedy that?”

Hell, yeah,
my hormones screamed. But by the time I was on my eighteenth loser boyfriend I’d learned to override any influx of screaming hormones. “I think I’ll wait,” I said.

He grunted something unintelligible, then, “Can you get your ass over the fence or do you need assistance?”

“Please!” I scoffed, trying to inject my tone with injured self-confidence. But mostly I was still arguing with my hormones, and my knees felt a little unsteady. Also, I really didn’t want him to see my fence-climbing techniques. If I remembered correctly, they were less than noteworthy.

“You first,” he said and eased away. I tried to adjust to the separation of our bodies and hardly staggered at all as I turned around to grip the bars.

Adrenaline was more powerful than I had expected, because I was halfway up the fence before I knew it. Of course, the fact that he splayed his fingers across my left butt cheek didn’t hurt any. For a moment I considered shimmying down on top of him, but shame made me scramble faster, over the top and down the other side.

Even considering my prowess and his weakened state, his technique was somewhat superior. But once on the opposite side of the fence, his face looked pale in the darkness.