скачать книгу бесплатно
Although the owner—they’d never gotten around to exchanging names—had left the bottle on her table, she wouldn’t be drinking any more once her glass was empty. She knew her limits, all of them, and stayed scrupulously within them. It had been a reeducation of sorts, every bit of knowledge that she’d learned about herself a prize that could be pieced together with others to get a sense of the whole.
Some had appeared at odd times, disconcerting bits that had formed an undeniably disturbing picture of whom she’d been. She’d had very little trouble devising a plan for getting out of Santa Cristo. She thought it might prove more difficult post 9/11, with all the heightened security. But at the time, she’d never missed a beat, whether it was fighting a masked assailant to the death, breaking into a safe in a resort room or assuming a new identity.
Though her personal recollections had never reappeared, there were plenty of things that she did remember, and those memories were troublesome. How many amnesia victims could claim to recall exactly how to beat a polygraph? She’d been confident in her ability to do so, and had succeeded in the course of her recruitment to the police academy.
It was second nature for her to enter a new place and make immediate note of the exits, while sizing up the occupants with a speed that spoke of training or practice. From just a few glances she knew the bartender here would be as adept with a weapon as he was at mixing drinks; that the couple in the far corner were probably engaged in an extramarital affair; the guy to her right would fold in the face of trouble, but the one sitting at the bar could handle himself in a fight; and that the man on her left was screwing up the courage to approach her.
She no longer questioned where these skills stemmed from. They were merely tools, to be used in her search for answers of a far more serious nature. Although there was very little she could be positive of, she was fairly sure that whatever her identity before that fateful night in Santa Cristo, she’d almost certainly been operating outside the law.
It had been a hard realization to swallow, and she’d done her share of dodging the truth. It would have been easier, far easier, had she been able to manufacture another explanation. There was any number of possible scenarios for her ending up shot and left for dead off the shore of the island. But coupled with her familiarity with weapons, Dim-Mak combat and assassination techniques, there were only a few explanations that made sense.
She’d either been a criminal, a mercenary or some sort of operative, military or government sanctioned. While she’d hoped for the latter, she’d long ago resigned herself to discovering the worst.
Because the pang that accompanied that thought was unwelcome, she pushed it aside. Happy, happy birthday to her. Her lips twisted into an expression that should have dissuaded the interest of the man at the next table, before she swallowed some more Scotch, welcoming the fiery path it traced down to her stomach.
Her steak arrived at approximately the same time as the guy beside her, and was much more welcome.
“Looks like you’re dining alone.” His smile was toothpaste ad bright as he rested his folded arms on top of the chair next to her. “Me, too. Not much fun, is it?”
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked.
Ignoring the stranger for the moment, Ria smiled at the woman, shook her head. “No, thank you. This looks great.” The waitress sent a quick glance at the man and moved away.
“It should, for these prices. But they do a decent fillet here. Not as good as Falstead’s. Have you been there?”
“No. I’m looking forward to enjoying this one, though.” As a dismissal, it was more polite than she was feeling. Spreading the napkin on her lap, she picked up her silverware.
“Be more enjoyable with company, wouldn’t it?” The man aimed another smile her way, pulled out the chair next to her. Sinking into it, he continued, “I’m Tyler Stodgill, by the way. I placed my order right after yours. My food should be coming any minute. No reason for us to eat alone.”
Looking at him, she said succinctly, “But I want to eat alone.”
“Bad for the digestion. Believe me, I know. I’m on the road three or four days a week. I’m a pharmaceutical salesman.” He flashed his teeth again. “I hit forty-fifty medical offices a month.”
Deliberately, she set her knife and fork down, before she was tempted to use them on him. He wasn’t bad looking. He was a little stocky, with short-cropped sandy hair, brown eyes and a rounded jaw. His navy blazer jacket and wheat-colored pants were sharply creased, his white shirt spotless. He could have been a lonely traveling salesperson, looking for a little companionship. She might have believed it if it wasn’t for his eyes. This was no dense oaf without the social skills to sense her lack of welcome. This was a man filled with an overinflated sense of self-importance and—a woman’s worst night-mare—a gross overestimation of his own appeal.
She sighed and reached for some rapidly dwindling patience. “Look, I’ve had a hard week. I just want a drink, a steak and silence. I wouldn’t be good company.”
His expression went ugly. “Looked like your company was fine when Jake was here.”
She blinked. “Who?”
“You know. The owner. The guy you were drinking with.”
Jake. The name suited the man somehow, tough and no-nonsense. “I told him basically the same thing I’m telling you.” She aimed a pointed look at him. “He took it with more grace.”
His face had smoothed. “Whatever it is that’s bothering you, I’m just the guy to make you forget about all your troubles.” With a sense of disbelief, she felt his hand on her thigh below the table, caressing her leg suggestively through her white slacks. “I’m staying at a hotel not too far from here. After dinner, maybe we could—” Whatever he had been about to say ended in a yelp as she bent his two middle fingers far enough to nearly touch the back of his hand.
She kept her expression pleasant, but her tone was lethal. “You need to learn to pay attention. I’m not interested. Do you understand now?”
With his teeth clenched, he grasped, “You’re breaking my damn fingers.”
“Not yet. But I could.” She exerted just enough pressure on the joints to back up her words, and a whimper escaped him. A man at a table nearby gave them a cursory glance. Ria wasn’t concerned. The long table linen would hide her actions.
Stodgill’s face was rapidly losing color. She noted the approach of the waitress. “Your food is coming. I want you to take it and ask for a different table. One where I can’t see you. If you don’t, I am really, really going to hurt you.”
“All right! Let go!”
She did, only because the waitress had halted at his table, clearly uncertain about where to set his food. He immediately shoved back his chair, a vicious expression on his face, muttering an obscenity. Ria picked up her silverware again. “I think a table on the other side of the bar might suit your needs best.”
He rose, the chair clattering behind him. “I want a different table,” he told the server in a loud voice. “I don’t like the view from here.”
The young woman said, “But you asked for a view of the river, sir. This is the best—”
“Dammit, I said I want a new table! Something over there.” He lurched off, leaving the waitress to follow with his tray of food.
While a few diners watched the small scene, Ria reached for her Scotch, drained the glass. The bottle was still there, a silent temptation, one she wouldn’t allow herself to succumb to. She couldn’t afford weaknesses in her life. Weaknesses led to mistakes. And even one slip could lead yet another assassin to her doorstep, like the one who’d found her in Santa Cristo.
And the second who’d caught up with her in L.A.
She cut another piece of steak and brought it to her mouth, savoring the taste. A woman who had faced death as often as she had had learned to enjoy life’s small pleasures. Even now she couldn’t pinpoint how the second killer had managed to track her from San Diego to L.A., although she suspected the money she’d taken off the first one had somehow been traced. She hadn’t been in Los Angeles two weeks before a man had been waiting for her one night in the room she’d rented.
He’d been as able as the first killer, his intent just as deadly. But instead of a knife, his weapon of choice had been a garrote—a thin wire used for strangling victims quickly and silently. The savage fight had lasted no more than a few minutes, but in the end it had been the stranger who had ended up dead on the floor, without ever having spoken a word.
He’d been dressed exactly as the first would-be killer, down to the pouch at his waist. Again, it had held only a vial, a syringe and a wad of ten one-hundred-dollar bills.
And the tattoo identical to her own, and that of the first killer, had been found on his right shoulder.
This time she’d taken a few precautions before fleeing. She’d gone to a department store and bought a disposable camera, using one of the bills she’d taken off the man. Then, using city transit, she went from one discount store to the next, buying items she’d need, each time carefully exchanging the man’s money. When she’d gotten back to her room, she’d taken several pictures of the killer and the tattoo before packing quickly and leaving L.A. behind.
Ria stopped devouring the steak long enough to taste the baked potato, drenched in melted butter. She could practically feel her arteries clogging, but she’d work off the calories the next day at the gym. Tripolo had a new YMCA with a very decent weight room. One of the first things she’d done upon moving there was to join it. Staying in shape was as vital for her new occupation as it had been for whatever her former one had been.
She’d purposefully crisscrossed the western United States in a random manner meant to confuse. When she’d gotten low on money, she’d stolen more, and found herself distastefully adept at it. She’d landed on the campus of the University of Iowa, where it had been surprisingly easy to join a group of prospective new students there for orientation, and obtain a photo ID. And then she’d melted in with the other twenty-nine thousand students and gone back to work. Before she could set about discovering her real identity, she’d first had to manufacture a new one.
“Would you like any dessert this evening?” The waitress was back with a practiced smile.
“No, but I will take some coffee.” Ria waited for her to return with it and fill her cup, then had her leave the carafe on the table.
Ria drank pensively, lost in memories that began six years ago. At the U of I she’d haunted the computer labs, careful to use different ones each time, searching for anything that would connect to her.
The discovery of the body she’d left in her L.A. apartment had warranted a three-inch article buried deep in the L.A. Times. She’d hoped that a revelation of the assassin’s identity would provide clues to her own. She’d even called the news desk at the Times on a couple of occasions, talked to the crime reporter who had covered the story. By feeding him some careful details, she was able to whet his interest enough to have him digging further. But the dead man had remained a John Doe, and the case had eventually been shelved as unsolved. The only thing of value she’d learned was that neither of their fingerprints had been on file in the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Whoever the would-be killer had been, his death had caused as little stir as had her own disappearance.
Because new identities didn’t come cheap, she’d used almost every dime she had left on establishing hers. And she’d been aided, at first unknowingly, by the one person who’d been allowed to get halfway close to her, Benny Zappa.
Something inside her softened at the thought of Benny, with his gangly scarecrow walk and too large Adam’s apple. His narrow black-rimmed glasses had been meant to be stylish, but they couldn’t disguise what he was—a computer geek through and through, and proud of his abilities, if not of the persona that he could never quite shed. In his awkward, bumbling way he’d offered to help her—in an attempt to hit on her, she’d thought. And at first she’d seen his shy overtures through purely shrewd eyes, as a means to an end. It wasn’t until later that she discovered in the process she’d made an invaluable friend.
His genius with computers was coupled with a hacker’s love of a challenge. No database—university, state or federal—seemed impenetrable with him at the keyboard. With the information he was able to access for her, she’d chosen a new identity and followed every lead she could think of. And what she appreciated most about him, in all this time, was his willingness to use his skills without asking questions she had no intentions of answering.
Although he must have put some details together about what drove her, he didn’t press her about it, and she appreciated his discretion as much as his friendship.
Refilling her cup, she sipped, watching the river churn sluggishly by, as evening turned to dusk. If she headed back now she could get a couple hours of work in. Not at the sheriff’s office, but in the office she’d set up in a spare bedroom in the house she’d bought in Tripolo.
Each lead she’d followed about her identity, every fact she’d discovered, was carefully encrypted and kept on her home computer. After six years she had a substantial file with a copy downloaded to CD monthly and sent to a mail drop across the country for safekeeping. So far she had plenty of dead ends, plenty of threads that apparently went nowhere. But she wasn’t giving up. She’d never give up.
There were some who would consider her existence lonely. But she thought she must be used to being alone, because it had never bothered her overmuch in the last half-dozen years. What had seemed strange was the openhearted generosity of Luz, the puppy-dog friendliness of Benny. The fact that Ria had first regarded both of them with suspicion was surely an indictment of who, or what, she’d been.
Catching the waitress’s attention, she summoned her over, ready to leave. Whatever else she’d learned about herself, she wasn’t one to make the same mistake twice. Benny lived halfway across the country and she was excruciatingly careful on the rare occasions she allowed herself to contact him on an untraceable cell phone. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear it if another person died because of her.
“Oh, there’s no bill, ma’am,” the waitress said. “Jake said it’s on the house.”
Jake. She’d like to pretend she’d already forgotten him, but she wasn’t in the habit of lying to herself. He’d hovered in the back of her mind since he’d left, a haunting reminder of a fascinating man she would never see again. Ria opened her purse, took out some bills. “I told him that wasn’t necessary. I’d like to pay for my own meal. Could you please tell me how much it was?”
But the woman was backing away, a faintly alarmed expression on her face. “Oh, no, ma’am, I couldn’t do that. Jake said specifically, and ’round here, we do what he says.”
With a mental shrug, Ria gave up. She folded the bills and handed them to the server. “Then this is for you.”
The woman gave her a shocked look, but whisked them into a pocket in her apron quickly enough. “Thank you, ma’am. Hope you come back real soon.”
But thoughts of returning were far from Ria’s mind as she made her way to the large parking lot outside, keys in her hand. It was full now, much more crowded than it had been when she’d arrived. Walking purposefully toward her car, she heard her cell phone ring and took it from her purse, checking the caller ID. Eldon Croat. With a grimace, she decided against answering it. Tomorrow would be soon enough to meet with the county commissioner and try to talk him out of the press conference he’d want to call about the latest drug busts. Even after all these years, and the attempts she’d taken to change her appearance, she was leery about getting—
He seemed to come out of nowhere, looming from between two cars and taking quick steps toward her. Her hands were full, slowing her response, and before she could react he was behind her, grabbing her nape and smashing her face into the roof of her car.
It was telling in that instant, with stars bursting behind her eyes, that her first thought was of the assassins. And that they’d finally caught up with her.
Chapter 2
Jake Tarrance cruised into the lot and pulled into his private parking spot. Not even to himself was he willing to admit he’d hurried through the problem-solving meeting this evening. It was doubtful the copper-haired woman with the incredible eyes was still at Hoochees, even more doubtful that she’d changed her mind about keeping him company. Still, the memory of taut curves and a tight body had him dispatching his troublesome supplier, Roy Hastings, more quickly than usual. Tonight’s solution had been temporary, at best. Hastings was getting to be too much a liability. And Jake had no conscience about dispensing with liabilities.
There were some who would swear he had no conscience at all. More and more frequently these days, he was inclined to agree.
Lights were visible from the security booth installed in the center of the lot, but he didn’t see anyone inside. He got out of the car with his hand on the gun nestled at the base of his back. Security might be making rounds, but for a man with a price on his head, caution was a way of life.
After taking a couple of steps, he paused, hearing sounds of a struggle. He withdrew the gun and thumbed off the safety, running in that direction.
He didn’t have to go far before he saw the fight going on. He reholstered the gun and reached for his cell phone to alert the still-absent security. But in the next second Jake realized the struggle involved a man and woman, and something inside him went glacial. The phone remained in his pocket. He’d deal with the matter himself.
Racing forward, he became aware of two things simultaneously. One was that the guy was definitely getting the worst end of the battle; the second was that the female beating the hell out of him was none other than the intriguing woman he’d shared a drink with.
The other man rushed at her, his head lowered. She kicked out, catching him in the jaw with enough force to snap his head back. The blow made him stagger, and he stumbled against a nearby car. While he leaned there dazedly, she closed the distance between them, grabbed his shirt to pull him forward and rammed her knee into his groin.
Jake’s brows rose in approval. He didn’t recall ever seeing a woman less in need of rescuing. Folding his arms across his chest, he watched as the man gave a strangled moan, then in slow motion crumpled to the asphalt.
“That ought to take care of his social life for a few days, anyway.”
The woman wheeled around, probably still nerved up with adrenaline. But Jake’s amusement fled the moment he caught sight of her face. The blood covering it was still flowing freely, and staining what remained of her yellow blouse. The buttons had been torn off, to leave it hanging loose, revealing the nude, lace-edged bra beneath. The ice abruptly re-formed in his veins.
Jake took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her. When she didn’t move to take it, he pressed it into her hands. “Are you hurt as badly as you look?”
She gave him a slight frown, bent to catch a glimpse of herself in a car’s side mirror. “Great,” she muttered, wadding up his handkerchief and pressing it against her nose. Sending a sidelong glare at the man still clutching himself on the ground, she said, “I ought to hammer him again.”
Something inside Jake eased slightly at her tone. It was disgruntled, but she didn’t sound as though she was badly injured. “I think at this point that would be redundant, don’t you?” He stepped closer, caught her chin in his hand, turned her face one way, then the other, surveying it critically. “Your nose doesn’t look broken. How does it feel?”
“Like it got slammed into a car.”
When she pulled away from his touch, he let her go. She set down the handkerchief for a moment to tie the front of her shirt together. Taking the cell phone out of his pocket, he pressed a button on his speed dial. Without taking his eyes off her he spoke into it. “Cort, get someone to take over the bar and come out to the parking lot. Bring Finn and Dobbs with you. And find out where the security guard went who was supposed to be on duty out here.”
She looked past him to the still empty security booth. “There was no one in it when I left the restaurant. Either this creep has lucky timing or your security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Either way, someone has a lot to answer for.” Jake looked at the man on the ground, who was struggling to his feet, then back to the woman. “Feel like telling me what happened out here?”
“It’s not what it looked like, I swear.”
The man’s voice was familiar. Jake peered closer, recognized him as an occasional patron of the restaurant. Taylor something. No, Tyler. That was it. “And what do you think it looks like?”
“She was coming on to me. You know how it is, right?” The man gave him a sickly grin, talking so fast his words practically fell over themselves. “But when I met her out here like she asked, damned if she didn’t start talking price. Well, I’m not a guy who pays for it, you know? So things got kind of heated—”
“Stop,” Jake advised softly. He knew where the razor-edged fury he felt sprang from. There was a time when it had dictated his every thought, his every action. Surprising that ten years hadn’t really dulled it in the least. Surprising, and for this man, unfortunate.
“Uhh…Mr. Tarrance.”
Jake looked at the security guard, who had run up, his expression worried.
“Is there a problem?” The man asked. “I just stepped inside for a minute. I was feeling kinda sick. But I wasn’t gone longer than that, I swear.”
“You’re done here. Cort?” He addressed the other man that had appeared silently, already looming over the guard. “Be sure and escort our former employee off the premises.”
The guard took a sideways look at the bartender and inched away. “I swear, Mr. Tarrance, I think I got the flu or something. I never woulda left otherwise…”
“Really? Then you won’t mind if we go through your pockets.”
With a nod from Jake, the bartender quickly searched the man’s pants pockets, pulling out a folded fifty that looked a hell of a lot like a bribe.
Jake gave Cort a pointed glance. “I think you ought to drive him home. Have a little talk.”
The security guard was still protesting when the bartender took his elbow and led him, almost gently, away.
“Tyler, right?” Jake addressed the man still leaning heavily against a car, dusting off his pants.
His eyes darted nervously as Finn and Dobbs moved silently to flank him. “That’s right. Tyler Stodgill. Sorry about all this, but that’s the thing about women, huh?” He swallowed hard. “Nothing but trouble.”
He seemed to flinch in the face of Jake’s answering smile. “You might want to avoid this kind of trouble in the future. It doesn’t seem healthy. My men will take you to the hospital, get you checked out. Don’t worry. They’ll make sure your car gets there, too.”
For the first time real fear showed in the man’s expression, and he shook his head vigorously. “Hey, that’s not necessary. I’m okay. Really.”
“I insist. Insurance problems, you know.” Jake gave a what-can-you-do shrug. “You could be suffering from internal injuries. Those can be tricky.” He made a slight gesture and the two men closed in on Stodgill, his protests trailing behind him as they led him away.
The woman shot him a knowing look. “I have the distinct impression that although he doesn’t need a doctor now, he will when he arrives at the hospital.”
“Really?” Jake frowned, considering her words. “I could see how a person might think that, if he had a suspicious mind. And if he didn’t know what a kind-hearted philanthropist I am.”
