Smokescreen (3 page)

Because he thought it was the same woman. The
same shaggy, coppery hair. The distinctive little notch in her chin. The same emphasis of expression. The light caught those same eyes, fired from within.

But he distinctly remembered a nose ring. He remembered that the boarder had been young, still growing into herself and all soft around the edges. And the hooker—thin as a rail, bony and used up.

This woman was neither. Vibrant and determined and self-confident as opposed to arrogant….

Too bad she hadn’t actually ever been there.

Digital cameras don’t lie, Jethro.

Or so he’d believed. Now he wasn’t so certain. Nor could he imagine who would go to the trouble of deleting specific photos and replacing them with ringers. It seemed far too subtle for an underground organization, not to mention pointless.

Unless the point was to convince Jethro he was crazy.
Okay, that could work.
He was already half-crazy with Lizbet’s disappearance.

Crazy enough to go back there tonight and get another photo of that hooker. Crazy enough to hide out in that little niche revealed by his photos this evening. Just crazy enough to watch that street for another chance at the Captain—hookers, skateboarders and big angry pimps notwithstanding.

S
am couldn’t believe her eyes. She, who spent all her time feeding illusion to the rest of the world, and secure in her quiet knowledge of what was and what wasn’t, stared at the dark figure crouched in the dirty little not-even-an-alley where half the street girls took their quickies and couldn’t believe what she saw.

She tried closing her eyes, squinching them shut hard, and then looking again.

Nope. He was still there. Persistent in his stupidity. She didn’t know whether to admire him or go give him a good kick. It was hard to think of him as someone who’d driven a woman into hiding, in spite of his current oblivious persistence. She kept remembering the way he’d put himself between her and the danger from the hookers’ “agent.” She’d just pushed him to the limit and she’d been expecting a blow, not a noble gesture. Contradictory, for sure.

Oh. My. God.
He couldn’t be leaving that scant safety for another less-than-stealthy approach of the house, could he? Not really. Sam closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and muttered an especially foul string of words reserved for moments like this. Whatever his motivations, he risked the security of the underground railroad every time he drew attention to it.

Which would be every time he showed his face.

Oh, look. How inconspicuous was that, crouching at the back bumper of an old van? She frowned at the van a moment—it wasn’t one she’d recognized, and though she had the plate memorized to give to her P.I. boss if it became necessary, she already knew it didn’t belong here. The vehicles that parked here regularly, she knew. The ones she didn’t know—customers of this sort or that—never hung around long enough to become noteworthy.

Please don’t tell me he’s going to take pictures from there.

She should have let him get into trouble with the pimp earlier in the evening. They didn’t need him here, not when they had the infamous ex-husband spreading threats and intimidation so indiscriminately that he actually had a chance of locating the refuge. This man wasn’t the ex’s style in thugs, but he could still inadvertently put this place on Scalpucci’s radar.

Oh, things just kept getting better. The Captain’s sturdy silhouette appeared in the first-floor window. She’d spotted the interloper. No doubt she’d seen him earlier, too—once the local pimp had joined in the party, no doubt
every
one on the block had seen them. Any moment the Captain would be out to deal with Sam’s oblivious if chivalrous interloper, filling her own reputation as a bad-ass lady cop who’d retired young with the cloud of controversy over her head. Excessive force, intimidation, planting evidence…

None of that was true, but it helped to set the scene. And it spoke of the woman’s dedication to her refuge. Sam’s interloper didn’t have a clue what would soon be headed his way. But it was Sam’s job to spare the Cap
tain this kind of confrontation, especially when she already had her hands full. Sam’s job—her personal commitment—was to keep the impending moment from happening.

Sam made herself unnoticed—an instant of concentration, a twinge of feeling from deep inside to tell her she’d done it right—and went to intervene. The Captain still lingered at the door and if Sam moved fast enough, she could head off the whole mess.

She reached the van and grabbed the man’s shirt collar, hauling him back and yanking him off balance so he could only backpedal in an effort to regain his feet. His stifled yelp gave her grim satisfaction; she’d meant to startle him, and she’d succeeded.

But he recovered more quickly than she ever expected. His back up against the van, he didn’t even give her a chance to speak. “Back the hell off, lady—I’m here for a reason and I’m not leaving.”

“You’re
trying
to piss her off?” Sam nodded toward the house. “It hasn’t occurred to you that she must damn well be able to take care of herself or she wouldn’t be living here?”

“She’s
not
living here, she’s—”

Sam scoffed. “Of course she lives there.” And the Captain did. Always on hand to look out for her refugees. “If she sees you she’s going to come out and—”

His fingers, held to her lips, came as a great surprise. They were too gentle to be part of this confrontation. “Exactly,” he said, and his voice matched the gesture. “This is exactly where I want to be.”

“No,” Sam said firmly, “it’s not.” Clever. Really clever. That would be sure to convince him. So she backed her words with action, and grabbed him by the
arm and got him several steps down the street before he managed to disengage himself.

“Holy freaking—” something. He muttered it to himself and Sam couldn’t catch the words, but she understood the allusion well enough.

“Batman?” she said. “I’m trying to save your butt
again
and you’re quoting Batman at me?”

He gave her a funny look. Almost a wounded look. “Robin,” he corrected her. “And it wasn’t a quote. It was just…along those lines.”

“Great,” she said. “Just great.” But she prodded him a few more steps down the street while she was at it. A glance told her that the Captain was on the house stoop, knowing Sam was out here, hesitating long enough to see if she would handle things. “Whatever you want, whoever you’re here to find, you’re only causing trouble for the rest of us.
We’ve
got to survive here. When the bullets fly, they don’t exactly have laser-guidance systems.”

“Well, isn’t that fancy talk for a lady of the night.”

She would have kicked him in the knee if it wouldn’t have stopped their halting progress. “You jerk! Every time you show up here, you mess with the balance. The peace. All that lurking? That camera? You think anyone here likes that?”

“Every time?” he said, and his look turned sharp. “You act as though we’ve met before this evening.”

She looked twice at him that time, and didn’t like the speculation in his eye.

Doesn’t matter. Just get him out of here.

“As if I would remember,” she snapped at him, giving him another little shove. “You all look the same to me. Now will you just get the hell out of here before we all pay for your interference?”

The explosion came without warning. The noise, the light, the huge hand smacking her down just as the pavement came up to meet her. The night turned inside out, swallowed them, and spat them out again.

The pavement smelled faintly like aftershave.

But only, Sam realized, because while her knees and palms still stung from impact, she lay crookedly over her annoying interloper, spanning the hard muscle of his back.
Impact.
Ringing ears. Dark whirling world with the glow of fire in the corner of her eye.

The van.

No, what used to be the van.
Bomb.
Flames licked into the night, someone’s car alarm went off in what seemed like the distance but who could tell with ears still recoiling in shock.
Bomb.
Okay, she still had a brain cell or two at work. She did a quick repair to her guise, hunting for the image in her head, absorbing herself in it. There’d been a bomb, and it had been more than a little pop-off of a warning. Any closer, and she would have been more than stunned. She’d have been—

He wasn’t moving yet.

Was he even breathing? Surely he hadn’t hit the ground that hard, even if she
had
landed on top of him—

“Sam!” A low voice in the night—or what seemed like a low voice. The Captain! Sam pushed herself away from the man beneath her and quickly dropped her guise. She never showed her exact personas to the Captain; she never showed them to anyone. They knew she was on the job, they knew she had an uncanny ability to blend in. That’s all they needed to know.

“Over here,” Sam answered, and she thought she pitched her voice correctly. She pushed herself off the pavement, resting her hand on the black-clad back be
neath her just long enough to reassure herself he did indeed breathe. Just stunned, she hoped, from the double whammy of being hit by asphalt from the front and by Sam from the back. She climbed painfully to her feet and met the Captain in the tree-shadowed edge of the yard not far away.

“You’re okay?” the Captain asked, her hard mouth set in a thin line.

“Okay enough.” Sam nodded at the new pavement decoration. “I’ll say the same for him in a moment or two.”

“Good. Then get him out of here. Get both of you out of here. There’s no way to avoid official attention this time, and you can’t afford it.
I
can’t afford for you to have it, either—if we have to move the primary house on short notice, I’ll need you lurking around on watch as much as possible, can’t have you on anyone’s list.” She rubbed her forehead; she’d probably had a headache even before the van went sky-high. “That bastard must have tracked us down—but he’s got to know she’s not here. He’s just putting us on notice.”

Sam looked at her abraded palms and frowned. No amount of Nu-Skin would handle this one. “This guy’s not in on it,” she said, the words coming out before she even truly thought about it.

“I don’t think so either.” The Captain looked over at the man, who’d come around enough to mutter a bleary, succinct and heartfelt word of badness. “He’s too…”

“Nice,” Sam finished for her. “Doesn’t belong here and can’t even fake it. Somewhere he’s got a nice little house with a dog—golden retriever, wanna bet?—a little picket fence, a green lawn and a cat in the window. And maybe his mom lives with him.”

The Captain’s tight mouth skewed into something re
sembling a smile. “
Nice.
He’s after someone who came through here, remember that. But get him out of here all the same, and find out how he tracked us down.” She cocked her head. “Sirens. Move yourself, dammit. I’ve got panicked ladies to deal with.”

Sam couldn’t hear the sirens. The explosion must have affected her hearing. Damn. But she didn’t doubt. She returned to the interloper and crouched down. Many parts of her body instantly suggested she would never rise from that position again, and she ignored them. She took the moment to turn herself back into her hooker self, and then she prodded his shoulder. “I know you’re in there,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ve got to get out of here.”

He pushed himself to his hands and knees and looked over at her, his dazed expression making way for a trickle of anger. “What the hell—”

“Holy freaking
boom,
” she informed him. “That’s what the hell. Now let’s go.”

“I don’t have anything to hide.” He put fingers to the darkness gleaming on his mustache and looked at the resulting smear of blood. “I’m not going anywhere. Maybe the cops can get some information about this place for me.”

Sam bit back her exasperation. “Oh, really? You don’t think they’ll be interested in the way you’ve been hanging around here for days…or how you were hanging around by the van before it went up in itty-bitty pieces?”

“What?” He frowned, not so much at her words but at what she guessed to be the discovery that his hearing was as affected as hers.

“Or how about I tell them about the threats you’ve been making?” She was getting creative now.

He heard enough of that to react strongly, sitting back on his heels to look at her. “I haven’t been—”

She shrugged. “It’s all enough to put you on the wrong side of them. So come on. Run away now and you’re alive to come back and lurk another day.”

He gave the house an odd, sad gaze. “I’m probably too late already. Madonna said the Captain didn’t keep people here for long.”

Madonna. His informant. Sam needed to know more, so the Captain could change those things that had been compromised. She held out a sore hand. “Come
on.
Before they get here.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Sam made a face at him. “Neither do I. But you better believe they’re on the way.”

He must have. He rose unsteadily to his feet, smeared the blood under his nose around with his sleeve, and gestured at her to lead the way.

Lead she did, grabbing his hand to pull him around not one corner but two, where she stashed him between a New Age herb shop and a Chinese take-out storefront. “Stay,” she told him, in the same commanding tones she might have used with his fictional golden retriever in his fictional picket fence-enclosed yard. He bristled—not that she could blame him—and she relented enough to add, “One of the Captain’s people wants to talk to you. That’s what you wanted, right?”

After a hesitation, he nodded. A careful nod, one that meant his head probably still rang as much as hers. He leaned against the brick of the New Age shop and crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at her, and she headed off to “get” his new keeper. Herself, of course. She
couldn’t keep up the hooker guise, not and do what she needed this night. She needed something more flexible.

Plain old Sam I Am.

Well, almost. Because no one ever saw that part of her. But as close as anyone ever got.

She took herself down the block to the run-down gas station across from the liquor store and let herself into the nasty little unisex bathroom at the side of the building. The door didn’t actually close all the way and there wasn’t any toilet paper, but all she needed was the flickering light, the mirror below it and a trickle of water. She cleaned her face of dirt and blood, and carefully washed her abraded hands. No way to get around the fact that she’d been near the explosion, but that didn’t matter—as one of the Captain’s people she had reason to be there. She’d just have to hope her semicaptive interloper hadn’t noticed the exact nature of her injuries, because she hadn’t thought to hide them.

Her clean face made a big difference, although even in the bad light Sam could tell she was pale. She left herself that way—no reason she shouldn’t be, given the circumstances. She sleeked her hair, faded her freckles, and eased the flaring angle of her jaw. Her hair lost the bright edge of its copper sheen, grew sleeker. She hesitated, looking at herself, her torn turtleneck, her wary eyes…fighting the impulse to change herself to someone else entirely rather than face this man so close to her real self. But she didn’t hesitate long. She’d best stick to a guise she could hold even under the greatest duress. This one, she could hold even through sleep.