Willing Hostage (5 page)

“Where are you going?”

He wrinkled his nose and grinned. “I'm going to look up the local fuzz. Couldn't get him on the radio.”

Leah felt human for the first time in a week. Even law and order had a sense of humor in the West. She picked up the menu stuck between the napkin and the salt and pepper holders. The café was worn and dingy, but obviously patronized by the locals.

Knowing her ulcer would have ordered a poached-egg-on-milk-toast, Leah ordered the number one with bacon and hot chocolate. She deserved a binge. The gregarious waitress didn't seem to mind the hold on the patrolman's order and brought Leah's hot chocolate right away.

Tempted to human kindness by the comfort of her hot drink, Leah stopped the waitress as she came by with a tray of dirty dishes. “Do you have doggy bags?”

“‘No. Do you have a doggy?”

“There's a stray cat in my car and he—”

“Oh, poor starving thing.” She set the tray on the table.

Leah blinked. “If you can imagine a blimp starving, you've a better imagination than I have.” She felt foolish to have brought up the subject.

“Fur,” the waitress said and sat down across from Leah.

“What?”

“Well, some cats look fat because of their fur. Had a good feel on this cat? Probably all ribs under that fur. What does it like to eat?”

“Anything.”

“Honey, no cat eats anything, even if it's starving. I know. I've got three. Hubby hates them but.…” She rose and lifted the tray. “All kinds of scraps around here.”

“I don't have much money.”

“Forget it. They'd be thrown out anyway. Any cat lover is a friend of mine, honey.”

Leah finished her chocolate and pondered the cat. Having one opened strange doors.

She remembered having an insane desire for a dog when she'd had to leave New York and return home. She'd met a dog once who would have been perfect. He was a large bony red, with a tail in constant happy motion and soft amber eyes.

Leah read his tags, took him home, and called the owner. That was how she met big, strong Jason, who always asked after scraps for his “Mutt” when he visited a restaurant and who invariably left with a doggy bag.

The relationship was Jason lasted about three months. Leah discovered that he wanted her on a leash as tight as Mutt's. When it was over, Leah missed Mutt more than she did Jason.

She'd finally begun to tremble with delayed reaction and letdown when the number one with bacon arrived. Two beautiful fried eggs, hash-brown potatoes, three strips of bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and a huge mug of coffee. Leah hadn't tasted a fried egg or coffee for two years. She stopped only once, to reflect on whether or not her dark attacker would have any breakfast. A body the size of his would demand a lot of it.

She didn't pause even when the patrolman and his companion slid in across from her. The patrolman's breakfast arrived with a brown bag for Leah and a wink from the waitress. “For Goodyear, your blimp.”

“Goodyear?” The law looked up from his number one with ham.

“The cat … in the car. He's kind of big and fat like a … Didn't you ever see the Goodyear blimp over cities or football games?”

His look was blank but he said, “Oh, the cat.” He made Leah feel old.

When she'd finished her breakfast she retold her story to the “local fuzz.” She assured them both that she had left marks on the man's face, that she had not been raped, that she did not need a doctor, that even if it sounded crazy it was all true.

The sheriff's deputy had her repeat her description of the attacker, told her of a cheap motel, and left.

Leah was stunned when the patrolman insisted on paying for her breakfast and escorting her to the Shangri-La. “Not every day I run into a beautiful blonde in distress.” He blushed.

She felt like giving him a motherly pat on the head and hoped that Shangri-La would prove less exciting than paradise.

Shangri-La stood at the very edge of the treeless town. On a treeless hill. Across from a treeless cemetery.

“You stay right here now, so we can contact you when we hear something. Okay?” He'd carried in her luggage, even emptied the trunk.

“Okay.” Leah felt a long way from Shangri-La as she looked around her room. She was getting the shakes again.

“Should we feed your blimp?” He looked at the greasy bag in her hand and the Siamese next to her left foot. God, did the creature heel, too?

“Okay.” She was so tired and at last so sated with food, she couldn't think. She'd forgotten the cat.

The patrolman spread out a feast of bits of sausage, bacon, and ham. There were five little cartons of half and half and he poured the cream into an ashtray. “You need sleep. I'll keep in touch. Good-bye, Miss Harper. You too, Goodyear.”

Goodyear was too engrossed in the feast to look up. Leah managed a wave and a “Thanks.”

After the cat had gobbled all but the bag and the ashtray, he yowled at the door.

Leah opened it. “Good-bye, Goodyear, go find yourself a good home. I can't afford a pet and I don't really like cats. My mother had five and.…”

But Goodyear was gone. He hadn't even looked back.

Chapter Seven

Leah reached for the hot and cold handles of the bathtub … and saw the tub in the house in Chicago … and her mother's body … the bloody razor … heard her own uncontrolled screaming.…

Would she ever be able to look at an ordinary bathtub again and see just an ordinary bathtub?

A shudder joined the shakes she already experienced. She lay back in the hot water and stared at the steam slowly clouding the tile. She must relax, soak away the soreness of her wild night, think of something other than her mother's suicide … what?

The cat. He'd entered her world and left it as quickly as the big man with the shadowy eyes … no, she wouldn't think of the man either. But he'd said she had a great body. That was nice to hear at thirty, even from a murderer. There were ugly swollen places on her wrists and ankles.

She'd think of the good days before her father died, when they lived in the comfortable house in the suburbs. Or she could think of later, her college days before the lawyer informed them that the money was running out, that they'd have to find a less expensive life style, that Leah would have to leave the university and find a job if her younger sisters could hope for even a junior college.

Leah's mother had never used her college degree. Unable to face the working world after her husband's death, she couldn't even manage the family finances. Widowhood had been a hard blow to Iris Harper, but the sale of her home and loss of her cleaning lady, bridge club, car, charitable committees, affiliation with the suburban church and its women's functions, membership in the country club, its golf course, and all the things that had summed up her identity to herself—all these losses had wiped out an entire personality.

She closed herself away from her unfamiliar neighbors into the little house in a redevelopment section. Leah and Annette took over the younger Suzie and everything else, and worried every minute they were away from their mother. But Iris just watched TV, talked to her cats, drank, vegetated, grayed.… Until a week ago.…

Leah washed quickly and stepped out of the tub. Perhaps in sleep she could find forgetfulness.

When her father died, Leah discovered that the mother she'd considered a pillar of strength was not. Leah had been surprised at how unsettling this discovery had been. When Iris took her own life, her daughter strengthened her resolve never to depend on anyone but herself.

There was a scratching at the door as she left the bathroom. “Oh, no, you don't. I said good-bye, remember?”

She ignored the plaintive yowl and slipped into a nightgown. Checking the watch in her purse, she found it was only nine thirty in the morning.

The Siamese had moved to the windowsill, staring in at her with evil slanted eyes framed by the metal rims of the picture window; the barren cemetery with old-fashioned gray headstones provided a haunting background for the “evil eye.”

How had he come to adopt Leah? Had he been dumped from a yellow Volkswagen? Had he hopped into the next one that came along? Or did Leah resemble a former owner? Maybe the food hadn't suited at home. Food was obviously at the top of his priority list.

Leah closed the drapes and crawled into bed, lay listening to the noise and prowlings at the window and at the door.

Goodyear did not have the fine aristocratic bone structure of a true Siamese. Although she thought of him as Siamese because of his coloring and markings, his bones were built more along the lines of alley-massive. He was probably the result of a chance encounter between a treasured purebred and a big back-street torn.

A dog—it sounded large and very near—growled low in its throat. Goodyear hissed. Leah leapt from the bed.

The cat collided with her ankles the minute she opened the door. She stood looking at a German shepherd with a surprised expression on his face and blood dripping from his nose. The dog turned and ran.

Goodyear calmly washed himself on her bed.

“Looks like I've been taken in again,” Leah muttered and locked the door. “You were in about as much danger as a.… Oh, just turn off your motor so I can get some sleep.” She lay down again and tried to feel some ribs through lush fur. The ribs were well padded with fat.

But the fur was soft, squishy, warm. It felt soothing under her hand, accompanied by the loud purring, the scratchiness of the animal's tongue as it extended its washing to her wrist.

“You can take on a German shepherd but just get chummy with a murderer. Someday when I can afford a pet, it's going to be a dog.” But she continued to stroke the luxurious coat. It had the tactile allure of rich velvet or worry beads.

Leah went to sleep, still seeing the haphazard dark knots on the pine walls surrounding her and thinking of the tall, cruel man who had tied her to a bed. He'd automatically stroked the cat, too.

She awoke to a persistent sound she could not at first identify. Goodyear lay curled in the hollow of her arm.

Someone was knocking at the door. She pulled her coat over her nightgown and slid the safety chain into place. A man stood outside the slit the chain allowed, but he was not dark and threatening.

“Leah Harper?” A stiff, mechanical smile.

He hadn't called her Sheila. She relaxed. “Yes.”

He slid an open wallet through the crack and she read the intimidating words “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She'd slipped the chain from its lock before she remembered where she'd heard the name on the card below the badge—Welker. Joseph Welker.

He was in the room, closing the door behind him before she could protest.

Leah pulled the coat around her tightly and backed away. “Welker.”

“Yes, Miss Harper. You don't know me, but”—he slid sideways along the wall and peered through an opening he'd made in the drapes as the dark man had done the night before; what was supposed to be out there this time?—“the local authorities have informed me of your problem, the man who held you captive last night?” He sat in the room's one chair and his smile warmed a little before it vanished. “His mistaking you for someone named Sheila?”.

Leah backed as far as the bed and sat. Tendrils of anxiety chased away the grogginess of having slept all day. Anyone could have a badge made. She'd never seen a real one and wouldn't know the difference. “But the FBI. He didn't take me across any state lines or—”

“I know. And I realize this must seem strange.” His neck wrinkled over his collar and his eyes continually scanned her face as if he were trying to read her thoughts … or her character.

“He mentioned a Welker. He said you goofed because you didn't send a professional.” The Siamese crawled onto her lap and hung over on both ends. He too watched Joseph Welker with suspicion.

“That's because he thought you were Sheila. She
is
a professional. But you somehow got in the way.” Resting his elbows on the chair arms, he put the tips of his fingers together and continued to study her over them. Behind his brown hornrims, Welker looked like a lawyer or a doctor. In fact, he resembled her brother-in-law—the calculated ease, the controlled posture, the slightly receding hair clipped short and combed back away from his face, the air of authority.…

“Miss Harper, I'm afraid we have a problem.” He crossed his legs and ran a finger down the crease in the pants of his brown suit.

“We?” Leah sensed her most recent set of troubles were not over, after all. She buried a hand in the comfort of cat fur.

“I have just arrived from Washington to find a certain situation in a very nasty mess.”

“Why is that
my
problem?”

“Because, quite innocently, you've become involved. You have twice been mistaken for a woman named Sheila, you've also been in contact with Glade who—”

“Glade?” It sounded like an air freshener.

“The man you met last night. He's in a great deal of danger and—”

“
He's
in danger! He's the most dangerous man I've ever met.”

“Well, there are even more dangerous men after him, Miss Harper. And if they even suspect that you might be able to tell them where he is or give them a clue, their questioning might not be pleasant. The word is probably out that he was seen with a blonde in a yellow Volkswagen and … I understand that there was an aircraft involved this morning before he jumped from your car?”

“Yes. It tried to run us off the road.”

He stood to survey the jumble of luggage on each side of the bed. “I don't suppose you have a wig with you? That isn't blond?”

“I don't own one.”

“Well, then I suggest you wear a scarf over your hair for the next few days and that Volkswagen will have to go. They couldn't have seen you too clearly from a plane.”