Sneak And Rescue

“You’re gonna get naked!” the club owner shrieked.

Sam knew she was in trouble when the cheap velvet drapes separating the howling audience from the stage started to open. The music grew deafeningly loud. So did the roar of male anticipation out front.

Now that she’d got the information she came for, she had to get the hell out of the building. Her hand closed around the exit door handle and she started to shove it open when a big paw grabbed a hunk of her hair and pulled her back.

“I paid you to strip.”

“How about you strip?” she yelled, applying pressure on the nerves at the base of his flabby bicep just above his elbow. He yelped in pain and released her. Sam waited for him to raise his left hand, but before she could act, a loaded bottle connected with the back of his skull and he collapsed.

Sam looked up into her husband’s furious face, seeing his eyes sweep over her almost-naked body. “What the hell are you doing here?”

For Matt Henke,

My pop culture and music maven,

besides being the world’s best son

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shirl Henke received her BA and MA in history from the University of Missouri and then worked at many different jobs, including running the circulation desk on a small daily, writing and editing “house organ” newspapers, administering a federal information programme for the elderly, and finally as a university instructor, teaching in four different departments.

Ever since she was a child she read avidly, everything from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi adventures to the big historical sagas of the 1970s and 1980s. She always had ideas for stories and sold her first novel to Warner Books in 1986. Within two years, she was able to quit her day job. Now she can’t imagine doing anything but writing for a living.

She and her husband, Jim, share their cedar house in the woods with an utterly spoiled and very geriatric tomcat. As with writing, life without cats would be unimaginable. For therapy when she’s not at the computer, she cooks large dinners for their extended family, works in her garden and greenhouse and still reads avidly. When deadlines permit, she loves to travel. Visit Shirl on the web at www.shirlhenke.com.

Sneak and Rescue

SHIRL HENKE

MILLS & BOON

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sam and Matt’s second adventure was even more fun to write than the first and I could not have done it without the able assistance of many people and organisations. Any mistakes or excess of “literary licence” are my own.

The setting for this caper is the beautiful Miami metro area. I owe thanks once more to Detective Juan DelCastillo and the Miami-Dade Police Department for information about how my fictional homicide sergeant, William Patowski, might have conducted his investigation.

For the fictionalised Space Quest, its fans and the wider universe where they boldly go, I received creative inspiration from my son, Matt Henke, and the Atlas Chapter of the real international organisation.

I grew up listening to Elvis Presley’s music and there is only one “King.” But my Elvis Scruggs was pretty cool in his own way. I hope you think so, too. Who knows? He just might pop up in a future story. Let me know what you think: www.shirlhenke.com.

Chapter 1

“Quit hiding from me, you sneaky piece of junk!”

Sam dug through the stacks of receipts and file folders, frantic as a starving squirrel looking for its winter cache of nuts. One heavy binder slid off the chair in front of her and toppled dead center onto the neat piles of checks and bank statements spread out on the carpet. With horror, she watched an hour’s worth of sorting flutter into its former chaos. Muttering a curse beneath her breath, she listened more carefully. The muffled chirp of the new cordless phone was coming from behind a tower of IRS pamphlets piled on the love seat next to the chair.

“It used to be so much easier—just start at the jack and pull the phone through the rubble,” she muttered.

Crawling on hands and knees to the sofa, she tossed aside manuals with print so fine she couldn’t read them with the magnification of the Hubble telescope. “Might’ve known it was the IRS’s fault,” she said, seizing the phone, which had been wedged behind a cushion.

Just before the final ring set off her answering machine—if she’d remembered to reactivate it—Sam answered, “Ballanger Retrievals,” in her most professional voice. She pushed another stack of manuals onto the floor to create a narrow empty space where she could sit. The small sofa was so full of folders, pamphlets and papers that only the brown leather armrests were visible. Risking an avalanche that might bury her five-four frame if either side toppled, she gingerly leaned back, trying to catch her breath so she would not be huffing like an asthmatic marathon runner.

“Ms. Samantha Ballanger, please,” a male voice with a clipped upper-class accent said, as if accustomed to instant acquiescence. She’d heard the type before.

“This is Sam Ballanger.” If he expected her to have a private secretary to screen her calls, he was in for an unavoidable disappointment. After growing up poor in a big south Boston blue-collar family, Sam never wasted money on things she could do herself.

“My name is Upton Winchester IV, Ms. Ballanger. I understand you find and return runaways…discreetly.”

“Who referred my service to you, Mr. Winchester?” She always wanted to know her clients were legit and not wasting her time. Lots of wacko husbands who used their wives and kids for punching bags wanted her to haul the victims back. No dice. She’d seen too much when she’d worked as a paramedic and then a police officer after moving to Miami.

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line. “I was referred by Jayson Page Layton. Jay and I golf together,” he replied, expecting her to be impressed.

She was. Layton was a Bal Harbor real estate tycoon whose daughter had joined a religious cult and vanished into a commune in the Everglades a couple of years ago. Sam had literally wrestled an alligator while rescuing the poor kid from her nutcase captors, who’d been little more than child molesters and responsible for at least one dead cult member. That was Sergeant Will “Pat” Patowski’s take on it. He was her mentor at the Miami-Dade Police Department, where she had spent seven years as a police officer. The Kingdom Come “prophet” and his “deacons” were presently serving ten to life in the state pen at Raiford.

“What seems to be the problem, Mr. Winchester?”

“I’d rather not discuss the matter over the phone, Ms. Ballanger. Please come to my office at the Seascape Building, say—” he paused as if consulting his day-planner “—four this afternoon. Winchester, Grayson & Kent Accounting is on the fifteenth floor.”

She paused, as if consulting her own day-planner, which was a scratch pad and ballpoint buried somewhere in the income tax debris smothering her office. “Yeah, that’ll work for me. Oh, my retainer’s three hundred for consultation. If I take the case, I get three-fifty a day plus expenses,” she said, figuring any guy with a Roman numeral in his name could afford a little extra.

“Very well. I’ll expect you at four promptly.”

She found herself holding a dead phone. “Jerk,” she muttered. Obviously used to getting his way. But the address was in the Brickell high-rent district and he hadn’t haggled over the price. She scanned the wreckage of the room, looking for the yellow pages, then spotted the volume on her desk next to the empty phone charger. Two feet of books and other papers were piled on top of it.

“Screw it,” she said, getting up to dig for it. As she scooted out from between the piles of IRS manuals, they toppled, then slid with a loud series of thumps onto the mess on the floor. She managed to extract the phone book without disturbing the “ordered chaos” on her desk. Sam thumbed through the accounting section until she reached the Ws, then whistled. A full-page ad, tastefully done in black and white—or black and yellow, more properly—proclaimed Winchester, Grayson & Kent had been in business for over fifty years. Corporate taxes were their specialty.

“Yeah, I did smell money. Must be a family business. Too bad I didn’t up my fee even higher. Looks like Winchester could afford a lot more than three and a half bennies a day,” she said regretfully.

Her mother, God rest her Irish Catholic soul, used to light candles and pray for Sam to abandon her avaricious ways. Avarice was one of the seven deadly sins, after all. But stretching a beer driver’s income to feed six sons who ate as if each meal was going to be their last, Mary Elizabeth Ballanger never had an abundance of time to fret over her daughter’s vices. Sam had elevated what she liked to think of as “fiscal prudence” to an art form.

Her ruminations about family back home were interrupted by a loud crash, followed by an oath as the front door slammed. “Dammit, Sam, I thought we agreed you’d call that cleaning service while I was gone,” her husband yelled down the hall.

“Welcome home. I missed you, too, darling,” she called back, walking down the hall into the living room of their condo.

Matt Granger sat like a disgruntled yoga student, rubbing the toes of his right foot while cursing inventively. “A man needs steel-toed construction boots to walk in this sty.”

Returning from a weeklong assignment for the Miami Herald, he’d unlocked the door, juggling his suiter and laptop as he entered the dark room only to trip on one of an assortment of free weights Sam had forgotten to pick up. In a last-ditch save, he’d cradled his computer in both arms and pitched forward. He landed on an empty pizza carton.

“Let me guess. Double cheese and pepperoni, right?” He glowered at the orange stain on the knee of his best tropical wool worsted slacks. “You take these to the dry cleaners,” he said, knowing it would provoke her, but not caring at the moment.

“No way. I have some cleaning solution here that will take that out in a jiff.”

“Way. You’re not touching my Natazzi slacks with some junk you bought in the discount store.”

“Well, since they’re Italian, they go with pizza,” she said, stooping to pick up the carton and toss it in the general direction of an overflowing wastebasket. “You know, we could afford professional dry cleaning if you let me—”

“Let’s not go there, Sam,” he said, interrupting before she could restart the old argument. Why had he given her the opening? On the subject of money, his wife was as tenacious as a Boston bull terrier with teeth sunk into a letter carrier’s leg. “I have a ton of work to do. Kiss and make up?” he suggested hopefully as he climbed to his feet.

She gave him a grudging peck that ripened into a long, languorous welcome. When they finally broke apart, she said, “I’ve been too busy working on income taxes to think of the mess. It is April, and besides, I have a business to run, too.”

He looked around his once neat-as-a-pin bachelor pad. When had the hurricane hit? Everything from fast-food packaging to dirty laundry littered the room. He could only imagine what the kitchen looked like. No, on second thought, he didn’t even want to imagine it. “You promised to get a maid.”

“Do you know what they want an hour just to straighten up a little? I’ll get around to it.” She gestured vaguely.

“No, you won’t. Like you said, you have a business to run and so do I. We’re both gainfully employed, Sam.”

“We don’t make enough to afford a cleaning service…but we could if—”

“Don’t start with Aunt Claudia again,” he warned. “We can afford a damn maid—if any of them are brave enough to set foot in this landfill. And we don’t need the Witherspoon millions to live quite comfortably.”

Sam threw up her hands, cocking her head so she could look up at Matt. At six-six, he towered over her, but she never backed down. “You are nuts, you know that? First, after graduating from Yale, you turn your back on a trust fund Paris Hilton wouldn’t sniff at.” She ticked off number one on her finger, then moved to number two. “Whaddya do instead of living the high life in Boston? You enlist in the army!” Finger number three. “Now you bust your ass working the news beat at the Herald when we could have the deal of the century.

“Your aunt—your very, very wealthy aunt—has forgiven you for being nuts. Or maybe she’s forgiven you because she knows I’m not nuts. She offered me—out of the goodness of her heart—a monthly stipend to stay married to you.”

“Stipend,” Matt snorted. “Try bribe!”

“Try allowance for the fodder and stabling of my jackass husband!”

Matt looked down into his wife’s stubborn little face. “You know, you mercenary little runt, if I weren’t kinda fond of you, I’d drop you off one of the causeways into the bay.” There were days that it didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. This was shaping up to be one of them.

“And if I weren’t afraid of getting a hernia, I’d do the same to you, you Godzilla-sized jerk…wait a sec, if you were fish bait, I bet Aunt Claudia would settle a widow’s jointure on me.”

Matt couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing in spite of the aggravation. “You’ve been reading those historical romances again. A jointure is something out of the last century.”

“Yeah?” Sam poked her husband in the chest with a stiff finger. “Aunt Claudia is out of the last century. Hell, she’s probably out of the nineteenth century!”

Matt grunted, rubbing his sore chest.

“Don’t bother me. I’m thinking.” Sam shushed him before he could interrupt. “With that money I could hire a maid…”

“And have our taxes done,” Matt added.

“That maid would give me time to work on my own damn taxes. You know it’s April and the vultures are circling.”

“We should hire an accountant. You don’t have to battle the IRS like the Lone Ranger—”

“Accountant! Damn, I’ll be late. Gotta scoot, sweetie,” she said, stretching up on tiptoe to plant another fulsome kiss on his mouth before she dashed down the hall.

As he watched her sleek little derriere disappear into their bedroom, Matt shook his head at her mercurial mood swing. He could never stay mad at her even when she drove him crazy. Their argument was over…but only for the moment. Matt knew she’d renew it. But he was damned if he wanted his eccentric millionaire aunt paying his wife to stay married to him!

Sam simply didn’t understand how hard he’d struggled to break free of the smothering boardroom mentality of his rich family. Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth choked some kids. The Grangers and Witherspoons were a stuffy bunch of humorless old farts who only mingled with “the better sort.” In other words, other Boston Brahmins. His great-aunt Claudia ought to know. She’d run away to Europe to escape. But since he was the last of the Granger men, she now felt it her duty to see that he fulfilled the very obligations she’d fled.

“Out of the goodness of her heart!” he parroted, kicking the offending pizza carton that had tumbled from the wastebasket. His aunt Claudia didn’t have a heart—a spleen, sure, but a heart? Ha! If he gave in to her manipulations, she’d have him back in Boston, in charge of the family brokerage firm, attending high teas and charity auctions! He was an adrenaline junkie, addicted to the thrill of chasing after a hot story. He had acquired friends in low places and liked it that way.

“I’ll never go back to that gilded cage—not even for Sammie. Damn, one week trying to be a society matron and she’d go crazy herself!” But he’d never been able to convince her that luring them back to Boston was Aunt Claudia’s ultimate goal. His aunt and his wife had bonded the first time they met. Small wonder. Claudia had made Sam an offer a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks couldn’t refuse—a ton of money.

In spite of the differences in their backgrounds, they were sisters under the skin—ruthless schemers. He loved them both to distraction, but that was all the more reason to keep them separated. Claudia a thousand miles away was a good thing. The very thought of the two of them united and working together made him shudder.

Abandoning the ongoing argument that was giving him an ulcer, he trailed her into the walk-in closet where she was hastily stripping off a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’re taking our records to a tax accountant,” he said, but could see she was too rushed to hear him.

Sam hated panty hose for a number of reasons besides the humid South Florida heat that fused them to her legs, but she grabbed a pair from an overflowing drawer. Shoving her way past Matt, she lay back on the bed and yanked them up her legs in one quick motion. “Gotta look like class to impress a guy with a ‘fourth’ tacked on the end of his name, after all,” she muttered to herself.

She made a quick scan of her sadly depleted wardrobe, then seized the first suit that she found, a little black number with a fresh cleaners’ bag over it, remembering gratefully that Matt actually took care of their dry cleaning. She started putting it on while she eyed the pile of shoes on the floor, praying she could find two size-six pumps, preferably the same color.

“An accountant won’t allow you extra deductions for looking great,” he commented as she pitched shoes right and left, trying to match up a pair of Via Spiga pumps.

After finding the second elusive shoe, she looked up at her husband. “Sorry, Matt. This tax man is a new case.”

She thought he muttered something about her being the case as he turned around and stalked down the hall toward their Dumpster of a kitchen. God, she hoped there was some coffee and a couple of bagels left in the fridge—or that he wouldn’t think to check until she was gone. Jamming her feet into the pumps, she ran a quick comb through curly brown hair and made her getaway.

Four in the afternoon in Miami was rush hour, but then the same could be said at four in the morning if you were driving on I-95. Convertibles with tops down and tanned halter-topped drivers with their hair whipping in the wind vied with leather-clad bikers racing up the wide highway. Both weaved in and out like demented triggerfish, changing lanes in front of semis who blasted them with deafening horns. Since her favorite uncle, Declan Ballanger, was an over-the-road trucker, Sam shared the semi-drivers’ irritation. She’d made numerous cross-country runs with him while she was in high school and college. The money had helped her pay tuition.

She was late and far exceeding the speed limit in her—or rather, Matt’s—sleek little Mustang. She had to admit the ride was pretty neat as she cut off a carload of college kids who should’ve been home studying and took the exit leading to Miami Avenue where she headed south, then angled east to Winchester’s posh building.

She paid an obscene amount at the underground parking garage and searched for an open space. Just as she was about to give up and park illegally in a crosswalk, a car pulled out. The guy riding her fender since she’d entered the deck squealed his brakes to keep from hitting her as she waited for the SUV to back carefully out of the tight space. Sam resisted the urge to give the guy behind her the finger.

“Jerk, get your own space.” She expected him to pass her and continue his search, but he just sat behind his darkly tinted windshield in a beat-up Olds that looked long overdue for the junkyard. When the soccer mom was gone, Sam executed a neat turn into the narrow space and jumped out of the car. The elevator was halfway to the other side of the deck.

“Should’ve worn flats,” she groused to herself, hiking down the opposite side of the long aisle. She hadn’t gone more than a dozen car lengths or so when she heard the sound of the Olds’ tires’ squeal as it came up behind her—fast. She whirled around and saw the crazy nut aiming directly for her! Should’ve worn joggers! Sam threw herself onto the hood of a shiny new Town Car and rolled over the side a second before the Lincoln’s front fender crumpled like tinfoil when the Olds sideswiped it.

The Town Car lurched sideways, almost crushing her between it and the Chevy truck parked next to it. Sam jumped on top of the pickup bed and started a game of leapfrog from car to car, trying desperately to get to the elevator as the Olds backed up for another pass. If the heels hadn’t been a splurge for her even though they were on sale, she wouldn’t have bothered to stuff them in her handbag after pulling them off. But she’d be damned if she’d loose a pair of Via Spiga pumps just because some loony wanted to play dodgem cars!

Shoes in, .38 snub nose out. She always carried the small Smith & Wesson on retrievals. But since the job she’d met Matt on had run them both afoul of the local Russian mob, she carried it everywhere now. She felt the fillings in her teeth loosen when the Olds bashed against the little Miata she was balanced on. “A thirty-story office building. It’s near quitting time, but does anybody walk out of the friggin’ elevator or drive by?” she muttered, jumping onto the roof of a much more substantial Dodge Caravan. “Damned yuppies all work overtime!”

Sam flattened herself to aim at the attack vehicle when it again backed up for another pass. She grinned when the passenger window rolled down. “Come to mama,” she crooned, drawing a bead on the big hairy fist holding a Glock out the window. Before he could fire, she did. A yelp of pain followed. As the Olds sped away, she only caught the first four figures of the letter-number combo on the plate. Even that was obscured by mud.

She drew a shaky breath when she heard the big engine’s noise fade in the distance. “Bet he doesn’t pay his parking fee.” But she’d also bet even if the video camera got a clearer shot of the plate as it busted through the wooden crossbar, it would be bogus. Still it wouldn’t hurt to check. She might get lucky.

Yeah, Ballanger. And you might win the lottery, too.

Sam slid off the dusty roof of the Caravan and started to limp toward the elevator. Suddenly she heard the sound of an engine coming up the ramp behind her. It couldn’t be. No, thank God, it wasn’t. A sweet little red Corvette driven by an elderly man barely tall enough to see over the wheel turned the corner and crawled past her. She leaned against the side of an old Buick and took a deep breath.

“Damn.” She looked down at her clothes to inspect the damage. It could be worse. She could be dead, she reminded herself as she started to fish the shoes out of her handbag and replace the gun.

When another car whined down the incoming ramp, Sam jerked her head up, recognizing that particularly powerful old engine. “The chutzpah of some people,” she muttered, diving behind the Buick as a shot grazed her thick mop of hair, then smacked into the wall behind her, dislodging a nasty chunk of concrete.

The Olds was back for a second try.

Chapter 2

This time the driver was doing the shooting. She could tell the shot had passed from the far left side through the passenger window. After she’d put his pal out of commission, he was apparently taking no chances, leaning toward the right of the Olds. If she stayed where she was hiding, he could smack into the car and crush her between it and the wall.