Sneak And Rescue
Unlike Winchester after her interview, Reicht didn’t dismiss her. She would’ve preferred that he had when he launched into a panegyric on Homeside and how happy poor Farley would be once he was tucked safely in the marvelous facility. When he got warmed up, the doc really loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Finally, she glanced down at her watch.
“Sorry, Dr. Reicht, but I have another appointment shortly. Gotta run.”
“You will make Farley your first priority, I trust?” he asked intently.
“You bet I will. I’ll call if I need any more info. Thanks.”
As she rode down on the elevator, Sam considered the weirdness of the day—a pair of psychos tried to kill her, a snotty pencil pusher managed to snub her while enticing her with a hefty fee, the shrink played on her sympathy for a poor crazy kid. Did the thugs in the Olds have any connection to Farley’s case? Doubtful, but Sam never assumed anything.
And something niggled at her about the shrink, too. He put on a nice-guy veneer, the complete opposite of Roman Numeral, as she’d dubbed Winchester. Still Reicht was a cipher. Of course, he was a psychiatrist and that might explain the creepy feeling he gave her. Some of them were as loosely packed as their patients. She made a mental note to have Matt check out Homeside while she was searching for Farley.
The last thing Sam Ballanger ever intended to do was to deliver a client into a worse situation than the one she snatched him from.
“Yeah, that’s right, a 1980 Jaguar XJ6.” Sam ticked off the license plate number to an old friend at Metro-Dade Police Headquarters. “Bright maroon. Oughta stand out like a black tux in a room full of brown shoes.”
As she tapped a pencil against the edge of a front tooth, waiting impatiently for the cop to check the computer records, Matt watched his wife. Sam arched her back against the wreck of a swivel chair she insisted on keeping when she moved in. In spite of her small one-hundred-ten-pound body, the springs creaked precariously when she tipped it sharply backward. Her bare feet were propped up on the cluttered desk in her office and she was wearing a ratty old pink chenille bathrobe that he teasingly called her “Linus blanket.”
He eyed the ugly bruise on her shin and the scrapes on her cheekbone, worried but knowing there was no way short of putting her in one of those custom straitjackets she used on retrievals that he could keep her safe. They argued about her dangerous job almost as much as they did about his aunt’s money. Correction. She argued about the money. He argued about her safety.
Matt glided into the room and began massaging her shoulders while she leaned forward and jotted down information. What was a guy supposed to do with a bullheaded female like Sam? She wouldn’t even take his name—unless he agreed to “really let me in the family by accepting Aunt Claudia’s offer.” She’d signed Sam Ballanger on their marriage certificate. The woman had the instincts of a first-rate blackmailer—or a criminal defense attorney.
Sam hung up the phone and laid her head against his flat abdomen. The man even had a sexy navel. “Mmm, that feels good,” she murmured as he bent over her for an upside-down kiss. “Even better.” She held his head in her hands and returned the kiss for a moment before spinning her chair around and considering the notes she’d scribbled on the page.
“Any leads on your lost boy?” he asked, then couldn’t resist adding, “Or on those two goons who tried to play crash-test dummy with you?”
“Strike out on the Olds, but I figured it would be. Bogus plates. I asked Pat to keep checking. Doubt he’ll turn up much on them, but he just might on Elvis Scruggs. I did come up with where Farley and Elvis are heading. A vintage Jag stands out almost as much as a flying saucer.”
“And a guy named Elvis doesn’t?”
“Depends on what part of the country you’re in. Nobody remembers him but thanks to my hacker pal, Ethan Frobisher, we have a trace on cash flow to back up the runaways’ destination. Seems Farley’s been using several of Daddy’s credit cards. Hotels, meals, ATM withdrawals in Tallahassee, Nashville and Louisville. The last was in some hick burg in southern Illinois. Then I used that info you so kindly dug up for me on the Net.”
She tossed him the printout of Space Quest conventions he’d pulled off the Internet for her. One was circled. “Big one in St. Louis. Starts tomorrow.”
He shrugged. “Your crazy job’s going to get you killed. I don’t know why I aid and abet you.”
“’Cause you can’t get enough of my bod,” she said, grinning as she stood up and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“You’re the trained health professional, Ms. Paramedic. What do you think?” he asked, prodding her with an erection that always grew like Pinocchio’s nose when she got within a dozen yards of him.
Sam rotated her pelvis against him and chuckled. “I think if I don’t take care of this immediately, you could suffer a serious…backup.”
“Speaking of backing up…” he said, turning her around while nibbling small kisses across her eyelids and down her nose to her throat. He backed her through the door and down the hall to their bedroom.
They were so engaged in the hot exchange neither saw the obstacle until their feet were tangled in it. They went tumbling across the threshold and landed on the carpet. Somehow Sam managed to come out on top. She always did. Matt looked down at what they’d tripped over—the ruins of her good black suit.
“As long as we’re down here, might as well make the ride worthwhile,” he said, rolling her onto her back.
Chapter 4
Sam let him pull off her old chenille bathrobe while she worked the snap on his jeans and carefully lowered the distressed zipper. By the time his tongue danced from one bared nipple to the other and back, she had worked the denim over his buns and he kicked the pants away. She arched into his delicate caresses as she buried her hands in his thick black hair, urging him on.
“Talk about steam-cleaning the carpet,” she murmured. “I’m gonna have rug burns…again.” She didn’t sound particularly concerned.
“It serves you right,” he growled as he felt her hands play along his back, down to curve around his butt. “Hussy.”
“Hunk.”
“Sammie, oh, Sammie,” he murmured, gliding inside the sleek wetness of her body.
Was it always this good? Only with Matt. Always with Matt. Sam wrapped her legs around him as he moved in her, slowly, gently. She could feel the springy hair on his chest abrade her sensitized breasts, making her nipples tingle and draw into even harder little points. “I’ll…give you…exactly one hour…to cut this out,” she whispered breathlessly.
But when he started moving faster, she bit his ear and said, “An hour, remember? I can’t last…if you don’t…ahhh.”
“Who says you have to last?” he asked with a wicked chuckle, feeling her body spasm around his. Matt concentrated on control. Dames did have the advantage when it came to coming. And his little Sammie had to be the world’s champ.
When he renewed his sensual assault with slow precision, Sam took a moment for the world to stop spinning. Then she took control. She was little but she hadn’t earned a black belt in judo without developing some serious moves of her own. With one heel and a lift of her hip, she rolled them over until she was on top, breathless, grinning triumphantly down at him.
“How…the hell…do you…do that?”
“In judo, it’s called mat work.” She chuckled, running her hands proprietarily across his hard pectoral muscles and tracing the narrowing pattern of black hair in its downward descent.
“We gotta…work out…more often.” Now it was Matt’s turn to be breathless. The view inspired it. He looked up at the most sensational pair of knockers he’d ever seen, standing high and firm above a slim waist and flared hips that perched neatly over him. Oh, my, yes…yes! Her sensational body, especially the breasts, had been the first thing he’d noticed about Sam Ballanger the day they met.
The day she kidnapped him at gunpoint.
But as she worked her magic on him, kissing and caressing, moving only the way she could move, memories of that incident faded. He felt the wild exhilaration building. When she tossed her head back and cried out his name, he let go with everything in him.
Sam lay prostrate over his much larger frame. When her heart returned to some semblance of a normal beat, she raised her head and looked over at the clock. “You’re off, Granger. Only fifty-four minutes.”
He came up from the carpet with her in his arms, growling, “Then I’ll just have to practice more.” With that he tossed her onto the bed and dived after her.
When they’d finally exhausted each other, they lay side by side on the pillows. Sam reached up and smoothed one devilish black curl away from his forehead. She always liked this time afterward. The quietness. Just pure relaxed enjoyment, being together with no words necessary. Raised in a big boisterous family, Sam was good at arguing, always had a quick comeback. She’d had to, as the only girl and the eldest of seven Ballanger children. But she’d never learned flowery talk. Didn’t want to. And with Matt she didn’t need to. If only he would come to his senses about Aunt Claudia’s money, everything would be perfect….
Pushing that disturbing thought away, she said, “I should get back to Pat about Elvis. He may have something for me by now.” She didn’t move.
“Yeah, I guess you should.” He didn’t move, either, even though he had two deadlines tomorrow. Just because he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for his exposé of Russian mafia activities in Miami didn’t mean he could rest on his laurels. Besides, the Pulitzer Committee didn’t meet to decide the winners for four months yet.
They lay quietly until the annoying beep of the bedside phone broke the spell. Matt reached one long arm behind him and groped for the accursed thing, then pressed Talk and grunted, “Granger here.”
Sam recognized Patowski’s cigarette-roughened voice on the line but waited until Matt handed the phone to her. “Speak of the devil and up he pops,” he whispered grumpily, climbing out of bed and grabbing his jeans. She admired the view of his bare buns while he slid worn denim up his long legs and stalked off toward his office.
“Whatcha got for me, Patty?”
“Don’t call me Patty,” Patowski groused, starting their usual ritual of ethnic insults. “I’m a Polack, you’re the Mick,” he added, beating her to the punch.
Sam rolled off the bed and walked into her office, seizing a notepad and pencil as he talked.
“Your pally Elvis P. Scruggs—by the way the P doesn’t stand for Presley—it’s Peter—he had an interesting childhood. A local bad boy from grade school on in some podunk township in the panhandle. Took a joyride in the sheriff’s patrol unit, snuckered to the gills on moonshine.”
“Guess that might tend to piss off the local constabulary,” Sam said dryly.
“Especially since the sheriff was his father.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Old man was a real hard-ass. Wanted to charge him with GTA but since he was still a minor, it didn’t stick. Sealed court records. I had to do some pretty fancy footwork to come up with the bits and pieces I got.”
“That your subtle way of saying I owe you, Pat?”
“You damn betcha you do.”
Sam knew he was right in spite of the recent help she and Matt had given him breaking the Russian mafia murders. As an officer on the Miami-Dade PD, she had been blamed when a hot dog rookie on the force had been killed. Patowski had gone to bat for her, knowing it had been the kid’s fault, not hers. Sam had still been cashiered, but by then she had been ready to move on anyway. Too many of her fellow officers had blamed her for the botched takedown. Besides, her retrieval business had proved to be far more lucrative.
“What’s our boy Elvis been up to lately?” she asked Pat.
“He did some time in a pretty rough juvvie facility up there, then dropped off the radar screen. No record of him until he turned up here a few months ago.”
“Usually that kind of bad actor rides the down bound train straight to hell, but Scruggs has no other records as an adult you could locate?” she asked.
“Maybe he went out of state. Out of the country. Or, maybe wrestling gators in that detention facility scared him onto the straight and narrow. Who the hell knows? Oh, one thing—you said he was twenty-one?”
“That’s what I got from my client, who had him investigated. Not very well, it seems.”
“He could pass for it, but the sucker’s twenty-eight if the records from Tallahassee are accurate. Birth dates aren’t something they usually screw up.”
Sam hummed, doodling on the notepad, talking to herself. “Wonder what went on for those seven years?”
“Track him down and find out, I guess. That’s what they pay you the big bucks for, isn’t it?” Patowski asked sourly.
“Yeah, Patty, it sure is,” she replied cheerfully. “Thanks. I owe you.” Before he could curse at her again, she hung up. “Looks like I’m headed for St. Louis.”
Standing in the doorway, Matt listened to her musing. “I’m going with you,” he said.
“Nix on that. I have work for you here.”
“I have an editor who sort of expects me to turn in stories by deadline. The Herald pays me for that.”
“Then you obviously don’t have time to drive to St. Louis with me.”
She had that gotcha look in her eyes. “Look, Sam, are you sure this kid’s just a Space Quest fan run amok? I mean, he’s not a psycho or anything, is he?” His wife was sometimes selective with what facts she provided him.
“Just a poor geek. Look at his picture, for crying in the night.” She pulled the snapshot from the clutter on the desk and offered it to him.
“That’s a Confederation Ensign’s insignia,” he murmured.
“You know about this Space Quest junk?” she asked, amazed.
“It isn’t junk. It was a great series—still in syndication. And the films have made millions. Five spin-off shows since it premiered.”
Sam burst out with a guffaw before she could stop herself. “You were a Spacie!” she exclaimed.
His look became at once thunderous and defensive. “The term is Spacer and yes, I was a big fan. Anything wrong with that?”
Sam was hard put to find a glib answer. “I never got the chance to find out. All we ever had on television at our house was baseball and boxing. Mostly, I worked part-time jobs growing up. Not much time for television.” Now she was the one sounding defensive, so she shifted the subject. “But dressing up in those crazy regalias and going halfway across the country to conventions. Kinda weird, if you ask me.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with attending a Spacer Con. I always thought it would be fun.”
“Then why didn’t you go?” she asked, puzzled.
Matt cleared his throat, then looked her in the eye and confessed, “Aunt Claudia wouldn’t let me. She didn’t want me doing anything that’d make me more of a geek than I already was.”
“You? A geek?” That was the very last thing she could imagine her six-six sexy husband ever being. “Get outta here!”
Matt could see the humor in the situation as he looked at her amazed expression. “My height was a bigger number than my weight in junior high. I wore braces and needed correctional glasses—though at least they weren’t as ugly as these.” He looked down at the askew horn-rims on Farley Winchester. “I can identify with the kid. Sometimes other galaxies can hold a real appeal.”
“Maybe just being born with a silver spoon doesn’t make up for other stuff,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Your parents died when you were nine, right?” He nodded. “And Aunt Claudia popped in and out of your life like Auntie Mame?”
“Why do you think I went to private boarding schools all those years?”
She sighed. “I thought all Beacon Hill kids just did. Dumb, huh?” She walked over to him and laid her head against the steady beat of his heart. “I’m sorry, Matt.” Before he could reply, her head shot up and she looked him straight in the eye. “But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on Aunt Claudia’s offer. Ten K a month just to stay married isn’t anything to sneeze at. Think of it as her penance.”
His expression turned grim. “Episcopalians don’t do penance. And even if they did, she wouldn’t. Forget the money. We’ll never agree about it.”
“You’re right about that, but don’t think I’m gonna give it up,” she said stubbornly. Feeling him tense in anger, she paused. “Okay, let’s give that topic a rest for a while.” She began tracing small circles on his bicep with her fingertips. “About doing some checking for me…”
“What do you need?” he asked, resigned. With her out of town, he’d be bouncing off the walls as soon as he finished his current assignments.
“This whole thing smells kinda funny. If Farley withdrew twenty large from one of his daddy’s bank accounts, why are he and his pal Elvis using Winchester’s credit cards instead of spending the cash? Even if the kid’s spacey, er, a Spacer, a guy like Scruggs has to know how easy it’ll be to trace them. Besides, according to the doc, the kid’s crazy, not stupid.”
“Good point.” Matt rubbed his chin, considering. “You said something earlier about the shrink giving you bad vibes. Maybe I’ll check him and your ‘Roman Numeral’ guy out while you’re gone.”
“You’re the greatest—even if you were a geek before I met you,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Oh, yeah, about being a geek, I wouldn’t know a Reemulan from a rhinoceros. Fill me in a little about that stuff.”
“Reemulans have pointed ears, not horns. I can explain what you need to know about the Confederation of Planets, their allies and their enemies.” He began a lengthy discourse on the warlike Reemulans and their logical, peaceful cousins, the Vulcants. Both civilizations felt mere Earthlings were both technologically and ethically challenged. “Then there are the Klingoffs—”
“Are they anything like jackoffs?”
“Sort of, yes. Barbaric, living by a primitive warrior’s code but highly advanced in technology. Everyone in the galaxy thinks they’re animals.”
“They the ones who look like they have turtle shells glued to their foreheads?”
“I see you’ve watched a smidgen of the shows.”
“Went to a movie once—on a date. I didn’t get to pick the show,” she retorted. “Never went out with the guy again, either.”
Matt regarded her with a smirk. “Ironically, it’s Earth that first came to understand their culture and accept it. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t make a bad Klingoff warrior woman.” He pulled a volume from the shelf in his office and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said sarcastically, flipping through the color photos and text about Space Quest in its various incarnations. “I can see why the kid’s schizoid. This is weirdsville, but it’ll give me enough background to fake it when I get to the convention. All I have to do is wait for a chance to snatch Farley.”
“Be careful. If Scruggs did hard time, even as a kid, he won’t want you taking away his meal ticket.”
“I always come out on top, remember?” she purred, planting a quick kiss on his mouth.
Sam drove a specially equipped Ford Econoline van, an old model with an engine her uncle Dec had helped her soup up. It could go from zero to sixty in less time than most fancy European sports cars and had been remodeled to serve the nurse-transporting-a-patient cover she used on many retrievals. The paneled back was furnished with a unique set of restraints to hold her “patients” securely while she drove.
Going against Matt’s advice, a frequent occurrence since they’d met, she headed out that night for St. Louis. It would be a long pull and the “Con” as he called it was set to begin the next day. Who knew where Farley and Elvis would head after that? Sam wanted the kid safely in her grasp while she could still reach him. Maybe they were saving the twenty K to skip to Mexico, for all she could figure.
Clutching a twenty-ounce paper cup filled with thick black coffee, heavy on the sugar, she headed up I-95 and hit the Florida Turnpike. Dawn was a faint glow on the horizon when she felt the blowout yank the steering wheel from her grasp. Cursing, she quickly corrected, grateful for her uncle’s training, then pulled to the side of the road. Wonderful. A stretch so isolated she could dehydrate before Road Assistance found her.
With no time to waste, she climbed out of the van and opened the back doors. This was hardly the first flat she’d changed, but dammit, it was costing her time! Sam wondered why the hell the tire had blown. She’d checked them carefully, always did before she drove. “Probably some litterbug tossing a beer bottle out his window a few miles back,” she snarled, placing the jack under the rear bumper.
Before she could start working the jack, headlights appeared on the horizon. Although she’d been careful to pull well off the highway, Sam had been drilled by her uncle Declan to always be wary of dozing motorists when the flat was on the left side of the vehicle. The inbred precaution saved her life. Still squatting, she glanced up to see the car veering directly toward her.
Sam dropped the jack and flung herself across the berm into the marshy weeds of the ditch.
Chapter 5
The car grazed her van, leaving faint dark smears on the white paint. Not a direct hit, but the speed of the encounter rocked the Ford’s suspension. By the time she climbed from the muddy ditch, pulling briars and dry leaves from her clothes, the car had vanished into the distance. She couldn’t even tell what make or model it had been. Too busy leaping for her life.
“What the hell is it about me and cars lately?” she muttered, thinking about the incident in the parking garage. Did someone want to stop her from retrieving Farley? She watched the horizon for lights as she walked to the front of the van and pulled out her cell. Dead zone. Big surprise considering she was smack in the middle of nowhere. May be best not to call Matt and worry him. And what could she tell Patowski or any of her cop buddies?
She hadn’t a clue about the car, other than that it wasn’t the Olds. That ancient rust bucket couldn’t have moved that fast without the driver putting his foot through the floor-boards and breaking a leg. And it had been an indistinct light color. The paint deposits on her van were dark.
“Damn, it’ll cost a bundle to get this baby repainted.” She would add the expense to Winchester’s tab, but having a quality paint job done took time and aggravation. Just in case the jerk decided on another crack at her, she dug her snub nose .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it into her belt before returning to the jack.
“Maybe I’m being paranoid. Just some drunk or dumb kid showing off for his buddies,” she said. But all the while she fixed the flat, she kept an eye on the highway.
Sam caught a few hours sleep that night in a cheap roadside motel. By late afternoon the following day, she was past Atlanta, heading toward the Tennessee line. Scenery was great and traffic light. She hummed along with a Cole Porter tune on her CD player, watching a big Caddie coming up behind her. Fast.
“Who does that jerk think he is, Mario Andretti?” she muttered.
The highway wound its way through some very mountainous terrain with steep drop-offs and sharp turns. Definitely not the place for a big luxury sedan to be doing ninety. “Your funeral, buddy,” she said as the Caddie pulled abreast of her. She slowed to let him pass as they approached a beaut of a curve.
But he didn’t pass. Instead the black sedan started to crowd her, veering dangerously over the line into her lane. A quick glance at its right side showed scrapes and flecks of white paint. “Shit!” she gritted out, punching the accelerator.
All the wiggle room available to her right was a couple of feet of berm and then a flimsy guardrail. The drop-off below was a minimum of fifty feet. She could easily have outdistanced the heavy car on the uphill grade with her specially modified engine if not for the wicked curve coming up much too fast. But the Caddie driver’s intent was clear, even though the tinted windows hid him from view. This bozo was out to finish the job he’d begun the preceding day.