Bait (16 page)

Ana grabbed Louise's arm and pointed. “There they are!”

Four pairs of eyes fastened on Maddie and Jon. Four mouths opened wide. Then the Creative Partners staff shouted, cheered, clapped, and broke ranks with the rest of the waiting crowd to storm the new arrivals, surrounding them on all sides, dealing out handshakes and hugs and exclamations indiscriminately.

“We got the account! I can't believe we got the account!” Louise enveloped Maddie in a suffocating hug. “Maddie, you did it! Oh, my dear, I think I'm going to cry!”

Louise, of all of them, had known how precarious the company's position was. She handled the bookkeeping. Feeling her own eyes unexpectedly stinging, Maddie hugged her back warmly. Louise was wearing her usual polyester pants and a matching striped blouse, and she smelled of lotion, soap, and just faintly of the hairspray she used to keep her short, unruly silver curls under control. She smelled just the way Louise always smelled, and Maddie found it unexpectedly heartbreaking.

Ana was next, flinging her arms around Maddie as soon as Louise released her.

“This is so cool!” As exuberant as a puppy, Ana squeezed Maddie so hard she could almost hear her ribs cracking. “Does this mean you can keep me? Say yes. Please say yes!”

Wincing slightly, Maddie hugged her back anyway. Ana the Ever-enthusiastic would be a great permanent addition to the team. If only ...

“We'll talk on Monday,” Maddie promised, and managed a smile.

Judy's hug was more brisk. She and Herb had worked for Creative Partners since long before Maddie had come on the scene, and Maddie knew that they had worried a lot about the agency's future over the last few months.

“I've already contacted Maury Pope with
BusinessMonthly.
There'll be an article about this in the next issue. Maury was all excited when I called him. He said our landing the Brehmer account is just huge.” A rare grin transformed Judy's rather severe face. “And the timing couldn't be better. Matthew”—Matthew, entering his senior year of high school, was her second son; her oldest, Justin, was a rising sophomore at the University of Missouri—“just told me he wants to go to Vanderbilt.”

She made a comical face, and Maddie rolled her eyes sympathetically even as her stomach twisted.
Judy needed her job....

“Rising tides lift all ships,” Herb said, giving Maddie a hearty slap on the shoulder. “Way to go, Boss.”

Boss.
There it was again. Despite everything, Maddie felt that warm little glow, followed by a pain, sharp and swift as the stab of a knife, right in the region of her heart.

“You guys. You're the best,” she said, and to her horror felt herself tearing up as she looked at them.

“Oh, don't cry,” Ana protested. Louise promptly burst into noisy tears, which made everyone laugh and hug her and enabled Maddie to get her emotions more or less under control. By this time, the rest of the crowd greeting arriving passengers had pretty much dispersed, so at least they were spared an audience for the love-fest that followed.

TEN MINUTES LATER, the group was standing en masse in front of one of the silver carousels in baggage claim, waiting for Jon and Maddie's luggage to be disgorged. Multiple flights had apparently landed at approximately the same time, so the warehouse-like space was crowded. The sounds of excited conversation and squeaking cart wheels and the thud of suitcases being dumped on the conveyor belts overlay the rumble of the moving carousels, making conversation difficult. “You feel like going to dinner to celebrate?” Jon asked Maddie in a louder than normal voice as they watched the various bags tumbling out through the chute.

The lump in her throat got bigger. Maddie shook her head. “Not tonight. I'm too tired.”

“Yeah, well, you've had a rough twenty-four hours,” Herb, overhearing, observed sympathetically. Jon had filled the group in on everything, apparently, and as soon as they'd stopped exclaiming over the Brehmer account, they'd started exclaiming over what Ana called “Maddie's mugging.”

“Of course you want to go on home and relax,” Louise said. “You enjoy your weekend, and then we can celebrate on Monday.”

“Yeah, you can take us all to lunch.” Jon grinned at Maddie. “Somewhere expensive.”

“With a wine list,” Ana added, and the group made enthusiastic noises. Drawing on some deep reservoir of strength she hadn't even known she possessed, Maddie pinned a smile to her face and did her best to pretend to be cheerful.

“Sounds like a plan,” she said. Then her familiar small black suitcase appeared, bumping into view in a sea of others. Rescuing it and securing her briefcase to the top of it gave her a chance to steel herself for what was to come.

“Herb's going to drop me off.” Jon had retrieved his suitcase, too, and it trundled along behind him as they all headed for the exit together. “You need a ride home?”

Maddie shook her head. “I drove. My car's in the lot.”

“You want some of us to come home with you?” Ana asked, frowning at her. “In case you're scared or something?”

“I'm not scared.” Now there was a lie if she'd ever told one, Maddie thought, but the kind of scared she was wasn't anything that the presence of Ana or any of the others could fix. “The way I look at it is, what happened last night was just one of those things that happens sometimes in big cities. Now that I'm back home, I'll be fine.”

“You sure?” Louise asked, surveying her a little anxiously. Afraid of what Louise might be able to read in her face, Maddie concentrated on looking serene. “You can sleep over at my house if you want.”

“You can sleep over at
mine.
” Jon gave her an exaggeratedly lascivious grin.

That did make her laugh, and she was grateful to him because of it.

“Thank you both, but I'll be fine.”

They reached the pair of sliding glass doors marked “Short-Term Parking.”

“We're here,” Herb said, and everyone stopped near the door. “Maddie, can we at least walk you to your car?”

“Well, I guess you could—except I'm taking a shuttle to the long-term lot. Think I'm going to pay forty dollars to leave my car in short-term parking overnight? No way.” Heart aching, she smiled at the assembled group, all of whom were looking at her with varying degrees of concern. “Would everyone please stop worrying about me? This is
St. Louis.
I'll be fine.”

They all seemed to feel the force of that, because their faces relaxed.

“All right, then.”

“Have a good weekend.”

“See ya.”

“Don't think we're not going to talk about that raise on Monday.”

Jon, bless him, struck just the right note with that last comment, and the cheery smile with which she bade good-bye to them wasn't quite as much effort as it could have been. Maddie lifted a hand in farewell and watched them turn away, with the lump in her throat now so big it felt like an egg, then turned away herself and headed off toward the exit marked “Long-Term Parking,” where she knew from experience that a shuttle made periodic trips back and forth to the distant lot.

She walked through the sliding glass doors. It was necessary to go through one more set to actually get outside, but she stopped in the twenty feet or so of dead space between the doors and waited. Five minutes later, she turned and walked back inside the terminal.

As she had expected, Jon and the others were gone. Maddie felt her shoulders sag as she realized that in all probability she would never see them again.

Friends. Family. A place to belong. She had worked so hard to acquire them all. That she had to give them up just when she was finally on the verge of getting everything she had always wanted didn't seem fair. It
wasn't
fair. But such, as she had already learned way too many times before, was life.

So cry me a river,
she thought sardonically as her throat started to tighten up again.
It won't change a thing.

She sucked it up one more time.

With her suitcase rolling along after her like the faithful dog she'd always wanted and never permitted herself to acquire, Maddie hurried toward the taxi stand.

She'd had plenty of time to think on the plane ride from New Orleans. And the conclusion she'd reached had been inevitable from the first second she'd awakened to find the man in her hotel room.

What had happened wasn't an accident, and it wasn't a mistake. She would be a fool to believe either.

Deep in her gut, she'd known the truth all along: They'd finally found her.

If she wanted to survive, she was going to have to cut and run.

TEN

She had been preparing for this day for seven years, but that didn't make it any easier now that it had finally come. Hopping into a taxi, Maddie directed the driver to take her to the Galleria, one of the area's busiest malls. It was Friday night. There would be lots of action at the mall. Lots of action made it easier to lose a tail, which she hoped she didn't have. But it was possible. It could be. It might be.

It would be foolish to assume that no one was following her. Worse, it might even be fatal.

The Galleria was swarming with shoppers, just as she'd expected. On autopilot now, following a script she'd composed in her head long since, Maddie made her way into Dillard's, bought some clothes, basic gear like jeans and T-shirts and sneakers and underwear, things she hadn't brought with her on what was to have been an overnight trip. She bought a suitcase, too, a nondescript-looking tapestry bag that was larger than the little black one that had served her so well. Since she was still able to use her credit cards, paying was not a problem. Maddie signed the charge slip, looked down at the signature, and felt her throat constrict.

Her father's words again. She could almost hear him saying them, could almost see him just the way he'd looked the night it had all started to go so badly wrong, when she had tried to stop him from going on what he'd called “an errand” for Big Ollie Bonano. He'd been—what? Maybe fifty? Beefy and balding, with deep horizontal worry lines cut into his forehead, he'd looked a decade older. She'd been in bed in the cheap little apartment they had rented by the week, but she had heard him go out and had run down to the car in the oversized T-shirt and panties she had worn back then to sleep in, not caring that it was a tough neighborhood, that someone might see. He had rolled down his window to talk to her. But even as she begged, she had known he was already in too deep. There was no way he could have said no to Big Ollie, he owed him—them—too much money. Gamblers who can't pay make good fish food, as Big Ollie's lieutenant Charlie Pancakes had put it. Or good errand-runners.

Though he'd never meant for it to happen, her father had gotten her caught up in the mob's sticky web, too. In the end, he hadn't been able to get out. But she had. With both hands, she had grabbed an opportunity that had presented itself and had run for her life.

Just like she was going to run for her life now. Because that hit man in New Orleans had come for her. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. She'd been hiding for seven years, and now they'd found her. The terrible thing about it was that an innocent woman had died in her place.

Thinking of that other Madeline Fitzgerald, Maddie felt sick to her stomach. Guilt over her death would be something she would carry with her for the rest of her life. But there was nothing she could do to change what had happened now. It was over. It was a done deal. The only thing she could do in the aftermath was try to save herself. And to do that, she needed to disappear.

At least, this time, she knew the drill: Lugging her purchases, she went into the nearest ladies' room and changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, stuffing the clothes she'd been wearing along with the remainder of the new things she'd bought into the old suitcase, which went inside the new suitcase so that, when they started looking for her, they wouldn't find the old one abandoned at the mall. She crammed in her briefcase, then tucked Fudgie in a little more carefully. Thank God she'd brought him with her.

If she wanted to stay safe, she was never going to be able to go back to her apartment—her
home—
again.

At the thought, she found her eyes stinging once more.

Get over it,
she told herself fiercely, and splashed her face with cold water until the incipient tears went away. Then she set about changing her appearance as much as possible, brushing her hair flat with water, tucking it behind her ears, slicking a dark maroon lipstick she'd just bought at Dillard's on her lips, clipping big gold hoops from the same source to her ears. She tied a bandanna around her throat to hide the bruise there, and was done. Finally she left the ladies' room and headed for the part of the mall opposite where she'd come in. Taxis cruised there, as she knew from experience. She was dressed differently, her hair was different, she looked different. More like a college student than a businesswoman. Unless a tail had dogged her every step—and no one had, she was as sure as it was possible to be of that—he wasn't going to recognize her unless he got up real close and personal. Not in the mass exodus of shoppers streaming out of the mall now that it was closing time. Not in the brief period of time it would take her to step out into the open and grab a taxi.

“Where to?” the driver asked as she pulled open the back door of the cab.

Sliding inside, Maddie ignored the tightness in her chest and told him.