Deadly Deceptions (21 page)

Tucker grinned gently at my expression. “You're thinking too much again,” he said.

I wanted to smile back, but I couldn't quite make the grade. “I guess it's no big deal,” I admitted. “It's not as if I'll be their new stepmother or anything.”

Tucker didn't say a word. He laid his sandwich down, though. Looked away, taking a sudden interest in the calendar tacked to one of the cupboard doors.

I figured it would be a good time to change the subject.

“Maybe you ought to get some sleep,” I said quietly. “I have an appointment, but you can crash here if you want.”

He turned back to me, but his gaze dropped to the Glock before rising to meet mine. “No rest for the wicked,” he said, his voice a little gruff. “I didn't get a chance to run the stats on this gun. If it's illegal, I'm going to have to confiscate it—permanently.” He pushed back his chair, stood and set the pistol on top of the refrigerator. “In the meantime, hands off.”

As if I couldn't get to it if I wanted to. I did an internal eye roll. “Whatever,” I said.

He came to stand directly in front of my chair and leaned down so we were practically eyeball to eyeball. “I
mean
it,” he said. “If the serial number checks out, I'll teach you to shoot. If it doesn't, I don't want your fingerprints all over the thing.”

Something just in back of my stomach twitched, and paranoia hormones flooded my system. I hadn't fired the Glock, but I'd certainly handled it.

“Promise,” Tucker insisted, still leaning, although now it was more mouth to mouth than eyeball to eyeball. His breath made my lips tingle.

I promised, albeit reluctantly.

He kissed me lightly, then straightened, but he was still within easy range.

I fought a strong temptation to unzip his jeans and delay his departure for a while.

He stepped back. Smiled down at me. “Don't touch the gun,” he said.

I grinned up at him. “Is it loaded?” I asked.

“For bear,” he said. And then he kissed the top of my head, cleared the remains of his breakfast from the table and left.

I waited until I heard him descending the outside stairs before following to lock the door behind him and put the chain on.

Then I just stood there for a while, uncertain what to do next.

I decided Dave ought to have a walk, and found the leash. Went through the whole process of unlocking and unchaining the door again.

By the time Dave and I got back to the apartment, it was almost time for my shooting lesson at the range. I decided the sundress probably hadn't been the best choice, and swapped it out for black jeans and a lightweight turtleneck of the same somber hue. All I needed to complete the cat-burglar look, I thought, assessing my reflection in the mirror over my bureau, was a stocking cap.

I'd been hoping Justin would come back with the ghost report on Greer's whereabouts, but he didn't show, and neither did Gillian. I filled a water bowl for Dave, made sure he had plenty of kibble, spread some newspapers on the floor and vacated the premises.

 

M
AX
S
UMMERVALE
was waiting with a smile when I showed up at the indoor target range in Scottsdale. I automatically checked his ring finger, which was bare and as tanned as the rest of his body. Not that you can always go by that, because married guys can be tricky. My dead ex-husband, Nick, for example, had taken his wedding band off about a week after we got back from our honeymoon, claiming he was afraid of catching it on something and peeling the skin off like carrot parings.

As if you could do that tapping at a computer keyboard or punching in numbers on a cell phone, which was about as close to physical labor as he ever got. Nick was a wheeler-dealer real estate kind of guy, and he always worked in a suit and tie.

God, I was naive back then.

“Ready to shoot?” Max asked, picking up a pair of safety goggles and a set of orange-and-black earphone-style hearing protectors.

Suddenly I flashed on Jack Pennington, sprawled dead on the floor of Greer's entry hall, and I must have gone a little pale or something, because Max tilted his head slightly to peer at me.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, injecting a shade more perkiness into my tone than firing at a paper figure of a man really warranted.

“It's not unusual to be a little nervous the first time,” he said, and his hand rested lightly, unobtrusively and very briefly against the small of my back. When I stiffened, he untouched me pretty fast. “Shooting, I mean.”

I looked at Max and noticed a faint blush along the upper part of his neck and his lower jaw. He was capable of embarrassment, then. Probably not the sly type. I decided I liked him.

“Lead on,” I said.

“Are you interested in target shooting as a hobby?” he asked, opening the door to a kind of locker room, with a long panel of glass, hopefully bulletproof, separating it from the actual range. Beyond it was a row of aisles, with the requisite paper target at the end of each one. There were a few shooters popping away at them, the sound muffled but unmistakable.

“Self-protection,” I said. “I don't have time for hobbies.”

Max opened a door, waited for me to pass through ahead of him. “I believe you mentioned yesterday that you don't own a firearm.”

I do,
I imagined myself confessing,
but it's on top of my refrigerator at the moment, and I promised my boyfriend the homicide cop that I wouldn't touch it until he made sure it was legal. I bought it from a guy in a souvenir shop, you see.

“No,” I said, surprised to find that the lie, small as it was, bothered me a little. Maybe I was losing my touch.

Skepticism flickered in Max's dark blue eyes. “I see,” he said.

I willed myself not to blush, but it was too late. I tried to get past the uncomfortable moment by changing the subject. “How did you wind up in this business? Teaching people to shoot, I mean.”

He grinned, closed the door behind us. A pistol waited on a counter a few feet away, looking cold, black and ominous. “Not everybody needs lessons,” he said. “A lot of cops come in to practice—competitive shooters, too.” He paused, sighed. “I've been around guns all my life. My dad was a state patrolman, and he had me popping cans and bottles off sawhorses as soon as I was big enough to hold a revolver. Once I'd graduated from college, I went into the army and served with the military police. From there, it was the FBI.”

Tucker had been DEA until very recently, so it wasn't as if I'd never met a federal agent before, but I was impressed in spite of myself. Max was an
impressive
man, exquisitely fit, self-possessed, obviously intelligent. Not to mention good-looking. “You don't seem old enough to be retired,” I said. I'd pegged him at thirty-five, tops.

“I was injured,” he told me, handing over the ear protectors and goggles.

The words jarred me.
Everybody has a history,
I reminded myself, putting on the gear and forcing myself to step up to the waist-high counter where the pistol lay. Seeing it up close and personal made my heartbeat accelerate, and not in a pleasant way. The Glock hadn't affected me, beyond what tension one might expect to feel when handling a deadly weapon, but this one brought back a rush of vivid and horrific memories. It was like the semiautomatic used to murder my parents.

I trembled a little.

Max moved in behind me, put his arms loosely around me and guided my hands to the pistol. A sensation like static electricity rushed through my body with such intensity that I almost expected my hair to stand up. Was it the gun? Or was it Max's close physical proximity?

“This is easy,” Max said, close to my temple. “Relax.”

I trembled a little more. “Okay,” I said shakily. It's hard to describe, but I felt as though I might literally be expelled from my own skin, like a grape squeezed hard, and never find my way back in.

He chuckled, and the sound vibrated through me, through all the passageways hollowed out by the electricity and the strange sense of coming untethered from that place where my essence and my physical being connected. “Easy,” he repeated.

He showed me how to make the paper target move, using a button on the floor under the counter. It was creepy, the way the man shape rushed toward me when I stepped on the button, but I understood the reasoning behind it. Your average assailant won't stand still and politely wait for you to shoot him. He—or she—is a lot more likely to rush you instead.

If you're going to shoot, you'd better mean it.

I don't remember much about the first few minutes of that lesson; I know Max fired off a couple of shots before placing my finger on the trigger. I pulled, when the time came, and I was shocked by the way it made me feel. I'd expected revulsion, but I
liked
it, liked the kick of that pistol, the grim sense of power it gave me.

Max eventually stepped back, though I knew he was close by. Like Tucker, he seemed to take up more than his fair share of space in close quarters. I was more aware of Max than of the target, but I couldn't have admitted that to myself at the time.

He showed me how to reload, how to work the safety and then left me alone to practice.

I stepped on the floor button, made the paper man zoom forward, then backward. I riddled him with bullets, taking a primitive satisfaction in the
thwup-thwup-thwup
sound as I fired.

When target-man suddenly morphed into a bloody, grinning specter, I knew I was seeing Jack Pennington. A soundless scream swelled in my throat when he glided rapidly toward me, as though he, like the target, was suspended from a roller in the low ceiling.

Sweat slickened my palms, and the pistol slipped out of my hands and clattered to the floor. Thank God it didn't go off on impact.

Jack was within inches of me, splattered in blood and gore, when Max hurried in, retrieved the pistol from the floor and set it back on the counter, then took me by the elbows and turned me around to face him.

“What is it?” he asked. “What's the matter?”

I couldn't speak for a moment. That scream was still stuck in my throat. Was the
thing
that had been Jack Pennington behind me, looming, ready to pounce? I was too scared to look. In fact, I'm not sure I wouldn't have sagged into a heap if Max hadn't been holding me up. I did manage to tear off my ear protectors and my goggles and fling them aside…just before I leaped right out of my body, rushing through total darkness at dizzying speed, then landing—
somewhere—
with an impact that should have left a crater.

I was conscious of being—well,
me.
I could see, though I didn't have eyes. I could feel, though I didn't have hands or feet or any of the anatomical parts that should have been there. I was pure energy, intensely focused, acutely aware and totally terrified.

Where was I?

In a dark room that smelled of cigarette smoke, cheap cosmetics and stale popcorn. A computer monitor provided the only light, the screen saver a dizzying spiral. As far as I could tell, there was no one around. I tried to move toward the computer, and the instant I made the effort I was flying backward through space again.

“Ms. Sheepshanks?” Max prodded anxiously as I slammed back into the body I had involuntarily abandoned seconds before. He towed me into the locker-room area, walking backward himself, sat me down on a bench, got me a paper cup filled with cold water from a nearby cooler, held it to my mouth.

My stomach pitched, and I was drenched in a cold sweat. For a moment I thought I was going to pass out. But after a few sips of water I began to feel minimally better.

“What just happened here?” Max asked.

I was wondering the same thing.

I couldn't tell him what I'd seen—Jack Pennington's ghost racing toward me on the target rollers—or about my impromptu out-of-body experience. He'd never have let me within a city block of the shooting range again if I had.

I pushed my hair back from my face. Managed an unconvincing smile, though I couldn't bring myself to look directly at Max. I was still shaking uncontrollably. “I might be coming down with something,” I said to the row of lockers across from the bench. “Flu, maybe.”
Or possibly I'm insane.

Max went to refill the paper cup at the cooler, returned and handed it to me. Sat next to me, but not too close. “I know about your experience in Cactus Bend,” he said quietly. Still disoriented, I wondered if he was referring to my parents' murder, when I was five, or the more recent nightmare in the same town, when I'd nearly been shot at close range. But I wasn't about to ask.

I was on overload as it was. I didn't need more information to process.

“Part of the background check?” I inquired between sips of cold water, proud of how calm and together I sounded. Slowly I was shrugging back into place inside myself—hooking up the nerve endings, blinking my eyes, tapping one foot just so I'd know I could still command my own physiology.