Falling Awake (37 page)

“No he won’t,” Isabel said quietly, simply, her eyes never leaving Ellis’s face.

Amelia laughed. “Of course he will. He understands that he needs me, don’t you, Vincent? I’m the only one who can give you the right dose of the CZ-149.”

“Scargill is fast,” Ellis said. “He can probably take me out. But you will be dead before that happens so it won’t make much difference to you. Your only hope is to put down the gun.”

Scargill gave a raw, weary, utterly humorless laugh. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a three-way standoff.”

“Looks like,” Ellis agreed. He raised his voice slightly. “This would be a very good time.”

“No.” Amelia took a step back. Her face worked with fury as she struggled to come up with a way to get out of the impasse. She yanked Isabel with her. “No, you’re not going to do this to me, Cutler. I’m not going to let you win, not after all I’ve gone through to get this far. I’m leaving now and I’m taking Isabel with me. Don’t move. Do you hear me? Don’t move or she dies.”

Amelia-Maureen was fraying fast around the edges, Ellis thought.

Clank, clank, clank.

The muffled rumble of a heavy, rusty chain lift shuddered across the park. Simultaneously a spiraling maze of small yellow and white lights lit up the foggy twilight. The majority of the bulbs that festooned the old roller coaster had broken or burned out long ago but there were enough left to illuminate the carcass of the old thrill ride in a strange, ghostly glow.

“What?”
Amelia’s voice was shrill with rage and bewilderment. Clearly unnerved, she jerked her head around to stare over
her shoulder at the strange apparition that had appeared. For an instant she seemed confused and distracted by the clanking noise and the otherworldly light.

Down, Isabel,
Ellis thought.
For God’s sake, get down.

As though she had read his mind, Isabel was already in motion, seizing the opportunity. She dropped like a stone to the ground, vanishing from sight on the other side of the counter. Amelia reflexively let go of her arm rather than be pulled off balance.

“Damn you, Cutler.”
Amelia whipped back, gun swinging toward Ellis.

He pulled the trigger at the same instant that Vincent Scargill did.

Amelia Netley collapsed without a sound.

The roar of the guns filled the night, louder than the clanking of the roller coaster.

Ellis watched Scargill.

“Take it easy,” Scargill said. He put the gun down very carefully on the counter. Then he wiped his forehead. “Thanks. Wasn’t sure if you believed Isabel a minute ago when she said that I wouldn’t kill you.”

Ellis lowered his pistol. “Amelia didn’t believe her but I did.”

Isabel scrambled to her feet. “Are you two okay?”

“Yes.” Relying on his good shoulder, Ellis planted one hand on the counter and vaulted through the opening to get to her.

Scargill followed him, moving much more slowly and awkwardly. He went to stand looking down at the very still body on the pavement. A visible shudder went through him.

Farrell appeared from the dark, misty space between a teacup ride and the carousel.

“Everything okay?” he asked, checking faces anxiously. “I heard you give me the order to start the roller coaster but then I heard two shots.”

“Farrell,” Isabel whispered.

“Your timing was perfect,” Ellis assured him, switching off his phone.

The
clank, clank, clanking
stopped.

Ellis listened to the silence and felt the breathless anticipation that meant the roller coaster train had reached the summit of the first, high lift hill and now hung there waiting for the irresistible force of gravity to take effect.

Isabel threw herself into his arms. He wrapped her close and hard against him.

There was a grinding, metallic screech of rusted track and ancient steel wheels as the cars went over the top. Or maybe that was his heart, Ellis thought, breaking free of the dark place deep inside where he had kept it safe all these years.

There was a dazzling, intoxicating
whoosh
and a thrilling rush of excitement as the roller coaster cars plunged into the first, glorious turn.

Isabel tightened her arms around him.

No going back now.

i
sabel flopped back against the pillows, exhausted. “I can’t believe I’ve got three men sleeping under my roof tonight. This is definitely a personal best for me in terms of my social life.”

Ellis came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his lean waist, his hair damp from the shower.

“But only one man sleeping in your bed,” he reminded her.

She smiled, enjoying the sight of him standing in front of her in her bedroom; relishing the knowledge that he was safe.

“True,” she said.

“Could have packed Dave and Vince off to a motel,” Ellis said, untying the towel.

“Not after all they’ve been through. Dave is dealing with the
closure that he got tonight regarding his sister’s death, and poor Vincent is still ill from the effects of the CZ-149. I couldn’t send them away to a lonely motel room. Besides, they both needed you.”

“Me?” He pulled aside the covers and got in next to her. “I didn’t do anything except tell them what to say to the cops and give them both a couple of beers after we got them back here.”

“You talked to them.” She turned on her side and propped herself up on an elbow. “You let them talk. That was important. You’re a role model for both of them whether you like it or not.”

“Not,” Ellis grumbled. He leaned back against the pillows and put one hand under his head. “Got no training as a role model and no aptitude for the job, either.”

“Au contraire.”
Smiling, she bent her head and kissed his mouth. “You’re a natural. No wonder Lawson is always after you to return to Frey-Salter to do special seminars for the new recruits.”

“Huh.” He looked at his watch, which he still wore, and sat up again, shoving back the covers. “Speaking of Lawson, I’d better turn off my phone and yours, too. I know him. As soon as he’s finished doing damage control on that end, he’ll call me back, wanting to ask more questions. We won’t get any sleep at all.”

The official story had been put together by Ellis and Lawson via a phone call while they all waited for the emergency vehicles to respond to the scene at the amusement park. It was simple and reasonably straightforward: While employed at Frey-Salter, Inc., Dr. Amelia Netley, using the name Maureen Sage, had engaged in high-level corporate espionage. She stole some very dangerous
experimental sleeping medications. She was also suspected of killing Katherine Ralston, presumably because Katherine had stumbled onto the scheme.

Following the murder, Maureen disappeared, assumed her new identity as Dr. Amelia Netley and landed a position at the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research. Ellis and Vincent Scargill, agents of the corporate security firm Mapstone Investigations, had been sent out to gather evidence. Isabel had assisted in the investigation.

Tonight, fearful that the investigation was closing in on her, Amelia kidnapped Isabel with the goal of exchanging her for an airline ticket and guaranteed safe passage out of the country. Ellis and Vincent, together with the help of Dave and Farrell, had staged a rescue operation.

“Think the local cops will buy that story you and Lawson concocted?” Isabel asked, watching Ellis turn off his phone.

“Sure. It’s the easiest way to clean up the mess.”

She wrinkled her nose. “So much easier to let Mapstone Investigations, with its murky connection to the feds, take responsibility.”

“You got it.”

“Think Lawson can keep his agency out of it?”

“Lawson has managed to keep himself and the work he does at Frey-Salter out of the public eye for over thirty years. What happened at the amusement park tonight is just a small glitch as far as he’s concerned. Could have been a lot worse and he knows it.”

He turned off the ringer on the phone beside the bed, hit the lights and got back under the covers.

Unable to suppress another of the little quivery sensations that had plagued her since the events in the amusement park, Isabel drew her knees up under the sheets and wrapped her arms around them.

“Ellis?”

“Yeah?” He reached for her, pulling her down against him. “What’s wrong? You’re shivering.”

“I feel the same way I did after we found Gavin Hardy’s body. Exhausted but very, very wired.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“The excitement doesn’t seem to have affected Dave and Vincent. I think they were asleep before I turned out the hall lights.”

“They’re young,” Ellis growled. “At their age, they can sleep under any circumstances. Give ’em a few years. That’ll change.”

She smiled against his shoulder. “You’re not that much older than they are.”

“Sometimes it feels like centuries.” He stroked her, his hand gliding down her side to her hip. “I have, however, discovered one thing that makes me feel about twenty-three again.” He nibbled on her ear. “Hell, even better than I ever did at twenty-three.”

“Really?” She curled her fingers in the crisp, curling hair on his chest. “What’s that?”

“You.” He tightened his hold on her. “In fact, you make me feel a lot of things I had forgotten I could feel. Things I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel. I love you, Tango Dancer.”

“Ellis.”

Joy, as radiant and sparkling as the rarest of jewels, shimmered through her. It drove out the cold residue left behind by the violent events of the evening. She reached up to catch his hard face between her palms. “I fell in love with you months ago, soon after I started analyzing your dream reports. Couldn’t you tell?”

“I hoped all that advice you tacked onto your reports meant that you felt something. Why do you think I moved out to California?”

“You moved out to the West Coast because of
me
?”

He smiled wryly. “I had a long-term plan to get to know you, see if you felt the same way about me that I felt about you. I wanted to find out if I could be part of your life.”

She was delighted. “You planned to court me?”

He cleared his throat. “I never thought of my plan as a courtship. Not exactly.”

“Of course not,” she said, dismissing that clarification with an airy wave. “You were probably thinking in terms of an affair, right?”

“It did cross my mind,” he admitted.

“You told yourself that you would have an affair with me because anything more than that involved serious risk,” she said gently. “You’ve spent a lot of time and effort avoiding that kind of risk because you learned long ago what it’s like to experience a great loss. Anyone who went through the kind of trauma that you went through when you were twelve is bound to be very, very careful.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “When you love, you take risks.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “But we both know how to do that, don’t we?”

“Yes.” He seemed vaguely amazed by that simple observation. He closed his hand more snugly around her waist. “As I said, I had a plan. But I got distracted.”

“Your shoulder.” She traced the wound with her fingertips. “I know you went through a lot of pain—”

“The shoulder was the least of my problems,” he said. Moonlight glinted on his cheekbones, casting the rest of his face into deep shadow. “The real issue was Lawson and his growing conviction that I had developed a bizarre fixation with finding a dead man. I was starting to wonder if he was right. Maybe I had gone off the deep end. Then you got fired and took off for Roxanna Beach and everything started to change.”

She smiled and arched beneath his hand, loving the scent of him. “I was waiting for you, you know.”

“Just like I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”

He moved on top of her and kissed her until she stopped shivering from the aftermath of violence and trembled with passion instead.

a
fterward, she felt Ellis relax as if his climax had turned off a switch somewhere inside him. She was glad the heated lovemaking had proved to be the tonic he needed to allow him to sleep. Unfortunately it did not have the same effect on her.

She closed her eyes, willing herself to sink into oblivion.

Nothing happened.

She opened her eyes.

“Mmmph?” Ellis tightened his arms around her to stop her wriggling. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t sleep. I know he’s out there. I can feel him breathing.”

“Who? Scargill? Dave? Forget ’em. They’re fine.”

“No, not them. Better let me up. He’s not going to go away. I can’t stand the thought of him just sitting there and he knows it.”

Reluctantly, Ellis released her. She pushed the covers aside, got to her feet, went to the door and opened it.

Sphinx was on the other side. He rose, stalked past her into the room, heaved himself up onto the bed, settled at Ellis’s feet and went to sleep.

Isabel got back into bed.

“Everything okay now?” Ellis asked.

She smiled into the darkness, loving the feel of his arm wrapped around her and the heat of his body enveloping hers.

“Like a dream come true,” she said.

i
found Maureen Sage, aka Amelia Netley’s personal dream log in her car last night.” Ellis lounged on one of the stools in front of the kitchen counter, one hand curled around a mug of freshly brewed green tea. “Got a chance to read some of it this morning. Turns out she was a Level Five herself, but she kept it a secret because she thought it would give her an edge.”

“That was the doc, all right,” Vincent muttered. “She was always looking for an angle.”

Ellis nodded. “Amelia-Maureen was fascinated with what she saw as the potential power of extreme dreaming. She was obsessed with her plan to get control of Lawson’s government-funded dream research program. She went to work for him and saw her opportunity when he was at a bad point in his relationship with Beth. She dazzled him for a while with her expertise in
psychopharmaceuticals, and seduced him. But in the end he canceled her experiments with CZ-149 and then he canceled their affair.”

The kitchen was crowded this morning. Isabel listened to the debriefing with only a small part of her attention. Mostly she was focused on the task of fixing scrambled eggs, toast and soy sausages for three large human males and one big feline of the same gender.