Rapid Fire (8 page)

Chief
Parry wanted someone to babysit her.

Thorne was
under orders to keep her away from the Henkes case. She’d bet on it.

Maya
crossed her arms tighter, wishing she could tell Thorne to go to hell. But
common sense wouldn’t let her. In reality, this might be her only chance to get
back into the game, and she might even be able to convince him to listen to her
theories.

Whatever
she and Thorne had—or hadn’t—shared, he was an outsider in Bear Claw, just like
her. They weren’t bound by Henkes’s politics or popularity. Maybe, just maybe
she could get him on her side.

She
didn’t want to work with him, didn’t want to be near him and feel the shameful
memories or the burn of an attraction she’d thought had died years ago. Didn’t
want to risk the temptation, or the possibility of sliding back into old,
destructive patterns. But at the same time, she’d be damned if she let the
Mastermind take more innocent lives, damned if she let him drop another cloak
of fear across Bear Claw City.

Was her
own comfort level more important than the innocents she was sworn to protect?

Of course
not.

“Okay.”
Maya uncrossed her arms and hooked her thumbs over her green lizard belt. “But
on one condition.”

Thorne
regarded her, eyes unreadable. “Which is?”

“You give
me the opportunity to present my case against Wexton Henkes. You have to
listen, really listen without any of the preconceived notions the chief and the
other locals bring to the table.”

“And if I
don’t buy into your theory?”

Maya felt
a spurt of relief, of victory laced with the knowledge that she was riding the
fine edge between success and disaster. “We’ll cope with that if and when it
happens. Do we have a deal?”

She held
out her hand to shake on it, only then realizing the foolishness of the move.
But before she could pull back, he said, “Yes, we’ve got a deal,” and took her
hand.

The touch
of palm to palm was electric. Powerful. More damaging than it ought to have
been. His eyes darkened, the mismatched pupils widening until there was more
black than hazel, until they seemed to look straight into her.

Her heart
lodged in her throat, and for a mad, crazy minute she wondered what he saw.

Wondered
how many of the stories about him were true.

But
before she could ask, he pulled away and strode to the door, expression
shuttered. “Bolt the door behind me. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning and we
can get started.”

And then
he was gone. His presence echoed in the air, on her skin, in the beat of her
heart. The neat condo seemed suddenly empty, though her brain teemed with
reawakened memories of the High Top Bluff Academy, where the female students
had followed Thorne with their eyes, then whispered when he was past.

She set
the lock and chain with numb fingers, though she told herself she had nothing
to fear in her own home. Almost without conscious thought, she crossed the
living room and passed into the kitchen, which was separated from the rest of
the open first floor by a waist-high breakfast bar topped with green, blue and
orange mosaic tiling. Cabinets lined the other three sides of the small area,
some beginning at the parquet, others hanging above the yellow tiled
countertop. She opened the first of them and pulled out a glass bottle most of
the way filled with a lovely clear liquid.

She
touched the bottle to her cheek and rolled the label across her lips.

The
bottle was an old friend. Eleven years she’d had it. Eleven years it had gone
unopened in her cabinet, set front and center like a sentinel. A symbol.

But not
anymore. Now the seal was broken, had been for months.

She set
the bottle on the breakfast bar and dropped into one of the stools, so she
could fold her arms on the tile mosaic, press her cheek to her folded hands,
and stare at the label, where a handsome man stood in the full warrior’s
regalia of another time. His sandy hair was long and his muscles bulged across
his chest and calves. His eyes were shaded beneath the brim of a flipped-up
faceplate, but now, as always before, she swore he winked at her through
mismatched eyes.

Want
kindled hard and hot in her belly, the want of a man, of a drink. Of oblivion.

The phone
rang.

Maya
screeched and jumped, shoving back from the breakfast bar and nearly tipping
the stool in her haste as she saw the bottle and realized what she’d nearly
done.

She
grabbed the phone automatically, and licked her suddenly parched lips. “Hello?”

“I saw
you climb up on the roof with him.”

The
computer-modulated voice sent a sharp, ferocious slice of cold through her
midsection, where it tangled with the sick roil of temptation. She tightened
her fingers on the phone. “How did you get this number?”

“That’s
not the right question,” the voice said, and tsked with disappointment. “I’ll
only answer the right question.”

“What is
the right question?” she asked, heart pounding into her throat as she tried to
find her psych specialist’s calm where there was no peace to be had.

“Not that
one,” he said, and for a moment she thought he’d hung up. But then his voice
said, “I saw him at your place this evening, too. Handsome fellow. It’s really
too bad.”

She
cursed herself for playing along when she asked, “What’s too bad?”

“Look
outside your window,” the voice said.

And the
line went dead.

Chapter
Five

Thorne
jingled his keys in his hand as he crossed the underground garage, the noise
providing a metallic counterpoint to his footsteps. His personal ride—a
decommissioned police Interceptor that was neither cool nor sexy, but that went
like a bat out of hell and never quit on him—sat where he’d parked it, looking
undisturbed.

His gut
tightened and a spurt of adrenaline warned him that all was not well, but he
couldn’t see a damn thing wrong with the car.

“It’s the
woman,” he said aloud. “She’s what’s wrong.”

Or more
accurately, his response to her was a problem. An unacceptable complication. It
was bad enough he felt the gut-punch of attraction to a woman he was looking to
beat out of a job. Worse were the flashes he’d gotten the two times they’d
touched—once at the ranch and once again just now, when they’d shaken on the
“deal” Chief Parry had ordered him to offer.

He didn’t
want to babysit a suspended cop while he worked on a case the Bear Claw force
hadn’t managed to put to rest in nearly nine months’ worth of full-time task
force effort. And he sure as hell didn’t want to babysit this particular cop.
Not when touching her triggered the moments of prescience he’d fought so hard
to block.

It was
ironic, really. She’d been the catalyst for him learning to block the visions.
Now she was breaking down those hard-won barriers, and she didn’t even know it.

Some of
his so-called cop friends in Wagon Ridge—including Tabitha—had pressed him to
tune in on the flashes, to use them to solve cases. They’d wanted to turn him
into some sort of freaky psychic detective, a sideshow or a conversation piece.
They hadn’t understood that the visions weren’t like on TV, where some poor
schlub put his hands on a knife and instantly saw the perp’s face in glowing
Technicolor.

No, it
was messier than that. More painful. Less sure. Each flash reminded him of the
days he’d spent captive in Mason Falk’s mountain stronghold, reminded him of
the drugs and the electric charges the cult leader had used to torture him. To
break him. To force him to disclose how much the High Top Bluff PD knew about
the cult’s planned attack on the town.

He hadn’t
given up the names or dates, but he’d been broken nonetheless. His mind had
been injured, his link between now and then had cracked, letting something else
bleed through. Something that seemed like ESP, but felt like pain. Like death.

Like
murder.

Thorne
cursed and started the Interceptor, which responded with a double-throated roar
of raw power. “Not again. I’m not going back there again.”

He’d
fought the flashes before. He could fight them again.

He gunned
the engine and sent the dark green cruiser out of the parking garage with a
chirp of heavy-duty, high-speed tires. The violence simmered just beneath the
surface of his soul, sending a fine tracework of electricity along his skin.
Images of death and destruction crackled at the edges of his mind, and he
cursed as he swung the Interceptor out of the garage, onto the empty street. He
hit the accelerator, needing to outrun the memories—

And a
figure lunged from the building and hurtled in front of his car.

It was
Maya, waving her hands and shouting.

“Damn
it!” Thorne stomped the brake, and when that wasn’t enough to stop the heavy
vehicle in time, he twisted the wheel and sent the car behind her, up onto the
sidewalk, then back down onto the road. The rear end shimmied and then cut
loose in a vicious skid that had him cursing and fighting the wheel.

A
delivery truck rounded the corner of the city block, taking up the lane he
needed. Thorne saw the driver’s face, saw that impact was inevitable.

He let
the steering wheel spin through his fingers and braced for the crunch.

A
nanosecond later, the Interceptor whipped back into the right lane and slid to
a stop, barely bumping up against a navy blue mailbox as it came to rest, well
clear of the delivery truck.

The
engine stalled and Thorne’s world went silent.

His heart
didn’t beat. His blood didn’t flow. His chest didn’t rise. There was absolute,
chilling stillness in his head.

Like
death.

Then
everything came back at once. His heart rocketed in his ears and the delivery
truck’s air brakes released with a loud hiss as the guy drove on, maybe because
he was on a tight schedule, maybe because he couldn’t be bothered to help.

Or maybe
because he saw that Thorne already had someone coming to his rescue.

Maya
yanked open the door. “Are you okay?”

Her brown
eyes were wide and scared, her fine-boned features pinched, as though she’d
seen a ghost.

Or nearly
created one.

“What the
hell were you thinking?” Thorne bellowed. He yanked off his seat belt and
lunged from the car so he could go toe-to-toe with her when he shouted, “I
could have killed you! Hell, you could have killed me! What sort of idiotic
stunt was that?”

It was
then that he realized how physically small she was. He topped her by nearly a
foot, and was probably double her weight. Her stature was almost childlike, but
there was nothing immature about the fire in her eyes, or the way the soft
curves of her breasts rose and fell as she breathed heavily and scowled up at
him.

“I’m not
the idiot who was doing fifty on a city street. What is your problem?”

“You have
no idea,” he replied cryptically, and stepped back, creating a chasm of empty
space between them and bringing a sense of coolness where there had been heat
moments before. He jammed his hands in his pockets. “Why the hell are you down
here jumping in front of cars when I specifically told you to lock yourself in
the condo?”