Return of the Dixie Deb (13 page)

“First time I’ve seen a fish farm.” She flicked a ladybug off a sandwich wrapper and gathered up his trash to stow it in the sack.

“Yeah, it’s similar to the salmon hatcheries out West.” He got up to chase a piece of plastic that had blown away. “You’ve got to admire her drive. Well, I think I need to get back to work before I blow this job, too. I’m going to stop in at the café on my way back and see if the paper’s come in. Maybe there will be some good news. What’s on your agenda this afternoon?”

“Oh, I’ve got big plans.”

She smiled.

****

He froze in his tracks. The sight of a bra flapping in the breeze had that effect. Along with the white cotton underpants dangling in the foliage of a young redbud.

“Oh, hi.” Jan stopped in the cabin doorway to wring out some sopping denim. “Did you find a paper?”

Mac watched dumbly as she walked to a scrub pine reaching up to drape her jeans over a low limb. She had put on the tea-length dress from their last robbery. The sun behind her backlit her long legs and rounded butt through the thin cotton.

“The paper?” She turned with a smile, cocking her head.

He inhaled. It seemed he was supposed to make a response. Nothing came out.

Clearly, there was only Jan under her dress. As naked as the day she was born. She was coming toward him, her breasts bouncing in rhythm to her stride.

“So are we still making the front page?” She pulled the paper from under his frozen arm and walked back to the cabin. The clean smell of soap and fresh laundry engulfed him as he watched the sway of her hips.

“Yeah.” He swallowed. At least, his vocal chords were working again. There was something he had to tell her. If he could think of it.

She took a seat on the step and opened the paper, a furrow in her brow as she bent over to read it.

He stopped, mute in front of her, watching the shadowed curves her plunging neckline revealed.

“I see they’ve upgraded Jake’s condition to serious, but stable and taken him out of the critical care unit. These pictures of us are awful, thank goodness.” She held up the paper toward him.

His heart rate was slowing. Breathing was back.

In the photo Jan’s face was hidden under the trailing, lacy brim of her hat. Wearing make-up, pearls, and dark glasses, she was miles away from the half-dressed wood nymph on the steps in front of him. His own picture showed the head and shoulders of a dark-haired man with sunglasses, his hand helping to obscure his jaw line.

Subconsciously, he rubbed his face now evincing more than just a twelve o-clock shadow since his shaving kit had bit the dust back in Titusville.

She folded the paper. “I decided to wash my clothes since I’d been living in them the last few days. Hopefully, they’ll be dry by morning.” She looked out to where her bra was trailing in the breeze.

It seemed she hadn’t been sending him a signal.

“Oh, sure.” That sounded intelligent. He wondered what her bra size was.

“Maybe you’d like to wash your stuff out. I’m just going to sleep in this tonight while everything dries.” She tugged at the sleeve of her dress.

Too bad the dress wasn’t wet too. Clinging to her, all the way down to the hidden darkness between her…

He concentrated on a pair of squirrels running up the trunk of a nearby tree.

“You could sleep in your overalls.” She tilted her head evaluating his Maggie Mays’ Fish Farm outfit.

Nothing under his uniform but him?

He’d be sleeping on his stomach tonight.

****

Jan wadded up pieces of newspaper and poked them into the kindling. Flames ignited pine needles, giving off their aroma. She wrinkled her nose as she pushed in some of the broken slats from the wood box and shut the stove door. She heard the door open behind her.

“I thought I’d start a fire. There’s a breeze picking up outside.” She turned to face him.

“Got my washing hung up.” Mac came over to sit at the table. “Hopefully, it’ll be dry by morning. While I’m in town with Maggie tomorrow, I want to pick up some toiletries for us. I’m feeling like a backwoods hermit.”

She smiled and leaned down to run a hand through his hair. Mac sat motionless as her fingers were caught in its tangled thickness. With his unruly hair and three-day beard, he looked even less like a white-collar government employee.

“I’ll give you a list of some things—comb, deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste. Gosh, this is exciting. Do we have enough money? Everything I had was either in my purse or luggage back in that parking lot.” She took a seat beside him.

He nodded. “We’re all right ’cuz Maggie is paying me by the day. I think she’s had experience being poor herself.”

“What about being out in public tomorrow? Do you think anyone will recognize you?”

“I don’t know how hard the Bureau is pursuing this. There are better pictures they could have used if they wanted us captured. My feeling is they’re trying to do this as quietly as possible before the media catches on to their part in setting up the robberies.”

“What are you going to say if you get a chance to call?”

“I’ll leave a message. I don’t want to get anyone live on the line trying to trace the call. The tip line is monitored so someone will hear it eventually. I’ll say we were set up. The keys were locked in the car accidentally or we would have been killed. We had no connection with the explosion. I’ll ask them to publicize a way we can turn ourselves in and get this resolved, take polygraph tests or whatever it takes to clear our names.”

She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “So maybe in a day or two, things will be back to normal?”

“Yeah, the Bureau needs to get to the bottom of what’s really going on. Someone almost killed Jake.”

In the stove, twigs popped and cracked. Somewhere outside an owl hooted.

“Smells good,” he said.

“Our little cabin in the big woods.” Jan got up and pushed her chair away to go in the bedroom, returning with the quilt and pillows. She spread the quilt on the old rug, dropped the pillows on it and lay down on her side, propping herself up a pillow.

“Join me?” She patted the blanket. “If we don’t have an entertainment center, we can still watch the fire in the grates.”

“Ah, sure.” Mac got up to move slowly down beside her, moving his pillow to the other edge of the quilt and lying down to face her.

“This must be real different for you.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“From life in the big city.”

“Yeah, I did work in the New York City office, but originally, I’m from rural New York State. I grew up in Lake Claire in the Adirondacks region. It’s a little resort town, no one has ever heard of, about two thousand people.”

“So how did you get to the F.B.I.?”

“I joined the military after college. Came back and tried law school for a while, but it wasn’t a good fit. I was too restless after the service. I needed something with a little more action so I applied to the Bureau.”

“Do you still have family back home?”

He paused a moment, studying the pattern on the quilt.

“Not now. No.”

“Were you ever called Mike, or has it always been Mac?”

“No, it was Michael when I was little. But then in junior high, I went with Mac. It’s what the guys on the team called me. A lot of things were happening about that time and I wanted a change. Sounding tough or grown-up seemed important back then.”

He rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling.

“Dad was from the Lake Claire area. His family didn’t have much so he joined the army and spent some time in Europe. When he came back, he worked his way through college on the G.I. Bill. It was his dream to be an art teacher. After he married Mom, he did go on to teach art in one of the county high schools.”

“Are you artistic?”

“Me?” He snorted. “I couldn’t draw a name out of a hat. My sister had the talent—sculpture, painting, photography. When I was fourteen, our mom passed away. She’d had trouble with blood clots and one in her lungs killed her.”

“I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

“It was hard. Dad couldn’t support us and pay the hospital bills on a teacher’s salary so he left teaching to work in a machine shop.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, but he did keep doing his artwork on the side. Sketching nature, making crafts for bazaars, festivals, those kinds of things, working with my sister. Anyway, at fourteen, I thought Mac sounded way more macho than my given name.”

“What’s wrong with Michael?”

He grimaced. “It’s Michael A. McKenzie. My dad was inspired by his tour of duty in Italy.”

She looked blank.

“Think of the David, the Pieta, the Sistine…”

“Oh, wow! Michelangelo?”

“Michael Angelo McKenzie. Yeah, and my little sister was Mona.” He stopped and looked at her.

“Lisa?”

“You got it. Crazy, huh?”

“It’s amazing what well-meaning parents can do to their children.”

“Oh, come on. Jan is at least simple.”

She looked at him and shook her head.

“It’s not just Jan unfortunately.”

“Janice? Janet?”

“I was named for my grandmothers. I was the first grandchild and they’d been waiting quite a while. Janine and Thalia. Mom and Dad put it together to make Janith.”

“That’s kind of pretty. It could have been worse. You could have been Thaline.”

“Yeah? So my full name is?”

Janith Thimmons
. He thought about it and grinned.

“Sounds like you have a lisp?”

“You think? Anyway that’s why I go with Jan. Just plain Jan.”

“Works for me.”

“At least we’ll know things to avoid when we name our kids.” She yawned and stretched, pushing herself up.

Beside her, he hesitated, then returned her smile.

Chapter Eleven

“Wow, this is better than Christmas.” Jan grabbed the plastic sack he offered dumping it out on the table. “Toothbrushes, toothpaste, yes, dental floss!”

“Glad it’s a hit.” Mac leaned on the doorjamb, watching her enthusiasm.

“A comb, real shampoo and conditioner, new underwear. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. All the best the drug store had to offer.” He grinned at her as he came on in and sat down to watch.

“Wow, gum, breath mints.” She opened the container, shook out a few, and popped them in her mouth. She offered him the box.

“No thanks.” He took a piece of gum. “At least being on the run means I haven’t been able to afford cigarettes.”

“Good, they’re a nasty habit. My dad has emphysema.”

“Yeah. I smoked in the military, then picked it up again when I was dealing with some things last year.”

Dealing with things? Like Miss Supermodel?

“Lip gloss.” She uncapped it, outlined her lips, and rubbed them together. “Strawberry. It’s amazing how much you regret not having the little things when they’re gone. I was wishing we’d kept all the little samples from the motels.”

“Miss the Major’s?”

“Probably more than you. You slept on the floor the last night we were there.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“So, fill me in. How did everything go? Did you have a chance to make the call?”

“Yeah, I did it when Maggie was settling up in the business office. It’s a commercial seafood vendor. They finish raising the trout and retail them to restaurants and stores. I walked over to a strip mall nearby, found a pay phone, and then went shopping.”

She laid down the comb she’d been using and took a deep breath. “So what did you say?”

“I left a detailed account of our side of events. I asked them to publicize a way we could contact them privately and turn ourselves in.”

“Turn ourselves in. Doesn’t that sound grim?”

“Yeah.” Mac grimaced and looked down, chewing his lip. “I may have goofed up too while I was there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I took the time to make another call. I got the number of the hospital in Atlanta where Jake is being treated.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“I was connected to the floor where the burn unit is. I said I was his brother. I know enough about Jake to be able to fake it. The woman at the desk said his condition had been upgraded to serious.”

“That’s better.”

“Yeah, it’s an improvement. But then she asked if I wanted to speak to the F.B.I. man who was visiting him. I said no, not to bother him and hung up. I’m sure she meant Whittaker.”

“You think they might get suspicious?”

“If the gal I was speaking to passes along word that Jake’s brother called…” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, Jake’s an only child.”

“Sounds like our kind of luck. Did you just get back?”

“A couple hours ago. It’s a three-hour round trip. One more bit of news. Maggie had the radio on in the truck.”

Her stomach caught. Mac looked serious.

“There was a news item. They’ve found the delivery truck from Titusville we abandoned.”

She made a face.

“I’m not sure how much it makes things worse for us, but it’s probably only a matter of time till they make the link to the stolen pizza delivery car so I’m glad I got it out of sight.”

“Oh, right.”

“Anyway, I helped Maggie with the afternoon chores when we got back. She’s a fascinating character. Strong enough to do what a lot of men couldn’t. She always wanted her own business. Took an inheritance, bought out the original owner, and then expanded over the years. So tell me, what was your day like?”

“Less exciting than yours. I helped with the lunch crowd and then Etta let Rochelle and me clean out the pantry and re-organize it. I took a walk down by the river and saw a blue heron. Is there anything else new about us or the Titusville robbery?”

“Nothing more. I scanned the papers at the drugstore, but I didn’t see anything in them. I’ll pick up the local paper tonight. Right now, I’m going to head up to the restroom and work on this beard. I’ll be a new man the next time you see me.”

“I’m glad I’m not hogging all the goodies.”

She gathered up the things scattered on the table.

He paused in the doorway and looked over at her. “Oh, I managed to find something for myself.”