Species (31 page)

Stephen deliberated a moment before responding. “What gives, Press? You sound like you’re going to miss her.”

Press started to reach in the pocket of his shirt for a toothpick, then remembered what Laura had said earlier about sounding like he had a branch in his mouth. He picked at his fingernails instead. “I . . . had respect for her, that’s all. I might not know how she really felt, but I could appreciate the hell of being thrown into a situation you didn’t ask for and having to deal with it. I suppose that’s why I still don’t understand the outcome.”

Stephen gave him a comradely clap on the shoulder. “Look,” he said as he leaned forward, “this may have been a miserable job, but I still enjoyed working with all of you. We had a great dinner and Uncle Sam’s paying for the drinks. Let’s oblige that fine old man and start putting this behind us.” He raised a hand in the direction of the bar. “Waiter, when you have a chance, we need assistance,” he called merrily. “A round of nerve medicine for the table, please!”

“A glass of water will be fine. Or maybe an iced tea,” Dan said as the waiter came over to take their order. “I don’t drink.”

Stephen waved aside Dan’s objection. “Don’t worry, Dan. Tonight you will. And you’ve just told me exactly what to order for you.” He sent a fetching smile in Laura’s direction. “How about for you, Dr. Baker?”

Laura’s fingernails tapped thoughtfully against the tabletop, then stopped. “No, thanks,” she said finally. She turned her face toward Press. “Would you like to dance?”

Press blinked. “Me?”

“No, silly,” Laura teased. “I’m asking your guardian angel.” She gave him a comical roll of her eyes.

Press looked flustered for a second, then uncrossed his feet and stood. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” He offered Laura his arm and glanced apologetically at Stephen, who gave him a sheepish grin and sat back in defeat. On the way to the dance floor, Press and Laura nodded at Dr. Fitch as they passed his table. Concentrating on his drink, the other man saw them but didn’t acknowledge the greeting.

Laura stopped on the dance floor, turned, and stepped easily into Press’s arms. The number from the band was slow and easy, another soft piece of music that fit perfectly with the extravagant, richly paneled bar, abundant fresh flowers and low lighting. He might not care for the music style, but Press grudgingly admitted to himself that the band knew their market.

“So,” Laura said after a while, “do you have family back in the Big Apple?”

Press thought she felt good in his embrace, warm and soft. Holding Laura this close had triggered thoughts of lots of things, none of which had anything to do with family or New York. It took a conscious effort to focus his thoughts and answer her. “Family? Not much. An older sister, that’s all. She doesn’t live in New York though, and my mom and dad are gone.”

“I’m sorry.” Laura tilted her head back to look at him. He’d never seen her eyes this close and found them flecked with bits of green. Even her hair was a surprise; the gentle candlelight lamps around the bar revealed strands of strawberry blond among the soft, shining red. “How about a girlfriend?”

There was nothing joking in Press’s answer. “They don’t hang around very long,” he said. “I’ve got too many secrets.”

“Tell me one.” When he didn’t answer, she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “I know what you are, Press. And what you do. It doesn’t scare me.”

He rubbed her thumb with his own, enjoying the tingles of attraction the touch was causing. “You’re no ordinary woman.”

Laura chuckled and he felt her breath against his jaw; warm and sweet, it smelled like the butter mints in the crystal bowl back at the table. “How did you get into finding people? Were you a police officer?”

For an instant the room shifted out of focus, then Press pushed away the old memories. “No, I was never a cop. My father taught me,” he said at last.

“He hunted people down, too? Like you?”

Press shook his head. “No. He
needed
hunting down. My sister used to send me out to find him before my mother did. It saved everybody a lot of grief.”

“Where was he all the time that you had to go after him?”

Press gave a careless jerk of his head that didn’t fool Laura at all. “Various girlfriends,” he answered. “He was a very traditional guy.”

“Ah. So you went from there to joining the army,” she said, deciding to steer the subject away from family and his less-than-happy recollections.

“It was something to do. I got into finding AWOLs before they got too deep into trouble to get out without ending up in the slammer. People—normal ones, anyway—nearly always follow a pattern. For instance, if they go bowling every Thursday night, they could be halfway around the world, but come Thursday night—”

“They go bowling,” Laura finished for him. Her eyes were veiled in the more dimly lit area of the dance floor. “So for all your ability to find people, you haven’t done very well for yourself.”

He hesitated before answering. “No . . . I guess not.”

Laura’s face tilted toward his, her lips close and warm and sweet. “I wouldn’t want to never see you again, Press.”

Laura’s voice was softer than he’d ever heard it and she moved more snugly into his embrace. She felt so nice, like she belonged there, and Press was opening his mouth to tell her so when something else caught his attention—a woman he hadn’t noticed before, sitting at the bar with her back to the dance floor while she talked animatedly with the young, good-looking bartender. Long and lean, platinum-blond hair spilled down the center of the woman’s back and the loose silk top she wore over skintight black leggings did everything to tease the imagination. He’d seen that hair before . . . he’d seen that
attitude
before.

Press let go of Laura’s shoulder and backstepped, his hand diving into the holster under his jacket to retrieve the SIG-Sauer he preferred to carry in normal circumstances. Laura gawked, then followed as he elbowed his way roughly through the other five or six couples moving slowly across the parquet flooring. With their complaining still burning in his ears, Press grabbed the shoulder of the woman on the barstool and spun her to face him.

“Freeze!”
he ordered, shoving the barrel of the pistol under her chin.

The woman paralyzed in his grip stared at him with wide, brown eyes the color of chocolate. Her face was round and pixielike, her eyelashes and arched eyebrows several shades darker than her obviously bleached hair. Below an upturned button nose, lips the color of overripe strawberries had formed a circle that silently said
I’m-going-to-scream-any-minute!
Reflex kicked in and the semiauto was holstered and out of sight before she could inhale enough to start. “Hey, now!” Press said as loudly as he could manage. “My mistake! No harm done, just a case of mistaken identity, that’s all. Sorry—I apologize.”

The couples on the dance floor had stopped in midstep and the bartender’s face was scarlet with fury; he looked ready to leap over the counter and pummel Press. Before he could, Press swung an arm around the shaking woman and turned her stool back toward the scrupulously polished bar. “Bartender, the lady’s drinks are on me tonight.” He flipped out his wallet, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and tossed it atop the bar. “Whatever she wants, and buy yourself a couple rounds besides. Keep the change.”

“Just a minute, pal,” the bartender said hotly. He was leaning on clenched fists. “Your money’s big, but that doesn’t change the fact that you just pulled a piece on one of my customers. I’m calling the cops.”

“It’s all right, sir.” Before the bartender could reach for his cordless telephone, Laura cut in front of Press and came up with the government identification card that Fitch had given her at the start of the project. “I’m Dr. Laura Baker. This was just an accident, that’s all, the result of too much pressure. The young lady does bear a strong resemblance to someone we were hun—ah, looking for.”

The blond woman was holding tightly to the rail that ran down the edge of the bar, but starting to recover enough to look angry. “Well, for God’s sake,” she said shrilly at Press, “next time, whyn’t you look first, you freakin’ maniac!” She tossed her head defiantly, but there was a glassy, scared look to her eyes that might have been tears. “I need something to calm my nerves. Guy’s ruined my whole evening.”

“Come on, Press. Let’s go.” Laura turned him toward the doorway out of the bar and gave him a little push.

“Sorry,” he offered again over his shoulder as he led the way. Wincing, he saw that the woman at the bar had turned whiny and now seemed bent on detaining Laura long enough to chew her out for Press’s indiscretion.

“My blood pressure’s sky-high,” she complained as she thrust her hand forward. “Feel my wrist—I bet my pulse is two hundred. I don’t feel so good.”

Laura obligingly settled her fingers across the woman’s wrist and checked the second hand on her wrist-watch for a count of six. “Nope,” she told the anxious woman, “steady at about ninety-eight. That’s pretty good, considering you’re consuming alcohol.” She touched a finger to her forehead in a parting gesture. “Thanks for your understanding. Enjoy the free drinks.” She tried to scoot away, but Press’s mistaken target was still bellyaching.

“But he scared me so
bad.
He could have shot me!” The blonde tossed her hair again. “He’s crazy, that’s what he is. I could have had a coronary.”

Laura shrugged and turned away. “Look at it this way,” she said without looking back. She was grinning at Press but she was also a marvelous actress; her voice was unaccountably icy as she walked away. “At least he didn’t squeeze the trigger. You
could
be dead.” She left the woman with her mouth hanging open.

Unfortunately, Press discovered in the hotel lobby that the grin Laura had sent his way wasn’t sincere, either. “What the hell were you doing in there, Press?” she demanded. “You came very close to killing an uninvolved civilian. Is this the kind of top-notch work you do?”

Press was seldom at a loss for words, but she had him on this one. “I—I thought it was Sil. I saw the blond hair, and the way she moved . . . I thought it was her.”

“She’s
dead,
Press. Remember? We found the severed thumb and the aide left me a message saying it matched genetically. The tests we did proved it was her.”

The coldness was back in Laura’s voice and it hurt to have it directed at him. And she was making perfect sense, of course . . . except everything in his gut was screaming
No way, it’s just too fucking easy.
“You’ve got your tests,” Press said aloud, “and I’ve got my instinct. Don’t you see how the whole thing is so convenient, Laura? This is not a stupid creature. Sil came to the ID because she
wanted
us to chase her, and I think she made it look like she died in that car because she knew that’s the only way we’d stop looking for her.”

“Fine,” Laura snapped. “Now let me tell you what
I
think.
I
think that as long as you believe she’s still out there, you’ve still got your mission. You don’t want this job to be over, do you? You want to keep going with it!”

“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. Why, he wondered, in a world where people could cross a full day’s time zone and talk to each other from different sides of the globe, did getting something across to the person standing right in front of you have to be so damned difficult? “But maybe it’s—”

“I have to go to the ladies’ room,” Laura said abruptly. She whirled and stalked away.

“—not for the reason you think,” Press finished lamely.

But he was speaking to empty air.

37

A
t first Sil didn’t understand what happened to make the dark-haired man pull a weapon on the blond woman at the bar, but it wasn’t hard to figure out as she watched his red-haired companion defuse the situation and send him out to the lobby. The blonde who’d been threatened was still griping about it to the bartender when Sil rose and walked casually to the exit. The dye in her hair and the darkness of the hotel lounge had apparently rendered her all but invisible—even to the esteemed Dr. Fitch from the compound. Sil found it absurdly funny that he’d sat not two tables away from her for the past half hour, nursing a drink and catching everyone in the room—including Sil—in his sharp, hawklike gaze at least twice. This was the man whose biochemical makeup had helped make the blueprint for her own, her
father
—she had finally learned the right word—in a roundabout way, yet he never sensed she was fewer than fifteen feet away. So close, and the only emotion Sil saw was when the scene at the bar had brought a sneer to his lips that he’d hid badly behind his glass of Crown Royal.

Sil got to the door of the lobby in time to see the red-headed woman stride away without listening to the remainder of what the dark-haired man was saying. After a few seconds he started back for the lounge and Sil did a half turn that put her face in the shadows as he passed. She didn’t want to approach him for the first time in the bar with the rest of his group—the same people who had joined with him in the effort to destroy her. Alone, he probably wouldn’t recognize her, but to face all five of them at once was sheer stupidity. That dark-skinned one, especially; there was something . . .
peculiar
about him that no matter how she tried, Sil couldn’t identify. A foolish decision unavoidably made without enough forethought: she should have killed him in back of the ID when she’d had the chance.