Then You Hide (13 page)

“Get down!” he ordered, almost standing as he smashed the accelerator with a dark, determined look on his face.

When she didn’t move, he yelled again. “Get down, Vanessa!”

His right hand moved so fast she almost didn’t see him pull out his gun.

With a gasp, she flattened herself into the seat as they zoomed by the truck. She could see the hair on Wade’s knuckles, the index finger locked on the trigger, the barrel of a gun aimed directly at the driver to their right. His hand didn’t even quiver.

“Don’t shoot him!” she yelled.

He kept the gun pointed until they passed the truck. Then he stood, his right foot still on the accelerator, his left knee on the seat to lift him higher. Driving with one hand, he fired.

“What are you doing?” she screamed, turning to see the front tire of the truck explode and the pickup swerve and roll into a thicket of palms in the hillside.

Calmly, Wade eased back into his seat and stuffed the gun into his waistband.

“Where I come from, this finger”—he wiggled his index finger—“is more effective than that one.”

She breathed hard, trying to slow her heart rate.

“Look at that,” he said, nodding toward a wooden road sign. “Jessup’s Village is one mile down that road.”

Her mouth dropped open as she put the pieces together. “The maid. The batik. The sister. Were we set up to be driven off a cliff?”

“I think that’s a distinct possibility.” He reached over and put his hand comfortingly on her thigh. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She actually shuddered as the adrenaline seeped from her veins. “Just remind me not to get on your bad side.”

“That won’t be too tough.” He patted her leg. “I don’t have a bad side.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“YOU’RE LATE.” LUCY
Sharpe didn’t look up as the footsteps slowed and Jack stopped in the doorway of her library. “It throws my entire day off when someone is late, and I don’t appreciate it.” She tapped a few buttons on her PDA, sent a message, and set the device to the side, finally lifting her gaze to meet his.

And hid even a flicker of response at the way he looked. Unshaven, uncombed, untucked, unspeakably…dark.

He strolled in, long legs eating up the space between them, his insolent smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “If control were an Olympic sport, you’d hold the world record.”

“And if irritating me were in the same games, you’d get gold.”

He laughed. “Good. I love to win.” He dropped onto the settee in the middle of the room and stretched his legs, maddeningly at home in the very room where she’d confronted him, argued with him, and ultimately fired him.

She stood and got little satisfaction from the way he drank her in from head to toe.

“You always look amazing, Luce, but you’ve outdone yourself today. For me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She came around the desk, picking up a file folder on the way. “Let’s get to business; my schedule’s tight.”

He glanced at the folder, no doubt reading the words typed on the label.
Eileen Stafford.
She watched for a reaction and got nothing but a direct look from bottomless brown eyes.

“My schedule’s tight, too,” he said. “So shoot. You called me.”

Lucy perched on the armrest of the chair across from him to maintain the advantage of height. “First, tell me about your investigation.”

“
My
investigation,” he said pointedly, “is going fine. Why did you need to see me?”

“I thought you’d like to know that Wade Cordell just checked in, and he’s making progress with Vanessa Porter.”

“Really.” He locked his hands behind his head, a move that accentuated his well-formed biceps and made him look even more at ease in a room designed to make no one feel comfortable. “Last I’d heard, she slipped right through his fingers—and a bathroom window.”

“He found her, as I knew he would. They’ve hit a minor glitch and have to spend a few more days in the islands.”

“Time’s running out for Eileen,” he said. “Not the best time for Mr. Cordell to have a little fun in the sun.”

“No one’s having fun, Jack. Evidently, Vanessa is down there to find a friend who is on an extended vacation, and won’t leave until she does. They are staying briefly at a private home, and with some help from my team, they should be able to locate her friend. When they do…” She held out her hands as if she was about to announce a major coup. “She’s agreed to come back and meet Eileen Stafford.”

“Great.” He didn’t seem very happy about that, considering how invested he was in the case. He just ran a hand through long, wavy hair that hadn’t seen a professional hairstylist in months, maybe more. Still, his eyes were clear, his skin looked tanned, and from the looks of the muscles under his black T-shirt, he’d been hitting the gym far more than the bottle.

He watched her, silent, waiting for her to show her hand.

“I’ve been doing some interesting reading, and I want to discuss it with you.” She set the file on the coffee table. “Eileen Stafford’s trial transcripts.”

He didn’t touch the folder. “What brought that on?”

“I like to know what my team is up to.”

He gave her a sharp look. “I’m not on your team anymore, Luce.”

“Wade Cordell and Adrien Fletcher are on my team, and they’ve both been sidelined from fee-paying clients for this case.”

“Not for
that
case,” he corrected, pointing to the file. “They are helping to find Eileen’s daughters—a standard adoption search for you. That’s the only piece of this investigation that has anything to do with the Bullet Catchers.”

She slid into the chair, curiosity winning over the advantage of height. “Jack, why are you so secretive about what you’re doing to help Eileen Stafford?”

His eyes narrowed. “When you kicked my ass out of this company, you lost the right to ask me questions about anything I do.”

“And when you purged your NYPD record, lied about an injury, and accidentally shot one of my men, you lost the right to borrow my resources and staff.”

That impudent smile pulled again. “We both know that isn’t the reason you fired me, Luce. So don’t pull the self-righteous ‘Jack Culver lied and can’t be trusted’ bit with me.”

“You did lie to me. And you can’t be trusted. And that
is
why I let you go.”

He leaned forward and put a bold hand on her knee, instantly warming the skin underneath her thin silk trousers. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of jerking away from his touch.

“You fired me because I did what none of your other hot-shot Bullet Catchers could do. I found your weakness.”

“I see you still suffer from delusions of grandeur.” She stood to look down at him. “I can help you on this case, Jack. I can help you save time, money, and effort. But you have to tell me everything.”

“Forget it.”

“You don’t want help?”

“You don’t help, Lucy. You control. Big difference.”

She walked to the window and stood at her favorite spot to look at the rolling hills and river valley. “It must be big.”

He didn’t respond.

“My instincts,” she said softly, “and many of the facts in that file scream that someone with some serious power pulled the strings that tied Eileen Stafford to the murder of Wanda Sloane. I want to know why.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t care about why. I want to know who, and I want to see them pay for the years they stole from her.”

She eyed him warily. “Very noble.”

“It has nothing to do with noble. It’s just what’s right.”

“Unless she’s really guilty. Then it’s wrong.”

“My problem, not yours.” He stood. “Is that it, Luce? We can wrap this up now, and you can probably get back on schedule.”

“You know, I haven’t assigned anyone to search for the third daughter yet, but I’m about to. I was waiting for Roman Scott to finish an assignment.”

“I’m this close to finding her, Luce. You don’t have to spend any more unbillable hours on my pet project.” He headed for the door.

“Then you can be the unofficial Bullet Catcher on that job. I’ll give you anything you need to find the third sister.”

He hesitated but didn’t turn. “In exchange for what?”

“No exchange. You want to help a dying woman, and I want to help Miranda find her sister, since she’s fallen in love with one of my men. I don’t always have an ulterior motive.”

His shoulders moved with a soft laugh, and he turned to her, his eyes twinkling. “Lucinda, your middle name is Ulterior Motive.”

She tilted her head to the closed door on the other side of her office. Every Bullet Catcher knew what was behind that door: a war room and computer center so heavily equipped with state-of-the-art technology that it made the Pentagon look archaic. “You could cut the search time in half. It’s a good deal for both of us, since neither of us is getting paid.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Jack, why are you being stubborn? I don’t want the glory or the credit if we crack this case. I just want justice to be served.”

Again, the slow smile, the teasing glint, the look that made women melt. “You know what always amazes me, Lucy?”

The fact was, she never had figured out what amazed him. “What’s that?”

“That you and I are so much alike. Deep down, we both want what’s right. Truth, justice, and the American way.”

“That’s not amazing.”

“No, what’s amazing is that you actually think you can control that. You think you can find out who really killed Wanda Sloane and drag him or her into Eileen’s jail cell and replace the wrong person with the right one.”

“Yes, I do. What do you think
you
can do?”

“There are other ways to mete out justice.” He turned and headed out the door. “I’ll take your help,” he called as he disappeared down the hall. “Call me later.”

She just stared at the empty doorway and took the deep breath she always needed after a round with Jack.

Wade stood on a plain wooden deck, propped his foot on the handmade bench that ran along the perimeter, and studied the rough-hewn wooden house with the grand and misleading name of Mango Plantation. “For a vacation home of a gazillionaire CEO, this place is pretty modest.”

Vanessa flung open one of the shuttered doors that led from the main room to the unfurnished deck. “It has a private beach and a postcard view, and it rents for seven grand a week. I’d call it a gift from the vacation gods.”

“If we were on vacation.”

She went back into the shadows of the house, leaving Wade to continue his inspection alone.

The view
was
spectacular: a hundred and eighty degrees of crystalline water every imaginable shade of jade and navy, broken only by the tip of St. Kitts and a few majestic yachts that bobbed in the far distance.

He zeroed in on the access and security, which were less than spectacular.

The house sat perched on a hillside, surrounded by an acre or two of fruit trees and some crabgrass cut into the rain forest. While the lush foliage blocked them from general view, they were only about five hundred feet from the road, with no fencing, wall, or security gate. Worse, there was no driveway, so Wade had to park the Jeep on the road—a virtual advertisement that they were there.

The next set of shutter doors popped open, and Vanessa stood victorious in the archway. “This place is fantastic. They have cable TV and Internet, the fridge is ice cold, and the shower is huge.”

“Great. We can watch movies, surf the Net, drink beer, and shower together.” He shook his head. “We’re not on holiday, Vanessa. I just want to find your friend and get the hell out of here before whoever bugged the room or followed us out of Charlestown shows up.”

“I do, too,” she said defensively. “But you could at least thank me for jonesing a great place to stay while we look for Clive.”

“Thank you.” His voice was dry. “But you realize we’re out here like sitting ducks.”

“It’s completely private.” She waved a hand. “We’re surrounded by rain forest.”

“Providing perfect cover for someone who wants to ambush us.”

“Whoever built this place thought of that.” She lightly jumped up and down on the wooden deck that encircled the house; the same planks formed a boardwalk from the road and a rickety set of stairs down to the beach. “It creaks if someone’s coming. No one can sneak up on you. It’s like an alarm system.”

Not a foolproof one, though. “The whole place is accessible by someone intrepid on foot or quiet in a boat.”

She put her hands on her hips. “So we’ll have to be careful. Or if someone you don’t like shows up, you can shoot them.”

He clenched his jaw and turned toward the sea.

“You could have killed that guy in the truck,” she said softly, sounding as if she’d been brewing over the incident.

“But I didn’t.”

“But you’re capable of it.”

“I have the skill, yes,” he agreed. “That doesn’t mean I go around murdering people.” He brushed by her into the house. “I’ll check out that—”

“Have you?”

He asked the obvious, but unnecessary, question. “Have I what?”

“Killed someone. With that gun.”

“With this gun? No.”

She closed her eyes. “With any gun?”

“With many guns,” he said quietly.

She barely nodded. “Well, you are an ex-Marine.”

There was no such thing as an ex-Marine, but he wasn’t about to correct her when she was rationalizing his past. “Look, the faster we get out of here before our friend in the yellow truck comes back, the better we are. I’ll find out if there’s any progress on pinpointing that call made to your cell phone.”

She stayed out on the deck while he made the call in the small bedroom nearly filled by a king-size bed. How many more nights would he spend sleeping in a chair, now that he had told her she wasn’t his type and that he didn’t
fuck
for fun?

Sage Valentine answered her phone on the first ring. “I wish I had better news, Wade. Your caller wasn’t using a satellite phone, and in the Caribbean, cells are spotty because some of the cell towers are on ships. The tower used to send this signal was moved out because of a storm.”

This was a complication they didn’t need. “How long until you can get that reading, then?”

“A day, maybe two.”

“Make it one, please.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He disconnected the call and strode into the other room, where Vanessa stood at the kitchen island, jotting something down. He told her Sage’s news, and she nodded, tapping her paper.

“Then we have to do our own digging. I have a list of places where people have seen Clive. Let’s start with Papaya’s in Brick Kiln. After that, we’ll head down to a very remote place called WhiteBayBeach. I can’t remember the name of this little hole in the wall there, but I can find it again. I had an interesting conversation with the owner, who definitely lied to me. Let’s see how you do with them.”

He glanced at the map. “Why do you think the responses would be any different this time?”

“Because you’re going to ask, not me. And the clientele in these places will react better to a man.”

He looked up at her. “Now who’s the chauvinist?”

“These are gay hangouts, Wade. You’ll be like catnip to these guys.”

“They’re gay, not stupid. They can smell a fake a mile away.”

“Then be a good actor. This time, you’ll ask about Russell Winslow, and I’ll stay in the background. Come on.” She tugged at his sleeve. “You said we’re sitting ducks here, and this is a plan. You love plans.”

“Not this one.”

“We have to do something,” she said, “so let’s go bar hopping.”

Less than an hour later, they arrived at Papaya’s, separating before they stepped onto the sprawling cliffside patio populated by scruffy-looking locals and tourists who wanted to look like them. Wade joined the bar crowd, mixing with the drinkers knocking back Carib lagers and dancers clomping on the wood boards to the calypso beat of a steel-drum band.