To the Limit (2 page)

She still couldn't believe she'd let him get the drop on her. Like a damn rookie. Like a wet-behind-the-ears newbie instead of a seasoned professional who had years of experience under her belt.

Not that her attacker had been a run-of-the-mill street thug. Neither had he been some cokehead jazzed on crack. The guy had been a pro. Big. Strong. Expert. He'd known exactly what he was doing. Known how to put the hurt on her without killing her. And it had been no random attack.

You're dead. You just don't know it yet.

His—what? Threat? Promise? Warning? Whatever. The words continued to rattle around the edge of her subconscious just as they had all day while she'd worked on getting a lead on Tiff. And since she could take care of herself— normally—and Tiffany couldn't, finding Tiff took top priority over the threat on her own life.

That's why Eve was here at Club Asylum instead of home, licking her wounds in solitary comfort as she'd promised Jillian she would do. Instead, she'd sucked it up. She'd covered the bruises on her face with makeup and dressed to blend with the party crowd in a black Lycra bodysuit and a black sequined waist-length jacket.

And here she was. It was pushing 1:00 a.m.—almost thirteen hours since Jillian had found Eve's bruised and battered self still in bed—and all she'd turned up for her efforts was more dead ends.

Dead. There was that word again. It annoyed the hell out of her. So did the fact that she wasn't yet up to full speed. Her head still felt as thick and murky as LA smog. Every step was still an exercise in pain as she worked the crowd at the current West Palm "in" spot and watering hole—and, more important, one of Tiffany's favorite haunts.

She'd made repeated and failed attempts to contact Tiffany on her cell phone today. She'd called a very short list of Tiff's friends. The yacht club, country club, stables ... anywhere she could think of, and had turned up nothing. She was running out of ideas and was pinning some hope on the crowd at Club Asylum providing some answers—or at least a lead.

The dance club and bar was billed as a retro knockoff of New York City's Studio 54, which had gained notoriety in the eighties for being the den of iniquity that it was. The music was loud; the smoke was thick and suspiciously sweet smelling. As with Studio 54, the name of the game at Club Asylum was to see and be seen—the more outrageous the antics and the outfits, the better. The bored and famous of Palm Beach high society, international celebrities, and even minor-level European royalty were known to frequent the place.

More to the point, all indications were that Tiffany had taken up with a band playing here and had recently dropped some huge coin. Since Eve had read in the papers that one of Tiffany's favorite stunts lately was to take off for a few days with the rock band of the month, it seemed a likely place to look.

"Haven't seen her," was the standard response as Eve worked the floor for information about Tiffany.

No one at the bar or in one of the many privacy cubbyholes or even on the dance floor had seen Tiffany for two, maybe three weeks. Or if they had, they weren't talking. One person did, however, remember the name of the band she'd been so taken with.

"Dead Grief?" Eve repeated above the head-banging beat of a glitter and glam band giving it their all from a platform suspended high above the packed dance floor.

"Yeah, they were sooo sick. That lead dude could really wail."

"They still around?"

"Nah. Played their last set a few weeks ago, then blew out of town."

A few weeks? If Tiffany had taken off with them, then where had she been when she'd called Eve last night?

If it had actually been Tiffany who had called.

More and more, Eve had been playing with the possibility that it hadn't been Tiffany. More and more, she wondered if whoever had attacked her knew enough about her to know that Tiffany was her Achilles' heel, and had taken advantage of that fact to lure her out and into the night. Where she would be vulnerable. Accessible.

You're dead. You just don't know it yet.

"One problem at a time," she muttered under her breath as the words came back with haunting regularity.

Regardless of whether it had been Tiff who had called or not, the offshoot of all this was that she was still missing. Or AWOL or something. And regardless that Tiffany hadn't been on speaking terms with her in three months, Eve needed to find her—if nothing else, to give her a little
"straighten your act up"
talk
before she truly did end up in some trouble.

Eve moved among the dancers recapping what she had so far: that no one had seen Tiffany in two or three weeks and the name of a band she'd been "playing" with. Oh— and Eve knew that Tiff's cell phone was still out of service. Combined, it wasn't much, but warning bells were still clanging like crazy. Or maybe it was just the pounding in Eve's head that half a bottle of painkillers and close to a pound of M&M's hadn't been able to reduce to much better than a dull roar.

Time to regroup. OK. Dead Grief. The band's name was something to go on. A very minor something, as no one could come up with individual band members' names—Eve figured that had something to do with the weed that appeared to float around as freely as the drinks.

It left Eve only one option to get a lead on Tiffany. She needed to find out more about Dead Grief. Who they were, where they called home. Since she hadn't turned up anything in the bar crowd, the next best option was to get a look at the club's records—financial transactions, checks written, receipts that may have even been received from Tiffany.

Drawing as little attention as possible, Eve wandered off the dance floor toward the back of the club—and spotted a bouncer guarding the hall like the equivalent of Fort Knox was at the other end. Or possibly the boss's office.

She sized up the Steven Seagal wannabe, worked up a smile—no easy task given the shape she was in—and headed toward him.

Then she caught her first break. Turned out he wasn't a Steven. Fortunately for her, Leo, the not so lionhearted bouncer, also turned out to be a soft touch and an easy sell. Thank God. She was running out of steam when they finally struck a deal and she slipped quietly down the hall toward the first floor manager's office at the back of the building.

Sneak and peeks weren't her usual investigative methods of choice—not that she hadn't conducted a few when she was in the Secret Service—but desperate times and all that. She needed a lead on Tiffany yesterday.

Even though she had to do it on the QT, Eve always kept an eye out for her. Like she would a little sister. She'd tried to be there for her ever since Tiffany had been Eve's first Secret Service protective assignment three years ago.

They had a history. A complicated history. Tiffany—or rather her father—was also the reason Eve had been forced to resign from the Service.

Life is just too much fun,
Eve thought as she quietly entered the office.

Her first impression was of stale cigarette smoke and one of those automatic air deodorizers that spritzed what was supposed to be a clean, fresh floral scent at programmed intervals. The smell brought to mind an unsettling combination of antiseptic, BO, and cheap perfume.

She shut the door behind her, flicked on her penlight, and shone it around the dark office. No sense turning on the overhead and inviting inquiring minds to want to know who was burning the midnight oil.

That's why she'd slipped Leo a hundred in exchange for a few minutes' time in the absentee boss's office—so she wouldn't be bothered and ostensibly so she could look for signs that the lowlife was cheating on her. The cash had tempted the bouncer, but it was Eve's tears that had gotten results.

She felt a little guilty that the club's manager, Frank Leoni—innocent as a babe at least in the cheating on
her
department—was getting a bum rap. She didn't even know Leoni. Still, a little guilt hadn't stopped her from batting misty baby blues and tearfully thanking Leo for helping her.

She'd love to tap the computer but didn't think she had time, so when she spotted the file cabinet in the far corner of the office, she headed straight for it. It was a long shot, but with some luck she might find some financial transactions with Dead Grief's or Tiffany's name on them, since another one of her penchants of late was renting the place out by the night for private parties.

Naturally, the file cabinet was locked, so Eve had to sort of "unlock" it with the help of her pick kit, all the while trying not to think about the minimum sentence for a B and E.

She'd just finessed the top drawer open when she heard a sound that was out of place and out of time with the muffled rock beat bleeding into the small room through the office's thin walls and door.

She froze. Listened. And heard it again.

Damn it.
She was too tired for this.

She flicked off her penlight and ducked into the shadows behind the desk, grimacing in pain as she crouched down to make herself as small as possible. Barely breathing, she reached for the .38 clipped on her belt and concealed beneath her jacket.

B and E with a deadly weapon. She was having some fun
now.

It didn't take long for her pupils to adjust to the darkness. Or to figure out that whoever was joining her didn't have a key—which, sharp tack that she was, told her
they
didn't belong here, either.

God. She'd preempted a
real
break-in. Either that or the thug who had attacked her last night had followed her here—and that notion had her lips thinning and her trigger finger itching. Paybacks, as a rule, were hell. She may be packaged like a Twinkie, as her brother Nolan was fond of saying, but she had the disposition of a pit bull when someone pissed her off. And someone had.

She held her breath as an alley-facing window slid slowly open and humid tropical air leaked into the room. Shortly after, a black shoe attached to a leg also covered in black— she was sensing a theme here—was followed by the top half of a broad-shouldered man wearing a
black
turtleneck easing in through the jimmied window.

He was big and he was broad, but he was not her attacker. The guy with the stun gun had been Hulk Hogan material. This guy was big but lean. But he still didn't belong here.

On a disappointed breath, she stepped out of the shadows and trained the revolver level with the center of his chest.

"Freeze, dirtbag."

He stilled with one foot on the floor, then slowly twisted from the waist and turned toward her.

Eve flicked her penlight back on and watched as a slow grin spread across a rugged face that was half-hidden in shadow.

"Consider me frozen, cupcake, but for the record ... am I still your
favorite
dirtbag?"

Her heart slogged to a stop.

She blinked, disbelieving, and glared at the rough and edgy features of the man grinning like he'd just won the lottery.

And then she thought about shooting him on general principles.

"What in the
hell
are you doing here, McClain?"

The moment he heard her voice Tyler "Mac" McClain knew the woman wielding the gun was Eve Garrett.

Man, oh man, this is just too good.

And too weird. It had been a million years, a million lifetimes, since he'd heard that silk and honey voice of hers, but he'd never forgotten it. A million nights since he'd been a cocky eighteen and pretty Eve of the beautiful breasts and breathless sighs had taken him to heaven and back one moonlit night in Eddie Franco's cabana.

Yeah, the last time he'd heard Eve Garrett's voice—God, had it really been fourteen years ago?—she'd been sighing his name like he was a god.

Strike that. The
last
time he'd heard her voice, they'd had a chance meeting at the beach a few weeks after they'd had their close encounter of the hottest kind and he'd broken his promise to call her. He'd just ridden into shore on a monster wave. She'd been almost wearing a teeny-weeny neon yellow string bikini. One look. Instant hard-on. He could have pole-vaulted off his surfboard to Havana.

"Dirtbag" had come up then, too. But unlike now, there hadn't been any heavy artillery involved.

What was she doing here? With a gun no less? Somehow he just couldn't see the daughter of a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former West Palm police officer descending to a life of crime. Mac knew he was here on the up-and-up— unless someone decided to split hairs—but what was up with pretty Eve?

He nodded toward the S & W. "Um ... would you mind pointing that thing in another direction?"