Trading Secrets (28 page)

“Nothing is going to convince her that you’ve got a good job. Not as long as there are armadillos involved. See you soon, Alex.”

She hung up the phone and grinned at Brad. “Your father is fine. He’s on his way.”

“Here?” The relief in Brad’s eyes told her just how anxious the boy had been.

“Right here. As soon as he can get out of the Caribbean. Come on, let’s go buy some cereal and milk and something for dinner. Who knows? Maybe Matt will be here by then. We’d better buy enough for three.”

But Matt was not there by dinner. Sabrina and Brad ate in a companionable atmosphere, speculating on what Griffin and Shadwell might be doing and where Matt was at the moment.

“You, uh, think you and Dad might stick together when this is all over?” Brad finally asked as he helped Sabrina clear the table.

She knew he was trying to sound casual. “It’s a possibility.” God, how she hoped it was a possibility. “A lot would depend on what Matt wants.”

“I think he wants to stay with you,” Brad said carefully. “But …”

Sabrina held her breath. “But what?”

“Well, I was talking to Cindy and she says people will notice that you and Dad aren’t, well, uh, married,” Brad blurted.

And that would be embarrassing for Brad, Sabrina realized with startled perception. She slid him a sidelong glance. “I thought you modern kids didn’t worry about things like that.”

“Living
together’s
okay for some people. But not for you and Dad.” Brad concentrated fiercely on the pot he was drying.

“Why not?” Sabrina pressed.

Brad’s shoulders moved uneasily. “It’s just different for you guys. That’s all.”

Wisely Sabrina decided not to pursue the subject. She thought she knew what was going on in his head. Brad wanted some security. Whereas he had once viewed Sabrina as a threat, he seemed to have adjusted to her presence in his father’s life. Therefore he had decided that presence should be formalized.

“You know what I think?” Sabrina said mildly.

“What?”

“I think you kids have a double standard. You expect adults to live by one set of rules while you live by another.”

“Well, you are grown-ups,” he pointed out logically.

“One of the privileges of being a grown-up is that you can make a lot of your own rules, Brad,” she tried to explain gently.

“Well, I guess so.” Sabrina noticed that he mulled over the information with a serious expression on his young, Matt-like features. “But Cindy thinks you ought to get married,” he insisted stubbornly.

Given that irrefutable argument, Sabrina retired from the fray.

Matt had still not arrived by ten o’clock that evening. Brad, exhausted by the limited sleep and the excitement, finally went to bed, telling Sabrina to wake him when his father arrived.

Sabrina couldn’t sleep, even knowing how much she needed the rest by now. She sank into the depths of the old overstuffed sofa and absently turned the pages of an out-of-date magazine someone had left behind. The fire she and Brad had built crackled invitingly on the hearth. She ought to go to bed. No telling when Matt would arrive. Perhaps not until morning.

The light she had been using to read by winked and went out along with every other light in the house at five minutes after eleven.

Sabrina froze as the sudden darkness descended. Jerking to her feet, she reminded herself that it was not unheard of to lose electricity this far from a major city. But there had been no storm, which was usually the case when the lights flickered and disappeared.

She stood tensely in the middle of the small living room, letting her eyes adjust to the faltering light provided by the fading fire. Her father was an orderly man. He always kept a flashlight in a kitchen drawer. Taking a grip on her nerves, she walked into the other room and fumbled until she found the right drawer. Sabrina breathed a sigh of relief when the batteries proved to be still alive. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Her father was the kind of man who paid attention to details. It occurred to Sabrina that if Matt kept a flashlight around it would always be in working condition.

Swinging the light in an arc around the kitchen, Sabrina double-checked the locks on the windows. She’d already checked them three times that evening. The violent pounding on the front door nearly made her drop the flashlight.

“Matt!” she whispered in overwhelming relief. Eagerly she raced into the living room. “Matt, is that you?”

“Open the door, Miss Chase. We want the boy.”

Sabrina steadied herself, grabbing the arm of the sofa for support. Griffin! Griffin was out there, and that meant Shadwell was around, too. She said nothing, trying to pull her jangled nerves together.

“Open the door or we’ll be forced to break in. You are obstructing government agents, Miss Chase. A grave federal offense.”

Sabrina forced herself to move, stubbing her toe against the leg of the sofa as she bent down to lift up the corner of the rug. The old board was stubborn at first. It had always been stubborn. Bennet Chase hadn’t wanted anyone discovering the small floor safe underneath by mistake.

Oh, God, it had been so long since she’d memorized the combination. Nolan’s birthday. Was that the twenty-eighth of August or was that Jeffrey’s? She always got them mixed up. Her fingers shook violently as she spun the combination. Nothing happened. It must be November fifteenth. It had to be one or the other.

On the second try the lock clicked and she wrenched open the heavy steel door. The Smith and Wesson was still inside, the ammunition lying next to it. Bennet Chase had felt there were certain skills a man should know, regardless of what he did for a living. And he’d had a daughter who had insisted on learning the things her brothers had been taught. When she’d turned sixteen and antimilitary she had decided that guns were disgustingly macho manifestations, representative of the kind of arrogant male fantasizing that had gotten the world into so much trouble. Sabrina had suggested her father get rid of his. He’d smiled vaguely and told her that some kind of protection was necessary here at this isolated cabin. She’d argued that having a gun around fostered a basically violent, military mentality. Bennet Chase had explained he was a banker. She had no need to worry.

She’d quoted statistics that proved people who kept guns in the home were far more likely to be injured by them than they were to actually use them in self-defense. Bennet Chase said he assumed he’d taught her sufficient respect for the weapon that she wasn’t likely to get hurt with it.

With unsteady hands Sabrina lifted the .38 out of the safe and loaded it.

“You have one more chance, Miss Chase. If you do not open the door this minute, we’ll come in anyway.”

Sabrina drew a deep breath and knelt on the rug, pointing the weapon at the door. “I have a gun,” she called out, vaguely astonished that her voice still worked.

“There’s no point playing games, Miss Chase. We’re here to take the boy. This is government business.”

“Screw the government.”

A stunned silence greeted that remark. And then a roar sounded outside. Griffin must have seen some film in which the hero had shot the lock off the door, Sabrina thought hysterically. Unfortunately, after another shot, the attempt worked.

“Sabrina?” Brad’s stunned voice sounded from the hall just as the front door swung open with a slam. The man who bulled into the room was illuminated by the glare of the flashlight Sabrina had propped up on a stack of books.

“Get down on the floor, Brad. Stay there.” She didn’t look in his direction. She was focusing completely on Griffin.

“This has gone far enough, lady.”

“Get out of here.”

“Why, you little bitch!” He raised his hand, his left one, and let her see the gun he was holding. He didn’t see hers in the shadows; probably didn’t even believe she had one until Sabrina pulled the trigger.

The blast roared through the cottage. It was accompanied by a scream of rage and pain as Griffin spun backward into the night. The door swung slowly shut behind him.

A shocking silence fell on the cottage and then, through sheer force of will, Sabrina managed to get to her feet. There were things that had to be done.

“Quick, Brad, help me get this sofa over there.”

Brad got up off the floor, staring at her in the weak firelight. “You shot him.” He looked dazed. “You shot a government agent.”

“If that was an official government employee, then the Civil Service had better have another look at its hiring policies. Give me a hand, Brad.” She realized the boy was in shock. “Hey, that’s the guy that Alex had to beat up a couple of days ago. Remember? I didn’t kill him, you know.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I was probably lucky to hit his shoulder. Hopefully the left one, since Alex already took care of his right one.” She heaved against the heavy old sofa. She was shaking, Sabrina realized. She didn’t have any way of knowing whether she might have just killed a man. Griffin might be lying in a pool of blood just outside the door. The knowledge was sickening. But the notion of letting Griffin have Brad was unbearable.

Brad finally released himself from his stunned paralysis and came to her assistance. “Geez, Sabrina. What do we do now?”

Damned if I know
, Sabrina thought wildly. But you weren’t supposed to say things like that to a kid who was looking to you for protection. Maternal types were supposed to sound totally in command of the situation. Aloud she said, “Now that we’ve got the door blocked I think our biggest problem is going to be the windows. Anyone trying to get through them would have a job on their hands. Let’s close the doors to the bedrooms. If anyone enters through a bedroom window, he’ll have to open the door and that will give us some warning.”

There was uneasy silence outside the cabin as Sabrina crawled on her hands and knees across the floor to pull the bedroom doors shut. Brad watched her with wide, anxious eyes.

“Maybe we should build a barricade or something,” he suggested when she returned to his side.

“Good idea. Let’s use the table and chairs.”

Staying low so that there would be no risk of their shadows’ showing through the curtains, Sabrina and Brad laboriously pulled two of the heavy, overstuffed chairs into a barrier. Crouching behind them, with the wall of the cabin at their backs, they waited. Sabrina set the gun down on the floor beside her. She wondered again if Griffin was bleeding to death outside the front door.

“When do you think Dad will get here?” Brad asked quietly.

“Soon.”
Dear God, let it be soon!

“What if those two outside realize he’s on his way?” The boy didn’t look at her. He sat cross-legged in the fatigue pants he’d pulled on before coming out into the living room.

“Your father knows what he’s doing,” Sabrina assured him firmly.

“But if one of those guys ambushes him …” Brad’s voice broke faintly and he stopped talking.

Sabrina closed her eyes in silent anguish and then took a grip on her own wild fears. “My guess is that Griffin and Shadwell won’t hang around if they realize Matt is on his way. They’ll know the game is over.”

“Yeah, maybe they’ll try to escape. Maybe they’ve already gone,” Brad added hopefully. “I haven’t heard anything for several minutes.”

“Maybe.”

Sabrina was mulling over her own doubts when the second shot split the tense night. She jumped, her fingers closing instantly around the handle of the Smith and Wesson. But no one tried the door or came hurtling through a window.

“What are they doing now?” Brad wondered.

“Trying to scare us. All things considered, they’re doing a good job.” Sabrina tried a shaky smile, but it vanished as two more shots sounded.

“Maybe they’re just firing wildly at some animal moving around in the dark. They might think it’s us trying to escape,” Brad suggested.

“That’s a thought. I’ll bet you’re right. They’re like a couple of hunters who get overexcited and shoot at anything that moves.”

“I asked Dad if he’d take me hunting when the season starts,” Brad said abruptly.

Sabrina slid the boy a sidelong glance. “Don’t expect me to cook anything you shoot. I don’t approve of hunting.”

A brief smile came and went on Brad’s face. “Dad said he had a hunch you wouldn’t.”

They both fell silent after that. Sabrina tried not to think about the possibility of a dead man outside the door, and then she tried even harder not to think about where Matt might be at this moment. What had Alex said? Something about having a tough time getting out of the Caribbean. It could be hours before he arrived. Would Griffin and Shadwell wait hours for their quarry?

She wished she’d had more sleep the night before. It wasn’t that she felt sleepy now, heaven knew the tension was too great for that, but she might have felt steadier if she were better rested.

Then again, maybe no one felt steady in a situation like this.

Sabrina never heard the window in her bedroom being forced nor the bedroom door being opened. The fire was burning very low by now and there wasn’t enough illumination in the room to see well. It was instinct as much as anything else that made her close her hand once again around the gun.

She didn’t question the impulse. In a second she had the weapon locked in her hand as she crouched behind the chair. Beside her Brad watched her tensely. He said nothing.

It was now or never, Sabrina told herself. She would have to rise to her knees and risk a couple of shots over the arm of the chair. It was either that or take the chance that someone was creeping up on her in the darkness.

Moving abruptly so that she wouldn’t have a chance to become any more frightened, she lifted her head and the gun in a single motion. In the fleeting glimpse she had, Sabrina realized a man was coming through the bedroom door. He dropped to the floor just as she pulled the trigger.

The bullet cleared Matt’s head by several feet, embedding itself in the bedroom wall.

“Dad!” Brad struggled upright.

“Matt! Oh, my God, Matt!” Sabrina tossed the gun down onto the chair and raced across the room. Throwing herself down onto the floor beside him, she reached out to turn him over.