True Lies (15 page)

“He’s not a player.” His shirttails bunched around his wrists as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and took up an ankles crossed, hips forward pose. Even without the costume props, he effectively projected the belligerent toughness of his Primeau character. Under other circumstances, Emma might have admired his skill. As it was, though, she didn’t have room for anything but the tension that hummed through her nerves.

Haskin’s close-set beady eyes were hidden behind reflective sunglasses. A small, dark brown blotch that was probably spilled coffee stained the shirt front that stretched across his ample stomach. He hitched up the belt that held his holster and came to a halt a foot away from the dock. “Hello, Miss Cassidy.”

Emma forced herself to nod. “Sheriff.”

He looked toward the stacked crates and studied Bruce for a moment before he turned to face her. “Fixing on taking a trip in your plane?”

“If the weather cooperates.”

“Who’s he?”

“A friend.”

Bruce stirred into motion, easing his hands from his pockets as he moved to Emma’s side. He looped an arm negligently around her shoulders. “Is there a problem here, sweet thing?”

The absurdity of the roles they were playing threatened to choke her. “Everything’s fine, honey” she said between her teeth. At the warning squeeze of his fingers, she looked back to Haskin. “What brings you out here, Sheriff?”

“I was wondering when you last saw your brother, Miss Cassidy. I'm still waiting to talk to him.”

“I have no idea where he is,” she answered, for once truthfully. “Why?”

Instead of replying, Haskin pursed his fleshy lips and glanced toward the hill. Through the open doors of the shed the black Corvette was clearly visible. “Did you get a new car?”

“The 'Vette belongs to me,” Bruce said, his tone holding a note of challenge.

The sheriff rested his hand on the holster at his hip. “That’s some fancy car. Those aren’t Maine plates.”

“No, they're not.”

“Yeah, that’s some fancy car.” Haskin climbed back up the hill, swerving toward the shed to take a closer look at the Corvette before he returned to his blue-and-white cruiser.

“What was that all about?” Bruce asked as the sheriff disappeared around the bend of the driveway.

“You've seen it before. He likes to hassle me about Simon.”

“Why? Does he suspect what you two are doing?”

“I doubt it. Simon had a run-in with the sheriff over a speeding ticket when I first moved here, but my brother hasn’t done anything since then.”

“Yeah, your baby brother with the rap sheet’s a real angel, all right.”

Emma twisted to face him, and her sharp retort died unsaid. He was so close. He still had his arm around her shoulders, and the physical connection was all too easy and natural. Almost...enjoyable. Instantly, she stepped away. “Why did you become Primeau just now?”

“I told you. Haskin’s not a player.”

“You really don’t trust anyone, do you? Not me, not even another uniform. Must be a lonely life, Bruce.”

“Lonely?” He looked pointedly at her solitary cabin. “It seems to me that you've done a good job of making sure your own life turned out that way.”

“If it hadn’t been for the way the police persecuted my father, my life would have been—”

“Give it a rest, okay?”

“What?”

“Forget it,” he muttered. Pivoting away from her, he began loading the empty crates into the plane.

To her disgust, she couldn’t help watching him this time, either.

* * *

Shadows deepened in the corners of the main room. The air wafted with traces of the acrid, back-of-the-mouth sting of wood smoke from the fire Emma had lit at dusk, a fire that was more for comfort than for warmth. She sat on a cushion in front of the hearth, her chin on her updrawn knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, and gazed unseeingly at the randomly flickering pattern of flames. What if McQuaig wanted her to make a run tonight? Then again, it might be tomorrow, or the next day. All he’d said was that a shipment would be in before the end of the week. There was nothing to do but wait for his call, and the inactivity was grinding on her nerves.

“Are you sure you plugged the phone back in properly?” she asked.

“Yes, Emma. It’s working fine.”

She turned her head to look at Bruce. He was lounging comfortably in the middle of her couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his feet propped on the coffee table. He didn’t even glance up from the thick book he was reading. It was hers, the most recent collection of short stories from Stephen King, and he had been quietly immersed in it for the past hour.

His calmness was another thing that was grinding on her nerves. “Did you check it?” she persisted.

He tipped his head and looked at her over the rims of his glasses. He wore glasses for reading. They made him look oddly boyish and appealing and...human. That bothered her. She didn’t want to think of him as anything other than a cop.

“Yes, I checked it,” he replied. “Why are you so anxious? Do you think McQuaig might call off your deal?”

She couldn’t even consider that possibility. “I just want to get this over with. I don’t like waiting.”

“A large percentage of my job involves waiting of some kind or another. You get used to it.”

“Is that when you do your reading? When you're on a stakeout? Or was that stuff about your fondness for books just another of your lies?”

He shut the book with a snap and set it on the cushion beside him. “Except for my occupation and my reason for seeing you, most of the things that Prendergast said were true. But I don’t usually get the chance to read while I'm on a case.”

“Then how do you handle the waiting?”

“I think, or I exercise, or I talk if I happen to be working with someone I get along with.” He raised his arms over his head and stretched until his shoulders cracked audibly, then took off his glasses and set them down on the coffee table. He went over to his bag, removed a small pouch, and carried it back to the couch. “In this case, I think I'll clean my gun.”

“You have a gun?”

He held her gaze while he reached behind him and slipped his hand beneath the loose tail of his flannel shirt. Half a second later he was holding a gleaming black handgun. “Of course.”

She narrowed her eyes at the way he was deliberately displaying it for her. “What’s this? An attempt to scare me? A typical police ploy to intimidate me into behaving?”

“Now, why would I need to do that?” He sat down and opened the pouch to take out a cloth and a small plastic bottle.

Frowning, she pushed herself to her feet. A log popped and fell over in the fireplace and she raised her gaze to the hunting bow over the mantel. “I don’t know, Bruce,” she said as she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the carved wooden grip. “Why would you?”

“What are you doing?”

She lifted the bow from the rack and balanced it on her palm a moment before she tipped it forward and checked the pulley action. Satisfied with the easy rotation, she extended her left arm to elevate it into a firing position. Keeping her body straight, she turned by using only her feet until she could sight on an imaginary target where the far wall joined the sloping ceiling. Smoothly she drew back the bowstring to the point when the kiss button nudged her lip.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Since you're cleaning your weapon, I'll clean mine. Not that I'm trying to intimidate you or anything.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Don’t worry.” She eased the string down slowly so the empty snap wouldn’t stress the bow, then glanced at Bruce. “It isn’t loaded.”

A glimmer of something that could have been admiration shone briefly in his gaze. Grinding his teeth, he tossed the cleaning cloth onto the coffee table. “Damn, you did it again.”

“Did what?”

“Never mind.” He shook his head and rubbed a palm over his face. “Just how good are you with that thing?”

“I always hit what I'm aiming at. What about you? Are you any good with that pistol?”

“I hit what I'm aiming at.” He leaned forward in order to tuck the gun beneath his shirt, then relaxed against the cushions and draped his arms along the couch back on either side of him. “When did you learn to use a bow?”

She picked up a dish towel from the corner that served as a kitchen and walked across the room to join him. “I was on the archery team at the private school I went to. It was the only thing about that stuffy place that was worthwhile.” Sitting on the armchair, she propped the bow between her feet and began to polish it with the towel. “They didn’t supply any compound bows, though. An arrow from this one could have gone through the gymnasium wall.”

“You had to quit school when your father was arrested, didn’t you?”

“It sounds as if whatever background check you did was thorough. Did you know all this before I told you who I was?”

He waited a beat before he answered. “Yes.”

“I should have guessed. I could have saved my breath.”

“You talked mostly about your family, not about yourself.”

“Well? What else do you know?”

“You didn’t finish college. Instead, you took over what was left of your father’s business and were extremely successful, despite the cloud of suspicion concerning your ethics.”

“As soon as anyone’s successful, there will always be people wanting to believe they had to cheat.”

“Undoubtedly. You had an active social life, and were frequently featured in the society pages because of your family’s notoriety.”

“I was an easy target. Photographed well, too.”

His mouth tightened and he glanced quickly toward his bag. “I'm sure you did. A lot of people probably found your looks fascinating. Why did your fiancé break your engagement?”

“What?”

“You were engaged once. Turner Addison was his name, wasn’t it?”

She dropped the towel and braced her hands on her knees, surprised that the bare facts could so easily bring back the memories. She had been so young, still clinging to her idealistic dreams of a fairy-tale wedding, still trusting a man who had claimed to love her. “Chalk up another one to your blind justice system.”

“What do you mean?”

“Turner’s family couldn’t stomach the scandal when my father was convicted. He broke off the engagement in order to find a more socially acceptable mate.”

“Sounds like a real prince, all right. You're probably better off without him. Any man who couldn’t stick by you through the bad times likely wouldn’t be strong enough to handle you, anyway.”

“Handle me? Of all the stupid macho attitudes—”

“You're a strong woman. It’s obvious that you would be best suited to a strong man. Maybe someone who didn’t intimidate easily.”

“I don’t want any man.”

“That’s obvious, too, considering the way you've hidden yourself away out here.”

“I can see why you preferred cleaning your gun to having a conversation if this is an example of how you talk, although I suppose that’s about all I could expect from a cop.”

“Your conversation seems limited to finding new ways to blame all your problems on the justice system.”

“It caused all my problems. The moment the law got involved, my life fell apart like a wall of dominoes.”

“Is that why you run drugs? Is it vengeance? Wasn’t it enough to run away to this cabin and play bird with that Cessna? Do you have some kind of inner need to defy authority?”

Stiffly she stood and carried the bow back to the rack over the fireplace. “What about you?” She turned around, bracing her elbows against the mantel. “You weren’t lying when you said your job is all you have in your life. What made you that way, Bruce? Did you ever have a life outside your disguises, or were you born a cop?”

He caught her gaze. Firelight flickered in his startling blue eyes and augmented the harsh angles of his face. “I think we’d better change the subject before we get into another argument.”

“Maybe you’d better take out your gun.”

“Maybe I should. Because I remember quite vividly how our last argument turned out, and you wouldn’t want to push me into forgetting I'm a cop again, would you?”

The relaxed pose he had maintained was a sham, she realized suddenly. He was strung almost as tightly as her bow.

His gaze hardened. “Or maybe you have a notion to pick up where we left off last night.”

“Why don’t you take your gun and stick it—”

The shrill ring of the lone telephone cut across her words. She jerked, and her elbows slid painfully over the edge of the stone mantel.

Bruce was on his feet in an instant. He snatched up his glasses, crossed to her desk to pick up a pen and a pad of paper, and pointed to the phone. “Answer it,” he ordered.

Emma wiped her palms on her thighs, her hands trembling. Another ring echoed through the silent cabin.

He snapped his glasses open with a flick of his wrist and propped them on his nose. “Go on.”

Somehow she made it across the floor and picked up the receiver without dropping it. “Yes?”

“Miss Duprey?” It was Harvey’s voice.

“Yes.”

“We need your services tonight.”

Bruce moved beside her and motioned for her to tip the receiver so that he could hear. She nodded and held the phone slightly away from her ear. “What are the coordinates of the pickup?” she said, struggling to keep her voice level.

Paper rustled at the other end of the phone line. Harvey read out a string of numbers. Bruce transcribed them onto the pad he held. “The ship will be there at 1:00 a.m.,” Harvey continued. “It will wait for thirty minutes, no more. When you reach it, signal by switching your landing lights on and off twice. They will spotlight the area you are to land in.”

Emma had already heard these details from McQuaig in the warehouse, but she still wasn’t inured to the risk involved. “I'll do my best.”

There was a pause. “I thought we had a deal, Miss Duprey.”

The threat in the softly spoken words was clear. She thought she heard an echo of Simon’s sobs. “Yes. Of course.”

Another pause, this one more ominous. “And you will be on schedule with your delivery to us, won’t you?”

Bruce scribbled something on the paper. Emma read his question aloud. “Where do you want it delivered this time?”