Authors: Penny McCall
Tiny shrugged. She didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. “Not much I can tell you,” he said, turning around and leaning against the counter. “Found him half dead in my alley five, six years back, stabbed a couple of times and beat to hell. He never said, but I’d bet real money the other guy wasn’t going anywhere at the end of that fight, ’cept maybe hell.”
“You don’t know what it was about?”
“Only thing Jack would say was no cops, no hospital. Harley patched him up as best she could, and . . .”
“She fell in love with him?”
“I wouldn’t say Harley has that soft a heart. More like Jack was her kind of challenge.”
“Mean enough to disarm her? And I’m talking actual weaponry.”
Tiny laughed. “Something like that. Once he was on his feet we helped him finish his op and the excitement of it got under her skin. She wasn’t too happy when Jack took off. Beat the crap of out every guy who even looked in her direction for three months solid afterward.”
“Wait a minute.” As much as the idea of Harley in a depression intrigued her, there was a bigger issue. “You helped Jack out on an op?” Which was setting off some alarm bells, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.
“We didn’t do anything really, but Jack insisted we saved his life. His boss even called to thank us. He wanted to bring us down to Washington, but how would it look, an old Hells Angel like me with an FBI commendation?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Jack won’t tell me what’s going on,” Tiny said.
And he thought she’d spill her guts. “Jack’s trying to protect you. It’s one of the things he’s good at.” Along with being irritating, and hard to get along with, and when he made up his mind there was no changing it. But she had to admit the thought came along with a half-indulgent smile that hadn’t been there four days ago. Or maybe she was still mellow from the wine.
“I have all the protection I need,” Tiny said. “Seems to me you two are out in the cold on this one.”
Aubrey struggled with herself over telling him the truth, but it was mostly because she hated the idea of agreeing with Jack. “I can’t tell you what’s going on, Tiny. Jack’s right.”
“That wasn’t easy to say, was it?”
She smiled.
“Maybe I can help.”
“Not this time.” She put her hand on Tiny’s arm. “You don’t want to be up against this enemy.”
As soon as Jack got back to the room he dialed the phone. No need to make sure Aubrey hadn’t followed him. Even if Tiny wasn’t keeping her busy, the stairs were old and creaky, and Aubrey didn’t do anything quietly. Despite her delusions of her own skills, she wasn’t devious enough to sneak behind his back and listen at the door. And she didn’t have to. The stuff she did right in front of his face was damaging enough.
When he heard Mike Kovaleski pick up, he said by way of greeting, “We have to talk fast. I don’t think your line’s secure.”
“I’ve been through the system, Jack, and I recheck it almost hourly. My phone’s clean. No tap, no bug.”
“Somebody found us after I talked to you last time.”
“You think it was me who gave you up?”
“No,” Jack said, flat, absolute, no doubt leaking into his voice. But he was wondering if his best friend had turned on him. Maybe it was nothing more than a remote possibility, but he hated that it occurred to him at all. And he blamed that on Aubrey Sullivan, too. “Had to be the Library of Congress.”
“I checked the place out,” Mike said. “Didn’t find anything. All hell broke loose after what happened there the other day. My guess is, nobody can get inside to plant bugs, and nobody wants to take the chance of having a phone tap traced back to them and get fingered for the shoot-out.”
“How’d they find us, then?”
There was a shrug-like pause from the other end of the line, then, “Don’t know. Could be any number of ways. Somebody probably watched the girl’s house, waited until you were a fair distance away to move, so no one would connect what happened to her with what went on at the library.”
Or it could have been somebody Aubrey talked to before he got to her house that first day, Jack thought. Or Larry’s One Stop. Who knew how many phone calls she’d had time to make before he caught up with her?
“Come to think of it, Jack, if I had to make a guess on what you’d do, I’d say you’d head out of D.C., staying off the main highways and out of the cities where it’s more likely some diligent state or local cop will make the vehicle you’re driving.”
Which made the Blue Ridge Parkway the logical choice. Jack took a moment to digest that. “And then what do you think I’d do?”
“You’d probably keep moving, stealing cars and ditching them along the way, hitting up your friends for a place to stay rather than using hotels.”
Jack grumbled out a couple of four-letter words. “So who else knows that about me?”
“Anybody who’s read your case files.”
“Who’s read my files?”
“Anybody higher up than me has access. You think it was one of them?”
“I was hoping you heard something.”
“Nobody’s talking,” Mike said, “or they don’t know. As far as I can still tell the information came from Corona’s organization. The same tape as the one that revealed Aubrey’s contract.”
“Okay.” But Jack didn’t buy it. Somebody at the bureau had to be in Corona’s pocket. Somebody big. How else would Corona’s thugs know where to find them time after time? Getting fingered as a mole had to be an inside job, and it had to be somebody with high enough clearance to access his files. And Tiny was in one of those files. Shit.
“You can’t run forever,” Mike said, “not when Corona knows every move you make almost before you make it. At least let me send someone to watch your back. Tag Donovan’s available.”
Jack snorted. “Uncle Sam’s treasure hunter?”
“It’s perfect. Nobody at the bureau will miss him because nobody knows where he is half the time anyway.”
“That’s because he doesn’t actually do anything useful.”
“He finds a lot of money for the government. Given a choice most of Congress would keep him around and lose guys like you.”
“Congress is filled with morons.”
“True,” Mike said. “He can head out tonight.”
“No.”
“C’mon, Jack, you need help, and Donovan’s as good an agent as you are.”
“Used to be,” Jack said. “There’s a reason he went from working the mob to chasing wild geese.”
“One of his ops went bad, which wasn’t his fault any more than what’s going on with Sullivan is yours. You play the cards you’re dealt.”
Right, Jack thought, and he was holding a handful of jokers. “I appreciate the offer, Mike.”
“But you’ll handle it your way.”
That went without saying, so Jack ended the conversation and went downstairs, calm, deliberate, in no hurry to retrieve Aubrey until he got to the kitchen and witnessed the touching scene she was playing with Tiny.
“What’s she trying to talk you into?” he asked.
“What’s the matter, Jack,” Tiny asked, “worried I’m cutting in on your action?”
“I’m worried you’re getting suckered.” He dropped his eyes to Aubrey’s hand, still on Tiny’s arm, and she snatched it back. “You’ve been in stray adoption mode too long, Tiny. Some of them are trouble, usually the most harmless-looking ones.”
“You’re such an expert on human nature” Tiny shot back. “Did it ever occur to you that some people put up a tough front because they’re not all that tough inside?”
“Your soft heart is going to get you in trouble someday.”
“Tiny’s not talking about himself,” Aubrey said, rolling her eyes and whispering, “Harley,” when Jack still didn’t get it.
“And Jack’s not mad at you,” she said to Tiny. “It’s me. He thinks I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”
“Now would be a good time to learn.” Jack took her by the arm and hauled her through the main rooms, hustling her into the stairwell and boosting her up the first couple of stairs.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” she said. “What good would it do to drag someone else into this mess?”
“He may be in it anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Get your stuff together. We’re leaving.”
She gave the bed a wistful look and Jack felt an unwelcome shift in his blood pressure. She didn’t want to share the bed with him, he reminded himself. She was just tired. So was he. That was the only reason he’d be sorry to leave. “We need to move.”
“Why? I thought Tiny was your friend.”
“He is, but we’re not safe here, and I don’t want to put him or anyone else in danger.”
She sucked in a breath, eyes wide, pointing her finger at him as the earlier part of her conversation with Tiny came back to her, and realization finally cut through the wine haze. “Tiny is in your records, isn’t he? And somebody you work with is going to tell the hit men.”
“I’m more interested in recent history. Like you remembering something.”
“I’ve been racking my brain, Jack, honest.” She went into the bathroom, and he could hear her throwing stuff into her backpack while she talked. “I’ve been trying to remember anything I might have seen or heard. And not just at work, at the grocery store, parties—”
“Parties?”
She stuck her head out the bathroom door. “There are a lot of parties in Washington. Somebody is always fund-raising for something or just blowing off steam because they got into office or passed a bill.”
“And naturally you end up at all the parties,” Jack said. “You’re exactly the fashionable kind of stick woman who appeals to all those junior politicians.”
“And not one of them can give a compliment like you.”
“Did I give you a compliment?”
Aubrey sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m trying to help.”
“Every time you help I get wounded,” Jack said, backing up until he felt a nice, solid wall behind him. “There aren’t any weapons in the room, are there?” Besides two guns and a switchblade.
“Do you want to have this conversation or not?”
“I don’t really have a choice, and neither do you. Tell me about the parties.”
“Have you got a few days?”
“There were a lot of parties.”
“Yeah.”
“Were there any bigwigs at any of these parties?”
“Yes.”
“Any time you want to start listing their names, I’m all ears.”
“What good would that do?”
Jack buried his face in his hands and took a minute to find some patience. Not that it wouldn’t feel good to yell at her, but then he’d have to wait while she got all offended and sulked for a while. He really didn’t have the time for that.
His one and only contact inside the system was getting nowhere. He needed Aubrey to come up with something useful and if that meant he had to show some self-restraint, it was the least of what he was prepared to do so he could act instead of react.
“First of all, I never even get close enough to the important people to overhear a conversation, let alone take part in one.”
“Okay, let’s talk about who you went with.”
She looked away.
“Let me guess, that’s a pretty long list, too.”
“I’m not—I wasn’t dating anyone steady. Most of the times I went with my . . . friends.”
Jack grunted, kind of a who-would’ve-guessed grunt. “So the rest of the times you went with a man. Any of those first dates?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Most first dates consist of some poor schmuck trying to impress a woman into the sack.”
“And you want to know if one of those poor schmucks said something he shouldn’t have in his quest to score.”
Jack would have answered, but she got that little line between her eyes, and seeing as he wanted her to be thinking this time, and for once she was cooperating, he decided not to distract her.
“I’m coming up empty,” she said after a minute.
“There has to be something.”
She blew out a breath, running her hands back through her hair, leaving a thatch of unruly curls behind. “Nothing someone would want to kill me for.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me, Jack, I want this to be over with as much as you do. If there was anything . . .” She spread her hands. “Nothing jumps out at me.”
“Give me some specifics.”
“Do you want to assess the criminal potential of my dates or make fun of me?”
“If I’m lucky I’ll be able to pull off both.”
She came off the bed, a bundle of nervous energy. “This is ridiculous. I don’t know the sort of people who would be involved with Corona.”
“That kind of thinking will get you killed,” Jack said. “You want to believe everyone is harmless, that everyone is exactly what they seem on the surface, but maybe I’ll pick up on something you didn’t. If you give me the chance.”
“Don’t do sincere, Jack, it doesn’t work for you.” But she sat down again. “Here’s my love life for the last three months. First there was a guy who took me out to dinner, ordered a side salad for himself, ate off my plate, and insisted we split the bill. Then there was the guy who invited me to dinner, then showed up with pizza and a six-pack of beer and suggested we eat in.”