Authors: Penny McCall
“I called him before I got to you in Miami. He’s had a couple of days. He hasn’t traced all the transactions, but he’s found enough to tell me I’m right. Waters is dirty.”
Tom shook his head, still in denial. “The congressman wouldn’t do something like that.”
“If the congressman isn’t behind this, it must’ve been you.”
“Me?”
“We know you were moving money on those trips,” Jack said to Tom, “and we know who the money came from. Either you were doing it on behalf of Waters or you were doing it to impress him.”
“Huh?”
Tom looked so completely flummoxed Jack found himself saying three words he’d never thought would pass his lips. “You’re right, Aubrey. He’s clueless.”
She sent him a look that said, “Shut up, Jack.” Among other things. “Waters worked for the FBI before he ran for office,” Aubrey said gently to Tom. “He’s only in his second term in office, and he’s one of the most powerful congressmen in Washington.”
“That doesn’t mean he was blackmailing anybody, and if he was he certainly wouldn’t involve me in it. What about his career? What about mine?”
“Somebody wants her dead,” Jack said, stabbing a finger at Aubrey, “and all you can think about is your damn career?”
“Corona wants her dead.”
“Because Waters set it up that way. When he found out you were taking Aubrey on your trips, I’ll bet he blew a gasket.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Tom said, taking to his feet. “When he learned I had taken Aubrey with me a few times he suggested I marry her.”
Jack took a minute to digest that. “If he was hoping that would shut her up, he doesn’t know her very well.”
“Why would the congressman want her shut up? She didn’t know anything about what I was doing. Hell, if what you’re telling me is true, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Waters couldn’t take that chance,” Jack said, ignoring the disclaimer. “You’re stupid enough and loyal enough to shred documents, but Aubrey isn’t, and if she’s called to testify there’s no saying she doesn’t recall.”
“But . . . having her killed?”
“He had Doris killed, and if you’ve ordered one murder, you’ll order two.”
Tom shook his head. “The congressman has done some wonderful things. Everyone tried to tell him he didn’t have the influence . . .” Tom broke off, a sick look coming over his face.
“So he found a way to get it,” Aubrey finished for him.
“You really believe this guy?” Tom asked her. “You think the congressman is blackmailing people and killing people and that I . . .”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Tom. I’ve known that all along.”
“But you think I could work for that kind of man.”
“Will you believe it when you hear it from him?” Jack said.
“Jack . . .”
He rounded on Aubrey. “What?”
“Let me talk to him.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Give me two minutes. Please, Jack.”
It was the begging that got to him first. She layered on a pleading look and he was a goner. “Fine,” he said, stomping over to the window that overlooked the street. “Two minutes. I’m timing you.”
He shot his cuff back so he could see his wrist, but he wasn’t really ticking off the time. He was listening to Aubrey trying to convince Tom that it was no reflection on him that he’d respected and trusted someone who was lying to him. In Jack’s opinion that was a big reflection on Tom. It labeled Tom a sucker. And a patsy, and . . .
He left off trying to find more ways to call Tom stupid when he saw headlights at the end of the block. Two sets of headlights. They winked off, but the cars kept coming, dark shapes ghosting up the street. It was no surprise when they angled in to the curb down below, and four men swarmed out of the car to huddle on the sidewalk.
“Aubrey . . .”
“Just one more minute, Jack.”
“We’re out of minutes.”
She joined him at the window in time to see the men disappear in the vicinity of the front entrance.
They traded a look, then turned to Tom, both of them having the same thought.
“Brushing his teeth, my ass,” Jack said. “That’s why it took him so long to answer the door.” He really wanted to hurt Tom, but Aubrey already had the lapels of his bathrobe fisted in her hands, and that made up for the satisfaction of plowing his fist into Tom’s face.
“You called the police, didn’t you?” she demanded.
“The congressman instructed me to call him immediately if you or Mitchell showed up here,” Tom babbled. “I called him before I answered the door, and he told me to keep you here as long as possible.”
Now who was the sucker? Jack asked himself. Cavendish had played stupid to run out the clock and he’d fallen for it. Now he had to get away from the cops, yet again. He was trapped in a building with only one exit, and at least one of the people he had to take with him wanted to get caught.
Good thing he liked a challenge.
“Why are we taking the stairs?” Tom wanted to know.
Jack gave him a look like the one he’d given Aubrey that first day. He got the same reaction he’d gotten from her, shock, fear, and silence. Except Tom stayed quiet.
Jack turned to her, the expression on his face saying he’d noted the difference, too, and thought she ought to learn something from it.
“Must be a man thing,” she said with a shrug and a smile.
Jack shook his head and barged through the steel door to the stairwell, hauling Tom behind him by the lapel of his bathrobe. When they got to the tenth-floor landing, he dragged Tom to a stop and attempted the door. It didn’t open.
“The stairwell doors are locked at night,” Tom said.
“No shit.” Jack shoved him to one side, backed off a couple of steps and planted his boot next to the doorknob, putting all his weight behind it. The door flew open and they all trooped through, including Tom. Either he was resigned to his fate or he was tired of being shoved around by Jack.
Jack punched both elevator buttons, got on the first one that stopped, and hit the button for the second floor.
“How did you know the cops weren’t on this one?” Aubrey asked him.
“They’re going up, we’re going down. If they’re still on they’re way up, their car won’t stop for us until they get off and it starts back down. Or it was the other car.”
“You know, Jack, sometimes you amaze me.”
“Not everything comes out of books,” he said. “Experience counts for something.”
“Experience counts for a lot. I figured that out a while ago, Jack.”
“Oh, puh-lease,” Tom muttered from the back corner of the car. “It’s just an elevator. He doesn’t deserve a medal for knowing how it works.”
Aubrey snorted. “This from a man who couldn’t figure out he was laundering money.”
Tom crossed his arms and went sulky.
They got to the second floor and took the stairs the rest of the way. Jack stopped at the bottom, motioning them to stay back at the foot of the stairs. When Tom started to ask why, Aubrey clamped a hand over his mouth.
Jack didn’t say anything, but she could see the approval in his eyes. Okay, maybe she’d only imagined it, but it still gave her a little kick to think she’d finally gotten with the program. His program, that is. If she blew something up, or shot somebody—besides him—Jack might actually think she was worth having around.
A noise startled her out of her private ego-boosting session. Either it was the door easing shut or Jack had growled in the back of his throat. Definitely Jack, she decided. The noise must have come from him because it had sounded pissed off and impatient, and that was how she’d have labeled the expression on his face.
“There’s one cop out there,” he whispered to her. “Can you handle him?”
“What? Beat him up?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Just distract him.”
Aubrey gaped for a second, not quite believing he’d actually enlist her help after days of cutting her out of the action.
“We don’t have all night.”
“Oh. Right.” She squared her shoulders and started for the door, heart pounding, mind racing, no earthly idea how she was going to distract an on-duty cop. Until she shifted her backpack to her left hand so she could open the door. And then she almost laughed—okay, the laughter would have been more from nerves and hysteria, but someday she’d look back on this and laugh for real. If she wasn’t in jail. Or dead.
She unzipped the backpack, balancing it on one hand and digging through it as she walked toward the lone cop guarding the front door.
“Ma’am?” he said before she ran into him.
Aubrey looked up, eyes wide, hand flying to her heart. “You scared me.”
“Where are you going?” the cop wanted to know.
“To work, where else?”
“You start work at three in the morning?”
“There’s always some emergency when you work for the government,” she said, trying to look harassed and irritated. “Here, hold this. I can’t seem to find my car keys, but I know they’re in here somewhere.” She plopped her backpack in his hands and pulled him to the overhead light, turning him so his back was to the stairwell.
Thank God Jack didn’t waste any time because the cop was peering down at her jeans, probably wondering why she’d dress that way for a government job. Before he could ask the question, Jack clipped him from behind and he went down like a sack of flour.
Tom sucked in a breath, backing away one horrified step at a time. Jack snagged him by the belt and dragged him back to the door. “It’s about time that damn backpack came in handy,” he said.
“There were the dogs. And the tracking device.”
“And in between you had to lug it to Florida and back.”
“True, but think of all the fun we had along the way.”
He shot her a look, but he directed his next comment to Tom. “Where’s your car?”
Tom, still looking shocked and slightly ill, pointed off toward the parking structure.
“Stop pretending to care about the policeman,” Aubrey said to him, adding for Jack’s benefit, “Tom always parks on the street. He gets ticketed, but he uses the congressman’s influence to get the tickets waived.”
“I can’t believe you would do this to me, Aubrey,” Tom snapped. “I thought we were friends.”
“People are trying to kill me, Tom. If we were friends, you’d cooperate with us.”
“But the police—”
“The police shot at me in Atlanta. Do you expect me to trust them now?”
“Get in the car,” Jack ground out, “or I’ll shoot you.”
Aubrey realized she’d squared off against Tom in the middle of the street. She shook her head, disgusted with herself for letting his thickheadedness get to her.
“Now you know how I feel,” Jack said.
“Oh, shut up.”
“You can’t shoot me,” Tom said. “You need me.”
And Jack didn’t have any bullets, Aubrey reminded herself, which was probably a good thing, because she was ready to shoot Tom herself. She settled for planting both hands on his back and shoving him over to the car. “Let’s go,” she said to Jack when she and Tom were settled in the backseat. She’d have preferred the front, but the last thing they needed was Tom taking off the first time they caught a red light—which became a nonissue when two police sirens fired up behind them.
Jack peeled out of the parking space, clipping the bumper of the car in front of them.
“This is a BMW,” Tom shrieked.
They both ignored him.
Aubrey hung over the back of his seat, watching Jack muscle the car down the street and feeling like things were back to normal. “At least we lost Danny and Carlo.”
“They won’t be far away,” he replied. “They’re not very smart, but they’re persistent.”
They rocketed through the empty streets of D.C., sirens screaming, Tom freaking out about the speed, yelling at Jack to be careful, making idle threats.
“Is that what I sounded like?”
Jack met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You were never that bad, even on your worst day. And you’ve improved.”
“Yeah, now we’re a well-oiled team.”
“Don’t get carried away, Sullivan.”
“I’ll get carried away when there aren’t any cops breathing down my neck,” she said.
“I’m about to solve that problem.”
There wasn’t a lot of traffic in Washington, D.C., at three a.m., but Jack apparently knew where to find some action. No wonder since it was in an area of the city filled with strip clubs, corner dealers and hooker strolls, the three groups of society he chose his friends from.
It was a chilly night, but the streets were filled with people. Jack threaded the BMW into the crowd, just another rich jackass looking for some kind of action. The police weren’t as welcome. Nobody challenged them directly, but the crowd wasn’t in any rush to let them through, either.
As soon as they were out of sight, Jack made a series of quick left and right turns, then pulled the car over in the mouth of the first alley he came to. He climbed out, holding the keys up in the air. “Who wants to trade?” he shouted.
All hell broke loose. The crowd erupted into a huge shoving match, and Tom lunged for the keys. Jack stepped aside and watched him eat pavement. At the same time a man, roughly the size of a bus with skin the color of mahogany, waded out of the melee, shaking off combatants like rag dolls. He held out his hand.
Jack closed his over Tom’s keys. “I said trade.”
“I take that car away from you, I can have both.”
“You take the car, you get him, too,” Jack said, prodding Tom with the toe of his boot.
“You throw in the woman instead, we trade cars even up.”
“She’s more trouble than he is.”
The man threw back his head and laughed. He flipped Jack a set of keys and pointed to a circa-1980s Lincoln Town Car parked not far away. It suited him perfectly, big as a bus and a little the worse for wear.
Jack hauled Tom up by the back of his bathrobe and dragged him, sputtering and fighting the whole way, to the Lincoln. “Knock it off,” Jack said, “or I’ll let you try to take your car away from that guy.”
“But . . . you can’t just . . . that was . . . I’m still paying for that car!”
“It’s just a hunk of metal—an insured hunk of metal,” Jack said. “Get over it.”
Tom’s shoulders slumped and he ducked into the backseat of the Lincoln, all the fight gone out of him.
Jack and Aubrey took the front. Jack started up the Lincoln and they floated away from the curb. About a half-mile away they motored through an intersection, and saw the police cars, lights still flashing, about a block down. The four cops were standing in the street, hands on hips, looking frustrated and pissed off. They could have arrested people but they probably wouldn’t make it out of the neighborhood alive.
“You should probably avoid cops in the future,” Aubrey said to Jack. “You’ve embarrassed them in three states now.”
“Three states that you know of.”
Sarcasm would have been the way to go, even better if she could have pulled it off with a straight face. Aubrey couldn’t help but laugh, and then she really trampled the bounds of their relationship. “You might have issues with the written word, Jack, but you can read people and situations better than any politician.”
Jack glanced over at her, stone-faced.
“That was a compliment.”
“You called me a politician.”
“Politicians are pretty smart people.”
“Except for their career choice.”
“The same could be said for you,” Aubrey pointed out.
“Politicians have to pretend they like their enemies. I get to shoot mine.”
“You, uh, don’t consider me an enemy, do you?” Tom asked from the backseat.
“At the moment you’re more of a nuisance,” Jack said to him. “But that could change at any time.”
Congressman Waters owned a brownstone in Georgetown, which wasn’t all that far from where they were. Jack double-parked in the street and led the parade up the steps and through the unlocked door.
“That was easy,” Aubrey said.
“He’s expecting us,” Jack said.
“I still can’t believe you called him,” she said to Tom.
Tom sighed. “He’s my boss, Aubrey. And I called him before I knew . . . everything.”
“And now?”
“I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you should try it.”
“Maybe you should try spending a week and a half with people shooting at you and see how open-minded it leaves you.”
“You used to be so much more relaxed, Aubrey.”
“Unfortunately, you haven’t changed.”
Tom worked up a glare that was almost worthy of Jack, then led the way down the hall. “At least let the congressman tell his side of the story before you decide he’s guilty.”
Aubrey followed Tom through a door at the end of the hall and stopped short. Alan Waters was a handsome, personable man, the room was the epitome elegance and the walls were lined with shelves filled with first editions and rare volumes. Aubrey couldn’t take her eyes off the guy standing behind the congressman’s chair.
“Okay, Tom,” she said, “that guy tried to kill me. Does that change your mind?”
“Horace George,” Jack said, “I thought the Caparellis dealt with you.”
“Takes more than getting bashed over the head and tossed off a cliff to kill me.”
“Who are you, Rasputin?” Aubrey wanted to know.
All four men looked at her.
“Russian guy, advisor to Tsar Nicholas, had to be poisoned, shot, and thrown into a river before he’d die.”
The explanation elicited four different reactions, each of them rooted in impatience.
“By the time I crawled back to civilization,” Horace said, “I knew I was too far behind to catch up, so I came back here and waited for Corona’s men to do what they’re best at.”