Now or Never (40 page)

The man stood in the shadow of the willow tree by the stream. He watched, puzzled, as a shadowy figure walked across the sunset porch and peered into the lit windows. He could see it was a tall, thin man in jeans and sneakers, and there was a second man two paces behind him.

The man’s hearing was sharp as a dog’s, and he heard the sound of the car long before they did. He slipped deeper into the shadows, running silently across the grass until he came to the lane at the front of the house. In the distance he could see the car’s headlights bouncing over the dips, and he guessed it was Harry Jordan coming back.

He ran as fast as he could down the lane, trying to beat the car. When it was almost in sight, he stepped behind the trees and lay facedown on the grass so that the lights would not catch the pale glimmer of his skin. Behind him he heard the black Infiniti starting up, then its engine gunning as it roared, without lights, down the lane
toward the oncoming Jaguar. He held his breath, listening for the crash.

Harry didn’t see the oncoming car, but he heard it. He spun the wheel hard to the right. The Jag responded brilliantly, but it couldn’t cope with the ditch and the tree. There was a terrible scream of hot rubber, a rending of beautiful steel, and a crash of splintering glass.

“Son of a bitch!”
he yelled, wiping the blood from his eyes, staring back over his shoulder at the speeding vehicle. He did a double take—it was the black Infiniti from this morning.

“Oh, God,” he muttered, panicked. “Oh, God, Mallory.”

He got the seatbelt unfastened, but he couldn’t open the door. He banged and pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried the other side—same thing. He glanced up and saw stars, real ones as well as the ones spinning in his head from where he’d thumped it on the wheel. Then he remembered he had been driving with the sunroof open.

The car was at a forty-five-degree angle, with the two right wheels in the ditch. He hauled himself up and out, then slid to the ground. He started to run.

The man picked himself up from the grass. He saw Harry running toward the farm and gave a bitter laugh. Whoever was driving the Infiniti had saved Mary Mallory’s life tonight and almost killed the detective instead. He began to jog steadily back to where he had hidden the Volvo, beneath trees on a side road a couple of hundred yards away.

He climbed into the car, smoothed down his hair, slipped on his nice tweed jacket, and tied the silk cravat. Then, with the lights off, he drove slowly back down the lane toward the road leading to the freeway. He would
not
take the freeway, though. Instead, he would use the secondary road through the small towns and villages.

He switched on his headlights. It was a slower route,
but if the police were out looking for the black Infiniti, nobody would bother about a well-dressed man driving a station wagon. After all, everybody drove a Volvo in the country.

Mal froze as she heard footsteps pounding up the drive. “Oh, no,” she gasped, cold with terror, “oh, no …”

Someone was trying to open the front door
.

Squeeze leaped to his feet and ran into the hall, barking frantically.

Mal clutched the shotgun to her chest. Cold sweat trickled down her spine, and her throat had turned to ashes—she couldn’t have screamed if she tried.

The footsteps were outside the kitchen door now.

Scrambling unsteadily to her feet, she aimed the shotgun at the door. Squeeze galloped in from the hall, just as someone tried the handle.

She shut her eyes and counted to ten. It was now or never, and she had no ammunition….

Harry put his shoulder to the door once, then again. It crashed inward. The kitchen was in darkness. He flipped the switch and stared at Mal, clutching the shotgun with her finger on the trigger. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and she said through gritted teeth, “Get out, or I’ll kill you.”

Harry began to laugh.

“Don’t shoot—I beg you, Malone, don’t shoot!” he chortled, weak at the knees with relief. “Oh, God, if only you could see yourself.” The chuckles just wouldn’t stop coming.

Mal opened her eyes and glared furiously at him. “Oh,
great
, Harry,” she said icily. “You’re just in time for dinner.”

B
LOOD WAS DRIPPING
into his eyes from a long gash across his forehead. “Oh, my God, he shot you,” she said.

Harry put his hand to his head, still grinning with relief. “No, he didn’t. But I thought for a minute you were going to.”

He took the shotgun from her numb hands, broke it open, and checked the chamber. “It’s empty,” he said, astonished.

She nodded, feeling like an idiot. “I couldn’t find any bullets.”

“Shot
, not bullets,” he corrected her, and she glared at him, then charged him, pummeling his chest with her fists. He grabbed her hands and put them around his neck, then got a grip on her, clasping her so close, she could hardly breathe.

He buried his head in her hair, kissing any available part of her: her hair, her neck, her earlobes. “I thought I’d lost you,” he muttered, his voice breaking with emotion. “I thought I’d put you in danger, left you alone, and the maniac had found you—”

“I swear he was out there,” she whispered, clinging to him.

“Someone was,” he said, grimly. “I met them on their way out.”

She pulled back, looking up at him.
“You saw him?”

Then the killer really had been out there. A shiver of horror ran down her spine.

He shook his head, the blood from the cut trickled down his face. He wiped it away impatiently, heading for the phone. “I don’t know who it was, but I recognized the car. It followed us from Boston this morning. And it just rammed me, driving without lights down the lane.”

He dialed the local police, quickly told them what had happened, then called Rossetti. An APB was put out immediately on the black Infiniti, which was sure to show damage from the impact with his Jag.

Mal sat in the same chair she had sat in a few minutes earlier, expecting her end to come. Her legs were shaking, and her heart was racing like the Jag’s engine. She suddenly remembered that Harry was the injured one and that, apart from shaken nerves, she was perfectly all right.

“He almost killed you,” she said, stunned.

Harry put down the phone; he turned, and grinned at her. “Forget about me—he killed my Jag. Right now it’s a heap of screwed-up metal in a ditch.”

She inspected his wound tenderly, then fetched a towel and water to clean it. “It needs stitches.”

Harry grabbed her hand and held it to his cheek, then to his lips. “Listen, you’re okay and I’m okay,” he said. “The only victim this time is the car. But I’m gonna get the bastard who did this.”

“You don’t think it’s him?”

He shook his head. “Somehow it’s not his style. He’s a stalker, a plotter and planner.” He looked her in the eyes and said levelly, “Mal, if he’d wanted to get you, he would have. Believe me, he’s that clever.” He added with a shrug, “Besides, the car was wrong. A black Infiniti. It doesn’t match with our descriptions of his vehicle. There’s always the possibility he has two cars, but anyhow the Infiniti doesn’t work with his profile.”

The wail of police sirens shattered the country silence,
and suddenly the house was filled with detectives and uniformed policemen.

A long time later, when the house had been thoroughly inspected inside and out, as well as the wrecked car in the ditch, they were taken to the local hospital. Harry had stitches put in his forehead, while Mal drank weak coffee from a paper cup, waiting anxiously.

She looked up as Harry finally emerged. They had shaved part of his hair for the stitches, which ran from his right eyebrow to the top of his skull. The black stubble made his face look even paler, and there was an exhausted look in his gray eyes.

In the police car taking them home, Harry leaned back, eyes shut. She could see he was in pain, and she held his hand, glancing concernedly at him. A couple of uniformed cops had been left on guard at the farm, and they bade them good night as they went indoors.

Harry poured himself a neat whiskey and drank it quickly down, preferring it to the painkillers they had offered him at the hospital. It had been a long day. His head was throbbing, and the rest of his bruised body was beginning to stake a claim on the pain threshold. But worse was the fact that Mal had been in danger, and that he had put her there by leaving her alone. Somehow it had never occurred to him that Jordan’s Farm was not the safe haven it always had been. Still, he was sure the Infiniti driver wasn’t the serial killer. But if not, then who the hell was it?

He was still mulling over the question the next morning, when he awoke in the old double bed that had been his since he was a boy. Mal was lying curved around him; he could feel the softness of her breasts against his back and her gentle breath on his skin. One long leg was flung over his, and she was clutching his hand as she slept.

It was almost worth getting his head smacked up just to
have her there, acting like a protective mother hen with a damaged chick.

He turned and slid an arm under her, and she opened her eyes. They were so deeply blue, it astonished him all over again, and her long curling lashes gave her an air of innocence. But the smile in her eyes was replaced by a worried frown as she inspected his head.

“I guess this is called role reversal,” Harry said, kissing her. “little Woman looking after Big Strong Man. Better be careful, I might get to enjoy it.”

“Surely you know that it’s always the women who look after men?” she said firmly. “It’s only the male ego that makes you think otherwise. Better not relax and enjoy it too much, Mr. Detective, or you’ll lose that macho edge and be forced to admit that women are stronger.”

He laughed, but then she kissed him and he forgot all about what she had said. He ran his hands over her smooth body. “Silk and satin,” he whispered, nuzzling her neck.

She slid from his arms and stood there naked, stretching lazily. “The wounded are not allowed to make love. They get breakfast in bed instead.”

He drank her in. She looked wonderful naked, as tempting as Eve’s apple. “That’s not a fair exchange,” he grumbled. “Whoever told you that?”

“The doctor at the hospital last night.” She threw on a robe and walked to the door. “A
woman
doctor,” she called over her shoulder as she headed into the bathroom.

“What does pain matter when I can have a woman like you in my arms?” he demanded when she emerged from the shower.

She rolled her eyes, unrelenting, and marched to the door. Just then the phone rang. Suddenly apprehensive, she waited while Harry answered it.

“Morning, Prof,” Rossetti said. “How’s the head?”

“It’s Rossetti,” he said to Mal. She nodded, relieved, and went downstairs to make breakfast.

“Not good, Rossetti,” Harry replied gloomily.

“Yeah? Sorry to hear that, but what I’m gonna tell you ain’t gonna make it feel better. You seen any of the newspapers this morning?”

“No. Why?” Harry suddenly didn’t want to know.

“The tabloids have a couple of nice pics of you and Malone. The captions are pretty much the same: ‘Mallory Malone in Hot Affair with Cop in Serial-Killer Case.’ And the pics are of you with your arm around Malone, walking in the grounds of Jordan’s Farm. Which, just so you know it, is described as ‘a love nest.’”

Harry groaned. “That’s all she needs.”

“You too, detective,” Rossetti reminded him. “Whoever took those pics might also have been driving the black Infiniti. I twisted a few arms, metaphorically speaking, and got a name and address. You’ll be glad to know, Prof, that the guys who wrecked your car are now in custody on charges of dangerous driving and removing themselves from the scene of an accident, plus trespass and anything else I can think of to throw at them.”

“Then it wasn’t the killer, after all,” Harry said, relieved.

“Unh-unh, just your plain old tabloid paparazzi. That’s what happens when you date the rich and famous,” he added. “You can consider yourself lucky they didn’t point their lenses in your bedroom window.”

Harry looked at the window they had left innocently open last night with the curtains drawn back. “I’m gonna have to be more careful.”

“You got it, Prof. Meanwhile, take care of the head. And Ms. Malone—she did a great job. The phone calls have tapered off. Nothing solid so far, not since the two false alarms yesterday.”

Harry hadn’t even thought about the two men they
had taken into custody for questioning yesterday. He had known as soon as he saw them that neither was the killer. The first was just looking for a moment of glory on television, and the other was a pervert with a mania for gynecological obscenity that would send him to the funny farm. Suzie Walker’s killer was still at large.

He told Rossetti he would be with him in a couple of hours, then went downstairs to tell Mal the news.

She was at the stove, slowly stirring scrambled eggs. “You were supposed to stay in bed.”

“I’ve got news.”

She put down the wooden spoon, her eyes filled with a mixture of fear and hope. He said quickly, “No, we haven’t caught the killer, but we know it wasn’t him last night. It was paparazzi.”

“The tabloids?”

“I’m afraid so. Rossetti saw the pictures this morning. Nothing too bad. I have my arm around you, and the headlines call Jordan’s Farm a ‘love nest.’”

Mal realized what it meant. “You mean it was tabloid
photographers
out there last night?”

“You got it, Malone.”

“But they almost
killed
you, driving like that. How could they? How
dare
they?” She flung down the spoon and paced, her arms folded, her mouth tight. “Have they sunk so low, they’re prepared to
kill
for a cheap picture? My God.”

“At least it wasn’t the serial killer.”

She stopped pacing. “No, it wasn’t.” Chilled, she remembered last night’s terror.

“So you don’t have to worry about that. Only about the headlines trumpeting your personal life.”

She gave him a dazzling smile, dizzy with relief. “The hell with my personal life. It was worth it, detective.”