Pursuit (24 page)

“Voilà,” Matt said.

“Voilà what?” Charlotte looked at the contraption linked to her TV. “What is it supposed to be?”

“Can sure tell you’re not a teenage boy,” Matt said, and pressed a button. The machine beeped then glowed into life.
Drug Lords from Hell
—
Combat Action,
glaring red letters stated. Two huge soldiers loaded with enough firepower to bring down a small country glowered at her.

Charlotte was more puzzled than ever. “You bought me a video-game console? Why?”

“You’re clearly not into video games,” Matt said dryly as he pushed a button on the black box and something inside whirred to life. “Particularly shooter games.”

“No,” Charlotte said, eyes wide, appalled. “I’m—”

“—against violent video games,” he finished for her. “Yes, I know. Or rather, I can imagine.” He turned on the TV set, fiddled with a remote control, and all of a sudden a garish cartoony scene appeared on the screen—a desert with four Mad Max-like creatures, led by a huge, hulking tattooed bald creature with lats so wide he had to hold his hands away from his body. In the foreground was the barrel of a gun. The whole system hummed gently, waiting for her to pick up and start shooting.

“Oh, no,” Charlotte said. She put her hands behind her back. “No way.”

“Okay, this is how it is.” Matt pulled out two dining-room chairs and set them down on the flagstones, facing each other. With a gentle pull, he urged her to sit down. He sat down across from her, pulled her hands from behind her back, and held them. His large hands were warm, the skin slightly rough. His hold was gentle but unbreakable. Charlotte tugged once, then gave up.

“There are ways to deal with someone gunning for you, but none of them apply to you. If you’ve run away here to San Luis, it would be pointless to run some more, because whatever it was that could lead him to you here could lead him to you somewhere else. It takes a lot of street smarts to disappear entirely, and sweetheart, intelligent as you are, I just don’t think you’re savvy enough to erase your tracks entirely. Not to mention the fact that you’ve got someone watching your six, now. Me.”

Eyes wide, Charlotte whispered, “Watching my what?”

“Six. Your back. I’m here, and I have no intention of going away.”

“I could—” Charlotte licked dry lips. “I could run away.”
Again,
she thought.

“You could.” The big hands tightened briefly. “But I’d find you. Make no mistake. And it would be stupid to run away from me. I don’t know you well, but I do know you’re not stupid.”

“No.” The word came out a whisper.

“If I’m alive, I’ll be there, and I’ll stand for you.” Matt’s voice had turned harsh. “But I can’t guarantee that I can be there forever, it’s beyond my power. So you need to know you can defend yourself.
I
need to know you can defend yourself, in some way at least.”

“Kung fu and judo. Not my style.”

“No.” Matt shook his head without taking his eyes from hers. “There’s no way on this earth you could defend yourself in a physical fight against a man. You simply don’t have the heft or the muscle, and there’s no way I can give it to you. That’s why you need to learn to shoot. Guns are many things, most of them bad, but above all they are
equalizers.
The biggest toughest man will go down with a bullet to the head.

“But to be able to use a gun,” Matt continued, “it needs to become second nature. Part of the indoctrination process is having soldiers fire thousands of rounds, until it’s second nature. Special Forces soldiers even more so. My team of twelve men fired more rounds than the entire Marine Corps during training.” Charlotte’s eyes rounded. “That’s extreme,”

he conceded, “and that’s not what I’m aiming for. What I want for you is to have conditioning and muscle memory, and going out in the desert and popping a few beer bottles isn’t going to do it. That”—he indicated the black box cabled up to the TV with his chin—“that’s what will do it.”

Matt was so close that she could feel his body heat. He was pumping heat out like a human furnace, waves of it, warmer than the spring air outside the open window. Her hands felt as if they were encased in heated gloves.

Charlotte had never been this close to an attractive single male, certainly had never sat touching an attractive male, without there being some form of flirtation going on. Matt wasn’t flirting, not in any way. He was deadly serious. The skin over his cheekbones was tight, eyes narrowed, lips thinned with tension. This was his essence, she understood. The seriousness, the ability to think about violence and killing without shirking, facing it head-on.

“A video game is going to help me learn how to shoot?” Charlotte tugged once again at her hands, and this time his fingers opened and released them. It felt like a mild electric current had been switched off inside her.

“A personal shooter video game is basically conditioning, pure simulation of battle conditions. It gives muscle memory—”

Charlotte zoned out a little as Matt started talking about combat simulation and sight picture and trigger pull and simply watched him, fascinated.

He was sitting in classic male mode—big hands dangling over his spread knees, broad shoulders leaning forward to make his point better, totally focused and intent. She would draw him like this—no, no she’d
paint
him like this. An oil, in earth tones, the bright red tee shirt covering his broad chest the focus of the painting. Around him, as frames, the bookcase in shadows and the tall saguaro in the big ceramic vase of swirling greens and yellows. The window at his back, the sea a thin bright line on the horizon just over the sill. Any portrait of Matt should have the sea, anyway. Right now the structure of the painting was perfect, with Matt sitting slightly off center, his forward pose bringing him to the center. Darkness and shadows on his right, to mirror the darkness and shadows in him. Light at his back, lighting only part of his face, the other half lying in the penumbra. Her fingers itched to sketch him, to capture the coiled energy and strength just behind the relaxed façade. He looked so compelling, sitting in the carved wooden chair, serious and sober, still and concentrated. All his coiled power and energy was visible in the thickly corded forearms, the broad shoulders straining the tee shirt, the long, strong lines of his thighs visible underneath the faded jeans.

It would be a study in contrasts, which was what
he
was, his essence, a contrast of lights and shadows, and it would all appear just underneath the surface of the painting, the layer upon layers, drawing the eye closer.

“Mmm?” He had finished talking, and there had been an upward tone to his voice at the end. A question. She rewound the tape in her head to a few seconds ago.
Don’t you think?

Matt had said.

“Absolutely.” Charlotte didn’t blink, just put certainty into her voice. Over the years she’d learned how to cope with social situations when she zoned out planning a drawing or a painting in her head. People did not find it amusing when they discovered that she was often much more interested in the planes of their face or contrasts in coloring than she was in what they were saying.

“That’s reassuring,” Matt said dryly as he uncoiled himself from the chair. “Since after I explained to you all the reasons why it was important for you to practice as much as you could on the first-shooter game, including statistics, I started reciting the multiplication tables. Good to know you were paying attention in math class.”

Oops.
Caught out. “Sorry.” She tried to look repentant, though she’d had very little practice at it.

Matt caught her hand with his and brought it to his mouth, kissed the back of it. His breath was like steam. She could feel the touch of his lips to her skin all the way up her arm. Heat tingled in her veins. For a moment, her hand trembled in his. His dark eyes watched her face carefully. “Charlotte. Promise me you’ll practice as often as you can on the game. I want to keep you safe. Considering I just spent ten minutes in which you weren’t listening explaining why, I think you owe it to me.”

Charlotte nodded. He smiled and put a big hand to her back. “Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

There was something to be said for dining out with an artist, Matt thought as he walked into the dark cantina, blinking a little as his eyes adjusted from the glare of the bright Baja sun outside. The entire Garcia family had come out to welcome them, including the ancient, stooped geezer in the kitchen whose gnarled, horny hands could somehow build a burrito in five seconds flat.

Charlotte’s watercolors and drawings were everywhere.

This time Charlotte had brought a watercolor of the cantina’s façade at sunset, and even Matt, who knew exactly zero about art, could see that it was a small masterpiece. She’d caught it perfectly—that breathless moment just before the sun disappeared into the ocean, when everything was calm, the whitewashed adobe beachfront stores tinged bright pink by the setting sun. The cantina beckoned, door open in welcome, sweet jasmine framing the windows, peaceful and friendly.

“
Para ti,
” Charlotte said gently to Mama Pilar, placing the watercolor into those rough, brown, workingwoman’s hands. Though Charlotte was an American, a
gringa,
at least thirty years younger than Pilar and a world away in terms of interests and education, the two women had somehow forged an intense bond in the time Charlotte had been in San Luis. Matt could almost see the ties linking them as they huddled together, a beautiful blonde
gringa
and a short, squat Mexican cook, in perfect harmony. Charlotte had also soaked up a good working knowledge of Spanish. Matt couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could tell they were speaking in Spanish and that Charlotte was making herself perfectly understood.

Lots of guys in the Teams were excellent linguists, though not Matt. Being able to pick up languages easily was almost a precondition for becoming a SpecOp warrior, and Matt had had to work doubly hard to make up for the fact that he had absolutely zero linguistic abilities, which together with his zero musical and artistic talent made for a little trifecta of talentlessness.

Though they’d sent him to the Monterey Institute, where he’d had full immersion courses in Arabic and Farsi, and what were supposed to be introductory courses in Spanish and Russian, he was never able to get much beyond
where’s the bathroom
and
freeze
motherfucker
in any language.

It had been a real handicap and it was only because he was so damned good at mission planning and strategizing that he hadn’t been tossed out on his ear. His tin ear. But Charlotte seemed to just pick up Spanish out of the air. It floated into her head and out of her mouth, easy as you please. Who was she?

Matt had Googled her, of course, on Lenny’s laptop. Endlessly. Charlotte Fitzgerald, Charlotte Fitzgerald, Charlotte Fitzgerald, over and over again. He didn’t even have to fill in the name in the blank field. All he had to do was type in
Cha
and the machine knew what he was doing. Following his obsession. It helpfully filled in the rest of the name for him, and waited, humming, cursor blinking, for him to strike out, fall flat on his face once more. Matt was sure that the damned machine was laughing at him.

For all his forays into the Internet, she might have come from the moon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t found plenty of Charlotte Fitzgeralds. Jesus, there must have been three thousand Charlotte Fitzgeralds in the US alone, not to mention England and Ireland, where the name was about as common as Jane Smith. They ranged from Charlotte Fitzgerald, aged two months, born in Roanoake, Virginia, to Charlotte Fitzgerald, aged ninety-eight, from Anchorage, Alaska, and everything in between. He checked all the photos on the Net he could find, flipping through them as fast as he could. He didn’t worry about missing a photograph of her—he’d recognize her face in an instant, her features were burned into his brain. There was no way he could miss even a fraction of a second in which her face was up on a screen. He could see her face at night on the inside of his eyelids. She was such an unusually beautiful woman, you’d think there’d be a picture of her
somewhere
—as Homecoming Queen, maybe, or Best-looking Woman in Town. Or—

shit—Divorcée of the Month. But no, he came up blank, time and again. He’d started looking that first day, the day he’d seen her on the terrace, as soon as he knew her name. He’d spent a couple of hours a day at it, day after day, with the regularity and dedication he put into PT, except he’d come up with zilch. At least when he exercised, he got conditioned.

He’d searched for an ID—for her passport and driver’s license. She couldn’t have made it down here without at least one of them. A driver’s license or a passport would give him an address, a state.
Something,
dammit, to narrow the search down. If he had an address and a photo, he knew where to go to get more intel. With an address, he could start getting somewhere—her DOB, SSN.

He should have felt guilty about searching through her purse and her things, but he hadn’t. Not a bit. It took him two days to realize that she’d hidden her documents, and another day to figure out that she’d hidden them for a reason.

What could the reason be? What was it about her ID that she didn’t want anyone to see?

Where she came from? Was there a document that testified as to her marital status, and she didn’t want anyone to know? Did she have an unusual profession she didn’t want him or anyone else to know about? He needed to know it all. The more info he had, the more he could figure out who or what she was running from.