Kerry nodded amusedly. “Be my guest.”
They ducked down a small, unmarked hallway, and the woman unlocked a plain door with her keycard, pulling it open and allowing a gust of cool, brandy-scented air to hit Kerry in the face. “Go on in and relax.”
Kerry stepped inside the Platinum Fliers Club door and was glad to hear it close behind her. She trudged to the courtesy desk and set her briefcase down, pulling out her wallet and handing her club card to the woman behind the desk. It was quiet inside the club, though many travelers were already taking sanctuary there, and she could hear the faint clink of glasses from the bar and a soft murmur of voices around the bank of modem-jack equipped cubes.
“Thank you, Ms. Stuart.” The woman gazed kindly at her. “Were you on the flight to Chicago?”
Kerry nodded.
“Would you like a drink?”
Kerry nodded again.
“C’mon.” The woman rose and took her briefcase, motioning her to follow. “You going to need a hotel room?”
“No.” Kerry found herself smiling. “Someone’s picking me up.”
The urge, at that moment, to see Dar’s face was so overwhelming, it almost made her cry. “But thanks for the offer.”
“No problem.’ The agent smiled at her. “You’re lucky you know someone in town. Hotels around the airport are not much fun to stay in.”
Kerry rubbed her hands, which had finally stopped shaking. “I certainly am lucky,” she agreed. “You think the storm will last ’til tomorrow?”
The woman led her to a nice, comfortable looking chair. “No, don’t worry. It’ll be nice weather tomorrow. You’ll get your flight out, no problem.”
Kerry sat down and sighed, having a flashback to her younger days wishing for snow to close school. “Okay. Thanks.”
DAR RESISTED THE growing urge to just tell the driver to shut up.
He wasn’t a bad sort, but he’d started talking to her the minute she’d gotten into the Lincoln, and all her attempts at not providing any conversational feedback had gone completely unheeded.
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“You been here before?”
“Yes.” Dar leaned her head against the glass window and watched the dark buildings go by.
“You like New York?”
“No.”
“Aw, really? Hey, it’s not so bad. People say stuff about the crime and stuff like that, but it’s really a great place.” The driver got into a groove. “We got lots of stuff to see; you been to the Statue of Liberty?”
“Yes.”
“See? That’s a great place, and Ellis Island, too. You been out there since they redone it?”
“No.”
“You should go. It’s great stuff. You been to the Empire State Building?”
“Yes.”
“That’s some place, huh?”
“It’s got rats.”
“Huh?” The driver turned to look at her, despite the fact that they were driving over a very large bridge.
“Rats.” Dar muttered. “They eat the damn cables.” She willed the car to move faster.
“Oh, well, y’know, we got them all over,” the driver apologized.
“They live here too, y’know?” He turned around and weaved his way through the traffic. After a moment of blessed, pensive silence, he spoke up again. “You an exterminator?”
Dar looked at the back of his head, willing it to explode. “No.”
“Oh. I figured maybe you were, since you knew about them rats,”
the driver commented. “My cousin Vinnie’s an exterminator. They make good money, y’know?”
The traffic was thinning out now, and they made better time. Dar saw a sign for the Newark airport, and she felt her pulse pick up. Before she’d left, she’d swallowed a few aspirin to try and kill the headache Kerry’s scare had given her, but the back of her head still throbbed.
The car pulled up to the terminal entrance a minute later, and she gladly got out, pulling up the zipper on her leather jacket. She leaned on the window and handed the driver the fare, giving him a dour stare in the bargain. “Thanks.”
“No problem! NO problem.” The man grinned at her. “Hey, you goin’ back to the city?” He asked. “You ain’t got no luggage, so I figure you gotta be picking somebody up, right? You want me to wait for you?”
Dar glanced around, gauging the lateness of the hour against the annoying nature of her friend the driver. “Yeah, all right,” she decided.
“Wait here.” She turned and headed for the terminal, breaking into a jog as she dodged the stream of people heading in the opposite direction.
The terminal felt overheated. Dar unzipped her jacket the minute
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she cleared the doors and plowed through the crowd inside, heading for the security gate in front of the terminal she knew Kerry had to be in.
Impatiently, she dropped her cell phone and pager into the small bucket, then walked through the metal detector as the guard waved her casually by.
She grabbed the electronics and moved on, pausing in the center of the terminal and looking around in mild dismay. It was a zoo. There were people piled everywhere, and angry, tired faces seemed to fill every available space. Dar pulled out her cell phone and flipped it open, then closed it again as a thought occurred to her.
She turned on her heel and headed toward a bank of elevators.
KERRY CURLED HERSELF up into a ball in the comfortable leather chair. She had one hand clasped around a glass of cognac, and she sipped slowly from it as the tension in her body very gradually unwound. All around her were trapped travelers, most on cell phones, none of them happy people.
They were all trying desperately to get somewhere else, and it felt odd to know that she wanted nothing more than to stay right where she was. She took another swallow of the good cognac, feeling the light buzz starting as she sat quietly and let the chaos in the room fade a little.
How long would it take Dar to get to the airport? Kerry tried to think about how far the city was, and how bad the weather seemed. She resigned herself to the wait, curling up a little bit more as the door opened and more disgruntled travelers entered.
Would Dar be able to find her?
Kerry set her glass down and opened her cell, then cursed softly as the battery indicator bleeped reproachfully at her and the device shut down. “Damn it.” She tapped the cell against her chin, then put it back in its case. “Guess I’ll wait another fifteen, then go see if I can find her.”
The lights flickered briefly, then steadied, causing a momentary hush in the room before the conversation picked back up again, not without wary looks toward the ceiling.
“Great.” Kerry muttered. “Just make it harder, why don’t you?”
She was facing away from the entrance to the club, looking out the plate-glass windows at the busy terminal on the level below. Suddenly her senses prickled and she felt a tingling sensation between her shoulder blades. Instinctively, she turned in her chair and looked up, startled at the sudden feeling.
And there was Dar, her tall frame outlined in leather and denim, walking toward her through the crowd. Kerry put down her glass and untangled herself, nearly tripping as she stood up and reached for Dar’s already outstretched arms. “Oof.” Off balance, she landed in an embrace that fairly lifted her off her feet anyway. “Oh, boy, am I glad to 36
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see you.”
Dar simply hugged her in silence.
“They just brought my bag up,” Kerry murmured.
“So I see.” Dar eyed the leather overnighter. She sniffed curiously.
“What was in the glass?”
Kerry licked her lips. “Cognac,” she admitted. “I was tied up in knots from that damn landing.”
Dar rubbed her back. “Did it work?”
“No.” Kerry peeked up. “But you did. I feel great now.” She smiled.
“Thanks for coming after me. I realized after we hung up I could have just taken a cab to your hotel.” She reluctantly released Dar. “Then I realized you would never know where I was and tried to call you back, but my cell’s dead”
“Bah.” Dar picked up Kerry’s bag. “And had me miss a ride with a prize New York cab driver? C’mon.” She put her arm over Kerry’s shoulders as Kerry retrieved her briefcase. “Let’s get out of here.”
Kerry blew out a breath. “I guess I can keep tabs on the flights from the hotel, right? So I know when I have to come back here.”
Dar glanced at her. “Uh-huh. Let’s worry about that later.” She steered Kerry toward the door, ignoring the envious looks from those obviously destined to spend the night right where they were.
THE STORM HAD settled in overhead by the time they pushed the doors open to the outside of the airport, and Dar blinked as wind driven rain dusted her face. She tugged her zipper up a little and then shaded her eyes from the rain, peering around for her cabbie friend. “Figures.”
“What?” Kerry was buttoning her own jacket. “Here, I can get that.” She reached for her overnighter, only to find it held up out of her reach. “Dar!”
“Leave it.” Dar sighed, watching the jam-up of cars on the ramp, a solid block of traffic honking and blaring their horns. “Lost our cab.”
Kerry glanced around. “Well…” She peered down the slope nearby.
“Hey, there’s a cab stand down there. Let’s go for it.”
Dar abandoned searching and resigned herself to a wet walk, putting her arm around Kerry as they emerged from the overhang, and the cold rain spattered over them.
They left the crowd behind quickly, no one else apparently willing to brave the weather in return for a shorter wait for a ride. The slope led them down toward a set of bus shelters, where a broken down city bus was standing with several people around it.
“Yeesh.” Kerry turned her collar up. The combination of the cognac and her recent experience had her knees feeling a little unsteady, and the long slope downward didn’t make that any better. She wrapped her arms around Dar for support and sighed.
“Did you get dinner on the plane?” Dar asked.
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“No.” Kerry paused. “Wait, yes I did,” she corrected herself. “But even if I hadn’t, this headache’s making me sick to my stomach. I’d settle for a cup of hot milk and you.” She wiped the rain out of her eyes.
“How did your dinner with what’s-his-name go?”
Dar guided them both around a group of men standing under the bus shelter, catching a whiff of long stale urine and marijuana coming from it as they passed. “Nice.”
“What?” Kerry eyed her in puzzled bemusement. “After all that doubting?”
“Um…dinner was fine.” Dar cleared her throat. “We grabbed some sandwiches. He wanted to take me some place underground but I wasn’t going for that.” She hesitated. “Didn’t last long.”
“I bet.” Kerry glanced around at their darkened surroundings and began to regret not waiting up at the top of the ramp. The cab station, which had seemed so close from up there, now was across a dark stretch of underpass and the rain had started to come down harder. “This wasn’t the best idea, apparently.”
“Eh.” Dar was glad enough to change the subject. “I’ll take your cup of milk and raise you a blob of chocolate syrup in it.”
Her partner chuckled a bit, but then a soft sound behind them made Kerry glance back. Of the group near the bus, two had separated, and were strolling casually behind them, their faces hidden in hoods they had up against the weather.
She looked ahead again, then she looked up at Dar. Her partner was walking with her eyes on the ground in front of them, a faintly troubled expression on her face. “Dar?”
“Mm?”
“Is it totally WASPy for me to think that just because two guys are following us, we could be in trouble? Or has it just been that bad a day?”
Dar looked behind them. “Maybe they’re heading for the cab stand too,” she reasoned. “Bus’s broke down.”
“Mm.”
Dar abruptly changed direction, taking them into the street as she headed across it toward the sidewalk on the other side of the road. She felt her heartbeat increase as she heard footsteps on the tarmac behind them, and felt a lump in her throat as she realized her lover’s instincts were probably correct. “Got your cell?”
“Batteries dead,” Kerry muttered back. “They following us?”
“Yes.”
“Got yours?”
“Yeah, but it’s in my pocket can you…”
“Hey, babes, where ya going?”
“Shit.” Kerry felt an unreasoning wave of anxiety. “Let me get your phone and I’ll call 911.”
Dar handed her the overnight bag as she released her arm and 38
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started to turn. “Hold this. Let me see what the hell these idiots want.”
She slowed and swiveled her body, as the two men following them came up behind them. “What do you want?”
“Hey, that any way to talk to a man?” the nearer one said. “Chill your jets, baby.” He had his hands in his jacket pockets and now one emerged with a dark solid block in it. “Now you and little blondie just dump your wallets on the ground, quick!”
The other man got between them, and the crowd left around the bus, blocking their view. “That’s right. Hurry up! We ain’t got time to mess around here!”
Kerry’s heart almost stopped as she recognized the shape of a gun pointed at Dar’s chest. She took a breath to stammer a reply and reached for her wallet, but froze when Dar stepped in front of her and squared her shoulders defiantly. “Dar!”
“What the hell do you think you’re going to do with that, you little jackass.” Dar answered him. “You think you’re gonna shoot me? You’re not near a man enough to do that.”
“Hey!” The gun wielder shoved the weapon forward. “Shut the fuck up! Put your wallet down or I’m gonna kill you, you stupid bitch!”
“Dar.” Kerry felt a sense of panic overwhelm her again. “For the love of God, please, just give him the damn money. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Dar mentally knew Kerry was right, but her nerves were close to snapping after the long day and she took a step toward the robber instead. “Yeah?” She growled. “C’mere, asshole. I’ve had a bad day and you’re gonna be the bright spot at the end of it.” She gently pushed Kerry behind her as she made her choice and started moving, heading for the robber and keeping her eyes fixed on the gun.
She could feel a hot bolt of fear hit her in the guts, and it almost made her waver, but the robber was raising the gun and now she was out of time.