Running Hot (27 page)

“Because I didn’t enter anything into the computer files about the link to Nightshade and because Zack chose not to inform the Council about what you and Grace discovered,” Fallon said.

Luther whistled softly. “You two really are worried about a spy, aren’t you?”

“I told you, Zack sensed that there was a Nightshade plant somewhere very high up within the Society. He had even begun to think that the spy might be on the Council. Guess the big sixty-four-dollar question now is, How many other members of the organization are members of the Society?”

“Any idea why Craigmore wanted Eubanks taken out?”

“Not yet,” Fallon admitted. “Just starting to work on that. Probably some kind of competitive thing. Maybe he and Eubanks were both going after the same promotion within Nightshade.”

“Why the hell did he come after me?”

“Because you’re guarding Grace,” Fallon said with his customary devastating logic.

Luther suppressed the icy chill that slithered through his veins.

“The only reason he would have been worried about Grace is because she can identify the singer,” he said quietly.

“Right. Craigmore must have been convinced that if we found the singer, we would uncover a connection that would lead straight back to him.”

Luther thought about that. “Wonder why he didn’t just take out the singer and cut the connection that way?”

“I keep telling you, she’s a pro like Sweetwater. She wouldn’t be all that easy to find, let alone remove.”

Fallon clicked off the way he usually did, without bothering to say good-bye. The way you knew a chat with him was over was when the phone went dead in your ear.

THIRTY-FOUR

Grace watched Luther close the phone and sink down onto the sofa. Absently he rubbed his right leg, weariness in every line of his body. The aftermath of the confrontation with Craigmore was having its way with him, hitting him on every front. She remembered the sensation all too well.

“Fallon says Sweetwater is still looking hard for the Siren,” Luther said. “He’s sure it won’t take long to find her.”

“That’s good to know.”

She got up, went into the kitchen and took the whiskey down from the cupboard. She poured a healthy shot into a glass, carried it back into the living room and gave it to him.

He looked at the glass for a moment as if he didn’t recognize the contents. Then he drank some of the whiskey.

“Thanks,” he said. “I needed that. Or something.”

Grace sat beside him. Together they looked out at the night through the open lanai windows. She put her hand on his thigh and began a gentle massage. He hesitated, as though he didn’t know how to react. Then, without a word, he let her continue. After a while he drank some more whiskey.

“Fallon sounded strange tonight,” he said.

“In what way?”

“I don’t know. Different. Tired. Worried. Depressed, maybe. Or maybe just a little overwhelmed. Hard to explain. Never heard him quite like he was tonight. He’s always been . . .”

“Fallon?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Long as I’ve known him, he’s always been Fallon. A force of nature, like a thunderstorm or a tsunami or a shark. But not tonight.”

“J&J is all we’ve got to stop Nightshade, and Fallon Jones is in charge of J&J,” she said. “That means the outcome of this battle is on his shoulders. He needs someone.”

“Who?”

She thought about it. “Someone he can talk to. Someone he can trust. Most of all, someone who can take over a portion of the responsibility. An assistant, maybe.”

Luther shook his head. “He’d never go for an assistant. He works alone. Like me.”

“You didn’t work the Maui case alone. I was there, too, remember? And I’m still around.”

“Because I won’t let you go off on your own as long as it looks like you need a bodyguard,” he said. He drank some more whiskey.

“No,” she said quietly. “I’m still here because I want to be here.”

He contemplated the darkness. “Living in the moment?”

“That’s all any of us really has, isn’t it?”

“No,” Luther said. “We’ve also got our pasts.”

She sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

Luther swallowed some more whiskey.

After a couple of minutes she tried again.

“I know what it’s like,” she said.

“Living in the moment?”

“No, killing someone with your aura. I’ve done it, too, remember?”

He looked at her over the rim of the glass. “For what it’s worth, Fallon says that, technically speaking, we didn’t actually kill anyone. We used our own energy to reflect the violent energy of our attackers. The process set up a dissonant wave pattern that shattered their auras. He said it was like they were killed by a ricochet from their own weapon.”

She contemplated that for a long moment. “Interesting but I’m not sure it changes anything. The bottom line is that we are responsible for the deaths of those people, and no matter how bad they were or how much they deserved to die, you and I still have to live with it.”

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

“He was trying to kill you, Luther. You were fighting for your life.”

“His aura winked out like that damn laser. Like someone had turned off a switch.”

“I know what it’s like to watch that happen, too. It’s terrifying to realize that you have it within you to take a life without even using a weapon.”

He gazed into what was left of the whiskey. “Makes you feel like there’s something inside you that’s not really human.”

“Oh, we’re human, all right,” she said. “Humans have always been very good at killing. But we pay a heavy price when we use that talent. I don’t think anyone is the same after they’ve gone down that path.”

“I know you and I and Petra and Wayne have paid a price. What about guys like Sweetwater?”

“I expect that, in their own way, the members of the Sweetwater family pay, too,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they’re such a tight-knit clan. They need each other to survive what they do for a living. One thing’s for sure, I’ll bet none of them has any real friends outside the family, not even when they were children. They can’t afford to trust outsiders.”

“Yeah, I guess you would have to keep the truth about what Daddy does for a living from your kids. Kids talk.”

“And then, later, you’d have to teach them to lie to everyone. Finding a wife or a husband must be tough if you’re a Sweetwater.”

“Running that kind of family business would tend to limit your life-style,” he said. “Hard to talk business with your golfing buddies, that’s for sure.”

“Nevertheless, I think it’s different for people like you and me. Knowing that we can kill and in such a very personal way, with our auras, makes us feel . . .” She broke off, unable to find the right word.

“Uncivilized,” Luther said.

“Yes, uncivilized,” she agreed. “We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. It violates our sense of who we are. But one of the things that defines us is that we are survivors. When push comes to shove, that’s what we do. We survive or we go down fighting. I think we need to accept that part of ourselves, too.”

He did not look away from the night but he put his hand over hers on his thigh. She threaded her fingers through his, stood and led him down the hall to the bedroom.

They made love first; hard, fast, a little violent, affirming what Grace had said earlier. They were both survivors.

His phone rang,
bringing him awake with an unpleasant jolt of adrenaline. His eyes opened to the sunlight outside the window. Going on ten o’clock, he decided. He grabbed the phone.

“Package got picked up a few minutes ago,” Petra said. “We watched the plane take off for the mainland. Tell Grace the walk-in’s clean. No need to worry about the health inspector.”

“Thanks,” Luther said.

“No problem. Like old times. How are you doing?”

“Okay.”

“You did what you had to do. Get over it and have breakfast with Grace.”

Luther closed the phone and looked at Grace.

“Petra says I should get over it and have breakfast with you.”

She smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Grace scooped the tiny black seeds out of the papaya half and set the fruit on a plate.

Luther watched her while he made coffee, his expression bleak. He was still recovering from the trauma of what had happened in the garage, she thought. He needed time.

“This isn’t the kind of place you’re used to, is it?” he said.

Startled, she paused in the act of carrying the plates to the small kitchen table. “What?”

“This apartment.” He angled his head to indicate the cramped kitchen-living area and the small bedroom beyond. “It’s not exactly your style. I could tell that first day when we checked into the hotel suite on Maui. You didn’t even blink.”

She set the plates down very carefully, unsure of where the conversation was going.

“Should I have blinked?” she asked, wary.

“No, because you’re accustomed to that kind of first-class travel.”

“Ah,” she said. She smiled.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I now know where you’re going with this conversation. Yes, I did spend more than a decade traveling first-class. Martin Crocker knew how to make money and he paid me well. But before I met Martin I was living in an apartment that was about this size and buying my clothes in thrift shops. My cottage in Eclipse Bay is not much bigger than this place.”

He gave her a head-to-toe glance, silently underlining the fact that her shirt and trousers had not come from a thrift shop.

“J&J pays me a very good salary,” she said drily. “I’m sure the agency pays you well, too.”

He turned back to the coffeemaker. “I’ve had a lot of expenses in the past few years.”

“I’m told that divorce is never cheap. Guess that’s what you get for being such a romantic. Is that coffee ready?”

He glared at the coffeemaker. “Yes.”

She finally lost her patience. “Let’s get something straight. I’ve lived high and I’ve lived on the streets. Living high is definitely more comfortable but neither place felt like home. My cottage in Eclipse Bay hasn’t ever felt like home, either. This apartment and the Dark Rainbow, they feel like home. Now why don’t you follow Petra’s advice? Get over it and pour us both a cup of coffee?”

He didn’t move for a few seconds. He just stood there, looking at her. Then he smiled slightly. His eyes warmed. He picked up the pot.

“I can do that,” he said.

She watched him fill two mugs. “And while you’re doing it, why don’t you tell me about your accident?”

He handed her one of the mugs. “I got shot on my last J&J case.”

“Shot?” Horrified, she stared at him. “I thought you said it was an accident.”

“It was.” He picked up his own mug, grabbed his cane, hiked around the counter and sat down at the table. “Someone pulled the trigger of a gun. I happened to be standing in front of said gun. Wrong place, wrong time. Pretty much the working definition of an accident.”

“Good grief.”

“I got what you might call a split-second warning,” he said around a mouthful of papaya. “Time enough to dodge, at any rate. The shooter was aiming for my back. Hit my thigh instead.”

“What happened?” she demanded.

“It was a routine referral from J&J. One of the low-rent private jobs. The client told me she wanted me to protect her from her ex-husband. Claimed he was stalking her.”

“Claimed?”

“She thought she could sucker me into killing him for her.”

“What made her think she could convince you to do that?”

“She was a level-seven strat talent. You know strats. They think they can manipulate and outmaneuver anyone. They always figure they’re the smartest person in the room.”

“Well, they do tend to make good chess players,” Grace said. “Didn’t she know that aura talents are darn hard to manipulate because we can usually see it coming?”

“Like a lot of sensitives, she didn’t think much of our kind of talent. Thought the only thing we could do was perceive a little radiation. She assumed that when we look at folks, all we see are human lightbulbs.”

Grace made a face. “Typical.”

“When she contacted J&J, she specified that she did not want to pay for a high-grade talent. In fact, she specifically asked for an aura.”

“She didn’t want to take any chances, is that it?”

“Right. She would have preferred to use a nonsensitive, a P.I. with no psychic ability at all, but she didn’t have much choice. She had told everyone, including her family, that she was deathly afraid of her ex. They were all registered members of the Society and they all insisted she get a bodyguard from J&J. She had to make it look good.”

“Bet she wasn’t expecting a powerful aura talent.”

“She didn’t know how strong I was,” Luther said. “But she wouldn’t have cared. So long as I was an aura, she felt safe. Fallon was a tad suspicious.”

“Fallon is always suspicious.”

“True. I shared his suspicions but neither of us could figure out what to be suspicious about, and I needed the money.”

“So you took the job.”

“The client assumed that I was just so much dumb muscle on the hoof.”

“Bless her heart.”

“I regret to report that she was not too far off in her assumption,” Luther said. “She damn near got me killed.”

“How?”

“The ex wasn’t stalking her. He didn’t want anything to do with her. When it finally dawned on me that she wanted me to get rid of him, I informed her I wasn’t in that line of work. Like I said, she was a strat. She realized immediately that I wasn’t just walking away from the job. She knew I’d probably warn her ex.”

“What happened?”

“She lost it.” Luther took a bite of his scrambled eggs and swallowed. “Flew into a rage and started screaming that I had ruined everything. Told me the whole story. That’s when I found out why she wanted her ex dead.”

“Can I assume you tweaked her aura a tad to prod her into losing her temper and spilling her guts?”

He shrugged. “Figured by that time I had a right to know what she was up to. Turned out the reason that she wanted her ex dead was because she stood to inherit his share of the business they had founded together.”