Running Scared (31 page)

Sedona

November 4

Night

S
hane waited for Risa
to say something more. He couldn’t see her face, but the tension in her body told him how tightly strung she was. His voice whispered through the darkness like another shade of night. “Is the gold here now?”

“No. But . . .” Risa rubbed the gooseflesh on her arms. “Can’t you feel it? It was here. And something still is.”

“Yes, I feel it. I just didn’t identify it as fast as you did.”

“Practice,” she said bleakly, looking around Virgil O’Conner’s empty cabin. “Christ, I hate feeling like this, knowing I’m different. Maybe I should have been a nurse instead of a curator.”

“Maybe I should have been a proctologist.”

She gave him a disbelieving look and then laughed out loud. “Sorry. Was I whining?”

He touched her cheek gently. “You’re entitled. If there was a way to keep you out of this, I would.”

“If you tried, I’d fight you tooth and nail.”

The corners of his mouth turned up. “Could be fun.”

Shaking her head, she started pulling out dresser drawers. There weren’t many clothes to look at. All were of the kind that gave thrift stores their reputations as centers of low couture.

No papers. Certainly no gold.

She glanced at the unmade bed.

“No need,” Shane said quickly. “Nothing on top or underneath except skid marks in the dust left by suitcases or ammo boxes.”

“Short of pulling up floorboards and poking holes in the wall, we’re out of luck.”

“Dead end,” he agreed. “But I know there’s more.”

“Here?”

“Or close by.”

“I wish I didn’t agree with you.” She put her hands on her hips, did a slow circle, and shook her head. “Not this room. The only thing in here . . . isn’t in here anymore.”

“The gold?”

She nodded.

“Like Wales?” he asked.

“Exactly. Damn it.” She rubbed her arms briskly. “I’ve had tingles from artifacts before, but nothing like Wales until Smith-White’s gold. And now this.”

Just like, she thought, glancing sideways at Shane, she had had tingles from men before, but nothing like him. What she felt with him was so different it should have terrified her.

Sometimes it did.

“Same here,” he said.

At first she thought she had spoken aloud about how he made her feel. Then she realized that he was simply agreeing with her about the gold.

“And the gold, too,” he said.

“Stop that!”

He laughed and stroked her bare wrist above the exam gloves. “You have very speaking eyes, darling.”

“I’ll get mirrored lenses.”

“Would it help if I said I felt the same way?”

“About mirrored lenses? Not particularly.”

He lifted her hand and nipped the skin he’d just stroked. “You know what I mean.”

The goose bumps that went up her arm owed nothing to ancient Druid gold. “What if it burns out in a few weeks or months?”

“What if it doesn’t?”

She blew out a breath that was almost a laugh. “One day at a time, huh?”

“That’s how life comes. One day at a time.”

Her smile was shaky but real. “Okay. A day I can do. But I want to get out of this house right now.”

Silently Shane took her hand and walked through the house into the night. “Better?”

“Yes.” She peeled off the gloves and put them in her purse. “Much better.”

“Feel up to a walk?”

She looked down at her shoes. Since her barefoot sprint through the casino, she had made a point of wearing footgear she could run in. That didn’t mean she was eager to take on rough country in tennis shoes.

“How far?” she asked.

He glanced up to the long mesa that loomed behind the house. “Maybe half a mile.”

She followed his look, tossed her purse inside the truck, and said, “Do you know where we’re going?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, that makes it so much better.” She waved a hand toward the cliff looming out of the darkness. “After you, boss.”

The moon’s radiance was strong enough that Shane didn’t have to use his penlight. The trail was well defined by previous hikers. Even if it hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have hesitated. Every step farther up the rise to the base of the bluff made him certain he was heading the right way.

“Feel it?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.” Risa’s voice was clipped, saying more than words about how much she disliked sensing something she knew she couldn’t touch.

Shane paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “Does it bother you that I can feel it, too?”

“No. Should it?”

“I just thought it might be part of what had you running in the other direction for such a long time.”

“That was pure common sense. I didn’t want another job.”

“That’s not what you said when you brought those offers to me and I had to match them.”

“I didn’t say I was stupid. I just said I didn’t want another job.

He smiled despite the tightening of his skin with every step up the trail. It wasn’t uneasiness exactly. It was more an awareness of
difference,
a sigh breathed across primitive nerve endings, the faint burned scent in the air after a nearby lightning strike.

He rather liked it.

“How are your goose bumps?” he asked after a bit.

“A lot happier than I am. Why?”

Something rustled in the brush about twenty feet off the trail. He looked, listened, saw only what might have been four-legged shadows sliding away into deeper shadows.

“It can’t be much farther,” he said, turning back to the trail.

“How do you know?”

“Because O’Conner was an old man, and old men don’t climb cliffs.” Shane stopped walking. “Certainly not this one.”

The pencil beam of the flashlight couldn’t begin to penetrate the darkness that concealed the top of the cliff.

“It’s to the right,” Risa said.

“What is?”

“Whatever is whispering to a part of me I don’t even want to know about.”

Despite her words, she stepped around him and walked along the lighter thread of darkness that was the trail at the face of the bluff. Shane was right. Ignoring what she was hadn’t made it go away. Besides, it was easier knowing that she wasn’t the only one who had odd wiring.

Two odds make an even.

She was smiling at the memory of Shane’s words when she stumbled over a rock in the dark, put out both her hands to catch herself, and came smack up against one of three leaning stones.

Sensation poured through her, a rush of gold-masked faces, ritual blades of death and renewal, voices chanting sacred words, and all of it swirling through time and moonlight, through her, until her head spun and she would have cried out if she could have breathed at all.

Then it was night again, just herself and Shane’s muscular warmth along her back, his hands over hers against the cold rock, his breath tangling softly, rapidly, in her hair, echoes of the chant retreating, common reality returning.

“You okay?” Shane asked, his voice rough and low.

“I think so.” She blew air out in a shaky sigh. “You?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You get the name of the train that ran over us?”

The sound he made wasn’t quite a laugh. “No. And I don’t want it.”

He pulled her hands away from the rock. Then, deliberately, he put his own hands back.

She watched, waited. “Anything?”

“Cold rock. And . . .”

She didn’t want to ask. Couldn’t help it. “What?”

“Time. Distance. Night. The kind of night that has no dawn.”

“That’s why they marked the summer and winter solstice,” Risa said in a low voice, knowing what she couldn’t touch. “That’s why they cast their dreams and prayers in gold, gold that never corroded, never corrupted, never changed. Gold and ritual and blood sacrifice to all the gods named and unnamed who controlled life. The darkness that had no dawn, the cold that wasn’t followed by warmth, the death that had no afterlife, the end of all life, including the life of the gods. The Druids feared that.”

“So does anyone with the intelligence to imagine it. Entropy by any other name is still, ultimately, extinction.”

Risa hesitated, then put her hand back on the rock. All she sensed was a stirring of air, a fading murmur, trembling silence. Frowning, she lifted her hand and stepped through the opening until she stood in the center of the three stones.

“Anything?” Shane asked.

“Not anymore. It was here, though. The gold.”

“And now it’s gone.”

She nodded as she touched the cool, rough surface of each sandstone slab in turn and sensed the silent stirrings. “I can’t say I like what I sense, yet I’m not worried by it now.” She looked at him and admitted, “But I’m not volunteering to fall asleep here either.”

“Yeah. C’mon.” He took her hand and urged her out of the shadows of the three rocks. “Let’s get to a place where there’s cell coverage. I want to know if Rarities has anything new to tell us.”

Risa walked behind Shane down the trail toward the empty cabin. Too empty. “Can we put out an anonymous tip so that the police start looking for Virgil O’Conner?”

“Right after I call the local hospitals. If possible, I’d like to talk to him before the cops do.”

Not far down from the cliff, Shane heard things sneaking through the brush in the same place he’d noticed them before. This time there wasn’t any itching on his neck to distract him. He switched on the penlight and raked its beam through the brush.

Three sets of gleaming eyes flashed and then vanished in a scrabble of claws over rocks and sun-hardened dirt.

“Wait here,” he said to Risa.

“With those eyes watching me? No thanks.”

“Then stay close enough to share the light.” He reached around behind his back and pulled the gun. “I’ll need it to find a way through the brush.”

Holding the penlight and the gun so that both swept over the brush simultaneously, Shane started off the trail. Risa followed close enough to touch his back.

The wind shifted.

The smell of death clogged the air, telling Shane that the resident wildlife had been enjoying a not-so-fresh kill. Grimly he moved the penlight in ever-widening arcs. The edge of the beam picked up a worn boot, shredded clothes, and remains only a coroner could look at without gagging.

Swiftly Shane turned around and blocked Risa’s view of Mother Nature at work.

“Time to go back,” he said.

She swallowed hard. “O’Conner?”

“Let’s just say I won’t be calling any hospitals. As soon as we’re well away from here, I’ll call the cops like a good little anonymous citizen.”

“I’m glad I know you don’t want that gold enough to murder for it.”

“Why?” Shane asked.

“Every time someone has died lately, they’ve taken with them one more link in the chain leading back to the true owner of the Druid gold.”

“Leave it to a curator to worry about provenance.”

“Somebody has to worry.”

“Oh, I am. I’m worried about the fact that too many people who touched this gold ended up dead.”

“Cherelle hasn’t.”
I hope.

“I wouldn’t announce that to the cops,” Shane said.

“Why?”

“It could tag her as the murderer.”

“I’m voting for Bozo,” Risa said instantly. “Or Tim.”

“You don’t think Cherelle can kill?”

Risa didn’t answer.

Shane didn’t ask again. He just followed her down the rise, away from the smell of death.

Las Vegas

November 4

Night

R
ich Morrison and
Gail Silverado looked at the six gold artifacts from every angle. Both of them wore exam gloves. So did John Firenze, even though he’d done nothing more than set the gold out on pages of casino letterhead on his desk.

“What do you think?” Firenze asked when he got tired of listening to silence punctuated by the soft beep of his computers when new e-mail arrived. “Is it real?”

Rich looked at Gail.

She didn’t notice. She was holding a heavy gold ring whose exterior and interior were incised with letters or symbols from a language she couldn’t read.

But she knew someone who could.

“Shane has a ring like this,” she said, savoring the weight of gold in her palm. “At least the outside is like it. He never takes it off, so I don’t know about the inside.”

“Where did you get this stuff?” Rich asked.

Firenze shifted uncomfortably. “It just came to me.”

“Try again,” Rich suggested.

“A guy—”

“Try harder.”

Firenze looked at Rich’s eyes. They were as cold as his voice. He wanted answers, and he was going to keep pushing until he got them. Firenze was just irritated enough at the world in general and his stupid nephew in particular to push back. Besides, no matter how worthless Cesar was, he was still blood. Firenze’s mother would make life living hell for him if he implicated her grandson in a lousy pawnbroker’s murder.

“Why do you care?” Firenze said. “I’m not asking you to buy the fucking stuff. I’m just giving you a chance to set up Tannahill. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

There was a tight silence, a muffled curse. Rich looked back at the gold. He wanted Tannahill, sure.

But that wasn’t all he wanted.

“I want to be sure the goods are hot,” Rich said.

“Be sure.”

Gail’s lips quirked at Firenze’s retort, but she didn’t let Rich see it. He was in a pisser of a mood. Even the thought of nailing Golden Boy’s ass to the courthouse wall hadn’t brought a smile to Rich’s grim face.

“And I want to cover my ass when the cops start asking me questions,” Rich said.

Firenze shrugged. “What’s to ask? I won’t mention your name. I’m just letting you preview the gold so I can be sure it’s the sort of thing that will snag Tannahill.”

“I don’t like it.” It was a snarl as much as a statement. “Tell me how you got the gold or there’s no deal. I’m not buying a pig in a poke.”

The spike in Firenze’s blood pressure showed in the darkening of his face. He really hated being reminded that he wasn’t top cock of this walk. “My nephew got it from a friend of a friend.”

“Which nephew?”

“Cesar.”

“The one who shot up the Golden Fleece?” Gail asked, drawing Firenze’s angry attention from Rich.

Firenze grimaced. “Yeah.”

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“Cooling off at the lake until we can get him out of the country. He hates the family houseboat, but tough shit. Do him good.”

Gail hid a smile. The Firenze women’s love of the huge Lake Mead houseboat was the despair of the men, who would rather be staked out on anthills than spend a weekend at the lake. But they did it anyway, at least once a year, along with everyone who was anyone in Las Vegas. Firenze’s Fourth of July bash was as famous as Gail’s own Halloween party.

Firenze glared at Rich. “You in or out?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You got until tomorrow. After that, you ask me about gold and I don’t know shit about nothing.” Firenze shot Rich a slicing glance. “You disappoint me. You asked to have Tannahill on a platter, and I’m giving him to you and you’re backing up.”

“What do you want out of this?” Rich asked.

“A bigger slice of the laundry pie.”

“How much?”

“Twice as much.”

Rich looked back at the gold. “Then who gets cut?”

“Whoever isn’t here.”

After a moment Rich turned back to Firenze. “Good work, John. When I’ve set things up, I’ll call and someone will pick up the gold. A few hours, no more.”

“You’re going for it?” Gail asked Rich.

“I’d be stupid not to. I’ll even get a gold star in my files from the feds on this one. It sure as hell will keep their nose out of my business for a while. They’ll be too busy sticking their nose up Tannahill’s.”

Gail looked uncertain.

“What?” Firenze asked her.

“I think he’s too cagey to get caught by a blind call.”

“It won’t be blind,” Rich said. He gave Firenze a look that told the other man he had better answer with something more to the point than
a friend of a friend.
“Who did Cesar get the gold from?”

Firenze wasn’t stupid. “A bitch named Cherelle Faulkner.”

“The one who’s tight with Tannahill’s curator?” Rich asked, as though he didn’t already know the players.

“That’s what my tip said.”

“Then the message will come from Cherelle.” Rich looked at Gail. “You in?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, it’s the smart call. But Vegas sure won’t be the same without him.”

“Who?” Firenze asked.

“Shane Tannahill.”