Swerve (2 page)

“Just find him, Mary. He can’t be hard to find,” Vernon responded as he started to leave her tiny office at the front of the building.

“This is Cairns. It’s the tourist season. There are thousands of people flocking to the city every day.” How was she supposed to find one man out of thousands?

“Just do it, Mary. You’re good at doing the impossible.”

Which was Vernon-speak for “I have no idea and leave me alone.”

The man she had to find was Simon Mayhew. He owned the company they worked for. From what Mary had read on him, he pretty much owned half of Australia. He was very, very rich and very, very late. He was supposed to be in Cairns for two days looking over their small shed construction company, Man-Land.

Mayhew Incorporated had bought it in a takeover of the much larger and more profitable Lamond Industrial. Because of that, they had been swallowed up in the takeover. Mary was daily expecting for Man-Land to be closed down and those parts that were profitable, and there weren’t many, would be swallowed up within the Mayhew megalith. She had seen it all before. The non-profitable Man-Land was doomed. Did it really matter if they found this man or not? The fact that he hadn’t bothered to show up at their office indicated their importance to him.

Mary watched Vernon rush off to his office. She knew he liked to rush because he thought it made him look busy. Mary knew he was just going back to his stack of Sudoku’s he had in his bottom desk drawer. She blew out a breath and looked around at the four other people in their small office. A computer nerd with no concept of life and still living at home with his parents at thirty, an angry engineer who blamed everyone for his shortcomings, a software technician who Mary had never seen do any work and the sales manager who spent more time chatting on the phone to his girlfriends than actually selling anything. She knew none of them would be any help. They had trouble finding the office supplies of toilet paper and coffee while whining over the size of the paper towels in the restroom. “Can’t they be a quarter of an inch smaller, Mary?” Why smaller? Who the hell knew? They were people marking time and getting paid while doing it. “A bit like me,” she murmured to herself.

Mary turned to
Google
and looked up the accommodations in Cairns. From what she knew, Simon Mayhew was disgustingly rich. It was unlikely he was staying at ten-to-a-room backpackers on the Cairns Esplanade or a caravan site with shared facilities. She rang around some of the larger, flashier hotels. There was no Simon Mayhew registered. She rang the
Pullman Reef Casino
. They were reluctant to give much info other than Mr. Mayhew had been in the casino last night but they had no idea where he was now and did she want to leave a message for him?

Mary contemplated leaving, “Get your rich, playboy ass over to McLeod Street and be a responsible employer,” but sometimes your first instinct was not always your best instinct to follow. She hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen. “Perfect. Great. Spoilt, rich sod. If I was a millionaire where would I be?”

Mary had read in the newspapers he was a womanizer. That meant he could be in the bed of any woman in Cairns right now. Mary’s mind visualized the naked man at the beach yesterday. He had been popping in and out of her thoughts on a regular basis. “Now that would be a man to have in your bed, on the floor, against the wall.”

She slumped back in her chair and once more ignored the chaos in her cramped office as she thought about the tattooed man. Her legs parted as she imagined him between them, smiling up at her just before he started doing whatever he—“I wonder how the hell he knew my name?” That still made her wonder. Foolishly she had some wild idea that he was meant to be in her life and that somehow they were tied together and destined to meet. “That or I haven’t has sex in a really long time and abstinence has made me delusional.”

Mary sighed and re-focused on the Internet. If she had a photo of the missing Simon Mayhew, then maybe she could track him down. But pictures of him were few and far between and the ones she could find showed a tall man in a business suit with his back turned to the camera. “Great, now I just have to look for a man with a back…”

* * * * *

Swerve stood looking at the red door. It was a door, but not a door. At first sight there was nothing remarkable about the Bungalow Post office in Cairns. It had the standard red mail box out the front and people were coming and going doing business. A normal person wouldn’t have stood and looked at the red door like Swerve did. But then few people considered Swerve normal. He didn’t care.

Normality was for the boring and those who cared little about what went on around them. But Swerve cared. He cared a lot and the red door was a problem.

Outside a dozen rows of business mail boxes stood a prefabricated metal wall.

It was there to protect the boxes from the elements. In the wall were two red doors.

They were spaced ten feet apart. One door went from floor to ceiling and had a standard round metal knob. The other did not. It was a half door. It started at the top and stopped waist height for a man and the knob was rough, metal and battered as if great force had been applied to it. Anyone passing by, if they had cared to look and wonder at the difference between that two doors, may have pondered at the reasoning of the half door. Swerve wondered how many hands had touched that battered handle, turned the knob and were never seen again.

He blew out a breath and ran his hand through his dark red, shoulder length hair. He had forgotten how humid the tropical heat of Cairns could be. He reached into the back pocket of his red
Billabong
board shorts and pulled out a leather cord, trying it around his hair to get it off the back of his neck. He contemplated his options. Turning the knob on the half door would answer a lot of questions. “But what would it release? And where would it take me?” Swerve was not one to fear the unknown. However the thought of getting sucked into what he suspected was a powerful vortex and not being to get back again was pointless to what he was trying to achieve.

He placed his palm on the painted surface of the door. It was as he expected.

Cold to the touch. Everything else in the tropics was hot and sticky yet this half door was not. “Bloody time lords.” Swerve loathed them. As far as he was concerned time lords were not at all like the charming and quirky
Dr Who
of television fame.

Time lords were dangerous meddlers who travelled from world to world and cared little for others. Their lives were dedicated to the pursuit of adventure, uncaring what happened when their peccadilloes affected the rest of the world. Which they did. A lot. As for time lords trying to make him and others believe they did it all in the name of science? Bullshit. They did it for the treasures and the power they could amass.

“What to do?” Swerve muttered to himself. A time portal was dangerous thing to be left out in the open in a public place like this. If it was a less than public place he would have set an explosive charge to it and blown it up like he had done to others. But this portal? That was not possible and he wasn’t about to cause fear or harm anyone in his need to rid his world of time lords.

He contemplated gluing the door shut. That would work as an interim measure until he could consult others of his kind into the best way to handle this. While it annoyed him not to be able to think of a quick, effective solution, he wasn’t arrogant enough to think he knew everything. He didn’t. There were things in the universe that defied even Swerve.

From the same back pocket Swerve pulled out his cell phone and dialed in a number. “Yeah, Jim, it’s a portal.” He listened intently to the other man. “No. It’s way too public for a detonation.” Swerve’s gaze wandered over the half door. “No, I went under the gap in the door—well, you knew I would—and there was nothing.”

Swerve dropped to his haunches before the door and waved his hand under the gap.

“I may have to go through it. Yes, you know I’m aware of the consequences. No, I expect he won’t be happy to see me but Sholto rarely ever is happy to see anyone.”

Swerve listened to his colleague and thought about Sholto. He was the worst of the time lords and word had it that he was in Cairns. That meant trouble. Big trouble. That was why Swerve was in town. That and other things. He wanted to track Sholto down. He was honor bound to do so. The time lord was hurting a lot of people by his reckless actions and Swerve wasn’t about to let that continue. The problem was Sholto was hard to catch. He knew more ways to disappear than Swerve and his compatriots had managed to work out. They had to bring Sholto to heel and have him transported somewhere he wouldn’t cause trouble. Doing that to a time lord was always perilous. They had lost a few of their own doing exactly that.

“We need to speak to Socia,” advised Jim over the phone. “If anyone would know where Sholto was it would be her.”

Swerve nodded. Socia Black was an interesting person. She always knew everything before anyone else did. While her information was consistently solid, Swerve was always wary of her. Why? He’d never been able to say. Maybe it was because she knew too much. Maybe it was those black fathomless eyes of hers that drew you in but refused to reflect back what their owner was thinking. Maybe it was the rumor that she was of the mythological Siren race of women who tempted men to their deaths. Was she paranormal? He didn’t know. That she was dangerous, Swerve didn’t doubt. He just wasn’t sure if it was to him, their enemies or herself.

Swerve stood up and looked around him. If anyone thought it was odd his fixation on the door they didn’t say. Cairns was like that. People were laidback and casual. He suspected he was viewed as just another backpacker and that suited him.

The town was full of traveling souls looking for adventure in paradise.

“Jim, I’m going to—” Swerve stiffened suddenly and nearly dropped the phone.

It was like a bolt of lightning had charged up his spine and set his whole being alight. He closed his eyes and savored the rush. It was her. He could feel it. “I have to go. Yeah man, I’ll call you back when I’ve had more time to think about it.” He smiled. “Come on, Jim, me do something stupid?” Swerve was not surprised by his colleague’s words. He had done some rash things in the past. But that was then.

Now, he had the future to deal with and it was walking towards him on size eight Doc Martens. “Talk to the others and let me know what they think.” Swerve snapped off the phone and turned to face the woman he knew was walking towards him unaware that they were each going to change the other’s life.

He smiled as he watched Mary Dalton move with a purposefulness he saw in few people. He suspected if anyone got in her way she would have coolly told them to get out of it. He knew all about Mary and what he knew he liked. A lot. From the top of her mid brown hair to the non-office approved Doc Marten boots that stopped her boring blue plaid work shirt and navy pants from looking too frumpy, she was the woman he wanted. “I cannot wait to get to know her better.” His gaze roamed her face taking in the thin sheen of sweat on her upper lip and the clever brown eyes that he suspected saw everything but revealed little. He liked that in a woman.

Unraveling a mystery was fun. And this one? If the keenness of her mind matched the enticing curves of her voluptuous body, Swerve knew he would never let this woman go. It would be beyond his will to do so.

He waited until she was level with him and smiled. Her eyes narrowed then opened wide as if she was remembering something, He felt her gaze on his hair and shoulders.
Yeah. She remembers me.

“Hey, beautiful lady. I’m a wayward traveler on the crooked path of life and I’m looking for a woman to share my riches with me.” His airhead, dopey sounding alter-ego came naturally to his lips. He used that to disarm and confuse people. It was better than a cloak and it threw people off the real reason he was with them.

She stopped and looked at him coolly. “Bollocks.”

Yeah, Socia was right. This one is mine.

Great, the guy with the hot ass is a pot-headed, surfer dude
. While Mary had nothing against surfers, the word ‘gnarly’ was not in her vocabulary. As for drugs?

Nope. Life was a reality trip enough without mind altering substances. “Excuse me,” she said as she started to move past him. Mary had mail to pick up and drop off and standing in the heat wasn’t something she wanted to do.

“Bodacious babe, I love thee.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Of course you do.” She looked into his bright green eyes. The intensity and intelligence in those depths belied his words and demeanor.

That was weird. She remembered the man from the beach. They were one and the same and yet this man was not as she thought he would be. It was like something was missing or added on to confuse and intrigue her. Few men did that.

“Come ride with me to Camelot and be my queen.” He reached out and took her hand.

Mary shrieked at his touch. It wasn’t just the fact that an unknown man had taken hold of her hand that shocked her. It was the sudden surge of electricity that shot through her arm. Her whole body felt like it was on fire. Her gaze locked with his. The look he gave her made Mary start to shake with a feeling of long-held suppressed need releasing from within her. She staggered slightly and tried to pull away. He held fast to her. Normally Mary would have yelled and fought to be free of him. But this was not normal. This was something else she couldn’t define. “I—

er, um—”

“Words in my world are not necessary my, love. My chariot awaits you.” He pointed to a black
Triumph
motorcycle. “Let us away to make a paradise of our own.”

Mary tried to pull her hand from his. It felt melded to his flesh. His hold was firm but not punishing. “I—you—” She was not normally a blithering idiot bereft of words but with this man? Nothing would come out.
Maybe I’m the one on drugs?