Something stirred at the edge of her vision—a tall, black shape promising safety and shelter. Cooper! She tried to stand, to go to him, but there was blood all around her, thick and ropy. Her feet scrabbled uselessly for purchase.
Cooper stared at her for several heartbeats, eyes black and unreadable, then he moved in slow motion, wide shoulders turning. He was leaving! She could see his broad back, the long legs taking him away from her in giant strides, moving so quickly she barely had time to scream at him.
Cooper! Come back! Help me!
She screamed until her lungs ached, but no sound came. Cooper kept on walking and in the time it took to stretch out her hand to him, he was gone. She stared at the cold empty space where he had been.
A low cruel chuckle sounded from behind her and she whipped around, dread pooling in her stomach. Santana’s smile had stretched unnaturally, his entire mouth blood-red as he raised the large black gun. Red and black. The world had turned the colors of blood and death. He raised the gun and she braced. “Die, bitch,” he growled and pulled the trigger.
* * * * *
Julia bolted up in bed, trembling and sweaty. The dream was different this time. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there had been a different feel to it, an urgency, as if something were closing in on her.
Lightning crackled and thunder roared across the sky. It sounded as if it were an inch above the roof and Julia realized that it was the crack of thunder that had roused her and not a bullet to the brain. Something wet touched her hand and she screamed, one hand at her throat, the other frantically reaching for something she could use as a weapon. Something about the quality of the wetness had her snapping on the lamp on the bedside table.
Fred sat on his haunches, big brown eyes warily watching her. He whined softly without opening his muzzle and Julia remembered that he had been mistreated. She had been thrashing about on the bed in the throes of the nightmare and had frightened him.
Well, she’d frightened herself. Julia patted the bed and Fred immediately jumped to her side, curling into a warm hairy ball, his weight causing the already sagging mattress to dip even further. At least he didn’t smell anymore.
Julia leaned her head back wearily against the cheap imitation brass bedstead and tried to fight the waves of despair. But even despair was better than what was lurking behind it—fear.
Someone—probably several someones—was gunning for her and every day she spent here was a day he—or they—could crawl closer to her hiding place.
Davis wasn’t any great help in reassuring her, either. He had sounded impatient the last few times she had called. The calls depressed her so much, she’d started calling less frequently. She was supposed to call from pay phones, not her home phone. They always had the same conversation, anyway.
Any news?
No.
Do you know what’s going to happen?
No.
How long will this go on?
I don’t know.
There were very few variations and Davis tended to turn testy when she tried to prolong the conversation. Julia didn’t even like Davis that much, but he was all that was standing between herself and the abyss. Or Santana, which was the same thing.
Fred laid his muzzle on her knee and she patted his head with a trembling hand. She found that spot behind his ear that made his eyes slit with contentment, and wondered how it was that easy for dogs. No amount of scratching behind her ears would make the fear and loneliness flooding her soul go away.
Julia pulled up the blanket tenting her knees. Like most other things in the house, it was cheap and threadbare, the colors faded from many washings. A far cry from the down-filled pure raw silk comforter in gemstone colors her mother had sent her from Paris for her twenty-fourth birthday.
It had arrived after her parents’ funeral.
Julia dropped her head to her knees and struggled to keep the tears back. Tears wouldn’t help anything, and she should be all cried out, anyway. But apparently she wasn’t because a few renegade drops seeped out. Julia lifted a hand to her cold cheeks and shivered as a gust of rain rattled the windows. Had the heating somehow gone off? She was too tired and too depressed—too scared—to get up and check.
Maybe Cooper—Julia stopped herself. She shouldn’t get used to leaning on Cooper. Cooper had gone.
That was the other part of her nightmare. Cooper leaving. Turning his back on her and walking away. In life as in the nightmare.
Well, of course he had left her.
He was a businessman with a business to run. He had things to tend to and wasn’t responsible for a forlorn Eastern lady who had had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Cooper and she were lovers, sure. But who knew what Cooper was thinking or feeling? What she meant to him. He showed up, they had sex for hours, and then he left again.
Repeat cycle.
A friend of hers in New York had had a married lover like that and she had called him The Bat. Cooper seemed to care, but he sure wasn’t talking. And now he’d left her for a whole week.
Julia bit her lips. A week without Cooper in her bed seemed almost impossible to bear. She had no fear when he was around. And all that backed up fear was flooding in now. She wanted to call him back, tell him he needed to stay with her.
Which was nuts, of course. What was she to him besides a good lay?
What was she to anyone?
For the first time in her life, Julia took stock. She had moved all over the world with her parents and it had been wonderful, but she had never thought to look over her shoulder, to see what had been left behind. All she had ever seen was what lay ahead. It had been so exciting, each move a new country, a new city, new people to meet.
For the first time in her life, Julia wished she belonged to a community. People she could turn to for help. A community of people who lived in one place, and had done so for generations, not expatriates who lived in far-flung places.
There were new friends here, of course. Alice, Beth. But they thought the women they had befriended was Sally Anderson, a perfectly normal grade school teacher.
Not Julia Devaux, woman on the run.
* * * * *
Nothing, but nothing, was as satisfactory as surfing cyberspace. It was like being invisible and all-powerful. Nothing was safe from the prowling intelligence. People would be astounded at just how much could be learned if you knew what you were doing. You could find out a man’s hat size, his favorite reading material, what trinkets he bought his mistress and whether he was on pain medication for his hernia and he wouldn’t even know he’d been investigated.
Of course the Department of Justice’s files were harder to access than most. The D of J’s firewalls were thick and high and studded with protective devices. But it was all about as useful as a Lego fence if the right person wanted in.
And I’m the right person
, the professional thought. It wasn’t a question of whether Julia Devaux’s file could be found, but when.
Time to tighten the timeline. Accessing the D of J’s computer system could be done anywhere from a laptop with a modem. That was the easy bit. The next step required intelligence.
The professional’s ruminations were interrupted by the TV newscaster stating that the weather forecasters were predicting a cold winter. There would be snowstorms around Thanksgiving.
I want to be in St. Lucia by Thanksgiving
, the professional thought. Sunshine and crab
instead of snow and turkey.
* * * * *
“We’ve got a man down.”
Herbert Davis looked up blankly from the circular letter written by the new broom upstairs who was so determined to sweep clean. The circular was the umpteenth reminder that terms derogatory to women and minorities were forbidden by amendment blah-blah-blah to ruling number blah-blah-blah.
We’re law enforcement officers, damn you!
He sent the sizzling thought upstairs.
We can’t make the world better. Just safer.
How the fuck were they supposed to do that on a diminishing budget while tiptoeing around mincing words? Barclay coughed and Davis remembered that he’d said something. “What?”
“We’ve got a man down.” Barclay grabbed a nearby chair, turned it around and straddled it. Barclay looked like shit and smelled bad, too. He looked uncomfortably like a bum. The divorce was dragging him down.
Davis shook his head morosely. The world really was going to the dogs. “Who?”
“Guy named Richard Abt. Remember him? We relocated him as Robert Littlewood.”
Davis looked to the ceiling as if going through a mental Rolodex, but the truth was there wasn’t a chance he could remember. The Marshall’s Office ran over 2000 witnesses in the Witness Security Program and Davis found that he could no longer keep track of them all. He tapped his lip. “That was the…” Davis paused.
“Accountant.” Barclay was reading from the file.
“Accountant,” Davis said wisely. “Right. Uh-huh. And he was going to testify in the…the…”
“Ledbetter, Duncan and Terrance case.” Davis nodded as Barclay read out the particulars of the case, then flipped the thick file closed. “Abt was due to testify in court on the 14th of November.” Barclay tapped the file and sighed. “Looks like those creeps at Ledbetter, Duncan and Terrance are going to be let off the hook, after all. Abt was the only one willing to testify. All that trouble we went through and there won’t even be a break in their tan line.”
Davis took a pen and started taking notes. It wasn’t his case, but losing a witness was something that shook the entire service from stem to stern. It was a rare event and when it happened, heads rolled. Davis wanted to be ready to cover his ass if any of the shit hitting the fan blew his way.
“We know who the perps were?” Davis gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “Besides the obvious—stooges for Leadbutt, Dunce and Torrid.”
“Well, that’s just it, boss.” Barclay shifted uncomfortably. “Looks like…looks like it was an accident.”
“A what? An accident? Who bought that crap? The local cops?” Davis looked pityingly at Barclay. “Where did we put Abt, anyway?”
“In Idaho. Little town named Rockville.”
Davis snorted. “Local cops probably couldn’t find their butts with a stick and a map.”
“Nah, it wasn’t the local cops who closed the case, it was us.” Barclay rubbed his bloodshot eyes with the knuckles of his index fingers. “Our people say it really did look like an accident. A hit and run.”
“A real one?” Davis frowned.
“Sure looks that way. If it’s a hit, the wiseguys make sure everyone knows about it. Real clear message to anyone else who might have any bright ideas about testifying. Sort of a warning. Like shark repellant.”
It was true. Still…Davis shook his head sorrowfully. “Can’t believe that poor bastard’s bad luck. Here Abt danced his way out of—” Davis checked the file again, “—a sure conviction on three felony counts, looking at twenty-five to thirty, easy. Decides to go state’s witness and gets a whole new identity and a new job.” Davis ran quickly through the info. “Looks like he was doing pretty well in his new identity, too. And it all goes kerblooey because of a drive-by—”
“Ain’t that the way.” Barclay picked at a dirty fingernail. Davis noted uneasily that his hand trembled. “Sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.”
* * * * *
The professional scrolled through the facts on Sydney Davidson, the second name in the file hacked from the U.S. Marshal’s Office. A real Doctor Feelgood, our Sydney, the professional thought.
A brilliant biochemist, Dr. Davidson had been hired by Sunshine Pharmaceuticals, a Virginia-based drug company, right out of college. But the good doctor’s knowledge wasn’t limited to aspirin and antibiotics.
The professional remembered clearly when the Sunshine Pharmaceuticals scandal hit, in the midst of a hotly contested Senate election campaign. A number of members of the company’s board of directors had been involved in an extremely lucrative sideline—providing highly sophisticated designer drugs to the professional elite of the Southeast Seaboard.
The photographs of Sunshine’s CEO being led to the courtroom in handcuffs and shackles helped the underdog candidate—an aspiring young district attorney running on a law and order platform—to a landslide victory. After a warrant had been issued to the entire board of directors, Sydney Davidson had turned state’s witness on a dime.
The professional didn’t care much about drugs either way—to each his own poison. Personally, the professional preferred
Veuve Clicquot
.
The professional checked the organization chart. No use contacting the CEO or any other of the board members. Only the head of security would do.
The professional typed the posting to the Norwegian: MESSAGE FOR RON LASLETT, HEAD OF SECURITY, SUNSHINE PHARMACEUTICALS. INFORMATION RE LOCATION AND NEW IDENTITY OF DR. SYDNEY DAVIDSON AVAILABLE UPON RECEIPT OF NOTIFICATION OF DEPOSIT OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS ON ACCOUNT N° GHQ 115 Y BANQUE POPULAIRE SUISSE GENEVA HEAD OFFICE. DEATH MUST APPEAR TO BE ACCIDENTAL. NO CAR ACCIDENT.
After two hours, the computer finally beeped and the professional blinked and sat up. There wasn’t much do to in Idaho except doze.