Accompanying Alice Read online

  with the heel of his hand, jarring open his wound. Fresh blood trickled down his cheek, and he viewed his bloody fist with surprise.

  “You’ve been hurt,” Alice said tentatively. “You need a doctor, maybe the police—”

  “No.” Panic roused him suddenly, tightened his hold on her blouse. “No police, no doctor. Gunshot wound they file a report. They file a report and they find me. They find me and I’m dead. Do you understand that? They’ve already killed Nicky and God knows who else. I’m next, unless I stop them, and maybe even then, but I’ve got to try.” He shook her in despair. “Do you understand? I don’t have time to die right now.”

  Her sentiments exactly. For the barest instant Alice stared at him wildly, wondering if she’d spoken her own thought aloud. Then sheer will let him twist his legs underneath him and push himself upright, drag her up with him. “Come on,” he urged. “Can’t stay here. Got to leave. Got to move before they find...”

  Vertigo staggered him, rocked him back. For the first time in her life, Alice recognized opportunity when it slapped her in the face: she shoved him hard, yanking away from him

  at the same time, making a beeline for the car. With stunning speed he recovered and caught her, tossed her against the station wagon’s mud coated tailgate and pinned her there. He breathed hard, his breath warm and human against her rain chilled face. Gathering the courage she didn’t think she had, she lifted her chin defiantly and matched him stare for stare. “I won’t go quietly,” she spat. “I won’t lie down and let you kill me.”

  He recoiled as though slapped. “Kill?”

  Stunned, he stared at her, and all at once the balance between them shifted perceptibly. Her eyes took him by surprise. Where he’d expected ordinary brown he found mocha, cinnamon, flecks of chocolate.

  And directness.

  His mouth went dry. In a flash he saw himself the way she must see him, not as Gabriel Lucas Book, who’d fifteen years ago sworn to serve and protect, but as Luke Book, the corrupt cop, the bastard he portrayed, the man at home among killers, drug runners and thieves. He licked the rain off his lips, trying to moisten his tongue.

  Unsettling. He wasn’t prepared. He’d pegged her as a nice, naive, everyday sort of woman with a social worker’s conscience, easily mired in extraordinary circumstances, not the type of woman to make a man uncomfortable with his stray thoughts. Not the kind who could tell a man to go straight to hell and leave him standing there like a dummy asking for directions. Not the kind of woman who’d be worth that particular emotional trip.

  Distracted, he looked at her again. Dark hair short enough to require little care, but long enough to tangle his fingers in, brushed her neck as she cocked her head to view him from another angle, waiting. Her eyes told him she’d had a lot of experience with waiting, with fear.

  He blinked and looked elsewhere, trying to escape her eyes.

  Step back, Book, he told himself. It’ll eat you alive.

  Concentrate. This is life ‘n death you’re messin’ with here—her life, your death. You owe her something, but don’t go gooey and screw it up.

  “Listen, lady,” he said softly, and felt his gut cramp.

  Telling her who and what he was violated all the rules, but he didn’t see where he had much choice. He had to trust someone. If anything happened to him, someone had to know why. Someone had to speak for him. Someone had to forgive him. “We have to get out of here now. I know this is tough for you, I know you’re frightened, but I’m not the killer here and I don’t have time for long explanations.”

  He pulled her around to the open driver’s door of her car and slid in across the seat, drawing her in behind him. “My name’s Book, Gabriel Lucas Book. I’m a federal agent—FBI—working internal affairs undercover at the request of the Oakland County prosecutor’s office.” He grabbed up a pile of paper napkins that sat in a tray on the floor hump, then angled the rearview mirror and wiped the mud and blood from his face and hands. “You’ll have to take that on faith. I don’t have any I.D. Last night somebody killed my partner and shot me. I think it was a cop—in fact I’m sure it was a cop. Had to be. Only three people know who I am and why I’m here. One of ‘em’s dead and the other two...”

  He stopped, turned a blind eye to the rain rolling down the windows, looking for courage, for relief from the pain. “The other two are friends.”

  Abruptly, he tapped the keys she’d left in the ignition.

  “Drive,” he ordered. “I have to pick up some stuff, then I need a phone. Whether I want to or not, I’ve got to find out whose gun this is. After that...” He stared bleakly at the weapon in his lap. “After that,” he said grimly, “I’ll need a new identity and a place to hide for a while. A safe place.” He turned to her and the depth of his ocean-bay-colored eyes was intense and endless. “Your place should do.”

  *

  “Huh?” Alice’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. She shut it with a snap, and the soft line of her jaw firmed. “What am I supposed to do, let you waltz in and take over my life and my home at will?”

  Gabriel ran a hand regretfully through his hair, wincing slightly, and fingered the gun. “You don’t have much choice right now, Alice,” he said. “And neither do I.”

  Something inside Alice snapped. She rounded on him ferociously. “I’m tired of people telling me there’s no choice. There’s always a choice whether you want to make one or not.” Her voice faded abruptly. What was she doing yelling at a man with a gun in his lap—even if she did believe him?

  She believed him.

  With only part of herself she watched him reach across the car to turn the key in the ignition, heard the car jump to life. She looked at his hand. Beneath the mud and grease it was a neat hand, long fingered and strong, nails and cuticles trimmed, nothing ragged about it. The hand of a gentleman. Or a well-paid crook.

  “Come on,” he urged, voice gentle despite the tightness in it, bass-rich beneath a veneer of gravel. “However many choices we’ve got, we can’t sit here talkin’ about ‘em. They’re out there looking for me. We have to go.”

  Facing him, she squeezed her hands around the steering wheel until her nails cut into her palms and her knuckles ached from the strain. Oh, God, she believed him. She hadn’t intended to, but she did. And that meant she’d let him stay with her. Willingly. Just another man she’d say

  yes to when what she really ought to do was give him a punch in the gut and a firm no. Why was it that, when she was so strong in other ways, she’d let herself get into that yes-no-maybe so habit with men? First there’d been her father and the dare-to-challenge-yourself camp she hadn’t wanted to attend at fourteen that had cost her a broken ankle and torn ligaments in her knee. Then there’d been Matthew in the back seat of his car when she was sixteen and fertile.

  She mentally ticked off the rest of them. The real estate agent who’d sold her the house for more than it was worth. The man at the dealership who used to work—and work and work—on her car until it really should have been better than factory fresh ever thought of being. Five years ago when her former boss insisted she become manager of the bookstore when she wasn’t sure she wanted the extra responsibility even though she had already shouldered most of it…

  Well, maybe she shouldn’t include him. He’d only wanted to promote her to the position she’d taken on by default, pay her what she deserved for it and…

  Off topic, Alice, she admonished herself, and came back to the point. Anyway, that brought her up to this guy with the gun, sitting in the car beside her now...

  In resignation she faced forward, shifted the car into drive and pulled away from the side of the road. “Where...” She paused, suddenly knowing that, in spite of anything else, she had to help him because instinct told her it was the right thing to do. Period, exclamation point, and damn her mother, anyway. “Where to first?”

  *

  They drove in near silence, attention focused deliberately away from one another on things that were l
ess unnerving.

  The air between them was stifled, tense, unsure. Gabriel gave directions circumspectly. Alice followed them nervously. Further talk seemed inappropriate—they weren’t here to get to know one another—and the rarely tongue-tied Alice couldn’t seem to find anything to say, anyway. Gabriel sank inside himself, as though wrestling with the demons of his own disbelief, offering and inviting nothing.

  Rain fell in sheets, cut a blinding path across the empty pawnshop parking lot as she pulled in and, at Gabriel’s direction, angled the car sideways as close as she could to the front door. Across the street near the intersection of M-59 and Voorheis Road that officially divided the in-decline City of Pontiac from more rural Waterford Township, yellow buses stood in line at the corner waiting for traffic to clear. Around the corner stood the steepled church and once-Catholic grade school Alice had attended. When the time had come for the girls to go to school, Alice had scraped together the tuition to send them there, too. Cattycorner from the pawnshop was the independent family-owned grocery store where she’d shopped all her life; a couple blocks down was the Irish pub where, on rare occasions, she met her sisters for drinks.

  Her lips worked over her teeth as she struggled to collect her bearings. Funny, she’d always thought of this industrial suburb in the northwest Detroit area as a large city. Now as she really looked at it for the first time in years, Pontiac seemed suddenly small-not unlike the shrinking world around it, she supposed-unwittingly giving her more in common with the man beside her than she would have liked. Common ground usually meant common interests, and she really didn’t think she wanted...

  She licked her lips nervously, trying to un-sidetrack her thoughts, and eyed the pawnshop with misgivings. He’d said he had something important to pick up here. Proof, he’d said, evidence that would make her more comfortable about having him in her life. At a pawnshop?

  In the midst of her childhood stamping grounds, the place had stood here as long as she could remember. She’d never been inside, though her family had frequented the television repair shop adjoining it. Pawnshops belonged in sleazy, addict populated downtown areas and detective novels, not in suburban neighborhoods. She glanced at Gabriel for direction. He’d made no further threats, either overt or implied, but she still didn’t feel safe with him. He wasn’t a safe kind of guy. He was the kind of guy who’d attract trouble in the middle of an empty field without another living soul around for miles. The intense broody type who belonged on the back of a motorcycle with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. The type who attracted women because he was dangerous and needed saving.

  The kind of guy who’d attracted her when she was sixteen, then frightened her so badly she’d turned tail and rabbited straight into the arms of someone safe like Matt.

  Her breath stuck in her throat behind the fine bone of shame she’d never quite managed to get rid of whenever she thought of that mistake. But now was not the time to consider past mistakes, nor the time to make new ones. Especially not to make new ones. She dragged her thoughts into the present, let her eyes focus on Gabriel. He picked the gun out of his lap and tucked it into his jeans at the small of his back underneath his shirt, then took her hand and jerked his head to indicate she should follow him. Her skirt caught on the corner of the seat when: she started to slide across the car. She tugged it loose and lifted herself over the slight bump in the center of the bench seat. Gabriel towed her through the rain and into the shop.

  A bell rang over the door as it swung shut behind them.

  Voices seemed to rise at the back of the store in response to the bell. Alice looked around; the place was nothing like she’d imagined. No army-jacketed, suspicious-looking characters lurked in the shadows. No guns lay invitingly behind unbreakable aquarium-like counters. No frightened-looking chain-smoker stood behind an iron cage backed by bulletproof glass. The store was dim, but from dust and clutter rather than furtiveness. Bicycles crammed the floor at the front of the shop, lined a side wall, hung suspended from the ceiling alongside radio-controlled miniature cars, orange pup tents, and drab camouflage tarpaulins.

  Everywhere Alice looked there seemed to be a resting place for other people’s cast-off hopes and dreams: camp stoves, gas heaters and propane canisters littered deep shelves piled high with typewriters, desktop copiers and radios. Expensive new fishing equipment looked as dull as the much used rods and reels that overshadowed it. Army surplus camping supplies made the unused, scientifically designed, brand-name paraphernalia beside them looked like bright, untried uptown yuppies standing next to never-been-innocent mercenaries. A glass-fronted counter to the side and behind more bicycles showcased both fine and not so fine jewelry. Newer electronics equipment filled the back wall behind a long wooden counter.

  At the same time that Alice wanted to hold herself tightly away from the things other people had clutched, used and sneezed on, she found herself strangely thrilled at the discovery of a place full of buried treasure at economy prices. Whether or not she could actually get herself to come in here alone, scrounge thoroughly, then buy some of this stuff, she didn’t know. She canted a tentative glance at Gabriel, who lifted his chin and indicated the back counter, stepping aside for her to precede him down the narrow aisle that led to it. Gathering a shallow breath, Alice did so.

  A doorway covered by strings of wooden beads stood to the right of the counter. A man in his mid-thirties, who appeared to have been watching them, stepped through the beads in response to a cough from Gabriel. “Picking ‘em up?” he asked without preamble.

  Nodding, Gabriel slid two fingers into his left boot, withdrew a pawn ticket and tossed it onto the counter. “Last time,” he said.

  “Good thing you came in when you did, then. Had a buyer for ‘em in here yesterday. Told him to come back today. Gettin’ tired of movin’ the damn things around.” The man behind the counter picked up the ticket, fingered it. “You’re almost a month late. You weren’t so regular ‘bout comin’ back for ‘em I wouldn’t even’ve held ‘em an extra week. Would’ve sold ‘em if you hadn’t come in today.”

  Gabriel’s knuckles whitened over the edge of the counter. “I hear you,” he said softly.

  The pawnbroker eyed him uncomfortably for a second, then tapped Gabriel’s ticket on the counter and disappeared with it through the beads. Expression remote, Gabriel looked after him, jaw tightening and straining over thoughts Alice couldn’t imagine. All at once, as though some new problem had just occurred to him, he dug into a hip pocket and pulled out a money clip, fanning quickly through the few bills on it. The pickings were a trifle slim. His mouth thinned for an instant. Then, looking like what he was, a man who’d run out of choices, he drew Alice aside and asked quietly, “You got any cash?”

  “Let me check,” she replied automatically, then caught herself with her hand in her purse. She should have anticipated the question, but somehow she hadn’t. For all his other flaws, he didn’t look like a man who took money from women he was barely acquainted with. “Do I have any what?”

  “Cash. Money. Moola.” Gabriel sent an uneasy I’d-rather-do-anything-else look toward the beaded doorway. “I’ll sign a receipt. You’ll get it back.”

  Alice stared at him. Lord, he did have nerve. What was it the Samaritan code had to say about lending money? She clamped her lips together hard. Oh, yeah. Give it freely, she

  answered herself in her mother’s voice, so beggars don’t have to steal. She pulled out her wallet, opened it and, without counting the bills, handed him its contents. “This is not an auspicious beginning for our relationship,” she whispered tartly. The Samaritan code said nothing about keeping pointed comments to herself.

  “We don’t have a relationship,” Gabriel assured her, sorting the bills and tucking them into his money clip. “You’re an accident, default, luck of the draw, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?” By the sudden sensation that she’d burst into flame, she knew her face and neck had turned red and she was about to explode. People sh
ouldn’t treat people like pebbles in a stream bed, like mechanical drones without personality or function other than that programmed for them. That was just plain wrong. On the other hand...

  She swallowed inflexible judgment with difficulty. She’d spent the thirty years since kindergarten learning to douse the fuse on her temper once it had been lit. She struggled with it double time now. “I don’t know about you, but some guy sticks a gun in my face, kidnaps me, takes my money and tells me he’s commandeering my house, I have a relationship with him whether I want one or not. It’s not based on trust, of course, but it is a relationship.”

  “I told you, as soon as it’s safe, you’ll get your house, your life and your money back.”

  Alice shrugged. “Forget it. I always give my grocery money to men with guns.”

  With a sense of irony, Gabriel took in the line of her jaw, the soft oval cut of her chin, the disturbing quality of her eyes and his unaccustomed vulnerability to them. He knew better than to let her get to him. He didn’t expect this kind of weakness from himself. At least not under the circumstances. And if he hadn’t felt exactly like the kind of cheap mugger she compared him to, he’d have been able to grin and ignore—hell, enjoy—her barbs. Instead, he sucked air between his teeth, too tired and shaken not to snap back. But before he could say anything, the pawnbroker reappeared with a pair of oversized stereo speakers on a dolly and settled them in front of him. Distracted by his original purpose, Gabriel turned to inspect the speakers, momentarily giving Alice both the last word and his back.

  Speechless, Alice stared at the three-dimensional brown rectangles, all fake maple and textured cloth. This was what it had been about, the gun in her face, the six miles she’d just driven with her heart quivering against her lungs, and her knees feeling like mush? This was his evidence, his proof, the embodiment of all that desperation, the intense agony of life and death? She didn’t know what she’d imagined he had to pick up here, but a set of speakers? And she’d