Smokescreen Read online

  She reached the van and grabbed the man’s shirt collar, hauling him back and yanking him off balance so he could only backpedal in an effort to regain his feet. His stifled yelp gave her grim satisfaction; she’d meant to startle him, and she’d succeeded.

  But he recovered more quickly than she ever expected. His back up against the van, he didn’t even give her a chance to speak. “Back the hell off, lady—I’m here for a reason and I’m not leaving.”

  “You’re trying to piss her off?” Sam nodded toward the house. “It hasn’t occurred to you that she must damn well be able to take care of herself or she wouldn’t be living here?”

  “She’s not living here, she’s—”

  Sam scoffed. “Of course she lives there.” And the Captain did. Always on hand to look out for her refugees. “If she sees you she’s going to come out and—”

  His fingers, held to her lips, came as a great surprise. They were too gentle to be part of this confrontation. “Exactly,” he said, and his voice matched the gesture. “This is exactly where I want to be.”

  “No,” Sam said firmly, “it’s not.” Clever. Really clever. That would be sure to convince him. So she backed her words with action, and grabbed him by the arm and got him several steps down the street before he managed to disengage himself.

  “Holy freaking—” something. He muttered it to himself and Sam couldn’t catch the words, but she understood the allusion well enough.

  “Batman?” she said. “I’m trying to save your butt again and you’re quoting Batman at me?”

  He gave her a funny look. Almost a wounded look. “Robin,” he corrected her. “And it wasn’t a quote. It was just…along those lines.”

  “Great,” she said. “Just great.” But she prodded him a few more steps down the street while she was at it. A glance told her that the Captain was on the house stoop, knowing Sam was out here, hesitating long enough to see if she would handle things. “Whatever you want, whoever you’re here to find, you’re only causing trouble for the rest of us. We’ve got to survive here. When the bullets fly, they don’t exactly have laser-guidance systems.”

  “Well, isn’t that fancy talk for a lady of the night.”

  She would have kicked him in the knee if it wouldn’t have stopped their halting progress. “You jerk! Every time you show up here, you mess with the balance. The peace. All that lurking? That camera? You think anyone here likes that?”

  “Every time?” he said, and his look turned sharp. “You act as though we’ve met before this evening.”

  She looked twice at him that time, and didn’t like the speculation in his eye.

  Doesn’t matter. Just get him out of here.

  “As if I would remember,” she snapped at him, giving him another little shove. “You all look the same to me. Now will you just get the hell out of here before we all pay for your interference?”

  The explosion came without warning. The noise, the light, the huge hand smacking her down just as the pavement came up to meet her. The night turned inside out, swallowed them, and spat them out again.

  The pavement smelled faintly like aftershave.

  But only, Sam realized, because while her knees and palms still stung from impact, she lay crookedly over her annoying interloper, spanning the hard muscle of his back. Impact. Ringing ears. Dark whirling world with the glow of fire in the corner of her eye.

  The van.

  No, what used to be the van. Bomb. Flames licked into the night, someone’s car alarm went off in what seemed like the distance but who could tell with ears still recoiling in shock. Bomb. Okay, she still had a brain cell or two at work. She did a quick repair to her guise, hunting for the image in her head, absorbing herself in it. There’d been a bomb, and it had been more than a little pop-off of a warning. Any closer, and she would have been more than stunned. She’d have been—

  He wasn’t moving yet.

  Was he even breathing? Surely he hadn’t hit the ground that hard, even if she had landed on top of him—

  “Sam!” A low voice in the night—or what seemed like a low voice. The Captain! Sam pushed herself away from the man beneath her and quickly dropped her guise. She never showed her exact personas to the Captain; she never showed them to anyone. They knew she was on the job, they knew she had an uncanny ability to blend in. That’s all they needed to know.

  “Over here,” Sam answered, and she thought she pitched her voice correctly. She pushed herself off the pavement, resting her hand on the black-clad back beneath her just long enough to reassure herself he did indeed breathe. Just stunned, she hoped, from the double whammy of being hit by asphalt from the front and by Sam from the back. She climbed painfully to her feet and met the Captain in the tree-shadowed edge of the yard not far away.

  “You’re okay?” the Captain asked, her hard mouth set in a thin line.

  “Okay enough.” Sam nodded at the new pavement decoration. “I’ll say the same for him in a moment or two.”

  “Good. Then get him out of here. Get both of you out of here. There’s no way to avoid official attention this time, and you can’t afford it. I can’t afford for you to have it, either—if we have to move the primary house on short notice, I’ll need you lurking around on watch as much as possible, can’t have you on anyone’s list.” She rubbed her forehead; she’d probably had a headache even before the van went sky-high. “That bastard must have tracked us down—but he’s got to know she’s not here. He’s just putting us on notice.”

  Sam looked at her abraded palms and frowned. No amount of Nu-Skin would handle this one. “This guy’s not in on it,” she said, the words coming out before she even truly thought about it.

  “I don’t think so either.” The Captain looked over at the man, who’d come around enough to mutter a bleary, succinct and heartfelt word of badness. “He’s too…”

  “Nice,” Sam finished for her. “Doesn’t belong here and can’t even fake it. Somewhere he’s got a nice little house with a dog—golden retriever, wanna bet?—a little picket fence, a green lawn and a cat in the window. And maybe his mom lives with him.”

  The Captain’s tight mouth skewed into something resembling a smile. “Nice. He’s after someone who came through here, remember that. But get him out of here all the same, and find out how he tracked us down.” She cocked her head. “Sirens. Move yourself, dammit. I’ve got panicked ladies to deal with.”

  Sam couldn’t hear the sirens. The explosion must have affected her hearing. Damn. But she didn’t doubt. She returned to the interloper and crouched down. Many parts of her body instantly suggested she would never rise from that position again, and she ignored them. She took the moment to turn herself back into her hooker self, and then she prodded his shoulder. “I know you’re in there,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  He pushed himself to his hands and knees and looked over at her, his dazed expression making way for a trickle of anger. “What the hell—”

  “Holy freaking boom,” she informed him. “That’s what the hell. Now let’s go.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide.” He put fingers to the darkness gleaming on his mustache and looked at the resulting smear of blood. “I’m not going anywhere. Maybe the cops can get some information about this place for me.”

  Sam bit back her exasperation. “Oh, really? You don’t think they’ll be interested in the way you’ve been hanging around here for days…or how you were hanging around by the van before it went up in itty-bitty pieces?”

  “What?” He frowned, not so much at her words but at what she guessed to be the discovery that his hearing was as affected as hers.

  “Or how about I tell them about the threats you’ve been making?” She was getting creative now.

  He heard enough of that to react strongly, sitting back on his heels to look at her. “I haven’t been—”

  She shrugged. “It’s all enough to put you on the wrong side of them. So come on. Run away now and you’re alive
to come back and lurk another day.”

  He gave the house an odd, sad gaze. “I’m probably too late already. Madonna said the Captain didn’t keep people here for long.”

  Madonna. His informant. Sam needed to know more, so the Captain could change those things that had been compromised. She held out a sore hand. “Come on. Before they get here.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  Sam made a face at him. “Neither do I. But you better believe they’re on the way.”

  He must have. He rose unsteadily to his feet, smeared the blood under his nose around with his sleeve, and gestured at her to lead the way.

  Lead she did, grabbing his hand to pull him around not one corner but two, where she stashed him between a New Age herb shop and a Chinese take-out storefront. “Stay,” she told him, in the same commanding tones she might have used with his fictional golden retriever in his fictional picket fence-enclosed yard. He bristled—not that she could blame him—and she relented enough to add, “One of the Captain’s people wants to talk to you. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  After a hesitation, he nodded. A careful nod, one that meant his head probably still rang as much as hers. He leaned against the brick of the New Age shop and crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at her, and she headed off to “get” his new keeper. Herself, of course. She couldn’t keep up the hooker guise, not and do what she needed this night. She needed something more flexible.

  Plain old Sam I Am.

  Well, almost. Because no one ever saw that part of her. But as close as anyone ever got.

  She took herself down the block to the run-down gas station across from the liquor store and let herself into the nasty little unisex bathroom at the side of the building. The door didn’t actually close all the way and there wasn’t any toilet paper, but all she needed was the flickering light, the mirror below it and a trickle of water. She cleaned her face of dirt and blood, and carefully washed her abraded hands. No way to get around the fact that she’d been near the explosion, but that didn’t matter—as one of the Captain’s people she had reason to be there. She’d just have to hope her semicaptive interloper hadn’t noticed the exact nature of her injuries, because she hadn’t thought to hide them.

  Her clean face made a big difference, although even in the bad light Sam could tell she was pale. She left herself that way—no reason she shouldn’t be, given the circumstances. She sleeked her hair, faded her freckles, and eased the flaring angle of her jaw. Her hair lost the bright edge of its copper sheen, grew sleeker. She hesitated, looking at herself, her torn turtleneck, her wary eyes…fighting the impulse to change herself to someone else entirely rather than face this man so close to her real self. But she didn’t hesitate long. She’d best stick to a guise she could hold even under the greatest duress. This one, she could hold even through sleep.

  Someone pounded on the door. “C’mon, bitch, go to the Y if you want personal time.”

  Sam shoved her way out, responding with casual crudity and a sneer that made the waiting woman step back, well-versed in the ways of don’t tread on me here on the streets. The woman was frightened…probably looking for a way to hide from the cops who must be streaming into the area by now.

  On the other hand, Sam had heard her through the door clearly enough. Maybe she’d be able to count on her hearing after all. She struck out for her stashed interloper, her game face in place, her purpose clear. Learn what he knows.

  And after that, get rid of him.

  Jethro leaned against the cold brick wall and waited for his ears to stop ringing. They didn’t.

  This is what people do to one another. Lies and running and hurting one another, leaving tangled trails like the one Jethro now tried to follow. What had Lizbet gotten herself into? And dammit, how much simpler it would have been if she’d just been honest about it. Until now, he’d been hoping—foolishly and futilely enough—that he’d somehow been fast enough to find her in that first refuge, the entry station of the underground railroad.

  Now he hoped she wasn’t anywhere near. A car bomb, for God’s sake.

  His head pounded and he avoided focusing on the dark features of the alley around him; it only made his vision swim and there wasn’t anything worth looking at anyway. But his nosebleed had stopped and he’d been in enough rugby wrecks to know his head would clear soon enough.

  She came around the corner at a fast clip, stopping short when she saw he stood right where the hooker had left him, her body language full of relief.

  And he recognized her right away.

  Except then he didn’t. Then she didn’t quite look like the woman in his pictures at all. That woman had been full of spark and eye-catching features; this woman was blander. More boring. Pasteurized and processed. Even the flare of her hip and rounded curve of her bottom had somehow gone…less so. He barely stopped himself from reaching out to touch her, hunting tactile proof of those differences.

  A sister, perhaps. Or maybe just his unsteady vision.

  He gestured at himself two-handed. See? I waited. Now I want something for it.

  She said, “I need to know how you learned about the Captain’s house.”

  “Hi,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jethro Sheridan.”

  Not, it should be said, that he truly cared about an introduction. But it made a point.

  She got it, too. “Jeth,” she said. “I’m Sam. And I’m afraid what’s going on here tonight is too important to dance around with conversational niceties.”

  “Jethro,” he corrected her. “And I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t important to me, too. I expect to get something out of this encounter. I even think I want that particular payment up front.”

  She took a sharp breath, holding it for an instant before letting it out with enough force to reveal her exasperation. Then she took another, and seemed calmer. “Do you have any idea what happened here tonight?”

  “As near as I can tell,” he said dryly, “a van blew up and almost took me with it.”

  “That was a warning.” She shot the words back at him with anger. “Someone who doesn’t like what we’re doing. Someone who penetrated enough of our security to leave a warning of that magnitude. We need to know what else he knows—how many of us are in danger. How many of our…clients…are in danger. And that means I need to know how you found your way here, so I can go back and check out your source.”

  He hesitated, taken by surprise at the ring of truth in those words. She’d put her cards on the table…he hadn’t expected it. Some bullying, perhaps, and lies and evasion. That’s what these people were good at. And still…he needed what he needed from her. “I’m looking for someone. I want to know where she’s gone.”

  Sam—if that was her name—snorted. “What makes you think I know? The whole system works to make sure I don’t. I do my little job and I don’t know anything or anyone else involved.”

  “Then you’ll have to find out.”

  This time he got a rude noise. “Do you have any idea what we risk to protect these women? If someone ran from you, she had a reason. I’m not going to betray her, and I’m not going to endanger everyone else in the system.”

  “Ran from me?” He repeated the words blankly. “What are you talking about, ran from me? Don’t you do your homework?”

  She crossed her arms, revealing a flash of pale skin behind a rip in her clingy black turtleneck. “I guess you haven’t been listening. My homework is to avoid doing homework. At least the kind you’re talking about.”

  “So you think I—” He stopped short on those words, took a hold of his temper and his gut-deep horror, and said as distinctly as possible, “I’m Lizbet’s brother. I came to help her—to keep her from ruining her life.”

  “Uh-huh.” She gave him a bored look. “I don’t think she’s the one who ruined her life, do you?”

  It took him a moment. A long moment, after which he was flatly speechless. No one in his life ever doubted his word, simply because everyon
e in his life knew better. “You don’t believe me. You think I’m the one she’s running from.”

  She shrugged. The rip in her turtleneck grew with the gesture, shrinking again as her shoulders settled into place. “Maybe.”

  He wasn’t used to it; helpless anger rushed through him, tightening every muscle. She must have seen it; her eyes narrowed. But she held her ground and after a moment he put a coherent thought or two together. “Then why ask me anything? I might make it all up on the spot.”

  “Sure,” she agreed. “I might go off and check into things and learn you were lying. But I know your name. I know the name of the woman you were looking for. It’s enough. I can find you if I need to.”

  He hesitated, hunting for rancor in her voice and face and finding none. Just matter-of-fact, as though this were simply the world she was used to, so different from his. He ran his thumb over the spot where his little finger used to reside. That misbegotten firecracker prank had happened so long ago that the scar tissue wasn’t even sensitive anymore. It could have been the finger that never was, instead of lost in the culmination of a series of mean childhood tricks and fibs. Instead of being the thing that opened his eyes to how false words and careless action trapped even those who loved one another in layers of misery. His father and his affairs, his mother and her drinking.

  So Jethro had learned to tell the truth, to avoid the misery—even if it meant never quite trusting others to do the same.

  And his sister had learned to close her eyes, pretending her world was peachy keen even as it closed around her. Hiding the bruises…believing the promises it would never happen again.

  Sam stood in the mouth of the alley, waiting. She appeared relaxed enough; Jethro forced himself to do the same, wincing at all the tender places he found in the process. And what, he wondered, are her truths? What brought her out into this dark night, watching over a system that took women away from their own lives?

  And she said, “Just tell me. And then I’ll go away.”

  “No,” he said, quite suddenly certain of his only remaining chance to find Lizbet. “I’ll show you.”