Smokescreen Read online

  He couldn’t be serious.

  Sam’s hands landed on her hips of their own volition, disbelieving defiance shouting out through posture. Her palms stung fiercely. “You can’t be serious.”

  He pointed at himself. Clothes disheveled, hair disheveled—hell, even that mustache was disheveled. “Do I look serious?”

  She wrinkled her nose. He looked serious.

  “You’re wasting time,” he told her. “Holy Oleo, what have you got to lose? It’s not like you’re going to learn anything I don’t already know—that’s the whole point, isn’t it? That I’m the one who can help you follow the trail backwards?”

  “Holy Oleo,” she said flatly, her thoughts going a hidden ninety miles an hour. To a certain point, he was right. He’d only be revisiting someone to whom he’d already spoken. “You took that whole Batman thing a little too seriously when you were growing up, didn’t you?”

  “Easily,” he admitted, and in that moment, in that little self-aware dip of his head, that wry twist of his mouth, he charmed her.

  And is that how Lizbet had started?

  Of course, there was no telling. Maybe he was, against all amazing odds, actually the woman’s brother. She didn’t exactly have time to check him out. “And if you come along, you probably figure you’ll ride me the whole time. You really think I’ll let some little juicy tidbit slip?”

  “No. I think you’ll figure out I’m telling the truth and you’ll give me some juicy tidbit on purpose.”

  She let out a long breath through her nose. “Were you listening when I already told you I don’t know anything?”

  “Listening,” he said. “But believing’s got to go both ways.”

  Stubborn jerk.

  “Excuse me?”

  Aurgh, had she said that out loud? “I said,” she repeated, “you’re a stubborn jerk.”

  His eyes gleamed briefly in the darkness; she thought he’d smiled. Somehow she’d actually just made points with that too-blunt honesty. “Okay, then. Shall we go?”

  Not so fast. But still, she felt the time slipping away; the Captain’s trust made her shoulders ache with impossible responsibility. She had to find Jethro Sheridan’s source, to see if that same source had spoken to Scalpucci—and then what else had been said. What else of the railroad had been compromised.

  “Besides,” he added, in a casual tone that gave her no warning he had a trump card to play, “you need someone to drive. Unless you want to handle a steering wheel with that road rash on your palms?”

  Ah, damn. There was that. She lifted her hands, gave them a rueful glance. “You’ve got good eyes.”

  “And a good camera,” he said, but didn’t make any effort to explain the comment, not even when she frowned at him and fairly demanded it. He just moved on with the conversation. “You choose. I’ll take you back to where I got my information. You let me hang around. Maybe I can convince you I’m Lizbet’s brother, maybe I can’t. I figure I’ll learn something either way.”

  He thought he knew something about her. He thought he’d talked her into a corner, thought she couldn’t drive easily, thought she’d been bowed down by his superior logic. Given that camera crack, he might even think he had a clue about who she was. Who she really was.

  Not a chance. No one knew who really lived behind her ever-changing exterior. No one ever had—not since those early years when she’d learned to hide her true self and to give her parents what they wanted to see and hear in a daughter, all to get a glimpse of approval—that kiss on the cheek, that simple caress on her arm. A parental smile of pride. Oh, she’d learned all right. And after a while the real Sam never came out to anyone. Never risked that disapproval.

  “All right,” she said, mind made up. She could ditch him any time she pleased—so it was, for a chameleon. And she had no worries about spilling information to him…he might not believe she didn’t have any, but it would be his problem when he learned she’d been straight about that. “My car is a couple blocks from here. I hope you can drive a stick.”

  Sam shouldn’t have been surprised when he pulled to the curb a mere block from Sheltering Arms, the women’s shelter that sent the Captain the most referrals. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. This whole system ran on secrecy, and their contact at Sheltering Arms was no less dedicated than anyone else. There’s no way anyone here would have talked—not unless she’d been threatened somehow—and threatened badly. Those here were used to dealing with domestic violence, with how quickly it ratcheted out of control and with how deeply the aftermath scarred its battered victims.

  Threatened. Threatened badly.

  Sam shot Jethro Sheridan a sideways look.

  She wished she had more than just her mousegun with her this evening. The Kel-Tec snugged nicely into her back pocket, but it wasn’t a gun that could be brandished. It was a gun to be used from point-blank range, before its target even knew the threat existed. It wasn’t a gun that offered second chances.

  And nonetheless, it was what she had. She gave Jeth a warning look—one he certainly wouldn’t be able to interpret, and if he actually needed the warning then she was a fool to give it. But she did, and then she sighed and fumbled in the backseat for her lined windbreaker, holding her hand out for her keys at the same time. And though she winced inwardly in anticipation of that cold metal hitting her abraded palms, it didn’t happen. Jeth carefully hung the keyring off the end of her undamaged pinky so she could slide the keys into her pocket.

  Well. All right, then.

  They got out of the car at the same time, hit the locks, and stood up to regard one another over the roof. He looked like he might have something to say and she felt words hovering on her own lips—unformed words of further warning, words looking for reassurance that he might actually be telling the truth about Lizbet being his sister.

  Then again, even if that were the case…it meant he knew his sister had been beaten, knew and hadn’t given her the safe harbor or support she needed to resolve the situation without going underground.

  That’s probably not fair.

  No, of course not. And exactly how fair was anything about this situation?

  Sam nodded at the shelter. Her breath gusted a light cloud against the sharpening chill in the night air. Snow, maybe, even this early in the season. Whatever. She said, “Lead on.”

  He surprised her then. He pulled a pair of gloves from his sweatshirt pocket, fine deerskin half-finger gloves with slightly padded palms. “My biking gloves,” he said, holding them out to her. “They’re probably big, but they might help.”

  She hesitated, looking up at him. Searching his eyes for signs of a man who might have threatened someone at this shelter into talking.

  He smiled crookedly at her. “Not the gesture you expected from a man who takes his problems out on women?”

  She was supposed to be embarrassed, but she didn’t look away. She took the gloves and murmured, “Just for the record, Jeth, I’m not personally worried about it.”

  He took the warning for what it was. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you are.”

  Chapter 3

  He led her not to the shelter itself, but to the dark empty lot beside it—a burned-out shop torn down but not completely removed, making for piles of old construction material, piles of garbage and piles of people. Veteran street people, mostly, those who conformed so poorly to society that living this way had turned into a default choice. They were angry tonight, huddled by their carts and beneath their cardboard and eyeing Jethro balefully from beneath prodigious layers of clothing. Sam came in behind him, making herself unnoticed—letting him draw all the attention and watching the results with sharp eyes.

  These were not hateful people; their community had its own sort of unspoken order. But they didn’t like Jethro. They didn’t want him here. Several of them pulled their own disappearing acts, sliding completely into their makeshift shelters—or simply closing their eyes to pretend they weren’t there.

  Sam
knew that trick, too. It was the first guise she’d learned.

  “Over here somewhere,” Jethro murmured, heading for the back of the lot. The night had turned sour, carrying the smell of old alcohol and rotten garbage and the accumulation of the unwashed, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  That, Sam decided, putting the fingers of one hand over her mouth and nose, must be what the mustache was for. Air filter. Fingers in place, she smelled nothing but the faint scent of her own blood and the leather of the glove. Used, worn leather, imbued faintly with the scent of aftershave.

  “Here,” he said, and then he frowned. He crouched down by a cart that had been filled with old flip-flops—outrageous colors, sequined thongs, giant flowers hanging limply from the toes. “This is hers,” he said, and looked around at the various nearby lumps of sleeping humanity. “She seemed pretty possessive of it. I wouldn’t have thought she’d—”

  “There are two of you!” someone said, an accusing tone.

  Whoops. Someone who could see Sam. Someone who could not only see her, but who could perceive she’d made an effort to go unnoticed. It happened now and then, most often under circumstances just like these. Someone not well. Someone off their meds—or someone on someone else’s meds. Sam dropped the guise, such as it was, and by the time Jethro turned around, raised her eyebrows at him in question. “Your source is here?”

  “That’s better,” said the voice, muffled by whatever concealed its owner. “Now take care of her.”

  “She was here,” Jethro said. “And this cart is hers…”

  “Stupidstupidstupid,” said the voice.

  Sam was beginning to think the same…and yet she also couldn’t ignore the little frisson of warning that tightened her shoulders. She gestured at the lumps of sheltering humanity. “Then we’d better start knocking on doors.”

  He winced. “I hate to bother them.”

  “Bother them,” Sam said flatly. “There’s plenty at stake.” And she stood back and crossed her arms, because there was no point in bothering them with two strange faces when only one would recognize their quarry.

  Jethro took a deep breath. His determination—that which had been so obvious when Sam had accosted him on the street these two past nights—returned, squaring his shoulders in the darkness. He lifted a flap of cardboard here, pulled aside the corner of an old blanket there. And in a moment he muttered, “Damn.” A spare, short word so grim that Sam instantly came to join him.

  He moved aside so the faintly available streetlight crept across the woman he’d found. At first Sam thought her old; then she realized the woman was merely worn. And beaten. Oh, yes, quite thoroughly beaten. Both eyes too puffy to open, tears of blood and salt mixing with the grime on her skin, her nose misshapen and her lips no longer apparently human. Her hands, cradled at her breast, displayed the lumpy asymmetry of broken bones. She muttered something defiant.

  Sam shot Jethro an instant look of accusation, a look brimming with fury.

  “Hey!” he said instantly. “I didn’t do this! When I need a hobby, I go for rugby, or I go for my bike.”

  Sam said nothing, her lips tight as she bent over the beaten woman.

  “Dammit, not every man who crosses your path is the kind of man who—”

  “Shut up.” Sam didn’t care how sharp and short her words came out; she cared only that he shut up. “This isn’t about you right now. It’s about getting help for her. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “Yes,” he said, and to his credit he switched mental gears quickly enough. “But maybe we should just take her. To the hospital, I mean. It might be faster.”

  “Agreed,” she said. And they’d have a chance to talk to her…if she could talk at all. She quickly removed the tattered blankets, stuffing them into the shopping cart with the flip-flops. “This is Madonna?”

  “You caught that?” He shrugged when Sam glanced up, and nodded. “She answers to it, anyway.”

  So Sam spoke to her, and reassured her, and Madonna—when she got to her feet—turned out to be a plump young woman whose shoes and clothes were still decently new. She muttered constantly, twitching her head in motions that seemed ingrained, but her swollen lips made her words incomprehensible.

  “She told me about the house,” Jethro said, delaying them long enough to tuck the shopping cart away in a dark corner and to warn the silent lot that these were Madonna’s things. He came back to help Sam guide Madonna to the car. “She said the ladies at the shelter were nice to her when she didn’t know where to go, and that they got her into the underground. I gather her boyfriend wasn’t really a boyfriend after all, but someone looking to beat her down into prostitution.”

  Sam used the remote to unlock the doors to her battered Civic. “It doesn’t make sense. If she was in the underground, what the hell is she doing here?”

  Jethro carefully folded the woman down into the backseat and closed the door. “I didn’t get the impression she was very good at staying on her medicine. And how she’s just as happy living on the street as living everybody else’s life.”

  Sam slid into the driver’s seat, hands still tender on the wheel but nicely protected by the gloves. “The Captain’s runaways practically swear on their own lives that they’ll never reveal a single word about the underground. And then she covers her tracks by getting everyone out of the city ASAP. If they let anything slip, at least they won’t be in our backyard.” She started the car, glancing over at Jethro with a meaningful tilt to her head. “That means your sister is probably long gone.”

  Her words were sharp as an elbow jab, but he let them go for the matter at hand as he took the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “Well, this one never made it out of the city. And she was happy to talk to me. She’s quite concerned that I was separated from Lizbet. She told me enough to get me to the right street, where some very interesting individuals kept chasing me away.”

  From the backseat, the woman cried softly, “Won’t tell! Bad bad bad…”

  “You don’t have to tell,” Sam reassured her, glancing in the rearview mirror to find their battered informant curled up on the seat. She pulled away from the curb and onto the deserted night street. “We’re taking you to a hospital.”

  And by the time they got there, she hoped to have pried her own information from this woman. She’d feel like heartless scum in the process simply for questioning someone who needed nothing but comforting, but she’d do it anyway. Because this woman hadn’t been beaten by coincidence. Someone had come to her looking for the same information she’d given Jethro—and had been willing to beat the information out of her. If she’d somehow told them more than she’d said to Jethro…

  Then everyone in the city network was already in trouble.

  “Jeth.”

  Jethro spun away from the lure of the hospital vending machine, so certain he’d been alone…and yet there she was. Leaning against the corner, one ankle hooked over the other. Still looking not quite as he kept expecting, no matter how many times he saw her. His eyes kept looking for details and edges that simply weren’t there.

  But they were on his camera.

  “It’s Jethro,” he said, correcting her yet one more time.

  “Sure,” she said, but there was something in those honey-amber eyes of hers that failed to convince him she’d heed that detail. The eyes, now…those were the same. He hadn’t known for sure until they’d reached the hospital and he’d seen her blinking under the well-lit emergency entrance.

  Twins, he decided. Identical twins, without quite being identical at all. That could explain two women so similar. Explaining how one of those twins had shown up in his pictures instead of the young woman and the hooker to whom he’d actually spoken…that was something else altogether. He wished he had the camera here right now—the temptation to take a picture of Sam was overwhelming.

  He suspected she wouldn’t allow it.

  And in the end, it didn’t matter. Other than satisfying his natural compulsion to dig down
to the truth of things, it didn’t matter.

  What mattered was finding his sister…and with every moment that passed, he felt her slipping away. Madonna had told him how quickly they moved through the system. Sam had confirmed it any number of times. Lizbet had been gone only a matter of days, but for all Jethro knew, those days had been plenty of time to send her along her way. To her new life. Away from the scum of a husband who’d beaten her.

  Jethro had tried to help. He’d given Lizbet a place to stay, the name of a good divorce lawyer. He drove her to support meetings when she was afraid to go by herself.

  No doubt someone at one of those meetings had first spoken to her of the underground. And now—after her husband had tried to get her back, failed and gone out and killed someone on a raging spree of drunken anger; after Lizbet and Jethro had both thought her finally, truly, safe; after the trial had been delayed and that son of a bitch had somehow come up with the considerable bail—

  Now she was gone.

  I hadn’t given up, he thought at her, wherever she was. I would have seen it through with you.

  “Jeth?” There Sam still stood, still silhouetted in black against a worn desert sand wall, the same casual pose—this time with a tilt to her head and concern in those eyes.

  “Jethro,” he said without thinking. “Where’d you go? I turned around and poof, I was alone.”

  “Thought I’d run out on you, did you? That explains the vending machine. There’s solace to be found in junk food.” She unhooked her ankles and leaned back against the wall. “You might try bribing me with a Milky Way.”

  He didn’t want to bribe her. He wanted answers. Any answer that would get him closer to Lizbet with the clock tick-tick-ticking away. But he saw the fatigue in her eyes and counted up the time they’d been together and surmised that they could both use food. They weren’t likely to find any such thing in this machine, only a close approximation thereof….