Bait & Switch (2 page)

Mitch’s eyes narrowed further.

“Oh, all right,” Cary said. “It’s no big deal. Just that the original debt was closer to thirty thousand dollars, and I’ve been whittling it down.”

“How, exactly, have you been doing that?”

“I have a second job tending bar.” Cary paused, figuring there was no point in telling his brother what kind of bar it was. He could only take so much disapproval in one sitting.

“You made ten grand in two months?” Mitch sounded suspicious.

“They do let me open the cash register.”

“You
stole
the money?” Mitch paced back to the chair and dropped into it, extending his pajama-clad legs in front of him. He leaned his head back. “Here I am in Atlanta upholding the law, and my twin’s in Charleston breaking it.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. The bar’s the same one Flash uses to launder money. Don’t you think there’s poetic justice in paying back my debt with Flash’s own money?”

“I can’t believe this.” Mitch sat up. “I’m a cop. What do you expect me to say?”

“I just told you it was dirty money.”

“It’s still stealing!”

“It doesn’t count as stealing when the money’s dirty.”

Mitch shook his head, disregarding that truth. “Here’s what you’re gonna do. Drive back to Charleston and replace that money.”

“Like hell I am.” The unfamiliar rumbling inside him, Cary realized, was his temper erupting. “For starters, I don’t have the money to replace. And Flash is only giving me two weeks to come up with the rest. I have a better idea, bro.”

“Let’s hear it.”

As quickly as Cary’s temper erupted, it extinguished. If he approached this rationally, Mitch would have to agree. “I’ll disappear for a while. That’s why I need the cash.”

Mitch rested his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “Let’s say I loan you the money, and you disappear. In the meantime, what if this guy finds out you were stealing from him? He could have a warrant issued for your arrest.”

“Do you mean I’d be a fugitive?” Ugly thoughts ran through Cary’s mind. He saw himself being pursued by Tommy Lee Jones. He pictured himself coming to the edge of a dam and leaping. “Like Harrison Ford in that old movie?”

“Harrison Ford was innocent. You’re not.” Mitch had a point there.

“So what do you suggest?” Cary asked.

“I already told you. Go back and straighten this out.”

Cary’s gut clenched. “And I’ve told you I can’t come up with twenty grand in two weeks.”

“You won’t have to,” Mitch said. “I’ve got a plan.”

Cary didn’t like the sound of that. He remembered hearing those exact words ten years ago when they’d been eighteen. He asked Mitch to trade places with him long enough to ace the SAT, but Mitch had a plan. It turned out he planned to help Cary
study
.

“The police in Charleston want to nab this guy, right?” Mitch asked.

“Well, yeah. I guess so. If they could pin something on him.”

“Then deliver him to them.” Mitch started to smile. “You spend the next two weeks gathering evidence against Flash Gordon. Before he can collect on the debt, you go to the police with what you know.”

“And what if Flash finds out I was. . .” Cary paused, because he couldn’t bring himself to say the word stealing when it was so obviously the wrong one, “. . .
rerouting
the money. What then?”

“You deal. The authorities will probably let you off with a slap on the wrist after you deliver the bad guy.”

Usually, Mitch’s plans made at least a modicum of sense. This one didn’t. “There’s just one problem with your little plan.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not doing it.”

Mitch threw up his hands. “You’ve got no choice.”

“I choose to run as far away from Flash Gordon as I can,” Cary said. Mitch looked about to protest again, so Cary interrupted. “I’m not you, Mitch. I don’t fight bad guys for a living. And I’m a lousy liar.”

“That’s a lie,” Mitch shot back. “If you were a bad liar, you wouldn’t have gotten so many women to believe you were in love with them.”

“I was in love with them at the time,” Cary said, experiencing a pang of hurt. His own twin didn’t understand he never deliberately set out to wound anyone.

“Okay, then. If you’re such a lousy liar, why did Mom believe you when you told her I threw the baseball through the living-room window?”

“Honestly, Mitch. We were twelve. And you could have told her you didn’t do it.” Cary sighed, then shrugged. “I’ll admit I’ve told a lie or two in my time. But this is different. I can’t do this.”

“You can’t walk away from it either. A criminal charge could ruin your life. I can’t let you do that.”

Mitch had a point. Cary had really gone and done it. This time, his problem didn’t have an easy fix. There was no teacher willing to raise his grade because he was a star athlete. No father taking the blame for wrecking the family car because he’d gone on a joy ride before he had a driver’s license. No mother telling the principal he was at a doctor’s appointment so he wouldn’t get in trouble for skipping school.

This time, there was only himself. He stared across the room at his brother and the brainstorm hit him so hard he almost keeled over. Because he wasn’t in this alone, after all. He had Mitch.

Mitch, who was surely better suited for an undercover assignment than Cary. Mitch, who had never refused him a thing in his life. Mitch, who looked exactly like him.

The only person who might be able to tell them apart was Peyton, his latest lady friend. But after what he’d done last night, chances were she never wanted to see him again.

“Hey, bro,” Cary said, plastering on his most persuasive smile. “You ever hear of bait and switch?”

Lieutenant Harold Snowden ripped the badge from the breast pocket of Mitch’s police uniform. Mitch felt like his boss had also torn out his heart.

“Get this turncoat out of my sight,” the lieutenant bit out.

Two police guards with Popeye-sized biceps hooked Mitch under the arms and pulled him toward a jail cell. His heels dragged on the cheap linoleum floor.

“But I didn’t steal the money!” Mitch cried. “All I did was try to help my brother.”

The guards threw him in the cell and locked it. Mitch scrambled to his feet, grabbing onto the vertical bars. His brother leaned negligently against a nearby wall.

“Do something, Cary,” Mitch implored.

“Can’t do anything, bro.” Cary shrugged carelessly. “You should have known better than to trust me.”

Alarm bells pealed in Mitch’s brain. Alarm bells that had sounded far too late.

One of his eyes snapped open, then the other. The prison cell disappeared. The bells continued to ring. Groaning, Mitch reached out and hit the snooze button on the alarm clock. Still, the ringing persisted.

He tried to sit up, but rolled to the middle of the bed instead, feeling as though he were navigating the sea of insanity. As his head cleared, he realized he was stuck in the middle of Cary’s water bed and somebody was ringing Cary’s doorbell.

What was it about him that encouraged others to wake him out of a sound sleep?

Unlike when Cary came calling in Atlanta, however, Mitch wasn’t expected to answer the door. Cary was.

Except Cary was safely ensconced in Atlanta, thanks to Mitch’s grudging agreement to switch places and straighten out his mess. Cary didn’t seem to appreciate that Mitch was taking risks that involved his career as well as his kneecaps. One misstep and Mitch would land in a jail cell. Then his career would surely be over.

Mitch needed to focus on the positive side of their agreement. As a concession, he’d gotten Cary to promise to stop gambling. Granted, his brother had promised before. But this time he seemed to mean it.

Besides, considering who could be on the other side of Cary’s door, Mitch would much rather open it than Cary. He was a cop. He could take care of himself.

Mitch executed a log roll that took him to the edge of the waterbed, stuck out a bare leg and foraged for dry ground. All the while, the doorbell kept buzzing. Then the pounding started.

He pulled on jeans over his boxers and tucked a handgun at the small of his back. He stepped into the hallway, caught his toe on the edge of a skinny oriental rug and lost his balance. He went sprawling, saving himself from falling by slamming into the wall with a tremendous thud.

“Son of a gun,” he shouted. He righted himself and thanked God the gun hadn’t gone off. Rubbing his sore shoulder, he stalked the rest of the way to the door and the infernal ringing.

He didn’t care if the person on the other side was there to bust his kneecaps. He flung open the door.

“You unreliable jerk!”

Standing on the doorstep of his brother’s fancy Tradd Street sublet was the most desirable woman Mitch had ever seen.

Her eyes were a smidgen too close together, her nose a hair too long and her mouth a little too wide, but the net effect slammed into him with a sensual punch. Her short blond hair was cut in haphazard, fly-away layers that framed an oval face with the highest cheekbones he’d ever seen. The eyes that glared up at him were the color of Coca-Cola, which happened to be his favorite beverage.

He wasn’t quite through admiring her figure, which tended toward the very lushness he preferred, when she thumped him once in the chest. Hard enough that he gasped.

“You are the biggest, most irresponsible jerk I have ever had the displeasure to meet.” He even liked her voice. If she sang, she’d be an alto. Maybe a tenor. “I was stupid to believe you.”

“Uh, I’m sure you’re not stupid,” Mitch stammered.

“How dare you disagree with me after what you did.”

“What did I do?” Mitch asked. Stupidly, he instantly realized.

Her full mouth narrowed in a thin line, and her dark eyes flashed. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to ask that. Why, oh why, did I ever get involved with you?”

“You’re involved with me?” Mitch gaped at her. For an instant, he felt as though he’d won the lottery. Cary teased him about his dearth of dates, but the reason was because he seldom ran across a woman he wanted to ask out. For this woman, though, he’d brave a minefield. Then the reality of what was happening crashed down on his sleep-addled mind.

This enchanting blonde wasn’t involved with him. She was involved with Cary, who’d told him not much more than twenty-four hours ago that he didn’t have a girlfriend.

Knowing Cary, of course, it was possible she wasn’t his girlfriend. She could be the latest in the long string of women he’d wronged.

“I swear, Cary Mitchell—”

“Mitch,” he interrupted. She was looking at him as though he were crazy, which he probably was for agreeing to impersonate his brother in the first place. But he wasn’t going through the next two weeks answering to a name that wasn’t his. “Call me Mitch.”

“Mitch?” She shook her head, and the strands of her short hair danced. “You’re saying you want me to call you Mitch when I yell at you?”

Mitch couldn’t help smiling. Even spouting venom, she was so darned cute. “I don’t want you to yell at me at all. I want you to call me Mitch all the time.”

The space between her eyebrows narrowed. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“You’re trying to distract me.”

“No, I’m not,” Mitch said.

Something that sounded like a horse whinnying broke the morning quiet, and Mitch looked out in the narrow street in front of the house. It
was
a horse whinnying. A large horse that had a mate and was attached to a small carriage loaded with tourists staring at them.

“Did you know,” Mitch said, inclining his head toward the street, “that we have an audience?”

She heaved a sigh that sounded long suffering. It was then that Mitch noticed the white shirt she wore with khaki shorts was imprinted with the logo “Dixieland Carriage Tours.”

The blonde was the tour guide.

“When I spotted your car in the driveway, I told them we were stopping here because this building is a classic example of the French Huguenot style of architecture,” she said.

Mitch frowned. “Really? It looks like a simple row house to me.”

“It is.” She all but hissed at him. “See what you made me do.”

“Listen. . .” He was about to call her by name when he realized he didn’t know what it was. As spitting mad as she was, it would be unwise to try to pry any information from her.

Cary would know what this was all about, though. Cary, who was only a phone call away.

“Would you excuse me?” Mitch asked.

“Excuse you? I’m in the middle of yelling at you.”

“You can start again when I come back. Promise. But there’s something I have to do.”

He tried to shut the door but she stilled it with a hand and stomped into the house.

“You are doing something,” she sputtered, looking more adorable by the second. “You’re being yelled at by me.”

Mitch stifled a groan. How was he supposed to get information out of Cary if she listened in on the conversation? He started to head for the bedroom and his cell phone when he remembered it was out of juice and he’d forgotten his charger. His gaze ping-ponged around the house for the land line.

“Where’s the phone?” he asked before realizing why he shouldn’t.

With a puzzled nod, she indicated a phone perched on an end table in the living room. He snatched it up, relieved it had a cordless handset.

“Excuse me,” he said again, then ducked into the half-bathroom in the hall and locked the ornate door.

She immediately pounded on it. “You’re acting strange even for you, Cary!”

He navigated the discarded clothes and towels Cary had left scattered throughout the bathroom, sat down on the closed wooden lid of the toilet and realized he didn’t know Cary’s cell number by heart.
 

“Cary. Did you hear me?”

“Mitch. Call me Mitch,” he corrected absently as he hurriedly punched in the numbers of his home telephone.

Even when he wasn’t impersonating Cary, he never used his given name of Grant. Mitch liked the old-time actor who’d been the source of their names. His mother’s sense of humor, he could do without.

The blonde pounded louder. “What are you doing in there?”