Beachcomber (26 page)

But, damn! He’d left his gun in the Explorer’s glove
compartment along with his cell phone, because as far as keeping Christy under surveillance was concerned, the Explorer had been his method of transportation of choice.

The trunk of her car had never even entered his head as an option.

Gary was going to have a field day with this. At the thought of how fast the tale was going to find its way up through the Bureau’s ranks, Luke winced. He’d live it down, though, he knew—on a cold day in hell.

Having braced himself as well as he could against the bumps and sways and done his best not to think about what felt like the blazing speed at which they were moving, he’d just had a lapse in his positive thinking and was reflecting on what a scary driver Christy was when—
crash!
—the car had been hit by another vehicle. They went off the road, and all of a sudden he was bouncing around like a pebble in a wind machine.

The last thing he remembered was fetching up with a mighty
wham
against something solid. That recollection brought realization with it: there’d been a wreck. Suddenly alert, he sniffed the air. No gas fumes. No smoke. Thank God, there didn’t seem to be any fire.

Now that he knew what had happened, he realized that he must have blacked out on impact. Quickly he took stock of his situation: he was still in the trunk, curved around her small suitcase, his head aching in a way that reinforced his impression that it had taken a good solid blow when they’d hit. The car wasn’t moving. Except for the never-say-die rain, there was no sound.

Christy.

Prickles of alarm had him lifting his head and tensing as he listened intently. Where was she? Had she been hurt in the wreck?

Damn the woman anyway, she was more trouble than his last ten girlfriends and his last ten surveillance jobs combined.

He didn’t hear a thing other than rain, which was not, in his opinion, a good sign. He pictured her draped unconscious over the steering wheel, broken and bleeding, and felt a surge of fear so strong that it was probably going to bother him when he had time to think about the implications. At the moment, though, he didn’t have that kind of time.

He had to get out of the damned trunk.

Being trapped in such cramped quarters had one advantage, he quickly realized. By feeling around in the dark, he was able to locate his flashlight in a matter of seconds. Finding his Weatherman tool was even easier: he could feel it stabbing into his ass, which was pressed hard against the back of the trunk. He was just fishing it out of his pocket when a
thump
not far above his ear announced the presence of someone—or something—else in the vicinity. Christy? Was she up and about? The sound had resulted from someone or something bumping the trunk lid right over his head.

Another
thump,
this time just above the left taillight, made him fairly certain that the sound hadn’t come from something like a falling branch. He was almost sure it was Christy—who else could it be?—moving
down the length of the car, leaning or falling against it as she went.

The good news was, she wasn’t dead or injured to the point of immobility. The bad news was, if she was moving normally she wouldn’t have been bumping so heavily into the car.

Maybe she was still woozy from the wreck.

On that semicomforting thought, Luke hesitated, weighing two possible responses to the situation: he could disclose his presence with a yell, or he could stay quiet, wait for Christy to go away, disable the interior light that would be a dead giveaway if there was a witness within miles when the trunk opened, and then get out of the trunk on his own and try to figure out what was what.

With a lightning vision of Christy’s face if she should discover him locked in her trunk, he opted to keep his mouth shut and hang tight.

The cricketlike chirp of the button on her key ring that opened the trunk being depressed hit him about the same way the sound of a gun being cocked next to his head would have. Eyes widening, he froze.

For whatever the hell screwy reason, Christy was trying to get into her trunk. Fortunately for him, the automatic trunk release apparently wasn’t working properly. Which gave him time to pull up the carpet and roll beneath it again as the tiny but unmistakable clink of metal scraping against metal told him that she had given up on the button and was sliding her key into the lock.

The trunk opened, the interior light came on, and for a moment Luke held his breath as rain and wind
rushed in. He smelled the damp, felt the cool night air curl beneath the carpet, got a face full of dust, clamped his nose tight against the threatening sneeze, and braced himself for possible discovery.

And racked his brain for an excuse:
I just happened to be in the vicinity …

He heard a thud and felt the bounce of the shocks as something heavy was deposited almost on top of him. A moment later the trunk closed with a solid
thunk
that made the whole car shake.

The darkness was once again absolute. He no longer had any room to move. Whatever was now in the trunk was lying partially on top of him and took up most of the remaining space. It smelled of earth, he realized as he struggled out from beneath the carpet. It was a heavy, inert object that—he touched it experimentally—was soaking wet. And resilient. And curved …

And had hair. Dripping hair that was perhaps six to eight inches long. What had been lying on top of him was part of a shoulder and an outflung arm. Pushing it over, his hand first touched and then closed around a narrow wrist, then slid down to find a soft palm and slender fingers.

His breathing suspended.

Christy. The horrible premonition became a certainty as his hand moved over her face. With a certain amount of grimness he realized that, just like the silkiness of her skin, the shape of her features was branded on his brain now: rounded forehead, high cheekbones, delicate nose, pointed chin. Getting so familiar with his bait that he could recognize her face by touch in pitch
darkness had never been part of his game plan. But the game had gone wrong from the start, and now, like it or not, all he could do was play the cards remaining in his hand. And the plain truth was, he had the hots for her big time. Knowing that he could have had her, that for whatever reason she’d been more than willing, that he was the one who had walked away, was driving him nuts. Under different circumstances he would have walked barefoot over hot coals to get to her bed, but the circumstances weren’t different. Staying close—but not too close—to her was his job, damn it. Still, she wasn’t just bait anymore to him. She was Christy, sexy and smart and vulnerable and scared. Even more than he wanted to capture Michael DePalma, he realized, he wanted to keep Christy safe. So far, he seemed to be doing a piss-poor job of both.

Her lips were parted, those soft, seductive lips that had all but driven him out of his mind not much more than an hour before, but he could detect no air passing through them. Cold fear clamped like a fist around his heart. With desperate haste, his fingers slid to the soft hollow beneath her ear. She was alive, he registered with relief. Unconscious, but alive. Her pulse was beating, faint but detectable.

One thing was sure: she had not ended up in the trunk as a result of any accident.

Taking a deep breath, surprised at how fast his own pulse was racing, Luke fumbled for and located the flashlight and was just about to turn it on Christy when a strange metallic grating noise from up near the front of the car stopped him cold.

What in hell was that?

The short answer was, nothing good.

Heart thudding, senses so attuned to what was happening outside the car that he was almost positive that he could hear the slosh of footsteps as someone moved around in the rain, Luke lay very still, listening. Clearly, the someone who had put Christy into the trunk had not gone away. It was almost certainly the same someone who had broken into her cottage and buried a hatchet in her shoulder. He would be willing to bet a large portion of his yearly salary that that someone was connected with Michael DePalma. Rage, primitive in its strength and intensity, surged through him, warming his blood, tightening his muscles. Women were disposable to Donnie Jr., as he had already learned. But the bastard wasn’t going to dispose of Christy. Not if he could help it.

The problem was, at this juncture he might not be able to do a whole hell of a lot to help it. Locked in the trunk as they were, he and Christy were sitting ducks. A couple of bullets fired through the lid, and they were done. Or a lit rag shoved into the gas line. Or …

The possibilities were many and varied. The bottom line was, thanks to his own damned carelessness the two of them were now easy to kill. The one thing that was in their favor was that whoever this bastard was, he clearly had no idea that there was anyone in the trunk besides Christy. That being the case, the best thing he could do was be quiet and await an opportunity.

Now that he’d had a chance to think the situation through, Luke realized that he didn’t dare use the flashlight
for fear that its glow might show through the cracks. Moving as little as possible so as to make no noise that might attract the bastard’s attention to the trunk, listening carefully to the grating sound that continued to mystify him, he carefully felt Christy’s skull, her neck, her arms and legs and torso, checking for blood or any obvious injuries or wounds.

He didn’t find anything, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t grievously hurt. She could be dying right there beside him and he wouldn’t know.

At the thought, he broke into a cold sweat.

The grating sound stopped.

Instantly refocusing, Luke concentrated all his attention on what was going on outside the car. He could hear an assortment of just-loud-enough-to-be-heard-over-the-rain sounds, but precisely what they were or what they portended he had no idea. One thing, though, he knew with icy certainty: the object of this exercise was to kill Christy. Just what form the attempt would take he had no clue. He only hoped that he wasn’t about to find out.

A thud almost directly over his head made him tense up. Trying to get enough purchase for his feet so that, if the trunk opened, he could immediately go on the attack, he hit the suitcase, shoving it a couple of inches along the wall. The sharp scraping sound it made paralyzed him. Had it been loud enough to have been heard by someone outside? There was no way to tell; he could no longer hear anything except rain. Nothing thumped. Nothing moved. Was someone out there listening, perhaps suspecting that Christy was conscious and moving?
Was a weapon even now being trained on the trunk? If so, there wasn’t a thing he could do.

It was a damnable realization.

Heart thumping, listening so intently now that he barely dared to breathe, he waited for a gunshot, for the trunk to spring open as the bastard decided to investigate, for something.

But the next sound he heard came from the front of the car. There was a muffled rattle of metal on metal, a jerk, and then the front end was hoisted into the air until it reached a near-forty-degree angle. He slid into Christy’s inert form before he could catch himself, squashing her against the bottom of the trunk. She made a pitiful little sound that was somewhere between a whimper and a moan.

Had he hurt her? Was she in pain? The thought that she might be hurt and in pain made him wild.

“Christy?” It was a husky whisper.

No answer.

Cursing under his breath, Luke pushed himself off her, shoved the suitcase out of the way, then maneuvered his arms around her and tried to roll. In the close confines of the trunk, this was no easy task, but at last he managed to reverse their positions so that he was wedged in at the bottom of the trunk and she, still heavily unconscious, lay against him. She was cold to the touch, wet and limp as a rag doll. He wrapped his arms around her, trying to warm her, trying to protect her from as much of the merciless jolting as he could. In the process he, too, got soaked through. His hands moved over her again, carefully feeling the back of her
neck, sliding the length of her spine, moving over her ass, her thighs. No obvious injuries. No warm stickiness that might be blood.

Thank God.

The car lurched slowly forward, bumping over the ground.

The blow to the head he’d suffered must be making him a little slow on the uptake, Luke decided. Because it was suddenly crystal clear what was happening: the grating sound he’d heard had been a chain being wrapped around the front axle. Add that to the weird angle and the uneven forward motion, and it didn’t require any great feat of brainpower to figure out that the car was being towed.

And not by Triple A.

Jesus, that was bad, and it got worse the more he thought about it. There were cliffs on the island, tall rocky cliffs leaning out over the ocean, over Pamlico Sound. At this time of night, the tide was coming in. It would be an easy thing to drop a car over a cliff. By morning, it would be gone without a trace. There was a scrap yard, too, at the island’s northern end; crushing a car into a cube the size of a cereal box was a time-honored mob method for eliminating the people inside.

Okay, first order of business: get out of the damned car.

“Christy.” Pushing aside the sodden strands of her hair, Luke spoke softly into her ear. No response.

The car lurched wildly, and bounced and then the ride suddenly got a whole lot smoother. They also
picked up speed. From this, Luke deduced that they were now traveling on pavement.

Wherever they were headed, they were getting closer to their destination by the minute.

“Christy.”

Rubbing her cold, limp arms, he willed her to regain consciousness. He didn’t know what their destination was, but he did know he didn’t want to find out. They had to get out of the trunk, and the sooner the better. Preferably now, while the going was relatively good. Once the car stopped and whatever was going to happen started happening, the situation was probably going to get a whole lot hairier fast.

“Christy, wake up.”