Protecting Plain Jane (20 page)
Epilogue
The man showed his identification to the guard, emptied his pockets of anything suspicious and signed the chart to be admitted to the visitation room at KCPD’s Fourth Precinct detention center.
He walked past a young pregnant woman and the lowlife in the orange jumpsuit who was lecturing her across the table. Other than the guard at the door and the man he was visiting, they were the only people in the room. Good.
Once he spotted his quarry, he straightened his tie and lapels and headed to the table at the far side of the room. He slid onto the bench on his side of the plastic table and studied the weak-jawed coward sitting across from him.
“Who are you?” Kyle Austin asked. “My court-appointed attorney? You look like an attorney.”
He reached beneath the knot of his tie, into the lining of his suit and from the underside of his watch, and calmly began assembling his gift out of sight from the room’s security cameras.
“Hey, c’mon, man. I’m as glad to get out of that cell as anybody, but I don’t know you.”
“Really?” he finally spoke. Compulsion had cleared his mind, left him focused on his task. “I thought you claimed to know me quite well. That I served as some sort of inspiration for you.”
He pressed the pad into the palm of his hand and glanced down at the drop of poison glistening off the sharp tip of the attached needle, carefully avoiding pricking his own skin.
His father and uncles had taught him well. They’d taken him all over the country, all over the world, to learn their craft. They’d beaten him senseless when he hadn’t learned it right. So he was very careful, very correct, very precise in every task he set for himself now.
“Wait a minute, are you…?”
“I believe your stepsister knows me far better than you do.”
“The RGK?”
He held out his hand and Kyle was already instinctively reaching across the table to shake his hand the way any man would. He took Kyle’s hand, pricked his skin, held on tight when the other man flinched so he wouldn’t waste a drop of the precious potion he was injecting into him.
Kyle Austin was already feeling the effects. His joints were locking up, his breath was constricting, his heart was stopping.
The visitor stood, pulling out his handkerchief to hide the device and wipe the trace of the other man’s blood from his hand.
“Never interfere with a plan of mine again.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8835-9
PROTECTING PLAIN JANE
Copyright © 2011 by Julie Miller
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
For questions and comments about the quality of this book please contact us at [email protected].
® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.