Smokescreen (10 page)

She had to free Gretchen…

So she put herself in the position to be grabbed. Lunged at Scalpucci so he’d
have
to grab her just to keep his florid face intact. He thought one hand would do, as it did for his deeply conditioned wife.

He thought wrong. Sam twisted, bringing the ball of her foot up against the side of his knee. He cried out, more anger at her defiance than pain—she didn’t have the room to land a solid blow.

But neither did he. He tried slamming her against the wall one-handed, and it gave her time to land a fist on his ear, imagining her target to be the other ear and her fist going all the way through. This time his yowl sounded heartfelt, and more so when she pulled back to do it again, both feet finally solidly on the floor.

“In here, Officer!” Jethro yelled, a convincing note of desperation in his voice.

Are they really—?

Damn, too soon, gotta get out of here
—

And finally, Scalpucci released Gretchen to aim a one-handed blow at Sam, a blow Sam ducked, flickering
unseen
in his grip in a guise she’d never tried before, enough to startle him and not enough to convince him he wasn’t simply seeing stars after the two solid, fist-aching hits she’d landed at the side of his head. He froze, just for an instant—

And then froze for real at the spectacular return of the older woman, the guardian. She reappeared briefly in the doorway and then charged forward at full shriek, and damned if she wasn’t followed by the woman who’d
been frozen in fear and even by Jeth’s sister, who held a weapon of the frypan persuasion. As Scalpucci’s minion finally threw off the chair and climbed up as far as his knees, they descended upon him—and Gretchen, rather than running, flung herself into the action boiling around the second man.

“No!” Scalpucci bellowed, his florid color inching toward purple. “You fool! We’ve got to get out of here—”

“Too late,” Jeth said, appearing around the corner behind Scalpucci—and from Scalpucci’s sudden stiff hollow-backed posture, Sam surmised the little Kel-Tec was firmly jammed into his spine. Jeth tossed a pilfered extension cord on the dining room table and said most amiably, “Suppose you release her.”

Scalpucci glared down at Sam, his hand still clamped around her forearm tightly enough to make bone ache. She’d taken nothing for granted; she stood half-crouched and ready to deliver hurt from half a dozen directions. But when she looked back up at him, she smiled sweetly and she gave him the flicker effect again.

The blood drained from his face even as Jeth grinned behind him. And slowly, so slowly, he peeled his fingers away from her arm.

Free, Sam wasted not an instant. She grabbed up the cord and hog-tied Scalpucci in short order, kicking his knees out from beneath him and accepting Jeth’s wordless help to finish the job as Jeth handed over the little gun. She turned to check the women; between belts and torn curtains and yes, the frypan, they had the other man well under control.

The guardian stood, dusted off the knees of her jeans, and handed Sam a kitchen hand towel split lengthwise.
“You might need this,” she said, indicating the similar gag around the dazed man beside her.

“Yeah,” said Jeth. “Especially when he learns the cops aren’t really here.”

Sam only grinned at him as Scalpucci said,
“What?”
and took breath for more. Sam got there with the towel first, tapping Scalpucci sharply on the forehead with the pistol to get his attention, indicating with a cock of her head and a significant look at the weapon that she’d do it again—and harder—if he gave her reason.

Jeth said, “The van’s gone, though. The third guy took off just now.”

“But not,” Sam verified, yanking the gag tight and then yanking the knot even tighter, “when you said he did.”

Jeth’s mustache twitched. He shook his head, then ducked it. From there he said, “The cops
have
been called.”

“Then there’s no time to waste.” The house guardian nudged the closest woman toward the door—but she didn’t move. She stood rooted to the spot, her eyes on Jeth as if she’d just now seen him. And Jeth returned the look, totally flummoxed, his work of the past moments quite obviously forgotten.

Sam reached out to tug him forward, a giant step over Scalpucci—who, fully trussed, now lay on his side on the floor.
“Outside,”
she said. “Out back. Do this
away from here.
”

The guardian wasn’t slow to realize the relationship between the two, and wasn’t about to let it interfere with their safety. She shoved Lizbet and pulled Jeth, and then suddenly the sound of an approaching siren cut the air and they all scrambled for the back door. Only Jeth hesitated, looking back at Sam…for Sam hadn’t moved.

She waved him on, and when he didn’t leave, repeated herself more vigorously—“Go!”—until he turned away.

But first, a conversation.

She crouched by Scalpucci, forearms propped on her thighs. The arm he’d grabbed throbbed in warning—the very least of the things for which she owed him. His eyes bulged above the gag and she followed the gaze to her hands—to the Kel-Tec. She laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. “This is the least of your problems.”

Her words left him visibly puzzled; he worked his hands behind his back, trying to loosen the cords. The siren closed in on the street—on the house. Sam didn’t move. Didn’t worry. “You thought you’d shut us down,” she said. “Looks like it was the other way around. Carl Scalpucci, defeated by a bunch of battered women—including his wife. Is that what you’re going to tell the police when they ask?” She glanced at the red and blue lights now reflecting through the windows and open front door to paint the walls. “And when they ask how, are you going to tell them about this?” She let herself flicker between guises—only briefly, for as discomfiting as Scalpucci found the sight, the effect from the inside left her dizzy with shifting energies. She leaned a little closer to Scalpucci. He tried—unsuccessfully—to cringe back through the wall. “You probably think I’d prefer you kept certain things as our little secret. Well, guess what. You are
so
wrong. When that first cop walks through the door, I think you should tell him everything. Tell him how we beat you two up, and how your loyal associate ran from the scene. Tell him that I flicker like a bad fluorescent lightbulb. Hell, tell him that I can
disappear.
Tell him all of that.” She stood, looming over
him. “Try not to babble too much, though. And watch your blood pressure, okay? I didn’t even know a man could turn that color and live.”

An authoritative knock pounded against the open front door. “Police! Come to the door!”

Sam went
unseen.
Such a relief to slide into the guise and hold it without the flicker; so satisfying to see the look on Scalpucci’s face. “Go ahead,” she said. “Tell him. All of it.”

She wanted to stick around to see it. To see Scalpucci, tied and gagged and surrounded by evidence, snarling demands and absurdities about a woman who flickered and who had then disappeared to walk right out from under the cops’ own noses. But she couldn’t take the chance of being caught in the house, and she couldn’t take the chance that a K-9 unit might roll on this one. She gave him one last long look as the cops finally, cautiously, entered the house, and painted him into her memory.

The Captain would be glad of his capture. Tied to the car bomb, to the break-in here, to the explosives this man had planted…he’d be jailed not for his crimes against this city as a whole, but for his personal beastliness. Like nailing a mafia don on tax evasion, only better.

She hesitated in the kitchen, tucking herself aside so the cop who’d covered the back door could enter; the woman declared the kitchen clear and cautiously moved into the dining room, regarding Scalpucci with dawning recognition.

It was enough.

Sam smiled, and she walked unseen into the night.

“Y
ou’re still leaving?” Jethro stood stunned in darkness that would soon turn to the predawn hours. Several blocks away from the refuge with the guardian leading the way and they’d finally stopped…and she’d said that he couldn’t come any farther. That he had to just stand here and watch as Lizbet walked away.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to him that she might still consider her flight. The loss of her established life. The loss of their family.

And now she looked at him and nodded. “It’s the only way for me.”

“It’s
not
the only way,” he said, taking a step forward, voice raising enough so the guardian narrowed her eyes in warning.

“It’s okay,” Lizbet told her. “He really is my brother. He’s not the problem.”

Or the solution, apparently. “Lizbet, let me help—”

“You
tried
to help,” she said, and her voice sharpened.

Tried. Right. And there she stood, catching her breath with one arm in a sling and her face still bruised and asymmetrically puffy.
Tried.
But hadn’t done enough.

“I’m sorry,” he said, miserable. “I should have done
better—I should have scared his sad ass right out of the state. I should have—”

Should have…

Sam stopped short at the curb of the residential street, still
unseen,
only feet away from the refugees. Only feet away from Jeth, who stood with an awkward combination of guilt and defiance, as startled as Sam by the guardian’s brusque interruption. “Bullshit!” she snapped. “There is no
should have,
because there’s no
could have.
Not with a man like that one. Nothing stops his kind but bars or death.”

“Lizbet—”

“It’s not forever, Jethro.” She sent him a pleading look, and Sam could well understand its meaning.
Make this moment easier, not harder.
“He
is
guilty, and he
will
go to jail. His lawyer even tried to get him to plead out, but that would be admitting he’d been wrong, and don’t you know it but his victims always—” Her voice broke, but she took a breath and went on. “His victims always
deserve
it.”

The woman behind her startled Sam when she punctuated Lizbet’s words by spitting on the lawn beside them, and Gretchen put an understanding hand on Lizbet’s arm.

“Anyway,” Lizbet said, “I’m lucky. Once everything’s settled, I can come back. Or if I like my new life, I can let you know where I am. You can visit.”

“Lizbet,” Jeth said, his voice thick, “you still could have come to me. You could have at least told me—”

Lizbet lifted her head sharply, cutting off his words with that simple gesture. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Because you would have tried to do something. You would
have tried to fix the unfixable. And that son of a bitch told me he’d kill you this time.”

Sam winced at the shock on Jeth’s face, the transition to the realization of why she’d made her choices…the very choices for which he’d blamed her. If she hadn’t been
unseen,
she’d have put a hand on his arm…taken a step closer…at least given him an understanding look. But she’d made her own choices; this was the way she lived her life. She had an extraordinary talent and she used it, and it affected every facet of her life—from the way she looked at things to the pieces of her true self which she chose to show others. For every price that talent exacted, it also gave her a gift—allowing her to blend where she wanted to, to help where she wanted to. To experience things that might otherwise be denied her.

And now and then, she could choose just to be Sam I Am.

This time, this moment, she’d been
unseen
so as not to endanger the refugees as she tracked them down, following the murmured directives, panting breath and occasional scuff of foot as behind her, the party music cut off and another siren ground to a stop. Now she stayed that way, letting Jeth and Lizbet play out their goodbye. Watching Jeth, speechless as he drew his sister in for the most cautious of hugs and then separated to brush a gentle thumb across her cheek. She’d been ready for more arguing; no doubt she knew him well.

What she couldn’t know was the things Jeth had learned this night by Sam’s side, seeing a world in which he’d never before been involved. So her eyes widened at his understanding. She took an unwilling step backward at the urging of the restless guardian; Gretchen tugged her hand, murmured something to her.

And Jeth said simply, “Call me when you can.” He stood on the sidewalk, hands jammed into his back pockets, and watched Lizbet go.
Let
her go.

Sam gave him a moment. A long moment. And then she switched guises and quietly cleared her throat.

He whirled, alarmed; his face cleared when he saw her—and then turned rueful. “I suppose you were there all along.”

“A few moments,” she agreed.

He stuck his hands back into his back pockets, and fatigue washed over his features. Yeah, it’d been a long night.

“You didn’t fail, you know,” she told him.

“What, you read minds, too?”

She moved up to him, off the grass and onto the sidewalk. She, too, was tired, and achy in too many places to count. Her hands had stiffened up in his gloves, skinned and tender and now puffy around the knuckles from the most recent action. “Expressions,” she said. “Body language. It takes more than new faces to pull off my guises, you know.” She moved closer yet. “The point is, your sister is safe. That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it?”

He looked away from her, putting his face in total shadow. “Yeah. It is.”

“I passed the van on my way here…the cops will have all the pieces to tie Scalpucci up for a long time.” She cleared her throat again, looked directly at his shadowed face. “You should know that I erased the existing pictures on your camera. What’s left should go to the police, one way or the other. Just wipe my prints, will you?”

“Sure.” He finally turned back to her, his expression not what she’d expected—fierce enough to make her
blink. “This is it, then? What you do? And you’re fine with all this hiding and skulking.”

She laughed. “I
excel
at all this hiding and skulking. I even earn a very good living while I’m at it.” She took a step back, held her hands out in a
take-a-look
gesture. “This is me.” She changed from her standard public guise to a young woman with mocha skin and a free-form Afro. “And this.” A man—slight of stature, but with a mustache that mirrored Jeth’s. “And this.” And back to the public Sam again. “
This
is what I do.” And then, finally, she dropped the guises altogether. His eyes widened slightly; she knew what he saw. Sam with the shaggy, copper-touched hair, Sam with the gold-brown eyes and the strong flare of jaw and the stubborn chin. Wiry, with the high, narrow waist that would have looked so much better under a bigger cup size.
Sam I Am.
“I had hoped,” she said, “that with all you’ve seen tonight, you could understand why.”

A twitch of his mustache gave away his small smile. “Holy freakin’ chameleon,” he said. “Damned if I don’t.”

She looked at him a moment, holding his night-shadowed gaze and startled by the realization that this night was over. That if they walked away now, with nothing more said between them…

She didn’t want that. She surprised herself, but she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to lose the honesty she’d seen and felt and offered here tonight. She didn’t want to lose—so quickly—the man who had shared it with her.

“I had
hoped,
” she said, “that with all you’ve seen tonight…you might want more.”

“Holy freakin’
me,
” he said. “Damned if I—”

Sam cut him short the best way she knew how—up close and personal with that mustache after all.