Smokescreen (4 page)

Someone pounded on the door. “C’mon, bitch, go to the Y if you want personal time.”

Sam shoved her way out, responding with casual
crudity and a sneer that made the waiting woman step back, well-versed in the ways of
don’t tread on me
here on the streets. The woman was frightened…probably looking for a way to hide from the cops who must be streaming into the area by now.

On the other hand, Sam had heard her through the door clearly enough. Maybe she’d be able to count on her hearing after all. She struck out for her stashed interloper, her game face in place, her purpose clear.
Learn what he knows.

And after that, get rid of him.

Jethro leaned against the cold brick wall and waited for his ears to stop ringing. They didn’t.

This is what people do to one another.
Lies and running and hurting one another, leaving tangled trails like the one Jethro now tried to follow. What had Lizbet gotten herself into? And dammit, how much simpler it would have been if she’d just been honest about it. Until now, he’d been hoping—foolishly and futilely enough—that he’d somehow been fast enough to find her in that first refuge, the entry station of the underground railroad.

Now he hoped she wasn’t anywhere near. A car bomb, for God’s sake.

His head pounded and he avoided focusing on the dark features of the alley around him; it only made his vision swim and there wasn’t anything worth looking at anyway. But his nosebleed had stopped and he’d been in enough rugby wrecks to know his head would clear soon enough.

She came around the corner at a fast clip, stopping short when she saw he stood right where the hooker had left him, her body language full of relief.

And he recognized her right away.

Except then he didn’t. Then she didn’t quite look like the woman in his pictures at all. That woman had been full of spark and eye-catching features; this woman was blander. More boring. Pasteurized and processed. Even the flare of her hip and rounded curve of her bottom had somehow gone…less so. He barely stopped himself from reaching out to touch her, hunting tactile proof of those differences.

A sister, perhaps. Or maybe just his unsteady vision.

He gestured at himself two-handed.
See? I waited. Now I want something for it.

She said, “I need to know how you learned about the Captain’s house.”

“Hi,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jethro Sheridan.”

Not, it should be said, that he truly cared about an introduction. But it made a point.

She got it, too. “Jeth,” she said. “I’m Sam. And I’m afraid what’s going on here tonight is too important to dance around with conversational niceties.”

“Jethro,” he corrected her. “And I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t important to me, too. I expect to get something out of this encounter. I even think I want that particular payment up front.”

She took a sharp breath, holding it for an instant before letting it out with enough force to reveal her exasperation. Then she took another, and seemed calmer. “Do you have any idea what happened here tonight?”

“As near as I can tell,” he said dryly, “a van blew up and almost took me with it.”

“That was a warning.” She shot the words back at him with anger. “Someone who doesn’t like what we’re doing. Someone who penetrated enough of our security
to leave a warning of that magnitude. We need to know what else he knows—how many of us are in danger. How many of our…clients…are in danger. And that means I need to know how
you
found your way here, so I can go back and check out your source.”

He hesitated, taken by surprise at the ring of truth in those words. She’d put her cards on the table…he hadn’t expected it. Some bullying, perhaps, and lies and evasion. That’s what these people were good at. And still…he needed what he needed from her. “I’m looking for someone. I want to know where she’s gone.”

Sam—if that was her name—snorted. “What makes you think I know? The whole system works to make sure I
don’t.
I do my little job and I don’t know anything or anyone else involved.”

“Then you’ll have to find out.”

This time he got a rude noise. “Do you have any idea what we risk to protect these women? If someone ran from you, she had a reason. I’m not going to betray her, and I’m not going to endanger everyone else in the system.”

“Ran from me?” He repeated the words blankly. “What are you talking about,
ran from me?
Don’t you do your homework?”

She crossed her arms, revealing a flash of pale skin behind a rip in her clingy black turtleneck. “I guess you haven’t been listening. My
homework
is to avoid doing homework. At least the kind you’re talking about.”

“So you think I—” He stopped short on those words, took a hold of his temper and his gut-deep horror, and said as distinctly as possible, “I’m Lizbet’s
brother.
I came to help her—to keep her from ruining her life.”

“Uh-huh.” She gave him a bored look. “I don’t think she’s the one who ruined her life, do you?”

It took him a moment. A long moment, after which he was flatly speechless. No one in his life ever doubted his word, simply because everyone in his life knew better. “You don’t believe me. You think
I’m
the one she’s running from.”

She shrugged. The rip in her turtleneck grew with the gesture, shrinking again as her shoulders settled into place. “Maybe.”

He wasn’t used to it; helpless anger rushed through him, tightening every muscle. She must have seen it; her eyes narrowed. But she held her ground and after a moment he put a coherent thought or two together. “Then why ask me anything? I might make it all up on the spot.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “I might go off and check into things and learn you were lying. But I know your name. I know the name of the woman you were looking for. It’s enough. I can find you if I need to.”

He hesitated, hunting for rancor in her voice and face and finding none. Just matter-of-fact, as though this were simply the world she was used to, so different from his. He ran his thumb over the spot where his little finger used to reside. That misbegotten firecracker prank had happened so long ago that the scar tissue wasn’t even sensitive anymore. It could have been the finger that never was, instead of lost in the culmination of a series of mean childhood tricks and fibs. Instead of being the thing that opened his eyes to how false words and careless action trapped even those who loved one another in layers of misery. His father and his affairs, his mother and her drinking.

So Jethro had learned to tell the truth, to avoid the misery—even if it meant never quite trusting others to do the same.

And his sister had learned to close her eyes, pretending her world was peachy keen even as it closed around her. Hiding the bruises…believing the promises it would never happen again.

Sam stood in the mouth of the alley, waiting. She appeared relaxed enough; Jethro forced himself to do the same, wincing at all the tender places he found in the process.
And what,
he wondered,
are her truths?
What brought her out into this dark night, watching over a system that took women away from their own lives?

And she said, “Just tell me. And then I’ll go away.”

“No,” he said, quite suddenly certain of his only remaining chance to find Lizbet. “I’ll show you.”

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 lit
tle 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 sys
tem 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.