Smokescreen (5 page)

He smiled crookedly at her. “Not the gesture you expected from a man who takes his problems out on women?”

She was supposed to be embarrassed, but she didn’t look away. She took the gloves and murmured, “Just for the record, Jeth, I’m not personally worried about it.”

He took the warning for what it was. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you are.”

H
e led her not to the shelter itself, but to the dark empty lot beside it—a burned-out shop torn down but not completely removed, making for piles of old construction material, piles of garbage and piles of people. Veteran street people, mostly, those who conformed so poorly to society that living this way had turned into a default choice. They were angry tonight, huddled by their carts and beneath their cardboard and eyeing Jethro balefully from beneath prodigious layers of clothing. Sam came in behind him, making herself
unnoticed
—letting him draw all the attention and watching the results with sharp eyes.

These were not hateful people; their community had its own sort of unspoken order. But they didn’t like Jethro. They didn’t want him here. Several of them pulled their own disappearing acts, sliding completely into their makeshift shelters—or simply closing their eyes to pretend they weren’t there.

Sam knew that trick, too. It was the first guise she’d learned.

“Over here somewhere,” Jethro murmured, heading for the back of the lot. The night had turned sour, carrying the smell of old alcohol and rotten garbage and
the accumulation of the unwashed, but he didn’t seem to notice.

That, Sam decided, putting the fingers of one hand over her mouth and nose, must be what the mustache was for. Air filter. Fingers in place, she smelled nothing but the faint scent of her own blood and the leather of the glove. Used, worn leather, imbued faintly with the scent of aftershave.

“Here,” he said, and then he frowned. He crouched down by a cart that had been filled with old flip-flops—outrageous colors, sequined thongs, giant flowers hanging limply from the toes. “This is hers,” he said, and looked around at the various nearby lumps of sleeping humanity. “She seemed pretty possessive of it. I wouldn’t have thought she’d—”

“There are two of you!” someone said, an accusing tone.

Whoops. Someone who could see Sam. Someone who could not only see her, but who could perceive she’d made an effort to go unnoticed. It happened now and then, most often under circumstances just like these. Someone not well. Someone off their meds—or someone on someone
else’s
meds. Sam dropped the guise, such as it was, and by the time Jethro turned around, raised her eyebrows at him in question. “Your source is
here?
”

“That’s better,” said the voice, muffled by whatever concealed its owner. “Now take care of her.”

“She
was
here,” Jethro said. “And this cart is hers…”

“Stupidstupidstupid,”
said the voice.

Sam was beginning to think the same…and yet she also couldn’t ignore the little frisson of warning that tightened her shoulders. She gestured at the lumps of sheltering humanity. “Then we’d better start knocking on doors.”

He winced. “I hate to bother them.”

“Bother them,” Sam said flatly. “There’s plenty at stake.” And she stood back and crossed her arms, because there was no point in bothering them with two strange faces when only one would recognize their quarry.

Jethro took a deep breath. His determination—that which had been so obvious when Sam had accosted him on the street these two past nights—returned, squaring his shoulders in the darkness. He lifted a flap of cardboard here, pulled aside the corner of an old blanket there. And in a moment he muttered, “Damn.” A spare, short word so grim that Sam instantly came to join him.

He moved aside so the faintly available streetlight crept across the woman he’d found. At first Sam thought her old; then she realized the woman was merely worn. And beaten. Oh, yes, quite thoroughly beaten. Both eyes too puffy to open, tears of blood and salt mixing with the grime on her skin, her nose misshapen and her lips no longer apparently human. Her hands, cradled at her breast, displayed the lumpy asymmetry of broken bones. She muttered something defiant.

Sam shot Jethro an instant look of accusation, a look brimming with fury.

“Hey!” he said instantly. “I didn’t do this! When I need a hobby, I go for rugby, or I go for my bike.”

Sam said nothing, her lips tight as she bent over the beaten woman.

“Dammit, not every man who crosses your path is the kind of man who—”

“Shut up.” Sam didn’t care how sharp and short her
words came out; she cared only that he shut up. “This isn’t about you right now. It’s about getting help for her. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes,” he said, and to his credit he switched mental gears quickly enough. “But maybe we should just take her. To the hospital, I mean. It might be faster.”

“Agreed,” she said. And they’d have a chance to talk to her…if she could talk at all. She quickly removed the tattered blankets, stuffing them into the shopping cart with the flip-flops. “This is Madonna?”

“You caught that?” He shrugged when Sam glanced up, and nodded. “She answers to it, anyway.”

So Sam spoke to her, and reassured her, and Madonna—when she got to her feet—turned out to be a plump young woman whose shoes and clothes were still decently new. She muttered constantly, twitching her head in motions that seemed ingrained, but her swollen lips made her words incomprehensible.

“She told me about the house,” Jethro said, delaying them long enough to tuck the shopping cart away in a dark corner and to warn the silent lot that these were Madonna’s things. He came back to help Sam guide Madonna to the car. “She said the ladies at the shelter were nice to her when she didn’t know where to go, and that they got her into the underground. I gather her boyfriend wasn’t really a boyfriend after all, but someone looking to beat her down into prostitution.”

Sam used the remote to unlock the doors to her battered Civic. “It doesn’t make sense. If she was in the underground, what the hell is she doing here?”

Jethro carefully folded the woman down into the backseat and closed the door. “I didn’t get the impression she was very good at staying on her medicine. And
how she’s just as happy living on the street as living everybody else’s life.”

Sam slid into the driver’s seat, hands still tender on the wheel but nicely protected by the gloves. “The Captain’s runaways practically swear on their own lives that they’ll never reveal a single word about the underground. And then she covers her tracks by getting everyone out of the city ASAP. If they let anything slip, at least they won’t be in our backyard.” She started the car, glancing over at Jethro with a meaningful tilt to her head. “That means your
sister
is probably long gone.”

Her words were sharp as an elbow jab, but he let them go for the matter at hand as he took the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “Well, this one never made it out of the city. And she was happy to talk to me. She’s quite concerned that I was separated from Lizbet. She told me enough to get me to the right street, where some very interesting individuals kept chasing me away.”

From the backseat, the woman cried softly, “Won’t tell! Bad bad bad…”

“You don’t have to tell,” Sam reassured her, glancing in the rearview mirror to find their battered informant curled up on the seat. She pulled away from the curb and onto the deserted night street. “We’re taking you to a hospital.”

And by the time they got there, she hoped to have pried her own information from this woman. She’d feel like heartless scum in the process simply for questioning someone who needed nothing but comforting, but she’d do it anyway. Because this woman hadn’t been beaten by coincidence. Someone had come to her looking for the same information she’d given Jethro—and had been willing to beat the information out of her. If
she’d somehow told them more than she’d said to Jethro…

Then everyone in the city network was already in trouble.

“Jeth.”

Jethro spun away from the lure of the hospital vending machine, so certain he’d been alone…and yet there she was. Leaning against the corner, one ankle hooked over the other. Still looking not quite as he kept expecting, no matter how many times he saw her. His eyes kept looking for details and edges that simply weren’t there.

But they were on his camera.

“It’s Jethro,” he said, correcting her yet one more time.

“Sure,” she said, but there was something in those honey-amber eyes of hers that failed to convince him she’d heed that detail. The eyes, now…those were the same. He hadn’t known for sure until they’d reached the hospital and he’d seen her blinking under the well-lit emergency entrance.

Twins,
he decided. Identical twins, without quite being identical at all. That could explain two women so similar. Explaining how one of those twins had shown up in his pictures instead of the young woman and the hooker to whom he’d actually spoken…that was something else altogether. He wished he had the camera here right now—the temptation to take a picture of Sam was overwhelming.

He suspected she wouldn’t allow it.

And in the end, it didn’t matter. Other than satisfying his natural compulsion to dig down to the truth of things, it didn’t matter.

What mattered was finding his sister…and with
every moment that passed, he felt her slipping away. Madonna had told him how quickly they moved through the system. Sam had confirmed it any number of times. Lizbet had been gone only a matter of days, but for all Jethro knew, those days had been plenty of time to send her along her way. To her new life. Away from the scum of a husband who’d beaten her.

Jethro had tried to help. He’d given Lizbet a place to stay, the name of a good divorce lawyer. He drove her to support meetings when she was afraid to go by herself.

No doubt someone at one of those meetings had first spoken to her of the underground. And now—after her husband had tried to get her back, failed and gone out and killed someone on a raging spree of drunken anger; after Lizbet and Jethro had both thought her finally, truly, safe; after the trial had been delayed and that son of a bitch had somehow come up with the considerable bail—

Now she was gone.

I hadn’t given up,
he thought at her, wherever she was.
I would have seen it through with you.

“Jeth?” There Sam still stood, still silhouetted in black against a worn desert sand wall, the same casual pose—this time with a tilt to her head and concern in those eyes.

“Jethro,” he said without thinking. “Where’d you go? I turned around and
poof,
I was alone.”

“Thought I’d run out on you, did you? That explains the vending machine. There’s solace to be found in junk food.” She unhooked her ankles and leaned back against the wall. “You might try bribing me with a Milky Way.”

He didn’t
want
to bribe her. He wanted answers. Any answer that would get him closer to Lizbet with the clock tick-tick-ticking away. But he saw the fatigue in
her eyes and counted up the time they’d been together and surmised that they could both use food. They weren’t likely to find any such thing in this machine, only a close approximation thereof….

He bought her a Milky Way.

She took the first bite and closed her eyes as if heaven had descended upon her, chewing with obvious delight. Shoot, if that’s what candy did for her, what would she do if he—

He blinked. He hadn’t expected that thought. Not in the middle of this particular night and this particular crisis. He quickly thumbed change into the machine and pushed the keypad to drop another candy bar into his waiting hand.

Sam swallowed. She didn’t open her eyes when she said, “Madonna sang a pretty song to the creeps who beat her. She wasn’t going to tell them anything—not even as much as she told you. She said she liked you but they were mean even before they quit pretending to be nice.”

“You talked to her?” Jethro stopped his hand just before the candy reached his mouth. “How did you—they won’t even let me ask about her.”

Sam didn’t answer his question. “She told them pretty much everything. I’m not even sure how she knew that much—but then, I haven’t been through the system, so I have no idea what you learn on the way through. Too much, apparently. That car bomb came from our mean guys…and I know who it was. I know who he’s looking for. And I bet he’s counting on the disruption of that bomb to keep anyone from stopping him.” She sighed, and when she opened her eyes it was with renewed determination. Amazing what chocolate could do. “I’ve got to warn the Captain.”

She pushed away from the wall, popping the last of the candy into her mouth and tossing the wrapper in a trash can on the way by. Jethro hastened to catch up. “You haven’t told me a thing.”

“Haven’t I?” She glanced back, affecting surprise.

“Nothing I didn’t already know—or that I
need
to know. Don’t forget I’ve got my own reasons for helping out.”

She stopped short, pivoting slowly and pinning her gaze on his. Sunshine through honey. “I don’t need your help,” she said. “I never did. You invited yourself along because you thought I’d get careless and feed you useful secrets, and it didn’t happen. Time to give it up. I’ve got work to do.” And she left him standing there, heading for the bank of phones on the other side of the Emergency reception desk.

He stared after her a moment, then blew a gust of air through his mustache. “Holy freakin’ iceberg.”

“
Waaay
too seriously with the whole Batman thing,” she informed him over her shoulder.

“Hey!” He ran a few steps to catch up with her, turning to put himself in front of her and then walking backward toward the phones when she didn’t hesitate. Only when one of the phones pressed into his back did she stop, fishing in her pocket with an annoyed expression and little success. He dropped a few quarters into her hand. “Didn’t
you
ever want to be a superhero?”

She pulled her brows together in a faintly puzzled, newly annoyed expression. “I never
wanted
it…” and then she pressed her lips together and dropped the change into the phone, quickly tapping out a number.

Jethro waited while she did, easing around to the side so she couldn’t take off on him so quickly. After an
endless number of rings, Sam slammed the phone back down on the hook and stared at it with an expression that should have melted it. Then she gave him a hard, dismissive glance. “I don’t have time for this,” she said, and what she meant was that she didn’t have time for
him.