The Heart Heist (2 page)

"Right." Matt rolled back half a wheel and looked down her slight figure. "But just pretending for a minute that it is about, ya know, guys, there's a few things you could do. To encourage the fellow."

A brief, harsh laugh escaped Kerrin and she quickly closed her mouth. The only thing she wanted to 'encourage the fellow' to do was leave them all alone.

Matt shook his head. "For starters, Ker, you could dress a little more...open. Like you're not afraid to show your skin?"

"Ahem. Could I?"

"Hey." Matt reached out to tap her jeans-clad knee. "It's nice skin."

"Thanks."
Nice skin
. Well at least she had something going for her.

"Of course that skin could use some rounding out," Matt went on, rubbing the chin he'd had to start shaving the year before. "How about some ice cream?"

"Right now?"

"Sure. You didn't eat much dinner, anyway, did you?"

So he'd noticed, after all. Kerrin bit the inside of her cheek and felt another stab of guilt, just as she had at the sink. Was it normal, she wondered, for the victim of blackmail to feel guilty? For she'd been blackmailed by those people in Los Angeles, pure and simple. "Okay, Matt, ice cream. But let's take it outside. It's hot in here."

Pleased, Matt wheeled with practiced grace between the freezer and dish cabinets. Kerrin watched him and wondered how much longer the town was going to be safe for a kid in a wheelchair. No matter how agile and strong Matt kept himself, he'd still be vulnerable to a man with two legs. For that matter, everyone in town would be vulnerable, once that fellow from L.A. got here.

And Kerrin was the only person in town who'd know who he actually was, and the danger he presented.

"Come on." Wheeling, Matt led the way outside.

On the porch, the air smelled of sage and pine and a little hot dust. From somewhere up the hill, where the sun still poked above the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, a bird called. But Kerrin looked down, toward the bottom of the valley.

"Here." From his lap, Matt thrust a bowl at Kerrin. "Eat."

Sighing, Kerrin accepted the bowl. She then sank to a seat on the wooden steps below Matt. Thinking about her meeting the next day, she gazed toward the valley and the Owens River.

Lazy, the Owens meandered between desert-dry banks until it hit the chunky concrete physical plant that straddled it, corralling the river into servitude. From there an aqueduct carried the water of the Owens Valley to a thirsty Los Angeles, two hundred miles away. The plant and the aqueduct beyond it were owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. They'd built it and they ran it.

It certainly was vulnerable
. Kerrin had to admit it. If anything happened to that plant no water would go through to Los Angeles.

Matt licked his spoon and his gaze, too, fell to the bottom of the valley. "Say, wouldn't this view be different if they'd never built the aqueduct?"

Kerrin froze, her hands cupping the cold ceramic bowl.

"There'd be fields down there instead of sagebrush," he went on, oblivious to her stark silence. "By now Freedom would have become a big city, 'stead of a rinky dink town."

"But there is an aqueduct." Kerrin's voice was hoarse. She nodded toward the structure. "After ninety years we've come to depend on that thing." Yes, at her meeting with them last week the mighty Department of Water and Power had made this clear to her. The economic life of Freedom depended on the fact that two hundred miles away Angelenos drank their water. If the DWP pulled out of the town, the jobs and money that came with their presence would likewise disappear.

Matt shrugged. "It's not a natural relationship. Them dependent on us. Us on them."

Kerrin could only agree, silently. But such dependency was already a fact of life in Freedom. If the DWP wanted to send an "expert" in security systems to check out the safety of their facility, there was little the town mayor could do to stop them. No, not even when that "expert" was an expert at
evading
security systems!

All Kerrin had been able to wrangle was a meeting with the man. All she could hope was that this meeting would convince him not to take the job, not to come to her town.

"Aw, Kerrin, you haven't taken a single bite."

Kerrin looked down at her untouched Rocky Road, then up at Matt. He looked so frustrated that she forced a spoonful of the sweet stuff into her mouth. Her eyes searched his to give her credit.

"How are you
ever
going to get a guy?" Matt lamented.

"I don't know." Kerrin swallowed her bite of ice cream. "It'll take a miracle, probably."

"And knowing you, you probably believe that one will happen, too. A miracle."

A smile started at one corner of her mouth. "It might."
She was counting on it
.

"Like some knight on a white charger is going to come and sweep you up off your feet."

"Maybe."
She was sure of it
.

Matt's face expressed disgust as only a male of sixteen years could manage. "And that's about what it would take," he pronounced. "A white knight."

"No doubt." In fact, Kerrin couldn't agree more. It would take a full-blown white knight to brave the dragons that scared off all other men, an armored hero to breach the wall of her defenses. But that such a man existed Kerrin didn't doubt.

For him she wouldn't be too smart or too skinny. To her white knight it wouldn't matter that Kerrin had three college degrees, that she actually wanted to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere or that, worst of all, she was a complete dunce in all things physical. No, Kerrin didn't know his name or point of origin, his profession or his age, but she knew that one day he would come for her. And he would be...perfect.

Kerrin's dreamy gaze roved over the majestic natural landscape.
From somewhere out there he would come
.

And then, unfortunately for her daydream, her eyes tripped over the concrete aqueduct. Far more immediate problems came crashing back to mind. The DWP, that man, the town. Kerrin closed her eyes and tried not to moan.

It didn't matter. Her white knight was still on his way. She'd believe that through every trial and tribulation.
He would come
.

Though it sure would be nice, Kerrin thought, if he'd choose to come soon.

~~~

Gary Sullivan woke to the sound of ear-piercing screams. He groaned and rolled over on his narrow cot. It was not unusual to wake up to the sound of heart-wrenching screams in the middle of the night. Not when you were spending the night in a cell in the Level Four lock-up of Chino state prison.

His present location made him struggle all the harder to hang on to his dream. Not yet. He wasn't ready to give up paradise yet. Her arms were too sweet, her hands so soft...

Outside the high window of his cell, the lights from the towers bathed the yard in a sickly fluorescent sunshine. Leftover wattage spilled into his five-by-nine foot residence, robbing him of the last remnant of his dream. Her face was already fading, along with the tenderness of her touch.

Gary sighed and rolled onto his back. She was gone. As he stared at the ceiling, the continued screams attested to the less pleasant dreams of one of his fellow prisoners.

Hickey, Gary decided. Hickey'd spent half his life knocking off convenience store clerks as if they were play rabbits in a shooting gallery. He deserved a few nightmares. But then, there were a hundred other candidates for bad dreams sleeping in cages down the corridor; men who'd lived violently, recklessly, and uselessly.

The screams dwindled down to frightened whimpers. Someone yelled out for the perpetrator of the night disturbance to shut the hell up or some vital part of his anatomy would be slit in two the next morning. The whimpers stopped.

Not that Gary would be able to get back to sleep. Not now. He threw an arm over his eyes, but that didn't keep out the tower lights, nor did it shut out the crowd of thoughts that hadn't given him a moment's peace since yesterday.

Ten years
. They'd offered him ten years off his twenty-five-year sentence. It was an amazing offer, half of the time he had left to serve. All he had to do was this simple little job for Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power. They would actually pay him -- ten years -- just for finding a way to beat the security at their plant outside of a town called Freedom. It was outrageous!

Yeah. Too outrageous.

Oh, he wasn't a violent offender like the other guys in Level Four, but ten years was too much of a break to be believed.

"Say, Gary. You up?"

The voice was crazy Willie Deere's in the next cell over. Sighing, Gary rolled off his cot. "Yeah, I'm up."

"Who d'you suppose that was?" Willie asked.

Gary couldn't see Willie's face, only his hands on the bars; arthritic hands with age spots.

Yawning, Gary turned and leaned against the concrete wall between them. "Maybe the new kid." Gary knew Willie had his eye on the new kid. The previous morning the old man had managed to pass a pack of real, outside cigarettes to the youth as they'd filed out of the breakfast mess hall. The look he'd given the kid had been full of love. "You know, everyone's trying to get that boy's attention," Gary now told Willie. "You ought to save those cigarettes for yourself."

Willie sounded injured. "You never know. I might get lucky."

"You might," Gary agreed, noncommittal.

"Now you," Willie accused, "don't even try."

"I like girls," Gary said, remembering the end of his dream. "Girls exclusively."

"Hmph." Willie's fingers fell over the edges of the bars. "Doesn't matter. Everybody thinks you're my bitch."

"Yeah, well, ain't that lucky for you. People tend to leave you alone that way." Gary was far less concerned with his reputation than he was for Willie's well-being. Without Gary's protection, the old man would be fish bait. Not that Gary had any particular fondness for the old coot. He simply couldn't stand to see a weak creature beaten by a stronger one. That was all.

"You're right about that," Willie conceded. "They do leave me be." Abruptly, he shifted course. "You going to tell me who was the man came to see you yesterday?"

Gary blinked in surprise. He hadn't realized Willie'd noticed his visitor. But then, crazy Willie was often sharper than he looked. "That was Marty," Gary decided to admit. "Used to be my parole officer."

"Parole officer!" Willie sounded as baffled as Gary had been. A three-time loser with his last burglary rap, Gary was years away from the nearest possible parole hearing. Not that he'd get very far even when that blessed event occurred. Marty, with good reason, hated Gary's guts.

"What did the guy want?" Willie asked.

Folding his arms across his chest, Gary carefully considered an answer. It had taken Marty forever to spell out the deal with the DWP, and even longer to get honest about it. "Just a chat," Gary claimed.

Willie made a disbelieving noise.

"Go back to bed," Gary told him. "It was nothing."

Nothing? Not exactly. Meanwhile Gary heard Willie obediently shuffle off to bed. In another two decades, Gary thought, he'd be as old and weak -- and probably as crazy.

Oh, that ten year offer was awfully tempting.

Still wide awake, Gary stalked over to his barred window. With one hand wrapped around a steel post, he looked out across concrete walls and barbed wire. Usually he didn't let himself think about how many years he had left to enjoy this view. Usually he didn't let himself dream about getting out early. He knew that he'd used up his good will with the parole board. Fact is, he'd used up his good will with just about everybody. Objectively speaking, he didn't
deserve
this chance.

Gary smoothed his fist down the cold steel bar. Maybe that's what made him so jumpy about the deal. It was too good to be true, too good for
him
.

His lips pursed. On the other hand, the deal wasn't without its drawbacks; serious, dangerous drawbacks. Could be those ten years would turn out to be cheap pay. Gary shook his head. Could be? Probably! Hell, he'd be a fool to get involved with this DWP job. 'Security' work. Right.

He'd say no. The whole deal was screwy. But he'd play along for the moment. At least until tomorrow.

Some of Gary's disappointment eased as he thought about the morrow. That's when he was supposed to meet the mayor of Freedom. Freedom was the little town beside the DWP plant. Apparently the mayor was in a big to-do about a prison convict polluting her town. Wanted to meet the monster.

Gary would have declined the invite, but Marty'd let slip that the mayor was a she. Well, hell. It had been five long years since Gary'd been near one of those. He might as well get something out of this.

Smiling, he strolled back to his cot. Oh, with his luck this she-mayor would turn out to be some middle-aged harridan, shaped like an army tank and with a face to match. Ironsides with a downy black moustache.

Marty'd told Gary to make nice to the woman. He'd said the whole deal was off if Gary couldn't convince the old battle-ax to keep her mouth shut about the job. Gary fell back on his bed and laughed silently up at the ceiling. It was too much. Those fools were depending on
him
for public relations?

Ah me, ah my. Still chuckling, Gary closed his eyes. But he knew sleep wouldn't come. The DWP deal was screwy, the system was stacked against him, and he distrusted every last one of them...but he couldn't get those ten years out of his head.

Maybe they were worth the risk.

Outside the window, the lights still blazed over the yard. Gary closed his eyes. If he concentrated very hard he could almost bring his earlier dream back to mind. He couldn't remember what the girl had looked like, but he could remember the way she'd felt. He could remember the way she'd touched him. Gary'd had plenty of women dance in and out of his life, but none had touched him like this. So soft, so gentle.

It was just a dream. He knew that. But, like the ten years, it haunted him all the same. As he lay on his bed, his eyes closed, he wondered. What if life could be more than a series of screw-ups? What if it didn't have to hurt? Oh, it was a stupid notion, probably ridiculous, but maybe, just maybe, it was true.