The Heart Heist (7 page)

"Kerrin?" His father seemed surprised. "What's wrong with Kerrin?"

Matt stifled a sigh. And sometimes they didn't notice
any
thing. "Well, you may have observed, she's been rather...agitated since she came back from Bishop this evening."

"Agitated?" Tom's forehead puckered. "I haven't noticed anything beyond her usual..." Tom waved a hand in the air, "...flutteriness. And there's this Independence Day business she's all involved in tomorrow. If you think she's acting more fluttery than usual, it's probably nerves over everything turning out all right."

Matt thought the euphemism 'fluttery' a good one. He'd have to remember it. But in the meantime he had to convince his dad that this was more than pre-party nerves. He leaned forward. "I think she has a boyfriend."

Tom raised an eyebrow.

"Look, she went to see him in L.A. last week, and then just today in Bishop."

"Ye-es," Tom drawled, giving Matt a severe look. "And just what does that have to do with us?"

Matt wanted to shake him. Didn't he get it? Okay, so his work for the government had driven him bonkers, given him a nervous breakdown. But that had happened almost forty years ago. Shouldn't he have recovered some sense of reality by now?

"Dad, we can't let Kerrin screw up."

His father didn't look impressed with this declaration. "I'm sure Kerrin can take care of her own social life. Besides, how do you even know this is a man?"

Matt brightened, encouraged that his father was displaying a modicum of curiosity. "Because as soon as he called Kerrin was jumping in her car to go see him. She said -- " Here Matt made it clear what he thought of this lame explanation. "She
said
that he was just an applicant for summer school teacher."

Tom Horton now raised his other eyebrow. "Well, then. I expect that's exactly what he is. The summer school teacher." He pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, signalling the end of the conversation. "The summer school teacher," he repeated musingly. "Fascinating. I'll look forward to meeting him."

Matt watched his father amble off toward his workbench and decided he'd accomplished something after all. At least his dad wanted to meet the guy. That was almost...acting like a father. As for Matt, he just hoped to hell that if the guy really did want a job as summer school teacher, Kerrin had enough sense to give it to him.

~~~

It was only ten o'clock in the morning but already the thermometer outside the courthouse was reading in the high nineties. The air of the plateau desert was dry and enervating. Heat began to lift off the asphalt track of highway that ran through the center of town.

Nevertheless the town had come out full force for the Independence Day parade, the kick-off event for Kerrin's all-day festival. Families were lined along the closed-off highway. Senior citizens waited in deck chairs and babies crawled around on picnic blankets. Kids blew on plastic trombones and a hunchbacked old man walked up and down the main street selling American flags.

Clad in a pioneer woman outfit, complete with sunbonnet, Kerrin stood on the podium overlooking the parade route and allowed herself some pride. It looked like the day was going to be a success.

Except for the fact Gary Sullivan would be blowing into town.

Not for the first time, she scanned the crowd, looking for him. Whenever she thought about the man, something funny happened in her stomach. An ulcer was forming, that's what it was. By the end of the summer she was going to have a full-blown ulcer for sure.

"Okay, Miss Mayor, let's get this show on the road." Ollie, the former mayor, gently prodded her into action.

Kerrin turned his way with a well-rehearsed gasp. "Oh, Ollie, I thought you said that you would give the opening speech." Most people in town would believe her scatter-brained enough to have forgotten to prepare an opening speech.

But Ollie, his weathered face shaded by a big black Stetson, only chuckled softly in reply to this obvious falsehood. "Go on. Nobody wants to listen to me when they've got a pretty little thing like you to look at."

Kerrin rolled her eyes. It was Ollie's down-home charm that had gotten her into this mess in the first place. Ollie had promised Kerrin that being mayor would consist of nothing more taxing than cutting a ribbon or two if a new store opened business. Right.

She pushed back her chair and stood up. That was when she saw Gary Sullivan.

He was down the block on the other side of the barricade. Both his elbows were propped on the open door of a white car, his weight set on one hip.

Even from a distance of a hundred feet, she could feel the aura of pure male sex that hung about him. It was in the hard form of his body, in the way his jeans clung to his hips, and in the set of his stance. For all Gary Sullivan's faults he was pure physical grace, ability, beauty.

And he was looking directly at her.

Now how was she supposed to pretend she didn't know him if he was going to look at her that way? Her heart took a dive and her knees went soft as marshmallows.

If that weren't bad enough, he had the audacity to smile. The expression utterly transformed his hard face, and he had a
dimple
, for God's sake, in his left cheek. Kerrin made a grab for the back of her rickety folding chair.

"Oh, all right, little filly," Ollie groaned, lumbering to his feet. "If it's gonna get you this frizzled, I'll do the speech."

"No, no. I'll do it." Shaking her head, Kerrin told herself to stop acting absurd. Sullivan would look that way at any woman, any woman. Besides, he was a three-time loser. Even if the attention of most men made her ridiculously nervous, that shouldn't be true of Sullivan.

Dragging her gaze from the man behind the barricade, she approached the microphone. Her prepared speech flew right out of her head, replaced by a completely different one, one directed specifically at the man standing by his white car.

"Freedom is not a right." With a brilliant smile, she heard herself cheerfully start improvising for the crowd. "Freedom is something earned." She continued in that vein, sternly adding that, "only when all respect the
rights
and
property
of their fellow men can true freedom be found."

"Independence is a state fraught with peril," Kerrin concluded. "Some nations have floundered under the burden. Others have ceded it voluntarily in vain hopes of greater gain. But we in these United States of America, we in Freedom, California, are determined to meet the challenge. Freedom, then, for one and all!"

Kerrin stepped back from the microphone, a little stunned by the round of applause that erupted from the sides of the street lining the parade route. And then, because she just couldn't help herself, she looked toward Sullivan, curious to see his reaction.

He wasn't there. Nor was his white car. In their place stood a large highway patrol officer. His legs were splayed, his arms crossed over his tan uniform.

Something crashed in Kerrin's chest. Had the police already blown Gary's cover? Had by some freak chance one of the local officers recognized him and taken him into custody? He wouldn't even have a chance to attempt his job for the DWP. By now he was probably sitting in some squad car, hands cuffed behind his back, sweltering in the heat and looking forward to a long drive back to Chino.

Ten years, she remembered him telling her, and the ache in her chest got worse. Did she know how long ten years was?

Excusing herself, Kerrin made her way down the steps of the wooden podium, ignoring Ollie's vociferous protests that she was leaving too early. Gathering her long skirts, she threaded her way around families craning their necks to watch the high school marching band. It seemed to take forever to get down the block to the barricade.

The highway patrol officer was Tim Holloway, a local boy. Two years ago he'd been in her high school class -- not the brightest of students, but well-meaning. Surely he would tell her what they'd done with Gary.

"The man with the white car?" Tim asked, in response to Kerrin's carefully worded query. "Now, let me see, was there a guy with a white car? What kinda car, do you know?"

"No, I don't know what kind of car." Kerrin did her best not to wail.
Did you arrest someone, a dangerous criminal, in the past ten minutes, you sad excuse for a lawman?

"Oh, yeah," Tim finally remembered, his lips curving upward. "That guy. I sent him up the hill to the visitor parking in Horace Winter's back pasture."

Kerrin closed her eyes and breathed a long, traitorous sigh of relief. She felt crazy. Why was she sighing with relief on Gary's behalf?

Meanwhile Tim rocked onto the balls of his feet, looking smug. "Though I guess soon enough he won't be considered a visitor, eh, Ms. Horton?"

Kerrin went still. "I -- I beg your pardon?"

"Well." Tim scratched his jaw. "He's hardly going to be a visitor once he starts teaching summer school, now, is he?"

"Teaching summer school?" Kerrin squeaked. "He -- he's teaching summer school?"

"Sure he is -- I thought you would know that if anybody did," Tim chided her. "Leastways, your brother seemed to think so." Tim began to look uncertain. "But I guess you're the boss, being the principal now and all so you would know best. Isn't he going to be the summer school teacher?"

The summer school teacher, for her teenagers. Gary Sullivan. Dear Lord. "Excuse me." Kerrin turned on her heel. She had to find Matt. He had to be the source of this misinformation. But how in the world had Matt connected Gary Sullivan to the "applicant" she'd said she was interviewing? And so fast!

Rumors in Freedom were like wildfires in the brush. Kerrin would have to move like lightning if there were any hope of crushing this one while it was still only smoking.

~~~

Gary closed the door of his borrowed car and leaned his forearms on its roof. The empty field smelled of hay and freshness. He breathed in deeply, holding it in his lungs for a long time. One of the small but consistently oppressive things about prison was the smell. It got to you, the smell of confinement, the smell of fear.

Slipping the car keys into his pants pocket, Gary turned and looked down the slope at the town of Freedom. It was even smaller than he'd imagined, nothing more than two blocks worth of shops along the highway and then maybe a square mile grid of graceful old houses, split on either side of that highway.

A faint shimmer of apprehension went through him. He was on his own now. The real test was here. The real test wasn't about finding the security problems at the DWP facility. It wasn't even about taking care of that federal agent's agenda.

The real test was if he could fight temptation.

Even now, barely ten minutes into town, he felt the urge to saunter down and calmly case the place. But Gary knew where that was coming from. He knew the urge meant he was feeling out of control. Stealing was a way of gaining control; it was a way of creating and possessing a situation in such a way that no one else could interfere.

But knowing didn't necessarily mean he could stop himself. Hell, he'd been stealing things since he was about five years old. What made him think that now, after a consistent thirty years of such behavior, he was going to change?

Turning deliberately from his view of the town, Gary closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. That wasn't the way to think. The past was past. He had to take it one day at a time. One minute at a time. Breaking it down like that was the only way.

With shaking hands, Gary got a packet of cigarettes out of his front shirt pocket. He leaned his back against the car as he shook one out. Hey, so far he was doing just fine. He'd even obeyed an officer of the law and moved his car out of the way. In fact, the home-grown parade was still filing down the closed main street.

From here he could see a bunch of kids on tricycles struggling past the city hall. Behind them a girl pulled a wagon full of what looked to be bunny rabbits.

Gary couldn't help it; he was smiling again, just as he couldn't have helped smiling when he'd caught a load of Kerrin Horton in her Old West gown. The dress had gone up to her neck and down to her ankles but still couldn't conceal that she didn't have a single curve on her willowy girl-body. And the sun bonnet -- well, it was way too late for such precautions; he'd seen the little copper-colored freckles that already danced across her nose.

Damn but she was young, which made the lustful dreams he'd been having about her all the more reprehensible. Ah, but a man couldn't help what he dreamt, could he? Especially since Marty had been less than accommodating about giving Gary enough rope to find a real woman in Bishop. A true prince, Marty was. Now that Gary was in Freedom, finding some willing body to satisfy his long suppressed physical needs was going to be difficult, to say the least.

It was a given that everyone in town -- Kerrin included -- would find out about it.

Gary frowned and fit a cigarette into his mouth. No, he couldn't imagine climbing into bed with some chick and knowing the lady mayor would be hearing all about it the next morning. And as for Rogers' bright idea Gary should take Ms. Horton to bed herself -- well he could forget it. Gary shook out the match he'd used to light his cigarette.

He might be a thief and a convicted felon but he wasn't a cold-blooded seducer. He'd never harmed a woman in his life and he wasn't about to start now.

~~~

Kerrin was pretty sure he was going to kill her.

Given the rumors started at the parade, she'd spent the last two hours searching for Gary Sullivan -- in vain. He seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Kerrin wondered if vanishing was another one of his talents, like breaking into places. As she traipsed through the park ground full of picnickers, she knew she had to find him soon, before he inadvertently blew his cover in town.

Everyone asked her about the new summer school teacher. Mary Gibbons wanted to know if he'd accept her fifteen-year-old son in the sixteen-year-old class. Ben Thomas wanted to make sure he didn't encroach on his son's softball practice.