Danielle Steel: Southern Lights

Copyright © 2009 by Danielle Steel

The man sitting in the threadbare chair with the stuffing pouring out of it appeared to be dozing, his chin drifting slowly toward his chest. He was tall and powerfully built with a tattoo of a snake peering out of his shirt on the back of his neck as his head shifted down. His long arms seemed lifeless on the arms of his chair in the small dark room. There was an evil cooking odor coming from the hallway and the television was on. A narrow unmade bed stood in the corner of the room, covering most of the filthy, stained shag carpet. The drawers of a chest were pulled open and the few clothes he had brought with him were on the floor. He was wearing a T-shirt, heavy boots, and jeans, and the mud encrusted on his soles had dried and was flaking into the carpet. As peacefully as he had been sleeping, suddenly he was wide awake. He jerked his head up with a snort, and his ice-blue eyes flew open, as the hair stood up on his arms. He had an uncanny sense of hearing. He closed his eyes again as he listened, and then stood up and grabbed his jacket with a single stride across the narrow room. With his head erect, the snake tattoo disappeared back into his shirt.

Luke Quentin slipped quietly over the windowsill and made his way down the fire escape after closing the window behind him. It was freezing cold. January in New York. He had been in town for two weeks. Before that, he had been in Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky. He had visited a friend in Texas. He had been traveling for months. He got work where he could find it. He didn’t need much to live on. He moved with the stealth of a panther, and was walking down the street on the Lower East Side, before the men he had heard coming reached his room. He didn’t know who they were, but he was smarter than to take a chance. They were cops more than likely. He had been in prison twice, for credit card fraud and robbery, and he was well aware that ex-cons never got a fair shake, from anyone. His friends from prison called him Q.

He stopped to buy a paper and a sandwich, shivered in the cold, and went for a walk. In another world, he would have been considered handsome. He had huge powerful shoulders, and a chiseled face. He was thirty-four years old and, with both sentences, had done a total of ten years. He had served his full time and hadn’t been released on parole. Now he was free as the wind. He had been back on the streets for two years, and hadn’t gotten into trouble so far. Despite his size, he could disappear in any crowd. He had sandy nondescript blond hair, pale blue eyes, and from time to time he grew a beard.

Quentin walked north, and west when he got to Forty-second Street. He slipped into a movie house just off Times Square, sat in the dark, and fell asleep. It was midnight when he got out, and he hopped on a bus and went back downtown. He assumed that by now, whoever had come to visit earlier would be long gone. He wondered if someone at the hotel had tipped the cops off that he was a con. The tattoos on his hands were a dead giveaway to those who knew. He just hadn’t wanted to be around when they walked in, and hoped they’d lose interest when they found nothing in the room. It was twelve-thirty when he got back to the dreary hotel.

He always took the stairs. Elevators were a trap-he liked to be free to move around. The desk clerk nodded at him, and Luke headed upstairs. He was on the landing just below his floor when he heard a sound. It wasn’t a footstep or a door, it was a click. Just that. He knew it instantly, it was a gun being cocked, and moving like the speed of sound, he headed back down the stairs on silent feet, and slowed briefly only when he got to the desk. Something was off, very off. He realized they were behind him then, halfway down the stairs. There were three of them, and Luke wasn’t going to wait and find out who they were. It occurred to him to try and talk his way out of it, but every instinct told him to run. So he did, he ran like hell. He was already down the street by the time they made it out the door at a dead run. But Luke was faster than nearly any man alive. He had run track in the joint for exercise. People said that Q was faster than the wind. And he was now.

He was over a fence, behind a building, and grabbed the roof of a garage and swung over another fence. He was in the thick of the neighborhood, and he knew by then he couldn’t go back to the hotel. Something was very, very wrong. And he had no idea why. He had a snub-nosed gun shoved in his jeans, and he didn’t want to be caught packing arms, so he dumped it in a trash can, and ran behind a building into an alley. He just kept running and figured he had lost them, until he hit another fence, and suddenly a hand came up behind him and grabbed his neck in a viselike grip. He had never felt anything so tight, and he was glad as hell he’d dumped the gun. Now all he had to do was get rid of the cop. His elbow shot into the ribs of the owner of the grip, but all he did was tighten his hold on Luke’s neck, and squeeze, hard. Luke was dizzy almost instantly and despite his impressive size fell to the ground. The cop knew just where to grab. He landed a resounding kick into Luke’s back, who let out a stifled groan between clenched teeth.

“You sonofabitch,” Luke said, grabbing for the other man’s legs, and suddenly the cop was down, and they were rolling on the ground. The cop had him pinned in a matter of seconds, he was younger than Luke, in better shape, and he had been waiting for the pleasure of Q’s company for months. He had followed him all across the States, and had already been in his room twice that week and once the week before. Charlie McAvoy knew Luke Quentin better than he knew his own brother. He had gotten special permission from an interstate task force to track him for almost a year, and he knew that if it killed him, he was going to get him, and now that he had, he wasn’t going to lose him. Charlie got on his knees and slammed Luke’s face into the ground. Luke’s nose was bleeding profusely when he looked up, just as the two other detectives came up behind Charlie. All three of them were plainsclothesmen, but everything about them screamed cops.

“Easy boys, play nice,” Jack Jones, the senior detective, said as he handed Charlie the cuffs. “Let’s not kill him before we get him to the station.” There was murder in Charlie’s eyes. Jack Jones knew Charlie had wanted to make him, and why. Charlie had told him in confidence one night when he got drunk. Jack had promised him not to say anything to anyone when he saw him the next morning. But he could see what was happening to Charlie now, he was shaking with rage. Jack didn’t like personal vendettas getting into business. If Luke had moved a hair to break free and run from them, Charlie would have shot him. He wouldn’t have winged him or shot him in the leg, he would have killed him on the spot.

The third man on the team radioed for a patrol car. Their own car was several blocks away, and they didn’t want to move Luke that far. They weren’t going to take that chance.

Luke’s nose was bleeding copiously onto his shirt, and none of them offered him anything to stop it. He would get no mercy from them. Jack read him his Miranda rights, and Luke looked arrogant despite the ferocious nosebleed. He had icy eyes, and a stare that took them all in and gave nothing away. Jack thought he was the coldest sonofabitch he had ever met.