Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

Using his cane, he followed slowly behind her. They didn’t speak until they were in the cab, on their way into the city. Mattie placed a wrinkled hand gently on Nick’s wrist. She smiled. Two smiles in the same hour. He really must look awful. “We have time,” she said. “We’ll clean up and have something to eat and catch our breath. Then we’ll go to Saratoga.”

Leaning back against the seat, Nick nodded and watched out his window as they moved toward a city he no longer knew.

Sam Lincoln Jones stood outside John Pembroke’s hospital room in jeans, a bright orange polo shirt, running shoes and military sunglasses. He wore a shoulder holster that held his Smith & Wesson.38.

“Subtle,” Zeke said.

“Subtlety doesn’t work with these people.”

“Then I take it you’ve met our patient.”

Sam’s mouth twitched in what passed for a smile when he was working. When he wasn’t working, he’d put on jazz and his half-moon glasses and read thick tomes on criminological theory, and sometimes he’d laugh out loud. “He mistook me for a lawyer.”

Zeke laughed, not sure if Sam was kidding.

“I had on a jacket,” Sam said. “Got hot in here and figured maybe the gun might impress him.”

“Did it?”

Sam just looked at him.

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Roger and Sara Stone showed up a little while ago. They were all real polite and cool to each other. Roger and Sara talked about how worried they were about their niece.”

Zeke nodded. “I just stopped at their place here in town. Roger tried to hire me again.”

“Bet the pay’s good.” Sam drank some gray take-out coffee. “But you don’t need money to make you keep an eye on this lady, do you?”

“No.”

“She blew in here, too. Left about twenty minutes ago. Nurses gave her daddy something to calm him down after she got through with him.”

Zeke had second-guessed his decision to leave her a copy of the blackmail note. But it was done. “You listen in?” he asked.

“Part of the job, isn’t it?” Sam spoke without relish or distaste; he was just stating the facts. “From what I gather, Dani Pembroke (a) hates anyone taking her for granted, (b) hates anyone short of the CIA deliberately keeping her in the dark about anything, and (c) hates anyone feeling responsible for her happiness and well-being, which is tied up with (a) and (b). I could give you some technical mumbo jumbo analyzing her behavior and attitude, but you get the idea.” Sam’s eyes were unreadable behind his dark glasses. “She’s intense.”

“And John?”

“Threatened to pour a pitcher of ice water on her head or hire you if she didn’t back off. A real pair. Devoted to each other under it all.” Sam was silent a moment. “I debated following her.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Bad vibes.”

Reason enough.

Even with the sunglasses, Sam’s gaze penetrated. “You holding back on her?”

“Not as much as she thinks.”

“You’ve always liked to take your life into your hands in the most peculiar ways,” Sam said, not as lightly as Zeke would have wished. “I assume you know Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke are on their way.”

“To Saratoga?”

“Ah. I see you did not know.”

Without a word Sam handed over his gun. Zeke took it. Knowing Sam as he did, he’d probably hauled an arsenal east with him. Yet he seldom resorted to violence, even in their sometimes violent profession. He just liked to be prepared.

“Hope you don’t need it,” Sam said.

“So do I.”

It was quiet and cool in the woods, with almost no breeze. Dani followed the narrow path from the bottling plant. She’d let her staff there know she was on the grounds. The receptionist, a sixty-year-old woman from Saratoga, had reported that Ira was looking for Dani. “He said it was important but not urgent.” Meaning whatever he wanted probably didn’t involve a burglary or a ransacked room.

Mosquitoes buzzed around her head in the stillness. She’d checked the spot where her father had claimed to trip. It might have happened as he’d said. But she didn’t think so, no matter how stubbornly he clung to his story.

Despite the warm air, she shivered, feeling incredibly alone. Her father had said the man posted outside her room-Sam Jones-was Zeke’s doing, a partner or friend or both. Jones didn’t say a word to her, but had looked as if he was considering stuffing her in a closet until his pal returned. Dani hadn’t introduced herself.

She slapped at a mosquito on her leg. She had folded Zeke’s copied blackmail letter into a small square and shoved it in her shorts pocket. Its words were seared into her memory.

She went around the hemlock at the top of the cliffs and down the steep incline to the boulder above the narrow ledge where she’d found the gold key her mother had been wearing the night she disappeared. Her heart raced. She felt light-headed. She’d come here straight from the hospital. She needed to eat, rest, think.

A woodpecker drummed nearby.

Did her mother drop the key off the ledge that night? Or was it put there or dropped there sometime between that night and when Dani found it a few weeks ago?

Did it have anything to do with the blackmail note?

Was it here-on the spot where she was standing now-that her mother had met and paid off her blackmailer?

Dani smelled the pungent odor of evergreen needles and heard the faint hum of traffic on the interstate in the distance.

There was a movement behind her, above her, in the woods. A rustling wind in the trees or a crunching of dried leaves. She went absolutely still and listened.

Nothing.

Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed such a sound. Now, however, following her visit to her father in the hospital, seeing his battered head, feeling her own fading bruises, she was on heightened alert. Her senses picked up every nuance of sight, sound, smell.

“Damn mosquitoes,” Ira Bernstein grumbled.

In her immediate, overwhelming relief, Dani almost lost her balance on the rock. She could hear Ira thrashing along the narrow path that spidered out from the old logging road that led through the woods to the Pembroke’s main grounds.

“Over here, Ira.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. You know, I’ve about decided I’m a city person. Think I’ll look up your grandpa and see if he doesn’t have a new job for me in some decent city in-Hey, who are you?”

Dani tensed at the change in Ira’s voice. The sudden fear mixed with indignation. She looked around for a stick or a loose rock, anything she could use as a weapon.

“Dani, run!”

Without thinking, she scrambled up the steep incline, pausing just to uproot a rock about the size of a football and twice as heavy, scraping her fingertips as she dug it free. She ducked under the low branches of the hemlock.

She heard sounds of grunting and choking.

“Ira! Ira-what’s happening? Talk to me!”

He didn’t answer. Stemming a surge of panic, Dani plunged through the undergrowth of ferns and brush onto the narrow path.

She swallowed a scream and almost dropped her rock.

A tall, muscular, red-faced man had Ira pinned by his throat to the thick trunk of an oak tree. Ira’s face had turned purple. He wasn’t making a sound.

Dani raised her rock shoulder-high and quickly debated heaving it down on the side of the attacker’s head. But she said, “Let him go.”

The man had his back to her and couldn’t see whether she had a gun or a pitchfork or just a stupid rock. But he released Ira, who immediately sagged to the ground, clutching his throat and gasping for air.

His attacker turned to Dani.

“Get off my property,” she said, surprising herself with her quiet determination.