Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Raley Gannon had kidnapped her two days after she woke up with Jay Burgess lying dead beside her. She didn’t know how the two events were connected, but she knew they must be, and all the implications were frightening.

He disappeared through the darkened doorway. A light came on in the adjacent room. She heard him rustling around, opening doors and closing them, and soon he returned with a bottle of pills. He shook out two tablets and extended them to her. “Take these.”

“What are they?”

“Ibuprofen.” He turned the bottle so she could read the label. “Generic.”

“I’m not taking them.”

“How come? Afraid that I switched them with a date rape drug?”

She looked up into his face, and it was remarkable how much he had aged since the last time she’d seen him. It was evidenced by more than just a few gray hairs. His skin was dark from sun exposure. His beard and mustache were as black as any pirate’s and concealed his lips, which she imagined were firmly set and slow to smile.

But what really added years were his eyes. Not only were there pronounced lines radiating from the corners of them but the irises themselves had become hard and cold, as if a pond that in summer was placid and green had now frozen over.

Or maybe they’d always been that way. After all, she’d seen him only a few times and from a distance as he’d dodged reporters. She’d really known him only as the blurred figure fleeing the video camera, as the subject of a hot news story.

If it was retribution he was after, she would just as soon get it over with. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“Jay Burgess.”

“Go to the head of the class.”

Jay’s death had prompted this…this whatever it was. Jay’s death had brought Raley Gannon out of obscurity. He had left Charleston five years ago, never to be heard of again. At least not by her.

Possibly he and Jay had stayed in touch. Jay had never mentioned him, though, and it had never occurred to her to ask him about Raley Gannon. As soon as he was no longer news, she’d forgotten about him.

He bounced the tablets in his palm. “It’s going to be a long, uncomfortable night for you. Take the pills.”

She hesitated only a second, then opened her mouth.

“No way in hell am I going to let you bite me. Stick out your tongue.”

She did. He set the tablets on her tongue, then pressed the water bottle against her lips again. He poured more slowly, she swallowed more easily, until she’d drained the bottle. He turned and walked into the kitchen to throw away the empty bottle.

“Did you…” She stumbled over the words, tried again. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to Jay and me night before last?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Did you?”

On his way back, he dragged a chair from the small dining table and placed it no more than two feet away from the one in which she was sitting. Straddling it backward, he folded his arms over the back of it. “You tell me.”

Britt Shelley, Miss Calm, Cool, and Collected when in front of a television camera, was remarkably composed facing her kidnapper, too. Oh, she was afraid, no doubt about that. But she was putting up a good front. He had to give her high marks for not going hysterical the moment she recognized him, which she’d done almost immediately. Although his appearance had changed, she’d placed him. His face anyway.

“Do you remember my name?”

She nodded.

“You should.”

It was she who had hammered the last nail into the coffin of his reputation. She’d sealed his fate but good. No telling how many other reputations she had demolished since then. Should he be flattered that she remembered him out of so many? Probably not. Maybe she never forgot the faces and names of the people she destroyed.

“I remember you, Mr. Gannon.”

“From five years ago. But your memory can’t account for hours of time night before last. Or so you say.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Sounds like an awfully convenient case of amnesia.”

He could see that she was plotting the best way to handle him. He could almost follow her thought processes as she considered one tactic and then discarded it in favor of another.

She said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, if you’ll take the tape off my hands and feet.”

So, she’d decided to try to bargain. “No deal. Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“If you’ll remove-”

“Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“Don’t you think I wish I could?”

So much for her bargaining scheme. It gave way to shouting and frustration. Fear, maybe. He saw a tear pick up light in the corner of her eye, which left him unmoved. He’d been looking for it, expecting it.

“You could have saved yourself the dramatic kidnapping, Mr. Gannon. And the gasoline to and from Charleston, and the jail time you’re going to serve for this, because it’s going to yield nothing. I’m blank, completely blank on what happened after Jay and I got to his town house.”

She looked at him imploringly, tilting her head at an angle that looked defenseless, blinking until the tear slipped over her lower lid and rolled down her cheek. “Free my hands and feet. Please.”

Bargaining to frustration to tearful appeal in under sixty seconds. The lady had talent. “No.”

“I’ll tell you anything I can,” she said. “I promise. But I’m very uncomfortable. Please.”

“No.”

She nodded toward his open front door. “Where would I go? I don’t even know where I am.”

“Tell me what happened at Jay’s place.”

Her head dropped forward, sending a curtain of pale hair over each shoulder. She remained that way for several seconds, then raised her head and said emphatically, “I can’t remember.”

Defiance now. She must have read a how-to book. “Tell me what you do remember.”

For a full minute, maybe more, they stared across the narrow space separating them. In person, with her face clean and her hair loose, she looked younger than she did on TV. Smaller, too. Her eyes were blue, her gaze steady and guileless, which he knew she must use to her advantage in front of the camera as well as away from it.

The earnestness in her gaze didn’t work on him, though. He was immune. She must have sensed that, because she was the first to relent. She didn’t break their stare, but she took a swift little breath. “I arrived…No, let me back up. I went to The Wheelhouse at Jay’s invitation.”

She told him that Jay had called her earlier that day, inviting her to join him for a drink, saying he needed to talk to her about something. “He didn’t say what. Only that it was important.”

She spoke without emotion, almost by rote. He figured she’d been over this with the police a dozen times already.

“It wasn’t like he was asking me for a date,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him in months. Hadn’t talked to him on the telephone. This was the first contact we’d had in a long time. I said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ He said seven o’clock. I arrived right on time.” She paused for a breath, then asked, “Have you ever been to The Wheelhouse?”

“This evening.”

“This evening? You stopped off for a drink before breaking into my house and kidnapping me? Although I suppose felony could be thirsty work.”

Ignoring that, he said, “The Wheelhouse didn’t open for business until after I’d left Charleston, so I’d never been there. I wanted to see the layout of the place.”

“What for?”

“Which table did you sit at?”

“Far corner.”

“Right-hand side as you enter? By the window?”