Dawn Stewardson - The Full Story

Ah. She was trying emotional blackmail this time around.

“Maybe I do,” he admitted. “But I don’t owe you a trip to New York.”

He set down the ice pack and picked up the semiautomatic she’d put on the counter, then started toward the front door.

“Wait a minute,” she said.

He kept walking, not even remotely surprised when she followed him.

“Look,” he said, stopping a few feet short of the door. “This isn’t open for discussion. My gun’s outside and I’m going to get it. After that, I intend to throw a few things into a suitcase and—”

“So you’re expecting to be in New York for a while?”

“No, I doubt I’ll be there long. But the only way I can get a gun on a plane is in checked luggage.”

“People can still do that? Doesn’t airport security X-ray everything these days? Whether it’s checked or not?”

“Uh-huh. But my stuff gets special treatment.”

“What?” she said, looking as if she figured he was delusional.

He simply shrugged. He didn’t care whether she thought he was crazy, and he had no intention of getting into any hows and whys with her—although the “arrangement” his company had for transporting guns was really a blessing.

It wasn’t always easy to acquire the sort of weapon you wanted when you’d just arrived in a city.

“You mean,” she was saying, “that you can walk into any airport, carrying anything you like in your luggage and—”

“I didn’t say anything I like. I said guns. Now let’s drop it, okay?” he added as he took a few final steps to the door.

Cautiously he opened it and surveyed the clearing, virtually certain the killer wouldn’t have hung around but not wanting to take any chances.

Then he glanced at her again, and said, “Would you mind waiting inside?”

For once, she did as he asked and simply stood in the doorway while he collected his Glock.

As he headed back up the porch steps, she said, “I could be a big help in New York.”

“I told you it wasn’t open for discussion,” he reminded her.

“Then we won’t discuss,” she said, trailing after him when he started toward his room. “I’ll talk and you just listen.”

TURK HAD RUN like hell almost the entire way from Billy Brent’s place back to where he’d left his rental car—hidden down an old pull-off that was so overgrown it couldn’t have been used in years. For a city slicker, he’d done well to even spot it.

He climbed into the driver’s seat and took his Beretta from the glove compartment in case things went even further off course.

Then he powered down the windows, thinking that he hadn’t had such a close call in…hell, he’d probably never had such a close one. But at least he knew where the problem lay. It was simply that he was out of his element.

Maybe contract killers did have to go wherever their work took them, but Vancouver Island was so different from Manhattan it could be on another planet.

He was used to bright lights and big city noise. So put him in the wilderness and it was hardly surprising that he wasn’t totally on top of his game.

Oh, not that the entire island was wall-to-wall forest. He’d landed in a city. Actually, to be specific, he’d landed in its harbor. But same difference.

Victoria. The capital of British Columbia, a fact he’d carefully tucked away.

He was a trivia nut, and after millions of hours of Jeopardy and Wheel and Millionaire he could usually come up with at least some inconsequential fact relating to just about any subject.

Foreign geography, however, was his weak suit. So whenever he traveled he paid special attention to names and places.

At any rate, from what little he’d seen of Victoria it seemed like a nice place. And only half an hour by float plane north of Seattle.

Still, once you left the city behind, there was nothing except mile after mile of mountains and trees, and he just didn’t get the appeal of this nature crap. You wanted nature, you went to Central Park. You didn’t head for Canada and total isolation.

He didn’t, anyway. Not unless someone was paying him big bucks to make the trip, which, of course, explained why he was here.

But when it came to Billy Brent, the guy made over twenty million a picture. He could afford to be anywhere in the world on his downtime. So why would he want to spend a single day of it in the middle of nowhere?

Oh, hell, he was back to thinking about Billy Brent and his damned retreat. And what a screwup that scene had been.

It would have been even worse, though, if he wasn’t in good shape. All those hours at the gym—in the ring, lifting weights, running laps—had really paid off today.

If he hadn’t landed that one smoker of a punch he might be in real trouble now. Because whoever the guy at Billy’s was, he wasn’t any pushover. That one punch had probably made the difference between getting away and not.

Of course, the important thing was that he had gotten away.

But that bitch with the gun had surprised the shit out of him and if he ever laid eyes on her again she’d be dead.

Hell, she’d be dead already if his Magnum hadn’t gone flying, which was another point against her. Her sneaking up on him had cost him his favorite piece.

That had him royally pissed, and it wasn’t the only thing that was frosting him off.

This job should already be over and done with. But because of her, it wasn’t.

He thought about that for a minute, then backed up his logic a little.

If not for her, the job would be over and done with, assuming that Billy Brent had actually been in there. Which might not have been the case.

What if Billy had realized he was being targeted?

That could be. And it would mean all the media crap about his being at his retreat had been nothing but a setup.

Turk lit a cigarette and filled his lungs with the hot smoke, feeling pretty much back to normal now, able to contemplate where things stood with a clear brain.

He’d pegged the guy with the Glock for a bodyguard. Maybe that wasn’t it, though. Maybe he’d been there instead of Billy, waiting to see whether anyone came looking for the superstar.

But if Billy wasn’t there, where was he?

After considering the question, he retrieved his laptop from the floor of the back seat, thinking he’d better see—courtesy of the world of wireless Internet connections—if there was anything new going on in Billy’s life.

Once he was into cyberspace, he clicked on his bookmark for the best of the Billy Brent fan sites he’d found.

The message scrolling across the top of the screen read, “Watch Billy tomorrow morning! Live on the Sherry Sherman Show!”

Well. Wasn’t that interesting.

He read the text saying that Sherry had announced Billy would be her special guest. Then he got off the Internet and shut the laptop, smiling to himself.

He’d really grown to love modern technology.

WHILE MICKEY DID HER BEST to convince Dan that taking her to New York with him was a first-rate idea, he tossed enough clothes into a suitcase to keep the killer’s gun and his own, from rattling around.

Not that he was about to pack his Glock just yet. He wanted it loaded and accessible until he had a flight lined up and was ready to check in.

Life had handed him enough surprises that he always felt more comfortable when he was carrying.

“…so I’d get the breaking story firsthand, which would save both of us time,” Mickey was saying. “And you and this Ken fellow would have my help.

“I can use a gun,” she elaborated. “I mean, for more than shooting into the air to get someone’s attention.”

Man, oh, man. Just what they’d need. An intrepid girl reporter with a gun.