Kiss Page 23

  He opened it onto equal blackness. The creaking hinge was all the prompting her mind needed to fill in the details of the room. Chandeliers. Scotch. Knife. She wondered where FBI-not-FBI was.

  “Where are—?” There was the hand over her mouth again. So annoying.

  Her head was taking way too long to clear out. Right then and there, she decided she really wanted to go back to sleep.

  Water dripped from her hair onto her shoulders.

  Her body was moving toward the door, then a sharp object clipped her in the thigh. Hard enough to bruise.

  “Ow!” She hadn’t meant to shout, but there it was.

  Her companion swore and dropped his own efforts at silence. He shoved her into the wall, using it to help hold her up while he fumbled for the doorknob.

  “You don’t have to be—” Shauna began.

  He threw the door open and whipped her out into the hallway, spraining her elbow in the process. She whacked her wrist on the door frame as her limbs slipped through, still not fully connected to her brain.

  There was the pain, and then, in rapid succession, three other observations that struck her like hailstones and finally awakened her from her bleary state.

  The first was a blond watchman crumpled in the hall outside the door.

  The second was the face of her cohort, one frowning Miguel Lopez.

  And the third was the sound of an opening door inside the room, accompanied by a shout.

  “Show me how fast you can run,” Miguel said, yanking her away from the elevator and toward a red exit sign.

  Run down stairs?

  Her legs somehow remembered what to do, though Miguel would not let go of her wrist and would have pulled her along regardless, she thought. Either that or he would have amputated her hand with his tourniquet grip and run off into the night.

  They both fell into the crash bar of the exit at the same time Wayne Spade threw the hotel room door open and spotted them at the end of the hall. He lifted a gun in their direction, but didn’t fire before they fell through.

  “Idiot,” Miguel said, pushing Shauna down the stairs ahead of him. “Doesn’t he know not to leave his valuables in a hotel room?”

  Shauna made it down two flights before the heel of her shoe snagged on a step, as instantly disabling as gravel under a turning motorcycle. Her limbs locked up and her mind missed the beat, and the fog of her sleepiness crowded in on her again as she took seven stairs face-first, watching the handrail rush up to meet her eyes.

  Wayne stood over Frank Danson with a gun, spinning a silencer onto the end of his barrel. The man was collapsed in a chair, only just starting to arouse from his electrified stupor.

  “You know why I asked you to come here,” Wayne said. It was not a question. “I was thinking it’s time for a little one-on-one about that cell phone you dropped into my truck.”

  Frank couldn’t move any more than his eyes. He grunted.

  “And I don’t mean a conversation.”

  Without looking, he shot one round into Frank’s chest, the impact flipping both man and chair over backward. Then Wayne left the hotel.

  This time, he would let someone else clean up the mess.

  “What a disaster, a complete disaster,” Miguel was murmuring over her, holding her hand and stroking her knuckles with his thumb, when she came to in a small examination room of a medical clinic. Oddly enough, her mind was far more clear now after the fall than when he’d tried to rouse her.

  “I look that bad, huh?”

  Miguel smiled for the first time since she’d met him. A full smile that lit up his face and deepened all the creases around his eyes. Beautiful.

  “That would be impossible,” he said. “And I wasn’t talking about you any-way, lovely.” The endearment took the chill out of the room.

  “And yet we are in the biggest, stinking mess of my entire life.”

  “Could be.”

  “I feel a bit swollen.” She touched the ice pack that covered most of the right side of her face.

  “Hairline fracture in your cheekbone.” Miguel traced his own face with his finger to indicate where her bone had cracked. “It could have been much worse.”

  “My nose, for example.”

  He laughed with the relief of a man who had escaped a burning building. “Something like that. You might get a black eye yet.”

  “That’s why they call me lovely. Is it time to go yet?” Her face throbbed, but otherwise she felt quite herself and thought—hoped—the effects of her injection were nearly worn off.

  “They want to keep you under observation. You were out for a few minutes.”

  “Just a few minutes.”

  “Total. You faded in and out on me on the way here.”

  “I’m sure it was the drugs.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. Do you know what they gave you?”

  She shook her head.

  He looked at his watch. “I’m not sure how much time we have, but you are priority one right now. You need some time.”

  “I’m fine. We should go.”

  She tried to sit up, and Miguel gently held her shoulder down. The muscles beneath her shoulder blades shot a warning across her back and down her arms. The ice slipped.

  “In a minute.”

  She adjusted the ice pack. “Tell me what happened after I fell.”

  “Adrenaline happened. That’s the only way I can explain it. I scooped you up without even thinking you might have hurt your neck—”

  His eyes went to the jacket draped across the back of his chair. “I haven’t always made the best judgment calls where you’re concerned.”

  “I promise not to hold anything against you. Does Wayne know where we are? Speaking of which—where are we?”

  He drew a hand down his trim anchor beard. The rest of his face needed a shave.

  “After-hours emergency care center. I figured he’d check the ER rooms first, thought this place would buy us some time.”

  “So my name’s on file here?”

  “I got you in as a Jane Doe, said I’d found you in a stairwell.”

  “They bought it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a problem that I drove you here myself instead of calling 9-1-1. I can only imagine what they think.”

  “One more reason to be on our way.”

  “When you’re ready.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to relax. No easy feat, as her mind went directly to Wayne, searching hospitals with a gun and his hired help.

  “What happened to the guys on watch?”

  “They’ll be fine. I’m a journalist, not an assassin. And they love their scotch. That helped.”

  She laughed. “I would like to have seen it.”

  “I never should have let go of you,” he said.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. I would have taken you down with me if you’d been holding on, and then where would we be?”

  “No. I mean, I never should have let go of you. I should have found another way, not let them decide our future for us.”

  Our future. Shauna tried to recall the last time she had been included in an our of any type.

  “Maybe we’ll have time to remember it together,” he said. He stroked the inside of her forearm.

  Shauna had once thought that reconstructing the past she supposedly shared with Wayne would help her to get back on her feet, find her way through the black holes in her mind. Was she about to sing the same song in a different key? Should she guard against Miguel too?

  The thought seemed ludicrous. She most definitely wanted to remember the bonds she might have had with this man. She understood more clearly now what had pulled them apart. Maybe she could also re-create what had first pulled them—

  A light flashed behind her mind, and she jerked her arm out from under his fingers.

  Nothing else happened.

  She exhaled. She needed his stabilizing touch, but more, she needed to respect him. Respect him enough not to steal from him. He clasped his
hands together as if her retraction was to be expected. But he could not hide his disappointment.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “One can do many things with a girl’s cell phone number.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “It has GPS.”

  “Ah. So that’s how Wayne found me. Please tell me you ditched that thing.”

  “Wish I could take the credit for that, but you left it behind. I moved too slowly to get to you before he did.”

  “I’m incredibly lucky that you got to me when you did.”

  “Well, not being a subscriber to luck, I look at this disaster a bit differently.”

  “How do you look at it, then?”

  “Like a clear sign that I shouldn’t leave you alone any longer. You have always been so tenacious. After you came the second time, I understood that hadn’t changed.”

  “And you saw me running headlong into stupidity.”

  “The only thing worse than running headlong into stupidity is running headlong into it without your memory.”

  She laughed at that and, strength renewed by the presence of Miguel Lopez, she pulled herself upright and set the ice on the mattress beside her.

  “Well, Sabueso,” she said. “I have a lot of questions for you and very little energy to endure the kinds of questions I’ll get from the doctors. And since you understand exactly how tenacious I am, maybe you could show me the way out before I attempt to find it myself.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “So sure I want you to cut this ID bracelet off my wrist so we can leave it here.”

  Miguel looked around the room for something to cut it, then remembered something in his own jacket. He withdrew a pocketknife. A pearl-handled pocketknife.

  “This is overkill maybe, but it oughtta—what’s wrong?” Miguel said.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  He grinned. “It was sticking out of the door frame when I snuck into the hotel room. Banged my head on it. The tip is broken off, but other than that it’s in good shape.”

  He sliced through the band.

  “Would you believe me if I tell you I have the tip? Back in Austin?”

  “I’m sure I’d believe anything about now.”

  She swung her feet off the bed and rose slowly.

  “This might require a little more stealth than our last breakout,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  He threw two one-hundred dollar bills onto the bed, then held out his hand to her. She didn’t take it. She didn’t dare.

  28

  Miguel Lopez drove an old beater Jeep that Shauna thought might be older than she was.

  “Nineteen seventy-four,” Miguel confirmed when she asked.

  They drove back toward Austin as the sun broke Wednesday’s horizon, all the scenery in her mind rather than on the road. The highway of her brain was littered with questions, and she didn’t know which to ask first.

  What was the huge secret Miguel had tried to expose?

  Where should they go?

  What should they do next?

  Miguel started the conversation for her by answering a question that she had abandoned eons ago. “I was in the car with you that night.”

  Her breath caught in her throat and she turned to him.

  “That was what Corbin was trying to tell me.”

  “I don’t know what Corbin was going to tell you. He did a lot of things without caring whether I wanted him to. He found me a couple weeks after the accident—I’m still not quite sure how. He was a better bloodhound than I, truth be known. What happened to him . . .”

  Dashed white lines reflected the Jeep’s headlights rhythmically.

  “Shouldn’t have happened to anyone,” Shauna whispered.

  “He did what I couldn’t. He kept a close eye on you.”

  “Through Khai,” Shauna thought aloud.

  “The housekeeper? Yes, she might have helped. He thought that I shouldn’t take Wilde seriously, that once you were well again and safe, we could go pick up the story again, see it through, go public with the whole nine yards.”

  He fell silent for a quarter mile.

  “But you doubted that.”

  “It was what I didn’t doubt, Shauna. I had no doubt Spade would kill you if he had to.”

  “You ever threaten Wayne with a gun?”

  “He tell you that?”

  Shauna was noncommittal.

  “I did. I went back home once before going to Victoria, to get a few things I needed. He was there, ransacking the place. I sent him on his way.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Until now. Other than disappearing, I didn’t know how to guarantee your safety. Really”—for a split second he lifted both hands off the steering wheel in a shrug—“I still don’t.”

  He rubbed his beard again and looked out the window. His silence was loaded with far more than regrets over an abandoned exposé.

  “It’s drugs. The reason I can’t remember. Experimental drugs.” She fiddled with the armrest on the door.

  She guessed Miguel also pondered the ramifications of that over the next mile that lapsed in silence.

  “I’m a clean slate now,” she finally said.

  He half smiled.

  “Wayne didn’t recognize Corbin when he confronted me outside the courthouse.”

  “I doubt their paths crossed before then. I don’t think Wayne was ever on the campaign trail.”

  “How important was the story we had?” she asked.

  “Not as important as you. I couldn’t have predicted what would happen . . .” Miguel shifted lanes to pass a slow car.

  “What was the story, exactly? I’m guessing it has something to do with my father’s campaign. Dirty money? Finance law violations? Illegally bundled contributions?”

  “Almost. Money laundering. MMV was moving funds into your father’s campaign without a clear paper trail.”

  “How much?”

  “Nearly forty million, last count.”

  “Forty!” Shauna angled her body toward Miguel, trying to piece together what information she could drag up from the distant past. “That’s how much he’s contributed from his own pockets.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You think it’s not his money?”

  “We thought it was not his money. Not technically.”

  “Why? Landon’s worth more than ten times that much.”

  “His worth is wrapped up in assets, not cash.”

  “Well, MMV had a record-breaking year last year.”

  “They’ve broken records for seven consecutive years, in fact.”

  “There you go then.”

  “What could explain that besides good luck, considering the state of the economy and the public records of other corporations like MMV? Not one in the field has had similar growth in the same time frame. Like I said, I don’t subscribe to luck.”

  Shauna sighed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. She probably looked terrible.

  “So you started covering Landon’s campaign—when?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “And you got suspicious? Did some number crunching?”

  “You did the number crunching. Forty million made a lot of people suspicious. It’s over-the-top. Most candidates aren’t even able to raise that much. Jeffrey Billings is worth more than three hundred, and even he only contributed four and half million to his own campaign.”

  “Was the story scheduled to run?”

  “No! We hadn’t gotten that far—for all we knew the money was legit.”

  “But you don’t believe that now.”

  “I didn’t ever believe it. But we never proved it, either.”

  She faced the dashboard and leaned back into her seat.

  “Okay. Let’s back up a little bit. How did we meet?”

  Miguel cleared his throat. “How much do you want to know?”

  “You’ll have to start with the bones. I’m already o
n information overload.

  These past twenty-four hours have been . . .” She didn’t have words.

  “Campaign stop in Houston. May this year. McAllister brought the family out for a public appearance. Not something you typically did. But Rudy really wanted you there. Talked you into it.”

  “I’d do anything for him.”

  “He didn’t deserve what happened to him either.”

  Tears sprang to Shauna’s eyes. She swallowed. Miguel noticed and squeezed her shoulder. Shauna put her defenses up quickly, to prevent herself from opening a channel to his memories.

  She said, “So we met, and . . . ?” She moved out from under his touch.

  “And you were captivated by my wit and charm, and I was captivated by the fact that you worked for the CPA who audited MMV’s books.”

  She chuckled. “I never would have disclosed that to you, Prince Charming.”

  “You didn’t. I knew the firm. You only told me you worked there. I talked you into the rest.”

  “No you didn’t. Landon and I have our issues, but I wouldn’t have betrayed him like that.”

  “You did it to prove me wrong, Shauna.” She looked at him. Well. Yeah. She might have done that. “You love the truth, you know.”

  The first rays of light broke the horizon on Shauna’s side of the car. “So, what convinced me that you were right?”

  “The facts convinced you: A profit-sharing structure that shifted the quarter immediately preceding MMV’s first profit spike. Exponential profits in certain MMV subsidiaries—eight, to be precise—rather than across all nineteen. International subsidiaries that looked more like shell companies than legitimate businesses.”

  Shauna blew her mussed-up bangs off her forehead. “That’s all?”

  “The shift in profit-sharing reduced employees’ takes to a stunted rate that was much slower than the actual growth. In theory, the executive officers took the balance, but in reality, the sum total was tipped into McAllister’s coffers. And not one of them objected.”

  “That kind of thing is hard to hide.”

  “Not when everyone is in on it. They’re being compensated some other way.”

  “What did we learn about the subsidiaries?”

  “That they’re nearly phantoms. We got far enough in investigating one of them to find a residential address. That’s it.”