Heart of the Hunter (5 page)

An unconscious need made her look up, into the face that had changed so much, and yet so little. There were strands of silver in his golden hair, and crinkles around his eyes. But their color was still so like the sea he loved, the dark, rich gray, when the surf would fly.

His skin was weathered, with the look of a sailor's tan. His mouth was...

She wouldn't let herself be fascinated by his mouth.

Taking a step back, she gained the space she needed desperately. To breathe. To gather her scattered wits. To calm her jangled nerves. A shaking hand clenched at her side as she struggled for the dignity to play the gracious hostess. Slowly, one long breath at a time, she found the grace. “I believe I would like a glass of wine, to celebrate an unbroken window.” Her smile was genial, a little mischievous, and only she knew it was complete bravado. “Would you join me?”

He wanted to reach for her, to clasp her wrists and bring her back to him, but he dared not. It was too soon, and something had disturbed her. Just when she'd begun to relax, a strange look flickered in her eyes, her wonderful changeable eyes, and she had drawn away.

She wasn't going to be easy. But nothing about Nicole had ever been.

Jeb flexed a tired shoulder, and only then realized how tense he was. Tony Callison was nowhere around, and still he was as taut and grim as death. Was it any wonder she was disturbed? “I'd like very much to join you, Nicole.” He returned her smile ruefully. “Maybe a glass of wine is what we both need.”

She showed him to a small table that looked out at the courtyard, before folding back the screen that concealed a minuscule kitchen alcove. With nervous moves she collected a decanter and slender goblets, setting them on a tray with a plate of benne seed wafers. The day had been a roller coaster, with one sensation after another tearing at her. When she sat across from him, sipping wine the taste and color of peaches, she was still skittish. Vulnerable.

Vulnerable enough to make thoughtless mistakes, to tell the truth when she meant to lie.

“So tell me, why were you so surprised to see me today?” Jeb turned his glass on the table, his fingers spinning the delicate stem as he watched the undulations of the rosy liquid against crystal. Lifting his head, he met her gaze. “Didn't you know I would come?”

Rain drummed on the roof and dripped from the eaves. Blooms flanking the garden wall bowed drenched heads to the ground. Lightning flashed, turning the courtyard neon bright, and the low lament of thunder faded before she answered. “I wasn't sure you would want to, not when you had time for second thoughts.”

“Why wouldn't I?” Jeb took her glass from her, folding her hand into his.

“Have you forgotten what an awful pest I was? You could hardly turn around without tripping over me.”

“Was that you?” Jeb grimaced in mock surprise. “I thought it was my shadow.”

“Sure, with wild, shaggy hair, and glasses perched eternally on the end of her nose.
Its
nose.”

Jeb reached across the table to slide a finger beneath a lock of her hair, tucking it behind her ear as he'd seen her do. He remembered when he used to ruffle it to a tousled mass. Now it was sleek, smooth, silky to his touch. “Nothing this beautiful could ever have been ugly.”

“I refuse to show you the photographs that would prove you wrong.”

Ignoring her disclaimer, he tapped her nose. “I have to admit I never knew what a shame it was to hide this under those heavy glasses. And your eyes? You can't expect me to believe I'm the first man to tell you how wonderful they are.”

“Contacts.”

“No, Nicky, not the contacts. Your eyes. You.”

Nicole muttered a derisive non sequitur and tried to take back her hand. He refused, holding her fast as he leaned back in his chair, looking at her as a man would look at a beautiful woman. As she'd always wanted him to look at her.

His thumb stroked the rushing pulse at her wrist. There was tenderness in his eyes, and in his smile.

“Friends?” he asked softly.

The rain slowed, then stopped. It was so quiet she could almost believe there was only this. A quiet little world, no fears, no demons. One woman. One man.

Jeb.

Over their linked fingers she smiled back at him, her eyes never leaving his. As softly as he, she murmured, “Yes.”

Then she laughed, a happy sound. Perhaps it was because he called her Nicky. Or the outrageous compliments. Or that he'd been kind.

Or even that for no reason at all, she simply wanted to laugh.

L
ive oaks whispered in the wind. Somewhere across the bay a halyard rapped against an aluminum mast. Ships creaked with the tide, straining against their mooring. The marina had bedded down, the most dedicated reveler long in his bunk. Beneath the familiar clatter a profound stillness gathered in the hours that belonged to the night.

Jeb sat in the darkness, head back, eyes closed, listening to the distant crash of the surf. Below deck Mitch Ryan groused softly to himself as he finished an unexpected chore.

He would have helped with the chore, even welcomed mind-numbing labor. But Mitch had cast an appraising look over him, then said no. And Jeb was left to his thoughts.

Damnable thoughts he couldn't escape.

“Done!” Mitch stepped onto the deck, scrubbing his hands with a cloth reeking of oil. “Good as new.” Dragging a match over a brad on his jeans, he stared at its flaring, charring head then dropped it down the globe of a hurricane lamp. In a second he was sprawled in a chair with a groan that welcomed the easing of cramped muscles.

Neither of them spoke as fire hissed and coughed, flickered, then caught the wick in a spurt of yellow flame. The light was a feeble pinpoint beneath a lightless canopy, yet enough that Jeb saw fatigue etched on the younger man's haggard features. The utter weariness his nonchalance couldn't mask.

This little difficulty with the engine hadn't taken long. Not for Mitch. Never for Mitch, who knew engines—cars, boats, any sort—as well as he knew people. The problem was timing, that it had come at the close of a twenty hour day. Jeb suspected there had been and would be more such days.

“Have you slept?” he asked almost to himself, more thoughtful observation than question. “Do you ever sleep, Mitchell Ryan?”

Mitch looked up, his auburn hair stained by sweat. Eyes like sherry, strained and irritated by engine fumes, locked with gray. “Do you, Cap?” His question, as Jeb's, was little more than a thought spoken aloud. “Have you?”

Jeb settled deeper into his chair. After a while he sighed and shrugged. He hadn't slept. He wondered when he would again.

He'd returned from Charleston, then spent the evening searching through Nicole's dossier looking for something he might have missed. Anything that would explain her.

An hour past midnight Simon had called, and his last hope for sleep was gone. Tony Callison had killed again.

A little girl. Thirteen, pretty, quiet. A dedicated student, a long-distance runner training for varsity track. A child much loved, with a lot to live for. Julie, who was never late. Julie, the paradigm of dependability. Julie, too kindhearted to worry her disabled father. He reported her missing at eight o'clock in the evening, two hours after she should have returned from her daily run.

An hour later a local deputy found her.

Julie Brown was dead.

Word spread. Telephones rang. Julie Brown was news.

Before the avid eyes of the world, tragedy visited the rural midwestern community. Needless tragedy, savage, cruel, the likes of which it had never known. And, if God were kind, would never know again.

Thirteen! The number echoed in Jeb's mind. A knell of sadness for a life hardly begun, ended on a hot summer evening in a shriveling cornfield. A sweet child, tossed aside like a cast-off rag doll, with a cheap, gaudy sun-face medallion draped over a naked, pubescent breast.

The face of the sun. A celestial icon, once the cachet embraced by a close-knit band of surfers. Spoiled and arrogant college kids fancying themselves unique, the self-appointed sons of Apollo, wearing the medallion to prove it.

A symbol of self-centered indulgence and childish narcissism.

Jeb's lay tarnishing in some forgotten box in a dusty attic.

...when I became a man, I put away childish things.

But one had not. For Tony Callison this symbol of foolish young men had become a signature for murder.

“Hurts, doesn't it?”

“What?” Jeb jerked back from the black maw of memory.

Mitch glanced at Jeb's clenched hands. “To lose a friend.”

“I lost him a long time ago.”

“I know.” Mitch ignored the bitterness. “But for a while, he was more than just a friend. He was a good friend.”

Jeb hesitated, then agreed. “The best.” The admission rose out of regret.

“What was he like?”

The sloop rocked with the lazy undulations of the water, a rope scrubbed against a cleat, and Jeb pondered. How did he explain Tony? Could he?

He began with the truth, as he knew it. “Tony could have been any of us, yet, at the same time he was different, one of a kind. He was wild, funny, nearly as intelligent as his sister, and a charming rogue in the bargain. Whatever he did was always on a grander scale. He was the ‘baddest' boy, flirting with danger. Skirting the edge, closer than any of the rest of us dared, yet he was never beyond redemption. At least not until the last.

“He had the charisma bad boys do. Women and men were drawn to him. Young, old and in between, they loved him.” Jeb flexed his fingers, then closed them again into a fist. “I loved him. We were rivals and friends, and brothers. The sons of Apollo.”

A wry smile jerked his lips in a grim twist. “Sounds ludicrous now, but then, when we lived to surf and play, the one thing that was as important was our brotherhood.”

Mitch rumbled a wordless communion of empathy. The bond and trust of friendships were rare as he'd fought and clawed to survive the streets of the underbelly of New Orleans. But now he understood. The Watch had taught him. “You never saw anything?”

“To indicate what he really was?” Jeb looked down at the teakwood deck where shadows danced. “No.” With an abrupt shrug that conveyed an absolute contempt he amended, “Nothing that concerned me as much as it should have. I was too busy raising hell to be clever.”

“But there was something,” Mitch persisted. There had to be. Something to explain this self-directed guilt.

“Maybe. If you call a look or the lack of reaction something. Nicole nearly drowned trying to do something he goaded her into, and it didn't upset him. I don't think he cared at all. After that, when he didn't know anyone was looking, his eyes would go flat, totally empty. Then he would laugh.”

“As if he were putting you on. Fooling the world.”

“He was. But we all thought we were. There were six of us, surfers first, thrill-seekers second. Anything else dead last. What we did was stupid, and, for the most part, innocuous. But I suppose it was inevitable there would be trouble.”

“Drugs.”

“By the grace of God, not my great common sense, I was involved only by association.”

“The rest was by the grace of Simon,” Mitch interjected.

The grace of Simon. Jeb hadn't heard it put quite like that before. But as rough and gruff and unrelenting as Simon could be, the analogy described, perfectly, an element common to most of the stories of the men of The Black Watch.

“Tony and I were already drifting apart,” Jeb continued, and realized it was as much catharsis for himself as response to Mitch. “I can't give a specific reason. Yet, for the first time, I wasn't really sure of him. He was exonerated on the drug charge, but I wondered.”

A shrug pulled his denim shirt close over the muscles of his shoulders and chest. A gold bracelet flashed on his wrist as he tugged a button free. “Maybe it was just happening. The natural progression of finally growing up. Who can say? Whatever the reason, graduation and Simon delivered the coup de grace.”

Mitch chuckled, a sound at odds with the tone of their conversation. “I know the drill. He dragged you out of trouble by the scruff of your neck, damned you for a fool, slapped your wrist, then, before you knew it you were signed, sealed, recruited and committed.”

“Something like that.”

“Then The Watch became your life. No friends beyond its ranks. No lovers as important.” Mitch waved an arm toward shore. “Just this.”

He left Jeb to consider for himself the hours of work, the study, the subterfuge. A killer who had been a friend. An intriguing woman who might, or might not, be as innocent as she seemed.

Discovering there was no more to say, they sat in silence, each bound in his own thoughts of children and killers of children. Jeb knew rage seethed beneath Mitch's laconic comment. Someone had hurt a child—no, not someone, Tony had hurt a child. Another child.

Mitch would remember, and Tony wouldn't forget.

A trill of laughter rose from some faraway deck. The lantern gutted and died. Mitch stretched, yawned and rubbed his hand over his jaw. A gesture infinitely weary. Lurching to his feet, he yawned again. “I think I better get some shut-eye before I relieve the medicine man of his duty at the lady's house.”

The medicine man, Matthew Sky. With his phenomenal night vision, it was without fail a foregone assumption he would take the night watch. Matthew never complained and, like Mitch, slept little.

“You gonna hang around?”

Not for the first time since he'd arrived bearing the news of Julie Brown, and battling his own sleeplessness, Jeb saw the toll the long hours had taken on his friend and colleague. Sliding back his chair, he stood, as well. “I'm heading back to the house.”

“To get some sleep?”

“Maybe.”

Mitch was too tired to argue. Three men, four if Bishop were included, made for a wretchedly small unit, spreading the duties heavily among them. It was Simon's call. Callison was smart, as intuitive as a cat. One man too many would flag his suspicions, and they could lose him completely.

They weren't the first of The Black Watch to work, virtually, around-the-clock. They wouldn't be the last.

At the steps leading below deck and to his bunk, Mitch paused. “Cap?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever regretted it? What Simon did to your life, I mean.”

Jeb stroked his jaw, much as Mitch had. Two dedicated men, on the brink of exhaustion, facing truths. Perhaps for the first time. “Not often, and then not for long.”

Mitch's head jerked in assent, a crooked smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Neither have I, but don't tell the old fox. Wouldn't want him to be too cocky about it, would we?”

Jeb chuckled and waited. There was more.

“It wasn't insomnia that brought you to the
Gambler.
”

No admission met the statement. No denial.

“There were things you needed to resolve about the little girl and Nicole.”

Jeb's amusement vanished. “Some.”

“Water's like fire, it soothes the brain and clears the mind.”

“It does that.”

“You know he killed her. Julie Brown, I mean.”

“I know.”

“Damn his black heart! A child!” Mitch's voice was strangled. “He just picked her at random, in the most unlikely place.”

“A red herring.” The words were mild, the look on Jeb's face was not. “He's laying a false trail, to confuse and confound whoever might be looking for him.”

“Then you believe he's coming?”

“Now more than ever. The last contract, Jimmy Merino's son, shut the door to his usual contacts. Now both sides of the law want him. He has nowhere to turn but Nicole.”

“What happens if the lady's righteous?”

Righteous? Innocent? Was she? “If it turns out that way, we'll move heaven and earth to keep her safe.”

“If she's not?”

Jeb moved past Mitch, clapping a hand on his shoulder as he went. “You were going to get some shut-eye.”

“Jeb.” Not Cap, Jeb. A barometer of the depths of Mitch's disquiet. He waited until Jeb stepped on the dock to ask the question that concerned each of them in general, and Jeb specifically. “What happens if she knows what her brother is and means to help him?”

Jeb looked over the inlet, his gaze focused on a remote spot, facing what he'd known he must all along. When he turned back to Mitch his expression was stark. “Then I'll do whatever it takes.”

I,
not we. Jeb had assumed responsibility for the unthinkable.

The sound of his footsteps had faded from the boardwalk, and the roar of the roadster's engine was only a purr before Mitch made one last round to secure the sloop. Tonight marked a milestone for a man of conscience and honor. Jeb Tanner was senior agent, he would do what he must, no matter what it cost him. But it had been no secret from the first that he was deeply troubled by this assignment.

A troubled man made mistakes.

Tonight a last reservation had been put aside, and Mitch would rest easier for it.

Tonight Jeb Tanner had come to terms with himself.

* * *

“Good morning!”

At his greeting Nicole slowed her pace and stopped. She'd heard the steady thud of running footsteps behind her for some time and dismissed them. Joggers were rare on the beach at this early hour, but not unheard of. But Jeb was the last person she expected. “Jeb! What are you doing here?”

Bare, tanned chest heaving from his exertions, Jeb grinned and wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead with the band at his wrist. “I live here. I'm your neighbor, six houses removed, remember?”

“Of course I remember. Surely you don't think I'd forget such an astounding coincidence. I just didn't expect you here, on the beach, at this hour.” Jeb's visit to her house in Charleston had ended almost with the storm. In retrospect, she realized he spoke very little of himself beyond saying he'd done well in stocks, retired at thirty-seven, and lived on the island. He hadn't said why. “I can still hardly believe that after all these years we've both landed in this small corner of the world, on the same island.”

“A happy coincidence, I hope.”

“Certainly.”

“Good, that's settled. Now, do you mind if I walk with you?”

“What about your run?”

“I've had enough, believe me. In fact I was singularly grateful when I recognized you and would have an excuse to stop.”