High Tide (35 page)

But whatever Suzie was, wherever she had been, she had certainly come out the hero in the end. Through her underworld connections she had found out where Ace and Fiona were hiding and had sent them the message that said they'd find what they needed at the Blue Orchid. Neither Ace nor Fiona had asked her where she'd obtained the passports with the fake names.

After Suzie had clobbered Kurt with Lisa's backpack, Ace had wasted no time wrapping a belt around Kurt's hands and making him immobile. He was no more tied than Lisa
came pounding down the stairs demanding the return of her pack.

Ace looked up from over Kurt's unconscious body and said, “How did you find us?”

“Him,” Lisa said with distaste as she pointed at Gibby.

“Stole your map,” Gibby said cheerfully. “I figured you'd know where you were headed and wouldn't realize it was missin'.”

“I didn't,” Ace said.

It was Jeremy who was awestruck by the lions; he couldn't take his hands off them. “It seems such a shame to put them in a museum,” he whispered as he caressed one of the four emerald eyes.

“We could always melt them down and split the money,” Ace said loudly; then when Jeremy's face lit up, Ace gave a snort of derision.

As for Fiona, she turned her back on Jeremy without regret.

Two hours later Ace's cousin, Frank Taggert, had a helicopter there and took the lot of them out of the swamp. And later Frank turned an army of investigators loose on finding out the facts of what Kurt had done.

Kurt hadn't bothered to cover up his own trail because he thought that he was safe in his anonymity, so there were hotel records, phone records, and eyewitness accounts. Several people had seen Kurt with Roy Hudson, and most of the patrons of a seaside restaurant had seen Kurt and Eric together the night Roy had been killed. “But I didn't think anything about it because the papers said that those two had killed him,” was the reply all the people gave.

By the next morning, when Ace and Fiona faced the police and the press, they were followed by six lawyers armed with enough paper to flood the courtroom. And just to make sure that the judge understood what the three murders had
really
been about, Frank had one of the lions crated, moved, then reopened before the judge.

In the end, “false arrest” was the verdict and Ace and Fiona were free to go.

Of course Frank was being sued by three conservationist groups who said he'd violated “archaeological standards” or some such when he'd removed the lions from their “original” resting place. Frank hired some museum curators to tell how old the lions were and attest that they were originally from China.

The last Fiona heard was that the Chinese government was about to sue for the return of the lions or for billionaire Frank Taggert to pay for them. But Frank said not to worry, that the courts would take so long to decide who owned the lions that …

“We'll all be long dead,” Ace said.

But Fiona was happy with the results of everything. In Suzie, she now had a blood relative, and she would soon have an enormous family by marriage. And the wedding had better be very soon because there was already a baby growing inside her. But, from the looks of the size of the families, no one was going to be shocked at her having a baby just seven or eight months after the wedding.

“Happy?” Ace asked, coming to stand beside her and slipping his arm around her waist.

“Very. But …”

“But what?” he asked, a small frown betraying his concern.

“I'd like to go home,” she said softly.

“Oh.” His voice was flat. “Your apartment. Did the rent ever get paid on it? I thought Frank—”

She put her fingertip to his lips. “Home to Florida.”

Ace couldn't have looked more shocked. “You hate the place. You hate the heat and the swamps and the—”

“I know that you want to make it on your own and you don't want to use your inherited money but do you think we could bulldoze that cabin of yours and build something like our house at the Blue Orchid? Something with air-conditioning and a swimming pool? And”—she hesitated, then lowered her voice—“and a nursery.”

Ace looked away for a moment. They were surrounded by people, but at that moment they were alone on the planet. He looked back at her. “Yeah, I think I can do that. You … have any idea when the nursery should be finished?”

“In about seven and a half months, I think.”

He didn't say anything as, again, he looked away from her, but she could see the big vein in his neck pounding.

“ ‘Heron' if he's a boy and ‘Ibis' if she's a girl,” he said at last.

“I was thinking more ‘Spoonbill' and ‘Gnatcatcher.' But only if they're twins,” she shot back at him.

At that Ace laughed so loudly that the whole room stopped and looked at him. But he just smiled, his fingers entwined around Fiona's.