Mercenary's Woman (18 page)

134

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

135

Sally paused in the
doorway of the living room with her
eyes wide as she saw the damage Jessica had
inflicted with
her missiles.

"Good Lord!" she exclaimed.

Jess grimaced.
"Well, he provoked me," she muttered.
"He said that I'd gotten lazy in
my old age, just lying
around
the house like a garden slug. I do not lie around
like a garden slug!"

"No, of course
you don't," Sally said, placating her
while she bent to pick up pieces of broken pottery and
various other objects from the floor.

"Besides, what
does he expect me to do without my
eyesight, drive the car?"

Sally was trying not
to smile. She'd never seen her aunt
in such a tizzy before.

"He actually
accused me of insanity because I won't
give up the name to Lopez," she added
harshly. "He said
that a good mother wouldn't have withheld a name and
put her child in
danger. That's when I threw the flowerpot,
dear. I'm sorry. I do hope it hit him."

Sally made a clucking
sound. "You're not yourself,
Jess."

"Yes, I am! I'm the result of all his
sarcasm! He can't
find one thing about me
that he likes anymore. Everything
I
do and say is wrong!"

"He doesn't seem like a bad man," Sally ventured.

"I didn't say he
was bad, I said he was obnoxious and
condescending and conceited." She
pushed back a strand
of hair. "He was laughing the whole time."

Which surely made
things worse, Sally mused silently.
"I expect it was wails of pain,
Jess."

"You couldn't hurt him," she
scoffed. "You'd have to
stick a bomb up
his shirt."

"Drastic surely?"

Jess sighed and
leaned back in the chair, looking
drained. "I hate arguments. He seems to
thrive on them."
She hesitated. "He taught Stevie how to braid a
rope,"
she added unexpectedly.

"That's odd. I thought Stevie wanted to beat him up."

"They had a talk outside the room. I
don't know what
was said," Jess
confessed. "But when they came back in
here, Dallas had several lengths of rawhide and he taught Stevie how to
braid them. He was having the time of his
life."

"Then what?"

"Then,"
she said, her lips compressing briefly, "he just
happened to mention
that I could have taught him how to
braid rope and a lot of other things if I'd
exert myself occasionally instead of vegetating in front of a television
that I can't see
anyway."

"I see."

"Pity I ran out
of things to throw," she muttered. "I
was reaching for the lamp when he
called a draw and said
he was going to sit on the front porch. Then Stevie
decided
to go to bed."
She gripped the arms of her chair hard
"Everybody
ran for cover. You'd think I was a Chinese
rocket or something."

"In a temper,
there is something of a comparison,"
Sally chuckled.

The older woman drew
in a long breath. "Anyway, how
was your date?"

"Not bad. We ran into his ex-fiancee at the restaurant"

"Maggie?" Jess asked, wide-eyed. "How is she?"

"She's very
pretty and still crazy about Eb, from all
indications. I think she'd have followed us
home if her
dark and handsome escort hadn't half dragged her away."

"Cord was there?"

"You know him?" Sally asked curiously.

136

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

Jess nodded. "He
was a handsome devil. I had a yen
for him once myself, but he married Patricia
instead. She
was a little Dresden china doll, blonde and absolutely gor
geous. She worshipped
Cord. They'd only been married a
few months when he was involved in a
shoot-out with a
narcotics
dealer. She couldn't take it. When Cord came
home
from the hospital, she was several days dead, with
a suicide note
clutched in her fingers. He found her. He
was
like a madman after that, looking for every dangerous
job he could find. I don't suppose he's over her
yet. He
loved her desperately."

"Eb says he works with Micah Steele."

"He does, and
there's a real coincidence. Micah also
has a stepsister, Callie. You know her, she
works in Mr.
Kemp's law office."

"Yes. We went
to school together. But Micah doesn't
have anything to do with her or his father
since his father divorced Callie's mother. They say," she murmured,
"that old Mr. Steele caught Micah with his new wife in a very
compromising
position and tossed them both out on their
ears."

"That's the
obvious story," Jessie said dryly. "But there's more to it than
that."

"How does Callie
feel about Micah's work, do you
think?"

"The way any
woman would feel," Jessie replied
gently. "Afraid."

Sally knew that Jess
was talking about Dallas, and how
she'd regarded his work as a soldier of
fortune. She stared at the darkened window, wondering how she'd feel under the
same circumstances. At least Eb wasn't involved in
demolition work or
actively working as a mercenary. She
knew that she could adjust to Eb's
lifestyle. But the trick
was going to be convincing Eb that she could—and that he
needed her, as much as she needed him.

Chapter Nine

Sally found herself jumping at every
odd noise all day
Saturday.
Jessica could feel the tension that she couldn't
see.

"You have to
trust Eb," she told her niece while Stevie
was watching cartoons in the living
room. "He knows what he's doing. Lopez won't succeed."

Sally grimaced over her second cup of
coffee. Across
the kitchen table from her,
Jess looked serene. She wished
she could feel the same way.

"I'm not worried
about us," she pointed out. "It's
Stevie..."

"Dallas won't
let anything happen to Stevie," came the
quiet reply.

Sally smiled,
remembering the broken objects in the liv
ing room the night before. She drew a lazy circle around
the lip of her coffee cup while she searched for
the right
words. "At least, the
two of you are speaking."

"Yes.
Barely," her aunt acknowledged wryly. "But
Stevie likes him now.
They started comparing statistics on

138
                            
MERCENARY'S WOMAN

wrestlers. They both like wrestling,
you see. Dallas knows
all sorts of holds. He wrestled on his college
team."

"Wrestling!" Sally chuckled.

"Apparently
there's a lot more to the professional
matches than just acting ability,"
Jessica said dryly. "I'm
finding it rather interesting, even if I can't see what
they're
doing.
They explained the holds to me."

"Common threads," Sally murmured.

"And one stitch
at a time. What did you think of Cord
Romero?"

"He's the
strangest ex-schoolteacher I've ever met,"
Sally said flatly.

"He was never
cut out for that line of work," Jessica
said, sipping black coffee. "But
demolition work isn't
much of a profession, either. Pity. He'll be two lines of
type on
the obituary page one day, and it's such a waste."

"Eb says Maggie's running from him."

"Relentlessly," Jess said dryly.
"I always thought she
got engaged to Eb
just to shake Cord up, but it didn't work.
He doesn't see her."

"He's in the
same line of work Eb was," Sally pointed
out, "and Eb said that his job
was why she called off the
wedding."

"I think she
just came to her senses. If you love a man,
you don't have a lot to say about his
profession if it's a long-standing one. Cord's wife was never cut out for life
on the edge. Maggie, now, once had a serious run-in with
a couple of would-be
muggers. She had a big flashlight in her purse and she used it like a
mace." She laughed softly.
"They both had to have stitches before they went off to jail.
Cord laughed about it for weeks afterward. No, she
had the strength to marry Eb—she simply didn't love
him."

DIANA
PALMER

Sally traced the handle of her cup.
"Eb says he isn't
carrying a torch for
her."

"Why should he
be?" she asked. "She's a nice woman,
but he never really loved her. He
wanted stability and he
thought marriage would give it to him. As it turned out,
he found his
stability after a bloody firefight in Africa, and
it was right here in
Jacobsville."

"Do you think he'll ever marry?" she fished.

"When he's
ready," Jess replied. "But I don't think it
will be Maggie. Just
in case you wondered," she teased.

Sally pushed back a
wisp of hair from her eyes. "Jess,
do you know where your informant is now, the
one that
Lopez
wants you to name?"

She shook her head.
"We lost touch just after Lopez
was arrested. I understand that my informant
went back to
Mexico. I haven't tried to contact...the person."

"What if the informant betrays himself?"

"You're clutching at straws,
dear," Jessica said gently.
"That
isn't going to happen. And I'm not giving a witness
up to the executioner in cold blood even to save
myself
and my family."

Sally smiled.
"No. I know you wouldn't. I wouldn't,
either. But it's scary to be in this
situation."

"It is. But it will
be over one day, and we'll get back
to normal. Whatever happens, happens."
Jess reminded
her niece,
"It's like that old saying, when your time's up,
it's up. We may not know what we're doing, but God
always does. And He doesn't have tunnel
vision."

"Point taken. I'll try to stop worrying."

"You should. Eb
is one of the best in the world at what he does. Lopez knows it, too. He won't
rush in headfirst,
despite his threat."

"What if he has
a missile launcher?" Sally asked with
sudden fear.

MERCENARY'S
WOMAN

Miles away in a
communications hot room, a man with
green eyes nodded his head and shot an order
to a subor
dinate. It
wouldn't hurt one bit to check out the intelli
gence for that possibility. Sally might be nervous, but she had good
instincts. And a guardian angel in cowboy boots.

Manuel Lopez was a
small man with big ambition. He
was nearing forty, balding, cynical and
mercenary to the
soles of his feet. He stared out the top floor picture window
of his four-story
mansion at the Gulf of Mexico and
cursed. One of his subordinates, shifting
nervously from
one foot to the other, had just brought him some unwel
come news and he was livid.

"There are only a handful of
men," the subordinate said in quiet Spanish. "Not a problem if we
send a large force
against them."

Lopez turned and glared at the man
from yellow-brown
eyes. "Yes, and if we send a large force, the FBI and the
DEA will also send a
large force!"

"It would be too late by
then," the man replied with a
shrug.

"I have enough federal problems
in the United States
as it is," Lopez growled. "I do not anticipate
giving them
an even better reason to send an undercover unit after me
here! Scott has
influence with his government. I want the name of the informant, not to wade in
and kill the woman
and her protectors."

The other man stared at the spotless
white carpet. "She
will never give up the name of her informant," he
said
simply.
"Not even for the sake of her child."

Lopez turned fully to look at the
man. "Because now it
is only words, the threat. We must make it very real,
you
understand?
At midnight tonight in Jacobsville, precisely at midnight, you will have a
helicopter fly over the house

DIANA PALMER

and drop a smoke bomb. A big one." His eyes narrowed
and he smiled. "This will be the attack they
anticipate. But not the real one, you understand?''

"They will
probably have missiles," the man said qui
etly.

"And they are
far too soft to use them," came the sneer
ing reply. "This is why we will
ultimately win. I have no
scruples. Now, listen. I will want a man to remove one of
the
elementary school janitors. He can be drugged or
threatened, I have no interest in the method, just get him
out of the way for one day. Then you will have one
of our
men take his place. The
substitute must know what the
child
looks like and which class he is in. He is to be taken very covertly, so that
nothing out of the way is projected
until
it is too late and we have him. You understand?"

"Yes," the
man replied respectfully. "Where is he to be held?"

Lopez smiled coldly.
"At the rental house near the
Johnson home," he said. "Will that
not be an irony to end
all ironies?" His eyes darkened. "But he is not
to be
harmed.
That must be made very clear," he added in tones
that chilled. "You remember what
happened to the man who went against my orders and set fire to my enemy's
house in Wyoming without waiting for the man to be
alone, and a five-year-old boy was
killed?''

The other
man swallowed and nodded quickly.

"If one hair on
this boy's head is harmed," he added,
"I will see to it that the man
responsible fares even worse
than his predecessor. I am a violent man, but I do not
kill
children.
It is, perhaps, my only virtue." He waved his
hand. "Let me know when my orders
have been carried
out."

"Yes. At once."

He watched the man go and his odd yellow-brown eyes