Now You See It (15 page)

“We should try to get a couple hours’ sleep,” he said as she stepped through the door. “I’ll take the couch, just in case.”

Disappointment slapped at her. She wanted his arms around her again, wanted the warmth—okay, the heat. Probably not the best idea, all things considered, she conceded as she lay down and pulled up the light fleece blanket.

Chapter Twelve

Brady had probably done his best with the clothes.
Gemma pinned up the shorts he’d lent her and tucked in six inches of T-shirt
with still enough to blouse over her makeshift tailoring job at the waistband.
She borrowed his comb to unsnarl her hair and plaited it into a quick French
braid.

Shoes were a problem, but Brady rummaged in a trunk and came up
with a pair of old moccasins. They were stiff with age, and worn nearly through
in spots. The seams had been re-sewn here and there, but the beadwork on the
front was a twining of stems and flowers that still somehow managed to be
totally masculine.

Gemma turned them over, admiring the exquisite beads that
reflected sparkles of light from tiny cut surfaces. “These are lovely.”

Dark hair had fallen forward over his forehead as he dug
through the footlocker. He looked up to answer her, and his eyes looked soft for
an instant, as if he were focused in the far distance. “One of my aunts made
them for me when I was a kid, for when I grew up. She didn’t know how big I was
going to get.” His smile was wistful, and something twisted in Gemma’s chest.
She put out a hand to touch him, but he had pulled back from whatever he was
seeing, whatever he’d been feeling, into the brisker present. The moment
passed.

“Get your shoes on, Lucy,” he said with a half-smile.

She blinked.

“We definitely have to work on your education, my girl,” he
said, rocking back onto his heels. “You obviously aren’t versed in the arcana of
bluegrass.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use ‘bluegrass’ and
‘arcana’ in the same sentence,” she said.

Brady grinned. “Here’s your first lesson.
‘Git your shoes on, Lucy, you’re a big girl, now,’
” he sang in a
twangy baritone.

Laughter bubbled out before she could stop it. “Oh, no! You’re
one of those!”

He tipped his head and raised an eyebrow, but she saw a slight
defensive tightening.

“Mike knows about every silly song ever written,” she said,
pretending she hadn’t noticed. “No matter what the occasion, he can come up with
something about Jesse James or Moses’s feet.”

Brady’s face relaxed. “Yeah, but he doesn’t know the good
stuff.”

“Good stuff? Like Lucy’s shoes?”

“Oh, yew pore thang, yew have so much to learn,” he
pontificated as he shooed her gently out of the way.

He opened a floor safe and took out more money than Gemma had
ever seen in one place before, singing,
“...he robbed the
Glendale train...”
From another cache in the bedroom wall, he took
two automatic pistols, extra magazines and a box of hollow-point ammunition, and
several disposable cell phones. He started putting it all into a half-filled
backpack. He wasn’t singing any more.

“You shoot?” he asked. His expression was polite, as if he were
just asking her as a matter of courtesy.

“Sure. The H&K nine millimeter will do for me,” she said in
her best Catholic-schoolgirl voice, and laughed at his expression. She picked
the pistol up from the top of the pile and worked the slide with a comfortable
familiarity. “My dad was a Navy cop, remember? Mike and I both learned to shoot
as soon as we could hold a target .22. I was a pretty good shot, once upon a
time. It’s been awhile, but it won’t take long to get it back.”

Brady stared at her, and a bubble of laughter lifted her
ribcage.
Gotcha!

* * *

Gemma pulled her plate out of the shaft of sunlight that
spread through the windows of the Breakfast Boutique. As far as she could tell,
the small, retro establishment off Pine Street was populated entirely by locals.
She and Brady seemed to be the only people there who weren’t on a first-name
basis with the server. She swallowed another bite of her omelet. The golden
crust was nearly bursting with spinach and sautéed mushrooms and creamy sauce.
She couldn’t remember ever tasting anything more scrumptious. “This is really
good. How did you ever find this place?”

“A friend brought me.”

A surprising little stab of jealousy immediately had her trying
to picture the sort of woman Brady would have breakfast with.

“He won’t be here for a few minutes yet, so don’t rush. Mike
told you something about my background?”

“A little.” She nodded, aware of the people seated all around
them. “You used to be in the Navy, and you do computer security work now with
your own company.”

“Between those two shots, I did some work in Southeast Asia. I
was a sort of...liaison between agencies of their governments and ours.”

Gemma nodded again. The little hesitation had said volumes.
“That ties in with what Mike said. That’s the cop part, right?”

He grinned. “Part of it, anyway.”

She lowered her gaze and sat back against the solid frame of
the chair. “What are we doing here, Brady?”

“Waiting.”

“No, I mean why are we here? Why are we running?”

He took a sip of coffee. “Because somebody has murdered two
people who were involved with Ned, and because last night somebody tossed a
couple of Molotovs into the house you’d just moved into, and you, I and the dog
were within a minute of becoming three, four and four-and-a half.”

“Mike—”

Brady shook his head. “Mike’s was the next logical target. But
nothing happened there.”

“Thank God.”

“Agreed. But that means whoever it was knew where you’d gone.
Followed you, maybe. But you didn’t die the way you were supposed to. That means
you’re still their focus. It’s not random, and it’s not blind lashing out. So we
need to get you out of sight until we can get some kind of handle on what’s
happening.”

The door opened with a little chiming of brass bells, and a
slender Asian man in his late thirties scanned the room professionally as he
came straight toward their table. Brady nodded at him, and he took a seat facing
the window.

“Gemma Cavanagh, Tran Nguyen,” Brady said. He nodded briefly at
Tran and turned back to Gemma. “Tran used to work with me. He knows a lot more
people than I do in this area, and he may have some idea what happened to
Ned.”

Tran gave a jerky little nod. “What can I do, Brady?” He leaned
back in his chair and lifted his hand in a two-finger wave, and the server
brought him a cup and set a pot of fresh coffee on the table.

When they were alone again, Brady said, “You know about the guy
they found in the cabin.”

“Yeah,” Tran said. “The whole thing sounds off, Brady. For one
thing, the women in the photos—the ones anyone would identify, at any rate, were
professionals, and are still alive. The cops have interviewed a few of them, but
they’re not very talkative.” His smile was sour. “Most have disappeared,
probably because they were illegal and can’t afford to get involved with the
police. So, I don’t buy a revenge scenario. From what I heard, they—”

“Let’s not do that,” Brady interrupted with a quick look at
Gemma.

Tran’s eyes followed his. “She’s a relative?”

“His wife.”

Gemma was beginning to feel invisible, but the little
interchange reminded her of Ned, “cut to pieces,” and her stomach flipped. The
mushroom-and-spinach omelet that had been so delicious a few minutes ago
hardened into a sodden lump halfway to her throat, and she swallowed several
times to keep it down.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Tran said blandly and turned back to
Brady. “I’ve got some feelers out, like you asked, and a couple of leads.
Nothing solid, yet. Give me a day.”

Gemma had the strong impression of something left unsaid and
wondered what he was holding back.

“Appreciate it,” Brady said. “We’re going to be out of touch
until then. I need you to call Mike Cavanagh,” he repeated Mike’s office and
home numbers and Tran nodded, but didn’t write anything down. “Tell him ‘06 dot
11 Go Navy.’ And I need a car.”

Tran nodded again and handed Brady the keys from his pocket.
“Green Civic three spaces left. My place, fourteen-hundred tomorrow.”

Gemma watched as the two men gripped hands, and Tran walked
into the growing morning to the sound of little brass bells.

“You speak Vietnamese?” she asked.

“That’s debatable.” He grinned. “I doubt Tran thinks so. Do
you?”

She shook her head. “He has a Vietnamese name.”

“Ready? We need to move.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a good hotel, where we can get some rest.”

* * *

“Remind me never to believe a thing you say,” Gemma said
as she hammered a yellow plastic tent peg into the soft earth.

“Not in public, anyway,” Brady answered, watching her. A
confusing woman. Full of surprising facets he realized he was hungry to explore.
In the past week, he’d seen her terrified, furious, humiliated, numb with grief,
raging with temper and blind with passion. Now here she was setting up camp and
organizing supplies like a seasoned outdoorsman—
outdoors-person
, he amended. No complaints, no whining, no grousing
about broken nails or lack of a hair dryer. He’d given himself some stern
admonitions about being careful, keeping a professional distance, but he knew it
was already too late. Besides, no matter how bad the timing might be, he wasn’t
about to let someone so right for him slip away. He cleared his throat and
pretended it was only from the dust. “You know your way around a campsite.”

The choice sites along the riverbanks on either side of the
campground were occupied in spite of the severe drought conditions, but Brady
and Gemma had found an idyllic clearing near the center, ringed with pine and
vine maple that cast deep shade over their tent and the picnic table in the heat
of the day.

“I love camping,” Gemma said. “We used to camp all the time
when we were kids, until Dad died. By then Mike and I were in college, and we
just never seemed to be able to put it together. I think I could stay outdoors
forever. It’s too bad there’s no way to bring the outside into a house,” she
added as she tightened the tension on a guy line.

They’d used some of the cash at a Kmart in Renton, where she
left him to pick out camping gear and a couple of changes of clothes while she
filled half a basket with food and essentials such as toothpaste and toilet
paper, a first-aid kit, water and batteries and ketchup.

On the way toward I-90 Brady filled the tank and got a map at a
Citgo station.

“It’s ten cents cheaper at the AM-PM across the street,” she
said.

“Maybe. My contribution to the peace effort. The refineries
that supply these guys don’t use Middle Eastern oil. Not so much, anyway.” He
popped the top on a diet cola, handed it to her, and started the car.

She had asked no questions as they drove out I-90 into the
Cascades, until he asked her to pick a number from one to seven. “Three,” she
said.

“Okay. Third exit to the left.” They’d repeated the exercise
twice more, and ended at a campground north of Roslyn called “Salmon la Sac,”
which he informed her meant something like “Salmon the bag” in ungrammatical
French.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she protested.

“Hey, don’t tell me. Besides, why does it have to? Nothing else
has so far.”

* * *

Gemma watched Brady settle into a comfortable-looking
position on the ground with his back against a large pine log. He opened an
energy drink, took a long sip and set the can in the dust beside him, twisting
it back and forth as if he were clearing a hole under it. He smelled like musk
and moss and sandalwood and warm male skin.

“Okay,” he said, staring out into the trees. Laughter floated
across the campground from an RV parked at a site near the water. He
relaxed.

“There was a doe here a little while ago,” Gemma said. “She
just picked her way into the clearing, so graceful. So alert. She poked around
for a few minutes and then some kids came by and she bounded off.” She focused
and smiled at him. “It’s peaceful here.”

One side of his mouth quirked up. “Seems to be.” He shifted his
shoulders slightly against the log. “Do you still have the map?”

She pulled it out of the big half purse, half backpack she had
scored at K-Mart and handed it across to him. Gemma smiled at the distinctive
noises of the road map crackling as Brady spread it on the ground, then brushed
it with the side of his hand to flatten it still more. He took a cell phone and
steadied the GPS against the log, stared at it a few seconds, and turned off the
phone.

“You still have your cell phone?” she asked, surprised. She was
missing hers badly. She pictured it as a melted lump in the ashes of the
mushroom house. She’d never bothered to memorize most of the numbers once they
were programmed into her phone, so they were gone, too. She wasn’t even sure she
knew Mike’s number off the top of her head. He had been at Speed Dial #3 as far
back as she could remember.

“Yeah. It was still in my pocket. Can you reach the
backpack?”