The Bliss Factor (12 page)

“Well,” she said to Mr. Greenblatt, “I have to go.” She stuffed the entire contents of her two-drawer file cabinet into a box and hefted it. “Thank you.”

“Let me help you with that.”

“No! It’s not heavy. Really. And I’m sure you have other things to do.”

“Nothing impor—”

“Mr. Greenblatt!” One of the assistants stuck her head in the door, “You have a visitor. Mr. Putnam said to make sure you tell him the rates because he doesn’t look like he can afford our services.”

Greenblatt scurried out. How he’d made partner when he was so clearly scared of Putnam and Ibold was beyond Rae. Not that Putnam didn’t take pains to be intimidating. Hell, two days ago Putnam’s disapproval would have been absolutely mortifying. Now . . . What she wanted to do was shrug her shoulders.

She hitched the box up and walked out, running into Mr. Putnam in the hallway.

“Please check in at regular intervals,” he said to her.

“I will, Mr. Putnam.”

As she passed him, he gave a dry, disapproving little sniff. Rae stopped and looked back at him; he was doing the same, the expression on his face speculative at first, then warning.

She drew in a breath and let it out slowly, realizing she stood at a crossroads, and she couldn’t take the fork she always chose, the one marked CAUTION
.
And sure, it was because her parents had unintentionally put her in the position of jeopardizing her job, but she refused to feel guilty about it. She’d worked thousands of hours of overtime for this firm, and if they decided to fire her over one special request, she’d survive it. She’d struck out on her own at eighteen, no money, no friends, no safety net, and she’d managed to make a life for herself. She could do it again. If she had to.

RAE KEPT HER HEAD UP AND HER SPINE STIFF.
She didn’t look back until she was in the elevator and the doors had closed. Her last glimpse of Mr. Putnam had not been reassuring. By the time the elevator hit the garage level all her bravado had evaporated, and her heart was pounding.

She didn’t waste time wondering what the hell had gotten into her. It was a useless question because she knew exactly what had gotten into her. Connor Larkin, and not in a good way. She’d been with him—she consulted her watch—less than twenty hours, and she was willing to throw her job down the tubes? In this economy?

She was good and steamed by the time the Hummer came into sight—or rather hearing, since she caught the thump of the bass from the radio well before she turned the last corner. And found the passenger door open and Conn gone.

“Shit,” she said under her breath, “shit, shit, shit,” as she climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Hummer, and screeched out of the parking space, the passenger door flinging itself closed from the acceleration.

How in the world had the bad guys found them? she wondered frantically. They didn’t know where she lived or worked, and the Hummer wasn’t registered to her so they couldn’t have found her that way.

She took the first turn practically on two wheels and hit the brakes when she saw an unmistakable form in the gloom by the exit. He was peering in the window of a Chevy Impala.

She pulled up next to him, shot the Hummer into park, and jumped out. “I thought you were going to stay in the car,” she said, hands on hips, toe to toe with him.

He gestured to the car he’d been examining. “I thought maybe one of these vehicles would strike a chord.”

“You don’t strike me as the family sedan kind of guy.”

He shrugged, which ticked her off even more, especially in light of her recent behavioral readjustment. “What’s that?” she demanded, lifting her shoulders to her earlobes. “This,” she did it again, “is not a response.
No
is a response.
Yes
is a response.
This,
” she mocked his shrug one more time, “just means you don’t care.”

“That is not my intention,” he said solemnly. “I simply mean that I feel no urgency—”

“No urgency? Two pirate wannabes with swords tried to carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Three clowns in a Honda shot at us. Not to mention some or all of them cracked you over the head and broke your memory banks, which is why my parents sent you off with me in the first place. The least you can do is listen when I give you instructions that are for your own good.”

There was a beat of silence.

“I’m finished,” she said.

“Do you feel better?”

“Yes.”

“I apologize.” He moved around behind her and began to knead her shoulders, then her neck and spine.

In the time it took to draw her next breath she went from burning mad to just burning.

“I did not mean to make light of my situation, or to give the impression that your life is so inconsequential that my presence is not an imposition.”

She moved away before she lost more than her anger, like some of her clothes. “I’m hungry, how about you?”

Conn didn’t say anything, but the air between them seemed to crackle.

It would be so easy to cross that supercharged foot of distance and throw herself into the inferno. And it would be the most difficult thing she would ever do. She wasn’t an impulsive person. Or an open one. That wasn’t to say she shut people out by choice. Rather, it wasn’t in her nature to let people in easily.

Besides, the man didn’t even know himself, so how could she know anything about him? Except that there were people who wanted to harm him, if not kill him, and while he might be a floater as an amnesiac, there was a core of steel in him, an ability to go from harmless to threatening in the space of a heartbeat that didn’t come from being an engineer or a mechanic. Whatever his occupation was when he was in touch with reality, it was something people like her didn’t want to know about.

 

 

WHEN RAE TOLD HIM THEY WERE GOING TO THE Somerset Collection, Conn thought it was something people purchased for no discernible purpose, like the little pewter figurines of knights and conjurers that were sold at the faire. Turned out it was a pair of large buildings on either side of a wide thoroughfare called Big Beaver, the two connected with a walkway made of glass that stretched above the road.

Rae guided the Hummer beneath the walkway, then turned a huge half-circle to end up behind one of the buildings. They went beneath a concrete roof covering a large parking lot, and Rae drove up and down the aisles until she found a space she could maneuver the huge vehicle into.

“Okay, now we just have to pray nobody parks too close,” she said, opening her door and stepping out just as they heard the screech of rubber on pavement.

Conn twisted around in his seat, making the shift from calm to alert even before he saw the Honda slide to a stop, blocking them in. All the windows were shiny new glass, but the car wasn’t blue anymore, at least not all of it. It was a rainbow palette of replaced body parts, green quarter panels, red hood, the remaining blue parts dented and crumpled.

Conn looked to Rae—their eyes met as they came to an instantaneous and simultaneous conclusion. And since Rae was already vulnerable, he shot out of the Hummer, rounding the front of it. He wrapped his hand around hers and took off running, between cars, working their way to the building, keeping himself between her and the Honda racing after them.

He kept them out of the wide driving lanes, not easy with the huge columns holding up the roof and drivers who parked too close to their neighbors, but the only way to neutralize the car was to get inside. That meant crossing the main drive between the cars and the mall entrance. He pulled Rae out into the yellow-lined crosswalk without hesitation, the Honda racing toward them. Conn poured on the speed, slinging an arm around Rae’s waist and boosting her up. His feet hit the curb just as the Honda blasted by behind them, tires galumphing on the curb as the driver jerked to a stop across the narrow lane that led to the delivery door for the pizza restaurant just inside the mall.

Conn let go of Rae long enough to muscle the big door open. She scooted in under his arm as two guys piled out of the Honda, then stopped to look back at the third, heaving his bulk out of the driver’s seat. He hitched his pants up under his impressive belly and took a position by the rear bumper. Waiting for them to come out.

Rae caught Conn by the wrist and tried to drag him into the mall. He pulled her into the restaurant instead, some sort of fusion pizza place. He could circle through there, he decided, come out the delivery door and surprise the third guy. The third guy wasn’t going to chase them on foot, and if Conn could get his hands on a knife, he wouldn’t be driving, either, not with a couple of slashed tires.

The other two guys followed, all four of them winding their way through the tables and booths at a fast walk. The hostess trailed along behind with menus, customers, and waitstaff staring as they went by. Conn burst through the swinging doors that led to the kitchen, and it smelled good in there. Really good. There were bound to be knives, too, but his stomach was growling—and two bad guys were right behind them.

The kitchen staff was yelling, pots and pans clanged to the floor, and things were frying and steaming and apparently not in the right way, considering how the cooks were racing around looking frantic and blocking off their pursuers in the process.

Conn spied what he wanted, towing Rae between a stainless steel table and a vat of hot oil along one wall. He snatched up a carving knife with his right hand, dipping his left into a wire basket suspended over the vat. He swiped his arm along the counter in the process, knocking things over as he went, but he’d seen the same kind of oil vat at the faire, and he had a decent idea what to expect from the basket.

“Ouch,” he said, juggling the crispy brown chunk he’d snagged until it cooled enough for him to take a bite. “Scottish chicken.”

“Forget about your stomach,” Rae said, apparently reading his mind yet again since she was pulling him toward the door at the back of the kitchen. “I’m more interested in the knife. For the tires, right?”

“Yep.”

But one of the bad guys made it to the delivery door before them, yelling, “Cut them off, Harry,” the other guy already moving away to do just that.

Conn backtracked, shoving the cooks aside and sweeping racks out of his way and into the other guy’s path. Restaurant workers shouted, dishes and flatware crashed to the floor, and a little curl of smoke emanated from the general direction of the deep fryer. The fire alarm began to wail and cell phones came out just as Conn pulled Rae through the door and back into the dining area.

They slalomed around tables and booths, back through the restaurant and out into the mall, Conn feeling like he was in one of his nightly memory flashes, still not remembering everything, but also not stopping to think. He stepped onto the moving stairway, taking the steps two at a time and boosting Rae up in front of him, scanning their surroundings.

The Somerset Collection offered everything the high-end shopper could want: valet parking, three levels of stores that sold everything from caramel apples to shirts with strange and disturbing messages blazoned across them. Options for people being chased by potential murderers were few and far between.

“Any ideas?” he said to Rae as they hit the top of the stairway and started off at a fast walk.

“Moe and Larry don’t seem to care if they catch us in here,” she said, sounding worried.

“Moe and Larry?”

“Stooges,” she said with a slight smile, “for lack of better names to call them.”

“Moe and Harry,” Conn said as if he understood a tenth of what she’d said. “One of them is named Harry.”

“They’re keeping up but not closing in.”

“Yeah,” Conn said, sounding grim, even to his own ears. If he’d been alone, he would have confronted the threat and eliminated it. If he’d been sure he was the only target. He couldn’t take the chance they’d kidnap Rae to get to him, and he didn’t ask himself how he knew that. It was what men had done to women since the world began. “We need to lose them, find a place to hide until they get tired of looking. Is there a way out up here?”

“I’m not that familiar with the mall.”

“We can’t go out the door we came in, not with the third Stooge waiting for us.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Rae said. “But maybe we should concentrate on the two guys coming up the escalator behind us.”

They took off again, up the next escalator, which seemed to lead onto a floor of small food purveyors, kind of like the stalls at the faire, but a definite step up in variety and quality. There weren’t any turkey legs in sight, for one thing, which meant no smoke, so he could smell everything else. His mouth began to water.

But Moe and Harry were right behind them, coming up the stairway.

Conn forgot about food completely, picking a direction at random and heading that way, staying behind Rae as much as possible without letting her know he was doing it. She might be a stranger to this kind of danger, but she was too quick-witted to miss the implications of his behavior, and too independent-minded to allow it. But he’d be damned if she got hurt on his account.

At least their pursuers seemed disinclined to pull weapons, which meant all he had to do was get away from them long enough to get back to the car. Easier said than done. They were in a well-lighted place, too sparsely occupied to provide them cover, so no ducking into one of the shiny, glass-fronted stores and hiding until the bad guys passed them by. And then it got worse.

A skinny man, a kid really, in a dark blue outfit fell in behind their pursuers, lifting a small device to his mouth and talking into it.

“Mall cop,” Rae said.

Conn heard the word
cop
, remembered her using it as a substitute for
sheriff
and poured on the speed, dragging her along behind him, heading toward a big store that seemed to take up one whole end of the mall. There had to be a way to get lost in there.