Authors: Anne Stuart
She found herself smiling back, up into eyes that were very, very blue. "That's all right," she said soothingly, falling into her natural role of caretaker. "We'll get you home to Belle Reste and get you settled. By tomorrow you'll be able to lie out in the sun and feel a lot better."
"If you say so." His expression was wry. "Lead the way to the Jeep. I'm assuming that pink monstrosity is yours."
"Daniel's, not mine. Where's your luggage?"
"Lost," he said succinctly. "The airline people said they've managed to track it down, and someone will be bringing it over in the morning. In the meantime, I can borrow something of Daniel's can't I?"
"Of course." She held out her arm, to give him some extra strength to lean on, and for a moment he simply looked at her, his eyes distant and unreadable.
"Thanks," he said, taking it and leaning heavily. "I need all the help I can get."
It was a slow process to reach the Jeep. By the time she got him settled she was breathing heavily herself, and she glanced over at him as he lay back in the seat, his eyes closed, his color pale, his chest rising and falling beneath the too-big suit. "Are you sure you're all right? We don't have much in the way of hospital facilities here on the island, but they might be able to help—"
"I'll be fine," he said without opening his eyes, and his voice sounded slightly fainter.
Whatever doubts she'd had about him vanished the moment she realized how very sick he was. She'd been able to be a remote, gracious hostess to the other lost souls Daniel had sent her. Michael Dowd was another prospect altogether. For the first time in months she found someone whose needs superseded her own. Someone to concentrate on, ignoring her own helpless pain. From the moment she'd felt his weak clasp and looked into his pain-lined face, she'd known he wasn't really a threat at all. He was simply a sick man, someone she wanted to help.
She drove with uncharacteristic sedateness through the narrow streets of the town, then headed up into the hills toward Belle Reste with only a decorous increase in speed. Driving was one thing she really enjoyed, and during the past few months of penance and mourning she'd been denying herself that pleasure. Now, suddenly, she felt like stretching her wings, but she knew that with an invalid beside her she had to be as demure as an old lady. Maybe tomorrow she would see about renting a car after all. A small sporty convertible, something with a little power beneath the hood. Her new houseguest would probably enjoy going for drives once his strength increased a bit.
The road to Belle Reste was a series of three hills and three valleys, with the villa lying at the end of the final valley on a spit of land jutting out into the warm Caribbean. With Francey keeping a sedate pace and a companionable silence as her passenger rested, they made it through the first hill and valley, up the next hill, and were heading downward again when the car began gathering momentum.
Francey pushed her sandaled foot down on the brake, but instead of slowing down the Jeep seemed to move even faster, and she glanced down, wondering if by some odd chance she was pressing the accelerator instead.
The brake was all the way to the floor. Pumping was utterly useless—the speedometer was climbing past its well-bred thirty-five to something beyond fifty. Suicide, on roads like these.
Don't panic, she told herself, still pumping the useless brake pedal. Keep steering and try to downshift.
The gears ground noisily as she tried to push the stick shift into third, and the speedometer climbed to fifty-five. Her passenger turned his face toward her, opened his sleepy eyes and said in a tone of complete unconcern, "Brakes failed?"
She couldn't help it—his mundane tone made her want to laugh. "It seems so."
"You've tried pumping them, you've tried shifting down," he observed casually. "What about the emergency brake?"
"It never worked." She allowed herself a quick glance over at him. She would have expected him to look even worse, paler, now that death stared them in the face. Instead his color had improved, and his eyes had something that might almost be called a sparkle in another man, another situation.
"Then you're simply going to have to drive like hell," he said. "Or we're going to die."
The speedometer had reached sixty. They were only halfway down the hill, and coming up was a series of S-curves worthy of the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. "Maybe in a Ferrari," she muttered, "with decent tires. We have maybe a snowball's chance in hell of making it."
Michael Dowd laughed. "Well then, Francey, it's been nice knowing you."
"Nice knowing you, Michael," she muttered, concentrating on the steering. The
speedometer was edging toward seventy, the S-curves were approaching, and
Francey Neeley didn't want to die. Patrick Dugan was dead, cut down in a hail of bullets, and she didn't want to run the risk of ever seeing him again, even in some nebulous afterlife.
She took one last glimpse at her passenger before they headed into the curves. At least he didn't seem to mind dying. That should have made two of them. But she didn't want to die. She didn't want to take the easy way out, the coward's way out. There was too much left to do, to accomplish.
"For heaven's sake put your seat belt on!" she shrieked at her passenger, just noticing he hadn't bothered to fasten himself in.
"Will it make a difference?"
"Humor me. We just might make it. If we get through the next section there's a stretch of rocky beach. I might be able to steer this thing into the water."
"I don't fancy drowning any more than I do crashing."
"Shut up and let me drive."
She almost made it. Not by slowing down, something that was beyond the Jeep's capabilities, but by speeding up just at the curve of each turn. She was cursing beneath her breath, a steady litany that had to take the place of the prayers she'd forsaken months ago, and by the time they entered the final S-curve she knew she was going to make it. The curve was ending, the beach was up ahead, all she had to do was steer across the stretch of rocky beach…
She hadn't counted on the moped with the teenager on board, driving too fast and blithely ignoring her oncoming Jeep. She stared in horror at the accident about to happen, momentarily paralyzed, and then Michael reached over and yanked the wheel sharply.
They went sailing past the teenager, past the stone abutment, past the rocky beach. Gripping the steering wheel, Francey closed her eyes and prepared to die.
The Jeep banged down on the rock-strewn beach, its deadly momentum slightly blunted as it hurtled toward the water. Francey was beyond fear, beyond rational thought, as the water loomed ahead. Bracing herself for the impact, she was astonished when the Jeep came to a stop almost immediately once it hit the ocean. Water sprayed up around them, drenching her, and for a moment she didn't move, letting the water settle around them in the sudden, deafening silence.
Then she reached over and turned off the engine that had already stopped, pulled out the key and turned to her passenger.
Michael Dowd was looking a great deal healthier than he had less than an hour ago when she'd picked him up at the airport. He'd fastened his seat belt sometime during those last frenzied moments, and his baggy white suit was drenched. "You're one hell of a driver, you know that?" he said in a conversational tone. "Where'd you learn to handle a car like that?"
The water was lapping over the side of the Jeep, over her sandaled feet. "I had lessons from a bootlegger." She smiled at the almost forgotten memory.
"Bootlegger?"
"I used to spend summers in the Smoky Mountains when I was a teenager. One of my stepfathers was a congressman from a fairly rural district, and his biggest supporter made his money from the sale of illegal whiskey. Someone suggested his son teach me how to drive."
"He did a good job," Michael said. "What else did he teach you?"
She glanced at him, startled. "Not as much as he wanted to. I was seventeen, but I was strong-minded."
"I can believe you. What next?"
She glanced around her, at the water lapping up around them. With a resigned sigh she climbed out into the hip-deep water. "I need to push this thing out of the water. You stay put while I see what I can do…"
But he'd already unfastened the seat belt and climbed out the other side. "You can't do it alone."
"But you're in no shape…"
"One and a half people are better than one," he said flatly. "And I'm in no shape to spend hours sitting in a Jeep in the middle of the ocean. Let's go."
She knew it would have been a waste of time to argue. The moon had risen sometime during their wild flight, and the silvery color danced off the ocean waves, gilding his pale face. He was right; she needed to get him warm and in bed as fast as possible. But they couldn't leave Daniel's Jeep in the middle of Martinus Bay. Not without checking what had happened to the brakes.
It was easier than she would have thought, given the push of the water against the Jeep. By the time they rolled it onto the rocky beach, water was pouring out of the engine, and a group of people from the nearby village had joined them, helping push.
She was in the midst of explanations to her curious helpers when her eyes sought out Michael. He was off to one side, talking to a man she'd never seen before, a huge black man who looked more like a football linebacker than the fishermen on St. Anne who'd come to her rescue.
Michael's instincts were lightning fast. His eyes met hers, seconds after she glanced his way, and he started toward her, leaning heavily on his cane. "I've got us a ride home."
"This is a small island—most of the villagers don't own cars. You did get a ride in a car, didn't you? I can't say I fancy a ride on a motorbike. Or a mule."
"Sort of a car," he temporized. "A delivery truck, to be exact. Cecil has offered his services." He gestured toward the linebacker, who smiled and nodded, flashing his white teeth in the moonlight.
"Who is he? I've never seen him before."
"Neither have I," Michael said wearily. "Do you know everyone from around here?"
Francey couldn't fight her guilt. Here she was quibbling over strangers when Michael was almost dead on his feet. "Of course not," she murmured. "I just thought I would have noticed him if I'd seen him before. He's awfully big."
"Shall we take the ride or not?" Michael swayed slightly, and his color had bleached back to a sickly white.
"We'll take the ride," she said, taking his arm in hers and helping him over the uneven rock-strewn beach. She could feel him tremble slightly from the exertion, and she held his arm more tightly against her, close to the side of her breast. He was harder, more muscular, then she would have thought beneath the baggy suit. At one point in his life, before the car accident, he must have been a fairly strong, well-built man.
The delivery truck was a silver Ford in surprisingly good shape. The three of them squeezed into the front seat—no mean feat, considering the sheer size of Michael's new acquaintance, Cecil, but apparently the back was padlocked and filled with whatever it was Cecil delivered. There was no identifying sign painted on the truck, and somehow Francey couldn't figure out a polite way of asking. Reaction was beginning to set in. Her own limbs were trembling when she climbed into the front of the track, and for the time being all she wanted to do was crawl into bed. Once she made sure Michael was comfortably settled, she reminded herself.
She felt very tiny, squashed between Cecil's impressive bulk and Michael's bony frame. Leaning her head back, she shut her eyes, waiting to be transported home. When nothing happened, she opened them again.
"Where do you live?" Cecil asked in a pleasant voice with just a trace of island hit. He must have spent most of his life off-island. Playing football?
"Sorry," she said briefly, giving him directions. St. Anne was a small, social island—everyone knew everyone's business outside the rush of tourist trade. Cecil should have known where she lived, just as she should have been able to identify him.
It didn't matter, she thought, closing her eyes again. She'd been through too much in the past couple of hours to make sense of anything. In the calm, clear light of day, after a good night's sleep, she would be able to place him and these nagging inconsistencies would make sense.
Like where had their huge black savior come from? Like why Michael Dowd, instead of being terrified by their near brush with death, had merely been exhilarated by the experience. Like why the brakes had failed on a vehicle that had just been checked.
But for now all she had to concentrate on was holding together long enough to get her frail companion settled for the night. Then a good strong dose of Scotch and she might be able to sleep herself. After she gave in to the strong case of shakes she was busy fighting.
Cecil was damned good; Michael had to grant him that. He'd objected to having him around at first, saying he could handle things better without backup. The more people who were involved in a situation, the more likelihood that things would get cocked up. But right now Cecil's buddies would be stripping the Jeep, and if they didn't come up with a severed brake line, then he'd been in the wrong business for the past fifteen years.
Of course, that might be the case anyway, even supposing he was right. A job where you routinely got shot at, threatened, beaten up, a job where you lied, cheated and sometimes even killed, wasn't the sort of job to lead to mental health. Maybe he was reaching his limit. Hell, there was no maybe about it.
But he wasn't ready to quit. Not until he tied up a few loose ends, including Frances Neeley's little chums. He'd learned there was a problem with loose ends, though. No matter how many you tied up, more appeared, ready to strangle you. Sooner or later he was going to have to simply walk away from it. Or the next time the doctors wouldn't be able to pull him back from the edge of death.
Cecil dropped them off at the front veranda of the villa with a flash of teeth and a subservient bob of his head. Michael frowned, wondering whether Cecil might not be carrying things a bit too far, but he pressed something that looked like a high-denomination bill into his meaty hand. Frances would assume it was a tip, not a carefully coded request for information. Unless she was even brighter than she looked.