LITMIR.BIZ

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jumped out of her chair. “You think his phone is bugged?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe.” Lou shrugged. “Or maybe it was just a glitch in the line.”

      The vampire sat comfortably in the overstuffed chair in the cheap motel room’s darkest corner. Jason Beck, standing near the bed, hung up the telephone; then Fieldner hung up the extension on the other side of the room.

      Jason turned to face him. His lip was split, but it had stopped bleeding. The eye, on the other hand, was already beginning to darken. It would be purple by morning. He was still angry with Fieldner for that. The man had become carried away when young Jason Beck decided to fight rather than comply. A foolish decision. Fieldner might look as if a stiff wind would blow him over, but occasional sips of vampiric blood made him strong. And utterly obedient.

      It was a shame the man was also an imbecile.

      “I did what you asked. I called them,” Beck said. “I want to see my sister now.”

      “You left a message on an answering machine,” the vampire said slowly. “That’s not precisely what I told you to do, now is it?”

      “They’ll call back. When they do, I’ll get them down here. I swear.”

      “How can you be so certain they will come?”

      “They will,” Beck said, lowering his head to stare at the photograph that lay on the bedside stand beside the telephone. “They’re my friends. They’ll come.”

      “They’d better. And when they do, you would do well to follow my instructions to the letter. Do you understand, Mr. Beck?”

      Jason met his eyes. “No. I don’t understand any of this. Who the hell are you? What do you want with Storm and Maxie? If you’re going to hurt them—”

      “I’m not. Not that you could stop me if I were. You have one mission here, Beck, and that is to do as you’re told. So long as you obey, there will be no harm done—to the women or to your sister. Or to you.”

      Jason’s eyes lowered beneath the vampire’s steady, penetrating gaze. He had a brilliant mind, this young man. His intelligence was great, his love for his sister even greater. But he had a deep affection for the two female detectives, as well. It could prove to be a problem if not properly controlled.

      “Since you’ve acted in good faith,” the vampire said slowly, “I will take you to see your sister now.”

      Stormy dialed the number, was connected to Jason’s room and waited. Then she slowly shook her head. “No answer.”

      As she put the phone down, Max frowned at her, recalling their earlier conversation, right after she’d gone off the road. “You were thinking about Jason on the way here,” she said.

      Stormy nodded. “Yeah. Odd, isn’t it?” She didn’t meet Max’s eyes.

      “What was it, some kind of premonition?”

      “Please,” Stormy said, loading the word with sarcasm. Then she turned the subject right back to the telephone call. “No answer, and no voice mail. Must be one nice hotel.”

      “Motel,” Lou corrected. “He said motel, not hotel. It’s probably nothing fancy.”

      “We should go there,” Stormy said, and now she did meet Max’s eyes, her own imploring.

      Stormy did have a feeling about all this; Max was convinced of it. “Go where?” she asked. “We don’t even know where Jason is.”

      “We could run some kind of trace on the call.” Stormy shot her gaze to Lou’s. “You still have friends on the force. You could do that, couldn’t you?”

      Lou nodded. “Yeah, but there are easier ways. You got the phones here turned on, how about the Internet?”

      “It’s ready to go,” Max said.

      “We can do it online, then.”

      Maxie moved behind the computer to make sure the cable was plugged in, while Lou took the chair in front of it.

      His cop juices were flowing; Max could tell by the light in his eyes. He had a real passion for his work. And when he immersed himself in it, he forgot to play the worn-out, burned-out role he seemed determined to play for her benefit. The mask fell away, revealing him as he truly was. A man in his prime, with a sharp, determined mind and a keen sense of justice. This was the Lou Malone who turned her on like no one else ever had. She watched his long, powerful fingers move over the keyboard, licked her lips at the way his strong hand cupped the mouse.

      Several keystrokes later, he looked up. “The call came from a town called Endover, in New Hampshire.”

      Max held his eyes. “You’re gonna have to show me how you did that.”

      “What, you weren’t paying attention?”

      “Sure I was. Just not to the right things.” She winked at him and saw him squirm. It was his usual reaction to her flirting, and far from the one she wanted.

      “We should go,” Stormy said softly.

      Lou seemed to have trouble breaking the hold Max’s eyes had on his, but he finally did, and focused instead on Stormy. “Look, he said we should call him back. Let’s wait it out. He can tell us what he wants us to do when we get him on the phone.”

      Max hid a secret smile at his use of the words “we” and “us.” He might think he was still planning to hightail it back to White Plains, but deep down, Max thought, he already knew better.

      “Lou’s right,” she said. “Besides, it’ll give us time to unload the van.”

      “How old would Delia be now?” Stormy asked. “What was she last time we saw her. Ten? Twelve?”

      Max nodded. “She must be all grown up. Sixteen, seventeen by now. He did say she was in her senior year.”

      “Hard to imagine,” Stormy said. “God, where did all the time go? He didn’t mention his older brother, did he? Mike?”

      “Last I knew, Mike had a wife and kids and was living somewhere in California,” Max said. She put a hand on Stormy’s shoulder. “We’ll keep calling until we get him. Then we’ll take it from there, okay?”

      Stormy closed her eyes, sighing deeply. “Okay, we’ll wait.”

       5

      He hadn’t left, Lou told himself a few hours later. He kept telling himself he was going to, right after the next little job, or the one after that. But he hadn’t left.

      Of course he hadn’t left. He’d been fooling himself to think he was going to get out of this place if Maxie wanted to keep him here. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for her—and no, that had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that he liked her and seemed to have developed a soft spot for her, despite her being his polar opposite in every way.

      She was also his biggest pain in the ass, and he personally thought she ought to be voted the girl most likely to get herself dead before her time. Which was a large part of the reason why, when she got into trouble, he tended to want to stick around and help her out of it.

      So he’d said he would hang around to help her unload, and he did. And then she declared they needed to eat, so they ordered pizza from a place in town and ate it on the patio outside the office. It was nice. Three friends, munching pizza and ignoring the herd of elephants currently dancing in the parlor.

      Stormy’s odd symptoms. Max’s worry for her. Max’s mad theories. Lou’s skepticism about them. Max’s constant flirting. Lou’s phony don’t-care attitude toward it. His lie about wanting to get home. Max’s lie about intending to let him go. And the fear for an old friend that hovered over all of them.

      Yep. A herd of elephants.

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