LITMIR.BIZ

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not going to lull me into uncuffing you and handing you back your gun.”

      She shook her head. “Besides, you know darn well who I am. Even if you don’t think too highly of my work, you’ve obviously read an example of it, since you knew about the Bigfoot story.”

      Dark eyebrows drew together in a frown. “You’re some kind of writer? Sorry, lady, I’m afraid I’ve never—”

      “Oh, please,” she snapped. “If I believed everyone who told me they never buy the Eye-Opener, I’d figure we have a circulation of about twelve readers in the whole country. The most you’ll admit is that you might have glanced at it in a checkout line at the grocery store, right?”

      “The Eye-Opener?”

      He didn’t seem to realize he was matching his actions to his flatly phrased comment. The rest of the man was hard angles of bone and solid slabs of muscle, Tess noted incongruously, but his eyes were—

      His eyes were beautiful, she thought a heartbeat later. They were a crystalline gray in the tan of his face, fringed with dark, spiky lashes any female would kill for.

      She watched as they closed briefly, the lashes dipping to fan against hard ridges of cheekbone. When they opened again she was sure she saw wry humor light them just for a moment.

      “You’re a tabloid reporter.” She hadn’t been wrong about the humor. A corner of his mouth quirked upward before it firmed into a straight line once again. “So there wasn’t any alien autopsy in Hangar 93?”

      She glanced at a fast-asleep Joey before replying. “Hangar 61. But no, of course it wasn’t real.” She looked at him in confusion. “For heaven’s sake, do you think I’m some kind of—”

      Belated comprehension flooded through her. “Dear God, you did, didn’t you? You thought I was a wacko, crazy enough to be working with whoever’s targeting Joey.”

      She stared coldly at him. “Nice theory, Agent. Too bad it’s even less grounded in facts than the stories the National Eye-Opener runs every week.”

      “Connor.” His tone was as clipped as hers. “And I don’t want to make you think we could be buddies, I’m just tired of being called Agent. Is Tess your real name or is that something else you’ve let Joey believe?”

      “Tess is my real name.” When she was annoyed, her voice was raspier than normal, she knew. “Tess Smith. Connor what?”

      “Connor’s my last name.” He grimaced. “These cuffs are cutting off my circulation. How about loosening them?”

      “Let me suggest an Eye-Opener headline for that one,” she retorted. “FBI Discovers Woman Dumber Than Dirt—She Believed Me When I Said I Wouldn’t Try To Escape, Agent Says. The cuffs stay. What’s your first name?”

      He looked away. “Virgil,” he muttered. “But I go by Connor.”

      His comment a moment ago had stung. She arched an eyebrow. “You think I deliberately lied to Joey, don’t you, Virgil? You think I encouraged his hero-worship for my own ends. Is that how you figure it, Virge?”

      The eyes she’d thought so beautiful took on a hard glitter. Restlessly Connor—no, Virgil, she told herself defiantly—shifted position on the hard wooden chair.

      “I still figure you that way, lady. What your day job is doesn’t really change anything.” He exhaled, his gaze on hers.

      “Did Rick Leroy tell you why Joey Begand was being held in an Agency safe house?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “It was because he witnessed a murder in an Albuquerque alleyway—the murder of a retired FBI agent, Dean Quayle. Quayle’s killer, a homeless man by the name of John MacLeish, was wounded during the encounter, but not badly enough to prevent him from escaping later that night from the hospital where he’d been taken after the police had arrived on the scene. The police found Joey hiding in a Dumpster, his memory of exactly what happened temporarily erased. The doctors say Joey’s amnesia won’t last.”

      His tone hardened. “I don’t care what your relationship with Leroy is, except for the fact that you have to be working with him, since he handed Joey over to you. What I do want to know is, what was Leroy’s deal with Quayle’s killer, MacLeish?”

      He’d already judged her and found her guilty, Tess thought. She’d gone into this realizing that no explanation she could give would be believed by the authorities. That was why she hadn’t bothered to present her side of the story to him during the drive here, and why even now she suspected it was going to be futile to try to make Agent Virgil Connor, a man who obviously lived and breathed his job, understand.

      But for a split second she’d thought she’d glimpsed a very different man from the single-minded enforcer of the law he appeared to be. Wasn’t it possible that those crystal-gray eyes might see she’d had no other choice but to keep faith with Joey Begand, even if keeping faith meant breaking the law?

      It was worth a try. Even before Connor had found them she’d had serious doubts that she could pull this off all by herself.

      “Maybe it’s time we got a few things straight.” She paused, wondering how best to present her story. “First, I don’t know what the connection is between Leroy and MacLeish, for the simple reason that I’m not working with Leroy. I’ve never even met the man, so—”

      “For God’s sake, woman, save yourself!” Abruptly the big man stood, the chair he’d been sitting on sliding backward across the linoleum floor. He started to take a step toward her, only to be jerked to a halt by the cuff on his left wrist. “I don’t want to fire the shot that takes you down or stand by and watch another agent have to kill you. But that’s the way it’s going to happen if you don’t call a stop to this.”

      Unsteadily Tess got to her feet, the fear she’d been trying to suppress for the past two days spilling over. “I’m telling you the truth, dammit! I’m not working with a killer and I’m not working with a dirty agent. My only loyalty is to a little boy who came to me believing I could keep him safe. That’s why I can’t bring myself to tell Joey the stories I write are all lies—because he needs them to be true. I’m his only hope, and I don’t intend to let him down.”

      “He came to you?” There was hostile disbelief in his tone. “There’s no way Joey could have escaped from Leroy after he’d snatched him from that safe house. Try again.”

      “Leroy didn’t get the chance to snatch him,” she snapped. “Joey knew the Agency wouldn’t be able to protect him, and the day he arrived at the safe house he started planning how he was going to escape when the time came. He got out through an air duct.”

      She took a deep breath. “Ask him yourself when he wakes up. It’s a more hair-raising story than any of my so-called exploits, believe me. Apparently he climbed onto a wardrobe and slid aside a duct panel he’d loosened days before. He hoisted himself up, replaced the panel, and when he found himself over a nearby vacant apartment he simply dropped down again, courtesy of a knotted length of bedsheet he had ready in his knapsack. Then he took the service stairs to a back exit and trekked across town on foot to my place.”

      “Supposing I believe any of that, why did he come to you?” His gaze was unreadable. “Did he know you?”

      “He knew of me.” She smiled crookedly. “He knew I kicked ugly monster butt, as he put it. Apparently before his mom died last year she was an Eye-Opener fan, and Joey told me I was her favorite writer on the paper. I’m sure she wasn’t gullible enough to swallow the Hangar 61 and Bigfoot stories, but her son did. He figured since he had a monster to slay, he needed a monster slayer. So he looked me up in the phone book and showed up on my doorstep.”

      “A monster to slay?” He frowned. “Forget that for the moment. Maybe I can understand why a nine-year-old boy might think a tabloid reporter could protect him better than the FBI, but how the hell did you convince yourself that going on the run with him was a good idea? And where did you intend to take him, anyway?”

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