Woman Most Wanted - Harper Allen

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      “Okay, Marg. I’m going to start making more lemon doughnuts now.” Pointedly ignoring Matt, he turned away from the open door.

      If anything, the rain was heavier now. Down the cracked pavement of the alleyway small streams ran and merged together, sweeping bits of paper and cigarette butts and other flotsam along with them. Jenna was out there, Matt thought. He’d been responsible for making her run. Anything could happen to her, and it would be his fault.

      “Thanks, Marg. Jimmy, forget anything you thought you heard me talking about on the phone.” Hunching his shoulders, he sprinted out into the downpour, heading toward the apartment building.

      THE KID HAD suckered him in. For the third time in as many minutes, Matt wiped the rain from his eyes in frustration and wondered briefly if it was too late to switch careers. A few feet beyond him was the dead end to the alleyway, beside him was an industrial garbage bin with the refuse from the apartment building spilling out of it, and behind him was the building itself—the building where this doomed nightmare of an evening had begun. Jenna hadn’t come this way at all. He’d been finessed by a donut-making teenager who, if he definitely wasn’t a rocket scientist, as Jimmy the security guard had said, certainly had managed to pull a fast one on one Matt D’Angelo, future area director of the Agency.

      Jenna could be anywhere by now. He’d lost her.

      He was halfway back down the alley when he heard the sound—an unearthly scream that floated eerily through the night. The hair on the back of his neck lifted in an atavistic reaction and he whirled around, his hand going automatically to his gun before he checked himself.

      It had sounded like a baby’s cry—but not like any human baby he’d ever known. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain spread through him. From out of his childhood came, full-blown and as spine-tingling as when he’d first heard it, the memory of a story his great-grandmother had told him and his sister Carmela; the story of the goblin’s child who sobbed and wailed in the forests of her native Calabria to draw soft-hearted maidens to their deaths.

      The cry came again, an unearthly, soulless entreaty that turned his blood to ice.

      Matt blinked the rain from his eyes, and his mouth thinned to an angry line. He didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy tales or fantasy. He believed in hard facts. He started running, heading blindly toward where the sound had last come from and he felt his foot connect with something.

      With a raucous clatter, the lid of a trash can fell to the pavement and rolled a few feet before its noisy progress ended. The next minute he saw a small figure leap from the edge of a nearby garbage bin and felt a searing pain rip its way across his left bicep. Immediately the cold clamminess of his shirt was overlaid with the warmth of blood.

      His blood. Dammit, he was bleeding. And he was holding a damn cat!

      For the second time that evening he found himself gazing into impossibly blue eyes, but this pair was cross-eyed. They glared myopically out of the triangular, brown-masked face peering from his arms, and even as Matt met that disconcerting gaze, the cat opened its mouth and let out a sobbing wail that gurgled off into an irregular purr.

      He’d insisted on proof. He’d refused to believe anything she’d told him, he’d let her run out into the night believing she was what that lying bastard West had called her—Miss Looney Tunes—and now she was on the run, alone and frightened, just because he had to have everything by the book. How could he have been so damn stupid?

      The cat in his arms yowled miserably and lashed a rain-drenched tail—which was covered, Matt saw, with a streak of sky-blue paint.

      Chapter Four

      Jenna was stiff from spending the night on a hard bus terminal bench, her hair looked like the proverbial burning bush, and her dress had wrinkled as only a natural fiber could. Jenna smoothed ineffectually at it with the palms of her hands and realized, for the first time in her life, that there was something to be said for polyester.

      The bus station washroom was empty, so when her stomach gurgled the sound echoed hollowly around the tiled room. A skimpy lunch yesterday, no dinner, and she didn’t have any money to buy breakfast.

      She shifted slightly, and the muted silvery chime of her ankle bracelet tinkled off into a delicate echo. At the sound, Jenna’s chin lifted and her slumped shoulders straightened.

      She hadn’t been able to sleep much last night, and her insomnia hadn’t been because she’d kept slipping off the plastic bench. She’d run a whole gamut of emotions before she’d finally dropped into a fitful doze; from fear and anguish to a sense of betrayal to bewildered confusion. And just as dawn had begun to filter through the grimy terminal windows she’d come to a conclusion that had brought her a faint ray of hope—enough so that she knew she could go on.

      Maybe Franklin had passed on the instability that had robbed them both of a normal, settled life. It seemed as if he had, judging from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. But she was Sara Moon’s daughter, too—Franklin had always said that Jenna took after her mother more than she did him—and Sara Moon had been the sanest person Jenna had ever known.

      She didn’t remember much about her mother, but she could recall a voice that was never raised in anger, a calm acceptance of Franklin’s spur-of-the-moment upheavals and a reassuring presence that had managed to turn each new and bewildering town into a comforting home for a lonely little girl. Sara Moon was as much a part of her as her father was, Jenna thought. Her mother’s strength would keep her from veering over the edge as Franklin had.

      From now on she would live a dull, uneventful, normal life, Jenna decided. If she saw Elvis walking down the main street wearing blue suede shoes and eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich this afternoon, she’d smile politely and walk on. She wouldn’t tell anyone, she wouldn’t phone anyone and she wouldn’t try to convince anyone of her crazy story.

      Least of all that snake in the grass Matt D’Angelo.

      She walked casually through the bus terminal, drifting by the vending machines and surreptitiously pulling on their handles to see if anything dropped out. Nothing did. There was a line of pay phones flanking the far wall that she’d tried earlier, but just in case, she glided like a hungry shark by them again, flipping open the coin return on each one hopefully. She was walking dispiritedly away from the last one, the bells on her ankle bracelet jingling sadly, when she heard a cascade of coins dropping to the ground behind her.

      Jackpot! Jenna stuffed the money into the pocket of her dress and dodged out the nearest exit door as guiltily as if she’d just pulled off a major heist. Half a block away she stopped to count her winnings—four and a half…no, five dollars in quarters. If she was careful, she could get breakfast and lunch out of that.

      The tiny corner diner was packed with truck drivers and, for some reason, six or seven young women dressed as if they were going out for an evening’s club-hopping, instead of sitting hunched over cups of coffee and half-eaten pieces of toast at six-thirty in the morning. Just looking at them while she placed her order at the counter, Jenna felt like a wreck, but when a seat at one of the tables became vacant, she slid in with a murmured apology.

      At one of the communes she’d lived on a few years ago there’d been a woman who made all-natural herbal cosmetics, but her beeswax lip balm had felt sticky and the buttermilk and orrisroot eyeshadow she’d given Jenna had smelled like—well, like sour buttermilk. She’d never really gotten the knack of makeup after that, Jenna thought.

      Out of the corner of her eye she cast an envious glance at the woman sitting beside her. Her lipstick was an iridescent mauve, and her eyelashes were thick and black and the longest Jenna had ever seen. She wore a white denim bomber-type jacket that was so short it showed her navel, and under it was a black lacy bra top. Her skirt was some kind of stretchy fabric that clung to her curves, and under the table five-inch-high stiletto heels lay toppled over on their sides. One of her feet was wrapped around the rungs of her chair. She was massaging the other one when she met Jenna’s

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